I think it's great that you had the conviction and risk taking appetite to find success and in retrospect be able to say it was the "right" choice for you. I also think there's some great advice in there about benchmarking the road that you're headed down and asking yourself if it is the right road for you.
However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end.
Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.
That's a very patient and balanced response, which I appreciate!
I think that in the last few years Hacker News and Reddit have made me super jaded and that's why I communicated like this - I responded to a comment that was brief and amounted to a rich guy bitching that he can't afford a house.
It feels like these forums are filled with an endless stream of people who either don't work that hard or don't know how to manage their money, complaining about how the system is rigged against them.
That complaint is fucking dumb. I'm sorry, but "I'm rich but I can't afford to buy a house or take a risk pursuing my passion," is just a dumb take and not a real problem. For those of us who started out life on food stamps, and yet did also grow up in a house, it's kind of an offensive take, in fact. I can't imagine a worse possible excuse for not taking some risks in life -- like this is not someone who has a fire under their ass because they've realized they need to get out of the ghetto, that's for sure. Their problems don't sound serious yet here they are bitching.
Are you really sure the soft and considerate communication style is what people like this need? Maybe there are some out there who are a little too comfortable and just need to get whacked on the head.
I think it depends on the audience. I have some closer friends that I would be comfortable taking a more aggressive communication style because they know my intent is to help them and sometimes people do need someone to shock them into making a change.
For internet strangers, at least in my experience, I think putting people on defensive footing through more aggressive language makes it more difficult to get your point across to most folks. Your goal, however, might be to talk to a group out there that does respond to a more "tough love" angle.
I do find it can make productive discussion with those who are going to perceive the language as insulting more difficult if not impossible. Just something to keep in mind depending on your communication goals.
This is a point worth clarifying. I think a lot of people actually do get rich investing. It just turns out the "good process" in this case is leaving your money in a diversified portfolio for decades. This leverages making a bunch of bets that on average have a positive expected value over a long enough time horizon that you are able to realize the gains.
There are also certainly other ways to have an edge in investing (quant firms come to mind), but I think the most realistic option for "anyone" is readily available in the form of low fee index funds and a long time horizon.
I guess it's a subtlety — in the end, since you said "for decades", and if you adjusted your wording sightly (such as "help you reach your financial goals", instead of "get rich"), the underlying message is similar. But I figured I'd share the link in case you find it interesting.
Yeah, agreed, love the Plain Bagel and the generally sane takes from that channel.
"Get rich" is definitely too broad of a target and probably has too many connotations with "mansion and luxury cars" when, as you identified, what I meant with that statement is closer to "financial goals" or, more tangibly, something like "comfortable retirement".
Reminder for folks who go to concerts or other events / areas that regularly have loud sounds - invest in ear protection! It is probably not worth it to risk your hearing for a slightly "better" listening experience. You will also avoid that partially deaf feeling after being exposed to loud music / sounds. There are a ton of reusable ear plugs on the market that you can easily keep on your person.
Is this not also true for many sporting or competitive pursuits that are also effectively zero sum? For sports I suppose one could argue there are benefits to exercise and for other competitive games with professionals like chess there are mental benefits from getting good at them.
However, neither seem particularly "productive" outside of all the money that is funneled into events for marketing purposes. There is, of course, perhaps some inherent aesthetic and community building around a common interest that is valuable, but I'd argue that the same is true for poker - I personally find the game of no limit hold'em interesting from a theoretical perspective and have met a lot of people that I would not have otherwise through playing it.
Poker doesn't seem that much different to other abstracted competitive pursuits to me besides that it has a larger luck factor to it.
In non-tournament settings, every dollar you win at poker comes out of the pockets of another player at the table. It's truly a zero-sum game, as adding up the gains and losses of players at the table will result in zero.
In contrast, tournament games (chess, golf, tennis, WSOP, esports, etc) may have significant entry fees, but at a professional level the total winnings are significantly more than the sum of all entry fees. Generally the excess money comes from corporate sponsors or viewership fees. The entry fees can result in some players walking away with less money than they started, but I don't think this is common outside of tournament-play poker.
The most popular professional sports (soccer, football, baseball, etc) have players on salaries. Those players often also get performance bonuses, either for entire-team results (winning the championship) or personal results (number of games played, statistical thresholds, etc). But they're all getting paid _something_ win or lose.
