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  Location: DMV Region, East Coast USA
  Remote: Does not matter to me.
  Willing to relocate: to US states between Virginia & Maine (or visiting/on boarding)
  Technologies: Golang (1.5 y), Python (2 y), C, Shell, JS/TS, SQLite & PostgreSQL
  Résumé/CV: by request
  Email: nicholas (no space) zingleman (at) gmail (d) (com)
Hello, I am a junior developer who is interested in backend programming and I am looking for my first role. I am willing to engage with an apprenticeship or other arrangements in order to prove myself as an eager programmer hungry for experience.

https://github.com/nicholasss


Housing was another bubble, and those investors got bailed out. “Too big to fail”, I believe, is still the prevailing neoliberal wisdom. This is quite a large bubble and seemingly one of the only bright spots in the US economy.

I give it a 85%+ chance of a bailout when the tech bubble pops.


It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons the electricity in Texas may be cheaper is due to not winterizing the grid and the lack of planning for deep freezes. Anyone else remember the black outs?


You do realize how much worse blackouts in CA are, right? TX never even experienced a full grid collapse like CA; CA has planned blackouts based on how dry the forests are, because power companies aren't allowed to trim nearby trees.

I don't mean to get personal but this is a really ill-informed opinion. Texas has to deal with hurricanes and legitimate weather events, CA has invented problems that cause blackouts at the expense of CA taxpayers; meanwhile CA pays 2-3x for the same power. It's really not a good comparison, CA has a famously mismanaged electric grid


Luckily I don't have to deal with too much American fun. So take my opinion as you will.

How many people died in the last major California outage? Didn't Texas have people freezing to death? I know what I'd rather deal with.


87 people died in the 2018 CA outage, and PG&E was eventually charged with 117 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Nobody died due to power outages in Texas during the freeze, and the power companies were not charged with any counts of involuntary manslaughter.

In 2024, there were no deaths due to power outages in CA or in TX.

That said, comparing natural disaster deaths is a stupid way to measure the success or failure of a power grid. Success should be determined by factors like uptime or cost.

Why don't you look up the uptime and cost of the Texas grid vs the CA grid in 2024?


Many people love their cars, I love my car too. I hate traffic though, everyone hates traffic. That’s the problem with everyone loving cars.

I love busses, bikes, and trains, so I use those as well.


Feels like I am the only person patient enough to not mind traffic. “Soul crushing” who cares? I’m effectively sitting in a room with a hifi stereo unit like a lot of people do anyhow with their free time. Driving purely on subconscious autopilot. It is on you if you can’t make that work for a bit IMO.

Crowded train is actually objectively unpleasant on the other hand. You have other peoples BO. The guy bringing in 50lbs of stuff strapped to the bike hits your knee. Another guy decides to smoke a cigarette in the train car or play with their blow torch. Everyone shoving you on the way in and out. Packed like a sardine. AC barely working. Elevators reeking of urine.


> Crowded train is actually objectively unpleasant on the other hand. You have other peoples BO. The guy bringing in 50lbs of stuff strapped to the bike hits your knee. Another guy decides to smoke a cigarette in the train car or play with their blow torch. Everyone shoving you on the way in and out. Packed like a sardine. AC barely working. Elevators reeking of urine.

None of this is actually inherent to transit or inevitable. (Where do you live that people would even consider lighting up in an indoor, public place? That sounds more like the 80s to me than today.)


Surely that difference, therefore, is worth $9/day to you?

Especially now that your commute is substantially shorter as a bonus?


Productivity in what sense? Education is literally a long term investment. As you stated, a local school district which may mean Pre-K through 12th grade (in the US) means that the children won’t be participating “productively” in the economy for potentially decades.

I cannot even fathom how hard the economy would crash if large swaths of the workforce were illiterate.


  Productivity in what sense?
If I told you I would give you either $27k to spend as you wish on education, or let your kid go to a SF public school (which would spend the $27k as it seems fit), which would you choose? I'd pick the former.

  if large swaths of the workforce were illiterate
I live in one of the richest cities in the US. Here, about 50% of 11th graders attending public schools can read and write at a level that meets the minimum state standards (which is a low bar).


It’s important to note the western myth of “ghost cities”. It goes that the cities were built and were never intended to be, and forever will be empty and unpopulated.

It’s hard to imagine in the west just how fast china is urbanizing- and the immense scale that the government is preemptively tackling a housing crisis.

GDP is it a useful measure? Maybe? Maybe not? What is your argument and how does the GDP numbers support it?


Financial surveillance would happen either way. It’s either from your government or to a foreign company, bundled and sold en mass.


In this case, maybe. But it's not the only option. The old payment system was a bit more private, as payments went through commercial banks and one needed a court order to access transaction history. According to The Economists' article the instant payment system in other countries adopts a similar scheme, which is more private than Brazil's, and which could have been adopted here too. Also, there exists technology today enabling private micro-transactions, such as Monero. But governments - including Brazil's - prevent exchanges to offer it. Europe is no different.[1] One may argue this prevents abuse, which may be true, but it also prevents financial privacy.

[1] https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/support-for-mon...


This is presented as problematic, but I don’t think it’s a negative thing.

You wouldn’t want a foreign company with billions of dollars in their war chest in charge of your countries payment system.


Isn't that what any other payment system and most of the banks around the world are - a foreign company with billions of dollars in charge of payment system in a country.

VISA, Mastercard, HSBC, UnionPay, ICBC, Santander... Or is this all Brazilian technology?

The difference is that Meta is privacy data hoarder, not that it's a foreign company. And it's not "in charge of countries payment system", because that's pretty-much impossible, but "one of the payment systems in the country".


That's why China created UnionPay, so it wouldn't be held hostage to a large foreign corp (Visa, MC) for CC payments.

But most countries didn't have that capability. Kudos to Brazil for putting something together for domestic digital payments so as not to rely on a foreign company.


actually, foreign capital and foreign investment is good - and fair play before the law facilitates that.

securitization and anti-globalization makes us all poorer, worse off, and more prone to conflict. lawfare is an addictive drug and can lead to serious outcomes, as history in Brazil shows any number of times - like even with the current president.


WhatsApp pay wouldn’t be an investment. All money made from it, directly or indirectly, would go straight to the US


that’s exactly how investments work. you build out something or fund the building out of something and then some of the returns are repatriated to the investor.

in this case, you invest in building out a compliant and easy money transfer service. in other cases, you invest in a toll road, etc. etc.

the whole point of investment is it is a win-win


I don’t understand this binary. The UK was able to create a near-instant bank transfer system without monopolizing in the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments

It costing more for instant transfers is just a regressive tax on the working poor.


I can't find the details of the UK system, but it's not "monopolized" in Brazil. Perhaps due to the fact that the infra is provided by the Central Bank, and banks choosing to implement Pix support must implement the Pix APIs in their system.


Everybody adopting an open protocol is "monopolizing" now...


If you remember the name that would be something I would be interested in!


Gris and Spiritfarer are two recent-ish ones I'm aware of, both were well thought of by my partner who works in grief care. :)


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