calmlynarczyk

CapOne sponsors, develops, and runs internally an open-source tool called [CloudCustodian](https://cloudcustodian.io/docs/index.html) (recently accepted into the CNCF) that analyzes cloud resources at runtime and notifies developers of items that are out of compliance. This allows you to identify issues with resources even if they drift from their templated configuration.

It's a pretty good way to manage IT infrastructure at a very large scale rather than just relying on every dev to configure their infra perfectly and check in on the web console regularly to see if AWS raised any possible issues.

Unless I'm mistaken about how this site works, downvotes shouldn't completely delete comments, just fade them. Who is stepping in and removing them entirely without a "[deleted]" marker displaying?

The logical fallacies with many modern examples of "cancelling" have already been pointed out far and wide. Not every bit of writing needs to be a statistical analysis (and considering the value of quantitative data is overrated, I'm inclined to agree that a well-written passioned analysis is just as welcome).

Also, lol at the very same circular reasoning the above mentioned whereby agreeing with his ideas is wrong because the people his ideas attract are already wrong.

The only evidence I need to see that what the author refers to is very much a serious concern for everyone is that everytime I refresh this comment section another comment agreeing with the author disappears. I used to defend the folks that participated in the doxxing and very real harassment of people they didn't agree with as misguided, but I've become convinced it's nothing more than malicious at this point. Such a grand scale of people can't lack that much self awareness.

People are mad because their livelihoods are being ruined with drive-by character attacks from people whose sole purpose is tilling the data landscape for any scrap they can latch onto to accuse a person of a heinous moral crime. It's as simple as going out and branding someone with the R-word without consequence; even if you're just making shit up you stand to lose nothing whereas even the label towards a person can destroy a person's life. You don't have to demonstrate any sort of credibility or saintly behavior; just toss an oppression monicker at someone and stand back while the mob handles the rest for you.

I could write a lot about the benefits these apps provide, but I think we can all agree their ease of use and flattening of the marketplace into a centralized data source is a very powerful combination. This means restaurants essentially have to be on them to compete. Before, more decentralized factors like geography and word-of-mouth helped restaurants gain and hold marketshare.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s a definite shakeup of an industry that didn’t have to deal with this issue as much before. It’s similar to how credit card networks like Visa and Mastercard inserted themselves into the payments space. The ease of use these services offered customers simply outweigh the option for sellers to not use them. Sellers already didn’t like how these companies skimmed a few percent off of every purchase. Now you have delivery apps which are taking far more significant chunks of revenue out of each transaction.

However, how many customers know how much of what they’re paying is going to transaction costs? Some stores and gas stations offer slightly lower prices if you pay with cash instead of card. Customers are given this awareness so they understand that they are paying more for a feature.

Takeout apps not only add to the transaction cost, but also control the interface between the customer and restaurant. A restaurant wouldn’t even have the option to tell the customer how much of the price of their food goes toward middleman fees because it’s not in the takeout services’ interests to surface that info in their app. Instead, they can hide away the details of price differences between restaurants and then play sellers off against each other for their own benefit. Even credit card networks don’t have that much control over the entire transaction process, but these new end-to-end marketplaces control both factors in order to pawn off blame on the sellers.

If this continues, I foresee these takeout services exerting so much control over small-business restaurants that the restaurants either fold or all be homogenized under whatever the takeout services will. Given the propensity for vertical integration these days, the takeout services will probably just stand up their own food services in place of the restaurants, similar to what Uber ultimately wants to do with its drivers. Small business won’t be able to compete and even more local restaurants will disappear. Some will continue to exist as a niche as demand for variety/personable service and low prices/convenience fluctuate back and forth between stabilizing somewhere in the middle. This will probably be at the expense of customers and society as a whole, given that restaurants are one of the last bastions of small business in the ever globalizing economy.

In order to combat the shock that restaurants face while takeout apps hold a huge level of control over the marketplace, public institutions and personal will are needed to keep these apps from becoming too powerful. I see it as a more proactive form of anti-trust enforcement. Otherwise, you’re looking at a future where local restaurants probably won’t exist.

I've always seen it as a matter of risk. You could have an absolute monarchy and end up with the smartest, most empathetic person in the world as your leader who would be a net-benefit to your society for years to come. You could also end up with a total asshole that you're stuck with until death do you part.

Democracy (or perhaps bureaucracy) just de-risks the chance that your government fails you through diversification of parties involved, similar to diversifying your investment portfolio. Given that human nature tends to lead people into the "asshole" column, I can understand why democracy would be the preferable of the two approaches.

I feel the same way about OP's article. I'm not sure what it's trying to get at. The example it keeps going back to is Nixon getting rid of the draft by using an argument made by an economist to justify it. The author lambasts Nixon for using an economic (i.e. data-based) argument rather than a feelings-based argument ("one that weighed national security, military readiness, and democratic control").

But then later the author rails against how economists are too beholden to their own "bias" and "political" beliefs. So which is it? Are we to utilize evidence to help justify our decisions, or should we base our policy decisions off of our gut? It sounds like the author prefers that we defer our social policy decisions to philosophers, a profession even less beholden to hard evidence to back their conclusions. But bias and political beliefs are simply an extension of personal philosophy, so... you would just end up right back where we started trying to reduce personal preference leaking into hard facts and poisoning the problem-solving process.

It's one thing to say that we shouldn't elevate scientific findings and theories (and in turn their founders) to dogmatic levels. Science is a technique to offer answers to problems; nothing more. The technique and its findings can be incorrect or misused or simply misunderstood, but I don't see how the alternatives proposed are any better. Yes, it would be nice if we (and by extension, our elected officials) could have come to the conclusion about the ill effects of the draft based on an argument like "it's bad to force people to go to war for a cause they might not believe in", but that is an open-ended philosophical question and is why we have a democratic process in the first place. We all get a say in what our values are and how our public policy aligns with those values.

I feel like the author does exactly what he argues against: hand-picks a number of data points (very loose ones in this case), packages them up into some kind of position that backs his worldview that things are not going the way he would prefer, and then uses that to argue a deeper philosophical point rather than just get at the concept that scientific findings can often be abused (maybe because that is a much harder problem to solve than just saying economists suck).

Don't even get me started on the fact that the author refers to economists as "privileged" and infers that they are a social class which "came to enter policymaking and insinuate themselves into the governing class". As if people in the field of economics are just born into this powerful bubble in society and should shut their mouths because they simply got lucky in life; not that many of them worked hard to get in to their current profession.