It's all a policy choice, though. The USA could, for example, increase property taxes on non-primary homes and offset investor losses by adding an incentive to sell non-primary residences for some length of time (say, 2 years). The problem isn't that the solution is a mystery. It's that we barely live in a democracy and the people that own multiple homes have more power than the young-ish (median first time home buyer is up to 40 years old now) population that doesn't vote in large (enough) numbers to offset the power imbalance.
That seems to be the sentiment based on our founding origins or if you talk to an individual, but the fact is that we imprison more people per capita than anyone else. It's hard for me to believe that all of the criminals just live in the USA.
About 70% of convicts in prison are there for violent offenses and should be there. The remaining 30% is mainly drug and property crimes.
Now it’s important to understand what is meant when people reference incarceration numbers. A lot of these are people awaiting trial on charges they will be found guilty of but receive minimal sentences via plea bargaining. Another large portion are illegal immigrants that are awaiting processing for either integration or deportation.
So if you erase those 2 groups it’s mainly violent people. There’s an abundance of violent people in the USA compared to Western Europe and certainly Asia I’d say.
And the US politics would be better off if politicians didn't need to worry about their decisions causing the stock markets, and with it people's pensions or healthcare, to tumble.
401k, HSAs etc are the stranglehold on US politics.
Similar story here. I've been remote for 9 years. I don't live that far from a minor tech hub, but it would still be an hour commute each way.
Housing here is below the national average, so there is a huge savings there. I've only put maybe 10k miles on my 2007 Corolla in the last 5 years, so I pay much less in gas/maintenance/replacing vehicles. I can have delicious, healthy food every day for half the cost. If I need someone to come to my house for repairs (or other reasons), I don't need to take a day off or miss hardly any work time. I don't have to be mad when they don't show up (maybe a little). My daughter can attend a great school that requires pickup, because being away from my PC for 30 minutes every day in the afternoon is just not a big deal. If I want to take a break and get in a quick jog in the middle of the day, it costs almost nothing in lost time; I just walk outside and start running.
I don't know what sort of raise I would have to get to convince me to give all of that up. I think I've settled on 40%, which is untenable without relocation.
I think the experience just isn't mainstream enough. I think there are a lot of people that would drop $200-$300 to get a beat sabre experience if they were aware of the option. Is there any reason it should be less compelling than the "Wii as exercise" craze, for example?
The Wii was heavily marketed as a family entertainment system. A 'Family Computer', if you will. It's even in the name. People were buying it because it's something your grandmother could play alongside your five year old son. VR is still marketed as ages 13 and up, gives some people nausea and can only be used by one person at a time. There's also extra hygiene concerns that make them awkward to use at parties as you have the extra step of wiping the headset down between users. The controllers are also pretty intimidating for new users because you can't see them. I was showing PSVR2 to my dad and told him "Push R2 to select" before realising that if you didn't know where the R2 button was already, you had no hope of finding it because you're physically incapable of seeing the controller.
It's a long way from the ultra-casual Wii experience.
Fun fact about wiping the headset down —- there’s a study at Yale to determine whether the Oculus mask can be sufficiently sanitized for safe use in pediatric cancer wings (a high bar) because of it’s form factor and immersive experience. Turns out it absolutely cannot. Sanitizing that mask is practically impossible.
In case you didn't know, the PSVR2 has a button on the front right side that switches the display to that of a camera coming out the front face of the unit so you can see around. It's a huge improvement over the previous generation. However, the resolution isn't great. While you certainly can see the controller, you wouldn't be able to read the "R2" imprint on it.
VR just seems too intense. I legitimately don't want to immerse myself in a new world. I'm perfectly fine sitting in front of the TV for an hour and mashing buttons from a distance and walking away after I'm done.
People that are that level of germaphobe tend to avoid people that are obviously the opposite way. It’s easier than explaining and getting them to do it your way (because there’s no meeting in the middle in these scenarios, it’s either clean enough, or it’s not)
Any solution here is just an arms race. The better AI's get at generating text, the more impossible the job of identifying if an AI was responsible for writing a given text sample.
You could even just set up a GAN to make the AI better at not being detected as something written by an AI, I don't see a good general solution to this, but I also see it as a non-issue - if students have better tools they should be able to use them, just like a calculator on a test - that's allowed on tests because you still need to understand the concepts to put it to use
Paylocity | Remote in USA | Full Time | www.paylocity.com Hiring: Senior Software Engineer + others
We're looking to add an SSE to our team whose focus is adding features to our Benefits product. Besides working with talented individuals, some aspects that I think are potentially appealing about working at Paylocity are:
* remote culture from day 1
* partial salary transparency
* flex work schedules (4x10 on my team)
* pay ($84,487 - $182,372/yr for this position)
* RSU (awarded yearly ~50k, 4 year full vesting in increments of 3 months)
* ESPP
* 30% growth YOY
* all standard benefits, 401k with 4% match on 8% contribution
* strong diversity & inclusion culture
Paylocity | Remote in USA | Full Time | www.paylocity.com
Hiring: Senior Software Engineer + others
We're looking to add an SSE to our team whose focus is adding features to our Benefits product. Besides working with talented individuals, some aspects that I think are potentially appealing about working at Paylocity are:
* remote culture from day 1
* partial salary transparency
* flex work schedules (4x10 on my team)
* pay ($84,487 - $182,372/yr for this position)
* RSU (awarded yearly ~50k, 4 year full vesting in increments of 3 months)
* ESPP
* 30% growth YOY
* all standard benefits, 401k with 4% match on 8% contribution
* strong diversity & inclusion culture
I put a 20% downpayment on my house and it involved a wire transfer that was scheduled for days in the future that required my physical presence at a centralized authority (bank). With Bitcoin, that process takes less than an hour, with very little "fee", and doesn't involve any of the "trust", which was represented in my example by time delays, scheduling, and traveling.
Oddly enough making buying a house faster is not really a priority for me. I appreciated that mechanisms of trust kicked in for that transaction - my bank wouldn’t release mortgage money to anyone but a lawyer or notary, and my notary would not have released money to the seller unless they actually owned the place and transferred ownership to me.
Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers, and have to trust the seller (who stands to gain if they can trick me) instead of now where i trust the bank and the conveyancers instead.
> Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers
Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.
Right, so my conveyancer (trusted by me, and my lender) escrows the money (lent to me by a bank that trusts me) via blockchain. How is this better than the current situation, where wire transfers are used, except 1) smaller fees 2) massive carbon footprint? Because I didn’t see any armored cars involved to offset the PoW energy.
I’m not saying blockchain is useless - just i see no use for it when it comes to the way that 99% of americans buy their house - and if 99% of americans switch to btc for this kind of transaction the carbon cost would be massive.
The carbon argument is so weird to me because if people understood blockchains it would actually bolster their argument.
Proof of Work Blockchains use the same energy whether there are any transactions or not. The idea that your participation or lack thereof deters demand in protest of the carbon footprint is just … wrong. Inaccurate.
Sure it’s not a direct per-transaction carbon footprint - but every transaction has mining fees, and more transactions mean there’s more money in mining which means more miners which means more carbon burnt.
The price on exchanges has little to do with onchain activity, which has always been a criticism of the valuation metrics, you are somehow reappropriating that retroactively in a way incompatible with the other criticism
its mind boggling… I would say more but I’m reserving my thoughts in case you have a rationale that is more convincing
I for one do not want to send hundreds of thousands of dollars to someone else without any kind of reversibility or fraud-protection guarantees. I'm willing to pay a token amount in terms of fee and delay in order to ensure that.
Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.
Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party.
Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate.
Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.
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