For poker it's actually negative sum at most venues outside of private games due to the fees taken by the organizer (i.e. the rake). But yes, point taken that at least within the closed system of the game poker is zero/negative sum.
My comment was more directed at the OP's assertion that poker is not 'productive' because it is zero-sum. I personally don't see how injecting corporate sponsors into otherwise zero sum games (only one team in sporting events can win, only one chess player can win the tournament) elevates competitive pursuits outside of poker to what can be considered 'productive'. OP's view could be that all of these pursuits are equally unproductive and that would be fair enough.
In order to make money at sports you have to entertain others, i.e. produce entertainment for lots of people. Theoretically, you could win at poker without producing anything, but practically, the most profitable players will be the ones who at least produce entertainment for the people they play with...
I meant zero sum in the closed loop of the game itself. Only one team can win, the reason why they are paid so much is because they have built an audience and the sponsors/teams are effectively built around advertising revenue and/or sales of merch.
Agreed on the distribution of who wins and who loses, most people don't lose money playing basketball. However, the point I am trying to make is writing off poker as "not productive" simply because it is monetarily zero sum (or negative sum in the case of raked games) is a disservice to the game itself.
Look down on? I think gambling is harmful. That's quite independent on whether I "look down on" it or not.
I do suspect that poker can't be as inherently fun as most other card and board games of chance and skill, because if it was it shouldn't need high stakes to be exciting. But that's just a suspicion.
I have a philosophy of life, that I'd like to explain. Picture there's an immigrant. He comes from some far-off country with a very different culture. He didn't move by choice, he doesn't much like the culture of the county he came to. He'd like to protect his culture and raise his kids in it. He doesn't let them mingle, or get too involved in the culture around them.
Naturally, he fails. Looking back on it as an old man, he realises that his kids have adopted not only the worst attributes of the surrounding culture, but they have kept the least sympathetic sides of the old culture, his culture too. And they're repeating his mistakes. "I should have let go", he laments. "I should have picked the things that actually matter, and asked them to hold on to just those, rather than trying to keep everything the way I was used to."
I've told it as a story about immigration, because then it's quite easy to believe, right? But truth is, even if we never move to another country, we move to the future. Culture changes. We are that immigrant dad. We too, if we just try to hold on to what we're familiar with, will lose. We need to make conscious choices about what really matters, what's worth holding onto, and what we can let go. If we just coast along without thinking, we'll keep bad traditions and make new bad traditions too.
Gambling culture is one of those things I want to let go. Become a thing of the past. Recycled into something better. I do love modern board and card games, which manage to be fun without high stakes, smoky rooms and martinis. It's not that I don't understand the glamourous appeal of of all that, I am your "countryman" in that regard. It's just not what I want to save.
The vast majority of people who play poker do not play it for the "high stakes, smoky rooms, and martinis". Speaking for myself, I regularly play for very low stakes with friends in my own place of residence and we enjoy it as both as an intellectual pursuit and something to socialize over.
Obviously your viewpoint is perfectly valid - there are plenty of people who have been irreparably harmed by gambling culture and the way that poker is marketed largely does itself no favors in that regard. My point is that degenerate culture and poker can be separated and there are absolutely healthy ways to enjoy a hobby which, yes, has a luck element to it, but also requires precise study and meticulous decision making to excel at.
From what I've read I think you are conflating the predatory nature of casinos with the game of poker. Those two things are certainly linked, but I would argue that it would be a mistake to write off a game like No Limit Texas Hold'em as irredeemably harmful due to the association.
Are you sure about that? If it was just for the intellectual pursuit and socialization, why are you playing poker and not, say, Catan?
Obviously not everyone plays poker in a smoky room with gangsters, or even with real money, but I think maybe that cultural context is part of the explanation. You absolutely can divorce it from that cultural context, if you like poker but hate gambling - but is that worth holding onto, when there are so many options to get similar intellectual and social pleasures?
Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another? Catan has a chance element to it, isn't that gambling to try to win the game? Why not play something completely deterministic? For the record, we also do play Catan and other games.
We play poker because we enjoy the structure of the game and it is different to other things. Personally I'm uncomfortable with your insinuation that I, and the friends I play with, are somehow culturally brainwashed to be gamblers because we enjoy poker.
I'll end the conversation by repeating what I said above. If you look down on this type of activity then there's nothing I can do to change your mind.
> Why does anyone choose to play any game instead of another?
Because of culture. But culture changes all the time - if we resist changing it, it gets changed for us, and then usually in ways we would least like.
