TBH the bill is kind of unclear on this. It seems to say if the employee tells the employer they are available 5pm-9pm each day then that is ok, but if the employer asks them to be available 5pm-9pm then the employee is paid 1.5x overtime for the whole 4-hour chunk even if asked to just do a few minutes of work sometime during that chunk.

I can think of a bunch of areas where this kind of bill would degrade people's experiences with businesses:

- handoffs will suck. Someone's shift ends at 2pm and you take over. At 2:05 you realize you need to ask them if a client issue got resolved or if they did some important item on their task list. But now you're not allowed to. Lots of time will get wasted as a result.

- scheduling will get slower. This would impact founders if it was in California! For example VC firms (like mine) have executive assistants, and the expectation is something like "work 7-8 hours a day, and check email a few times in the evening in case something pressing comes up." But if you can't ask your EA to do a quick email check a few times in the evening, the thing that could've been scheduled today for tomorrow will instead be scheduled tomorrow for the future.

- if businesses need to hire more just to have a little more around the clock coverage, then prices go up for everyone. E.g. if 5% of work happens unpredictably between 5pm and 10pm, then either that work can get ignored until the next day (previous points), or someone can be hired to work 5pm-10pm -- but eventually that extra cost gets passed down to customers.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674574

Points: 3

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1) Lots of features got moved around and there are now many "Write with AI", "Generate image with AI", etc buttons polluting user interfaces even though I don't use them and don't want to use them.

2) Actually, I would use some of these features if I didn't have to do a full opt-in to Smart Features for Google Workspace. If I'm writing a blog post and want to generate a cat picture, that doesn't mean I want to turn on invasive AI-enhanced features in every Google App under the sun. Gemini's chat interface is similar from I can tell: either I can see my search history but Google can train off of it, or if I don't want Google to train off of my chats then I can turn History off but then I can't view it myself. Why isn't there an option for me to see my history but not Google?? They're just the worst at caring about UX.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46276578

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

(I'm not disagreeing with the author, just sharing an article that is interesting/relevant.)

For these types of businesses, paying less for labor is a secondary goal and just having enough labor (human or machine) is the primary goal.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44447219

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44263554

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897636

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874710

Points: 1

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This reminds me of some early stage startup pitches. During a pitch, I might ask: "what do you think about competitor XYZ?" And sometimes the answer is "we don't think highly of them, we have never even seen them in a single deal we've competed for!" But that's almost a statistical tautology: if you both have .001% market share and you're doubling or tripling annually, the chance that you're going to compete for the same customers is tiny. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss that competitor. Same thing with the article above dismissing AI as a threat to jobs so quickly.

To give a concrete example of a job disappearing: I run a small deep tech VC fund. When I raised the fund in early '24, my plan was to hire one investor and one researcher. I hired a great investor, but given all of the AI progress I'm now 80% sure I won't hire a researcher. ChatGPT is good enough for research. I might end up adding a different role in the near future, but this is a research job that likely disappeared because of AI.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43214612

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

It's like a prisoner's dilemma where property owners as a class may not want more housing so that they are wealthier on paper, but any individual property owner will want to build housing because that'll grow their wealth faster.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514043

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

From the linked article (from Jan 2023):

  But sesame does differ in one distinct way from eggs, peanuts, shellfish, milk, and soy: The seeds are teeny tiny and hard to keep track of. This means they’re prone to “cross-contamination,” in food-allergy terms. If you operate a bakery that makes sesame bagels, the odds are decent that rogue seeds will end up in your other products, too. Bad news for people with severe sesame allergies. But it’s also expensive and frustrating for food manufacturers to ensure the seeds are kept away from other foods, if they’re on the FDA’s major allergens list.
  
  Advocates have therefore been warning since December that the FASTER Act is poised to have a counter effect. Rather than minimize cross-contamination, as they argue the law requires, many big food brands have opted to add sesame to their bread products, then simply declare it as an ingredient. They are intentionally adding sesame flour to “avoid complying with the spirit and intent of the FASTER Act,” FARE tells Fast Company. That is cheaper than certifying that their facilities are 100% sesame-free.

Given that the methodology was to compare wages for the 75th percentile vs. the 25th percentile, this just seems like a political potshot/non sequitur rather than an explanation for the wage gap. Billionaires are ~.01% of SF's population, and that won't meaningfully impact the wage gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40006032

Points: 2

# Comments: 0