einhverfr

Can you discuss with your SO why the vegetarianism without getting into political questions like:

    1.  What are our obligations to organisms we eat?
    2.  What are our obligations to each other?
    3.  Is vegetarianism an obligation?  Why or why not?

I don't see how those are not political issues.

But you can't go into depth very far on any of these without reaching political topics, can you?

Look up WL Gore and Associates. They have thrived on a very different company power structure. Or maybe their founder was right and the power structure wasn't different (he thought official power structures were not where the power was held, and therefore dispensed with them in order for unofficial power structures to more easily come to the fore).

The problem is that you have to have some forms of effort in coordination and there aren't a while lot of models for that in actual practice. There are a few different topologies.

Where I work is becoming more of a traditional company in many ways. But I still look to Gore's insight that the real decisions are made around the water cooler and in the carpool van, and that is helpful.

All opinions can be rationalized through a particular lens can they not?

Are you asking Google to be a voice of reason in the debate over global labor markets and liberalization of SE Asian economies for example?

Doesn't that give you a wolf-and-lamb problem, to reference Aesop?

I think the problem is that the US has developed for various reasons (including a lack of discussing politics) a series of echo chambers and people don't connect politically beyond their echo chambers. In urban California, among software developers, you are likely to have one or two political views represented at most, and these represent a small racial and class-based cross-section of urban California. The first of course is the Neoliberal views of the Rainbow Capitalism camp that brought us Hillary Clinton's candidacy. If there is a second view it is the Business Liberalism view of the elite GOP members such as the Koch brothers.

You aren't going to get the political concerns of rust-belt America, or the political concerns of black families down in Watts recognized, nor will you get the communitarianism of rural America in there either.

And so that sense of justice gets warped, even regarding national issues of the US today.

What happens when these things go world wide? Someone's sense of justice gets offended by economic orders where procreative/childrearing families hold businesses which are inherited and passed on to kids, and where there are solid gender roles associated (my kids' second culture for example)? I guess we better do what we can to make the world safe for American Capitalism to come in and liberate people from family expectations. But that means opening up such cultures to economic exploitation by foreign business and that harm is waved away as if it doesn't matter.

The arrogance does matter, because the arrogance can easily lead to outright economic colonialism ("for their own good" as much now as a century ago). The way to hold it in check is for other viewpoints to actually be entertained and discussed.

The larger problem is that the IP assignment clauses are way too broad in the US. When I worked at Microsoft I had one that theoretically covered everything I wrote regardless of when, where, or on what devices. As an hourly worker, though, Microsoft was never going to exercise that due to overtime issues.

I rechecked my contract and under the terms of the contract, if it is specific to my work at my employer, they could claim it, but frankly we prefer to release everything that isn't specific to our industry open source anyway, so.....

I just checked my contract again. If the patent is outside the scope of my work activities, and I don't write up the application while I am at work, I don't see how they could claim it.

But then Americans have these funny "all your intellectual property are belong to us" clauses in work contracts....

Private conversations are protected. So even in Germany if a report to me confides he admires Hitler I can't fire him for that. If he says so on a public channel, that is different (and depending on what is said might be criminal, but that is a time/manner/place restriction).

But the goal is to hold private political discussions as much as possible above economic retaliation.

A useful way to think about this is that the Supreme Court ruled the state cannot punish someone for advocating genocide in the abstract at a KKK rally, not because advocating genocide is somehow a natural right or that free speech is absolute, but because the government had previously exceeded its authority by going after political dissidents (particularly Communists) using similar logic. So free speech protections in the US for hate speech are a reaction to state abuse in the context of the US.

In Europe the abuses were different so the protections are different.

Yeah, it is what my colleagues and I often do over lunch break. Since it is a break, it is outside of work, right?

The issue was that tying political opinion to jobs was what the Fascists did in the 1930s. So it's kind of a "Never Again" category. It isn't entirely enforceable but companies cannot use it to fire people based on private conversations about politics. This has come up a few times where I work actually and the answer is the same. That's off the table.

In the EU, freedom from discrimination on the basis of political opinion is considered a fundamental right, and is mentioned as such in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Private conversations about politics thus is entirely outside the scope of what the company is allowed to care about. Public comments, for example on global email lists, would be a different topic.

One thing I learned in Europe is to discuss politics over food.

Food is like CS Lewis said about smoking a pipe: It gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to put in his mouth.

What that means is that people get to spend time thinking before they respond and that makes a big difference. When I did a contract in Denmark we used to discuss all kinds of politics -- immigration, cultural differences, which parties were insane, etc but always over food. And it meant we could discuss and disagree without feelings getting hurt.

Also if we can't discuss politics over disagreement in a civil way seeking to learn from each other even where we find the other points of view difficult, then all hope for a better future is lost. Nobody ever learns from mere agreement. Disagreement is a precondition to learning from other people.

Very insightful reply.

I think there is a specific problem in the discussion of how class is discussed in the US today, which is that Americans think of class in quantitative terms, i.e. it is about how much money you make. But these theories start with Adam Smith who saw the primary division as being between working class (labor), landlord, and employer classes. To Smith, you have two different rentier classes and a working class, and the difference is qualitative. (Now, assuming Picketty is right that returns on capital are greater than economic growth, qualitative differences lead to quantitative differences, but one is cart and one is horse.)

Until we start recognizing that we as software developers are working class too at least until we cash in enough options to own real assets, we can't have this discussion.

> that religions hinge on explaining the unknowable

I don't think that is right. Mircea Eliade suggested that the primary function of mythology was a series of stories our lives could participate in and experience, and I think that's closer to the way religion is usually understood in most parts of the world outside the corner of Protestantism where your view holds most weight.

