ashtonkem

> Having your email and calendar on Google is not a risk as long as you sync them so if something happens to your accounts that you can move them to another provider.

No, that’s not true. In the case where google shuts down your email, you will lose every email sent to that account after the shut down, and you’ll need to find everything and everyone that might send email to youraccount@gmail.com. This is why having a separate domain is super important, you could switch the MX records with minimal interruption.

How much of a minority matters though. There is a big social and economic difference between (number made up) 5% of jobs and 37% of jobs. Even if it never goes higher, that takes remote from a rare and exotic thing to a full third of the work force.

From my limited vantage point in hiring, the overwhelming consensus among software engineering candidates is to remain remote. Even among those already in the same city as our home office.

> "Generous maternal benefits" don't come anywhere close to filling this gap.

You would expect some effect though, yet Northern Europe and Japan continue to have extremely low birth rates despite the efforts of their governments.

Also, many European countries saw fertility rates drop a long time ago, often back when housing was much, much cheaper. IIRC countries like Sweden and Norway dropped below replacement levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I haven’t tried Magic Lantern yet, but I have been reasonably happy with Canon’s remote app. It has been reliable so far, with the only downside being that it doesn’t offer GPS tagging for my camera (EOS 80D)

No, I don’t think that’s how that works. Your contracts with your customers is under the jurisdiction of where your customers live, not where your company is headquartered. It would be way too easy to side step any law they wished that way.

Plus, must camera manufacturers sell through an american subsidiary. I know thats how Canon works.

I don’t think that Canon and similar could offer anything to compete with smart phones. While smart phone cameras have gotten much better, the real secret sauce is that everyone already has a smart phone. It’s not that smart phones beat DSLRs, its that they got sufficiently good and everyone got them for other reasons. Not having to buy and carry a second device is quite the market advantage, it turns out.

Frankly, no dedicated camera is ever going to win back users with software features, and it is extremely unlikely that Canon or Nikon could out compete Apple and Google in this area. It makes much more sense for Canon to continue to serve hobbyists and pros with features that phones cannot offer, rather than trying to complete on software.

This reeks of motivated reasoning on behalf of the manager, as this analysis makes absolutely no sense.

In fact, high transit costs might make low paying jobs like Applebees completely untenable. Why take a job if the cost of getting there is higher than what they pay?

The incredibly frustrating thing is that the metrics they’re “growth hacking”, engagement mostly, aren’t great proxies for product success in a lot of cases! In a lot of these cases the constant design tweaks probably reduces the overall sentiment users have towards the product overall.

I’m thinking specifically of the Netflix autoplay box, which I’m sure did wonders for their engagement, but also was universally hated. I think its no coincidence that during this time my social group went from “I love Netflix!” to “I can’t cancel Netflix because it has <favorite show>”. I fear GitHub going down the same path with such tweaks.

It’s worth pointing out that in a lot of countries, there’s also an inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate. Often those positioned to afford more kids choose not too. Similarly, even countries with extremely generous maternal benefits don’t see significant boosts in their fertility.

> A lot of this has to do with issues like zoning and building codes as well.

The general trend of richer countries having fewer babies holds even in countries with wildly different zoning laws and expectations around living conditions. Japan’s fertility rate fell below replacement a long time ago, and even countries like India and Mexico are now at or below replacement levels.

For any given material explanation one can point to, there are clear counterexamples of countries without that material problem which still has a low fertility rate.

I think a “harvesting effect” happened. A large chunk of people who were already thinking of having a kid decided to move up their plans to coincide with lock down. This results in a blip in birth statistics for the given month, but not for the overall year.

The drop in R rated movie share in the box office is almost certainly a result of streaming, not a change in cultural taboos. The linked chart only includes people who paid money specifically to watch a movie in a theater, and does not include movies watched on Netflix or Hulu.

> created a backlash and a desire for retaliation for anyone seen to be in the same camp as Trump.

Trump also demanded basically anyone who was ever insufficiently nice to him get fired. If anyone was for “cancel culture” it would be him. But like everything else in his life, he wasn’t very good at affecting those changes.

> What people today are reacting to is that it feels like we are less free to speak our minds, at least on some topics, than we were just a few decades ago.

And yet nobody ever produces any evidence that that’s actually true. This is particularly troubling when people are asserting that something ought to be done culturally or legislatively, when all they’ve got is a vague feeling that things are getting worse.

