kepler1

I am curious too. Why is SBF not being treated like a Bernie Madoff? Paper trail non existent or too complicated? It's odd how softball the NYT etc are treating him. There's a meme where they count the number of times "crime" "fraud" etc are mentioned in articles about him. Almost nil.

Lucky you -- I don't get more than a week before I'm told my work is useful, but we've moved on to other things and won't need it any more!

I mean, setting aside the emotional aspect of the issue for a moment and just being analytical, can't we also acknowledge that there is a type of observation bias here?

When you're talking about thousands of people getting hired a year, and a sudden event having to be done that affects 11,000 employees, you're bound to get a couple of very unusual and unfortunate cases.

If we looked at different windows of time, we would get even more people who fall into sympathetic categories. How many people were just laid off after just 2 weeks of being on the job / moving countries? How about a month ago? 2 months?

I wonder why the news story didn't look at an even larger window? But I guess they just are interested in (or heard about) the sensational case that draws your attention, huh? Or isn't the real story, "where's the person who got off his flight that morning and received an email that he was laid off?"

When you deal with human processes, and have to draw a line somewhere, certain cases will pop up as falling into very odd or unfortunate cracks. Hopefully the compensation and severance is designed to make up for these cases.

Oh fucking hell. I've never read an article that so made me want to slap the author. For having blinders half on, and making me read a story that has a headline about one thing and then completely turns it into another thing.

Funny how even if your position (you believe) is relatively secure, this news sucks the air out of the working environment and everyone has it in the back of their mind even as they continue holding meetings, etc.

Specific info (1st hand knowledge):

Concur has had a suspicious outage today, preventing people from submitting final reimbursement claims. As well as a general hold on purchasing requests (people I suppose trying to get their benefits in).

A mysterious slowdown in meetings with director level leaders, etc. and certain things (project plans, kickoff meetings) being asked to wait for some more information before publishing.

Shitposting forum blowing up with half-joking memes.

I'm curious, what kind of endgame was he planning, if any?

How do you launder and benefit from even any of the coins, if you know you're a wanted man and everyone is watching to see where the coin pops up?

Where do our free speech rights say that you are entitled to publish an opinion / statement on a particular channel or someone's private media outlet?

Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.

You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.

Isn't it interesting how the social or traditional rules of a people, the software, if you will, are a big factor in whether the country will be successful or not?

Funny how quickly a company that invents something that enabled people to do things never before possible, gets accused of crushing people's dreams like it's a human rights violation, all based on a percentage.

I would add that if you are a fan of courts protecting minority rights not subject to the whims and abuses of majorities, you should be grateful that judges are not democratically elected.

And consensus failure means that we should codify into the basic law what you believe is the consensus on that topic? Or change the rules to reflect the lack of consensus? How odd.

A change to the Constitution isn't going to save you from people fundamentally disagreeing on things.

Please say what about voting has been fundamentally attacked at its core that rises to the level of amending the Constitution? That voters are required to (gasp) verify their identification, once every 4 years, if certain conditions aren't met? That drop boxes for ballots were reduced in number?

Gerrymandering? Just look at some of the district designs in New York.

I might remind you that all the things that are criticized in Republican states for suppressing the vote, exist as rules in certain Democratic states as well.

It's easy, I might point out to you as well, to live in an echo chamber where issues get inflated in perceived importance, only because they hurt your side. Yet those same issues happening where it doesn't hurt the side, somehow fall from being a problem.

That's no way to come to what should be an amendment to our basic document.

I wish people (of both sides) who declare "the system is broken" etc would seriously ask themselves, is it because your particular issue didn't go your way? How would we run a stable country if that were the principle to follow?

There was the line "it may backfire on you sooner than you thought" and I think there's some good caution in that statement. Take your own argument out of the picture -- would you be happy for the principle by which you're suggesting we operate be on the other foot and the majority be in the hands of your opponent?

I come to think that democracy is, more than anything, learning how to lose gracefully and without a revolution. So many people now seem to believe, if I lose, it must be broken and deserves a revolution. On both sides.

On what issues are we going to reach a breaking point that calls for Constitutional change?

Wow, I think you're so attractive... to mosquitoes.

