This was a common practice in the early 20th century, as many of the wealthiest in the US owned and traveled by private rail car.
453 karma · joined March 25, 2022
...if the photon comes to rest on earth, and we compare clocks...
IIRC, the deceleration of the photon relative to me (as it comes to rest on earth as would a returning space traveler) would "reverse" the time dilation relative to me, so both our clocks would read 12:08.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I read this many years ago but never dove all the way into the math.
Thusly anecdotally armed, I can tell you that for cases towards the center of the bell curve, employees working in the office is better for the company and arguably better for the employee long-term. More shared vision, more opportunities for cross-pollination, more quick problem solving. All the usual arguments. It worked in my case, but productivity plummeted for the next guy who tried it, and we had to let him go.
It worked in my case because this was before the time when every kid expected to be able to work from home, and so I was terrified on a daily basis that out of sight would become out of mind. In the early days I made a point of traveling to HQ one week of every four, to meet the new folks and maintain relationships. I strove to overachieve so I didn't become redundant. Even so, by the end of the decade, with the growth of the company I was noticeably detached from the centers of power and the office culture, serving a role not much different from a contractor.
Not this specific post, which is reasonable and well-thought-out, but many rants I've heard by WFH proponents come across as myopic and naive. Yes, it can succeed sometimes, for some combinations of office culture and individual. Just based on my own experience, more often it doesn't.
> Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy.
Salaried employment in this business (at least in the US) is a contract between you and somebody who wants to give you a lot of money, with some expectations in return. The person offering the money has the right to set the terms of that contract, and you have the right to reject that contract and work somewhere else. I view this as the actual "choice of what makes that individual happy."
Finally, let's not forget that people working in group settings is what got us here. It gave us the airplane, modern medical care, and the internet. New is sometimes better, but sometimes it's not.
Yandex is a country-specific platform. For ten years it's been referred to as "the Russian google."
It seems myopic to search for the answer to this discrepancy purely within teaching styles. In high school, coincident with the onset of puberty, many students simply become more interested in achieving social goals than academic learning.
"Prices excluding energy and food rose 6.6%
The increase marked the biggest annual rise in core prices since August 1982, a sign that persistent increases are becoming entrenched in the economy. The overall CPI rose 8.2% in September, down slightly from the previous month’s gain."
I admit I don't know enough to tease out whatever subtleties you're referencing; can you explain what about this is misleading?
It's been a while since I read it, but my takeaway was that the depth of familiarity brought about by 10k hours of practice in an area was just one factor of many that contributed to success. You need all those other factors in addition to the 10k hours.
I think it's just humans with our predictable penchant for distilling accurate nuance down to adjacent-but-inaccurate bullet points that created the idea that 10k hours is all it takes.
All engineers are equal, but some are more equal than others!
The Agile Manifesto came into style, then predictably a cottage industry of small companies grew up around it, with the business model of charging Fortune 500s huge amounts of money to train their Engineering departments. I've sat through such training before, and I can say without doubt that the day our company took "agile training" was the day we stopped being agile.
We overlaid an efficient process with a ton of bureaucratic busy work. We came out the other side of it with an army of PMs (read: Jira configuration experts). Engineers had less time to engineer, with constant flow-interrupting meetings where they became trapped in a morass of Gantt Charts, "deliverables" spreadsheets, etc.
We had many employees for whom English was a second language, and interestingly none of those I talked to realized that "agile" was an actual word, meaning "nimble, quick, dexterous." Nothing about the new process conveyed any of those qualities. It was basically classic waterfall, with stand-up meetings thrown in. Rigid project management methodology is definitionally opposed to agility.
A few months later a prospective junior engineer came in for an interview. My manager asked him the typical "tell me about an interesting project you've worked on lately." He then proceeded to describe in detail the very project we had just completed, even referencing the magazine article about it (he must have forgotten he was interviewing at the company mentioned in the article). At the end of his presentation, my manager said "That's interesting, because here at X, we just completed that project."
Awkward silence. Then the interviewee got up and said "I guess I should go now." My manager said "Yes, I guess you should."
Impersonation of this sort can be simultaneously disturbing and somehow comical. It isn't a new phenomenon; I'm not decided on whether I believe the information age makes it easier or more difficult.
This is comparing apples to oranges. Alms for the poor is a personal choice: I decide to give some of my own money to someone who I think needs it more than I do.
"Reverse discrimination" in the sense you're using it refers (within this analogy) to somebody else taking your money away from you, because they believe that somebody needs it more than you do. I could write a book (others already have) about how many things can and always do go wrong with this approach.
Leaving the "working-memory-max=4" hypothesis aside (I'm sure it's all true), the "stack learning" paradigm has been hugely successful for me post-classroom, and (amusingly) specifically with Quantum Mechanics.
About ten years ago, I tried to understand what QM was about, by doing exactly what the article describes, starting at Wikipedia's "Quantum Mechanics" page. I got the exact result described: no understanding of the material.
However, the search eventually led me to ocw.mit.edu, where the same LIFO-based stack learning was super effective. Along the way, a refresher calculus course (also from OCW) got pushed onto then popped from the stack, as did the course "Vibrations and Waves" and the entire Walter Lewin lecture series (he has since been removed from OCW, but can be found on youtube).
In software, I've seen repeatedly how new hires with big ideas (and youthful confidence that they know a better way of doing things) will come into a company and want to rewrite things "properly." In one management position, much of my role involved the politics of defending a well-working, well-maintained, big-revenue-driving application from a steady onslaught of such ambitious exuberance.
At the time, I thought "this must be the same phenomenon that drives shrinkflation": new MBA arrives at pickle-making company, seeks to bolster their career by demonstrably saving the company millions, convinces execs to put one less pickle in each pickle jar, consumers won't notice; step 3: profit!! In 2022, when you buy a cereal box, it's half air on the inside. In 1980, it was only 20% air.
I also shake my head when media pundits equate the success of a particular congressional session with the amount of new legislation they pass. I can imagine no simpler way to cruft-paralyze a democracy (while following the rules) than "releasing laws early and often."
It's a simulation.
I will mangle the terminology since it's been so long, but the basic idea was that on an infinite canvas you would create nodes representing concepts; these nodes were just UI "bubble" objects, like the ovals you might find in slide deck software. Relationships could be added after the fact by linking these nodes, and there was a fast way to create linked "sub-nodes" from an existing node. Also, very strong UI for arranging the node diagram.
Maybe the big problem with mind mapping tools these days is feature creep. A complex UI with too many options will absolutely get in the way of the thought process it serves.
This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.
Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."