1) Execs complaining that it's hard to find skilled workers nowadays, while doing their best to make the company an unattractive workplace and not bother retaining existing workers who are leaving (including me soon).
Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will never stop. You'll hire new people, they'll see it's a shit show, and leave as soon as their relocation bonus expires.
This brings me no joy either. I'd much rather stay on one place for long, rather than go through various interview hazing rituals every couple of years just to escape the madness and get a decent inflation adjustment.
2) Western governments quadrupling the amount of money in circulation in the last two years, EU governments ignoring sane energy independence policies for decades, then blaming all the rampant inflation and soaring energy and real estate prices solely on the war in Ukraine, and telling the working class to tighten their belts and turn down the heating, while the upper class has never seen better days as their assets appreciated to new heights.
And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board, passing policies that work against the people's intersts.
> And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board
Hardest nut to swallow if you are interested in politics. To a large degree it is due to a dysfunctional media. I have no better ideas how to create and fund a better press that is still independent though. Politicians need to get on board of the circus because it is their only chance to publicity. That said, I wouldn't want to replace the current misery with people popular on tiktok either.
edit: My colloquial English is a bit weak, but I think it would be more apt to say "hardest pill to swallow" as nuts can have an unfortunate double meaning. So better to swallow pills and to crack nuts and better not mix that up too much...
Better press already exists for anyone who wants it. Almost nobody wants it. It lost the popularity contest to more entertaining and pandering versions. You have to give people what they want. If you want change you have to change what they want. That's the hardest pill to swallow.
A quick chat with HR followed by a "coding challenge" for free.
I just had a recruitment consultant tell me that my perspective might be wrong for not wanting to do it. He had 70 people in his pipeline for 25 jobs. So I do half a days worth of work for free and I have approx 2 - 1 chance that I don't get the job.
It’s been ten years and I am still mad at Facebook. Post phone interview on Friday I was given a code challenge to complete over the weekend. When I submitted it on Monday I received a response immediately “The team has reviewed your resume and decided to not move forward. We will not be reviewing your code challenge. Feel free to apply again in one year.”
I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and you could have at least glanced at it. Or at the very least lied to me.
> I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and you could have at least glanced at it. Or at the very least lied to me.
This is why coding challenges are an immediate dealbreaker for me these days. If I’m going to do a project to showcase my skills, you can be sure I’m going to put my all into it. Getting ghosted after that is insulting beyond words.
Put me in an interview setting and I at least know that it’s time-boxed and the interviewer is losing just as much time as I am.
That just sounds like an attempt to save both of you time (elapsed time, from interview to offer, not time spent) in case your phone interview did do well.
After the phone interview, somebody needs to write it up, a hiring committee needs to look at it, and then they can decide whether to move forward or not. If they give you the challenge after that it's easily another week.
Frankly I am surprised they gave you a full response on Monday after a phone interview Friday, that's actually quite fast given all the steps and people involved.
I went and looked up the emails. I submitted my code challenge at 9:45pm on Sunday central time and received the response at 2:18am Monday. Couple hours, and a strange time to get a response. I suspect the recruiter was not US based.
Given that the job was supposed to be west coast based, I have to imagine they’d made their decision on Friday.
I have been burned like that before.One time it was probably a days worth of work, but split over evenings of my free time took longer, so I didn't finish it.
Another time it was as if some junior developer was circle jerking. Whining about the most trivial things (a couple of whitespace errors in Pylint, not returning JSON when they had requested a "page without styling", Not adding a setup.py, when they didn't ask for it. )
Absolutely. If they had told me that the code was total garbage in a snide tone followed by derogatory remarks about my mother, I would be over it by now. I am a very forgiving person.
Having me do two days of work and immediately throwing it in the trash without even glancing at it is the far worse insult.
The reward is a pay increase (hopefully) and a delightful 6 months before you realize the new job has the same problems as the old job, then 18 months of stress while you try to change things, and then you get to do it all again. What's not to love about a system like that?
Do your thing I guess. The results will speak for themselves. Just know that even in the mid-2000s (when the market was red hot) there were all sorts of hurdles you'd have to go through to get a good gig. A lot of that involved doing work "for free".
A little hustle pays dividends long term. It's much worse in other industries.
You're not wrong, but there is a large spectrum of success out there. It's not like you get only "one shot, one opportunity" (Eminem) or nothing. Yes there's also a spectrum of the work/reward ratio and sometimes it's skewed in a crappy way. For some people it's too easy and for some people it's too hard
Point is that reaching upper middle class and higher is totally feasible no matter your walk of life as long as you keep the hustle going. Success could only happen in one's late 30s though.
(There are of course overriding factors like having an abusive childhood or something like that. Systematic discrimination plays a big part too. But that's outside the scope of this particular thread)
FanDuel sent me test (data science) before I talked with anyone. I'll admit the questions appeared aligned with the work and would be interesting. But I am not taking a test before talking with anyone.
Looking for a job means doing 'work' potentially for nothing. You have to apply, sit interviews, sit tests, etc. Investing half a day before a decision is very reasonable.
I am late to this game so I assume everyone else’s brain was melted by this in 2017:
Every Intel CPU since 2008 includes an autonomous computer called the Intel Management Engine that runs Minix, completely circumvents your own OS, has full access to memory, has network access, and cannot be turned off by the owner of the hardware (you).
We also don’t know what it does because it’s extremely difficult to reverse engineer due to obfuscation and because Minix 3 is published under a BSD license so Intel is not obligated to publish the source code.
