Location: San Francisco
Remote: Happy to work remotely or hybrid/onsite in the Bay Area
Willing to relocate: Not at this time
Technologies: Rust, JavaScript, React, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://petermulard.me/static/media/resume.64febd55.pdf
Website: https://petermulard.me
Hi, I'm Peter, and I have 5 years of experience as a software engineer, spanning both frontend and backend. For the past year and a half, I've been working as a Founding Engineer; primarily building distributed systems in Rust. Building software that positively contributes to society is a passion of mine, and I'm always happy to meet new people too. Even if it isn't related to work, feel free to reach out!
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Happy to work remotely or hybrid/onsite in the Bay Area
Willing to relocate: Not at this time
Technologies: Rust, JavaScript, React, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://petermulard.me/static/media/resume.64febd55.pdf
Website: https://petermulard.me
Hi, I'm Peter, and I have 4 years of experience as a software engineer, spanning both frontend and backend. For the past year, I've been working as a Founding Engineer; primarily building distributed systems in Rust. I'd love to continue creating backend systems with Rust (and am giving high priority to these roles) but am open to other tech stacks as well. Building software that positively contributes to society is a passion of mine, and I'm always happy to meet new people too. Even if it isn't related to work, feel free to reach out!
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Happy to work remotely or hybrid in the Bay Area
Willing to relocate: Not at this time
Technologies: Rust, JavaScript, React, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://petermulard.me/static/media/resume.64febd55.pdf
Website: https://petermulard.me
Hi, I'm Peter, and I have 4 years of experience as a software engineer, spanning both frontend and backend. For the past year, I've been working as a Founding Engineer; primarily building distributed systems in Rust. I'd love to continue creating backend systems with Rust (and am giving high priority to these roles) but am open to other tech stacks as well. Building software that positively contributes to society is a passion of mine, and I'm always happy to meet new people too. Even if it isn't related to work, feel free to reach out!
I don't think anybody really has an issue with a stable coin that people use to send money back and forth or keep some savings, but most of crypto isn't that. It's full of disgusting pyramid schemes that completely overshadow the few legitimate uses.
And replacing unstable fiat money with even less stable, totally speculatory crypto like Bitcoin? Seems like it's better just to buy some USD and stash it somewhere. Hell, even buying and reselling Steam keys is probably less volatile.
The FDA has no place in a free market. If people trust a company which poisons their food, they should be punished for misplacing their trust. Both the scammer and the scammed deserve a share of the punishment. Life naturally punishes the scammed already and teaches them a lesson at the same time... Without the help of the FDA... How good is that?!
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I'd much rather pool our money into a commission that does this for the population than spend every waking moment personally auditing companies for breaking the rules. Oh, and I have to set them too. No thanks.
I am also glad the FDA protects us from chemicals and ingredients that would cause processed food to be unhealthy and harmful, if they didn’t do that we would probably end up with an overweight population and tons of food related health problems.
No, it's making the correct point. The government can't get you out of having to do the evaluation yourself because the government is broken, which is unlikely to change. In fact this is a major problem with the existence of the regulations -- they protect incumbents. Patented drugs get FDA approval, public domain drugs that could be alternatives to them don't because there is no one to pay for the approval process.
If heroin is legal, nobody forces you to buy it. If generic insulin is illegal, you're in trouble.
How do "we" fix it? You can vote for two Senators and one Congressperson and even assuming that your vote in particular was the deciding vote and one of your choices on the ballot was someone actually inclined to do something, you now have a legislature in which the bad laws pass with a margin of 33 Senators and 174 members of Congress instead of 35 and 175.
The only way to fix it would be to fix the structural incentives in place, i.e. institute more checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture. But this is the chicken and egg problem -- to change the rules you have to be in power, but if you're already in power then you like the existing rules because they're the things that put you in power.
Or in times of populism, you use your power to remove the rules that were meant to constrain opportunities for corruption because they're inconvenient to your agenda, and then those constraints stay gone because they're inconvenient to the next administration's agenda too. So how do you get them back, or introduce new ones?
> And nothing can beat a good to great government.
The best form of government is a benevolent dictator. The worst form of government is a malevolent dictator. But the only difference is who is in charge, which changes over time.
> If you don't want regulations, sure, Somalia is that way
Is there some way we can get past the thing where people are unable to distinguish between the government prohibiting acts of violence and the government prohibiting informed consensual interactions between adults and imposing competition-destroying bureaucratic rules at the behest of incumbent megacorps?
Laws are about statistics. Statistically you can't trust even adults with stuff like gambling or smoking. Statistically they will make bad decisions that will wreck the lives of a big percentage of adults. Not a majority, but maybe 20%.