I mean yes, I'm not trying to be cruel or unsympathetic. We should help and minimize the harm to people who are being left behind.

But equally, gasoline used to cost $1/gallon. People used to communicate by mail and have to use pay phones.

Then people came to be expected to buy more efficient cars, pay more for gasoline, and communicate electronically. And by the way, many people who aren't dealing successfully with things getting more expensive are because they're being very inefficient. Think of all the houses and cars that were totally inefficient before higher energy prices caused them to upgrade?

Life moves on. People are forced to adapt.

> Does cashless society discriminate against the poor and elderly?

Of course it does. But so did society that started adopting the telephone, or automobiles, for people who didn't have money to buy telephones or cars, or didn't want to get on board the technological change. And what doesn't discriminate against poor people, by the way? The poor are always getting the short end of the stick. You come up with ways to help them, but railing against a new technology because it disadvantages some has never worked.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of cashless, but whatever the technology is, life adopts it and moves on. People have to deal. Or they die and get replaced with people who do. You will never get 100.000% of the people on something that takes away what you used to rely on.

Under a democratic (or let's say, public-opinion-based) system, who is rewarded for trying to uphold some kind of standards, when it doesn't benefit the majority to do so? I'm just commenting aside from the pandemic-related issues here, on the long progression of anti-testing, anti-standards pressure in the US.

The majority of people aren't happy with having standardized tests because they block kids from feeling they have a shot at the top schools. But of course that's their function -- to sort.

So, public pressure calls for dropping objective measurements so that people feel better about it... but they aren't doing better. And muddying the waters to say that everyone should have an equal shot at going to a top school -- for reasons other than academics and using the resource efficiently. And the kids just stagnate in performance and everyone feels good about it, until you get kicked in the ass by reality and you find other countries who don't care so much about making people feel better are actually passing you by.

I see, so all the stats about how many business fold and go bankrupt, how most startups never get to success -- those are all just fake news I guess? Business is just rolling in the money, risk free, huh?

Sometimes union expectations are as ridiculous as what corporations try to get away with. In some ways of course, they're the same motivation -- trying to remove yourself from the normal rules of economics and what you can bargain for with customers and suppliers.

In what magical world do unions expect that they can achieve all of 1) high wages, 2) great benefits, 3) long, protected employment contracts, 4) reducing anyone's work obligation to the minimum? I too would love if by legislation against reality, I could be paid a lot, forever, to do a job I could phone in via Zoom.

Life comes with tradeoffs, unless you're very lucky.

Some assembly may shift to India but the manufacture of the key components sure as isn't, correct? You've just shifted a part of the chain, not one of the critical steps upstream of it.

In the short-term, the factors well described by others above.

In the longer-term, is it the slow accumulation of a thousand cuts?

-- Brexit

-- Stagnating physical output of UK industry (aside from finance + healthcare)?

-- Aging population

-- Expensive living costs + recent inflation

I don't know how much each of these factors has contributed, or if there are other important factors missing above. But for me, having lived there and seen the general situation, the question is, how will the UK renew itself as a country from a long century of gradual decline?

I feel the same way about your personal belongings, socialismisok. What does it hurt if someone steals your catalytic converter once in a while, or smashes your window in, or mugs you. Small inconveniences, oh well. They probably needed it more than you did. I volunteer your stuff to be donated to such charitable causes.

Really, you don't think there's organized crime around those items too?

And even if not that particular case, it's just ok to do that? Yeah, why do we have prices on those things anyway.

Ok, "socialismisok"...

So basically, you do want to be "that guy", but you want people to think that you don't enjoy doing it so you can beg some social excusal to do it, rather then just outright do it with no apology and clearly be "that guy"...

What does the expression "not to be that guy" mean?

I guess the government were upset that the new constitution didn't pass, so they thought, "well we have to cause chaos somehow!"

This doesn't go far enough! If you really believe in equality, we need to have a flat tax on everyone. Each person should just pay $1000 per year, and that's it. That is truly fair. /s

How will the UC Berkeley administration prevent its head from exploding from cognitive dissonance, if they start requiring people to successfully complete lower courses to get into the program? Think of all the injustice and inequities this will produce. The privileged just get more privileged.

.