- I've already kind of made it clear here where I stand on this, but I gotta tell you, you really do sound a lot like management.
Do you really think your superstar programmers are well and truly doing intellectual work, the kind of work that produces business value, from the time they hit the coffee machine at 9AM to the time they grab their briefcase to go home at 5PM?
If you believe this, I think you might be interested in bringing the Bobs in to discuss making our T.P.S. reporting process more efficient. They have thoughts on coversheets.
- For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.
Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.
Yeah.
- It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"
It's about crushing labor.
WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.
For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.
- I have always wondered how we can reconcile that things "are" objectively so great and yet "seem" subjectively so bad. In my experience both online and off, there is a pessimism about work, poverty, and basic security that persists (or is even getting worse) despite these changes. To my eyes, it has to be larger than just the state of the media.
We have a few of things we can quantify, and that are often brought out in discussions such as this one. Healthcare outcomes, wages, life expectancy, basic material goods, access to education, casualties from war, etc.
I heard another commenter here talk about the human experience being understood as a vector, with twenty or thirty dimensions. Most of those are moving in their positive directions. But the problem is that when God made the human experience, he crafted it with uncountably many components, most of them themselves unquantifiable.
Unfortunately for us "objectively" exists only in that limited set, not in the greater whole. "The number of species going extinct per unit time is more than it has ever been, maybe ever." What is the cost, paid in pessimism and hopelessness rather than dollars, of knowing that? Does it counteract a 2 month increase in my projected lifespan?
- It does take time. But I would put it up in the trifecta of Most Important Things a person can do. Everyone says exercise makes you happier, but I will take it a step further: it fulfills a fundamental need for a person to be comfortable in their own body. Denying yourself exercise for any reason at all is self abuse.
- I am American, and I hear this from Americans all the time. The reality is far different, though. Does the Russian military perform more humanely in war than the US military? I don't think so. Would the Chinese? Things like My Lai and Abu Ghraib are the exception with the US military, not the rule.
I obviously don't want any single powerful entity to have access to this technology, but I can see the reality of it, which is that someone will have it. Who will it be?
- What is the solution? I would rather have automated drone armies in the hands of the US government than anyone else.
The same could be said of the atomic bomb. A weapon made purely for mass scale indiscriminate destruction of humanity. But if not us, then who would we trust to develop such a technology?
- Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability.
A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD."
We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.
- Best thing I've read about the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
I read monthlys now. Only sometimes I can't resist checking the daily (or instant) news.
- It was going to happen regardless, but it makes me deeply cynical to see this infrastructure going up in the folksy tone of "neighborhood safety." I guess to justify erecting yet another component of the massive surveillance apparatus, you have to have a startup-ey landing page and cool logo. I would prefer to see this announced on a dingy government website, or even signs on every corner stating "all movement is tracked" installed by bureaucratic decree. At least then we'd be honest with what we're creating.
- I recently took a 24 hour flight to Asia and chose the cheapest ticket. The seats were very small and very cramped. Economy plus seats had the 35" or 36" of legroom that were standard decades ago, and business class had 40" of legroom and wider seats. It was miserable, but I traveled across the Pacific ocean in less than a day's time. Economy Plus was $300 more expensive, and Business Class was $900 more expensive. I am a young guy, I don't mind packing into an airplane. That is the price I pay.
Cheap flights, big seats. Choose one.
- Learning math is like learning a language. It simply takes a lot of time and effort. If you read the rules of German grammar cover to cover, that will not prepare you to speak German; in order to be fluent, you MUST practice, over and over again, using and interacting with German.
Likewise for math. There is no "new book" to learn math that is going to blow the cover open on everything. It's a problem of motivating people to become fluent in math. I would like to see discussion in those terms -- fluency, because that's what it is.
- For type 1 and type 2, the more insulin you take per day, the lower your blood sugar will be. If you a1c is too high, you unquestionably must take more insulin. Simple as.
Should you exercise more? Yeah. Should you eat better? Yeah. Should you cut refined carbs? Yes, you probably should. None of these are unique to diabetics, but they get levied on us when we talk about insulin prices or complications with our condition.
Also, you owe it to yourself to be extremely skeptical when looking at any "diet doctor" selling a book. Most stretch the cure factor of lifestyle far beyond its limit.
The advice to someone with a high a1c is the same in every case: take more insulin.
Like everything it's a mix.
In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.