tharne

Some may be shortsighted, but others are often an act of desperation. Keeping everyone on the books isn't worth anything if you can't make payroll.

> This is a classic layoff debate -- is it better to do it with zero warning, or is it better to let employees know that a layoff is coming?

No good answers here. They're both bad, but in different ways, and I suspect that whether one is worse than the other is probably a matter of personality type.

Exactly. Companies really don't care as much about talent and performance as people think they do. Most of the time good enough is good enough. And companies almost always prefer attrition to layoffs or firings. Corporations are very conflict averse by nature.

I'm not a fan of Smart Homes, but I can appreciate this take on it. Making it all work is the cool part - everything else is just a side effect.

I'm always amazed that everyone seems okay with this, and will even say so when pressed on it. But those same people will get a look in their eyes as if they're going to shit their pants, if someone else picks up their unlocked iPhone and starts scrolling.

The Smart Home is the ultimate triumph of capitalism. A product that nobody needs who's biggest value is mining user's data in order to sell that user more shit they don't need.

RIP Mitch, you were one of the greats.

True. It's kind of funny that Microsoft did a better job implementing linux than they did implementing windows.

They've really decreased in popularity. As far as I know there are only a handful of manufacturers even making minivans for the US market: Toyota, Kia, Chrysler, and Honda, and they each only offer a single model last I knew. I'm not sure why no one buys them anymore since from a practical standpoint they offer a lot more space and ergonomics when compared to most SUV's. My only guess in that people have a lot fewer kids these days.

How is that a good thing? The internet is a dumpster fire of half truths, infotainment, and objective falsehoods. I'll take human memory with all its warts over most of what's on the web any day.

I love that we've come to an era where supposedly educated people are in the habit of telling others that the use of their senses and mind to understand the world are invalid because someone didn't put the conclusions on a website.

It really depends on the vehicle. Minivans are quite large and are some of the safest vehicles on the road.

> source?

A bunch of us were alive in the 90's and driving cars.

> Yeah, the article very conveniently ignores the "integrated" part of the IDE acronym.

How's that? In unix (mostly) everything is a file, which in turn is just a stream of bytes that you can pass to any unix-y application, the output of which can be passed to any other unix-y application. That may not be your cup of tea or preferred environment, but it's very much integrated.

Works great on Macbooks. Some would say better since copy/paste on a mac, even to and from a terminal in tmux is much less of a mess than on WSL or Linux.

What's the name of this company selling this cotton candy flavored nitrous oxide? Asking for a friend.

I really wish we could be more honest with ourselves about the tradeoffs inherent in the level of technological sophistication we achieved and continue to push the boundaries of.

There just isn't a way to have privacy and human dignity in a world where everyone and their brother is walking around with an internet-connected recording device in their pocket or on their wrist.

I know, I know, I can hear it now: "We just need to regulate it properly; It's not tech that's good or bad, but how we use it; tech is just a tool!".

While that's a nice intellectual platitude, it's just not workable. The level of regulation that will ultimately be required to manage things like recording people in public, AI, mass data collection, etc. is going to require a level of government intrusion at a scale never before seen. And then there's still the matter of the government actually being able to regulate the tech properly.

I just don't think our current level of tech, particularly with the emergence of AI, is a matter of having our cake and eating it too. We can have our fancy toys , but the social cost is going to be very very high.

Very true. What's more is that even if we did find a way to scale these, the cure might be worse than the disease. Do we really want a bunch of AI-driven robots taking care of infants for example? Would we want to treat sick people with the ruthless efficiency of a automobile assembly line?

Prior to the last half century or so, there was never a period in human history where you, as a norm, had both parents working outside of the home. I don't think it's realistic to provide affordable childcare at scale. Why not? Because people who provide childcare need to make enough to live too, and ironically they often have their own childcare costs to pay.

I know the typical answer is, "the government should just provide it". But is that really an ideal we should aspire to? Pay $56,000 a year so someone can work a $50,000 a year service job while strangers raise their children? The whole thing seems fundamentally broken. We've structured society as if the highest and best use of everyone's time is be a W-2 wage-earner.

I don't know why you're getting so many down votes here. What you say is unpleasant but it's all true.

