My team and I can spend less time at the office because of it. We also don't need a strict on-call schedule since the team is good about responding if they happen to be available and near a computer.
This gives everyone more overall freedom and flexibility.
Leave it up to the hospital. They are best equipped to assess the cost and likelihood of being able to save the person. They also are most responsible for the repercussions in terms of positive/negative publicity and reputation.
Won't this lead to a situation where some hospitals are known for doing free work, while others aren't? The former will quickly go bankrupt if they aren't subsidized by a charity or religious organization, which has serious drawbacks in itself.
As for the rest, the doctors, nurses, and paramedics are now going to be required to do something that's against their training and likely their nature, by letting people die on the sidewalk out front. Do you suppose this policy will be workable in the long run?
Basically, if you're poor, you will get a public defender. Someone who is overworked, underpaid and probably won't give your case the appropriate time it needs to develop a valid defense..
Whereas if you have money, you can afford an attorney that can spend the appropriate time to create a robust defense.
And how do you measure social utility? Price is currently
the best measure of 'social utility' that we have.
People choose to spend their hard-earned dollars on the products that provide the most utility. Companies spend their hard-earned dollars on the vehicles that allow them to sell the most product.
But advertising is explicitly designed to skew that measure - the purpose of essentially all advertising, and certainly all of Coke/Pepsi's advertising, is to convince people that they need something that they don't need; and to make them appeal to their feelings instead of their rationality when doing purchasing decisions (e.g. by inspiring brand loyalty).
That's the problem with saying Coke shouldn't buy so many ads. Coke got all their ad spend from people who gave them money in exchange for Coke's products.
Coke is rich because society likes drinking Coca-Cola and pals.
Coke is enjoyable to many, that's a benefit. Air travel and space travel also cause ongoing environmental harm, whose says the benefits of those outweigh the environmental cost?
Maybe we should ban them as well. All companies "burn" energy, effort, and time to produce profits, that's pretty much the goal of a company.
True. But would people enjoy it as much if it were priced accordingly to give the workers who made it a living wage? If they had to pay full non-subsidized prices for the corn sugar they use, and to give those workers a living wage as well? In other words, would people enjoy it as much if it was instead of a dollar a bottle, more like four dollars?
And don't even try and shift to a different company. It is not unreasonable to assume that there is ethical compromise involved in purchasing anything from a company Coke's size. Chiquita almost started a war so they could continue exploiting South Americans for cheap bananas.
I take issue with this "well there's no haaaarm" point because there very often IS harm. There is tons of harm if you follow the supply lines back to the developing world where western corporations exploit entire nations for the sake of cheap goods that then are consumed at a break neck pace in the West, far more than they should be, which then even harms THOSE people by making them overweight.
If your company could do actual good in the world by ceasing to exist, then I question why you need to exist in the first place. That's all I'm saying.
Experiments have shown that pilot waves would have to travel faster than the speed of light.
My understanding of the experiment is as follows:
Take two entangled photons, beam them up to satellites far away from each other. The satellites have detectors that measure the polarization angle from 0 to 360 degrees. Since entangled photons have opposite polarization you'd expect an inverted V (red line): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem#/media/File:B...
Instead, you get the blue line. Which is weird, because it is basically a cosine curve, and implies that the photons are able to determine the relative angle of the detectors. The crazy part is that this curve still holds even if those detectors are very far apart and you complete the experiment before any information about the relative angles of the detectors would have time to pass from one detector to the other at the speed of light. This is what implies that a pilot wave would have to move faster than the speed of light.
Education is more accessible now than ever. It's amazing that anyone anywhere in the world can watch Feynmann and Leonard Susskind's lectures on General Relativity without giving a penny to CalTech/Stanford. There is also plenty of cheap housing in the US, just not in large cities and highly desirable areas. If you do decide to live in a low-cost area, there are more options for remote work than ever before.
Over the last 20 years, humans have really mastered cooperation on a global rather than a national scale. IMO, the economy as a whole has expanded as a result.
Is this a joke? I mean, I understand the sentiment, and agree with it, but (probably unfortunately) the current value of education is more highly correlated with the ability to _prove_ that one is educated than education itself - the "piece of paper" if you will. Coursera is moving toward a model where affordable certification is possible for topics normally restricted to an advanced traditional post-secondary education in the US, but the reality that the value/cost ratio of post-secondary education for the average American has decreased significantly over the past 50 years.
Note: I'm doing this calculation under the assumption that the value of an undergraduate degree has remained constant, while the average price of tuition has increased significantly. Some might even argue that the value of a degree has even decreased due to looser lending practices enabling more people to obtain degrees, further increasing this disparity.
> Over the last 20 years, humans have really mastered cooperation on a global rather than a national scale.
There may have been improvements, but mastered? I guess a lack of global scale cooperation has nothing to do with our failure to address global warming....
It is being addressed. Not at the level of governmental cooperation, but some of the things that really matter are being done in spite of that.
Solar cell prices have decreased by 300x over the last 40 years and continue to do so. Similarly, solar production capacity and installations have increased very significantly.
There are also more electric car companies and models than ever before.
An IC can definitely have and maintain more control than managers, they just need to produce visible value to the company.
I've seen multiple ICs with more power than their direct manager. They are basically immune to being fired because higher-level leaders understand their value and respect their track record.
Were those higher-level leaders managers? I mean I agree with your exact statement, but in my direct experience, the higher-level leaders tend to be less and less engineers.