> often in ways that harms certain communities and life styles

My kids get to navigate three very different cultures -- traditional Indonesian society where getting married, procreating, and raising children is central to the family business economic order, the US where those are entirely separated from each other, and Germany where the recognition is you cannot have gender equality without support particularly for motherhood. I don't think you get that the conflicts between these are not merely religious but much more about the economic and social constitution of the societies, and that seeking to deprive, for example, Indonesia of their family business economic order in the name of sexual individualism or whatever harms these communities by opening them up to foreign exploitation. It's colonialism pure and simple.

Religion is an expression of culture and we assume our superiority over others culturally at great peril to both sides.

Very interesting and provocative read, so another book on my reading list.

I grew up in small town America myself. I now live in Europe because in part it reminds me of the nice life I experienced there -- focus on family and community rather than the atomistic, anonymized individual of the big city. Europeans support families (and in particular raising kids) better than Americans do.

I sometimes talk with Americans about the problem of urban privilege, and the fact that urban Americans a) can't usually understand where rural Americans are coming from and b) see themselves as superior. Every point you can make about white privilege applies to the urbanites and the urban/rural split as well. I have lived in Sweden, which reminds me very much of rural Utah culturally, and in Germany which strikes me more like where I lived in rural Washington State.

I love how this guy seems to have made it across this divide both ways, and come to understand the quiet strength, admirable characteristics, dignity, and community that lies behind rural life and to understand the fact that this urban privilege can be seen through (as he calls back-row rather than front-row).

This was also the original idea of Object Oriented Programming before people thought the real world was a good analogy.

Indeed the rise of ESPP's due to ERISA are why I consider Nixon the closest President we've had to being actually Socialist.

My experience is you want to move fast by reusing good software. This means that well understood components should be well engineered and documented components, while poorly understood problems might reserve documentation for the future.

Agility requires a stable foundation. And a lot of places forget that.

One additional principle is this:

When faced with a standard solution, use a standard component if you can. If you can't use a standard component, build a standard component. Keep your components simple, well-understood, and easy to maintain.

As an interesting note, my time in Indonesia introduced me to Sukarno's writings, which introduced me to Gandhi's writings on nationalism. These have been firm influences on my view that the choice is not between nationalism and internationalism, but between nationalism with internationalism and globalism with colonialism.

The problem is we have not found good ways to market and attract technical writers. Documentation is harder than testing and having people who are both good business analysts and good writers on a project are really important.

In my view consulting companies need to prioritize and bundle these skills.

For most of my time as a software developer and engineer I released code under GPLv2 and BSD licenses. It paid the bills because I knew how to sell what I was doing. I charged enough to cover the time sink. Now I am a world-class expert in some common BSD-licensed software.

I have made my living doing open source software development for a number of years now. My perspective here is a little different than the article's.

There are, in reality, three ways that open source software comes to be. The first two are heavily subsidized (educational/academic proof of concept and internal projects by larger companies which are open sourced to cut maintenance costs). In the first case, academia subsidizes the software and in the second case the software exists open source to try to reduce the burdens on one company. Kafka, etc. are good examples of the second.

There is a third approach which I have also used which is the the customer-sponsored-development model. This works well with a certain kind of application aimed at vertical markets in business. Here you expect those who need new features or support accounts to subsidize maintenance. This is also how a lot of larger open source software projects that escape academia effectively work.

In all cases there are two distinct issues. The first is subsidizing the initial development. This has to be subsidized somehow because often times getting to a minimum viable project is a lot bigger than folks expect. Academia and big business are the two major ways these often happen here. But then the second is subsidizing continued development and maintenance. Here there are different approaches. One can use pay-for-development/support models or expect users to contribute patches (depending on the context of the open source project either one might actually be viable and beneficial and the difference is who is paying the paycheck, and what the relationship is between the user and developer).

As an American residing abroad, and married to a non-American, I tend to get a lot of trouble from FATCHA and the like. These laws effectively force me to put all savings in my wife's name because that's the only way I can deal with banks in Europe.

Now we have these kinds of issues in the US. But proving citizenship isn't trivial. When we were in the US, my wife, to my knowledge didn't have to prove citizenship, only provide ID (such as a driver license) and a social security card (which also doesn't prove citizenship). Of course they can't just ask everyone for birth certificates or passports on short notice. So they just ask for verbal answers? Really?

But there is more. Why is there this focus on dual citizens? And why are banks being asked to effectively surveil people for dual citizenship?

Interesting how much money, despite our view of it as numbers, is deeply tied to culture.

I just moved from Sweden. I used cash frequently, but not in large quantities. Cashlessness is helpful in some cases, but a burden in others.

It is true you can get by without cash in Sweden but you cannot get by without a card, reasonably. But many of the corner markets have minimum payments by card, and so often having smallish money in cash is a very good thing. Additionally the farmer markets in the town squares are still mostly cash-based.

So I never found cashlessness to work entirely while I was there, whether I was in Malmo, Helsingborg, or Landskrona. Maybe in Stockholm it is different, and maybe it is different if you rarely buy at the farmer markets....

Germany, where I now live is the opposite. You can get by without a card, but you cannot get by without cash....

I think the biggest fundamental takeaway here is that PostgreSQL works fairly well as a big data platform for certain kinds of data.

20TB per server x 20 servers for raw storage, 32TB of storage sharded for analytics. trillions of data points per year. And we make it work.

One fundamental problem here is that business justification depends on business direction and strategy. What is your exit strategy? Do you care about being profitable? How important is autoscaling? How do you deal with a hardware outage?

These are not free tradeoffs. In all cases you solve some problems at expense of either making other problems harder to solve.

So I don't know about the no business justification argument. That is so contextual.

I do know we hire Gentoo packagers. We hire people who can code C. We hire PostgreSQL backend hackers. We hire the best and most senior people we can.