I live in Palo Alto making about $55k and live fairly comfortably; my actual living expenses are probably closer to $25k. It would be hard to have a family, but I get by just fine having roommates.
I live on the peninsula and was perfectly comfortable with the $60k salary at my first job here, even while paying off student loans and regularly going out to eat. Of course, I had a pretty dumpy apartment so I could pay relatively low rent, and I didn’t have many other expenses at the time. I definitely spend more now that I have more (nicer place, partner, cat) but I’ve worked my way up to a considerably higher salary as well.
Zillow tells me average house price in Palo Alto is $2.6m, average rent $5k. Do you own/share a house? I'm in Europe, so basing myself on public stats.
Thanks for answering! So the data is not far off. I should add "or is single and has no children" to my comment. Nothing bad about that, on the contrary, it does mean older founders with family or other obligations will need to bring/sacrifice their own nest egg.
I think a total household income of ~150-200k is right around the cutoff for 4 people to live in Palo Alto together. You can split that up however you want though. In my case, that's 4 people earning ~50k rooming together. In the case of a family, one person earning 120k and the other doing a startup earning 50k (plus 2 non working kids) works too.
You're right that someone trying to support a family on a single income at 50k would have a tough time, but I think the range of people who can make it work is a lot broader than you're making it seem.
To be fair two non working kids have a lot more costs than a frugal 20 something. Childcare alone in the bay area is probably in the 10s of thousands a year range.
How about an official statement from Facebook itself over a year ago[1]? If it was true, people could find out by decompiling the app and make Facebook look absolutely horrible.
It's one thing to lie, it's another thing to lie about something that could easily be found out and possibly get them sued. The risk/reward ratio seems way too high for Facebook to lie (unless they were forced to.) That's obviously not proof, but it seems like pretty strong evidence.
If I understand you correctly, the way you'd address this is by using counterfactuals. See this course[1] for an overview and this paper[2] which talks about the bias problem in the context of movie recommendations.
Yes, counterfactual inference is relevant to this. But it is not so much about answering "what would have happened if?", but more about control theory and feedback loops: Your model never being a static function, but a node inside a giant recursive net composed of other models and humans.
Another example (this time on the output-end): You build a model to route emails to sets of experts inside an organization. Your proxy loss is multi-class logistic loss on topic classes. You are interested in improving response times (which you can more or less measure in aggregate) and quality of response (which is harder to measure, if at all).
You build a first iteration of the model and response times improve. Then you create new features and modeling techniques and you improve logistic loss, but when you deploy this model, response times go way down. What happened? Maybe the experts fitted/adapted to the model output: They learned how to quickly answer a specific type of email because it keeps getting routed to them. The new model does better matching topics to emails, resulting in those emails now being send to another expert. While this expert in the long-term may become better at answering emails closer to his/her topic expertise, in a faster and more informative manner, in the short-term he/she will be slower and of lower quality, as they need to adapt to the new types of emails they are getting, and lack the priors for dealing with ambiguous emails.
Both on the input and the output of models there are all sorts of these nasty human-feedback loops that are very hard to even identify and harder to solve.
Unfortunately, all modern implemenatations of communism are authoritarian. USSR, China and NK. I understand that in theory it should not be that way but it is.
That link kind of a shallow criticism of Marx considering it doesn't take into account the evidence of actual physically existing communities that existed and still exist that do not have the capitalist notion of private property.
To be clear, it's a critique of what someone else wrote about what he wrote.
> What existing communist communities are you thinking of?
I'm thinking of, for example, cultures that are based on gift economics. The most well known example is the practice of Moka exchange in parts of Papua New Guinea [0]. Other examples abound in anthropology. A light read that specifically tries to outline systems of human existence outside of capitalism is Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology [1].
But what Marx would have been very familiar with because it had only recently been abolished is the commons that was used by peasants for thousands of years before the early capitalist states completed the process of enclosure which violently converted those common lands into private holdings. Marx actually does a poor job of describing pre-capitalist economies but he didn't need to-- he only needed to analyze them to determine the origins of capital. The concept he came up with is primitive accumulation, which is the process by which the class structure of capitalism originated [2].
The main point I was making is that human systems outside of capitalism exist. Marx doesn't need to make that case. In particular, he doesn't need to explain how to run a communist society in order to demonstrate that such a development proceeds after capitalism. He does this by examining how capitalism reproduces itself, and then he uncovers the contradictions within that reproductive process to predict what will happen when those contradictions become untenable. The main thrust is that capitalism is founded on a system where surplus value is expropriated by the owning class from the working class, and Marx's work is an analysis of how this determines the dynamics of capitalism. In particular, Marx predicts communism is what succeeds capitalism because he expects the resolution of this class conflict to be the abolition of class as a whole and the democratic management of the means of production.
This is a bold thesis, and certainly one that can be attacked. I just had a conversation at lunch about the ways in which Marx's analysis was incomplete or flawed, though he was impressively prescient considering how much mind-boggling technological and societal transformation that has occurred since then.
