parennoob

> as they don’t clean as thoroughly as wet wipes IMO

Once you have a bidet, your regular TP is equivalent to a wet wipe.

If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable": https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/are-flushable-w...

This isn't entirely a trivial absurdity. One of the biggest things I hear about traveling in China (and Japan) is that you're expected to carry your own toilet paper everywhere.

An analogy would be – someone from a non-tipping country complains about the fact that some restaurants in the US have a "compulsory gratuity" of 20% for larger parties. Sure, somewhat outrageous, but less so if you consider that tipping 15-20% is the norm in the US anyway.

As an aside: Toilet paper is an ancient, inefficient, and doubtfully hygienic way of cleaning your backside in the modern world.

Start using bidets instead of this nonsense. The TP can still be used for drying purposes.

I can't even pass as white, and I'm still excluded from most diversity programs because my race (South Asian) is overrepresented in tech.

However, overrepresentation in tech in Silicon Valley does not necessary translate into societal privilege, or even extend to all places in the US. Like sure, Google's CEO is Indian, but the entire upper layer of management at the company I work at (and a lot of other companies in Middle America) is 100% golf-playing white males with no way to break in. So I'm kinda SOL both in the diversity programs in Silicon Valley / more progressive tech places as well as the golf-and-whisky club at work.

Would like to hear solutions or experiences from other brown South Asians working outside Silicon Valley.

Blockbuster and Netflix did not sell perishable goods.

Now I could buy the argument that the supermarket chains just won't be able to attract the appropriate talent to deliver an experience rivaling that of Blue Apron (or Amazon, if they decided to get into this market tomorrow via Whole Foods).

> I would happily pay 80% taxes if I knew that when I needed it most the welfare state would have my back, but I know that it won't.

This crucial point of yours seems to have been missed by the author of the article. I wonder if that has something to do with them being from the UK, which has nationalized healthcare and some sort of a welfare state.

Also these places aren't good at the things they (sometimes) claim to specialize in. The wings at Buffalo Wild Wings are not better than the wings at a random bar.

Maybe millenials care about these things because we want value for our money and don't want to spend it solely on the basis of Super Bowl advertisements?

Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.

EDIT: My comment completely missed that there were 100 lines of identical code noticed as well. Leaving below for context.

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Does anyone else find the example cited in the article rather flimsy? Out of 450, two students incorrectly used the inverse of a Boolean for a conditional – an error I have seen tens, if not hundreds of times.

Perhaps they used better ways of detecting cheating (some are covered later in the article) for uncovering the collusion in this specific case. If not, this “veteran computer science professor” is going on unnecessary witch hunts.

> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests.

This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenarios that will be used in real life.

SF-isms (I understand NIMBY is also used outside SF) don't map perfectly across oceans.

Suffice it to say that people living in slums in India can have a lot of political clout. For example, once a large slum pops up in an urban area, literally no one dares to lawfully remove it, for fear of losing the next local election.

> Hospitals have to work with proprietary devices -- for example, retinal scanners etc, many of which only have Windows drivers.

Then the tenders for buying those devices should state "Devices that work with $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO will be given preference.". If it's a reasonable one, they will make a driver for it. Customer demand always generates product; and the NHS is about the biggest customer there is.

This. While I have come around to the concept of "It's probably better if more people learn to code", I rarely see other parts of the company so eager to share their knowledge.

In particular, I'd like more training on law and finance. For some reason, I have never seen any lawyers or accountants being eager to teach me about interpreting laws, or balancing books.

> take home homework and other things that blow up the 2.5-hour mark

I would think "take home" implies you take it home, i.e. do it in your own time. I don't know what your undefined "other things" are.

> The 2.5 hours will also scale up with the number of participants, 20 employees who are committing 2.5 each week (at very, very minimum) is a loss of 50 hours per week.

It is this sort of thinking that is super counterproductive. Even if one of those employees learns something simple, like how to programmatically create CSV files and import them into Excel, they will have saved thousands of man-hours.

You can't nickel-and-dime people's time like this. Philosophies like yours tend to end up with timing people's bathroom breaks and scathing articles in the newspaper; rarely successful companies.

I find it quite useful! My username should explain why :)

This is a good point, and why I didn't include the positive psychology point in my list – because it is a genuinely different thing.

I will bet that most of the comments in this thread are from people who have never lived in rural India.

I have, and will tell you the real reason. It has little to do with literacy or education. It is because (warning, this is going ironic) Indian people are incredibly disgusted about shit and want to not think about dealing with it.

