I'm currently on the last few weeks of a six month web developer internship at a startup in Portland. I'm looking for another internship or a junior developer position.
I just finished Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe. One thing I was really surprised to learn was that Stan Lee was in his 40's and had already been a comicbook editor for 20 years before he co-created all the famous Marvel heroes like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk.
>According to Born into This, a documentary on Bukowski's life, Martin, offered Bukowski 100 dollars per month for life on condition that Bukowski would quit working for the post office and write full-time. He agreed and Post Office was written within a month.
Thanks. That snip doesn't make particularly clear when this happened, though from Bukowski's biography, I'd guess 1969 or thereabouts (as noted in my other comment on the value of $100/mo today).
This also somewhat calls into question what's required for genius to foster. Seems that some people are simply driven to create, and any environment in which they're free to focus on their creative efforts, and have financial concerns taken off the table (I've seen similar arguments made for tech hires: pay me enough money to not have to worry about it) is sufficient.
And that was when $100 was an equivalent of 3 ounces of gold which is about $4k today. Barrel of oil and S&P500 had roughly the same price in gold then as they do today.
Both gold and oil are poor inflation metrics as their prices are fairly volatile, albeit for different reasons. Also, it's not like Bukowski was investing his monthly Franklin in commodities.
This website suggests $656 as a more realistic figure. Enough to survive on while working furiously on your writing.
Not necessarily. A lot of people live here for a lot of different reasons. I live in SF for the people despite the way the city is organized and run.
The types of people from the techies to the hippies are what make San Francisco desirable. The "quaintness" people admires? Who cares? What matters if that changes with growth so long as it changes for the better?
Instead of being against all growth, why not just support growth that improves your quality of life? For example, instead of only being okay with rent control, permit a mechanism where you can trade your rent control on your current place for rent control in a better newly constructed building. Further still, you could create a market for people to exchange rent control in one unit for rent control in another unit. This would permit builders to voluntarily submit to rent control as a way to get access to land. i.e. I want to develop a piece of land into 20 units, where there are now two units. I could offer the tenants of those two units at the same rent price in nicer and larger units in a building I recently built.
Why pick on the city? So much of it would go away if the cities in which these companies exist would loosen their zoning regulations. Then we could get rid of the buses.
Honestly if autonomous cars can reduce even 10% of accidents caused by drunk driving and other human errors then they will have payed their way and more.
But speaking of paying, self driving cars also won't speed, turn right on red without a full stop, etc. Which means traffic tickets would be a thing of the past, along with the revenue they bring in.
That's probably not true. I've gotten the impression that a sizable chunk of police funding comes from speeding tickets.
Paying an officer to do something low-risk like camping out next to a road for a shift isn't really expensive. Same with monitoring systems like cameras on traffic lights. Set-up cost is significant, but they probably pay for themselves within a year.
The initial cost doesn't matter. If an officer doesn't cost much, yet you don't have to pay him any more than that is a 100% decrease in cost.
Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
> Second I know that the officer is not the only cost involved. What about maintaining a fleet of top of the line vehicles? How about paying all the support personnel such as IT Staff, dispatch, managers, etc? All of the other expensive toys carried around by the chaser?
Arguable. It depends on how badly you want [insert autonomous car producer here] to run your local police department from the cloud.
I was thinking about this for other reasons (it is beneficial for the auto-car to know about road closures), but a reasonable implementation has the vehicle interpreting rules data provided by the governments where it is operating, so you can do certification by making sure the vehicle 'correctly' interprets a given data set.
Having the rules data provided by the government is a fairly straightforward way for the vehicles to work even after the builder repudiates maintenance (maybe that is better said as 'to continue to work longer after', but whatever).
(I'm not worried about the cloud, hand-wringing and paranoia are going to make these things at least function independently or keep them off the road altogether)
Currently, that situation isn't possible, as self-driving cars still require an attentive driver who can take over at any time.
In the future? That's a hard question, and I'm sure however the legal system deals with it first will be wholly unfair and illogical. It'll be a battle between car owners, manufacturers, state and federal bodies, cities and counties, certification and safety agencies, etc.