> isn't that gambling to try to win the game
No, of course not. When I say gambling I'm talking about out-of-game stakes. There's obviously a difference between real-world money and in-game stakes like victory points.
You're not brainwashed more than anyone is. Catan and poker are both part of our culture. But we lose culture all the time, whether we want to or not (the point of my story), so is it really worth it to hold on to the culture that is heavily about gambling?
As I also said: even though lots of poker buffs will resist that because they are into the gambling, you can divorce it from gambling for yourself and your game buddies if you're really determined to. It's your choice. But is that really a conscious choice, or are you just trying to hold on to it without thinking critically about why, like the immigrant dad in my story?
Poker has taught me so many things about life that I probably never would have learned otherwise. Yes, it’s gambling and there is a random element, but it’s a strategy game played in the currency of the world in which it is set. This has wide philosophical implications far beyond the poker table.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
>In the top 1% of basketball games and the top 1% of poker games, they are sponsored and no one loses money.
I don't know, I hear lots of sports fans complain about the money earned by athletes that one might think that the owners are only moments from bankruptcy because of those greedy players' salaries!
The gambling aspect is a pretty obvious difference! There's nothing - or well, little - stopping you from gambling high stakes at chess, or go, or scrabble or dominion. It's just that those games are fun without gambling. Even some games that used to be heavily about gambling, like backgammon, have mostly turned into straight recreational games. But no-gambling poker really hasn't caught on. My guess it's that it's casinos, and a certain casino-adjacent culture/aesthetic, that has kept poker alive as a gambling phenomenon in this day and age.
Should we let casinos shape our culture in this way?
Something like football or chess or Formula 1 is valuable in itself; there's a beauty and elegance in seeing the hard thing done well.
In poker even the thing you're celebrating is zero-sum. Could person A fool person B or could person B read them; that's not people collaborating to create something in the way that two tennis players beating out a long rally are, that's just A vs B. And so much of the game is simply random luck - does the right card fall or not - and that's what people want to see; you might say there's skill in the game and that might be true, but people don't watch poker for the chess moments where someone makes a brilliant move, they watch it for the moments when the right number comes out of the random box. The larger luck factor matters.
I enjoy chess and Formula 1 too! I think poker is broadly misunderstood to be a game of luck disguised as a game of skill when in reality it is very much a game of skill in the long run. The "long run" here being hundreds of thousands of hands.
There are absolutely brilliant plays in poker at its highest levels when a player finds an interesting line with a particular hand. I agree that most poker "highlights" are not of this variety, but instead highlight the gambley nature of the game, but that is not the whole story. To me, studying and understanding the dynamics of good poker strategy has the exact same beauty and elegance which you use to describe football / chess / Formula 1.
I'd fully agree that the way poker markets itself in many contexts definitely leans into the degenerate nature of it and does itself no favors. However, there is a very complex beautiful game of skill behind all of it.
I found this one [1] pretty interesting - finding a raise with top pair weak kicker is not intuitive. There is some solver work in this video which is probably overly technical for a casual observer, but will give a bit of flavor on how poker is studied at a high level.
In most sports money come from sponsorship. It's not a zero sum game but positive sum game where you compete for the value added (from the player's perspective)
As a part time live tournament grinder who has a full time job it's always sobering to hear from full time grinders who end up quitting due to how tough the grind is. A couple of observations to add:
1) There is absolutely a huge edge to be had playing live tournaments, even for buy ins in the $1k - $5k range. If you are playing outside of Vegas it is very common to end up at a table where at least half the table are "recreational" (i.e. players who are bad and are likely to make large mistakes).
2) The downside to playing live tournaments is that it is difficult to get reasonable volume in and the variance can be brutal. It is not that unlikely to go on a 20+ buy in downswing even with a decent edge.
3) Having an income source not tied to poker is huge and allows you to not have to be conservative with bankroll management. If you're pulling in mid 6 figures from a day job you don't have to worry about selling action or going down in stakes when you go on a downswing because you can always supplement the bankroll with your income. This, obviously, can be taken too far, but you don't have to be as worried about the variance from shot taking a higher buy in tournament where you know you have an edge like the $10k WSOP Main Event which is by far the softest $10k that exists.
As the saying goes, being a professional gambler is the hardest way to make an easy living.
It also sounds like an overall horrible, consistently highly amoral way of life. Plus some form of an addiction. All the details in this discussion point pretty clearly to this. You need to be a proper a-hole to be fine doing this long term.