I'm Indian myself. For example, we think toilet paper is a horrible idea. You just clean your shit with...paper...and just leave it like that? That would not fly, even in any of the villages you mention. They have to have water to clean their shit, usually supplied in a small bucket or vessel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lota_(vessel)

Now think about temperatures. The current temperature at many places in India is more than a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Your average restroom or shovel pit or whatever is going to smell incredibly bad and be full of flies and a horrible smell. That is why some people prefer the river, and don't use the toilets that are built for them (links elsewhere in this thread).

Solutions? It's a usability problem. Bidets for poop washing that can be filled up instead of using piped water, super hydrophobic coatings, really large pits (so you don't smell the waste) –- things like that are going to be the solution. Unfortunately, no one approaches it in that way, and prefers to go the route of "Let's teach these uneducated savages not to shit where they eat." This is very unfortunate and I hope it will change in the future.

I agree, I think that a lot of the points seem to serve only to pad the article length and are not actionable for most people.

- Surround yourself with great people

- Consider changing where you live

- Save money

- Look for ways to become more productive

- Figure out how to perform better in your job

- Think better

The authors could consider cutting out points that sound like platitudes that can be found in a standard self-help guide or magazine.

> The interesting thing with Remote is that most companies these days "allows remote" as part of their package.

This question goes for the original post too -- but how many of these are truly remote? i.e. I can work for the majority of the year remotely, with maybe one or two visits to the company main office, if that.

Asking because I see far too many companies these days trying to brand themselves as remote-friendly, when they really mean something with far less freedom, like “We'll maybe allow you to work from home two days out of five”.

> How do you impose a "robot" tax? Do I get taxed every time a neural net tarts up a photo on my Nexus?

It would have to be a balancing act. My guess is "probably not", because mass-producing modified photos wasn't a big source of jobs done by humans in the past.

Manufacturing industries where you could show a direct "1 robot replaced these 200 humans" causal relationship would (hypothetically) be the ones to be taxed.

> Robots are easy to demonize in the US

You can't demonize robots, they are non-living. If anyone is being demonized, it will the corporations who are moving from human to automated labor in order to cut costs. If 670,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 have been shifted from humans to robots, it seems only fair to point that out.

> None of these publications ever run with a solution to the problem.

Probably because it's hard and involves ideas like guaranteed basic income and 'robot taxes' that are very unlikely to be popular in the US due to social attitudes. Perhaps such articles will lead to the change of those attitudes.

Could anyone in the know comment on whether their invite-only nature contributed to this? I have wanted to have Deck Network ads on my sites forever, but there was no real way to do so. They seemed to be restricted to inviting only Apple-themed blogs and sites, plus maybe their peripheral network.

I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.

This is an argument that I have yet to see being addressed to my satisfaction.

If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.

There are ways to filter content without breaking user privacy. For example, you could restrict access to the Internet altogether, and suggest that your users only get what they need from your internal corporate network. See how incredibly productive that makes your staff?

What these "enterprise environments" want is to leech off the Internet's knowledge while keeping a firm chokehold on the privacy of their own employees Sadly, it looks like Google is caving in to their pressure.

It's not that surprising when you look at this: http://stateofobesity.org/adult-obesity/

A lot of states with the highest life expectancy are among the least obese states. That means there is something about the lifestyle there that promotes better health.

Maybe because it is more of a clear-cut case of sexism and workplace intimidation, than, say, ones about “watching your co-workers hula-hooping” (https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describe...) or “making a joke about dongles”? (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...)

Those cases invoke skepticism because they twist otherwise innocuous situations and try to blow them up into witch hunts where people lose their livelihood. No one should lose their job because an accusatory party happened to overhear them making a stupid juvenile dongle joke.

Susan's case on the other hand has clear, well-defined accusations of people acting in what sounds like unprofessional and sexist behavior to anyone with common sense. People should get fired if they ask their subordinates for sex multiple times. No wonder it (rightly) gets a lot of support.

Yeah, that phrase serves zero actual purpose. That, combined with the sloppy language in the rest of the paper makes me doubt the scientific detachment of these people.

Do any of these keyservers perform email verification? It would go a good way towards some kind of verification that a user's GPG key corresponds to their email. Otherwise, anyone can generate a key with any email address and push it up to the servers. The standard way of verifying it (key-signing parties) is somewhat difficult.

Your example actually highlights the problem with cable. There is no way to get – say, only HBO, ESPN, and no CNN.

Cable would force OP to buy 37 useless channels whose content is being subsidized by people paying for the 5 channels they actually watch.

Okay, that's a good explanation of why this is wrong. Cool!