Only allow American firms to use H1-B. Most of the H1-B abuse is from the Indian 'WITCH' companies. Why foreign firms are allowed to hire foreign workers in the US is beyond me. For training / administration, there should be another visa type which does not confer family benefits and cannot progress to greencard or whatever.
BUT... at the end of the day, the solution must be passed by congress. Have we all forgotten about Congress since they stopped doing anything?
Most llms can equally engage with text in picture form as text in token form. In fact my initial research on this (later corroborated by actual published papers) indicate that this is a cheap way to save on tokens.
Oh interesting and good to know on the token savings with this technique. My test with claude had it use vision and then programmatically test different variable font input variables (mimicking the user scrub interaction) until it was able to OCR it.
I mean I can't know for sure but I'm pretty sure that by the time the upper layers of the network are reached the lower level networks have already transformed the image tiles into proper position encoded embeddings of the tokens in the words in the image.
This is why I disagree with the zeitgeist that says this is due to economics. We have less kids because people don't want them. If you wanted them you'd have them.
To make sure that wasn't an anomaly or misrepresentative, I also checked https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator for Austin vs San Jose and got similar numbers: $150k in Austin requires $288k in San Jose.
You can argue that the Bay Area wins on weather, politics, startup ecosystem or whatever, but comparing taxes or cost of living is not where California wins.
True, but in my experience grandparent is a bit full of it. Yes property taxes are higher, but what op leaves out is that the values of homes are like for like 2-3x more expensive in California. So in the end I would probably pay around the same tax for a like for like home in California as Texas, simply because of the value of the home. Then we must consider the state income tax of California, which is a nonzero differential to that of Texas’ state income tax
Indeed, but circa 2019 the max taxable amount that the value of the home can rise any given year is capped in Texas. So if you are in that situation yes eventually the taxes will “catch up” and you will pay more every year, but that catch up is capped every year and you know what it is capped to and can plan for it
Yes people in Texas have to move a ton because as property prices go up so do their taxes. With California, you control how much income you earn. In Texas, people moving to your neighborhood can price you out even after you've bought .
A move for a family can cost thousands. Since the higher moving rate is due to the tax system these costs ought to be counted.
“A ton” is carrying a lot of unverified weight here. Do you have demonstrable evidence that move rates are higher in Texas AND that it’s a result of this AND that people hit this with an actual interesting frequency?
My experience supervising employees in CA and Texas. It's also just an inconvenience on businesses. I'd be giving my Texas employees grace time off all the time to move. My opinion. Sucks to not be able to live in your home
Because it's cheaper, partially because yes taxes are lower but also because it's just cheaper. The weather makes Texas less desirable than California, and it's almost as if they tax based on that.
So they move to the complete opposite end of the spectrum where not three years ago Texas was human trafficking migrants to other states? Quite the change of hearts.
Property taxes are relatively high in Texas but houses are so much cheaper. Also, the cost of living in Texas is far lower than in CA. From an economic perspective, living in Texas is a no brainer.
Even when you look at those rankings that take property tax into consideration, CA is way higher than TX. And the people who see a dime from the CA safety net aren't the ones paying property tax.
Don't take into account the higher appreciation in California .
I disagree about the safety net. I was a high earning California resident (mid six) and when I was laid off, I got my unemployment and my kids got free Medicaid that ended up paying out quite a bit. The safety net is pretty nice.
Since that payout from insurance, my total tax burden in California was actually negative. Had I been in a state like Texas I would have paid less in tax but more overall.
Texas has high property taxes. This causes people to need to move. It also spurs construction causing prices of homes to stay flat. For the typical homeowner, the total combined appreciation of your home in CA combined with the savings from the no moving property tax once you've been there a while more than covers the California tax burden.
My colleagues and direct reports in Texas constantly have to move as their property appreciates. This alone results in excess cost that is essentially a tax on not being rich.
Lots of states have high property taxes. Texas does not have "insane" tax that's more than California. Everything is cheaper, like gas, food, real estate, etc., in Texas than it is in California, and so California has that additional tax.
