The glorious state of California has the highest taxes in the nation and is the home of the tech industry. If wealth isn't trickling down, it's because it is being wasted.
Actually California has the 4th highest taxes in the nation behind New York, New Jersey, and Conneticut. It has the highest income tax, but that's because its other taxes are relatively low, in particular property taxes which were evicerated by Prop 13. California's current tax system is actually regressive, with the poorer section of society shouldering more of the tax burden than the richer segment.
Also the tech industry holds an awful lot of wealth outside the US, in tax havens such as Ireland. And while taxes in California are high by US standards, many European countries (with excellent public transport systems) tax at higher rate still, for example sales tax in the UK is 20%.
The state of California is chronically underfunded because it does a poor job of taxing the people who actually have money. Not because the money isn't well spent (some 40% of it goes on education alone).
>The state of California is chronically underfunded because it does a poor job of taxing the people who actually have money.
So does everyone else. The reason it's so hard to tax the wealth of the rich is not because they're masters of political manipulation but because they're -- as you note -- much better at (legally) restructuring their activities so that the wealth does not pass through a nexus that a given jurisdiction controls.
To be fair, Ireland is just used as a stop on the wayto the Bahamas/Caymans, for most tech company money. It does pump up our GDP though, which makes people think we are doing well, so at least we get that.
Reading Hacker News, I get the impression that tech startups are the only sector of our capitalist economy that has transcended the profit motive and is apparently serving a higher cause.
I love this, but at the same time I have to be wary.
I'm torn between thinking of Hacker News as benevolent or delusional and self-righteous.
I get the benevolent vibes when I see comments like golergka's. I get the delusional, self-righteous vibes when I see founders and VCs comparing themselves to JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller, saying "Hey! Look! I'm just as important as those guys!" "Silicon Valley is important!"
That said, Silicon Valley may very well be an important part of history. But the self-centeredness makes me wary.
Silicon Valley is most definitely an important part of history, regardless what Hacker News and its ilk do. It is named after the primary material input of its name sake first innovation, the integrated circuit. Robert Noyce, the "Mayor or Silicon Valley", Robert Moore, and the rest of the "Traitorous Eight" founded Fairchild Semiconductor and then these two went on to found Intel, a unicorn among unicorns. They accomplished all this by challenging many business norms including "not being company men" and selling their product at a loss until volume was up enough to turn a profit. They didn't just spin off companies, they are the ones that transformed the orchards into the Silicon Valley you take for granted today. They and their progeny laid the social (even the use of venture capital!) and technological foundation that is taken for granted today. Many people I ask have no clue who Robert Noyce is, and know Moore only for Moore's Law. It's like being a publicist and not knowing who Guttenberg is. It's embarrassing really. Silicon valley is already a part of history. I know this and I am young, not someone of an older generation that lived any of this. It's all so rivht there in front of your face, it's hard not to know this stuff. Hacker News, many threads show an ignorance of a lot of this stuff, and I'm just about over it all.
I don't see golergka's comment as falling into some sort of SV "VC-istan" delusional thinking. Joining a small, expanding company is an excellent way to build experience and career growth. It's just in SV we call those small businesses "startups" and accord them some sort of inherent moral superiority.
I have a different reaction. I think the idea that you shouldn't be in it solely for the money is a way to protect against the emotional costs of near-certain failure. If money is your only goal, then failure will crush you. If you can point to all the non-monetary things you gained, then you came out on top no matter how the business itself ends.
Yeah, I think there's one thing the startup world does offer: more freedom+respect than other places. (Above a certain income.) It's horrific, full of lies and doesn't let everyone in. And that "freedom" is often interpreted as harassment.
But. There's a reason why certain people choose it. You can be less of a cog.
In the magazine industry, those are the only "jobs" at all. There are very few paying jobs (and those that do pay a non-livable wage) so you have people with degrees and a year plus experience still working for nothing (or next to nothing).
Have you read the theory? Salary is not even a motivational factor. Salary is among the hygiene factors, that (quoting wikipedia) do not give positive satisfaction or lead to higher motivation, though dissatisfaction results from their absence.
