sgustard

One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds employees. These are not college graduates who have white-collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with software.

Properly disposing of an EXIT sign is no picnic either.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/f...

There are lots of things visible from my house that I don't want to look at. Power lines, poles, buildings, cars and roads come to mind. I believe if you own a thousand acres you get to look at what you want, otherwise it's not up to you?

In practice what's the difference in finger location between these almost identical notes on a violin? A millimeter?

Another possible cause: Do people even know how to make high-quality products any more? Who are the top 1% of refrigerator engineers, and do they still even go into refrigerator design, or did they become wall street quants instead? This is the same thing I wonder when I eat at crappy restaurants. It's not like the staff knows how to make good food and they choose not to do it. They don't know how!

As an engineer, I ask these questions all the time. Clueless product marketing people will request the most ridiculous features. I ask them: don't tell me the solution, tell me the customer problem. And what's it worth to you to solve this with the pieces we have now, instead of building something months from now? My teams have deflected years of pointless effort this way.

DaVinci, Picasso & other western artists also score highest on the list of most expensive paintings. Would you consider an economic view to be a more balanced measure of fame? Many of the buyers are Middle Eastern or Asian too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintin...

More believable as a machine superintelligence rather than aliens, since we "know" the former will be here in 10 or 20 or 100 years, and immediately formulate ways to get humans out of the picture.

Crustacean independence

The point is, a private one-on-one meeting is usually a required precursor to marriage and children. Casual group hangouts don't jump to that step.

There is a standard: https://schema.org/Menu

"A structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment."

Clearly the issue is that no one has convinced FoodEstablishments of the business case to spend tech dollars publishing their menus.

Well, many people bolt their safe to their house. That adds some time for the thief to abscond with it. But I don't think "not meant to be secure anyway" is an excuse for "designed with a trivial security flaw." I mean, am I still supposed to trust what the manufacturer says about its fire resistance?

Companies will flat-out decline to answer most of these questions, citing the information as confidential. There's a reason most employees, not to mention competitors, potential investors, etc, don't know the intimate details of a private company's financing. So you're welcome to ask but naive to expect detailed answers.

On the other hand, I always insist on talking to the CEO or the highest ranking exec you can during the interview process. It is absolutely in your best interest to hear the company's vision and path to success directly from the source. Again, this person will clam up when discussing financial specifics, but you should still expect them to make you feel secure about the company's potential.

US is 6th, so not far off, but fewer cars per person than the rampant car culture of ... Iceland and New Zealand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

In March 2020 when the pandemic lockdowns hit, my CEO literally cried as he told us on Zoom we had to furlough our friends and take a pay cut. He did not hide it in an email or call attention to how it made him feel. What he did do was bust his ass to bring back every one of those employees a few months later. The actions of truly caring people are so much greater than the empty posturing of failing amateurs running toy businesses.

I've ordered things from not-Amazon and had them arrive weeks late, or they ship the wrong or damaged items, or returns are a hassle, etc. One-click checkout is not the solution to any of that.

Fred's also the author of "Get Paid In Crypto." Yet crypto warrants no mention in his analysis of the current bubble? https://avc.com/2022/02/get-paid-in-crypto/

Adams was brilliant, of course, but to me part of the appeal of Hitchhiker's was its deep Britishness. Absurdity is funnier against a backdrop of English inhibition. Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" is only funny because it's so English. Spinal Tap took on fake English accents because it's funnier that way. Comedy is about contrasts you see.

This is a C vs Java argument. There are people who prefer each.

> when you get it right, there's nothing to second guess

Given the topic is "how to corrupt your db file," does that mean they didn't get it right yet? Or that the underlying platform prevents them from getting it right?

I've always wondered how you handle those lights at night, if you can't see the enclosure; and how you handle the occasional horizontal traffic light, which my town has one of.

This is also why I don't go to the doctor.

I do that extensively when hiring and it is valuable. But sadly, many people can hold a technical discussion without actually being able to read/write code. I'd like my orchestra to have a lively discussion of music theory, but I still need to hear them play the violin.

For much of the past century, the best career advice in the world was: go to IBM, General Motors, General Electric. Climb the ladder for a few decades, get a pension, retire at the top 1% of the income pyramid. That worked great until it didn't, and millions of people got left with no savings or useful job skills.

Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company as a cog in the giant ad-tech machine and hoping for the best. As a data point, go read last week's article on how Sidekiq has made $13 million for a solo developer.

Interesting that commenters here assert "most users don't want to be tracked," whereas in fact most users happily choose Chrome over any privacy-focused platforms.

> we had so many redundancies and test servers run

How did you hire the developers who built those systems? Was the bar higher then?

Lots of companies have institutional memory of how their first few hires were crucial to make the company successful. It's a tough decision whether to keep standards high, or risk losing the skills that got you this far. Eventually the early people leave. Where I work, the stuff they built is viewed as some kind of godlike crystalline shrine that you dare not touch.

Check out https://www.everrati.com for electric conversions.

A hundred years ago you could buy "Drink This Arsenic Cure-All" off the shelf. Not sure that "early-stage capitalism" was any better.

We're talking about the school's goals in forming a class, not the applicants' goals. Most schools that are among the "best in the world" find they can weigh multiple factors to decide who to admit, and there's no single magic number that does that job for them.

The MIT article literally says "diversity" is one of their goals. Seems like you're arguing against yourself.

> common, popular notion that standardized tests do not predict anything of value

It's backed up by research, for example: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-...

I don't doubt that MIT's study showed otherwise for their needs. But UChicago is also a top-tier school and is not requiring standardized tests, for educational not political reasons.