ashtonkem

Because if they do declare all sales final, it kills sales. Customers do not like final sale, and regularly go for sellers they trust to take care of them. Generally final sales are only acceptable to consumers on things that obviously have logistical, regulatory, or cleanliness concerns.

If return windows were shortened via legislation, it would massively advantage shadier resellers, as nobody would be able to offer better return polices to offset a higher end price.

That's not how the legal theory works, fyi. The theory is that “sincere belief” is not a choice, and since it’s impossible to determine that externally the only choices were to not protect sincere belief or to protect all religion sincere or not.

The reason why the “bake a cake” thing was ever an actual point of controversy is because it centered around an immutable aspect of people; their sexual orientation. There is leagues of difference between denying service due to who they are vs. their behavior.

Most universities required immunizations before covid, although I suspect that enforcement varied wildly. I distinctly remember having to get a whole bunch of vaccinations because we’d lost my records and couldn’t prove that I was in compliance without another round. It was a mild inconvenience at worst.

Humans exhale all kinds of stuff aside from just CO2, including moisture and other metabolic byproducts depending on what you’re eating. Probably some bacterial metabolic products from our mouths too.

I guess I’m less into the semantic difference between “smell” and “detect” and more whether it’s the CO2 they’re following or something else we exhale regularly.

I think its too early to declare it a fad. It hasn’t been around long enough en masse to know whether that’ll be the norm, or disappear yet. We’ll know in a year or two.

> So its likely about how that smells

I thought the theory was that they follow the CO2 we exhale.

Oh, that’s an interesting observation I’ve never realized until you pointed it out. I’ve always been the target of mosquitos more than anyone else I know, but it seems to get worse the fitter I am. Now that I’m a bit pudgy and out of shape, I haven’t had anywhere near as many bites.

But, to be fair for me being fit and being in the regions where mosquitos exist en masse is a related phenomenon. Out of shape me spends less time on trails than fit me.

> I imagine this specific case is a conflux of all the issues.

That’s a much more nuanced way of putting it, I agree completely.

I stopped a Google interview halfway through in 2012 because they would only consider junior engineers in NYC and Mountain View, and I didn’t want to leave Chicago. But I don’t think our one off experiences make a trend. Facebook and Google alone hired and kept a ton of talent in SF pre pandemic, never mind the countless non FAANG companies there. Not everyone obviously, but a gob smacking number of engineers lived in the Bay Area.

> Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler.

Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.

I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas.

My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.

Duh? I wasn't literally suggesting that GP walk from a hotel; baggage was obviously implied by the context. I'm just commenting on how taking a taxi on that route is less time and speed efficient than walking.

Obviously a bus would be a better choice, or a train depending on geography. They handle baggage just fine.

The big dig is actually a pretty phenomenal example of what we're talking about. It was a dumb project that was extremely expensive, incapable of fixing the problems it was supposed to fix, highly disruptive to locals, and it still got built.

Meanwhile complaints from a tiny number of affected people completely scuppered the high speed rail planned between Los Angeles and San Francisco before any track got laid.

Governments pull out the stops to complete car-centric infrastructure even over the loud complaints of the populace, but flinch the moment there is any push back against any public transit. Heck, trading on street parking for a bike lane is often a herculean effort.

Oh, and there's this little gem about the Big Dig "As of 2021, promised projects to extend the Green Line beyond Lechmere, to connect the Red and Blue subway lines, and to restore the Green Line streetcar service to the Arborway in Jamaica Plain have not been completed. Construction of the extension beyond Lechmere has begun.[20] The Red and Blue subway line connection underwent initial design,[21] but no funding has been designated for the project. The Arborway Line restoration has been abandoned, following a final court decision in 2011.[22]".

So once again, governments promised the moon about public transit and then did a rug pull once the highways were done. They in fact used this as an opportunity to destroy existing streetcar service. Exactly what we've been talking about.

> Or the new Kosciuszko Bridge?

Completed in 3 years. Again, we are really capable of building stuff, so long as that stuff supports cars.

> Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?

None that I can think of in the US, but Madrid is generally pointed to as the stellar example of rapid and cheap subway expansion. They added an unbelievable amount of track and stations at really low cost.

> Between 1995 and 2007, the Spanish capital swiftly and cost-effectively upgraded its subway system, building more than 150 new stations over 120 miles at costs far below New York City rates. First, in just four years, Madrid designed, constructed, and opened 39 new metro stations and laid 35 miles of rail, 23.5 miles of which required new tunneling. The expansion was unprecedented for its low costs (about $65 million per mile of rail) and speed. Then, between 2000 and 2003, Madrid built Metro Sur, a 28-station, 25-mile circular subway line that connects the densely populated municipalities south of the city. Simultaneously, Madrid completed a direct metro line from the city’s central business district to its airport, now a 12-minute train ride away. Finally, between 2004 and 2007, commuters in the Madrid region gained an additional 80 new metro and light-rail stations, at a cost of $6 billion.