Yes and no. It could potentially use the network. To do so, it would have to acquire an IP address, which in the case of IPv4 would show as ARP messages. More significantly, any attempt to call out could be detected at the router (IPv4 or IPv6). Now I know that most people don't look through firewall logs looking for comms from unexpected internal addresses - but some people do. And since this has been around since 2008 with no reports of such comms that I have been able to find, we can be pretty confident that it is not happening.
So why would they network-enable it? I would suggest that this is for the declared purpose - if you need to upgrade the microcode, the normal OS (Windows etc.) has to communicate with the IME, and IP is a good way to do that.
> we can be pretty confident that it is not happening.
We don't _really_ know this. It could of course wait for a signal (say, in a certain memory region, depending on the host OS) and be activated only by remote control in collaboration with other vectors, for special use against, say, heads of state, or the rare meaningful dissidents against whoever it is who has access.
But the only way that signal would get to it would be with the connivance of a user level application or the normal OS. At that point you have spyware with extra steps - and it's easier to detect because of the unexpected IP address.
Reality check I got after being accused of having anti-minority opinion while arguing for protection of all categories of people, just without double standards and without giving priority to some over others.
This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations.
Without accountability checks, people can and will use the positions of power to police the companies, communities and whatever they can to further their own agenda regardless if it hurts everyone else involved in the process.
It's important we start valuing maturity and ability to exercise nuance in thought process lest it will all go south.
I think there are two points: first, 'all lives matter' is a typical dog whistle for a lot of people who are racist, even if you are not. If you're going to argue that line, you have to try and put some clear water between you and them.
The second point is that, in an unjust society, not accounting for the effects of that injustice on people (say candidates for a job position) compounds that injustice. So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff.
That's the core of the issue. Instead of addressing rhetoric at a face value, people put their projection of disagreement into your words and judge you by that.
After all, what is the difference between people who use "all lives matter" as a thinly veiled excuse for discrimination and people who use "it's a pride month and you're homophobic" as an excuse to attack you when asked to stay on technical topic?
Addendum: I believe "affirmative action" is a major step towards dismantling freedom of speech.
It is until after I got better at English and started immerse into the Western medium of discourse, that it became apparent that my beliefs of equality by judging people upon their virtues/vices are considered wrong by many who prefer to insist on categorizing people only by their superficial features and use that as a basis of the debate.
> It is until after I got better at English and started immerse into the Western medium of discourse, that it became apparent that my beliefs of equality by judging people upon their virtues/vices are considered wrong by many who prefer to insist on categorizing people only by their superficial features and use that as a basis of the debate
Don't confuse mostly American language and culture with "Western". The UK sometimes follows some of these things, but not always, and the rest usually don't. For instance in France It's forbidden for government entities to categorise people by how they look. There are no quotas or statistics per skin colour. There's still racism here and there of course - be it in some police actions/accidents, or political parties, or whatever. There are poor neighborhoods (which tend to be prevalently with immigrants or close descendants of immigrants, be they from Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe), and there are efforts to help the people living there ( improve schools, provide jobs, etc.), not "people from Arabian/Western African descent living there".
France just narrowly avoided voting in the daughter of a noted neo-nazi, running the nationalist party that neo-nazi founded. It's also got a hijab ban, which puts it in the company of places like Russia, or Xinjiang in China, not noted bastions of tolerance and diversity.
> France just narrowly avoided voting in the daughter of a noted neo-nazi
She's drastically less neo-Nazi than her father, just an empty far-right populist. But yeah, not great.
> It's also got a hijab ban, which puts it in the company of places like Russia, or Xinjiang in China, not noted bastions of tolerance and diversity
It's more complicated than that. The hijab ban isn't coming from intolerance or to force conformity. France has a long and proud history of laïcité, separation of church and state and irreligiousness in public life ( you don't get politicians doing photo ops with bibles or praising Jesus, thank god). Outright religious symbols, especially ones that are a symbol of religious subjugation for many ( many women, especially the young ones, are pressured/forced by family/husbands to be "modest"; plenty of others do it for themselves) have no place in irreligious public places. Religion is a private matter you practice however you please as long as you harm noone. And the ban isn't for hijabs, it's for face coverings, so a Catholic nun is also included; and it only covers public places like post office, town hall, schools ( not sure about that one).
But the gist of it is - religion has no place in public life, especially its (often) intolerant parts.
> Religion is a private matter you practice however you please as long as you harm noone
I think the chinese make this argument in Xinjiang much more convincingly, after all, unlike the french, they do not have large, bell-ringing churches and cathedrals in the centers of literally every settlement, all of which are blazoned with symbols of the faith.
It's also the argument they make in Germany, where you're not allowed to have religious symbols in public offices, but they still manage to have a crucifix behind every blade of grass, public or otherwise, in Bavaria.
The other problem with the hijab ban is that modesty (which is what hijab means) makes no sense in private. So it ends up making women choose between their religious self-expression, and taking part of public life. I'm sure that some muslim women are oppressed by some muslim men, but I can say for certain that every muslim woman, whether they wear the headscarf or not, is oppressed by having this choice taken out of their hands.
I love the french universalist tradition, but it feels like mobilizing that in order to restrict the freedoms of a relatively poor and disenfranchised minority is a shameful betrayal. I would find it credible if there was also a general crucifix ban, and the French state, as the soviets did, was turning churches into community centers or tearing them down. Since no such idea is even proposed, it just seems like yet another classic of the european tradition: abstract equality, concrete discrimination.
> I can say for certain that every muslim woman, whether they wear the headscarf or not, is oppressed by having this choice taken out of their hands.
