kafkaesq

But isn't that just a reflection (and after-effect) of a more fundamental, underlying cause -- that is, the extent to which low- (and medium-) skill labor itself has become devalued, in recent decades -- along with, of course, the very class of persons taking those jobs? Along with a host of other changes in attitudes (sharply) favoring the welfare of the high-skilled -- and above all, of the rentiers -- over the welfare of those who actually do the bulk of the work that keeps our civilization actually running?

Which is presumably what motivated the actual votes on the particular pieces of legislation you (quite validly) cite.

There are plenty, actually. They just don't get a lot of airplay in the... corporate media.

What I see more of is situations where the developers "know" SQL but still just don't want to sit down and figure out their data models.

It's like, the temptation to reach for the nearest short-cut -- whether that means over-reliance on ORMs (or hodgepodge 'data access layers'); or continually munging stuff at the application layer for nearly every operation; or... Mongo -- is always just too great.

Don't ask me why, but something tells me there was a bit more to the actual Victoria Police project than just the image-scanning component. But the title makes for good clickbait, at least.

What rubs me the wrong way is when, applying for more or less "standard dev" jobs, one gets asked research-grade questions (i.e. "Solve this cute problem I was fed the solution to recently, either in grad school or in some handout my manager gave me just now. But which was actually an open problem in the literature for 5-10 years before a reasonable solution came down the pipe.")

For a job that ends up being, "Congratulations on making it through our interview process! Now would you mind debugging this {{horribly written X}} that no on here wants to touch with a 10-foot pole? Everyone here has to do 9-12 months of shitwork before moving on to anything interesting here, you see."

That's what people always say. Like, as if they actually tell from 1 or 2 of these goofy whiteboarding sessions.

It seems the most they can actually glean from these sessions is, "Huh, looks like their problem-solving approach is different from mine. Plus, they come in not having the advantage of having the solution already ready-baked and laid-out for them, in whatever interviewing guide it was I found this problem. Doesn't that suck for them? Not to mention being under pressure from doing way too many, generally carelessly orchestrated interview tracks (in their non-existent spare time) while being stuck in some job they're anxious to quit. And getting distracted by me diddling with my cell phone while they're doing headstands for me. Gosh, why is it so hard to find decent candidates, these days?"

It's really hard to justify the time investment in reading a piece that starts off with an implausible scare tactic like this.

One can only expect it to go downhill from there.

Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation.

Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).

But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...

That said, the various participation rates he's siting may presumed to be somewhat skewed by immigration.

No. He dissembled, and attempted to obfuscate the nature of the events at Charlottesville from the very beginning. And not only "obfuscate", but to turn the facts on their head, and reality inside-out. And Adams, in attempting to frame statements like the above (and the other ludicrous and/or simply nauseating things that Trump said after the attack) as a "generic law and order response, applied equally", is simply dissembling and obfuscating even further.

If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service. If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.

No, just self-impressed and (when he steps too far outside the realm of the comic strip that made him famous) tragically self-deluded.

For example, when you have a division of larger company that really should be its own company. But, no one's allowed to talk about that because "that's been talked to death already" and the show must go on, etc. Or because no on really cares (or bothers to think about things on that level) basically.

That's the problem - these AI companies... believe their own hype a bit too much.

One could say it's because the guy's basically a nutjob of sorts. But that's be oversimplifying (if ever so slightly).

The more nuanced explanation is that -- like a lot of rich techies -- he apparently subscribes to an intellectual culture that believes that now matter what written laws say -- states and other governmental entities actually have limited legitimacy, and in effect are fundamentally subordinate to "common" or "natural" law. Specifically when it comes to the "rights" of owners of real property.

So just because the law says something -- something silly about a requirement to grant the unwashed public "access" to a plot of land that, after all, you bought and paid for -- as the land owner, you really don't need to pay any attention to it. Or if you want to be a big craftier, you can just say "I don't like this current jurisdiction's laws, and I'd prefer to respect the laws of its (for some 150+ years) vanquished predecessor instead."

So if people come after you in the courts -- hey, if you can afford lawyers sufficiently skilled so as to bamboozle either the justices in the jury with lofty-sounding talk about how, actually, the chain-of-title goes all the way back the land grants made by the Mexican Empire (and hence, you only have to worry about what its laws say about any requirements for public beach access) -- then more power to you.

Which is actually the route Khosla took in this case.

Yet there's a near universal consensus that "the law" (i.e. the founding statutes regarding access to coastal properties, from the time California entered the Union) mandates that this access must be maintained, for perpetuity, by whoever takes title to the property.

So in effect there's a permanent easement attached to the property (even if the term as such didn't appear in the text of the original statues).

No, of course not. And that's the whole point that's been finally upheld by the Court.

I'm curious as to how you stand behind both of these statements.

Being as the second clearly contradicts the first.

The point I'm trying to make is that, thanks in a large part of very some "boom" you and I riding on, a lot of people not only can't afford to live in SF (or other pricier parts of the Bay Area) with a car and travel money -- nowadays, they can't afford to live there at all. Whereas 20 years ago, while it was never easy to make it in the Bay Area -- at least theoretically they could, at their skill and education level.

So while $120k may seem like chump change to you, it'd be a godsend to them. They may still not be able to travel, and they may have to cut back in a whole lot of other areas -- but at least they'd be getting by.

Which is again, the real "game" for most people.

And the "game" for them is simply to survive.

Even if you think you can easily do better, you shouldn't "laugh" at salary offers in that range. The vast majority of people in the U.S. won't ever -- at their current (and for many, basically immutable) education level -- stand a chance of making anywhere near that much.

And being as it's just a matter of blind luck that we've been born at a certain time and place that enables us to make that kind of a salary.

For basically playing with shiny toys all day, and all.

Actually it was, for a while. And I actually did read a lot of these works; and considered their points, very carefully; and debated them with their adherents, very patiently and thoughtfully.

Until I figured out what general superstructure of thought patterns was behind their arguments (which mostly boil down to: cherry picking; what-about-ism; and "authority, authority authority") -- and moved on other things.

Given the alarming cognitive deficits as they are routinely observed to have.

Maybe next time, Salesforce should think twice about sending its executives to DEFCON. Without some basic introduction as to what it's actually about.

Which said unnamed executive should have known was patently unreasonable to expect to be received and read in time.

Sounds like a failure in basic communication, somewhere in the organization. And if someone in the C-level feels they need to intervene at the last minute to set things straight -- this very strongly suggests point source of the failure was most likely somewhere in the middle layers (or at the C-level itself) - not with the frontline engineers.†

But which at Salesforce is apparently no protection against getting hung out to dry.

† Especially when we read the parts about "The talk had been months in the making" and that the executive pulled the plug at the last minute "despite a publicized and widely anticipated release."

Most likely because, whether the author intended it that way or not, the memo was draft in a way that was pretty much guaranteed to push people's buttons. And when people -- particularly very smart people who have a lot more important things to do with their time -- feel their buttons being pushed, they tend to react, and get to the root of the matter very quickly.