Hacker News: harryh

New comment by harryh in "The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup"

harryh — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:25:18 +0000

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

New comment by harryh in "The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup"

harryh — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:51:45 +0000

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

New comment by harryh in "The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup"

harryh — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:31:42 +0000

You're welcome!

The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

New comment by harryh in "The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup"

harryh — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:04:48 +0000

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

New comment by harryh in "Why the 2% inflation target? (2023)"

harryh — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 02:38:15 +0000

Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

New comment by harryh in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

harryh — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 21:00:06 +0000

Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the really bad thing is then he would be fired.

New comment by harryh in "We bailed out the banks but we’re not prepared to bail out the planet"

harryh — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 23:35:19 +0000

1) Note that I indicated that the 20% increase was a real increase and not a nominal one. That means that to the extent that household expenses have increased, it's because households are using their newfound wealth to purchase more/better stuff! That's not a hollowing out of the middle class, that's a prospering one.

2) Household debt has declined significantly over the past 15 years:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

New comment by harryh in "We bailed out the banks but we’re not prepared to bail out the planet"

harryh — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 21:02:41 +0000

Median household income in America is roughly $70,000 per year. That is a roughly 20% real (not nominal!) increase over the past 40 years.

$10/month would represent 0.17% of that income.

New comment by harryh in "Threads, a Slack alternative unrelated to Instagram, has seen downloads surge"

harryh — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:25:55 +0000

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

New comment by harryh in "1 in 5 adults don’t want children –– and they don’t regret it later"

harryh — Sun, 07 May 2023 01:34:55 +0000

Worse demographic ratios though which I think is likely more important.

New comment by harryh in "Stripe is just trying to do layoff without paying severance"

harryh — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 18:33:19 +0000

The WARN act only applies for "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

I'm honestly not sure how this would apply for a remote workforce. Consult your friendly HR or legal team counterpart. :)

New comment by harryh in "Stripe is just trying to do layoff without paying severance"

harryh — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 18:29:35 +0000

Fair point about Canadian law being different than US law. For the < 5% of Stripe employees there, that does appear to be true. Though I would again point to my 2nd bullet point:

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

New comment by harryh in "Stripe is just trying to do layoff without paying severance"

harryh — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 18:20:52 +0000

This post should be flagged off HN.

Everything in the tweet is factually incorrect.

- Companies aren't required to pay severance when doing layoffs.

- There is no evidence that Stripe isn't paying severance when firing for performance (I'd be shocked if they aren't)

- Employees fired for performance are absolutely eligible for state unemployment benefits.

New comment by harryh in "The Lonely Office Is Bad for America"

harryh — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:41:30 +0000

I suspect that whatever climate benefits generated by eliminating commutes will be counteracted by the urban sprawl fostered by your first point.

New comment by harryh in "AWS us-east-2 outage"

harryh — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 19:19:34 +0000

There is no "someone" who could do anything about this.

New comment by harryh in "AWS us-east-2 outage"

harryh — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 19:17:00 +0000

I think you're confusing availability zones with regions in this comment.

AWS AZs don't even have consistent naming across AWS accounts.

New comment by harryh in "Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time"

harryh — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 04:00:16 +0000

Yup. Which goes back to the housing problem. Under building of housing country wide (and even more so in major cities) is IMHO one of the root causes of many many many of the problems we see in America today.

New comment by harryh in "Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time"

harryh — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:46:59 +0000

You don't need eminent domain.

There are plenty of landowners that want to build. The issue is that NIMBYs have largely captured the city government and zoning restrictions have made new building mostly illegal. We jut need a government that legalizes new construction.

New comment by harryh in "Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time"

harryh — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:42:42 +0000

It's mostly illegal to build new housing in Manhattan.

New comment by harryh in "Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time"

harryh — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:42:07 +0000

If NYC politics serves property developers first, then it probably wouldn't be illegal for property developers to develop new property in the vast majority of the city.

I think you've misdiagnosed the problem.