Macross8299

>What other options do these officials have?

Paper voting, for one. If no system is offered that is secure enough, then the default should be no electronic voting system at all and just paper voting. It's scaled fine for hundreds of years and has clear processes in place for custody of ballots.

>The companies have the choice to improve their security of their hardware at the possible expense of lowering their profit margins.

You can't expect companies to just "make a choice" to lower profit margins without some sort of (dis)incentive or external pressure like regulation. It's unrealistic. Companies exist to make their principals money. It's the government's job to check that and make sure that the companies are acting in public interest while they pursue profit.

Local and state officials definitely can effect change on this level since they are often the ones in charge of the procurement process.

Interesting that this study accounted for regional differences between prostitution legalization regimes, definitely something that needs to be considered considering these kind of markets do not exist in a borderless vacuum.

Have to wonder if the scale effect dominating the substitution effect hints that perhaps the Swedish model is optimal for reducing trafficking wholesale while reducing harm (i.e. Johns need strong disincentives in order to not be terribly indifferent people in aggregate) They suggest that the Swedish model reduces the scale effect but not enough data to say if it increases the substitution effect.

Yeah, I wonder how much of the disdain for open offices is more of a company culture issue rather a problem with open offices.

What causes people to whisper in libraries but talk loudly and disturb others in an open office plan?

Perhaps some segmentation of open office plans would also be interesting -- a "loud" zone, a semi-quiet zone and a silent zone. I don't know how workable this would be for teams unless you had hot-desking, which is something else people seem to hate, but still. Engineers who need to work on a difficult problem for a while can use the silent zone, while groups who need lots of communication and the perennial extroverts are free to use the louder spaces.

I suppose it's more politically expedient to blame the companies trying to rationally minimize cost rather than risk reprimanding and alienating state and local officials who sign contracts for voting machines without any sort of serious security, auditing or compliance provisions.

This sure does seem like grandstanding from these senators. Probably not unrelated to fallout from the Mueller report.

>And if you donate only a small percent of your wealth, say 1%, I don't think you deserve more credit than anybody having a net worth of $10k donating $100

That makes sense if you view charity/philanthropy as a signalling device or a measure for how generous and good people are.

Doesn't really make sense if you care about the actual good/contribution done though. Ceteris paribus, someone with net worth 100k giving 10k is doing more absolute good and helping more people than someone with net worth 10k giving 1k. Not to say small donations don't matter or aren't commendable -- they can definitely add up. But there is "more credit" given because the greater amount of money is (presumably) helping more people.

>There are many time keeping devices that are not updated as often as UTC leap seconds are introduced.

Isn't this an argument against using TAI in certain applications though? i.e. if you're designing a system which relies on non-leapsecond-updated devices to be in sync with devices that are capable of being updated, you should always design as such to accommodate the former rather than the latter?

> Human trafficking is part of the prostitution supply chain.

Is that an inherent fact of prostitution or a function of prostitution's dubious legal status?

One could make similar arguments about ultra-violent criminal cartels and marijuana in the past. "Smoking cannabis isn't distinct from funding Los Zetas in practice"

Seems like a bit of a leap to compare enabling prostitution (something that ~50% of Americans think should be legal [0]) to enabling industrialized mass murder and genocide.

Backpage definitely enabled trafficking in some cases knowingly or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it made sex work safer in other cases.

[0] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID...

Yes, if you're not diagnosed ADHD I would emphasize a _strong_ word of caution when even considering using amphetamines for productivity purposes.

These medications are often strong enough and have enough addiction potential that even people _with_ ADHD end up abusing them. Be careful.

Some of the shady bitcoin exchanges and Bitcoin derivatives product offerings really do remind me of bucket shops that were popular in the early 20th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market))

One difference is that the obvious remedy that was applied to bucket shops at the time (regulation) doesn't seem to be as effective this time around due to the international nature of Bitcoin markets.

This Amsterdam law only applies to houses (single family dwellings), as far as I can tell.

Restricting home ownership as investment while not restricting apartment property investment or commercial property investment doesn't make things more fair.

It just puts property investment out of reach of the average middle class person and restricts social mobility.

e.g. a high-school drop-out plumber can afford to buy a house and rent it out based on just wages/credit, but he likely can't afford to do that with an apartment building.

The law doesn't mandate building apartments either, so if the same people who build/buy houses as rental properties are unwilling/unable to invest in apartments (because building a 400-person complex is a lot more expensive than a house), then rental property supply can only be constrained by this law or concentrated into the hands of management companies (who have a vested interest in constraining supply)

Furthermore, I'm not completely convinced that restricting rental property ownership to property management companies who can afford to build apartment complexes is inherently more equitable than letting a middle class person with good credit buy an extra house and rent it out. Where I'm from originally (Alberta), it was common for electricians/plumbers/tradesmen to buy an extra property with a combination of credit and wages and maintain it. It's a relatively simple and time-tested path for moving from working/lower middle class to being upper middle class or even wealthy.

>I’m more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven’t had the same economic opportunities as me.

All well and good. It's fine and commendable to personally sacrifice but when you start advocating for stripping property rights from other people to do it, it stops being a personal sacrifice and more of an imposition on others' freedom.

What about unintended backfire consequences of this law: people who own a place and are traveling, unable to put their places on airbnb because of this law and thus leaving vacant houses anyways and constricting short-term rental supply?

>a small take home project with a reasonable due date (say 5-8 days) that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected on the job. Then, a 1-2 hour code walk through and presentation. Candidate should expect to build, run, debug and describe the code and architecture, tools choices, show source control use etc.

The problem with this is that talented developers generally do not want to work for free on someone else's proprietary software and there is a very real risk of companies trying to abuse this practice to extract free labour from candidates the closer you get to "work that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected."

I do not want to spend hours of my life on unpaid labour for a company that may or may not hire me. Give me the 45-minute algorithmic challenge that puts me on the spot every time.

I also strongly suspect your 3 month probationary period would be an effective anti-signal as well, useful for attracting desperate candidates rather than the ones you really want. You can't reasonably expect a senior engineer to jump at leaving a secure position for a 50/50 shot they might be unemployed in 3 months because they're "not a good cultural fit."

All of these complaints about the various superficial reasons for Facebook's decline I think are missing the forest for the trees.

The "grow fast monetize later" model that social media companies use, along with the user being the product, inevitably acts as a template for bait and switch.

All degradation of user experience stems from that. Of course using a social media platform during its "growth phase" is going to be a lot more of a pleasant experience than using that same platform when it's trying to maximize revenue.

To add my own take on this, I think the reason that people who consider themselves "immune to advertising" are the most vulnerable is because they suffer from some sort of cognitive bias where they neatly classify things into "ads" and "non-ads" and never think to question if an instance of the latter is actually the former.

They see the "HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead" low-rent ads and glossy big budget car commercials that associate a sports car with sex appeal or freedom or whatever and think "that's stupid, who would ever be so gullible as to fall for that?" while classifying more insidious things like undisclosed paid reviewers or a subtle product placement as non-ads or even more dangerously, as genuinely informative material. They see effective ads as something else entirely and are thus less likely to resist!

This actually sounds pretty ideal for someone early in their career. Having to do that much must have been a great learning experience -- one of the perks at working at a startup.

I occasionally see ads for jobs that request absurd things like having x years of experience in a technology where x is greater than the number of years the technology has been around, but I strongly suspect that these type of ads are not serious about hiring an outside candidate and are just put up for legal/compliance reasons.