Or we could replace fines with suspension of driver privileges.
456 karma · joined September 26, 2022
In NYC, parking tickets cost $45-125. Fire hydrant violations are at the upper end of that range. But when garage parking is $10-20 an hour, rolling the dice on the fine is the economically rational behavior. Yes, this is sociopathic when you apply it to fire hydrants, but NYC drivers are sociopaths.
They ought to add a zero to all those fines and start heavily using the carrot to discourage driving. But the thing is, the city quite likes the status quo. If those fines were more of a deterrent, the city would get less revenue. The fines need to be low enough not to actually discourage the antisocial behavior. Isn’t neoliberalism awesome?
This specific problem we're discussing, of concurrent client retries effectively launching a self-imposed DDOS attack, isn't exactly the thundering herd problem. It's clients and servers instead of threads, for one thing. But it's a good enough analogy to another type of cascading failure in concurrent computing, IMO.
The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people.
Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset.
Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess.
This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.
The curse of IT Operations: if you do everything right, management grifters never think you did anything at all. Why do I need you? Everything works fine!
Most Internet platforms are put together by popsicle sticks and bubble gum. If Reddit didn't have 2000 full time employees babysitting that steaming POS, it would be offline by the end of the week. But Twitter was like a chicken running around with its head chopped off, and it didn't stop running for 9 months. It's a testament to how incredible those engineers were.
This collapse at Twitter should have happened by January. It's a real shame it didn't. How many thousands of tech workers were laid off because Musk's fellow parasitic oligarchs saw Twitter running "fine" after the lobotomy, and followed him off the cliff like a bunch of lemmings? How many billions of dollars has the economy lost because of this one despicable man?
Elon Musk is a fraud. He is not an engineer. He's a lazy bum who mooched his whole life off his groomer daddy's apartheid emerald money. He would be nothing without that disgusting, incestuous old man. Despite his enormous financial privilege, Elmo was too lazy to enter the US legally. He was in the US for many years as an illegal immigrant. He only bothered to get off his lazy ass and finish his Economics degree because the risk of his deportation was becoming a real problem for X.com. That crooked philistine doesn't know the first thing about hard work, engineering, or finance. He's a damn good conman, he's good at shitposting, and that's about it. He has no other skills. He is not an engineer. He has no STEM degree. His only real accomplishment in life is proving that you can, in fact, spend billions of dollars in one lifetime, if you simply buy a bird app, run it into the ground, and salt the earth behind it.
These are usually reported as averages, not floors. I’m interpreting it as “21 drinks per week.” “At least 3 drinks every single day” is a much more serious problem IMO.
7 drinks a day is a fifth of vodka every other day. That’s at the point where you’re likely driving drunk regularly, and need to spike your morning coffee to stop the shakes.
I’d be less annoyed if they just said “3 or more drinks a day.” Putting the 7 there is designed to frame the problem as more severe. Imagine if the range said “3-17 drinks per day” instead. Then it would be too obvious what they were doing.
As the great George Carlin said: the planet isn’t going anywhere, we are!
> 4 in 5 tech execs are taking medications ("controlled substances"), and among that cohort 1 in 2 use them "every day or nearly every day."
Would it be surprising to anyone to find out that ~40% of tech leaders are neurodivergent? Programmer and related jobs are at the top of every list of suggested careers for people with ADHD.
> 1 in 3 used controlled substances such as amphetamines and sleeping pills specifically to cope with work stress and long hours.
What a poorly worded question. Why not ask specifically: do you abuse amphetamines to work longer hours? Do you abuse opiates, ketamine, cannabis, or benzos to “wind down?” Do you use benzos occasionally for work related panic attacks?
They’re being extremely weaselly by grouping all controlled substances together here. Would it concern anyone to find out that 33% of tech leaders smoke weed occasionally to relax?
And what’s the overlap between the 40% of daily users and this cope cohort? I suspect it’s vanishingly small, but they won’t provide that data, because they’re pushing an agenda here.
> 1 in 2 self-reported as qualifying as heavy drinkers (3-7 drinks per day)
There is a world of difference between the bottom and top end of that range. It’s the difference between an unhealthy habit and straight-up alcoholism. Conflating the two further reveals the overwhelming bias of this article.
And how do we make any sense of these racist laws when there’s more and more mixed race kids applying to college anyway? Our first “black” President is half white. Our first “black” Vice President is half-Asian. If this chicanery went on for a couple more generations, every kid’s gonna be like Liz Warren, looking for any trace of victim in their DNA…
Race is a social construct. These remnants of apartheid are completely illogical. The rules are made up and don’t matter. There is only one objective race: the human race. It’s about time we started deconstructing it if you ask me.
Sinophobia is getting extremely out of hand at the moment. We need to condemn systemic racism against Asian people and reject the model minority myth, before we repeat some of the ugliest chapters of US history… both parties are way too eager for war in Greater China.
