Having served in the military once upon a time, it always makes me chuckle. Now, I didn't do much related to information technology or security, but "unbreakable" is not a term I ever associated with military equipment.
I remember listening both to the few PDQ Bach albums my parents owned and then his excellent radio show on music theory and concepts. I found some old episodes online and have been enjoying them again the last few days.
No, seriously, I had an uncle that smoked 3 cigarettes a day and lived into his 90s. I've started smoking a pack a day and I'll live well past 100, right?
I wish we, as humans, understood odds better. All health advice is about stacking the deck in your favor, but outliers always exist. I'd be more critical, except I'm sure there's some area where I apply a similar ignorance of the basics.
Yeah, everyone is an individual, that’s my point. You can treat us all as a mass, or the midpoint in a bell curve, but we’re not. And the majority of us will be outliers are on any bell curve
> And the majority of us will be outliers are on any bell curve
This cannot be possible, by definition. The majority of us will be within one standard deviation of the midpoint on a bell curve because that's how bell curves work. And that means basic evidence based health and fitness advice applies to the majority of us. Not bullshit like "oxidative stress".
I'm perhaps idealistic by saying that at least some of this time, these things can coexist. It's ok to make money doing a thing. I'm reminded of this video that makes an excellent point:
Part of the problem is that most of this works. If you pick up heavy things, you will get stronger. If you're trying to differentiate yourself you'll focus on specific techniques or sports, but really, the basics are not hard: do something that's difficult and your body will adapt to improve its ability to do that thing.
However, some specifics that I've found useful:
Barbell Medicine - focuses on strength training, not just barbells.
The Bioneer - a little lifestyle heavy, but the basic advice is sound.
Alan Thrall- also barbell focused, but lots of good advice to be gleaned there, including on bodyweight.
Ross Enamait - boxing focus, but bodyweight stuff. His book "Never Gymless" is good.
Underground Strength Gym - an oldie, but a goodie.
The above advice is good, since the most important thing is getting all major muscle groups regularly.
But you might also look into calisthenics, which is enjoying a surge in popularity, it seems. Lots of good stuff out there on bodyweight training with a variety of adapted equipment.
One thing I've found in fitness is that people need to do what will keep them active and for many, that requires specific guidance or goals. General prescriptions like "use your muscles by being active" is fine, but what does active mean? Some people like bodybuilding, or powerlifting, or powerbuilding, or crossfit, or hiking, or basketball or whatever and if those things get them active, then that's good.
The current physical activity guidelines call for 150 minutes of moderate intensity cardiovascular training per week and at resistance training on at least 2 days per week. There's lots of ways to get there, and maybe strength training is the way to do it for some people. Even if that's not the focus, however, people should set aside some time to focus on resistance training because it provides a number of long term benefits.
Yeah, I get it. I was mostly joking, but a few things:
I strongly suspect most people buy either the official case from the manufacturer or maybe they go to Amazon or buy one from their local store (Best Buy, Verizon, etc.). They are high markup items and thus readily available in places people shop already.
I find secondary markets that are essentially universal interesting. Imagine selling a TV, but not including a remote control, that seems absurd. What I strongly suspect is happening here is that the market does not favor phones that don't need cases because people want to buy cases. When you're talking about toting around a generic black rectangle everyone else has, there is a desire to make it unique and expressive through the case. I think even with plastic phones, cases would still sell.
I go through several cases and screen protectors during the lifetime of a phone. If the phone was made of the same materials as the cases, I'd either be looking at a new phone each of those times, or putting a case on it anyway.
Half of them provide discord access and 75% a custom rss feed for a subscriber only podcast in my list. And frankly, I only take advantage of a couple of those. Mostly I just do it to throw a few dollars to stuff I like and don't use the perks. I can't be the only one.
This for me. I don't use patreon perks for the people I support on an ongoing basis. I have subscribed for perks (templates for some productivity tool) and then unsubscribed a couple of months later, but that wasn't an ongoing creator I watch all the time. I guess getting my SMBC comics by email is convenient but I already have an RSS feed reader and early access isn't important.
I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not.
It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.
There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the content in there is nothing short of "nuclear" for typical corpo structuring and processes that are developed around it.
