> "Unions might be able to bargain against h1b..."

Remember, H1-Bs and immigrants, that a union would be not be on your side. They would have a large percentage of pro-nativists that affect their policies, regardless of what they say officially. There's a long, long history of unions in the United States opposing immigrant labor that is worth reading up on and, even on supposedly worldly and well educated HN, you will see that there isn't much pushback against posts with anti-H1-B sentiment.

When there's no solidarity amongst ALL workers, no wonder unions are a non starter.

In such an environment, H1B workers will actively fight union formation.

But remember, the company can always decide to just not employ US-based employees (including H1B) at all. Your job can be done elsewhere for a fraction of the cost, remember?

I hate MS as much as anyone else, but I don't have a problem with them doing this. Legally they have to comply if they have evidence in a legal action. Maybe they are at fault for not solely relying on the TPM, or not giving users informed consent about using the cloud, but I cannot fault them for not going to battle for civil liberties when they can't even implement notepad without screwing it up.

You absolutely can and should fault them. This is a choice they made.

the leeches are the publicly traded companies that are listed on the stock market. Any market should be happy to have more participants, unless you like price-uncertainty.

and I wonder how much of your success / failure is luck vs advanced-anything. You could wager 7-figure bankrolls in vegas on blackjack or baccarat and _possibly_ double or triple it. Doesn't mean your equation-solving had anything to do with it (in fact it expressly doesn't in that case).

Strictly wrong:

- a casino is a random game

- stock market is a game of incomplete informatoin

The one cant related to the other by whatever equation.

Taleb calls it the Ludic Fallacy (game fallacy)

The statistics of games are understandable, defined and easy to work with.

The statistics of markets, as Soros spent his career investigating, are filled with feedback loops, and as Taleb investigated, fat tails.

> and I wonder how much of your success / failure is luck vs advanced-anything

Well take someone who YOLO on a 0 DTE option and makes 80x (not unheard of) vs someone who wins the same amount over, say, four years and 8 000 trades... Well it's not impossible that the YOLOer is more skilled and has an edge (while also being a degen but that's not the point): it is just very unlikely.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of trades is not the same as "gambling one night in Vegas".

And it clearly violated the "only pay for what you use" philosophy. Like driving a bulldozer to get a soda.

I remember the first thing you had to do with eclipse was increase the memory limit so the obese hog called JVM could have barely enough room to wiggle around.

I think this is the perfect application of a micro payment service. Each PR must be signed with a nominal amount of money, say $0.15 give or take. You send in a commit, with no expectation to get it back.

I think a deposit would be better then. You make a deposit of ¢15 for each issue and PR you open, and then the maintainers can decide to give it back to you if it was opened in good-faith/useful/merged/whatever policy they decide on.

Agreed. Could be fiat or some sort of crypto currency that requires the submitter to have a vested interest in the outcome.

Honestly, I would love it if I could front some money in order to have the devs look at my PRs. Half my PRs just go into the void and nobody looks at them until some staleness bot inevitably closes it.

This is a similar problem to resume spam. I always wish I could pay $5 when submitting a resume with the guarantee that someone would actually look at it and give me a fair shot. If I ever run a place I want to experiment with only accepting resumes through letter mail or in person.

I want to extend this idea to email. Use encryption, but for proof that the email can't be read, instead of for security/privacy (not that I'm against either of those).

Update the email protocol so that all messages must be encrypted. Not "by default", but by necessity. The server rejects them if they aren't encrypted and signed in a way that proves the decryption key is on a block chain.

The only way to put the key in the chain is to submit a micro payment. By "courtesy" , but completely subject to the recipient, the users client will refund the payment 48 hrs after it has been decrypted/read. Only if they click "spam" then the payment stays on their ledger. This would kill spam overnight.

The two downsides I see so far are that the chain is a single point of failure for everyone, and it would cost people a few bucks and some friction to get the clients set up. Plus the coin would have to be very low transaction cost, and still fully redeemable for actual value somewhere.

Unfortunately, I doubt that would work. Email is so popular because it's sort of a universal messaging protocol that so many old but critical pieces of infrastructure require. If this "Email 2.0" released, it would take years, if not decades, for critical infrastructure to switch over.

In the meantime, you'd still need an Email 1.0 client. So now you have a mix of your most important emails from critical infrastructure and just spam from bots who don't want to pay money for sending spam in your inbox.

You'll still need to deal with spam, but if anything it'll be even worse because now you have to double the amount of inboxes you have.

It would be monumental to get people to shift en masse, I agree.

Perhaps it could start off as a niche service to contact really popular people who could command high fees to speak to them. For instance, $MOVIE_STAR could have a $500 message fee (that goes to charity) to be able to say something to him/her and maybe get a reply. This could popularize the service, and it could grow over time.

Another problem is that the legacy email providers would not like transporting encrypted payloads that they can't mine personal data from.

Attachments could also be a headache, do they get stored for free? On the chain or on the recipient server?

I think this idea doesn't go far enough. If it's money that's motivating slop, fine - let's make it about money. $50 to submit a bug report. If it's legitimate, we send you back $60; the judgement is on the curl maintainers' honor. If it wastes time, well, at least the curl maintainer gets a steak dinner.

or, having a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers on the weekend is fine. but drinking a 6-pack per day or slamming shots every night is reckless and will lead to health consequences.

I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.

It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.

"yes, I would my steak well done and macerated into an easily digestible paste with no seasoning".

There's more to good prose than just conveying the bare nutrients, y'know?

Here ya go with literally an order of magnitude fewer words:

> The Salinas Valley cycles through wet and dry decades. Droughts cause ruin and exodus, yet people always forget the previous climate phase.

I dunno, doesn't seem to have the same impact on me. Maybe there is something to that whole prose thing.

Maybe he could have just replaced that whole section with a couple graphs showing average rainfall and crop yield for the Salinas Valley.

Ahh but don't you know? A picture is worth a thousand words, so your charts would be upping the measures word count, not reducing it by an order of magnitude