I really really should not be laughing at this comment.
4,288 karma · joined August 21, 2013
Another dimension here is that it's a refuge from "the always on" society; if you were to step back and look at your life from a distance almost everyone would say "I need to disconnect more", but you often don't realize how dependent you are on that dopamine hit the connected internet provides until you're forced to disconnect. Then you see the peace and realize, "oh, I'm OK when I'm not attached to my phone".
But there are fewer and fewer opportunities to have that kind of realization these days.
Although I LOVE working remote, I sorely miss those interactions that happen at the office. I find they make me happier (being a socialite), help me build relationships that lubricate work interactions, and often are a much needed break.
However I count myself extremely lucky: my company will pay for me to fly in to HQ several times a year and put me up in a hotel and I take them up on this. I spend 1 week in the office, I plan on getting ZERO sprint work done, and I simply use that time to reconnect with my colleagues (who try to fly/drive in that same week), do group activities, planning meetings, eating out at night. It's simultaneously energizing AND exhausting.
After that week is over, I feel so much better and I fly back to my home office and find that I have a renewed sense of energy and creativity and am also much more productive with my "real" sprint work.
So I guess I get the best of both worlds! If you can get your company to do something like this, I highly recommend it. Although I know it is quite expensive.
It is crazy enough to be exciting yet practical enough to potentially be within reach given recent technological developments and – perhaps best of all – very easily reversible!
[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
We don't live in the past where you picked a company and built your relationships and career around it for most of your lifetime. That's what my grandfather did, but it's not how the economy works today. And I see this as a good thing; not only is the human race more productive by having more liquidity in the job market, but as an individual it frees you up – albeit sometimes more forcefully than you like – to shift around until you find the best place for you.
I enjoyed 4 out of the first 5 companies I worked for and thought I had things pretty great. But if I had stopped there, I wouldn't have arrived at the company I work at now (number 6) nor had the wisdom to know that I should commit to staying here for 3x longer than any previous company.
AMD market cap: $93B
Intel market cap: $104B
And now you will no longer be able to say that everything you've heard indicates that AMD is "absolutely crushing Intel".
So say, in such an organization, two teams each with a Staff Engineer are taking different and conflicting approaches, and neither Staff has been able to pursuade the other to their side? Often in this scenario it's extremely valuable to have a technically capable third-party mediator to help bring the two together.
A large part of The War On Drugs was the top-down messaging villainizing possession and use of cannabis, and that same power is now being used in the opposite direction to some extent. Combine that with an aging baby boomer generation, and you have youth growing up in red states today who are much less likely to believe that folks should be put in jail for possession.
Next the purple states will adopt similar language and policy, then the idea of criminalization well become an outside/extremist/fringe policy and – my prediction – finally within a decade or two even many red states will be decriminalizing cannabis as well.
That has to be so frustrating.
If society has normalized folks with 1/8 Native American heritage claiming the legal benefits of that status, then as an Asian I'd be doing my geneology to see if I can justify claiming any other race on my own college admissions.
At least 90% of phone calls I get are robocalls or spam. But, as the head of a large household, I can't disable unknown callers; who knows if that urgent care I took my kid to 6 months ago needs to call because I put my email address in wrong and they couldn't bill me, and I don't want the account to go to collections. Or maybe some random clerk from the city needs to contact me about property taxes?
I just do not have a definitive contact list of every number that might call me with critical information, and I'm not confident they would leave a voicemail. Or even if they leave a voicemail, it's often impossible to return a call because the caller is originating from some complex web of VOIP systems and when I call back I get a machine asking for an extension, which the caller forgot to leave in the voicemail!
If you want a well-reasoned discussion of where the waste is and isn't, I highly recommend Allen Holub's talk #NoEstimates [0].
This likely is making for a good deal of misaligned incentives, where public disaster relief expenses could be much less if building codes were raised in these areas, but such change is likely to be slow in coming and we should expect the status quo to continue for some time.
a) Build the property to withstand all but 1-2 statistically expected hurricanes within that N year period. This is possible, it's just costly.
b) You don't get public funds
c) You get private insurance
d) You don't build
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Borgholm+Castle/@56.870441...
I totally disagree!
I have 50k rep on StackOverflow, and roughly a quarter of that comes from the questions I've asked (I have 213 questions, 166 answers). In fact, that is my favorite way to interact with the site; I personally get excited when I find a question of mine that isn't answered on StackOverflow.
That said, writing a good question is an art. The impression that SO has a culture of not asking questions I think is at least partly impacted by the aspects of the culture that came into existence to deal with the huge deluge of really bad questions that it gets literally every second of every day.
Then, even if you put in the time and effort to actually write a well researched and thought out question, it's not uncommon to get close votes and downvotes. This is unfortunate, but it also usually comes from a small fraction of users who see your question within its first 5 minutes of posting. Once that time has passed, and folks start arriving at your question from Google, the upvotes come in as a steady stream.
Maybe my thinking is misguided, but this is exactly what I think. China has an abundance of labor and a strong appetite to perform just such tasks.
> That's just silly. China hasn't infiltrated HN.
It's not like you have to "infiltrate" anything here, it's an open forum and China would need to do little more than pay 2 people to take rotating shifts and they have essentially full coverage to counter any content critical of the country.
Since the readership of HN likely holds much more power than the average American, I'd think China silly to not make that investment.
I personally tire of this pattern:
1. Article submitted to an international forum about X country doing Y bad thing
2. "Well the USA is just as bad, they also did/doing/will do Y bad thing"
Well yes, that is true, but people are voting up the submission because they found that X-doing-Y-today was interesting and don't care to rehash the history of the US every single time. YES the US has plenty of blemishes in its history. Yes it has censored, warred, raped, extorted, and imprisoned. Yes the US persists in directly doing some of those today, and through malice or ineptitude it fails to prevent others.
But the regularity with which this pattern repeats feels so much like state sponsored astroturfing I'm just tired of it.
1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse
2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity
3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)
4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.
So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.
And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.
> The original launch date of Artemis 1 was planned in December 2016, but it was delayed at least sixteen times due to technical issues with the SLS and the Orion spacecraft.[0]
> The CoreLogic data shows that what it calls “mega” investors, with a thousand or more homes, bought 3% of houses last year and in 2022, compared with about 1% in previous years, with the bulk of investor purchases made by smaller groups.
So the mega investors only make up 3% of that 25%. I'd love to see data on what the remaining 22% are, but my guess is:
* flippers
* middle class individuals buying a second property as an investment
* small time property management firms run by local businesses
Also the Inside Economics podcast's recent episode Cooling Inflation and Confounding Housing Riddles[0] adds even more interesting color to the dialog. They explain that a lot of this is driven by demand for single-family home rentals. Roughly half of Americans will want/need to rent a single-family home at some point in their lives! Many people want to live in a home on a short-term basis, like when a family with kids moves to a new city and wants to familiarize with the area before committing to a full mortgage. And COVID combined with the changing demographics has caused a huge surge in demand, so surprise prices have also gone up.
[0] https://moodys-talks-inside-economics.simplecast.com/episode...