If one had only choice between being poor homeless or do this I could accept that relativity, but not like this. I can't have any possible respect for smart capable human living like that by choice, sucking desperate horribly sick people of their possessions, ever.
Sure, there are still few humans around worse than that, just look at the news, but its still pretty much the moral bottom. And all I've seen in this discussion just proves that (I don't judge this activity from my experience since I don't play cards, I get my happiness from mountains and extreme sports and that's more than enough, and salary is enough too).
There is absolutely nothing amoral about engaging directly in a fair game with consenting adults.
Nobody can lose anything they don’t choose to play. Consent matters.
We sell cigarettes on every streetcorner (to say nothing of bars), which is evidence that society has reached widespread consensus on the fact that addicts are allowed to choose to be addicted (or not) to things. (The vast, vast majority of people who play poker are not addicted to playing poker.)
I was sort of curious about whether or not other non-pedestrian motor vehicle fatalities also increased and came across an interesting stat. It looks like overall passenger vehicle occupant fatalities have also increased [1] and, interestingly enough, some of this is probably a result of a lower rate of seat belt usage among those fatally injured [2]. All of this coinciding with Covid.
100% agree. Does anyone know of a word that means "retirement" without the "not working" connotation? I'm in the same camp as someone who is aspiring to "retire early", but it will be more of a "work on whatever I want to" kind of retirement and not "move to Florida" type of retirement.
Don't use the term "retirement." Instead, you're doing a solo startup. Add that it's in stealth mode if you don't feel like talking about your current focus of attention. If I'm reading your comment correctly, it's not even a lie; it sounds like you'd be happy turning a hobby into a business if that's where fate took you.
I "retired" about a year ago after almost 25 years in the industry. My story since then is a lot like that of the author of the article. I've written more code this year for love than I bet I did in 10 years for pay. It's been exactly the retirement I wanted: one of the most productive times of my life.
Also important to note that "last year" includes the tail end of the pandemic where crime as a whole fell due to lockdowns. SF and NYC fall far below other, less dense, cities in the US such as Cleveland Ohio, Lansing Michigan, Rockford Illinois, and Anchorage Alaska in violent crime rates. Granted, Chicago is in the top 20 in violent crime, though, if I had to guess those statistics are driven by crime that occurs outside the "urban core".
Perception certainly matters -- perceptions of SF BART and MUNI probably are not helping ridership -- but the narrative that San Francisco has become an urban hellscape is not borne out by the data nor by my personal anecdotal experience.
You can't report a lot of crimes online (assault, Residential Burglaries, Robbery Incidents, Stolen Vehicles, stolen Electric Bicycles) and the police will tell you it's pointless to report minor ones in SF
If a homeless guy punches you in SF, would you really bother to walk to a police station and wait in line and waste a ton of time for literally nothing to happen?
I don't think you can report some of those crimes online in other cities either. Houston (https://www.houstontx.gov/police/online_report.htm) doesn't let you report violent crime nor stolen vehicles. Miami (https://www.miami-police.org/incident_reporting.html) doesn't allow violent crime to be reported either. Smaller cities like the city I grew up nearby like Rogers, Arkansas don't even allow you to file a report online at all.
I don't have time to do a comprehensive survey of how other cities operate online crime reporting, but I'm assuming in good faith that the implication here is that San Francisco's violent crime statistics are under reported if you can't report online. It seems to me that many other cities don't allow you to report online either.
Open to having a good faith discussion on if crime stats in SF are deflated due to underreporting. My guess would be that the base rate of actual people getting assaulted by a homeless guy is pretty low - curious if you have any anecdotal evidence or data to the contrary.
Violent crimes are probably relatively well reported at some violence threshold - something like "did you need medical assistance".
It's property crimes that are below the insurance threshold that will just not be reported; why bother? I had cars broken into and I never reported any of them because it would be pointless; the only time I did report was when the car was stolen - and that only because I didn't want it to turn up burning somewhere and blamed on me.
Chicago isn't even the top 50 worldwide for homicide, let alone the top 20. Several US cities are, though, including places like Cleveland. Chicago puts up big numbers because the city is deceptively big.
I think an interesting observation here is that the very thing that makes it difficult to get adoption of this product/data is the thing that makes the product/data valuable. Without the naive/narrative/entertainment bettors it would be more difficult to find an edge.