I keep seeing more laws and potential laws like this. It just goes to show that most of the folks who work in government and public policy are the type of people who were really good at school but don't have much in the way of common sense.

Were any of these people ever young? Anyone who's been a normal teenage boy at some point in their life, will tell you that there is no law under the sun that can prevent a teenage boy from getting his sweaty hands on pornography. No government in the history of humanity has ever successfully legislated porn out of the hands of teenagers.

So can we just acknowledge reality for a second, live with imperfection and stop trashing everyone's privacy in a vain attempt to keep teenagers from looking at naked people on the internet?

> I'm not sure how you reconcile your claim that you don't believe there's a clear answer to whether it was wright with the emotion-laden and leading statement you made just before.

The parent commenter stated that the way we handled COVID made them lose their faith in humanity. I was pointing out that there were a series of choices to make, none of them good, but just because someone wanted to make a different tradeoff does not ipso facto make them a bad or uncaring person.

Was I snarkier than I should have been, sure. That was immature of me.

You really can't do that legally, at least not in the US. HIPPA prevents you from sharing other people's health info, which disability is. That includes sharing it in the aggregate when it would be easy enough to de-anonymize the data due to small or small-sh sample sizes.

If anything, we should be doing less of this information gathering not more. It's very creepy, for example, that corporations have made it normal for employers to ask their employees questions about their sexual preferences and store that information in databases.

There's also a safety issue at play. If you're part of an historically mistreated group, do you really want your employer cataloging that? What happens when the zeitgest changes and things get bad for that group again? There are plenty of Jewish people in America who are shocked at the amount of AntiSemitism being thrown their way - A lot of folks thought that was behind us. Likewise, Iran was a fairly liberal country back in the 70's and the tide turned very quickly the other way. And of course there's the issue of women's rights in the post Roe era.

That's a bit circular isn't? Of course the people that still live somewhere don't worry about the crime as much, that's part of the reason that they're still there. The folks for whom it's a big deal, tend to leave.

New York has always had expensive housing. It's not as if that became a problem yesterday. On the other hand, crime varies considerably from decade to decade. I'm getting a good chuckle watching people bend over backwards to downplay the issue of crime in NYC. It often feels like crime is to liberals what climate change is to conservatives, a big problem made worse by their policies that's better off ignored.

> You really think that the idea of defunding police is a bigger factor than a global pandemic that shut down the city and drove many small businesses out of the city? What an odd take.

It's tough to say, but seems like the defund the police movement "locked in" a lot of the damage caused by COVID and continues to exacerbate it. Rule #1 of getting out of a bad situation is to stop making it worse.

> The amount of pushback these measures got, when we were literally just trying to save lives and prevent disability through long covid absolutely staggers the mind and erodes my faith in humanity.

Or you could reasonably conclude that the policies enacted during COVID are yet another example of how we prioritize the elderly over children in the United States, arguably because children don't vote and the elderly do.

We sacrificed the educational, emotional, and psychological development of children during the pandemic to help 90 year olds live to 91. Was this the right thing to do? I don't believe there's a clear answer to that - it's a tradeoff and one that many people felt was not worth it. That doesn't make them bad or selfish, they're just on the opposite side of very difficult question with no clear answer.

> Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps.

This is spot on and it makes me sad. We have hardware and programming languages available to us that people could only dream of 30 years ago and so much of the software we produce with it is objectively worse. I don't think Wayland (or X) is really salvageable at this point.

> Yea, more and more with computing, when I hear I should switch to something because it is "the future" or "modern," I am instantly suspicious.

Same, but I'd take a step further. If the most common argument in favor of application X or Platform Y is that it's "more modern" or "the future", I make a mental note to avoid using that tech if at all possible - it's almost always guaranteed to be garbage. It's the tech equivalent of being set up on a blind date and being told the other person is "Nice".

> How does that have anything to do with disabilities? Honest, it sounds like a form of fancy customisation and I don't doubt Wayland may not support it, but that's not why accessibility is a thing.

Only on the internet would someone discuss a change they've made due to a disability, only to have someone else say challenge them on it and imply that they're bullshitting.