It's nice to unpack the assumptions behind this (and gp) comments. You know, honestly, why I won't work for twitter in 2024? Or Tesla, or SpaceX. Because I don't respect myself enough as an engineer. Even if we assume I had the skill (which, for Twitter, I probably do; for the other two, unlikely), I don't care enough about developing technology to devote my life to it, I want to check out after a regular work day and go hang out with my wife or climb or play board games. Better - more engaged, at least - engineers can go work for Twitter.
Meh. Being unable to check out does not make one superior engineer. Persistent long hours are predictor of a lot of bugs and correlated with chaotic management. They are not actually correlated with some kind of greatness.
That sounds like a cope. I have worked with many engineers who delivered as high, or higher, quality and impact features at higher volume by working longer, because they cared more about technology and/or the product. And I've also seen the same person (myself included!) with drastically different output based mostly on time put in. The simplest case is people who have kids and now want to spend more time with them; for some people, like me, it's an interplay of hobbies and how interesting the project itself is. The productivity decreases, based mostly on time spent. Can they respect themselves more as engineers after that?
It even goes beyond the job, e.g. does one read research papers or code at home? That would usually make one a better engineer, but it's not great for work life balance.
Not a cope, genuine opinion. I have seen people who spent a lot of time in work long term and generally they were not all that productive. Meetings took longer, because their socialization needs were not met.
And when whole teams work long because management demands it, what you usually see is tired people wasting a lot of time.
It's surprising that people mention all kind of bogeymen but don't mention automatic updates.
Automatic updates should be considered harmful. At the minimum, there should be staged rollouts, with a significant gap (days) for issues to arise in the consumer case. Ideally, in the banks/hospitals/... example, their IT should be reading release notes and pushing the update only when necessary, starting with their own machines in a staged manner. As one 90ies IT guy I worked with used to say "you don't roll out a new Windows version before SP1 comes out"
This is at best misdirection. So, let's say England then had robust labor rights. Perhaps there's no child labor and instead, the same workers now use the machines, except most of them are fired and get 6 months of severance. Heck let's make it even better and say new skilled workers are needed for the machines and so the salaries for the remaining minority of workers are doubled.
Do you think the fired workers wouldn't have attacked the machines? I think they totally would have.
The only labor regime where they wouldn't is where they are maintained in perpetuity even though their labor is useless. Something like Soviet Union with "guaranteed jobs", or NYC construction unions with 5x staffing on the same jobs vs even the European companies... all great examples to emulate for "labor movements"!
I wouldn't expect any better given the source, but this is complete nonsense... what is the logic here?
If per-worker productivity increases, there are 3 options:
1) output increases;
2) under pretty much any labor rights some workers are going to lose jobs;
3) some former workers have to be maintained for free.
Is this supposed "labor" movement advocating for (3)? Because they are clearly against (2), seeing how they destroy the machines, and they are not considering (1) seeing how they don't plan to just get jobs working on the machines and not trying to compete with machines/go to other industries.
If it's (3) it's at best a "now-useless labor" movement. It's like throwing a tantrum because back in the days your parents gave you some cash to clean your room but at present that no longer obtains.
Makes me wish we could do proper punishment adjustment, taking into account the percentage of criminals punished, using this app. Let's say punishment X would deter phone theft. Now take the phones stolen, and how many are recovered with criminals punished, 1 in N. To actually deter theft, the punishment needs to be X*N; I'm pretty sure for realistic X (e.g. 6 months in jail?) and N (huge), the proper punishment is death. Every now and then, track one random phone thief down using these apps, and execute them with some fanfare (I use the term "them" loosely; more like, "it"). Deter phone theft, and also make the world a better place.
Why is humane "under-punishment always preferable to over-punishment" top priority? You can construct a mathematically absurd example - e.g. if we under-punish a psychopathic attempted murderer and he gets an opportunity to actually murder, we've done strictly more harm than if we over-punish an execute him.
But even in regular case, why should we be humane to someone who refuses to be humane to others? I don't get this logic at all.