Nobody is using statistics to pass these laws. There is no logical reason for cannabis to be illegal when alcohol isn't or for most stimulants to require a prescription when nicotine is available over the counter. They put caffeine in soft drinks and candy for crying out loud. The Federal Government of the United States directly subsidizes the production of high-fructose corn syrup.
There are two ways to deal with the fact that some people make poor decisions. The first is to teach people to make better decisions. This is obviously the correct answer, because it needs to be done anyway, because the second is insane. The second is to make all of their decisions for them.
And there is no "them" -- they're us. The people making the laws are just as human as anyone else. All you're doing is punting the decision to a different fallible entity which has less information because they're choosing in the abstract without the benefit of context. And causing errors to be universal rather than individual, resulting in systemic risk and lethal monoculture.
It's far better to have 20% of people make the wrong choice than 100%.
> If people trust a company which poisons their food, they should be punished for misplacing their trust. Both the scammer and the scammed deserve a share of the punishment. Life naturally punishes the scammed already and teaches them a lesson at the same time... Without the help of the FDA... How good is that?!
If your food is poison, you don't have the opportunity to learn from your mistake and stop doing business with that company, because you die. If you don't eat any food, you still die.
But Coca Cola is fully FDA-approved -- even though it's bad for you. Because it doesn't immediately kill you, which gives you the opportunity to make your own choices and learn from your mistakes.
Which is how investments work. Some of them are better than others. The role of the government isn't to make the decision for you, it's to punish the people who deceive you. And since bad investments don't cause anaphylaxis or liver damage, the case for heavy-handed rules or pre-registration is missing.
If someone is running a ponzi or committing fraud, you arrest them, the same as you do if they're selling counterfeit electronics. If someone is just buying and selling cryptocurrency on the internet, which is the thing you purposely intended to exchange for your money, and they do nothing more than faithfully convey to you the thing you knowingly requested, what does the government need to regulate about it? Nothing nefarious is occurring.
This sounds good in theory, but in a world where you can open companies by the dozen, international jurisdictions, no compulsory registration of company facilities, no private right of audit it's impossible to keep track of who is doing what. Additionally, tainting the news by flooding review sites and what not doesn't help either.
> Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[91] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants
It's perfectly legal to buy drain cleaner at any department store and if you drink it you are likely to die. But you are under no obligation to drink it. Or do heroin. So that has an obvious solution.
Whereas if you have cancer and cannabis can prevent your nausea but the federal government maintains a prohibition on it for three generations, what are your options?
For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one. There's good reasons people want more effective regulation instead of none.
Part of the ban on cannabis, psychedelics, etc has been to ban research on their effects as well. I think there's some clear lines that can be drawn on good laws vs bad laws here.
> For something more recent, I'd recommend any of the books or documentaries on oxycontin sparking a more recent opium epidemic. As badly as the FDA failed, we'd be worse off if we didn't have one.
I feel like the problem we have is that we've utterly failed at informed consent.
You go to the doctor for a minor surgery and come home with a prescription for opioids. You take them even if you're not in any real discomfort, because your doctor prescribed them. Or maybe you could have done with half as much, but then there's a chance it wouldn't have been enough, and having the patient rely on their own judgment is discouraged. So now you're addicted to opioids.
Then we get a backlash where the people who are actually in severe pain can't get their medication because doctors used to over-prescribe it.
This entire system is asinine. The problem is not that people have access to opioids. Anybody can get them by going to a doctor and lying about their symptoms, therefore anybody should be able to just get them from the pharmacy. Stop rewarding mendacity. But the process of getting them from the pharmacy should require being informed of the risks so you can be responsible -- not being handed a bottle with a bunch of papers you're not going to read and then taking them whether you really need them or not.
We need to stop banning everything and start better informing people so they can make reasonable choices.
We disagree on how human nature works and the ability for normal people to become educated on every topic that can harm them. People trust their doctor and don't have the medical training to know if something is riskier than they're told. Addiction is dangerous precisely because it overrides someone's ability to change their mind later.
Purdue and our system of insurance created monetary incentives for doctors to overprescribe and misled them about the side effects. Normal people died even when they followed instructions because of the cycle of withdrawal symptoms.
History has repeated waves of addictive drugs because there's alway someone with an incentive to sell them. This is not a place where market outcomes work.
If the FDA didn't exist, how many more harmful drugs would there be? Would those harmful drugs that had approval retracted still be out there being prescribed?
Just because the FDA is not perfect does not mean that it's a net negative.
Easy to have the best of both worlds, though. FDA can continue to collect and publish data on safety and efficacy of medications which is incredibly useful and absolutely worth the tax money. But if you want to take something not approved, then they should have no right to tell you that you can't take the risk.
And if you get seriously sick from that we let you die by the wayside?
