Yeah I think it'll be location dependent. FWIW I've got both by me and they're equally terrible as far as the availability and knowledge of their employees. Lowes edges out Home Depot a tiny bit for me simply because I've never been accosted by a sanctioned in-store roaming sales person for solar or siding at Lowes (yet!).
I get hit up for gutter guards every trip at my Lowe’s. I have a stationary woman hawking Generac and HVAC installs at my Home Depot.
I’d agree though, it’s department dependent. The electrical at my HD is an unorganized mess, but their plumbing section is world-class. Lowe’s is oddly flip-flopped. To Lowe’s great credit, their staff has those little tablets with inventory locations on them including all the top-shelf and end cap locations the website doesn’t show. Those usually save my trip, HD doesn’t seem to have an equivalent.
I've found it to be very datetime dependent. I walking the aisles on a late Sunday night recently and the only time I saw an employee was at the self checkout before I left.
It's important to note that this is just Airbus's best guess as to the cause, as there's no smoking gun: they simply exhausted their troubleshooting and were left scratching their heads so this was the "least unlikely" cause they could come up with given the circumstances.
I thought the same, but in a deeper dive into the postmortem, I think it's not a cop out from their side. The report is actually really well done ( I personally was impressed). The reasons it probably was a bit flip is that the CPU did not have edac on it in this instance so bit flips are expected. The consensus mechanism failed in this case and that is what they are updating, because even though the module gave wrong data because of presumably bit flips, the consensus should have prevented the dive.
Not going to happen. The potentially huge cost to their reputation alone makes it not worth it, the modification would cost money and make logistics more difficult, and the plane couldn't be used (or sold) worldwide anymore.
Isn't a major feature of consensus algorithms for them to be tolerant to failures? Even basic algorithms take error handling into account and shouldn't be taken out by a bit flip in any one component.
My reaction was initially that it was a cop out, but looking a bit in the report and thinking things through, I think that, yes, it's most likely a bit flip.
You've reminded me of the hellscape of Microsoft's "help" forums filled with people asking specific questions and getting their question closed with a barely-relevant response followed by many others commenting, essentially, "me too! why won't anyone help us?"
I think we have a surplus of "awareness" tools/websites that are great at what they do, but not much "rubber meets the road" tools to guide the user in actually taking action based on the information presented. I, for one, feel a huge sense of fatigue at the amount of awareness I have of problems I don't have the tools/strategies/knowledge/time to solve.
(This is not a negative comment about this post btw, more just commentary on how the fire hose of "look at how bad this is in excruciating detail" can be overwhelming.)
Dubious or non-existent performance numbers, self-aggrandizing references to being in close contact with other, more famous/infamous CEOs/people, and the bluster of urgency as a smokescreen to hide the lack of anything concrete throughout- this Blake Scholl is following the Elon Musk playbook to a "T".
100%! I will always give the benefit of the doubt when I see odd syntax/grammar (and do my best to provide helpful correction if it's off-base to the extent that it muddies your point), but hit me with a wordy, em-dash battered pile of gobbledygook and you might as well be spitting in my face.
I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac. Allying to price-fix is one thing, but surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?
MS (or any large company for that matter) didn’t participate in BLM discussions and get speakers to describe themselves and list their pronouns because they thought it was virtuous or right, they were just following the cultural zeitgeist in a way that they thought would make them more money.
Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.
It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.
There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.
I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.
>surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?
I think that's the point, using "pressure from the administration" as an excuse to nix culture war entanglements they got themselves into over the previous ~10 years. I think the "modern titans of industry" have wanted to dip out of this stuff for some time and felt stuck. Now they can do so while having plausible deniability (it was da govamint made us do it!)
The only reason implemented these measures in the first place was because of pressure from the other side of the political spectrum. It's hardly surprising that pressure from the opposite direction will make them walk it back.
DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.
The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.
Whatever DEI was supposed to accomplish in theory, in practice it was token hiring to make the PR (yes, not even the HR) department happy. And it very fast developed is own "old boys club" hiring one another and spreading through companies.
I don't know why you're being down-voted, I've seen diversity hires placed in charge of projects and destroy them. When you weren't promoted for merit you stop believing merit matters, and quickly build diverse teams with no experience incapable of building things in a timely manor.
Sure but the practical result of considering diversity is you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project. Projects fail or run over budget all the time with the best engineer, so hiring fifth best engineer for a project to achieve a particular diversity requirement feels irresponsible at best.
> you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project
I don't think this has actually been proven as of yet, since "best" is a very loaded word, especially you're required to measure on more than one axis. (But feel free to point me to any source that disagrees with me.)
I think you're misunderstanding; this is a logical exercise. The best is a hypothetical ranking, and to add a independent variable which means we must detract from hiring the best person. To disagree would be to say someone is better strictly because of the color of their skin.
It's like if you were tasked with buying the most powerful engine produced for a locomotive. How you define powerful is arbitrary and is an optimization problem on its own, but if you then say "and the engine block must come from the factory painted red" you are, by definition, no longer optimizing for the fastest engine, you're optimizing for the fastest red engine. Being red is independent from being the best engine.
If your logical exercise includes "interacting with other people" as a criterion, it would disqualify a lot of the people that you consider to be "the fastest engine", that's why I mentioned "multiple axis".
I do not approve of DEI methods as they usually get implemented in capitalist tech companies, but the underlying idea, encourage more groups with lower representation to participate in tech is sound, and it is what I'm advocating for in this exchange.
Western tech world is biased in favour of middle-class white men due to the fact that it's made out of mostly middle-class white men. You might not agree that's a problem, but most of the world does.
IMO, it's something more cynical. It's not bowing to pressure or whatever. Rather, the guys running marketing have realized a trick to getting attention is making some innocuous political statement that ultimately causes social media to freak out. For example, having a trans person advertise their beer.
These giants know that people are lazy, they aren't likely doing the effort to see all the product holding. And that people will forget the outrage when the next thing comes up. It also helps that a lot of the dumb reactions have been things like people buying their product only to angerly shoot it with a gun or run it over with a truck.
When time passes, so does the outrage. And what they've actually bought is a bit of unearned goodwill and forgotten badwill.
For three more years, and at significant risk of being basically neutered in a year (the polls aren't exactly going _great_ for him). Like, it's unclear how much accommodation one should be making to his delicate feelings.
I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.
While I don't think "corporations should be in charge", I also don't think a President should be dictating corporate culture or policy short of going through the proper channels of using Congress to write legislation that keeps corporations in check and doesn't allow their power and influence to grow too large.
But... uh... yeah that isn't happening either. Instead, those in power are helping each other out, at the expense of common citizens of the U.S. (and likely at the expense of people outside the U.S. too.)
> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.
If you dont, you could suddenly find that the thing you sell has a ridiculous tariff imposed on it. Then that might mean you sell a lot less. He has done much more for much less in the past.
If you make that thing in the US, good luck having the US government slap a tariff on it.
I mean, yes, Microsoft is international, and the president could probably find an angle to put a tariff on some part of their business. Not most of it, though.
There's a hell of a lot of power vested in the executive branch especially in the DOJ to really mess with companies and the real protection against it's misuse was the agreement that the President didn't directly instruct and control who the DOJ actually indicted. It used to be a notable event when a president even appeared to hint that he was encouraging investigations (not even indictments) into specific companies now we've got a president explicitly demanding the DOJ indict specific people and find any reason to do so, see Comey and Letitia James's recent indictments.
And, of course, since businesses are fundamentally in competition, that puts them in an interesting position: even if it's a net negative for the entire industry to capitulate to the bullying tactics of the executive branch, you can get a leg up on your competition by having one fewer giant complicated court case to worry about (even if the case is guaranteed to lose, it still costs money to defend it).
Yes, there's a lot of pressure to stay on his good side, even if the charges are bogus and eventually beaten or just ends in a pay-off like many cases the process is still damaging/costly and there's large incentives to pre-comply. Look at Apple's little gift plaque for an example of that, not really a bribe unless more laws are broken but a nice little ego stroke none the less.
So "democracy" [1], that term which is bandied about so much by those who seem to consistently fail at it.
[1] Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. You [2] voted for it, now you [2] get to keep it.
The OP was actually not questioning that at all. It was lamenting that they are bending the knee to someone unworthy of it, in furtherance of a culture war spearheaded by said someone. In particular, a glorified reality show egomaniac who treats their current job as a glorified reality show.
It certainly isn't useless information that the person is currently president, but that alone doesn't say much, because no presidents have ever acted this way before. The difference here is that this president is also a power-tripping glorified reality show egomaniac. Thus, the operant term is the latter, not the former.
The part which is relevant is that he’s willing to break the law in unprecedented ways and has the full support of the Republican Party in doing so. Americans used to pride ourselves on the government not controlling businesses.
Really? So like IBM getting big and then fading to Microsoft and then Apple and Google was a government plan? The government decided that American car manufacturers should lose to Japan but then pivoted back for … reasons?
This is not like “every other country”, it’s like corrupt authoritarian countries and you shouldn’t help cover for it by making excuses for corruption.
Sure, and again, that someone is also a 34-time convicted criminal and rapist. He wouldn't be doing these things if he wasn't predisposed to criminality and abusing people over which he has disproportionate power, or if he wasn't a malignant narcissist and glorified reality tv show egomaniac, with a track record of amoral transactional relationships aimed at improving his position at the expense of others.
So, your points and others' are all 'pretty relevant': we now have the means (provided by the article), the motive (provided by others), and the opportunity (provided by you). Thank you for your useful and equal contribution to the trifecta.
That's proved to be an idea only held up by the fig leaf of norms like the independence of the DOJ and the idea of the other two branches actually acting as a check on the others. Instead after the 70 year project we now have a compliant Supreme Court rubber stamping practically every action and flirting with ratifying the unitary executive as law. That plus a compliant Congress either ideologically aligned or cowed by the idea of his power over the voters means we very much have a President able to exert huge amounts of influence over companies.
For minor things with immediate payoffs like a pardon that seems correct. If you're ask is longer term though I'd be hesitant, he shows the same inclination to go with whatever the last person in a room wanted for longer term stuff, see his aggressive oscillations on Ukraine.
These companies had no problem resisting "the president". Heck, if Bernie Sanders or AOC were elected president, do you think they would bend the knee the way they do?
Trump is the president AND he is part of their in-group. They submit willingly.
Not really. This is one of the things Google got right; organize your company so founders have a controlling interest and it doesn't matter fundamentally what the investors think, they can't steer the company.
At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.
> At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.
Those baseball cards also come with some rights. The people running the company have a fiduciary responsibility to them. They cannot, for example, use the company as a piggybank.
It's a mistake to think corporations above a certain size care about anything other than getting more money for themselves and sharedholers.
If pushing diversity makes their goal easier then they'll do it, and if pushing diversity makes it more difficult then they'll back off of those initiatives.
The only thing they actually care about is what's best for their bottom line.
Nobody in the tech industry cares about DEI (most people I've met are downright hostile to the idea). All those companies in 2020 who hired DEI consultants and made big announcements about DEI and changed master to main were just buying cheap good will
Didn't Microsoft spend years basing the bonuses and performance reviews of middle management based heavily on the gender and race of who they managed to hire or promote?
The cynical take is that main was about shutting up Github employees protests against ICE contracts [1]. And it seemed to work: no more protests and another diversity consultant enriched.
Whatever they do, companies should not be doing quotas other than bringing in the people who will propel the mission.
Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline. From kindergarten, drive kids to want to participate in a dynamic economy instead of pursuing selling themselves short and perhaps getting involved in the underground economy, dead-end jobs, etc. Go give it a go in all areas of the nation that are under-served. That is the way to do it. If you do it any time later, like at hiring time, then you risk hiring on things other than merit.
So instead rely on public education which fails many students in delivering a quality education, or, having given up, just pass them to let them figure life out once they graduate.
It's not necessary that corps own the education, but they they have schools within a school to deliver the education that they are expecting from new graduates.
Public education is what made those great companies you fawn about.
Public education is also something you are responsible for as a citizen. If it is shit, it is so because you let it be. Assume your responsibilities instead of hoping for "enlightened" corporate lords to do it for you, peasant.
> Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline.
Previous company "did that", but what it amounted to was young HR women filtering all candidates before engineering saw them or their resumes, and you had to pick from their not-so-great candidates they got based on gender or race. Also interviewers could not see what other interviewers said - so we got bypassed as well behind the scenes
And I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to glorified twitter rants and non-technical HR busybodies who pushed DEI internally?
Yeah, because you know best. You never made any hiring mistake and you never have any bias whatsoever when you hire people. Who dared double-guess you, after you put all the effort of spending a few hours with each candidate?
You’re not responding to the post you’re replying to. I would’ve been happy to use tools to blind interview candidates. But that wasn’t what was asked - instead I was asked to racially discriminate against applicants.
The diversity efforts were companies bowing to government "egomaniacs" as you put it. If anything a more pure merit-based hiring is more in line with what companies and employees want
> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac.
In those terms it is equally perplexing for them to have bowed down to a geriatric dementia-addled has-been, to a deeply corrupt DEI hire, to a dynastical potato-brained fool, to a whoring sumb*tch, ... in other words to the leader of the 'free world' known as the President of the United States of America. Just because you don't like the current one does not mean he has less authority than any of the previous ones - especially compared to the previous 'democratic' iteration who had to be told where to walk, what to say to whom at what moment and had to be kept on a leash so he did not bumble off into the shrubbery during memorials.
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