Hacker News: pilom

New comment by pilom in "End Mandatory Single Family Zoning by Overturning Euclid vs. Ambler"

pilom — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:38:05 +0000

And how much more expensive is rent in your town because it has 100 fewer units? That is the opportunity cost. Unfortunately, these opportunity costs are not borne by landowners, just by renters. And then when the government charges landowners higher taxes on their now more valuable property, the owners balk.

New comment by pilom in "Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?"

pilom — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:31:23 +0000

I teach whitewater kayaking and swiftwater rescue with my company https://whitewaterworkshop.com. I started doing it on nights and weekends around a full time tech job and then when COVID hit, demand for outdoor activities skyrocketed so I went full time with it.

I worked in tech for about 15 years where I paid off my student loans very aggressively, then once those were done I started pushing the same amount of money into retirement and savings accounts. My wife and I have no kids and were probably putting $50k+/year away. Turns out if you do that for 15 years, you end up with enough money to never need to worry about rent or health insurance again and you can choose what you want to do that is more fun. For me that was instructing and leading epic multi-week rafting trips like the Grand Canyon 3 times, the Maranon River in Peru, and the Alsek River in Alaska.

New comment by pilom in "Why not tax private jets out of business?"

pilom — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 18:12:43 +0000

Above a certain level I could certainly get behind saying no she's not entitled to it. 100% marginal tax rates above $10 million in annual earnings seem perfectly reasonable to me.

New comment by pilom in "Why not tax private jets out of business?"

pilom — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 18:10:29 +0000

Sure they would. The companies would just have to have different ownership models that incentivized more distributed ownership between more people. If we somehow said that no one could own more than $100 million of a company, then for every person who has $1 billion of a company now, there would be 10 people with $100 million instead. This would be a net benefit to society.

New comment by pilom in "After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done with the Full-Time Work"

pilom — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 14:41:22 +0000

The key to avoiding lifestyle creep is "pay yourself first". Set up automatic deductions to automatically pull money from your paycheck before it ever gets to your bank account. In the US, you can put $20k per year into a 401k account and another $6k into an IRA account tax free.

New comment by pilom in "So, why not the coin?"

pilom — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 05:34:05 +0000

I'm going to take your comment at face value and assume a good faith question. There are a couple arguments for higher federal debt levels. Federal Debt doesn't really matter the way a household's debt matters. The debt to GDP ratio isn't the same as a family's debt ratio because the government can always just print more money to pay down the debt. Will this increase inflation? Very probably but not necessarily. Is higher inflation an absolute bad thing? Also likely but not proven. Modern Monetary Policy would state that you can just increase taxes (in particular on the wealthy) to avoid inflation if you need to.

New comment by pilom in "Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?"

pilom — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 14:43:27 +0000

Passive investing with savings from my tech job. My wife and I earned around 150k per year for 10-12 years but lived happily off of 40-60k per year for that time. The difference went into savings and retirement accounts and now we live off that nest egg and do what we want. I started a business teaching whitewater kayaking, packrafting, and swiftwater rescue which really took off during COVID but honestly the nest egg is what allowed me to do it pretty risk free.

New comment by pilom in "Why women receive less CPR from bystanders (2018)"

pilom — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 13:08:25 +0000

Counterpoint, I'm a whitewater rescue instructor. My students and I are much more likely to see drowning victims than heart attack patients. Compression only CPR doesn't help drowning victims at all so we've had to add a "don't listen to your CPR instructor, do rescue breaths first" statement to our classes.

New comment by pilom in "What happens when a reservoir goes dry"

pilom — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 21:05:07 +0000

"Buy and dry" is the default outcome. Cities buy the farms nearby, use the farms' water rights and let the fields go dry. Agriculture uses 60-90% of the water in the west depending on river basin. Cities can afford MUCH higher rates per gallon for water than farmers can so the cities will eventually just buy out the farmers if nothing changes. I have no worries about Denver or Las Vegas or LA running out of water. There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.

New comment by pilom in "What happens when a reservoir goes dry"

pilom — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 21:00:03 +0000

We already do this. In Colorado there are over 50 "Transbasin Diversions" that move water from one river basin to another. Most of them transfer water out of the Colorado River Basin to the east side of the continental divide, usually the Arkansas River or South Platte River Basins. California also does this on a vast scale to move water from the wetter north to the drier south parts of that state.

There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive.

Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.