This seems to be a theory based on the assumption that the person(s) are already having more than their base needs met: (decent housing, food, entertainment, retirement). Salary is one hell of a motivator if you're struggling to meet these things. It's all good and academic but antithetical to why a good portion of people obtain higher education.
It is just an academic theory, not holy gospel (with a long "Validity and criticisms" section in Wikipedia).
I think salary IS a motivational factor in real life, as for many humans it is a yardstick of superiority compared to other humans (whether it is right or wrong is another matter).
Its more than just a yardstick for comparison. I know I want to be able to buy the things I want (whether that be going out to dinner more often, buying a new car at 5 years instead of 10, etc). If my salary isn't enough to do those things without major sacrifices elsewhere, then its at least as important a motivator to me as other things.
I can only imagine a world without monetary payment, in some form, for the extremes of far too little and more than enough.
Thinking about the brighter side of things I suppose that in the more than enough side of things you would be paid with happiness. That to be wealthy would be to have something you enjoy doing all of the time. Success however, would be measured in a currency that is more difficult to track, respect.
Have you ever asked someone if they would still be working at their job if they weren't getting paid? Or even the weaker version, if they didn't need the money?
I have asked many people this and only two people have said yes to this. One was someone who already sold his startup so probably didn't have to work ever again. The other was someone who could have retired but he was afraid if he shut down his company his employees would struggle to find new jobs.
In my small corner of numerical computing, pretty much every name I know on the east coast who doesn't hold a university position has moved to Yahoo Research in recent years. So at least their research lab does not seem to experience a brain drain.
Oh really, what field / subfield are you in? Do they have an east coast research lab or are the people you know moving to the west coast?
They had a huge brain drain of their research lab like 4 years ago after some past company turmoil. Andrei Broder and dozens of other researchers left.
They might be building it up again, but I feel it's unfortunate for those being hired, because research is usually one of the first things to get cut when a company is in financial difficulty. Research is long term, and Yahoo doesn't appear to have a long term plan unfortunately.
I can't see how arXiv helps with the outlined problems. The goal of publishing is getting a stamp of approval from your peers, which you can then bring to hiring or promotions committees to buttress your case. Arxiv merely helps you put your paper online, which I would argue is a trivial problem (and has been so since the personal university homepage was invented).
S3QL may be a good fit for your needs. It's a FUSE filesystem for S3 that supports encrypted dedup snapshots. You can do backups by rsyncing your current state into the filesystem and snapshotting it. I considered using it for my backups but ended up choosing Attic, so I can't say how well it works in practice.
Unfortunately S3QL uses MAC-then-encrypt[1], which is pretty strongly discouraged[2]. Very nice there's a detailed writeup on the details in the docs though, wish more projects did that.
As a tangent, I was appalled to read that Stanford undergrads can major in "management science". What happened to the high academic standards for which Stanford is famous?
Management Science & Engineering is a major that broadly tracks Operations Research at other schools - it's a mixture of statistics, business, finance, and optimization engineering. Stanford has no business undergrad major, so it's often a popular choice for those who want to try something different than Economics.
The number of companies in Silicon Valley that fail purely due to management incompetence should yield a bit of respect for people trying to improve the situation.
In any case, Management Science at Stanford is part of the "Management Science and Engineering" division.. You can see their areas of research here:
I know several Stanford graduates. MS&E (management science and engineering) is basically the Stanford equivalent of an undergraduate degree in business. So judged relative to other business programs it's not any better or any worse (although we can argue the merits of studying business in undergrad at all).
And to be fair, mismanagement is more likely to come from people who think that studying business in school qualifies them to manage people than it is from other sources.
"self-designed major in management science and neuroengineering"
I would guess it is one of those programs where you kind of make up your title and path. Is neuroengineering more to your liking?
It takes the groups and arranges them as the columns of a table. Whereas groupby allows you to operate on this table in the vertical direction, the full pivot table allows you to also operate on it horizontally.
Yes, but the second half dealing with iterative algorithms is pretty much useless, especially the chapter on conjugate gradients which is the one most relevant here. There isn't really a book that offers as easy an intro to iterative algorithms as Trefthen does for direct ones. In this case I would recommend to fall back on trusty old Golub and Van Loan (recently released in a new edition).