Question is then, why do you have both? Where does this implicit "hierarchy" come from? It is simple: As soon as you have multiple people working on a problem there are communication requirements. You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?
Hierarchies are just an organizational pattern, a tool. There are neither a religion or "set in stone" as many think, they create communication choke points, induce unnecessary communication, cause "not our responsibility" mentality that may result in things falling through the cracks, have often the "Chinese whispers" problem to it, and so on. You cannot treat every problem like a nail just because your only tool is a hammer.
> You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?
I think this is a pretty great statement of the converse of Conway's Law[1].
I'd say "in evey case". And I'd say this happens whether or not there's an explicit hierarchy. Being articulate, or having knowledge or contacts, will get you more attention. The only way to mitigate this is through explicit processes, which have to be regularly reviewed. Meetings have to be chaired strictly. Everybody has to sign-up to the agreed processes.
These processes are time-consuming, and decisions can be slow. It becomes worse the bigger the organisation. I don't know how non-hierarchical decision-making can work in an enterprise where there are significant assets at stake; I've only ever seen it work in voluntary political associations in which non-hierarchical organisation is one of the prime objectives.
Those things become inevitable when a 3rd layer of management appears (for a total of 4 layers).
I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization, but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale, without a phantom organization appearing.
What happens to be wrong is all relative to everything else wrong in the larger organization.
It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management can't or doesn't want to do productive work.
From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is inconsequential to the organization.
As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on, until I learned that the various very trusted professional corporate suit folks acting like HQ were doing illegal shit, destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying everyone around them, and ruining other people's work.
Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you.
We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what?
Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and destroyed two tent pole properties in the process.
Or were at Amazon again and warned there’d be financial troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in FinTech?
…what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?
I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
> …what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?
>
> I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
>
> I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
If you truly think this, the only moral course of action for you is to immediately leave the company. Otherwise you're "fraudelently" continuing to take shareholder money. If you think the execs of your company give a shit, or will ever give a shit, about what employee #3141991403 thinks about the direction of your company, you're delusional.
If you want my opinion, just shut up and take the money. It's not your problem if shareholders make bad decisions. And besides, if it wasn't you, it'd be someone else.
I think you’re right in the aggregate and the abstract.
But it’s also funny that two of the situations you mentioned (Johnny Depp “victim” and Bud Light) are fake stories based on conservative media astroturfing where any judge would be hard pressed to find that there was unreasonable behaviour on the corporate end.
And of course, being a white knight only works if you’re privileged enough to be able to jump ship or fight your social wars and still have something to fall back on. Not everyone here is a US citizen with US resident parents and US college education, earns 6 figures, or has had decades of working experience to accumulate savings and make a CV.
WarnerMedia fired Johnny Depp based on unsubstantiated allegations from a woman who herself has a history of domestic violence and Mr Depp was subsequently found to have been defamed and awarded damages for that lost work.
WarnerMedia fired Mr Depp for mere allegations, but retained Ms Heard despite police reports documenting her abusing her girlfriend at an airport.
The sexism shown by WarnerMedia executives is not in the interests of shareholders — and is part of not only why WarnerMedia had to be sold off from ATT for a massive loss, but has failed to recover post merger with Discovery.
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Similarly, Bud Light decided to endorse a controversial spokesman, call their core audience bigots when they objected, denigrated them as “fratty” and “out of touch”… then seemed confused when the people they were openly rude to stopped buying their product.
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What particular facts do you believe I’m wrong about?
I’m curious — and explaining that is much more interesting than Poisoning the Well fallacies, such as calling things you disagree with “astroturf”.
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Finally, that’s excuses: you made up a stereotype about who I am, then decided you can safely ignore my point because that stereotype doesn’t apply to you.
maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?
> It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful.
speaking from my own experience, when I look at my earlier career years I didn't appreciate how resilient organizations can be to disfunction, yes 100 things are broken, but for the most part everything will still be fine.
Not to mention how incredibly challenging it is to build an organization that is highly functioning. I've had the pleasure of working at a few different companies and I feel the most internally mature were the companies that had been around the longest. Sure, they had issues, but fundamentally they had insulated themselves from a large class of problems that the startups were constantly fighting through.
