A survey by Breeze, an insurance company, found that 65% of people would take a 5% pay cut, 38% would take a 10% pay cut, 24% would take a 15% pay cut, 18% would take a 20% pay cut, and 15 % would take a 25% pay cut. The median household income in 2018 was around $60,000 so 65% of people value remote work at roughly $3,000 per year, 15% of people value it at $12,000. See also:
While not having to commute is equivalent pay raise, it’s not necessarily better for the environment. During COVID-19 lockdown last year, carbon dioxide emissions from transportation dropped 15%, but we should not expect that to continue as the economic recovery continues. In addition, moves out of city centers come with larger carbon footprints—homes in the suburbs consume three times more energy and typically have less access to clean energy sources. Finally, remote teams that get together every quarter will take more flights which is many times worse than car travel. “A round-trip flight from Chicago to Los Angeles releases nearly as much CO2 as three months of a 10-mile driving commute.” Read Is remote working better for the environment? Not necessarily in The Guardian. See also:
While just 5% of the workforce in the US worked from home prior to the pandemic, 20% are expected to work from home permanently. Read the paper Why Working from Home Will Stick. See also:
Much has been written about a great migration out of San Francisco. The population shrank by 1.4% between July 2019 to July 2020, but like most moves during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were within the same metro area. As the economy recovers, San Francisco and San Mateo counties added 17,200 jobs.
Mark Twain had a deep appreciation of Lake Tahoe.“As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface, I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”
Macro forecasting is an area where it is easy to be as right as the consensus, but very hard to be more right. This highlights that consensus macro forecasts provide no value—it doesn’t tell you anything everybody else doesn’t know so there is no information advantage. Read Thinking About Macro by Howard Marks. See also:
A time crystal is a repeating pattern in the time dimensions which breaks symmetry with the law of conservation of energy. Besides the energy used to set up the experiment, the repetitions appear to require no other energy to loop forever. See the video of the first recorded space-time crystal.
Remote work seems like a natural extension of death-cult politicians to rail against remote work like they did against masks and vaccinations. Similarly, it seems like remote work should be an essential part of any liberal platform. Why haven’t we seen either side take it up? What are we to make of this?
There is every evidence that intelligence can be embodied materially. Our intelligence and mind comes from matter. We know the rules that govern matter sufficiently well. We can even build and represent complex systems inside computers. We tend to think of artificial intelligence as something that needs to be constructed or built. Human intelligence is just a special case of artificial intelligence—the same rules about matter apply. However, we naturally evolved into intelligence rather than being constructed. Watch the video with Frank Wilczek See also:
Having ‘good taste’ is difficult to define. Taste is subjective, it is only confirmed by assent from others (from Immanual Kant) a kind of determinate negation. Taste is also essential for building great products. In Creative Selection, Ken Kocienda describes what it means at Apple. Taste is three things 1) judgment 2) balance 3) and wholeness. A refined sense of judgment leads to good decisions repeatedly. Balancing important dimensions and trade-offs means building for people and not building to build. Finally, it’s pleasing as a whole—it all fits together and pleasing not because of a thin veneer, but because design is how it works. See also
Steve Jobs was quoted as saying “Design is how it works.” Design is not a step in the process to make it look nice after it’s already been built, but an imbuing process that happens as a matter of course. In that way design is substantial and not a gimmick or afterthought. According to Creative Selection, this was a mantra repeated often during the building of the iPhone. In order for the whole product to be really great, how it worked and every little decision needed to be thoughtfully designed. See also:
Because the COVID-19 Delta variant is much more transmissible (translating to a higher R rate of 50-100% higher than a year ago) and mRNA vaccines are 90% effective, we need 90% of the population to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Unfortunately that seems unlikely due to the politicization of the vaccine. Read Delta Variant - Everything you need to know.