New comment by pilom in "Ask HN: What'd you do while HN was down?"

pilom — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 21:29:51 +0000

HN was down?

New comment by pilom in "Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage"

pilom — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 02:35:25 +0000

Anything is possible for enough money but I don't think you understand how much money what you're proposing would cost. In electricity alone desalination costs around 3kwh/m^3. 3.7mwh/acre foot of water. Last year we got 9.2 million acre feet of water in the Colorado River of the allocated 15 million acre feet. So if we say we want to supplement flows with just 2 million acre feet of desalination water, that's 7 Pwh of electricity. Per year. That's approximately 1000x the annual generated power of the largest nuclear plant in the world.

And we haven't even pumped that water 3700 feet up from sea level to the elevation of lake Powell.

New comment by pilom in "New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function"

pilom — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 01:03:29 +0000

BCRA mutations: "It’s estimated that 55 – 65% of women with the BRCA1 mutation will develop breast cancer before age 70" [0] ApoE4: "individuals with two versions of the ApoE 4 gene have a 50% chance of developing Alzheimer’s" [1] HTT: The Huntingtons gene. If you have the wrong version of this gene, you will get Huntington' disease.

All that to say that, in these cases, sure _most_ people have positive traits from these genes, not all do and we could theoretically use CRISPR to change people with the negative versions of these genes to the positive versions of these genes.

[0]: https://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/what-is-brca [1]:https://www.alzheimersorganization.org/alzheimers-gene-apoe4

New comment by pilom in "Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old"

pilom — Sat, 21 May 2022 04:03:21 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology for those interested in learning more.

New comment by pilom in "1 TW of solar to be deployed annually by 2030"

pilom — Thu, 19 May 2022 12:56:55 +0000

> Health care in the US was cheap before the government got involved in it.

Only for those who were healthy and had employer provided insurance. Everyone else either went without or paid through the nose or was dropped as soon as they actually needed services. Healthcare premiums are more expensive now because the insurance is a much better product for many people.

New comment by pilom in "The Biggest Potential Water Disaster in the United States"

pilom — Fri, 13 May 2022 14:41:11 +0000

If agriculture uses like 80% of the fresh water, why not just make water a public good and make people pay equal amounts for irrigation water so we stop subsidizing water rich plants like pistachios and almonds and alfalfa. All it requires is a little political backbone. Though I guess billions of dollars might be easier to find.

New comment by pilom in "Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?"

pilom — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:43:17 +0000

Charge more. Charge more. Charge more. Every problem you have gets easier if you charge more. Every metric you track will improve if you charge more (including customer satisfaction).

Charging more: 1) gets rid of most toxic customers. 2) increases customer LTV which allows you to spend more on acquisition or get more money for the same marketing cost. 3) helps you pay employees more which makes it easier to hire. 4) helps you pay yourself better which makes it easier to meet your non work needs. 5) can position you better in the market as many people see "more expensive=better" even if it isn't true.

More businesses fail for not charging enough than charging too much, so you should charge more despite the imposter syndrome in your head.

New comment by pilom in "Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet"

pilom — Mon, 02 May 2022 14:21:37 +0000

A pipeline like this is so naive I can't figure out if the op is serious or not. The cost alone would bankrupt multiple states. For example the Central Arizona Pipeline goes from lake Mead to Tucson. That's it. It cost on the order of $10 billion and provides barely enough water to cover the needs of the cities and farmers along it. Doing a pipeline from Iowa over the continental divide and into the Colorado River basin that was big enough to matter would cost hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars.

Forcing water intensive ag to move by actually charging a reasonable rate for water is a far more sensible answer. Just requires political capital.

New comment by pilom in "FTC sues Intuit for its deceptive TurboTax “free” filing campaign"

pilom — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:16:41 +0000

Cash app also couldn't file my ev credit correctly. Support was significantly worse than useless. Ended up going with Free Tax USA this year but I've also seen bugs with them.

New comment by pilom in "Ask HN: Should HN require/encourage job postings to have a salary range?"

pilom — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 18:54:51 +0000

I posted this elsewhere in this thread but it applies here as well: The way the Colorado law is written there is nothing wrong with posting what you think the salary range is and then actually hiring someone outside of that range _if you can justify it_. Someone didn't meet a required skill in the posting, feel free to offer them less. Someone is severely overqualified for the position you posted but you still want them, feel free to pay them more.

It also only applies to companies with at least one employee in Colorado.