Such observations seem to be completely disjoint from the rapid widening of the overton window that’s happened since the advent of the “alt-right” and to the lesser extent the dirtbag left. I cannot square the evidence free assertion that people feel less free to speak their minds with nazi marches in major cities chanting about jews, and tucker carlson talking about white replacement theory on prime time television. These two things are fundamentally incompatible.

> The fact that you need to dial as far back as 1930s to find a climate worse than what we have now (just so you can say "I betcha you didn't know about that stuff!") would seem to indicate... that there's not a lot substance to this argument.

I listed examples from the 1990s though, not just the 1930s. The moral panics of the 1980s and 1990s provides a ripe set of examples, if you’re interested in more.

There is also the radical change that social media and the internet has brought since the 1990s. And one of the great advents that things like Twitter has brought is the ability to get an audience and to speak anonymously if one so wishes. This has been an incredible boon to free speech, and it’s kind of frustrating that people aren’t treating it like the miracle that it is.

> Are we in a worse place than the darkest decades of the 20th century? Or even half as bad of place? Of course not. That doesn't that the current climate hasn't deteriorated substantially over the last 15 years or so. Or that some aspects of it aren't reminiscent of the darker times that you are referencing.

How, precisely are we worse off than the 1990s? Be specific, please. All these arguments break down to hand waving over how free speech has broken down, and yet nobody ever provides any evidence, only vague assertions and feelings.

Mean while I personally see the alt right out chanting things that were unthinkable in the 1990s. It is very hard for me to square the idea that free speech is worse off with the alt right openly saying racist and bigoted things.

> In the 90s the culturally most influential people tended to mock censors and championed being “politically incorrect”

There is a sizable industry still doing that exact same thing today. Instead of saying that they’re “politically incorrect” they say that they’ve been “cancelled”. It seems like this line of discussion is not only alive and well, it is quite lucrative too, which more than a tiny bit undermines the core premise of what being “cancelled” means.

> R rated movies were far more successful at the box office, with lots of questionable content by today’s standards.

As a sibling comment pointed out, this is factually incorrect. You also need to adjust for the fact that the internet exists, and various social and economic pressures are sending more R rated content directly to streaming.

Are there fewer R rated movies in theaters because of how sensitive we are, or are you just preferring to watch R rated content at home rather than in the theater?

> Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable to say was considered cool.

Given the rise of the alt right and the dirtbag left, pushing boundaries is still very popular and lucrative.

> Today, the academic and cultural power brokers are the biggest champions of shutting down “objectionable” speech.

[Citation Needed]

Seems like a convenient way to not engage with the argument I made.

How old were you in the 1990s? I’ve noticed that for a lot of people, the golden age of no strife just happens to be right before they became aware of how people actually behave in public.

I too looked fondly back on the 1990s, but I was also a child. Looking back as an adult I can tell that my recollection of the era was colored by my inexperience. To draw one example, I totally missed all the moral panics of the 1990s, and how many people that harmed just for liking D&D.

> But that, once upon a time, and it wasn't too long ago, there was a thing known as "civil discourse" in this country. In which (and granted the boundaries are fuzzy hear) -- in itself the mere fact of having an unpopular (or difficult) opinion on the state of the world ... did not run such an alarmingly and dysfunctional risk of getting you shut down in form or another as it does today.

This is so disconnected with history its almost delusional. Go read about how civil rights advocates were treated in the south, or gay rights advocates a mere 30 years ago. Go read about how distributing information on birth control was a crime, or how being a socialist brought the state down on you. Go read about the labor movement before WW2, and how many workers and would be reformers were shot for their words.

For a decent chunk of the 20th century, straying outside the bounds of “civil discourse” wouldn’t get you “shut down”, it might get you killed or jailed.

> The window of what is considered beyond the pale has grown quite a big larger than it was in the past.

Nonsense. I was born into a world where being gay was beyond the pale. My parents were born into a world where interracial marriage was beyond the pale, and advocating for integration in some states could get you shot. For most of my grandparents lives it was literally a crime to be a socialist, or to hand out leaflets opposing WW1. When my parents were children the state was busy arresting people for distributing information about birth control, and beating up anti-war protesters. There was a government agency that controlled “decency” in media. When I was growing up people lost careers over protesting the Iraq War. Jon Stewart lost his first hosting job after Marilyn Manson burned a bible on set, and Sinead O’Connor got death threats for (correctly) accusing the pope of covering up child sexual abuse on SNL.

We are not a perfect country, there is always room for improvement. But the idea that the range of “cancelable” acts is wider than it used to be is absolute nonsense. We have way more free speech now than we’ve ever had in our past, its not even close.

I think thats a big part of why powerful writers and journalists are complaining. They’re not used to the masses talking back to them, and they don’t like it very much.

> As you point out, while boycotting someone based on your perception of their opinion is not new, the modality of mass mob boycotts of individuals over things potentially taken out of context is entirely new. … One other thing that's new, in America, is the idea that speech is less important than people's feelings.

They used to kill people for advocating for integration and civil rights. Actual mobs used to assemble to kill black men accused of hitting on white women. Not internet “mobs”, actual ones with guns and pitchforks.

Literally nothing you’re talking about is new, in fact it has gotten way less bad over the past few decades. In fact, arguing that its new and pernicious requires us to purposefully ignore the history of political and speech based violence throughout the 20th century and earlier.

Your letting experience is missing one key factor; you’re not the customer to the letting agency. The building owner is the customer, not you. As long as the apartment gets rented out and maintenance gets done well enough, the owner doesn’t really care if you have a bad experience. And the letting agency doesn’t have to care about you either, since their treatment of you has no effect on their bottom line.

The fact that they don’t feel ashamed of mistreating a non-customer is however cultural.

Twitter is a mid sized tech company though, with a mere 5,500 employees. Facebook and Google are an order of magnitude bigger, and half the size of Uber and Netflix. It’s also a tiny bit smaller than Doordash and AirBnB by comparison.

I replaced my Roku a while ago, and yes I keep my Pihole up to date.

> I wish someone could tell me why Russia and the U.S. are not allies. Like, don't they largely share a similar cultural and religious heritage?

No, they do not. Culturally Russia has always ping ponged back and forth between seeing itself as European and not European. Currently Russia is on the "we're distinct from Europe and have our own unique and proud history" side of that equation. If you want more on this (extremely complicated) subject, read into the various Tsars that attempted to "modernize" and Europeanize Russia, such as Peter the Great. The backlash after his death towards his European preferences says a lot.

Religiously Russia is an Orthodox country, and it split off from Europe's Catholicism nearly a 1000 years ago. This split was both religious and political, aligning roughly (very roughly) with the divisions of the Roman empire into East and West. The Eastern (Orthodox) branch was originally centered in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), which even today we'd identify as a distinctly Eastern city. That alone should tell you why Russia sees itself as distinct from the rest of Europe.

Meanwhile the rest of Europe is either Catholic or Protestant, which itself split off from Catholicism half a millennium after Orthodoxy did. They're just not that close religiously.

> Seems like Russia and all countries that share similar cultures would be allies against China, with her 1.5 billion people . . . ???

Because international diplomacy and conflict isn't really as simple as pointing at borders and population counts. Yes, there has been some conflict between Russia and China, but by and large their population centers are a long, long way away from each other. There's a reason why Russia has fought basically three wars with China and dozens with Sweden alone; geography.

Meanwhile there are historical and personal reasons for Russia to turn West and specifically to Ukraine. Russia has a very, very long history in attempting to seize and hold Ukraine, as it's alternated back and forth between being a Russian owned territory and not. Take a look at the Kievan Rus, the ancestor state to both Russia and Ukraine, and coincidentally where Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity.

My experience is that Pihole has been getting less effective over time as more and more ads are being run through the same domain that legitimate content is. When I first installed it it killed ads on my Roku, that doesn’t happen anymore.

I know, that's why I was talking about industrial use cases....

It's genuinely the dumbest city design I have ever seen, and it makes transport an absolute nightmare assuming you're interacting with real technology and not magic.

Cities are generally round for a good reason. You put the important stuff in the middle and your average transit trip remains as low as possible. Straight lines do the opposite, as you guarantee that each new resident is in literally the worst possible position for transit possible, and you over tax the center’s transit in order to move people to the ends of the line.

Oh, and consider the cost for things like sewage and water. They’re a bit component of a city’s cost, and here they’re laid out as inefficiently as possible.

It's a great idea ... for industrial processes and machines. Unfortunately this is not where the hype is, nor where continual profits are. Industrial customers have a nasty habit (from the seller's perspective) of buying stable stuff that they can run for decades, which tends to rule out planned obsolescence based profits.