Easy now Rorschach, would you really want to live in a society like this? I could imagine finding out my cousin got murdered because he didn’t realize he was selling old iPhones that were stolen with a plan like this. This is comic book levels of absurdity and extremism.
It's called Saudi Arabia. (Okay, well, you don't get executed there; your hand just gets chopped off.) Some people do want to trade freedom/rights for safety, yes. Most people, even, going by history and the state of the world today.
Yeah, you could imagine all kinds of scenarios. We do have beyond reasonable doubt standard for punishment, so it's just that - fantasy; or rather, a gotcha that is simply an worthwhile tradeoff. The "absolute" values that do not recognize tradeoffs is what's, pretty much by definition, extremist.
I can only respond with an echo: "The fact that people like you exist is far more damaging for the world than phone thieves."
Unreserved compassion is by far the most harmful atavisms of human evolution. More evil, even, than tribalism and tall-poppy syndrome. The combination with the latter, in a sense of being reluctant to punch down, produces the likes of you - active fellow-travelers to psychopaths. The logical result is either societal collapse or someone like Duterte or Bukele restoring order. I think it's much better to have the right amount of retributive justice to being with.
Nice project, but I wouldn't claim 3m precision, at least not around steep terrain. I checked if I can use it for climbing areas, and a spot around here that goes in the shade around 1pm this time of year is still shown in full sun around 3-4pm.
It's interesting that both extremes are actually signs of the same problem.
First, why didn't other countries become too scare to build? The neighborhood I grew up at in Moscow was built in bulk in place of a village of the same name in the early 80ies. Nobody cared about the village; in fact it wasn't even replaced by housing - it was demolished to build a stadium and other assorted sporting venues; the housing was added shortly after. Did it make Russia too scared to build? No, it didn't. During the aughts oil boom, they demolished some 5-story flats to replace them with 20+-story flats, giving the residents better flats in more remote neighborhoods, with no real choice to stay in their neighborhood in many cases (like my grand aunt's). They just keep doing things the same way, and that has its own tradeoffs. Nobody is "scared".
The difference in the US is that there's a stronger notion of individual rights, and it was obvious that the bureaucratic nightmare machine was running ramshod over those. So it was great that it was reigned in. The not-so-great part that instead of just respecting those as was the original intent, US has replaced an incompetent bureaucratic nightmare that ran ramshod over the local residents, with an incompetent bureaucratic/legalistic nightmare that tries to protect them instead. Or rather, some perverted collectivist distortion of "individual rights" where frivolous lawsuits from rich neighbors, disgruntled unions, idiot activists or basically anyone can hold up the project forever instead of just individuals negotiating their narrow concerns...
If this thing was done properly, in some cases the weight of many individuals would counterbalance aggressive projects when it makes sense, but loonies would end up like Edith Macefield, with a house surrounded by a mall. As it stands, Edith Macefields of the world can delay and block entire projects forever, other property owners be damned.
Where did you ever see that? In particular for the actually wealthy? "Oh no, my house went from $10m to $9m, woe is me"? At most, it's a proxy for the above. As a not-so-wealthy, but well-to-do techie, for me the exclusion is absolutely about keeping poor people out. People are just too timid do admit it.
Now I do have to say as a semi-libertarian I support YIMBY, building up everything and making most zoning illegal. Sorta against my self-interest.
But at the same time, I strongly dislike US poor. It's almost an oxymoron that the more meritocratic the society, the better the sorting, and thus the worse an average non-immigrant poor people are. US, compared to most places, is pretty meritocratic. An average person at the same percentile poverty level in Russia (or, I bet, Mexico or China or Nigeria or whatever) is a much better human being than a corresponding non-immigrant in the US (any race). If the way to keep the latter out is to keep local property unaffordable, so be it. I don't really care about broad property values otherwise - I don't want to move and if I do I'd probably buy a similar house.. in fact given the transaction costs, cheaper housing may make moving cheaper.
I believe the US “poor” could be made to behave better if standards were raised (more and better policing). Nobody seems to have the stomach for that so coddling is the solution.
2) In any case it's the creators doing the cheating. Should malls be banned if one store happens to sell counterfeited handbags?