oconnore

Also, how "exciting" is it?

Whether or not they can afford a bottom quartile home is a different question than whether it's reasonable to expect them to afford a median home (and I don't think we have any evidence regarding that question here). They certainly aren't expected to be able to afford a top quartile home, for example, so I agree that the headline is a bit fishy.

The whole situation is being drastically oversimplified, though. Whether or not we expect minimum wage to support a family depends on whether there are other alternatives, like higher (and adequate) wage jobs that individuals can reasonably obtain when they do have to support a family. Is that happening? My sense is no -- we have a big step function where you're either mostly screwed (working several jobs, driving Uber, etc. barely making it if at all), or you're making 6 figures after getting a 4 year degree in some technical or professional field.

> Cranks and pedals are not a solution at all if we decide to cling to an energy-intensive lifestyle - but then, neither is any other renewable (or even non-renewable) energy source. The main problem with our approach to pedal powered machines is that we compare them to fossil fuel powered machines and not to the inefficient human powered tools and machines that went before them.

I’d prefer to take my renewable energy with no quality of living sacrifice, thanks.

I love that your website is “god arch[itecture].com”. Was that intentional?

> Yes, a part of that might involve involuntary commitment to an institution (though CA has lost its ability to do that for the most part), but... damn, "wall these people off from the rest of society"? That's pretty heartless.

Aren’t you agreeing here in all but tone?

Did they discuss that with Amazon prior to publishing? That seems like a completely silly assumption to make for a product that’s been around for only 13 years.

Why were you unwilling to lean into the process?

You could have said: these OKRs have to describe my actual work... here are my attempts to document what that means, and what to look for if I do a good job at that.

If they had pushed back on that, I think you would have a leg to stand on, but as described it sounds like you were just unwilling to engage.

This is the usual salary vs. contractor thing.

You can almost always make more as a contractor because you're shifting risk from the company onto your LLC. They pay for a la carte results instead of paying for an employee who could hypothetically deliver results.

The New York Times has been running a series of hit pieces on McKinsey over the last few months.

see: https://www.nytimes.com/by/michael-forsythe#latest-panel

How on earth did this turn into an ad hominem about my technical pride? Because I’m ok with slowing down the pace of a conversation?

For real time communication— I’m not sure why people find high latency to be so difficult. You just pretend everybody is taking a moment to think. Virtual “talking sticks”, or radio etiquette is not hard to add either.

What is difficult is audio quality issues. I wish voice and video software had a way to prioritize quality at the expense of latency (i.e. never compromise on delivering quality voice, but pause input or fast forward through quiet segments as needed to stay roughly in synch)

Total chaos.

Even when we were 20 people in an office folks coming in for interviews or to fix the WiFi/Coffee machine/plumbing would either be totally lost, or the person sitting near the door would be significantly burdened with constant distraction and less able to perform their primary function.

Furthermore no one would set up those maintenance tasks because they’re focused on the product not on making sure the office is functioning properly.

This seems totally reasonable. Google is primarily focused on building Chrome -- a product, with business oriented product goals. Anyone using Chromium has already agreed to be a tag-along. That was always part of the deal.

In general I find the category of folks who -- won't use Firefox, but want to pretend they're not basically just using Google Chrome -- to be very strange indeed.

Lots of things are path dependent. Probably the threat of an unmaintained email client is why they got enough donations to hire full time developers.

> Change my mind?

1) regulators are bringing first rounds of sanctions against Google, Facebook, and large Banks.

2) the sort of data GDPR protects is typically only valuable for larger companies -- you're definitely not running a small business selling to <10,000 customers if your business model is selling data for, say, $6.18/user (Facebook's return).

These things are not vaporware [1], and the claim (by experienced operators) is a fairly conservative 7-10% fuel savings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship#/media/File:Uni-Kat...

My point basically boils down to this: making parental leave about something other than enabling parents to recover and take care of their kids is really kludgey, and probably would have made our experience of raising our son more difficult unless it was really, really long (like one year long).

The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.

I meant valuable in terms of what I was contributing to the family ... when I took 9 months of part-time paternity leave. I feel like you didn’t really think about what I was saying. All of this was the result of lots of planning and long discussions between the two of us about how we would take care of our son, and how this would affect each of our careers — you really don’t need to lecture me here.

This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting.

Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us.

Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.

Yesterday there was a thread about predicting negative consequences of tech, and the dominant narrative was “how could lowly CS folks predict the future”. But is anyone really surprised here?

> not everything maps 1 to 1 from real world to digital world

We are in violent agreement.

The point is not that digital learning is bad. It's that people are making hand wavy assumptions about it being good without much evidence, without considering alternatives, and without considering tertiary effects (e.g. socialization).

Like, I don't even think I've seen a study comparing CS grads who either just got a solid math education up until 18 versus kids who did their first python app at 11. Yet lots of people are totally convinced that early access to computers is associated with later success in the software industry. Is it? I don't think either of us know. And if we don't even know that, does anyone know what they're doing with iPad apps?

Smart kids reading and writing a year before kindergarten is not a new phenomenon since the development of education apps. It’s wonderful that she’s doing that, though!

That’s not obvious. You are saying that “shadows of the real thing” have more value than other ways they could spend that energy, which seems unlikely.

If you want to let your kids play video games, fine, but the hand waving to support your personal intuition is blatant here.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

If ddg registered gogle.com and gooogle.com would you think that’s fair play, too?

Think about the 1700s, when printing presses had existed for a few hundred years (since 1439) to transfer data between people. Books were expensive, though. Would you have been able to imagine that in 1975, printed paper would be created each morning, and hauled around to everyone's door step in time for breakfast?

Now think about us sitting here in 2018. Computer rendered text has been around for a while (ASCII, UTF, .doc, .html, etc.) In another 200 years, the way we transfer, encode, and view those formats will be completely perfected and probably unrecognizable to us. They will probably be ubiquitous in a way that seems completely alien to us now, and all of the implementation issues we worry about in 2018 will completely fade away (proprietary vs. open, security vulnerabilities, compatibility, accessibility, etc.).

With this in mind, being reluctant to add enrichment to how document transfer works seems like it's obviously on the wrong side of history.

It's a shame that there isn't the regulatory flexibility to subsidize desalination plants, because desalination plants are sort of like insurance policies in that you usually don't need them that much until a drought hits and then you really wish you had them.

That sort of long term risk averse thinking is exactly where the market economy needs to be supplemented.

This is a really weird critique of the idea that people with fewer opportunities should be given a few more chances to show their skills. It's directly increasing the metric you're interested in, but you're still against it for... reasons?

What online service is giving you 480mbps or better?

> Locale should be picked up from the surrounding system; it's just that unfortunately the surrounding system is usually not configured correctly.

And around and around we go