Just like high speed rail, this was less of a revolution in public works, and more a series of unglamorous minor improvements that added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. The government aimed for speed above all else, with the understanding that delays and financial uncertainty are the doom of any large project. So they would hire multiple teams to bore tunnels at once, and pit them in friendly competitions to bore faster. They negotiated with local land and business owners over more interruptions over a shorter period of time to reduce lawsuits (a big issue in NYC subway expansion), and they designed all the stations to be modular so that they wouldn't waste a ton of time designing and constructing bespoke stations. The sum is that they got it done really fast and really cheap.

Ironically, it looks a bit like the way that we construct our highways.

Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.

Right? I genuinely don’t understand why “I want my commute to be more pleasant” isn’t a more common answer. Not everything has to be productive!

> It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere.

“Cars are land inefficient” isn’t a slogan, it’s literal fact.

> I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years

Ah, the stereotype of New Yorkers not paying attention to other cities strikes again! Yes, New York has its own problems, but for the vast majority of other cities GP’s comment is true. New York is one of the very few exception cases in the US.

> The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.

What if I told you that for a lot of transit activists, undemocratic processes that prioritize the needs of drivers over the rest of society is car culture?

It’s symbiotic. We can’t build denser housing because we need space for car storage and roads. We can’t encourage people to reduce/eliminate their car usage because our infrastructure makes that miserable.

A reasonably fit person can walk 2 miles in 30-40 minutes, so your cab was literally going walking speed.

It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.

> Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge.

Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially.

One of the clear downsides to transit oriented cities is that you do need to pay attention to transit access when renting. A unit being “luxury” is no guarantee that it’s in a convenient place for transit, nor that the trip will be short.

> Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up

I find the need to make commute time productive quite an odd but common impulse. How about just making your commute suck less? Reading a book is better than driving in traffic.

> I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit.

Again, experience varies. For a lot of people it would be cheaper to abandon the car and pay for deliveries when necessary.

Regardless, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you relegate your car trips to just when you need bulk goods, that is far more efficient than the current habit of using a car fo every single trip.

> Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places.

We could, but we’ve built our infrastructure with the opposite assumption in mind. Most other rich countries use a mix of regional rail, bus, and cars to solve this problem. The issue of “mass transit doesn’t go to the burbs, therefore I must use a car everywhere for everything” is an entirely self inflicted wound.

> Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent

Maybe we could solve that problem instead? Because that seems like a rather silly rationale for designing a transit system around.

Also, it’s not like all car drivers are sober. In fact, a drunk driver is almost certainly a far bigger risk to your safety than a belligerent drunk on the train.

> I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it.

It’s almost like I’m arguing that we should make public transit more convenient than using a car for urban transit or something.

> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations?

I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time.

In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design:

1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago.

2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes.

The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.

> While correct, the same is true for most projects at these companies. Very little work that a single engineer does can be assigned a provable revenue number. How does someone working on an internal build tool get promoted? Or a new training model? A large-scale refactor of a legacy codebase? (All of these are examples of very senior promos at my own FAANG company).

Which FAANG though? Google is usually singled out for this criticism more than the rest of FAANG combined. It’s possible that your experience at a non-Google FAANG might not be relevant for Google specifically.

(Note: I wouldn’t know first hand, I’ve never worked at a FAANG).

The article is commenting on a very common critique of food not being “authentic” and therefore inferior or not worthy of eating, especially foods that visibly derive from other national cuisines like tex mex.

And even when scoped to a specific place and time, definitions get fuzzy and the whole discussion gets a bit too navel gaze-ey for my tastes.

Which is how most “undo” features work for email.

Alas, in some orgs you will need permission to authenticate davmail to Outlook. My IT department has not approved davmail.

It always baffles me that concerts are allowed to get so loud. A few of my colleagues were complaining about their ears ringing after an AWS party, which is a strong indication they suffered some hearing damage!

Also worth pointing out that if you’re doing really loud stuff, you need to refer to NRR rating, not db. It’s a more precise way of measuring hearing protection against loud noises.

I personally interpreted that as professionals knowing how to do more post-shot tweaking than amateurs. That obviously doesn't matter if the results are bad, but if the defaults require significant tweaking that isn't going to be something that will stop a professional, although they might find it annoying as a matter of workflow.

> Other cults are certainly worse (NEVER go to a "private" meeting!)

I’ve had friends joke about going into the scientology temple in Hollywood as a joke. I always warn against it; cult recruiters are practiced and you are not.