The first way to take advantage there is to outsource the cost of dangerous experiments to (sometimes) desperate people and then to society at large for picking up the pieces.
That's the hypothetical half of the equation. The tangible, measurable half is how many people the FDA has killed by denying access to life-saving treatments. A number of studies[0] have been conducted on this topic.
Right, of course. Any preventative treatment is difficult to justify, as it's a risk waylaid, whereas treating symptoms has a visible direct impact on problems faced today; nevermind that it costs 500x as much and has worse outcomes.
I agree, FDA has no place in a free market. In a free market, companies would be able to sell poison to their customers... BUT, if something happened to the customers, they (or their estate) would be able to seek damages through the justice system. The problem we have with regulations is that they deflect responsibility... Any company can say "Look, we adhered to all the regulations" and use that as the basis to avoid taking responsibility if it turns out that the regulations were not adequate. Then they can just play the victim and demand more regulations. If you remove the regulator and just let the company deal directly with the consumer and don't let the government interfere with the free market to promote specific producers over others, then it would work itself out. The company would know that they have no regulatory shield to hide behind and they'll be forced to consider long-term implications of their decisions or face severe consequences and backlash from consumers.
Private regulation can exist inside of a free market. Consumers and producers of food or financial products can voluntarily participate with private ratings agencies. These standards can be higher or lower, based upon market preferences. The existence of a state backed monopoly is widely recognized as prohibitive to competition. State monopolies create issues around corruption, gatekeeping and more. Too many to expand upon here.
If you don't like free markets, that's fine. There's no need to misconstrue the options. The anti-market sentiment is somewhat surprising to see here.
There are no free markets in human societies. You can pick your trade-offs, that's it. Privatly regulated markets can fail, goverment regulated markets can fail.
No, because this is always (ultimately) by consent of the societies it is happening in and within those power structures. It always sits on top of a lot of stuff, never in a vacuum.
There's an important distinction between observing the status quo and holding or aspiring towards ideals. If we only observed what is and ignored principles and ideals, we would never be able to improve the human condition.
Even so, I doubt we'll be able to see eye to eye given your starting premises about collectivism. I'd venture that the individual does own himself and that the liberal tradition starts from this point.
A consequentialist might venture that some of the darkest events in history flow from the collectivist ideologies. The opposing deontological view would be that the individual does own himself and private property does exist. We would struggle to define fraud and theft without these premises. Indeed, objecting to fraud and theft becomes problematic when you are simultaneously arguing that private property, individuals and free exchange are impossible.
I don't think we are that far apart. I don't disagree that there are certain ideals to aspire to.
However, practically, we find out time and time again that these ideals are not enough to sustain themselves and that in the defense of those ideals there are trade offs to be made that compromise them to some extent. Realising some idealised version would require different humans and I don't subscribe to ideas of realities that need those (in the same way that that speaks against idealist versions of collectivism).
The real debate is then what trade offs to make and there we might not agree but that is totally fine and part of the process.
It is similar to the argument against utopia. It is true that we probably will not achieve the anarchocapitalist ideal within our lifetime. Any steps towards a freer and more prosperous society are still laudable. Those incremental steps would most likely involve pragmatic compromises.
Asserting that free-markets don't exist, because they have never lived up to the utopian ideal is a stretch. More so in the context of the discussion. There are already private financial ratings agencies, auditors and more. If people don't like cryptocurrencies or Kraken, they can simply choose not to participate.
The human condition will always contain challenges. This is what gives us the opportunity to improve. When we speak of laissez-faire, the claim is not that it will bring about a utopia or that living within a perfect ideal is a possibility for imperfect humans. The claim is that moves towards the ideal will offer an incremental improvement. History has illustrated this well.
Ok, then we fundamentally disagree as I don't see anarchocapitalism as an ideal to strive towards. Not because I am a collectivist, but because philosophically I think it a far too narrow ideal for humans to aspire to.
In a similar vein, I don't think free markets exists because of how humans are, not because they don't live up to some utopia. We might move towards certain ideals, but there might be a limit how close we get and beyond that there is no net improvement.
Also, no, people cannot just not participate: if cryptocurrencies cause some wider issue then everyone will have to pick up the tab one way or another.
Why's it surprising to see anti-market sentiment when we've been given a very clear look at how the free market has operated in the crypto space sans government regulation? The whole ecosystem has been dominated by grifts, outright scams, rug pulls, ponzis, unregulated gambling, etc. etc. with no end in sight. Why didn't the free market step up?
It is surprising to see these sentiments on a site ostensibly for entrepreneurs and builders.
If you'd prefer a centrally planned and regulated economy, that is a different discussion. From my side, I believe you should enjoy your views and the living situation which accompanies it.