In sales, the difference between hitting your numbers and not has more to do with the volume of your top of the funnel than anything else. Since a third of sales comes from doing nothing at all, simply increasing the amount of prospecting and appointment setting will improve your sales numbers and can make a big difference. See also:
In 2019, Americans spent an average of 55.2 minutes per day commuting. During the COVID-19 pandemic, remote workers have completely eliminated morning commutes which is like a 10% raise (or higher if you are like 10% of Americans that commute two hours per day). The monetary value of saved commuting time would be equivalent to the largest tax cuts for the middle class ever. See also:
Using codespaces, you can open a web-based VSCode session, open a terminal and install emacs. Then set the option for using the option key as meta in Settings. Install dependencies for Then clone my .emacs.d: Then open emacs (which installs packages with Now there is a full emacs with my config and a vterm running in the browser using GitHub Codespaces. It’s possible to run a Linux container and run it through the browser using Kasm (an easier remote desktop kindof thing). It can be customize to launch emacs directly. I haven’t tried it but seems promising for self-hosting and running privately behind tailscale.sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelleyk/emacs && sudo apt install emacs27
vterm:sudo apt install cmake libtool libtool-bin
git clone https://github.com/alexkehayias/emacs.d && mv emacs.d .emacs.d
use-package):emacs
Other tweaks
M-BKSPC not working like it does in macOSmagit can’t open the commit dialogueefm-langserver, aspell)CTRL-CMD-P (there’s still no way of removing the top heading, but it’s close to fully full screen)Alternatives
Product engineers solve user problems, but why are there so few of them? As recently as 1999, The Inmates are Running the Asylum told the tech industry that engineers were the reason websites and products were bad. Engineers were not trusted with knowing about users and their problems and yet, they are blamed for poor solutions to solving them. The way we organize engineering doesn’t help. As companies grow, engineers specialize and are closely managed by project managers and product managers. It’s difficult to build anything significant that requires action across teams and departments. Altogether that means we lack the trust in engineers to understand users and the experience pool to cultivate a strong product engineering discipline. Status quo preserving behavior will continue to keep engineering as they are, which doesn’t bode well for users. See also:
SQLite doesn’t have a However, to handle all cases of a string in a comma joined array of strings (e.g. a collection of tags related to a post aggregated using For example: This returns the correct result whether the FIND_IN_SET operator to test whether or not a string exists in set value. To work around it, you can do string comparison using LIKE.GROUP_CONCAT) you need to prepare the value by adding preceding and trailing commas.select * from (select post_id, group_concat(tags.tag) as alltags from tags group by tags.post_id) where ','||alltags||',' like '%,food,%';
food tag was first, last, or somewhere in the middle.
In org-roam v2, a new requirement was added for all notes to have an org ID. This has a few notable downsides. It duplicates unique identifiers. Notes already have a unique ID, the file name which is enforced to be unique by the file system. Changing a file name should be equivalent to changing a unique ID—you probably don’t want to do that (and it’s a sign you should probably delete it and start a new note). It clutters the note. The preamble alone is a minimum of 4 lines compared to 1 before due to the addition of the It hurts portability. Previously, org-roam files used to ‘just work’ in Working Copy, including links to other files. It doesn’t anymore because of ID links. It also further locks the implementation in with org-mode which is lacking parsers to make it more ubiquitous (go-org is a good option, but many more are started and abandoned).:PROPERTIES: drawer.
Professional employer organizations rely on co-employment to share responsibilities with their customers. A company enters into an agreement with a PEO where the PEO is responsible for statutory requirements (remitting payroll taxes and compliance with labor laws) and the company acts as the workplace employer that hires, terminates, and supervises. (Interestingly, PEOs also have the power to hire/fire, but it is seldom, if ever, used). Each state recognizes co-employment (to some degree). Co-employment enables PEOs to file payroll taxes using their FEIN and state ID numbers (except client reporting states). They also can put their customers' employees on their master health care plans and workers' compensation insurance. See also:
SUTA dumping is fraudulent arbitrage of State Unemployment Tax where fraud-y PEOs put employees from high insurance rate companies into a new entity with a low insurance rate and pocketed the difference. This was made illegal by the SUTA Dumping Protection Act of 2004 which is why you typically get asked questions when signing up for payroll whether or not you are trying to do this.
PEOs charge between 2-7% of the dollar volume of the payroll for their services (more for GEOs) generating revenue between $1,200 per employee per year up to $4,000 (source: JP Morgan). See also:
Employee leasing was started in the 1960s and is a predecessor to professional employer organizations (PEO). It was used to exploit loopholes in the US tax system. The idea evolved from staffing agencies to include HR and worker safety services until someone coined the phrase PEO to sound more like HMO and clean up the image of employee leasing. Their image was further cleaned up by the SUTA Dumping Protection Act of 2004 which prevented SUTA dumping. See also:
A global employment organization (GEO) is an employer of record that is used to hire employees outside of the client’s country. They provide payroll administration, benefits administration, and HR services. As an EOR, they also take on the liability for statutory compliance. See also:
While government tends to be short-term oriented (the election cycle drives decisions so officials can be re-elected), an area the do feel comfortable thinking long term is infrastructure. With regularity, they will initiate projects to build roads, telecommunications, buildings, and other infrastructure that takes many years to build (the second avenue subway line in Manhattan started in 1972). In the The Clock of the Long Now, they argue that the same infrastructure thinking can be applied nature such as terraforming. Maybe by trying to terraform Mars we can fix the Earth. See also: