makeitsuckless

That's just condescending exceptionalism.

The vast majority of trains in Europe cover short distances in densely populated urban areas of which the US has plenty.

Also, I don't buy the "Americans love cars" argument. Americans have an oddly obsessive relationship with owning cars, but it's definitely not "love". Wester Europeans are in general far more passionate and discerning about cars.

Everybody has the answers, nobody does the actual math in terms of costs, or the testing in terms of safety.

F1's biggest problems right now are A) costs, and B) the number of people pissing on F1 without the slightest knowledge of or affinity with the sport.

Also, F1 cars look just fine right now. They just look too similar, but no one has been able to solve that problem without escalating costs.

It sounds terrifying, and it certainly isn't pretty, but it omits all relevant information. The height of those "meagre" pensions (insanely high compared to even the Greek economy before the collapse), the age of those retired grandparents (often much younger than people that can't afford to retire in countries currently financially supporting Greece) the number of those "rest of the family members" and the sizeable black economy those family members use to supplement that income.

The whole system is terrifying, but the reality is that Greeks aren't starving in the street and this insane system needs fundamental reform to prevent that from happening.

If Greece asked for billions to feed their population they would get it, but they want us to finance keeping this system up. A systems that haemorrhages money so badly it makes aid to developing nations in Africa look like the summit of effectiveness.

In my experience, that still leaves 99 other things that need handling on a daily basis. Usually external factors.

As a manager, you should set yourself the goal of making yourself superflous. Just don't ever have the illusion you'll achieve it.

Human beings are way to messy and irrational for that, even the highly motivated and generally easy to manage ones.

Oh, and BTW: highly motivated and talented people tend to be very hard to manage.

What makes musicians sound more greedy or unreasonable than most is the generally passive attitude towards the innovation necessary to sustain their own income.

They expect Apple, Spotify, Pandora etcetera to take all the risk (including the major risk of being unilaterally torpedoed by those same artists), do all the upfront investment and then whine about not getting a big enough piece of the cake.

Taylor Swift is being an outlier here in the respectful way in which she communicates. And she knows it, that's why she chooses her words very carefully.

Most of these artist just bitch and whine about their percentage, ignoring the fact that, with antiquated copyright laws firmly on the side of the music industry, technology firms are taking quite insane risk in their attempts to innovate the way music connects to the listeners.

If they hadn't, sales of music would have totally flatlined by now and those artist would be way worse off.

With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard.

We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions.

This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.

The European Parliament is pretty f-ing far from a democratic institution.

Just because it has an election attached to it (for which the turn out is so ridiculously low they might as well not bother) doesn't make it a democratic institution.

Any power the EP has or doesn't have (mostly the latter) didn't come about through democratic process.

Imposing a faux parliament on people, especially one that operates without the context of a democratic government, doesn't make it a democratic institution. Never mind the fact that so many of these parliament members are the deeply corrupt representatives of corrupt countries.

And the people know this, hence the fact that the majority of the people of Europe now boycots these elections. Especially in countries that have a decently functioning democracy themselves.

Everything that comes out of Brussels is undemocratic, unless it pertains to the sovereign nation of Belgium.

Also, can we keep it civilized? If you don't call all opponents to your EU dreams "xenophobic", I won't call you a "eurofascist", agreed?

In other news: not single person who rips their own CDs in all of Europe will give a crap.

Also, the only people still buying CDs don't rip them, and the rest of us have ripped their last CD over a decade ago.

The actual impact of this decision is close to zero, and therefor not a strong argument for copyright reform. Many countries still have outdated laws on the books nobody bothers with, making noise about this just gives the impression copyright reform isn't urgent.

There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines.

Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours less.

There are only two motives for voting machines: commercial interests and the desire to obscure the voting process. Neither of these should be trusted with foundations of the democratic vote.

On the latter subject: because the transparency of the voting process is so fundamental to democracy, most countries had laws in place that first needed to be scrapped or mutilated to allow voting machines in the first place. The people who wrote these laws were neither stupid nor Luddites.

Ironically, we've always send observers to third world countries and former dictatorships to judge whether their elections are truly free and democratic, using criteria that would never allow for voting machines to obfuscate the process. For starter, it would make such neutral observation pointless.

I'm lucky I live in country (Netherlands) that has abolished voting machines years ago. (After a campaign against them led by by old school hackers.)

(There's one movement in the Netherlands that openly advocates a return to voting machines. This movement is lead by Dutch mayors. The Netherlands is rather unique in the fact that mayors are not elected but appointed by political manoeuvring, which has been subject of debate for a long time. I do not believe these things to be a coincidence.)

Seriously? I politely object to you pissing all over any country that isn't the US with false claims and I'm being gratuitously negative?

It's impossible to compare absolute numbers because the tax and benefits are so different, but the Dutch minimum is well above entry level.

In fact, it's well above what companies that don't value top talent are willing to pay for locals at senior level.

Because of this, there is no quota and very little in the way of formalities involved in becoming an accredited employer. If they're willing to pay top money for foreign talent, a business is free to bring them in.

Non-protectionist would be free traffic across borders like within the EU. Any immigration policy is a form of protectionism.

BTW, I find your naive notion of the US as the promised land rather unsettling. Personally, I don't know anybody who would want to immigrate to the US, and especially not for the archaic, exploitative work culture.

Yes, this is matter of perspective. But you seem to be lacking any other perspective than US good, everywhere else bad. Which is probably one of the reasons why it's so easy to exploit immigrant knowledge workers in the US.

7. If you get into an accident, you're screwing your passenger(s).

Yes, the valuable you're transporting is another person's life, and you're doing it in such a way that circumvent all regulatory safeguards to protect that.

Don't make Uber out to be selfish and greedy when you're doing the same.

I find it very hard to recognize a new model if it has the same look, same name, and 95% the same features as the old model...

Any immigration policy short of opening the borders completely is "protectionist".

Just waving the word "protectionism" around is a non-statement that doesn't say anything about what may or may not be wrong wit the current policy.

I believe the US, or any other Western nation, doesn't produce enough professionals to satisfy the needs of our businesses. (Source: I'm a hiring manager.)

I also believe however that this situation is being abused to suppress wages by bringing in underpaid labour in a market that already needs a big upward salary correction to account for the shortage and economic value of these professionals.

Abusing and manipulating the problem out of short term self-interest doesn't mean there isn't a problem. In fact it's a very common pattern. See for instance the war on drugs.

Denial is not a strategy.

Or simply prevent the problem.

In the Netherlands, similar visa have a minimum salary requirement. As a result, we have tech workers from all over the planet, but no herds of cheap labour from India. The Indians that are here are well paid experts.

If knowledge migrant visa are abused to import cheap labour, the problem is clearly in the word "cheap".

I know a newspaper who's IT guys very early on brought their major classified section (used cars) online, back in the 90s. It was a very low budget project, but it worked well.

Management pulled the plug on that project (because of course online was not core business and they were afraid it competed with print), only to years later buy a startup to get back in the game...

A centralized store is however unavoidable if you want to share and manage passwords inside an organization.

Although I share you discomfort, looking at it rationally I prefer to trust a specialized service, who's very existence and reputation depends on it, more than the alternatives.

The other alternative for sharing is stuff like 1Password over Dropbox, which is imho the worst of both worlds.

For my personal use, I feel more comfortable with 1Password and having full control over my data.

For company wide use, LastPass Enterprise is a better fit. Centralized management is essential when dealing with larger numbers of not particularly tech savvy and security conscious users.

And despite this incident, I trust a specialized operation like Lastpass more with keeping the data secure 24/7 than myself or company IT.

Isn't the same kind of thinking not just dominant in the US foreign policy, but also the same thing that explains much of it's internal issues?

From militarized police, the massive prison population to the proliferation of fire arms, doesn't it all lead back to seeing the world in terms of "threats"?

This kind of thinking scares the crap out of me.

There's not even any point in arguing with it: you see me and mine as a threat because I exists. Or in your words: we "are also playing this game".

That's terrifying way of looking at the world. I know people that have survived wars and oppression that aren't anywhere near this paranoid, not even towards their former enemies.

It is true in Europe. However, the effect is strongly dampened given all of the social and job protection legislation in most European countries.

This means the extend to which an employer can profit from preferring younger employees is very much limited.

Also, young people in Europe are generally less sensitive to promises of future riches because of both cultural differences and the fact that it's simply extremely rare that a European startup strikes gold.

The agism is the same, but it's easier to overcome since there's less profit in it.

There is a downside though: youth unemployment.

The denialist culture in tech and especially Silicon Valley is so absurd. Even in this thread people are scrambling to come up with excuses.

There are many industries around the world where agism is rampant, and there is only ever one excuse: money and control. Young people are cheaper and more gullible.

It's not a secret, far from it, it's one of the few things for which the cliche "everybody knows" actually applies.

Sure, many industries try to cover up this fact a bit, but only tech makes up such elaborate stories to pretend it isn't all about cold hard cash.

Obviously, there is a reason for this beyond creating a flattering self-image: Most other industries that exploit the young and naive have plenty of supply.

Good engineers however are rare at any age, so market forces aren't sufficient to maintain this exploitative relationship, it needs to be artificially enforced.

Resulting for instance in the insane situation that many older engineers are unemployed whilst the industry is importing cheap young and easily abused engineers from abroad.

(Full disclosure: I too used to believe the main cause for that was that these older engineers had outdated knowledge and no longer making the effort to learn anything new, until I became a hiring manager. And although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence (so has the other side btw), I will be so bold as to state that that is a big fat lie.)

That's the complete reverse of a guarantee. The person with the gun can stop met from going to a polling station.

Hence, in a true democracy, the only free way to vote is at a polling station, in a voting both constructed in such a way that I have total privacy from the moment I vote to the moment I put the vote in the ballot box, yet transparant enough so it can be observed by anyone (hence, short curtains, box in the same open space, etc).

We even put polling stations in hospitals, care homes, embassies abroad, military bases etcetera to ensure voting happens in total freedom, transparency and anonymity. This principle also applies to the counting of the votes.

All of this did not come about by accident, and the fact that it's being abandoned by people who do not wish to even argue why they want to remove fundamental democratic safeguards should be met with extreme suspicion.

The arguments in favor of electronic voting are extremely weak, and in many instances e-voting has already been found to be subject to deliberate manipulation.

There is no excuse for lowering our standards for the most essential element of a democracy.

Gamergate has nothing to do with "promotion of journalistic integrity". That is just the excuse du jour of this scum.

It's 100% bullying and misogyny mixed with some extreme right wing politics. I'm a strong critic of Islamists, but the comparison with Muslims is insulting.

There is no "double standard". A thug is a thug, regardless of the excuse for their aggression. There is nothing ambiguous about the obvious enjoyment they get out of terrorizing people.

Amongst those who want to promote journalistic integrity, Gamergaters are the fundamentalist terrorists.

Utter BS just to be contrarian. This says enough:

> "I have no research proving you’ll find as much benefit from a single monitor as I did."

But, the author does call upon a "professor", who then states:

> "But most people have their email up on the second screen"

Are you f-ing kidding me?

What we have here is the anecdotal evidence of one single journalist who's job clearly doesn't require having multiple screens.

This is just cheap clickbait.

This has always baffled me about the US. Always complaining about the bureaucracy and lack of freedom of "socialist" countries, yet maintaining this absurd professional licensing that defies parody.

Gamergate bullies complaining about ethics is hilarious. Especially given the recent developments over at Reddit.

As much as a think most of Gawker's publications are thrash, it is one of the few independent publishers that doesn't bow for the powerful and influential.

Unfortunately instead of speaking "truth to power", it often just throws shit at power just for the hell of it.