The vast majority of people make a very stupid decision by selling to a dealer and not selling private party.
A lot of Americans become very low IQ in the context of any car related financial decisions. Off loading their vehicles is one of the classic examples of this. Do NOT sell to your dealer. Carvana is the only exception and only because you can easily offload messed up cars to them without disclosing it.
It depends. I've gotten good prices from CarMax before, but like the other responder said, you have to research.
The other thing is that it's not always low IQ, but many people value simplicity. Do I want to show a car, deal with cashiers check fraud, flakey people, etc... or do I want money literally right now? I've sold cars to CarMax and I've sold cars and boats privately. The private price I think I can get has to be considerably more than what I can get with zero hassle.
It is obvious that the "suburb-to-downtown commute" lifestyle arrangement of America is not scalable, wasteful and a massive quality of life drain. Yet we're committing to it, why? Because the employers don't want to pay more in unemployment insurance and try to lay you off in some roundabout way? This is maddening.
This is practically unavoidable because of how economies work. People want to live near jobs, and jobs want to be near people. So we get congregations of people (urbanism).
It's not like these tech companies actually want to be in a high COL area paying out big fat salaries and paying exorbitant rent on their "campus" nobody cares for. But they want the talent, so they play ball.
> Human contact is more important than efficiency gains, hence mandating return-to-office.
First, citation needed. Second, in this day and age companies try whatever they can to ruin in-office employees' morale as well, which goes counter to the position that social quality of life is important for efficiency.
Poe's law strikes again, I should have added "/s" at the end of my message.
If I had to rewrite my previous message in a less subtle way, it would be that companies are constantly contradicting themselves when giving any public "reason" for their actions, and I do not think employees' happiness (which fathomdeez focuses on) is anywhere close to their actual reason.
The endless Q&A between employees and bosses show that it's not about collaboration, and bosses aren't saying what it's really about. None of their answers make sense.
I figure that's intended as a "gotcha", but a hallmark of any autocracy, fascism included, is the factional fights and purges. And few understand, but being an early supporter of fascism actually increases one's statistical chances of ngmi.
We reached the peak social fabric decay era and the whole new "empathy is weakness" orthodoxy right on the verge of mass unemployment. The worst possible timing. If oracles of AI are right, the aggregate suffering is going to be immense.
Neither will _modern_ manufacturing plants. Regardless, unemployment has not been a big problem in the US so far, and if you say that the recent mass gig/under employment is no longer sufficient for (american dream|middle class lifestyle|male ego), then the sweatshops and coal mines won't be better at all.
Ethics aside, we do not understand the technology enough to disentangle its outputs from the biases of its inputs. See the "Emergent misalignment" paper. The founder is clearly seeking to inject his ideology into this technology, so it is prudent to expect the technology to suffer in subtle and yet unidentified ways. This is Lysenkoism but for LLMs.
I guess the point is whether it's a private company collecting your data, the good government, or the bad government that gives the access to your data to random non-vetted individuals for fun, the end result is the same — your data ends up with people who have the ability and desire to cause you harm.
I forgot to follow up here, so apologies for the delay. Honestly, concise is a challenge here. Here is a lot of words, and they barely scratch the surface, but just in case they might be helpful:
- Embracing the idea of a manual valuable process is a great one - as engineers we often want to start by automating and/or building, and dive right in - only to realize later we either didn't understand the product, or our stakeholder didn't and now wants changes once they've seen what it does.
(Deeper dives here: "Escaping the Build Trap"[1], "The Minimalist Entrepreneur"[2]
- Understanding negotiation is extremely helpful as you are often operating under constraints, and need to get those across to your stakeholders such that you can both move forward together. Negotiation is basically about aligning two stakeholders with different goals and arriving at an arrangement they can both live with. (Highly recommend "Negotiate without Fear"[3])
- Another excellent concept surrounds the theory of constraints and getting good at recognizing bottlenecks, and subordinating all other processes to them. Essentially, if work is piling up somewhere, look at where it is coming from, and attempt to re-route those efforts to something productive (the bottleneck moves the same speed regardless of how much work is piled up in front of it). The classic book on this matter is "The Goal"[4] but a fun retelling more oriented around an IT department is "The Phoenix Project"[5].