Deep down, that’s what a lot of the critics want a return to. They just won’t say the quiet part out loud.
As entertaining as this is to ponder, I don’t think they’re that clever. I don’t think they’d do so much damage to their reputation for such a flimsy case. They’re just incompetent.
All these problems are coming about because software doesn't fit nicely into any of the traditional arrangements. We really fit in more as consultants external to the business, but the software consulting industry as it exists today is corrupted by the perverse incentives of generating billable hours and essentially scamming clients.
I'd like to see the emergence of software partnerships modeled after law firms, where engineers are owners and not employees. The problem is, tech is currently dominated by criminal monopolists who regularly collude to drive wages down in violation of numerous laws. Musk and his PayPal mafia buddies are running the same racket right now, that Apple and Google were convicted of 10 years ago. They would simply refuse to work with any tech worker co-ops, because they have monopsony power over our labor, and they can just lobby Congress for more H1-Bs.
Unfortunately, when the problem is in kernel boot software, that is not a practical solution for obvious reasons, and you're left using more basic techniques like running a binary search on the commit history.
Why bother? Because they're just working stiffs trying to put food on the table like the rest of us. They're not responsible for the existence of this detestable system any more than you are.
But I don't use Comcast DNS. Netflix would be the only site I visited which has a peering agreement with Comcast. It makes more sense that the route between Comcast and Netflix is broken, regardless of my local DNS lookups being unaffected, than malfeasance on Comcast's part. The route from Comcast to VPN to Netflix, on the other hand, is unaffected.
Have you ever heard anyone ever say their kitchen renovation project came in under budget? Humans are just doomed to never be good at estimating, in any context, outside the simplest of tasks.
Software has unique challenges that make it inherently difficult, but the bigger problem is all the incessant micromanagement, tooling like Jira that enables management's worst behaviors, and lack of any union representation or solidarity among developers. There's an infestation of libertarians that think they're better than everyone else, that think they can meet these impossible standards. They're too naive to realize that if they did make a miracle happen, management would just move the goalposts again and again, until you burn out, your wife leaves you, and you decide to start farming goats or whatever. We all need to refuse to play no-win games collectively. No estimates is the only answer. They can't fire us all.
Collective action is probably a pipe dream, though. With that in mind, I think half the issues with this career would go away overnight if a Russian ransomware gang erased Jira and Atlassian out of existence. Those grifters are selling the corporate equivalent of fentanyl laced with benzos to middle managers. Jira is poison.
Cool and normal! Nothing to see here, folks.
But of course, the planet is fine! The people are f'ed! The planet's not going anywhere, we are! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmo8sh77G6Y
Maybe in the not so distant future, the AI agents can have a shibboleth which cuts the human gobbledygook short, and reverts to speaking in dialup tones.
In other parts of the country, people are passive aggressive and it's extremely annoying. They won't admit they don't know, because it's all about appearances. Patients faced with such responses would become irate. What do you mean you don't know?! The workers hate themselves for not knowing, and they know this whole thing is a scam even better than you do. They hate themselves for participating in the scam, and so the cognitive dissonance manifests as rudeness towards you.
Conversely, I'm surprised you found a dentist and a mental health provider that takes any insurance at all, and didn't have a months-long wait list. I've almost always had to self pay for both...
Apply the logic for why Mao was as bad as Hitler, read up on the Bengal famine, and you'll come to the conclusion that Churchill was also Hitler. But of course he wasn't Hitler, and famines aren't on the same scale as the Holocaust.
While you're educating yourself, perhaps read up on Mao's nationalist counterpart in the Civil War, a fascist dictator and war criminal named Chiang Kai-Shek. I would find the comparison to George Washington and Chiang Kai-Shek to be quite distasteful. George Washington was not a bad man by the standards of his time, he was not a dictator, and he was not a war criminal.
Conversely, Chiang Kai-Shek was a murderous tyrant even by contemporary standards. During the White Terror of 1927, he infamously stated he'd prefer to kill 1000 innocent people "by mistake" than let one communist live. Over 300,000 people were murdered during this purge alone, and that's a floor. Some estimates put the death toll in the millions. We'll never know the true body count. Unfortunately, it was not difficult to kill people without a trace in rural China at this time. At any rate, it was a crime against humanity within an order of magnitude of Stalin's Great Purge. And this was just one of the many, many atrocities committed by Chiang Kai-Shek. I don't think anyone could fight this monster and win, without becoming a monster themselves.
And yet, I have no trouble understanding why Taiwanese people might have mixed feelings about this heinous man. Without Chiang Kai-Shek, there would be no Taiwan. As it stands, only 12 UN nations recognize Taiwan as an independent country. Nationalism is a helluva drug...
Why is it that we all know Mao Zedong's name in infamy, and not Chiang Kai-Shek? Because we are always eating from the trashcan of ideology.