I don't think they believe collusion isn't happening.
I think the argument above is that democrats are one of the drivers of building restrictions, leading to the ability to collude. If new entrants to the market were plentiful then the existing cartels would be undercut. Also, rent control puts a tight lock on the rental market by forcing landlords to keep their rents high lest they become locked into the low rents they may otherwise offer.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether to be on board with that assessment, but there is a reasonable argument to be made that a free-er market could actually benefit housing costs.
What this completely discounts is the existence of corporate landlords. Thousands of homes are being bought and kept empty to restrict that supply. It's ridiculous to destroy land used for other purposes just to build more empty houses and hope Blackstone et al. don't notice. It's also silly to hand those corporate landlords the right to jack up rents overnight as though they won't use it. The assumption that they'd rather have lower risk agreements over a longer period of time (e.g. lower rents now with slow increases year-to-year) is naively assuming that publicly traded companies will not attempt to maximize profits for the coming quarter.
This test is actually fairly well validated. The purpose isn't to specifically diagnose your problems, it is to find the floor for how much trauma you may have experienced. Sure, some may have had parents under the influence occasionally while others witnessed heavy usage in front of them. The point is that even for the "light" case, that is a significant issue.
Think of it as childhood trauma triage. It is a good first pass to help people understand their past and maybe help some people understand that their past is more traumatic than they realize.
I don't doubt it's well validated, and the point of it also is clear. Based on the questions I could appreciate exactly your point -- people with some mixture of traumatic experiences will score higher, people without (or with fewer) will score lower. I imagine, as a total laymen in this field, the intended application is surveying large groups to focus resources, or perhaps as intake material.
But sharing and comparing scores on an internet forum seems (to me, as a laymen) outside of the test's design purpose. Initially I thought I would share my experiences here, but like mentioned in other comments -- I just don't want to breathe life into any of that. I hope other people who participated in the discussion found catharsis at least.
ACE of 6, father of 3 under 7. I love fatherhood, but it is easily the most difficult leap of faith I've taken in my life. A majority of my coping mechanisms were based around quiet time to myself and that basically doesn't exist anymore for me.
Children are a deeply personal choice that make basically no sense. They are the ultimate selfless act, and much of the emotional damage children suffer is due to their parents not understanding this. They are exhausting, expensive, and time consuming... until you die. And every time you decide to use them for your own gain, it will cost them something.
To more directly address your point: children will force you to cope with their existence. Whether you have the ability to introspect on yourself during the process can turn that into growth is on you, not them.
If you don't mind me asking, what is your blood pressure with this abnormality? My gut feeling would be that it you have a much larger gap between your systolic and diastolic numbers than average?
That argument that GP is making isn't that low prices are bad for consumers.
The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers.
Sure, they may be a commodity product now. That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
It's also bad for consumers because they then have to migrate existing data to some new service (which is far from trivial for most consumers who don't know how to use rclone), and potentially face steep egress fees. Remember we're talking about the industry not just G. G doesn't charge egress fees for Drive, but many cloud storage providers do.
The strategy is "lock-in" and it's a primary part of the "go cheap or free to get customers" part, and it's bad for consumers. I'd much rather pay more in the short-term for cloud storage and not have to migrate later. Thank God for Back Blaze
> That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
What agreement? They offered a service with no guarantees that it would be provided in perpetuity. If they offered "free unlimited storage for life" and then backed out of that based on some legalese on page 75 of their EULA then I agree that would be slimy. But that is not what happened here.
> they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business
This can happen and when it does it is anti-competitive. But that is not what happened in this case. Do you really think that Google thought they could drive AWS and Microsoft out of business with below cost storage on Google Drive? Seems unlikely. And even if they somehow managed to do that, they would immediately have competitors undercutting them on price again as soon as they raised prices enough.
What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.
> What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.
This is the internet. Google has been around since the dawn of the popular internet. At this point, no one should be naive to the abuses that internet-facing services regularly encounter.
The correct thing to do here is not offer a fantasy service to customers. Now that they've offered a fantasy service, they should be on the hook for actually assisting the customers that have been locked into their service.
Admittedly, there's naiveté on both sides here. There difference is that the company is the one with the money and power, and they instigated this relationship by offering the service in the first place. They should shoulder the burden of fixing the problems they have created by attempting to undercut the market when it was beneficial to them.
It's clear that you haven't had to get an interview from a non-connection in the last year. It's a literal fucking nightmare unless you have connections that can literally hand you a job. I have 8 years of experience.
TL;DR: Connections don't mean shit. Companies require multi-hour takehomes and then ghost you. Every reply is automated unless you are moving forward. Recruiters take a week to reply to even the most basic updates.
For reference, I've job hunted twice in the last 2 years. The startup I joined in Feb of 2022 folded in Feb of 2023. My style is to treat it like a full time job, usually completely filling my schedule with interviews.
2022 stats: In 1 month I interviewed with 31 companies, received 6 offers in under 5 weeks and had a job secured making ~30% more than my previous role. Of the 25 companies that I stopped interviewing with, 13 were me cutting off the process to save time and 12 were rejections. So ~50% success rate depending on how well you count the 13 that I cut off.
2023 stats: First month I interviewed with 14 companies, was ghosted by 6 of them. GHOSTED. 3 of these were from direct referrals from friends and previous coworkers! Not even my connections could get information on my process! I interviewed just as strongly as my previous year and they vanish, not even with a rejection. Of the remaining 8, 4 were not actually software jobs and 4 were rejections that refused to elaborate at all.
Second month I interviewed with 34 companies. 12 ghosted me, 4 of which required a multi-hour take home assignment. With a mortgage and kids, I was doing it all.
Of the 22, 11 didn't work out for non-performance reasons (found candidate before I was through the process, recruiter misunderstood the role, company moved so slow that I couldn't complete the process). Of these 11, 4 were from connections! They could not get their internal recruiters to reply to me in less than 2 weeks.
Of the 11, I was rejected by 6. Again, with no feedback or even a response when I asked for it.
Of the remaining 5, I got an offer and ended the madness before waiting to finish my remaining 4 interviews.
I mean, the timeframe was also important there. Yes, that 16 months makes a huge difference right now. That's the exact time that I basically walked through my interviews to 6 offers.
RE Connections: I meant they only matter if they are high up enough to literally hand you a position. Anything lower than that (i.e. an IC referral) was completely useless in 7 different companies.
Conversely, 4 of my 5 employers in the last ~20 years in this industry have been through my network. I'm still I interviewing, but the process has been relatively painless for me otherwise, especially in the face of anecdotes like the GP and the OP.
The amount of value I get out of your service is nuts! No better place to figure out whether a multiplayer game is worth getting... Daily users is hard metric to game or lie about.
My observation of rental car companies is that they have figured out how to run on absolute skeleton crews.
I rented one earlier this month online. When I showed up they handed me a confirmation and told me to pick a car and drive, key was in the cup holder. They had a manned exit barricade to confirm the car you chose, but that was it. I'm not even sure they cared if I picked a car that I didn't reserve, the exit gate person scanned the car and reservation, so it probably would have just updated the reservation on the spot. I don't think it's even possible to predict with certainty what your inventory is going to be 2-3 days out with this sytem.
Just 2 people on the rental side, although I'm sure they have a cleaning/ turnover crew.
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