One needs to also understand that Marx was trying to explain in a scientific way the social unrest of his time. The history books they use in schools, unsurprisingly, undersell just how tumultuous and violent the rise of capitalism was, and how often it was in crisis.
From your link:
> Just as, a dam having been removed, a river will eventually reach the sea somehow, so capitalism having been removed society will eventually reach a perfect state of freedom and cooperation.
This is the same kind of error that is made when people reason about evolution as if it were a volitional process. Marx is describing the long-term behavior of the entire socio-political system. He's not making a deontological argument. His arguments are that the very same mechanisms that reproduce capital day after day lead to its instability and, ultimately, its transformation into a new system that has resolved its inherent contradictions (but it also, that new system will have its own contradictions that are unforeseeable).
> I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”
Well, ok. So, funny enough, the theoretical justifications for the welfare state were based on Marx's theory of historical materialism. Even Marx's critics since his time have had to incorporate historical materialism into their framework, even if they don't admit it in those terms. It's also the case that a historical materialist analysis of society is an epistemological tool which can be used for or against capitalism.
The slatestar dude is pretty decent when he talks about psychology. I think he is an arrogant fool when he so confidently dips his toe into serious philosophy. Like, there are far, far better criticisms of Marx than this. This wouldn't even pass muster for an undergraduate student.
In Marxist analysis, there is a distinction drawn between personal property and private property. The former is one's possessions. The latter is exclusionary ownership over economically active assets, i.e. the means of production. For example, land, factories, machinery. The way private ownership works under capitalism is tangibly different from ownership forms anterior to it, for example feudal titles to land. In many societies, including say England before the industrial revolution, the primary means of production was the land itself which wasn't owned by anyone: It was the commons that commoners are named after. It was enclosure, a generations-long political and violent process which converted the common land into private property. This had two implications:
1) There was now a class of people that owned most of the resources necessary for a human to survive by their own work.
2) There was now a massive class of landless people who could no longer sustain themselves through their own work of the commons that now needed jobs.
This is the sort of system of property that is strongly associated with capitalism that need not exist in other cultures.
> You genuinely think the type of people who subscribe to subreddits like coontown and fatpeoplehate are going to have their mind changed by people on the internet?
Yes, because I've personally met such people.
> I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.
Changing minds takes a lot of empathy and skill (and usually time) to pull off consistently in person, much less online; I'm not surprised that a strategy of throwing scientific articles in people's faces (which they will probably never read) would be unsuccessful. Regardless, even if you are successful, you will probably never know unless you have a long term relationship with the individual.
I also have direct experience with the opposite: an older friend (late 50s), socially isolated, who over the last year or two has self-radicalized into a hardcore Muslim hater.
A few years ago he was just a plain ol' gentle soul, and he liked to watch those militant atheist videos on Youtube (I have no opinion about such). I guess one of them had some sort of anti-Islam recommended video that caught his eye, because I remember the day we went out for lunch and he told me about a video he watched about Islam.
I have quite a few Muslim friends so I spent some time gently dissecting what he was saying. None of what I said stuck. Over the following year, he got deep into the rabbit hole, until how awful Muslims are is all he'd talk about.
I had to end the friendship, despite my efforts to talk him out of that, because that garbage had literally become the entirety of what he was into/wanted to chat about. (Objectionable and boring, hah.)
The jump from militant atheists to Islamaphobes is not a big one. A lot of New Atheists, including very prominent ones like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, have a tendency to single out Islam as particularly worth hating.
One of the things that Tocqueville approved of in America is that everyone had some experience of government via jury duty. Which is compulsory (at least in principle, and in those days, probably in practice too).
I've often wondered if random juries should play a larger role in day-to-day government. Forcing people to work like this is a huge tax and not to be taken lightly, but taxing peoples attention rather than their wallets might actually be what we need.
I was on a jury deciding a driving while intoxicated case. The first vote was basically two of us against the rest of the jury. The reasons I heard justifying the guilty verdict votes were things like "Well, I'm a mom and I think drunk driving is terrible. That's why I think she is guilty".
Fortunately, there was one other educated person on the jury, and eventually, after discussing the actual facts of the case the rest of the jury understood and we acquitted the accused.
It was scary, during the selection process, the candidates mostly fell into two categories. Those looking forward to the $40 (as I remember it) allowance they gave us for each day of the trial and those that valued their time at more than $5/hour. The latter group all seemed to have some excuse for getting out of the trial. If it wasn't for the two of us on the jury, I believe the accused woman would have have been found guilty.
> That's the problem with democracy. It's hard work.
I think that misses the point. The problem is not hard work, but rather hard work dictated by a preconceived belief that a one-size-fits-all collective solution is the best approach to all problems.
In my experience (have served in a few of these) it's hard enough to find one person willing serve in each organizational position. Contested elections are almost never seen.
A friend of mine got an offer from a startup in Palo Alto that he wanted to negotiate. He literally walked across the street to another interview and had a counter offer when he met with the founder of the first company the next day.
I've done this in San Diego, and it wasn't even in the city. I didn't even cross a street, just half of a small parking lot. It's totally possible in other places.