Unless there is some power of the purse-strings, the two-tracks thing is always going to be biased in favor of the managers.
That's the beauty of working in a tech company compared to a non-tech company. Every single manager in my org is a former engineer. Every single manager above them is a former engineer. Heavy majority of directors in the org are former engineers.
I feel like that's really gonna depend on what part of the tech sector you're working in.
In the world of early and middle stage startups, you're probably right. However, in massive tech companies or more legacy-type tech companies, it seems like you're a lot more likely to find managers who are trained as managers and not engineers (MBAs, etc.)
I agree with you in general. However, my specific experience with this comes from working at one of those massive tech companies. And there are definitely orgs within the company that fall under the "MBA-types-running-the-show" umbrella, but, I think, I just got very lucky with my org.
Yeah, the experience probably varies a ton across the industry and even within orgs. I'm sure most people around here who've been in tech for a while can tell stories about both types of company.
> they just need to produce visible value to the company
Many specialists don't get this opportunity and require certain character traits to go out of their way to make it known. If they maintain a key product but don't need to interface with group of people often, then they get ignored for "employee of the month" and other accolades that would translate into more clout
At my last company, I went through three managers in the 3 years I was there. The last guy in there, I was comfortable enough in my position to make a statement. At the time, I was getting into the office around 10 and leaving at 3 or 4, basically whenever I felt like it.
The first few days, I stayed until a couple minutes after he left, to let him know I supported him. Then one day, I walked out with him. He looked at me and said, "but you got in at 10." I looked right back at him and said, "I know. I stayed late the last few days in case you needed me." Then it was back to old habits.
He was going to need all the help he could get to manage the political situation. In the end he couldn't cut the knot, he left not long after I did.
Something about this comment really unsettles me. I can’t tell if it’s thinking that what was a “statement”, if it’s the underlying attempt at some lame kind of power play on a new member of your team or if it’s something else entirely.
What I'm reading in it is that the poster is a lot more comfortable in their position than the manager, knowing the manager is under a lot more stress and pressure than the poster themselves. After you've seen a few managers start and leave you kinda get the picture.
More or less. It wasn't intended to be malicious. I made it known I was there to support him in his Herculean task of moving the needle with his department with this wholly intransigent political environment. But I'd already spent some 2 1/2 years building up goodwill and clout in the company and there wasn't going to be any bowing and scraping.
Any ideas he had were welcomed but at the end of the day, they were going to throw it all out anyway. I was hoping they'd let me build the new platform, but they picked a consulting company to build them a Magento solution. To recognize my efforts, I got like a year and a half of half-salary to get on the phone if they ever needed me.
Is housing "going wrong" simply because it is expensive? Maybe it is overall a good thing that tech companies are now expanding into cities outside the bay area due to high housing costs.
At least housing prices are transparent to those thinking about moving in to the bay area, allowing them to make an informed decision. High traffic, insufficient public transit capacity, and over-capacity public services are less transparent. If we build more housing, do we just push problems elsewhere?
How do we determine the optimal amount of new housing?
Here's an idea we can adopt from literally every other aspect of American society: let the market work. We venerate the free market in all matters except housing, where we've erected a complex system of legal protections for incumbent landlords. The solution to high housing prices is more supply but it is illegal to build housing almost anywhere in the state of California. In SF it is illegal to build a duplex on 90% of the lots. Why? That just exists to enrich incumbents.
I would argue housing reaching the current prices is not good for the overall economy because it creates unreasonable pressure on people who aren't in the tech industry and still have a reason to live in the Bay Area. First, this makes it unreasonably difficult to stay in the region you grew up in unless you get into the top end of the local income brackets. Second, it makes it unreasonably difficult for all kinds of important and necessary, but lower paid, workers to live in the area. A city of nothing but high-end tech workers, with no teachers, police, firefighters, etc. would not be a very nice place to live.
As far as the "optimal amount of new housing," why not just match the number of new households moving into a region? That seems like a good place to start.
Not necessarily. I'd love to live closer to the Bay; if I could get in walking or biking range of CalTrain I could eliminate much or all of my 40 minute highway commute — thus reducing the congestion on the highway. But it would cost me ~$12k/yr. Similarly, if San Mateo had built adequate housing, 70k people might have shorter commutes, requiring less use of roads, transit systems, etc.
Personally, I am also massively for improvements to the various transit systems. If it were easily possible, I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues. We might get the EMUs someday, but I won't be around to see it. The downtown SF transit center finally reopened, I think, but it was a 8? month setback, not to mention it is way over budget. Also, the HOV lanes would be a lot more enticing if there weren't so much traffic in them, and there easily could have been had CA not hadn't out so many HOV stickers. There are SUVs getting stickered that get equivalent gas mileage to my '97. Also, enforcement.
> I'd love to have CalTrain have grade-separation, level-boarding, electric locomotives, and ideally 4 tracks the whole way instead of the 2 they have, to promote passing and ease recovery during issues.
You can get by with 3 tracks. Metra's busy BNSF line is a 3-track mainline, and they manage to launch 21 outgoing trains in the 125 minutes between 3:57 and 6:02. In addition to the ~80ish commuter trains, there's also another ~20 daily Amtrak and freight trains along the same stretch of rail.
My team and I can spend less time at the office because of it. We also don't need a strict on-call schedule since the team is good about responding if they happen to be available and near a computer.
This gives everyone more overall freedom and flexibility.