Not interested in arguing the virtues of either approach here. Taking exception with the inaccurate characterizations is as far as I go. If you believe an economy driven by central bank policy is a free-market, I'm not sure there's much more we can say here.
It did. People learned that there were a lot of scams and now the market for suckers is drying up. This is a typical pattern: Problem occurs, market responds to problem and results in improvement, government simultaneously responds to problem and has no effect or makes it worse, people point to improvement and credit new government regulations or lack of improvement and demand even more government regulations. Then we get stuck with a bunch of burdensome new rules because Something Had To Be Done.
Notice also that all of the stuff you're listing is fraudulent and already illegal. If regulations work then why didn't they work?
There are plenty of factory/labor jobs that don’t require people to wreck their bodies. Many of them provide workstations where people have the option to sit/stand or they are walking around most of the time. Occasionally bending over, not too much heavily lifting. Many of my ex coworkers who did these jobs were in fantastic shape. It’s disingenuous to pick out an extreme example.
I used to have a mavic mini, that is, up until it disconnected 500 ft from me, never to return again. I tried chasing it down to where I believed it was, but I was never able to reconnect. There is a return to home feature, where the drone is supposed to fly back to its launch spot, in case something like this happens, but that never happened.
Well I contacted DJI to see if they would replace it, due to clearly a software error on their side, and they basically told me to pound sand. I sent them a video recording of the drone’s final moments (it synced to my phone), and they wanted me to pay for their “free data analysis” because the drone was out of warranty; even though I had only flown it a handful of times. (This is data I know they can see, along with the rest of the flight data).
They ended up offering me a 40% coupon, which is just a joke, and I told them I will keep publicly shaming them unless they can offer a replacement. (So here I am). They also randomly called me at 11am on a workday, twice in a row, and didn’t leave a message; about a week after my emails with cs. Just a really weird experience. Highly don’t recommend DJI.
I keep thinking about what a people’s mega-PAC could look like, but I get stumped every time. The US is designed for corporations to easily be the best way of organizing people together, due to the incentives (make profit).
We need to figure out a way to organize people together in different ways, so they can get a seat at the table. The closest I can come up with are unions, but they struggle enough just to exist. Non profits and charities work (they make money), but they are corporation adjacent.
Hopefully technology can make this possible. Imagine a people’s PAC, where participants pool $10 a month to fund it.
I disagree with your premise - just because someone doesn’t make money on their work doesn’t mean it’s not good. We live in a capitalistic society, where the laws of supply and demand rule.
You’re able to make good money in carpentry by simply showing up, because there aren’t many carpenters left. Just like my cousin is able to do the same with landscaping. It’s all work fewer people are doing.
Other friends of mine, some of the most talented and hardworking people I know, have tried their stints on broadway, television, journalism, etc. and are struggling massively. Is it because they aren’t good? Of course not. It’s because there are 1,000 people lined up behind them who are just as good. And there’s another 1,000 behind that group who aren’t quite as good but are willing to do it for poverty wages.
But you see, you’re kind of making my point for me. Being good isn’t the same as being good enough. And this is only a problem if every industry is saturated with people who are good enough.
This isn’t the case, and if I’m not good enough at playing guitar to make a living at it, I go elsewhere. I don’t ask the world to make me a spot.
We need more carpenters and plumbers and a whole host of other industries. It feels very strange to me that people look at the world and say “it’s so unfair that society doesn’t value the thing that I do that isn’t particularly unique or contributive.” Why should that ever be the case?
Even in some perfect utopian society where everyone gets everything for free, am I supposed to read some mediocre book just because the person who made it wishes they were important? Even in such a society, people would still want notoriety, but they wouldn’t get it because they’re not good enough. For this reason I don’t see capitalism as the problem, I see them as the problem.
Ok let me rephrase this - the people I referenced aren’t good - they’re amazing. They have the credentials (Juilliard, S.I. Newhouse, etc.) and the work experience (lead role on broadway, ESPN and sports illustrated) and it’s still a massive struggle in their industries.
Compare that to being a warm body at a landscaping job, where the bar is “I showed up to work today” and it’s not even a comparison.
It’s the laws of supply and demand. Simple as that. Everyone wants to be a movie star.
And let me rephrase as well: be a Julliard, SI Newhouse. It doesn’t matter: if nobody fucking cares about what you do… they don’t fucking care about what you do. You aren’t going to change that.
One of the smartest people I know was a Julliard instructor. I love hearing their stories about their experiences in that world, but I can easily see why their “talent” didn’t translate into real world success. Despite their genius in musical interpretation, there taste is completely non-normative. Are you really arguing that the world is wrong and they aren’t?
It doesn’t fucking matter what you think matters. It only matters what _everyone else_ thinks matters. Feel free to downvote that opinion — I might be cynical but you’re wrong.