Presumably there is a very small, niche population that would find this information very valuable. Funnily enough, those that do find it valuable are unlikely to share it - if they're acting in their own self interest they don't want other sophisticated bettors to enter the market and inadvertently help the bookies set the line more accurately.
Prefacing this with the disclaimer that I work for Uber.
This talking point completely ignores the fact that California Props are, BY DEFAULT, not amendable by the legislature unless otherwise specified. If anything this 7/8ths clause gives the legislature more flexibility than the vast majority of propositions which the legislature cannot touch without putting another prop up for vote.
Which is how we get into the pattern of having the same issues on the ballot every election and constantly amending them with direct voting. Many propositions wishing to avoid this issue require some small super majority in the legislature. That is the standard practice for giving "the legislature more flexibility". Requiring 87.5% is new and it is so high to be completely impractical avenue for change. Claiming it is about flexibility is the type of dishonesty we need to remove from politics.
The CA legislature just passed AB323, which exempts journalists from AB5, with a 71-4 margin (94.7%) in the Assembly and unanimously in the Senate. So 87.5% is certainly doable!
Funnily enough, the website advocating for journalists to be exempt says the following. Sound familiar?
==========
* If forced to comply with AB 5, many community newspapers, including local, ethnic, urban, suburban and metro papers, will be unable to sustain operations. They will close their doors, leaving many communities with no local news source.
* For those that continue to exist, news operations will be forced to make deep cuts to both print and digital community coverage and offerings in order to survive.
[IF NEWSPAPERS ARE NOT EXEMPTED FROM AB 5, READERS WILL LOSE.]
* Limited home delivery.
* Fewer local news reporters and less hometown coverage.
* Loss of sports, comics, games and investigative reporting.
>The CA legislature just passed AB323, which exempts journalists from AB5, with a 71-4 margin (94.7%) in the Assembly
The link you provided says 67-4. The Assembly has 80 seats so 67/80 is 83.75% and therefore wouldn't be enough to amend Prop 22.
One big difference between that change to AB5 and this one is that almost zero journalists actually wanted AB5 to apply to them. Journalism is profession that is much closer to true freelance work than rideshare workers who flip back and forth between a couple employers.
In this blog's survey ~70% of drivers want to be independent contractors, and ~60% are a Yes on 22. In case you think it's biased, the writers ultimate argued for the No vote.
>I do see the first link says 67-4, but the second link uses 71-4, which is the correct vote count. You can see on the ca.gov website:
Fair enough.
>In this blog's survey ~70% of drivers want to be independent contractors, and ~60% are a Yes on 22. In case you think it's biased, the writers ultimate argued for the No vote.
My point was not necessarily that the workers should always decide. It was that there is a huge difference between roughly 0% who support it for journalists and a roughly 30%-40% who support it for rideshare workers.
Also that 60% who support Prop 22 is wildly influenced by the money spent by these companies and the underhanded practices that were the topic of this post. If these workers were given an unbiased account of Prop 22 and the ramifications, I think the numbers would be different. If this was truly a popular proposal, why would this become the most expensive campaign in history with roughly 95% of the money coming in support of Prop 22?
According to the Rideshare Guy, the proportion of drivers in favor of being an IC was higher pre-pandemic and higher outside of CA. You could make the opposite argument -- that political voices have influenced people in the other direction. I'm not sure which would be correct. I've personally seen a lot of misinformation in the other direction. The top post in this thread (which I replied to) is a distillation of general sentiment and misinformation from AB5/No22 voices.
Also, the "against" was not 40% even when "for" was 60%. It was 60% for, 24% against, and 16% undecided. I'm not sure where you got the number that 0% of journalists wanted to be employees but I doubt it's actually 0%.
Anyways, happy to get into a deeper discussion offline -- I think there's a lot of interesting philosophical arguments for both sides but with politics the way it is the Yes/No voices are currently talking past each other. Feel free to reach out to me directly!
However, I think this comment veers off into a tone that, for me, is a bit judgmental and prescriptive. Even out of the group of people who are single and childless people have different life situations, people have different risk tolerances, and there's not a one size fit all solution to quitting your job and chasing your passion for everyone. Not to mention unfortunately some people sacrifice a lot in pursuit of what they want and end up with nothing or very little to show for it in the end.
Again I think your comment comes from a good place and there's some useful advice here, but the unnecessary name calling is a bit of a turn off at least for me and overall reduces the effectiveness of communicating your advice.
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