There must now be projects like the one the author describes that are at least 5-10 years old now, I’d love to see a comparison of ones that delivered their promises and ones that keep delusionally lumbering on.
This is interesting to hear. I've always found that Overdrive does live up to its reputation of being a library focused company. The books aren't cheaper on Cloudlibrary or Axis360 and Overdrive offers the best user experience by a mile, even with all the warts on Libby. They are generally responsive to issues and supportive of concerns (they provided us a ton of data related to the McMillan boycott, for example). That may be in their self interest, but that's how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers. None of that seems sinister so I'm curious what else is going on behind the scenes.
I don't doubt they have good customer service - that's a way to grow and retain customers (in context of the article). However, the prices you are seeing are probably similar to internet/cable provider situation - there are three providers with approximately the same package, one is probably the best, but all three are overcharging you anyway, because neither has an incentive to reduce the price.
> that's how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers.
Yes*, but they make _a lot_. Being bought by an investment firm should be an indicator. Also, while I was there, they could give each employee half a million dollars and still be in the black at the end of the year. My point is that a company that profits from taxpayer money should be accountable to at least _some_ effort to be more efficient and less greedy. OverDrive is an example, but is not the only case. Yes, I realize the irony of expecting a business to make less money. But they are also dealing with budgets of (involuntarily) collected tax vs individuals voluntarily paying them.
I mean, that's the status quo under capitalism. But a huge reason I love libraries is that they are this amazing exception to the capitalist status quo in America. It's so refreshing to be in a space where no one is try get me to buy something.
My dream is that a different service comparable to Libby/Overdrive woud exist without any profit motive. Give it a similar funding model similar to libraries, or something directly from the federal government. It's hard to think like that in this neoliberal status quo, but the public library is a shining example that a different way of doing things is possible.
Do you expect authors or publishers to operate without a profit motive? I think I understand what you're getting at, but in any library model someone is getting paid. We buy books from the same wholesalers that serve book stores and subscribe to magazines that review them and catalog them with software we license (or if you're using open source you often have a support contract). It seems somewhat arbitrary to single out Overdrive as the ones who should go non-profit here. Overdrive provides a service that they charge for; that, in and of itself seems pretty standard, which is why I'm curious what else is going on.
Well, I'm practically some flavor of communist and would like to see all of society organized in a fundamentally different way :)
But that's not helpful, and I think it's not what you're asking. To answer your question pragmatically, no, of course I do not "expect authors or publishers to operate without a profit motive." I think art is very important, and under a capitalist society, I want artists and (to a lesser extent) publishers to get paid to they can buy food and have a nice place to live.
Public libraries themselves do not work on a profit model, though. Libraries buy books, but libraries themselves are not profit-driven. They do not sell a service, and instead receive money through other ways. Rather than understanding Overdrive/Libby as a product to be bought by libraries (analogous to physical books), I would rather see Overdrive/Libby/something-else to be understood as a service that is offered by the library (analagous to the librarian checking out books). The service would have to be owned by a different kind of entity, maybe some kind of non-profit that is beholden to libraries, or some kind of federal government entity. And the service would need a different funding model (one more similar to how libraries are funded, or one more similar to how inter-state or federal projects are funded).
Perhaps you disagree, that's fine, but I hope I've articulated my position reasonably well.
What you are suggesting does exist, at least partially. SimplyE is the largest open platform I can think of, but it does work by leveraging partnerships with traditional vendors like Overdrive. There's also Ebooks Minnesota and likely similar platforms in other states, though those are often run using proprietary platforms even if they contain open access material. There's also Internet Archive and Open Library, but both have been in some trouble. One I'm unfamiliar with was also mentioned in the original article.
I'll say that given my experience in identifying and spending funds for nebulous projects like software or service improvements, I'm not optimistic. It's easy to buy a bulldozer and shop and get the best price and then show you have a bulldozer. That's much harder to do for software and it's why so many government platforms seem to suck and why I think Overdrive will be comfortable at the top for a while. I'd like a world where libraries had control over the electronic content they purchase, but people will migrate to easy and we have to follow them there.
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