Game theory is complicated. Sometimes having a choice taken away from you is good for you... for example if it is a choice you never really wanted to take, but your environment would punish you for avoiding it voluntarily. When the choice is taken away, the punishment would not make sense.
Children do not choose their religion; it is chosen for them, and sometimes the punishment for breaking the rules or trying to leave the religion is death. I am pretty sure there are girls born in muslim families, who are happy for the opportunity to feel the fresh air.
Alternatively, literally every white woman I know has told me they find the pressure to appear presentable, to look in a certain way, oppressive and stressful. We live in a society that makes it easy for men to oppress women, in public or in private. Tackling domestic violence, exclusion of women from public spaces, women's wages, would make it much easier for women pressured by families or husbands to take the freedoms that are actually important to them, which may or may not include choices about head wear.
> Alternatively, literally every white woman I know has told me they find the pressure to appear presentable, to look in a certain way, oppressive and stressful.
Yes, it is oppressive and stressful, but the stakes are dramatically different, and so is the reason -- intrasexual competition.
In case of covering your face for religious reasons, the penalty for disobeying, in worst case, is death. Specifically, a murder, usually by your relatives, for reasons that are typically translated to English as "honor", although the meaning clearly is not the same.
A white woman who refuses to use make-up, will miss some opportunities in her life. Another woman will take the partner she wanted, or the promotion she deserved. She may get bullied by other women, especially at high school. Those all are impacts that reduce her quality of life.
But how is it related to domestic violence? I have never heard a serious suggestion that the real cause of domestic violence is lack of being presentable.
Similarly, what are the public spaces that exclude insufficiently presentable white women: streets? parks? cinemas? universities? trains? Okay, I am sure there are some parties where only the pretty girls are invited, but those probably exclude most men, too.
Anyway, I think that "you may be skipped for a promotion" and "someone quite likely will slit your throat" are not the same category of threat. Both can feel oppressive and stressful, but I am sure way more women would trade their problems in one direction than in the other.
My observation is that, in households where sexism is a real problem, the public-facing stuff isn't likely to be the meat of it. Nobody who has a husband who might murder them considers religious attire as the worst thing about their relationship. The worst thing is having a husband who is controlling and homicidal.
The point is, both muslim and non-muslim women face that in most countries around the world, because most countries are systematically patriarchal and domestic violence is largely normalized. In every country in europe, domestic violence makes up the vast majority of violent crime, and murders are most likely, especially for women, to be committed by family members.
So by focusing on the hijab and the makeup thing, you're missing my broader point: that muslim women face oppression as women, and not as muslims, except insofar as they are the targets of racial discrimination. The mechanisms that allow partners to coerce muslim women are the same as those that allow partners to exercise coercive power over white women.
The point is to do both, acknowledging that certain people have inherent (dis)advantages, and that established perspectives are usually the perspective of the establishment, which isn't representative of the whole
I think it's important to separate the ideas/words/meaning of "X lives matter" from the political movements that underlying them.
"So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff."
I think we're so far removed from that, that it isn't straightforward anymore. We're seeing discrimination against certain minority groups simply because they're overrepresented in some areas (look at the recent issue/cases regarding Asians and education). It's one thing if we're making exceptions for disadvantaged people (ethnicity alone is not an indicator for this) that corrects and injustice, but it's something completely different when we are using blanket policies that aren't actually fixing anything and might actually cause more issues in the future.
> is a typical dog whistle for a lot of people who are racist
How do you know this? Do you associate with racists? Or did somebody tell you that racists profess basic unitarian universalist values? If so, why were they telling you?
It's a known thing and questioning common knowledge is generally the tactic of a contrarian or a manipulator with the intent of diffusing the conversation.
I mean, there's nothing I can say or do to ever convince a person to see my viewpoint once they have decided that someone's race decides their value.
There are no magic words, no sudo "be a kinder person" command, no entreaties, no begging, no threats, no guile that can convince someone on the internet who has decided to take a confrontational stance to stand down, or reconsider.
If you act racist on the internet then you are racist. If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
It is a safe assumption that they are here to try to rile people up and make people upset and have no interest in speaking fairly or changing their position under any circumstances.
I am no more interested in the feelings of either racist people or the people who choose to act like them than I am with the quality of your coworker's friend's pet's bowel movements.
If you enjoy making people upset on the internet by spewing racist rhetoric then I hope your conversations constantly get derailed.
Things get more difficult if an online mob compiles a database of thousand different sounds that ducks allegedly make, and says "if it makes one of the sounds in this database, it's a duck".
"Known things" and "common knowledge" are specific to your context of existence.
The tactic to weave in the threads of logical statements or irrefutable facts together with person's/organization's agenda is used by everyone from radical individuals to sects to popular political parties.
However, you cannot turn this argument on its head by saying that a reasonable statement shared by "bad" people makes it bad or invalid by association.
Also, did you know hitler too would agree that sky is likely blue?
Godwin's Law, "if you mention Adolf Hitler or Nazis within a discussion thread, you've automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in."
You should address the other points made in my response. And yet, you choose the last one and conveniently avoid everything else.
By the way, Godwin’s law[0]:
“Godwin’s law is the proposition that the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.”
I feel like this is a classic case of American exceptionalisms. Americans have an absolutely bonkers relationship with race and often assume that other Westerners around the world feel the same way.
The _only_ reason the phrase "All Lives Matter" has any remotely political juice to it is because of the riots that occurred in America two years ago; the phrase itself is entirely innocuous and is really something most reasonable people can get behind.
It bothers me to no end when people imply that the rest of the English speaking world should try to update their lexicon and tread carefully around certain words simply to appease a tiny minority of Americans.