Are we talking push bikes? At least in the UK you don't need a license for that anyway. I guess it's possible you wouldn't need a license for a self-driving car, but while regulations demand a fit driver who can control the vehicle that won't be the case.
My point is, I think regulations will change as technology improves. As transatlantic flights started, engines were unreliable, so regulators forced airlines to take awkward routes when crossing oceans (so that they would be 60 single-engine flying minutes away from a diversion airfield). Now that engines are more reliable, the regulations are significantly more relaxed, sometimes allowing 330 minutes to a diversion airport.
The point is, regulations are not set in stone. Companies can advance the state of the art, and ask the government to regulate less strictly.
As it stands now, self-driving cars are a research project, so we'd expect them to be regulated very strictly. As testing shows them to be safe, then we can relax the regulations. If self-driving cars without a supervising driver end up being safer than a normal car with a normal driver, it would make sense to not require a license. If an accident happens, it happens. Car accidents are nothing new.
Actually assuming 190 million licensed drivers (although drunks kill all manner of people, including themselves) and 10K drinking related deaths per year (how many are caused by drunks as opposed to would have happened anyway with at least one driver who happens to be drunk?)
Anyway assuming all victims loose 100 years of life...
10e3/190e6 * 24 * 365 * 100 * 0.1 = a delta of 4.6 hrs/day so I think your hyperbole is pretty much mathematically correct.
Our local krispie kreme closed, so the next closest is about 100 miles away, so if a "driveby" was purchased for me, it could actually burn up 4 or 5 hours of my time, especially during rush hour.
That's too idealistic. The reduction of accidents caused by human errors could very well be offset by a substantial increase in machine/OS/SW/HW caused accidents.
That's pretty unlikely though. It's not like cars are going from manual-everything to autonomous all at once. Multiple levels of traction control and steering assistance are already in control of your car, and they prevent more accidents than they cause. Autonomy is going to be rolled out in pieces and tested little by little.
Sometimes I feel like "do what you love" is a kind of psychic barrier-to-entry for certain fields. People say "you really have to love this field in order to be successful at it". Which implies that just being hardworking, disciplined, and determined to improve aren't enough. You have to love practicing the craft more than food, sleep, sex, or any other hobby or recreation imaginable. You have to feel like you were born to do it and when you aren't that's all you can think about. That the idea of a perfect day is 16 hours at the task with as little time as possible left over for anything else like food or sleep.
That's what comes to my mind when people tell me "make sure you love this stuff before you try to become a professional. You wont succeed otherwise."
Isn't this just an effect of supply and demand? with so many people wanting to be actors or musicians, working for almost nothing, how can you compete in that market if you don't love it?
That's right - the article is also saying that because there are many people who love doing it - that they would be willing to be paid less than someone who doesn't want.
A bit of trivia I find interesting: the etymology of the word passion is "to suffer (as christ did) [1]". I think in reality, DWYL advice is quixotic. But from within the head of an undeclared major, it sounds great. "Kid, just do whatever you like, and people will pay you for it!" And from the perspective of an employer, it sounds even better. "A passionate employee will put in 120% because he wants to do it anyway." So from both party's perspective, it's a win-win. I think this is primarily why DWYL is perpetuated.
Disrupt all the nimby's who lobby against building additional housing. Landowners hate new housing because it drives down the value of their assets. If anyone's truly despicable in this culture it's the landowners who refuse to let more housing come into the market.
"Cutting everyone a check for $1,000 a month, which most people in that room would consider too little to live on, would cost almost $3 trillion."
...What? I work a low skill service sector job and I only make $850 per month after all the taxes and deductions are taken out and I do fine as far as shelter and food are concerned. $1000 a month is plenty if it's after taxes and deductions.
I think the authors point was that the people in that room consider $1000 a month to not be a livable wage. Therefore, the inference is that those people would want to see more than $1000 a month, which would be even more costly. Perhaps the author just picked $1000 for ease of mathematical illustration.
