ejb999

IMO, yes - Its a lot harder to stay in business selling trashy products when you deal with people face to face in a given location, and hope to be there for years.

I agree, cheap taste in things is a blessing in disguise.

If you simply raise wages, then the people that make the furniture will also have their wages raised - which will increase the cost even further - it doesn't solve this problem and may even make it worse.

Same here - I am constantly replacing my LED lights whereas parts of my house still have 25 year old incandescents that have never been replaced since I moved in.

If you think you can make and sell meals for $2.50 and make $2.00 in profit on every meal, you should go into the restaurant business.

In my experience, every scrum project I have been on became an exercise in satisfying the requirements of scrum, versus the requirements of the project.

I actually had multiple scrum masters tell the developers that if they finished their assigned stories early, and there was still time left in the sprint - don't start any new stories, wait until they next sprint officially started, because it made the reporting better to upper management.

People like that need to be fired.

zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly.

People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that.

People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, should move to those places that are.

Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?

Fair enough - but point still stands, newer is not always better (to me). Give me a house that is still standing decades after mother nature threw everything it could at it, over a shiny new one any day.

Based on what I have read, Canada is doing far, far worse than the USA - affordability problem up north is ridiculous.

Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more.

Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.

Honestly, if I had to choose between buying a house built 50 years ago, or one today - I personally would take the older one. Nothing scares me more (relative to owning a house) than buying a brand new one.

If it has been around for fifty years, it has been tested - may have some things wrong with them, but you usually know what you are dealing with and usually the skill was better and materials better. Heck, my parents house is now 250 years old, and still as solid as can be.

A brand new one where the builder was trying to save money by using the latest and greatest techie products, and may or may not how to install it properly? No thanks.

To each their own though - I know plenty of folks that wouldn't even consider buying a 'used' house.

why would you think that short term weather forecasts are somehow affected by climate change?

results are still manipulated for political purposes - it is just automated now instead of manually done.

I tend to think this is true - but then again, if they were hiding something from the public, this is exactly what they would say...

It is worse, because it is faster - how many incorrect blog articles can a sigle typical writer publish and post on the internet - maybe 1-2 a day if you are a prolific writer?

How many can an AI agent do? Probably hundreds of thousands a day. To me, that is going to be a huge problem - but don't have a solution in mind either.

And then those 100K bad articles posted per day by one person, are used as training data for the next 100K bad/incorrect articles etc - and the problem explodes geometrically.

not to mention the revolving door between drug company execs and regulators - which is ripe for conflicts of interest.

the harm is not all drugs are safe - even if this one was (and we aren't 100% sure of that either), and pharma companies using social media and/or sympathy stories to pressure regulators into approving a drug that would not otherwise get approved is gross.

one of the problems is, how can a doctor in good conscience continue to renew your prescriptions, if they don't see you and re-evaluate the need?

Maybe they put you on 5MG on amlodipine for your moderately-high blood pressure 18 months ago, but since then you have put on an extra 75lbs and now you have critically high blood pressure - lots of liability if they just keep re-prescribing a low-dose that doesn't match your current conditions.

Everyone wants the easy path to getting the pills they think they need - then there is a bad outcome and some greedy lawyer and client come along and want $10Million in damages for the poor care they got.

sadly, a lot of patients consider that good care - around me, doctors stopped weighing patients, and don't ever discuss lifestyle changes or dietary changes (patients by and large don't want to hear it) - they just give the patients the pills they want to offset the poor lifestyle choices.

Do you think if there are more doctors, they are going to be more willing to provide free services? I don't - doctors want to get paid for their services - insurance companies (in general) don't pay for doctors to respond to emails - having more doctors doesn't solve this problem.

Not saying we don't need more doctors, but seems unrelated to to the problem being discussed.

why are you putting effort in quotes? Do you not think there is any 'effort' involved?

Why do you think someone else's 'effort' should be free?

its not just you. Yikes.

It’s hard for others to compete with slave labor. Gives the Chinese quite a leg up on pricing power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/business/economy/china-fo... https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/08/27/customs-d...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636

>>My career lesson is that being right isn't the hard part of being a senior staff engineer.

Not only that, but your own definition of 'right' may or may not align with what is 'right' for the people paying your salary - pretending otherwise is just silly.

In any organization, you advocate for what you believe is 'right' the best you can, someone else (or a consensus of others) will likely decide if they agree - you get to decide if you are willing to live with it/compromise, or move on - I have done both in my career.

car dealers, like a lot of businesses, don't really need a full blown 'AI powered' chatbot - they have a limited amount of things that they can or want to answer - a chatbot that follows a script, with plenty of branching is all they really need - and will likely keep them out of trouble.

I developed a chatbot for a medical company for patients to use - it absolutely cannot ever be allowed to just come up with things on its own - every single question that might be asked of it, needs a set of one or more known responses. Anything that can be pre-scripted, needs to be answered by a real person - with training, and likely also a script for what they are allowed to say.

I think so many companies are going to just start rolling out GPT-like chatbots, they are going to end up with a lot of lawsuits when it gives bad advice.

How many millionaire-employees have you created?

Yikes! That is quite expensive compared to what I pay.

The fact that you car is 'cheap', is not the driving force behind the cost - you may drive a $10K used car, but you can still crash into someone else's $120K car and also put the other driver in the hospital with 100's of thousands of dollars of medical expenses.

Once your car is paid off, you can usually drop the collision damage on your own car - but don't be surprised if you are still paying thru the nose.

Curious though: what state are you in, and how much are you paying?

As comparison, we own three cars (2015, 2013 and 2011), for three drivers (youngest is 21) and have pretty decent level of coverage, including coverage for damage to our cars even though they are paid off - and only pay ~$1600/year in total for all three cars/drivers in Mass, which to me seems pretty reasonable.

The things is - you can't actually know for sure - it is entirely possible to get covid and have nothing more than a sniffle or nothing at all - so I think what the OP you are responding to is saying is that just because someone thinks they never had covid, it might not be true.

I know people who never had symptoms, but tested because a household member had tested positive (with symptoms) and found out they were positive too - it happens.

In my opinion, that is the best case scenario - you got it, didn't know it and your body fought it off like a champ.

thats what makes bureaucracies run (govt and big corps) - and why it is so frustrating if you come from a startup or small consultancy background to operate in huge bureaucracies - many folks in these big orgs only job is to sit in meetings and study things to death or else raise objections to theoretical problems that may never happen - in order to justify their existence, thinking that the more they study the problem, the better the solution will be - it usually does not end up with a better solution - just a late one, and more expensive and bloated.