I'm pretty ignorant of this, but was the phrase "All Lives Matter" really out and about in normal use for a long time? Or did it rise in popular use after "Black Lives Matter"?
If it's the first one, yeah I agree w/you. If it's the second, well...
Would you not classify them as riots? What word would you use?
I'm Canadian but was living in Seattle at the time. Businesses were burned, cars were flipped, statues torn down. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of what was being protested, but to pretend it was a peaceful demonstration is laughable. Riot is a perfectly reasonable word to describe it.
If you're pretty ignorant of the topic, then why do you know about the fact that "All Lives Matter" phrase only rose to prominence after "Black Lives Matter" movement in the US?
This is a pointed question led with dishonesty. It's important to ask oneself what was the motivation behind trying to manipulate other readers' perception instead of just dropping the "I'm pretty ignorant of this, but..." part in the first place.
"All Lives Matter" was not in common circulation until "Black Lives Matter" entered the scene, because the phrase is used as a rebuttal to "Black Lives Matter." That's why it's commonly understood to be a dogwhistle. When person A says "Black Lives Matter" and person B says "All Lives Matter", person B is really saying "NO. All Lives Matter" the un-spoken "NO" is their disagreement with "Black Lives Matter." If they agreed that "Black Lives Matter" they would not have had to come up with a rebuttal to counter it.
Whether it had much use prior to 2020 I'm unsure, the point is that Americans (like the charming one I'm trying my best to be patient with below) will now forever associate their country's own racial backstory with those three words, and for some reason expect others around the world to do the same.
The problem with this is that this is applying a fix in the wrong place, making the effects of original injustice exist in a different form for a vastly longer period of time. In your example, the society can pay for the livehood, training and education of such ex-slaves, and help them fit back.
But blindly giving them positions that require experience and skill is going to sound nice, but ultimately your whole society is going broke. And people will once again start associating low quality and untrustworthiness with the very same people you wanted to uplift in the first place..
How is this even relevant to tech work? Minority, inclusion,etc... do you work in HR, legal or PR? If not how does writing code or engineering systems include that subject? Honestly curious.
There is nothing in the question that seems to imply that we should keep it strictly about tech work, and various answers do not seem to be about it either.
HN is tech + everything else that's interesting. That basically includes "everything possible" (under quotes because it needs to have some basis in science / empirical knowledge)
A follow-up comment in the response above addresses your question. It's a situation online, not in a workplace.
However, it is similar to what I tend to notice at work more and more, with a small number of employees having major negative impact while the majority stays silent and does nothing.
Humans are good at dealing with crisis when it's apparent and happens quickly as it triggers our fight or flight response. This crisis I think is slow, which we are notoriously bad at mitigating (case in point: climate change). This means that we could expect seeing major resistance once the situation becomes intolerable even to otherwise agreeable people. My fear is when this happens, irreversible damage to fundamental freedoms will already be done and we'll be back to the cycle of bad times -> struggle -> good times.
It was on Reddit, was not it? I got banned from a sub just because of having opinion that contradicted OP, when I asked which rule did I broke, My account was suspended on whole Reddit... I have been member since Digg exodus and never had any problem till that day.
Unfortunately Reddit is ruled by moronic mods who can perma-ban your account, and admins can't be bothered. If your opinion is not in line, your IP is going to get blacklisted, so either you are extremely left wing, or you are out.
and it is sad, because I really liked the forums, discussions and occasional memes here and there, now they are just pushing ideas that can't be discussed, which is propaganda.
It was Discord but the behavior matches the one you've described about Reddit. Unfortunately, it's not used for in-depth technical discussions relevant to my sphere and you can't use WayBackMachine on Discord to preserve knowledge which is unfortunate.
It's funny that while discussing the incident, some other people would get agitated when you mention that unjust bans are by all means should be evaded.
Never understood people who ready to jump on anyone disobeying the law in letter but could never care less about actually following it in spirit.
It's not that easy. My ISP assigns static IP. As for not participating in subreddits - you can't really know which subs will popup on your frontpage, one might argue that you only use subs you are subbed to, but that destroys the point of forums as a principle. Where not forums designed to facilitate discussion rather than echo-chambers of propaganda?
I haven't used reddit in a while, but it wasn't uncommon to make a throwaway for some additional level of psueo-anonimty, authoring a post, submitting and then instantly getting a message saying you don't have enough karma.
Iirc it's more common in large subreddits, or really anything that has a decent amount of traffic and a somewhat organized moderation approach.
It's important to not stay silent thinking conflict is pointless because it means that tolerance to things you consider harmful only invites more of that in the future.
Naturally, pick your battles and all, but voicing your opinion encourages other people agreeing with you to do the same. And, in the end, you are no longer alone in your protest.
Age. I turned 40 and realized I probably wasn't on the upswing of life anymore. I've developed a small but weighty sense of "time is running out" that I didn't have before. I want that to be a motivator to do good and meaningful things and not a growing sense of foreboding. That necessitates contemplation of life, faith, priorities, etc.
This, but with the added realization that I seem to be losing brain power and memory quite rapidly. I used to be able to contribute to intelligent conversations, but these days find myself unable to keep up with peers and elders who're still super sharp.
If you have young kids.. that's it. Apparently it gets better. It did for me, had a big dip then came up smarter. Now with our third in the "terrible two" phase I'm in a terrible dip. This time next year I'll be back to my horrific smart, egotistical and demanding self :-)
This could be beginning of alzheimer's. Alzheimer's, like balding, is too often put away like an unpleasant thought until it's really too late to do anything about it. There is an obvious advice here of going to a good doc and having your lifestyle in order, but barring that there really is no sufficiently good treatment yet which is validated by large clinical trials.
But as a last resort, I'd check these papers and search for a doctor or an acquaintance who could help you make sense of the current cutting-edge research and possibly apply it for your case:
Similar to another poster below, I found new modes of existential crisis from not just age but witnessing another's decline. A long-time friend's surprise death by brain cancer started me off with what feels like your observation about time running out.
But watching elderly relatives as their minds melt into dementia and delirium has certainly been more cataclysmic. No matter how much you know about the possibility in theory, the qualitative experience of it in intimate practice is quite another thing. As I've heard from several social workers in the past few years and felt myself, grief wells up for the person who is still in front of you as you keep recognizing the loss of different parts of them or of your relationship to them.
The hardest part may be contemplating the limits of caregiving. I have newfound respect and awe for doctors, nurses, et. al who have to face this throughout their career. You have to acknowledge many limits in yourself and in the patient, including inevitable suffering which you cannot prevent no matter how much clever planning nor deep understanding you can muster.
I reached the same point. I am also helping terminally ill gentleman to have last comfortable days of his life. I literally see how the time is running out.
My wish is to finish my projects allowing my relatives to live ramen-comfortable life without me. Maybe I manage to retire and enjoy the life by myself for a while. I became very materialistic growing up in poverty.
Goodonya. Caring for the dying changes you in so many ways and can be
an ultimately positive milestone of maturity. It can really take it out
of you too, so make sure to get enough help to be a help.
I'm early-30s and found out this week that the tendonitis in my foot that the doctor swore would clear up "in a month or two" with ice, ibuprofen, and stretching, is actually arthritis. My hair's getting a little thin too. Feeling like I'm past my peak really isn't sitting well with me
I'm also closing in on 40 and have been thinking about the fact that I don't have any strong meaningful relationships in my life. I'm curious whether you've built a family or are planning to?
The realization that the majority of the rules/regulations/laws/policies that we have in place are directly connected to the suffering of a human being.
Our society is reactionary. We enact new rules in response to negative outcomes. Any time we try to pre-empt a bad outcome, people claim conspiracy and/or believe that the problem is being over dramatized. It takes a negative real world event (often several) before we collectively agree that it's a problem and do something about it.
So then... all of humanity's progress is built upon the pain of other humans. That really sucks.
There is an infographic floating around at the moment that maps the migration of millionaires in 2022. I have not dug through the data to see if everything in the infographic is accurate, but as I think most people would presume: it shows loads of wealth holders are making their way into the western world from Russia, China, India, Ukraine (you can predict the others net negative countries).
However what's got my mind going is that loads of wealth holders are also leaving the UK. What's this all about? Perhaps post Brexit jitters?
I mean, it doesn't really make me contemplate existence, but I guess I just didn't expect my lifetime to include a UK that's incapable of holding on to its wealthy citizens. (Maybe I'm overlooking an obvious explanation?)
The city of London is now outside the EU. A lot of those who worked in it have moved to Frankfurt etc, to be back on the inside; quite a few of those are loaded.
This feels like absolute unfair BS and it grinds my gears so much.
Someone gets rich in some crappy-to-live locale with bad human rights, etc. often by exploiting weak governance, regulations, exploitation protections. And then they take all that wealth and move to Canada or wherever, that's a delight to live and raise a family in. They get their cake and eat it too.
Honestly at this point it's almost worth excluding housing. You have a generation from about 45-60 who bought their London houses for around the 50-200k mark who have an asset worth 0.8-2.5M and are earning 200-300k a year. You then have those a bit younger with similar incomes but who had to "buy high".
Both are "rich" but I would probably only classify the former group as "wealthy" as they're sitting on huge assets.
Only on Hacker News is possible to read comment that unironically ask if being a millionaire is wealthy? Look at the percentile, look at the median and average income, median and average wealth, look at the distribution of wealth: in whatever way you look at it, yes, the equation millionaire = wealthy is true.
I guess we're getting into semantics here, but I would imagine someone with a net worth above a million USD would be considered to have above average wealth in a majority of countries.
A million, whether dollars or pounds, in NET wealth is being a wealthy citizen in the UK and I suspect all Western countries. It's probably far better than the top 10%.
The report mentions that they are HNWI. Defined in Wikipedia by: High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs): People or households who own liquid assets valued between $1 million and $5 million.
I assume liquid assets doesn't account for Real-Estate?
That graphic shows ~44k HNWI emigrating, and ~20k HNWI immigrating. I skimmed the underlying text and didn't see an explanation, so are we to assume the other ~24k HNWI immigrated to the rest of the world's countries in relatively low numbers per country?
I suppose another answer might be that it's easier to track HNWI leaving countries than it is to track them entering other countries?
While funny, California as a whole has (according to Wiki) 8.5% of million dollar net worth families. There are almost 10million of them in the US. That's on the order 1 in 10 people belonging to a family in that bracket in the US and thus a whole bunch of people. So that's not really just some tech bro's in the valley...
But I think when you extend the sample to the spectrum of all humanity (as the infographic does), $1 million USD becomes quite clearly a fitting benchmark of wealth.
The HUGE influx of recruiters from developed countries that wanna go thru the whole recruitment process without giving me a a range of salary.
The confrontational and accusatory tone when I state my desired range and say that I got paid similar with companies in my own country (when questioned about it) when comparing apples to apples (contracting), the gaslighting and excuses of why I should get paid less than I have got with local and international companies in the past. The reasons for such aggression normally is the frustration since they have a GOOD monetary incentive to seal the deal, but does not excuse the behavior for sure. Even telemarketers are nicer than recruiters at this point.
I do attribute this to the rise in remote work. I used to rarely get contracted by a recruiter before C19 and when in the rare occasion when it happened it had a good chance of getting something out of it, now it is companies looking for super cheap labor instead of just trying to find talent.
Fantastically put and exactly the same experience I've had.
They're entirely preying on the "talking about money is taboo" that exists in our culture and it only ever benefits them. We have to all collectively (or through the passage of laws like in CO, WA, CA) draw a hard line and the sand and not give any recruiter 15 minutes or even 1.5 minutes before they provide a salary range.
It saves them time so they can move on to the next target who may be more likely to give up a full time 6 figure salaried position with PTO and healthcare to take a contract job that requires a BS degree and 5 years of experience but only pays 150% of minimum wage, no PTO and no healthcare.
I get past the introductions and then say straight up, if this position doesn't consider mid 6 figures +/- $20,000 as its pay range then I probably won't be a good fit for it, and add $20,000 to that if it's not a direct hire.
They typically respond with, "We were hoping to pay more like $40,000" every time. I'm sure you were, but you need someone with an AA degree for that. With a BS they can make more, hell with a HS diploma they can make $40,000 a year working at a gas station. That's not even $20/hr. This is IT. You don't get to hire under $25/hr in a major city without either exploiting the newbies or tripping over the desperate.
I will concede I am not qualified to judge AI sentience/consciousness, but I'll venture to guess that it probably falls on a spectrum.
> "But eventually, I believe, someone will be right, and there will be someone in there. It will be a True Alloception. And many others will also see it. But not everyone."
I guess it will be determined by the size and skills of the set of people who see it.
I'm a hardware engineer:
The pitchforking on HN about "right to repair" issues. Frankly, those threads degenerate into what I'd expect on reddit.
To clarify, I support the problems trying to be solved but a lot of the ideas are just the wrong way to go about it. I've thought of weighing in, but the way some other dissenting commenters get beaten down means I self censor and move on to other threads.
Another hardware engineer here, and I feel the same way. As much as I know I lack knowledge in areas of software... there's something to be said from the wisdom gained from making an actual physical product and maintaining that product for years rather than making some CRUD app in some framework-of-the-month and hopping on to something completely different every 9 months.
"HN [...] degenerate[s] into what I'd expect on reddit" is a no no ;)
I suppose I'm a supporter of the "right to repair" and curious. Do you have something (more on the general side) that one has to be aware about this topic when discussing?
Recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Up to the 1970s, New Guinea had literal stone-age technology. Similarly, aborigines in Australia lived the the same ways for FORTY THOUSAND YEARS! We are more likely to end the world as we know it in 100 years than to last 40k years in relative stability.
That we really are living in unprecedented times. If you look any of a number of indices, things really starting changing for humankind as a whole about 150 years ago.
A lot of this I knew before, but didn't grasp how many things changed, how dramatically, and how recently. It kind of is like living through the onset of the dawn of agriculture or something, but compressed into 150-200 years.
I think people (myself included) aren't aware of how much uncertainty we're facing as a civilization.
I don't actually mean that positively or negatively, just blew my mind.
Possibly this is me misunderstanding things, but that all things move at a constant velocity (speed of light) through spacetime. So I’m moving at the same speed as light, it’s just that a lot of my velocity is in the time dimension, where as light’s velocity is fully in the dimensions of space (and zero in time).
"You can’t go faster than the speed of light, because you can’t go slower than the speed of light. You are always going the speed of light through spacetime. If you use some of your speed to go through space then there is less speed through time."
Lewis Carroll Epstein
Relativity: from our perspective, light moves at 300 000 km/s; from light's own perspective, it actually moves at infinite speed.
Which by the way is a reason why you can never reach the speed of light; because it would mean reaching (from your own perspective) an infinite speed, and you can't do that by burning a finite amount of fuel.
I've always been proud of being European, but this event is exposing how shambolic the EU can be in some situations. Fuck, I just saw the headline "Germany says it can send rocket launchers in August"...
Totally different. Yugoslavia was a deeply divided country held together by a strongman. When he died, if course it was gonna fall apart. No surprises there.
Vukovar was the parallel I was thinking of. And Osijek, and other towns.
Surrounded by invading Serbian forces (which taken over the assets of the 5th largest army in Europe), shelled mercilessly - the worst destruction since WW2. Then the defeat, and massacres - and mass rapes.
And an arms embargo on Croatia! Which effectively prevented any sort of defense.
I don't agree with the cold civil war thing, but seemingly many people believe the civil war has already started. Glad I have no intention of going to the USA. I would agree with that it seems inevitable. So there's your lay down and contemplate.
People at work complaining up a storm about the cost of military aid to Ukraine while at the same time advocating a declaration of war against Russia as if that would be cheaper.
Most people in developed countries don't know what a real war is. With some exceptions, most "wars" in the last decades were mostly TV shows about NATO/US bombing some unfortunate army to smithereens. The possibility of deadly retaliation resides in the same part of viewer's brain as Terminator movie
This, and the positive view of being a hardliner lead to insane statements
I'm just surprised how few people remember all the articles about Ukrainian corruption over the last 8 years and the shelling and political crackdowns in the east of the country.
Mutually assured destruction is unlikely to happen. It is game theory advantageous to make other party believe you are an irrational agent while being the opposite. If non-nuclear systems require human input to arm and engage them, rest assured nuclear systems would be even more so.
That said, if people actually looked at the numbers, the military help provided by US to Ukraine is spare change compared to the cost of economic and political consequences of not providing it.
MAD is tricky. I would like to think once you get nuked a few times you won't retaliate to avoid MAD. But in reality it happens very fast, if you hit the enemy with enough nukes fast enough you might save a few cities. In the US urban sprawl type mega cities mean several typical warheads places strategically and getting past THAAD will need to succeed to wipe out a city. In both US and Russia, most of the rural population will be just fine after several waves of nuking it will be the aftermath (afterthought during battle) that will kill most. Critical civilian and military infrastructure will still be viable in many places with millions of lives that could be saves if you overehelm the enemy quickly enough.
> The system could track an object the size of a soccer ball from a distance of 300 miles (480 km), and its mission was to monitor Soviet ballistic missile testing in the reentry phase
Nah, at a distance things are quite alright. EM power decreases with the second power of distance. At shorter distances you really have to be careful! Fighter jets have 3 no-go zones: engine inlet, engine outlet, the radome.
The vast scale of the organized child sex abuse activity among Catholic clergy. I have a hard time understanding how such organized activity can be performed by people who literally fear divine judgement, so I am alarmed by the number of clergy who are evidently atheist.
But young people presumably enter the clergy driven by a deep commitment to faith. Yet something along the way seems to convince them that God isn't real at all. I wonder what that is.
Obviously they don't fear divine judgement. In other words, it is evidence that a large percentage of Catholic clergy simply doesn't believe in God. There are websites out there dedicated to religious clergy who doesn't believe in God but has no choice but to continue spreading BS.
> religious clergy who doesn't believe in God but has no choice
In what sense they don't have a choice? Catholic church won't kill you if you quit.
First, you can leave the religion entirely, then they have no power over you. Second, you can quit your job while staying in the church (as Pope Benedict did), and I think you probably can quit priesthood... but if even you couldn't, quitting the religion is always the Plan B.
So I suspect that the main reason for staying is that getting paid for talking BS is just too convenient. Not believing in God, but preaching to people who believe in God and believe that you are the speaker of the God.
The Washington Post being referred to as "Hard Left"
The Fed clearly deciding that it is time to crash the economy into the wall rather than allow workers to get raises... And everyone thinking this is clearly the appropriate policy action and very much past due.
Many UK citizens migrated to Portugal upon retirement. They have one of the best regimes re tax etc. for HMWI. Meanwhile, UK has inheritance taxes, high tax on pensions over £1m, etc.
Immigration rules play a major role, with certain countries offering HNWI accelerated routes to resettle.
Fact that my work is completely dependent on proprietary SW (Adobe) and os (Win). Every update brings me questions like... Should I switch my profession to be more independent? Every update brings features that I don't need, have to pay for it, need to update to fix/broke things, send more data, be more online, etc. Those companies shape my workflow, literally dictates me how to create. It may sounds trivial, but in large scale, there is no freedom.
Trying to explore topics in arbitrary depth made me realize that I actually do not know anything.
I know that I know nothing. - Socrates
At some point, you need to be practical. Being overly philosophical robs your time.
In an absolute sense, one can be argued not to "know" anything, except for the existence of one's own thoughts, as 17th-century philosopher John Locke pointed out. Even earlier, Descartes addressed when saying cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). While Descartes was attempting to "prove" logically that the world exists, his legacy in doing so is to have shown that one cannot have such proof, because all of one's perceptions could be false (such as under the evil demon or simulated reality hypotheses). But one at least has proof of one's own thoughts existing, and strong evidence that the world exists, enough to be considered "proof" by practical standards, though always indirect and impossible to objectively confirm.
I said to the lecturer in epistemology class once "I don't know anything." He said "Don't you know your name?"
Every time I cross a busy road, I bet my life on my certainty that I know where the cars are, when I must walk to avoid them etc. There are many other things like that in life.
Can do - part of the treatment is more or less about relating to the traumatic event(s) in a healthier way.
It stemmed from seeing comments here about a book called 'The Body Keeps the Score' reading the book and subsequently self identifying as suffering from trauma.
So I sought out an EMDR qualified psychologist in the city and started seeing them. It's been just over a year now.
Benefits so far have included an increase in self esteem and of quality in my relationships with my partner and my child, a promotion at work(due to increase in ability to be present without zoning out due to anxiety) - along with increased social awareness.
Am basically now less inclined to withdraw and hide from life.
The mind melter is how absent I've been for basically my whole life - and not for lack of trying either. It would be terrifying - all those years - basically a lifetime lost, but I am so glad to have some semblance of a life now. I didn't think it was possible TBH.
Wonderful, thanks for sharing that. I had a traumatic experience about 50 years ago that didn’t affect my life much except for an occasional nightmare. I mentioned this to someone who is a psychologist and she mentioned EMDR. We had two sessions, and no more nightmares, and also I can think of that episode now with no anxiety. Wonderful tech.
Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity[1]. The theory being stupidity is a moral failing rather than an intellectual one. I'm still wrapping my head around the implications of this.
The word "stupidity" is confusing, as people use it to refer to different things.
1) People can do stupid things, because they are mentally incapacitated, either permanently (e.g. mental retardation) or temporarily (e.g. drunkness, tiredness). There is nothing they can do about it, so it is morally neutral. In case of drunkness, the moral failure could be getting drunk, especially if you know it will result in you doing stupid things.
2) Willful (and often joyful) irrationality. This is the kind that Bonhoeffer points to, I think. I agree that it is a moral failure, but for many people "morality" simply means "what my friends approve of"; so if they get irrational together with their friends and in the same way, they see no moral problem in doing so, and their friends would agree.
3) People can also do stupid things simply because they are misinformed, either by mistake, or by being manipulated. That again is morally neutral. If it was a mistake, and they get feedback that they are wrong, now they have a moral choice: either start thinking and stop doing stupid things, or double down (which now makes it willful irrationality).
Yes, from this perspective, many people are immoral. Note that even a group that seems "homogenously stupid" from outside can still contain all three kinds of members; some members are willfully irrational, others only made the mistake of trusting the former.
I find it a bit tragic that my comment is being downvoted. Maybe the downvoters think I should be relaxed about my government breaking national and international laws?
Perhaps you could elaborate on the specific laws being broken? HN is international, so not everyone knows about or is as focused on the issues you care about.
No problem. They created new national laws for covid 19 enforcing lockdowns etc and then were photographed repeatedly breaking them, and eventually the prime minister was fined by police. On the international front, the same government negotiated with the EU and signed an agreement relating to Brexit and the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. They have now, a short time later, decided to unilaterally change the contract, breaking international law. The EU are now taking the UK to court.
The Uk was a pretty decent place up until around 2008, now its much further along the train of stripping back every function of government than even the US. The entire media is in the government's pocket, we even had a literal conspiracy to intentionally lose elections from members of labour.[1][2][3]
Unlike the US, even the police departments don't escape cutbacks...
yes. I live in Scotland and am not a conservative voter but through the Cameron/May days I found myself in disbelief but the current PM and government are playing the trump playbook
Sturgeon is doing the same thing. Towing the Globalist/Neo-Liberal playbook. Allowed to get away with stoking nationalist ideology because she's pro-EU. Which reminds me - how is independence for Scotland a meaningful pursuit if you'll immediately attempt to join the EU?
> Sturgeon is doing the same thing. Towing the Globalist/Neo-Liberal playbook. Allowed to get away with stoking nationalist ideology because she's pro-EU.
She is definitely stoking nationalist ideology, but she is absolutely not towing the neo liberal playbook. Scotland is consistently pushing in the opposite direciton of the England in the areas that would come under the neo liberal agenda. She's also not taking the same plays as the UK government by doing things like trying to leave the ECHR to ship 1000 migrants to rwanda, and she's not taken the Trump play of "if I have enough scandals, none of them will stick".
> Which reminds me - how is independence for Scotland a meaningful pursuit if you'll immediately attempt to join the EU?
The Scottish government have published a document [0] which explains it, but the key point is this (from the linked document)
But the point is this: in an independent Scotland, crucial decision-making power will rest with the people who live here – not with Westminster governments that do not command the support of people in Scotland, and which pursue policies, for example, Brexit, that are deeply damaging to Scotland's interests.
Westminster has shown repeatedly since indyref that it's interests are _not_ aligned with Holyrood's interests. Using the Brexit vote as an example, there was a supermajority for remaining in Scotland, with every region in scotland voting to remain [1], and yet here we are. In the UK general election in 2019, Scotland overwhelmingly voted for the SNP [2] and the only conservative seats are the lizard support who will vote blue even if it was Sturgeon running for the Conservatives. Meanwhile, England voted for a majority Conservative government, in direct opposition to what Scotland voted for and wants.
The argument for Scotland leaving the UK isn't "we want to join the EU", it's "we don't agree with the direction the rest of the union is going in, we're still open to working together but we want to work with you, not for you".
The concept of infinity. I believe the Universe was a collision of two older Universes that slammed together. Two Universes among an infinite number of them.
There have probably been a few Tik-Tok things that have had me scratching my head. Here is something similar:
Andrew Tang demonstrating there is still hope for humanity: taking down Stockfish in Ultrabullet Chess (for the uninitiated, each player has to play all their moves in 15 seconds):
Here is something that's going to melt your mind (and maybe your body too): Global warming is real.
Now, I'm not claiming that global warming due to our CO2 emissions is real. (that's up for a debate that I won't get involved in). But our temperatures are raising every year (at lease across the Mediterranean) and consistently. I'm afraid they are getting a bit too high for stability and if the trend doesn't somehow reverse; there will be real tragic consequences.
And math. I was astounded how long it took me to do basic math as I haven't touched any equations or performed any non-trivial calculations for a few years. 8(
Trying to look positively, the leap forward in vaccines and mRNA
really restored my good feeling about some areas of technology. Many
great things like HIV vaccines can, and are emerging. It melts by
brain that humans are capable of solving extremely challenging
scenarios when we work together, but have to wait until things reach a
crisis point before doing so.
This is countered by the very negative descent into technofascism, but
I remain hopeful because medical advances cannot be "undone", whereas
technological authoritarianism is at least a treatable and reversible
condition.
While I share your optimism I do not agree with this particular argument for two reasons: the preventable disaster that is US healthcare shows how structural issues can undo whatever benefits expert knowledge might otherwise have given us (look at insulin price hikes, for example), and the fragility of said expert knowledge.
Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will never stop. You'll hire new people, they'll see it's a shit show, and leave as soon as their relocation bonus expires.
This brings me no joy either. I'd much rather stay on one place for long, rather than go through various interview hazing rituals every couple of years just to escape the madness and get a decent inflation adjustment.
2) Western governments quadrupling the amount of money in circulation in the last two years, EU governments ignoring sane energy independence policies for decades, then blaming all the rampant inflation and soaring energy and real estate prices solely on the war in Ukraine, and telling the working class to tighten their belts and turn down the heating, while the upper class has never seen better days as their assets appreciated to new heights.
And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board, passing policies that work against the people's intersts.
"Exhales"