> This alone results in excess cost that is essentially a tax on not being rich.
That's everywhere in the U.S. right now. Texas is not an outlier.
How many homeless people in California are actually from the state? Cause it seems like within CA, they move to big cities. Democrats then say that high-valued real estate is causing homelessness, and Republicans blame lack of law enforcement, but I don't see how it's either of those.
Almost none are from out of state. 90% were living in California when they became homeless, and 65% were born in California. It doesn't even make sense as to why a homeless person would voluntarily move to California where literally everything, including food, is more expensive and housing is impossible. Plus, homeless people lack the means to easily move around. California's housing situation is the worst in the country. It even has the lowest percentage of homes actually owned by homeowners.
Not disputing any of the statistics cited, but there is one advantage of being homeless in California compared to other places: favorable weather, especially along the coast. Snow is a once-in-a-generation event outside high-elevation areas, and while it does freeze on some winter nights, it’s rarely below 30 F. There are many parts of the country where temperatures sometimes get low enough to be life-threatening for those with inadequate shelter, heating, and clothing. The coastal areas of California also typically don’t get too hot. Heat is more of an issue inland, particularly the Central Valley and the desert.
This. It’s simply much easier to be homeless in California, one of the easiest places imaginable. Do people think if the state was red that suddenly all those homeless people would become homed? A ridiculous notion.
The wealth concentration is a symptom of a dysfunctional economy based around rent-seeking monopolies. If you address that, the wealth equality comes as a result thanks to the non-zero sum nature of the economy, as more people are able to operate businesses in a fair way.
This is almost exactly the situation that resulted during the first gilded age with standard oil. Antitrust legislation works wonders if it has teeth. Currently it does not.
The current richest man on the planet makes his money not from economic rent but from first mover advantage in the electric car market, first mover advantage in the private space market, and first mover advantage in the online payments market.
What part of this seeks rent?
It is exceptionally easy for Americans to fund and start businesses at this point
Monopoly may lead to wealth inequality but you're confusing causation with correlation. Witnessed wealth inequality does not necessarily signal large scale monopoly
The weights are uninteresting. People need to get out of their head that NNs are built on numbers. They're built on matrices, which are conveniently representable as numeric arrays, but are their own thing. Similarly, the rational numbers are their own thing and some are representable as 32-bit numbers via the IEEE754 encoding (or 16-bit numbers via a variety of encodings, etc).
Matrices are interesting because they can encode any algebraic group. They're also interesting because they can encode arbitrary linear transformations over a space. All of these things are interesting, and have nothing to do with numbers.
For any particular language model, you can always rotate the matrices and the embeddings and such and get a perfectly reasonable model out that behaves exactly the same.
This is because the training process produces a particular geometry, so transformations which preserve that geometry preserve the structure of the network. The geometry is interesting, the numbers are not.
Not judge no. Implement and create a working MVP, yes of course.
And yes, I fire off ideas all over. Many require predicting the future to decide what to focus my individual effort on. This is a terrible way to do things because humans (and LLMs) are notoriously terrible at predicting the future. The gold standard is to try everything and eliminate what doesn't work. This is impossible using human labor. With LLM labor, it's simply a matter of relatively cheap money.
It's amazing. Technical problems are now no longer having to predict what the best implementation is. You can just try each one.
Again, no need to have an LLM judge, because the metrics that define 'better' are well-defined, and this is the interesting part of computer science, not the implementation.
Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
There are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless.
The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India.
The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival.
> That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard,
They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.
The majority of Americans own stock and most of that is investments in the S and P 500. This is probably the closest any nation has gotten to mass public ownership of the means of production. Certainly more so than explicitly communist nations in which supposed shareholders (i.e. the citizens) have no right at all to influence company decisions.
In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.
BUT... at the end of the day, the solution must be passed by congress. Have we all forgotten about Congress since they stopped doing anything?
reply