jasonwocky

It's no choice at all. Don't talk.

Look, I understand these guys have a job to do, and they have a certain toolset they're allowed to use to do it. I don't begrudge them that. But damned if I'm going to let a sense of civic duty lead to my self-incrimination.

A friend of mine spent some time at the Public Defenders office. The number of times she saw people send themselves up for long stretches in prison, under circumstances in which the authorities would /never/ have gotten a conviction otherwise, led her to give me the same advice you see every single lawyer on television offer their clients: don't say anything!

Well, he could have hemmed and hawed and led them on. Sounds like maybe he didn't do that; perhaps he just gave them a simple "no" and they respected that.

> You can average it out at 30% of the time, but in a given week, you can't commit to it, because a greater responsibility of your job is being available to manage the unexpected

I'd argue that your job is to teach others how they can best manage the unexpected. Then you should only be involved in the really exceptional circumstances, allowing you more time to tend to your (metaphorical) garden at work. If writing code is part of that, so be it. But the bulk of time, I'd argue, ought to be in mentoring others.

The best managers I've worked with don't run around like chickens with their heads cut off, constantly responding to fires.

> They seem to be attempts to transform our technical field from solving real world problems via math and deep understanding into something like politics

The problem with that perspective, as I see it, is that all cooperative human endeavors are inherently political. You can't "technology" your way out of those dynamics, and you can't simplify your worldview to ignore them because they frequently-enough have real impacts on the work.

So what I see a lot of these movements doing is recognizing and reacting to those dynamics, rather than trying to build solutions based on a model of the world without them.

Not anymore.

"Why editors are 'literally' changing the dictionary" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23729570

That's a great point. I'm pretty sure the term of art for this would be an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

> Why struggle, working 16 hour days to move up in a career so you can afford the $700k 2000 sq ft home on a postage stamp sized property in a so-so part of town when you can move to Arkansas, work at a remote development shop and afford a $350k 4000 sq ft home in a gated community with and acre and a half of wooded property with an in-ground pool?

That's a pretty big strawman. There are tons of other options for someone , and not all of us and our families need 4000 sq ft (or even 2000 sq ft) and 1.5 acres of property to be happy. I like living in densely populated areas rather than the equivalent of a personal ivory tower.

I think that American dream of owning a big house with a huge amount of property has done more harm than good.

In New York, we can opt pay a flat yearly "Use tax" for an unlimited number items purchased over the Internet from outside of NYS that cost less than $1,000 each. For me, it's about $100, and yes I pay it.

Items purchased online in NYS are subject to sales tax at the time of the transaction, and the burden is on the vendor to collect it.

I don't buy things from the vast majority of corporations in existence.

> Do you feel responsible for all negative consequences caused by your tax dollars?

I've got other political enemies as well. If by "negative consequences of my tax dollars", you mean "things our governments spend money on that I disagree with"...no, I don't feel wholly responsible for them, since I fight the proponents of those things, too.

I'm a political enemy of anybody who habitually doesn't pay their taxes, and thus by extension, raises mine.

I don't do PR, but I've managed our relationships with PR firms. Rule #1 about dealing with the media: do their work for them.

The practice of getting PR pieces presented as news can be quite simplistic. One way to go: A company hires its own press agent or uses a PR firm (typically the latter for smaller companies). PR firms' specialty is in cultivating relationships with reporters, editors, and the like. It's no big trick; mostly just human relationships and the ability to provide the newspeople with stuff they can use to get their job done. In other words, they understand the "domain" of news.

Then the original company funnels information about stuff its doing to their PR firm on a regular basis. The PR firm takes the stuff it thinks might be interesting to the outside world, helps put some spin on it, and shops it around to the contacts they think might be interested in the stories.

If the newspeople bite, what happens next can depend on a variety of factors. But the hard work's been done at this point.

It should be noted that this isn't the only path things can take. This story has been making the rounds for a week or so now. It's quite possible that the WaPo was never contacted by any PR folks; instead they just saw it on other news outlets and wanted to follow up for themselves.

Examples?

> If everyone already agrees, then you're not saying something worthwhile.

Plenty of proverbs would disagree.

Oh darnit, you got me.

I won't argue that "No, because" and "Yes, if" are mathematically equivalent statements. But I hold that the immutability implication you mention is something added by the listener, not information "carried" by the bits of the "No, because."

They may not be proper synonyms, but a listener that's forgiving of input errors can interpret them as synonyms, at least until proven otherwise through further conversation.

I dunno. Sounds like there's a chance that the economist's own biases are coming into play here. I'd apply the Principle of Indifference...."No, because" and "Yes, if" pretty much sound like the same thing to me. It's how you react to those phrases that makes all the difference.

If you let "Yes, if" evoke a different emotional response than, "No, because", even though they provide more or less the same information content, what does that say about you?

> Of course it's in Apple's interests to control prices, the question is whether it's in the public's interests. I'm undecided.

Whether it is or not, I'm not sure that the fines are the way to go. If "the public" thinks that these practices are anticompetitive, why not simply declare that contract provisions to that effect won't be enforced in their jurisdiction?

> The only state that can split itself up is Texas

As your link indicates, a more accurate telling is "The only state that some proponents argue can split itself up is Texas".

In the same way that Napster lost. Imagine if you'd invested in that one after the mainstream noticed it.

> It's honestly stuff like this that makes me feel like the only sane person around.

You're not.

> If the CEO is pushing for it, the employees will all smile and nod and go along with the crowd,

I don't know what to say. There are more kinds of working relationships than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Not everybody lives in fear of their CEO.

> You can sing the happiness song and do all the lets-be-friends dances but at the end of the day we're people competing for resources

Sure, but some of us cooperate with others in order to compete with everyone else, and that's good enough.

I work at a firm with a similar salary structure. Like every other thing, it's a tradeoff. Sure, I concede there are ways it hurts, but they are offset in my case by the ways it helps.

I think the point of the transparency is that they'd discuss a situation like this as a company.

> governments are going to act forcefully to kill Bitcoin, and the fallout will be utterly unpredictable.

I don't think so. I think it's quite predictable that, if that happens, Bitcoin will lose. In the sense that it will ultimately become a cryptocurrency also-ran. Something else will probably rise to take its place after it's been bloodied, something designed to be resistant to whatever response the world's governments bring to bear.

Why? Assuming he's being truthful, all he's reporting is what the Man claims.

Plenty of "disciples" cling to a few soundbites from their idols that enable them to rationalize their behavior, without ever seeking to understand their idols' broader points.

I'm guessing that was the point.

IDEA is the one piece of software I buy that advertises "Faster performance!" with each new release...and actually delivers on it for me.

I've been doing Android programming on IDEA 12. Aside from missing some of the Android Lint checks (which are apparently improved in 13), I've had no issues.

No, that's an orthogonal concern. You have to use it to understand (edit: or you have to find someone smarter than me to explain it to you ;).

Jetbrains does something similar with their Ruby ide, but it feels more advanced in IntelliJ. Certainly the static analysis can gather more information.

Status quo bias is a condition of humanity, not just the media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias