These are almost exactly my thoughts as well coming from a 2015 MBP. I would only add that for me, I actually like the new keyboard. The low/firm travel of the keys is actually preferable for me. I felt like the old keyboards were "mushy". That's obviously a personal preference, however.
Sure, that's possible but then you're just dealing with relatively blind speculation. I would assume there's no issues on the investment side unless there's strong reason to believe there is.
RMarkdown and Knitr are dramatic improvements in terms of final outputs and VC relative to notebooks. Notebook believers (Satan worshippers, imho) would suggest that notebooks are best for developing in and not primarily made for use as final outputs.
Why? Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder?? What is your calculus that helped you arrive at it being the case that the now former monetary incentives' value was outweighed by the decrease in worker health that you have perceived?
In every thread like this, there's an argument like yours, taking the absolutist view that individual workers should have unlimited freedom ("completely and totally incapable," as you wrote) to sacrifice themselves for money. In the micro sense, you are possibly correct. However, as a society, we have decided at the macro level that no, workers are not free to make that decision because to do so would inherently drive the collective working environment to the bottom.
We make rules about a lot of things to protect the collective good at the sacrifice of the individual. Workers are not free to decide that climbing a tall tower without a safety harness so as to go faster and complete more jobs for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to put their unprotected hands into fast-moving machinery so as to be more efficient and complete more piecework for more money is acceptable. Workers are not free to decide to inhale toxic gases, labor in buildings without sanitary facilities, or be worked non-stop until the worker passes out from exhaustion. (These are, of course, generalities but, again, we as a society have also decided that carve-outs can exist where required but these are the exceptions to the wide rule.)
I would also note that the person to whom you replied expressed a favorable opinion of the trade-off for health against money not being made. No rule or law was proposed. That, too, is part of what society does: we debate things in good faith, not with the assumption that an opinion is a dictate by fiat. These rules are generally considered acceptable and good. It is up to you, the person with the view opposed to the current situation, to express why you disagree instead of simply turning the question back on the person commenting.
I'm not taking an absolutist view at all. I was asking questions challenging a blanket statement without any supporting evidence that the workers or society or some very broad concept's welfare was improved by removing performance based incentives. I don't even make a positive statement at all.
These incentives are totally and completely voluntarily pursued by the individual workers. It doesn't appear in anyway that these incentives present greater danger or risk to the worker beyond the worker's own choice to increase effort and therefore whatever risk is increased comes from voluntary effort within the confines of the job. Sure, society makes rules around workplace safety (many of which can be reasonably debated) but those are not made in the context of how much effort a worker puts into their role but rather the conditions within which the worker's role places them. The difference here is in the power balance. The view society takes around safety rules is that we don't want a worker coerced into a scenario by the tyranny of their need for wages that is greater than a reasonable level of risk. That's fine, but that's not what's at stake here. These are workers who have opted into roles, in work environments that aren't exorbitantly risky and are then incentivized to increase effort beyond expected baseline with bonuses. The person I responded to claimed that the removal of these was good without any evidence or reasoning. Do you claim that similar performance bonuses in white collar careers are similarly amoral?
I would note that the person I replied to explicitly stated that the removal of performance bonuses was good without stating any evidence for such. In polite societal debate, I've never in my life seen someone suggest that a person stating naked opinions on the benefits or costs of a scenario shouldn't be challenged to provide evidence for their statements let alone seen someone suggest that asking for evidence or reasoning is not only inappropriate but should instead be provided by the challenger. Very strange.
You make a great point. We have to be careful when we design a race to the bottom. We don't let companies do it to themselves, so we shouldn't let them do it to their employees.
There's also the fact that if you are free to choose it, you could also be pressured to choose it. Like companies that give you the freedom to cash out your vacation instead of taking it. It'd be great because not all of us want to go on vacation every year.
But unless there's a mandatory minimum vacation, some employees will be pressured into literally never taking a vacation. Think of Japanese work culture. Top down work-life balance measures are completely ignored because they're not mandatory.
I mean, can't this argument be made against ALL worker protections? We don't need OSHA, workers should decide for themselves how dangerous they want to be. We don't need minimum wage laws, workers should decide. We don't need overtime laws, let workers decide.
We have seen what happens when you remove all restrictions on how employers can treat workers - workers get horribly abused and often times die. If you think this wouldn't happen to modern workers, go look at what goes on in Dubai and the UAE.
If you look at a graph of historical workplace deaths you can’t tell where OSHA was enacted. There’s no change in the rate of decrease of workplace deaths. As far as minimum wage laws go less than 5% of the US workforce gets paid minimum wage, and unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit. Minimum wage laws are a great way to reduce workforce participation, just look
at France. Does the US even have overtime laws as such?
Dubai is part of the UAE for what it’s worth but it would be impossible to treat workers like that in the US because (a) the US does not do slavery, or indentured servitude outside prisons (b) you can sue people in the US because you have the rule of law and a functioning legal system where everyone has equal rights. Before OSHA if a worker got injured at your place they they could sue you, so most places had insurance, which got more expensive if injuries happened. People also notice if a workplace is more dangerous. They demand higher pay to work there.
> unpaid internships are both obviously beneficial to those who take them and ah, skirting the law to all parties’ benefit.
Unpaid internships are a great way to gate off poor people from high-paying jobs. No matter how beneficial they are to the intern, if said intern can't afford rent and food while on your internship it's simply not an option for them. Unpaid internships have no place in a society that wants to consider itself a meritocracy because the primary qualification for an unpaid internship is not merit but a well-off family.
If you can afford to not work for three or four years while getting a Bachelor’s and the tens of thousands of dollars you pay in tuition you can afford to do a six month unpaid internship.
What you say is absolutely true but if unpaid internships are a problems journalism schools and other forms of credentialist gatekeeping are much worse.
If the choice existed would you rather go to Columbia Journalism School it spend two years working for the New York Post unpaid? Wouldn’t you get more and more valuable experience as a dogsbody for a fashion photographer than doing a degree in photography?
Credentialism is bad for the sane reason unpaid internships are bad but does vastly more damage to oppprtunity.
OSHA is why I can't have a perfectly normal UL-listed power strip at work, but somehow a UPS (with a battery full of lead and sulfuric acid) is perfectly fine. Every place where I'd want a power strip, I have to use a UPS.
Possibly, but generally the difference is one of power structure. With OSHA, workplace safety laws are put in place to protect workers from the tyranny of their need for wages. People need to work and therefore their workplaces should pose a maximum amount of risk that society defines as reasonable. What's at stake here is not the general safety environment of the employee but rather the amount of effort the employee VOLUNTARILY chooses to exert. Who are we to define how much effort an employee chooses to exert? Who are we to define incentives that encourage a worker to exert more effort? None of this seems reasonable to me.
It would be nice to hear opinions from the workers at amazon.
I find it very compelling to agree with you. But i also like to make my own decision, to negotiate. My ideal, at least. And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world. And I also think, its a two way street. I will not risk my life, and Amazon does not want dead people.
And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
I can only speak for myself as an Amazon fulfillment center employee... I haven't directly witnessed any of the horror stories people tell about working there, but knowing the culture as I do, I would not be surprised at all that such things happen. Someone complained on the VOA board where I work about having been docked for time off task when they had to clean up after their own nosebleed, but that's anecdotal. You read about people having to pee in bottles to make quota, people passing out from heat exhaustion, people being forced to stand on injured feet because Amazon has a policy against employees sitting for any reason. Enough anecdotes pile up, though, and it smells like data.
The thing is, not everyone working at Amazon is a young, single person without any ties, who can afford to simply quit at a moment's notice and not worry about the risk of unemployment, or losing healthcare. So it's not a binary situation where if Amazon's employees are willing to work there, then clearly they must be willing to accept anything the company does because otherwise they would quit. For low income people, the cost of quitting can be significant, much more so if they have families to support.
Which is why regulations are necessary - because the relationship between employer and employee is not equal, as is often assumed in a perfectly ideal free market model. The ability of a company to coerce their employee due to holding arbitrary power over that employee's livelihood must be limited somehow, and there must be some means by which consequences can result for bad actors.
In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones. That's not a game most people can win alone against a billion dollar corporation.
>In an unregulated market, there are no bad actors, only inefficient ones.
The history of planet earth is full of bad actors in all kinds of markets, regulated or not. The animal kingdom is full of examples of deception. Seeking personal gain at the expense of others is a very deep feature of life.
> And i expect my elders and seniors to teach me about the dangers in this world.
My personal elders and seniors don't know the first thing about how to judge whether workplace chemicals would be harmful to me or not.
They're just other human beings, very fallible like myself.
As long at it seems decently run, I trust a government agency full of experts and reams of research over the elders and seniors I happen to know personally, who are generally totally lacking in both expertise and knowledge in most areas, any day.
I do not mean my personal elders, or, if you will, my parents or friends.
What i mean is, in whatever workplace i worked so far, there were people telling me, what not to do. Surely playing around with me at first, but always keeping me away from dangers.
In the long run, well, i agree, that there are many things, that are not very obvious to me. Like office work, sitting in the chair all day, not moving, looking at screens all the time. But iam sure my boss does not mean no harm. He surely looks more at his phone than me on a screen. We get smarter over time, i hope.
> And is US and Dubai really comparable? Why do people go so far, to work there? Don't they tell their relatives at home, how shitty it is? Why are they going? Why do they risk it? And who am i to judge their decision making?
Because people taking this up live in even worse conditions in some of the most abject poverty there is and they have no way to climb up the social ladder that doesn't involve saving some money with this kind of work even at the expense of their physical safety.
And here i am confused. So from their perspective, they can achieve something better for themselves, with that risk. And from my perspective, i see it as abuse of their situation, because iam on a different cushion level, where i dont have to risk my life for my job.
Because Taylorism is a blunt instrument that is marginally effective.
If you’ve ever worked in an environment with those sorts of incentives, it’s immediately obvious that they are loosely related to productivity and turn into tools of favoritism and control.
Amazon isn’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They no doubt concluded that just focusing on objective, easily controlled measurements like hours ultimately made more sense. The workers themselves are disposable anyway.
Besides, the workers now have more guaranteed income that can be invested in Amazon stock! They gain the freedom of dollar cost averaging.
Are the workers completely and totally incapable of deciding for themselves what the proper tradeoff between increased income and whatever decreased health comes from working harder??
Such a decision would be short-lived, as the level of work required to maintain bonus-level status would become the new baseline. Minimum wage + bonus will become your new pay structure.
Citation needed. This makes no sense. There's always going to be heterogeneity in output per worker in every role. Amazon pays for a baseline of expected output and wants to ensure that within a role they can manage to capture those workers whose productivity will exceed that. To do so, they provide performance bonuses. Not everyone will get the performance bonuses. Amazon is willing to pay the bonuses because the increased output is worth the increased cost. This race to the bottom isn't at all aligned with reasoning and could only happen in a monopsony which Amazon is obviously not.
For white collar roles, we don't claim performance tied compensation will lead to this, but you do here. Why?
I think if you compare R's tidyverse to Julia, you aren't at all in Julia's wheelhouse. Julia's value comes from algorithm development primarily, not from interacting with data.frame type objects. If you really want to speed up that, use data.table in R. It'll provide you with the fastest data.frame implementation around.
As an alternative, I personally love the keyboard of the 2018 Macbooks and I'm not sure I'm aware of dramatically better CPUs that could be put inside of them? Certainly my new 13" with the upgraded CPU is fantastic. I would like a better GPU, but I can use an external GPU if needed. The disk speed is I think literally unparalleled, the screen is fantastic, the touchpad is the best in class, the T2 chip provides great security... I quite like my upgrade from my early 2015 13".
They could focus on cooling, which would enable them to throttle the CPU less often. The recent firmware update helped with the throttling but it still runs extremely hot.
There is a reason for Apple's position though. Many/most of these MacBook Pros are being used in professional work environments which expect your laptop to be silent.
I've been in quite a few meetings with the fans going to 100% and it's incredibly disruptive. So whilst you have options to increase the fan speed the defaults are understandably kept quite conservative.
This is a fair point. At the same time, though, they have very few exits for hot air and could improve passive cooling by making the MBP slightly thicker (gasp!) and adding larger heat sinks.
Alternatively, they could add first-party support for fan-profile configuration. The needs of a dev or designer or video editor do not match the needs of an accountant or an executive. The ability to easily switch between profiles to match task would be extremely useful, I think.
A bigger chassis with a bigger/twin heatpipe and bigger holes to vent the heat from are completely silent ways to increase cooling performance. In fact they could even be utilized to make the fans even more silent depending on the workload.
Fair point. I've been in a conference room where I had a video going on my 2013 MBP with headphones in and the guy next to me asked me to stop whatever was running my fans so hard. Those things can get loud.
The most recent MBPs were being throttled after mere seconds of 100% CPU due to the poor heat management and poor fan profiles; Linus Tech Tips was able to go from sealed box to throttled CPU in under 20 minutes without even trying. A firmware update to address the fan profile issue improved this but it still has issues.
The MBPs were not really designed to handle the heat of an i9
This is fair. I don't have a ton of heat issues but they could allow me to easily bump fan speed earlier on in the process of heating up. Would be a welcome addition.
There are plenty of public companies that reach a steady state. What happens for those companies is their PE ratios shrink, they start paying out dividends and their expectation is to be a big lumbering giant whose valuation isn't expected to have dramatic swings based on outsized expected future earnings. What happened here is not "Wall Street" saying that Twitter must die, it's saying "Hey, your newly expected future earnings are no longer able to justify your prior valuation and therefore here's your new valuation based on all currently available information".
Okay so twitter has been in a "valued based on anticipated growth" state. And other companies can matriculate to a "valued based on reliable dividends" state? This I can understand. Thanks.
Yes. Bear in mind tech companies are terrible at paying dividends. Google has never paid one, Apple only really started after Jobs' death. No dividends means no reason to hold a stock unless you think the value will go up significantly (and ultimately the value is driven by an expectation that one day divis will be issued).
Facebook and Twitter are getting hammered because it's clear they're spending insane quantities of cash on attempting to "cleanse" their platforms of undesirables. Facebook alone announced they were going to hire tens of thousands more people to work on "security" (lol). That bloated spend reduces future dividend potential and causes their stock to be less valuable.
All this is new territory, mind you. This is why older traditional/value investors like Buffett don't dabble in tech. The PE ratios are through the roof and we don't know what it will mean once we start seeing these companies truly decline.
