It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management.
When I worked at Google everyone always said their favorite thing about work was their coworkers but when push came to shove they aren't willing to organize to help them. I get why many people don't want to organize but it made me happy to be gone, without cooperation they've just continued to be yanked around by management. I loved my coworkers, when management was shitty to them I wanted to fight!
> It's sad that tech employees won't collaborate to push back on management.
Some employees are like the Boxer character from Animal Farm[1]. I vividly recall Amazon employees complaining about Amazon's new leadership principle "strive to be Earth's best employer", and once the job cuts started to hit home there were employees attacking fellow employees with jabs such as "being the Earth's best employer means those who do not like it should just leave", and "you're whining here but 10 would eagerly take your place".
One of the biggest scams is making you believe that your fellow employees are looking out for your best interests, as there were no backstabbers around.
When I worked at a big company I did a lot of mentoring and the dissonance between what people I mentored thought was the "right thing to do" and what it seemed like the organization wanted them to do (enforced via performance reviews or other mechanisms) was a huge hurdle for new engineers. Especially early in your career you're just one engineer in a huge org and most people eventually decide it's easier to go with the flow than fight against it (or they leave) but it was a struggle for people to get there.
This post seems the logical conclusion of that. Why spend your time and stress doing work that your boss doesn't appreciate? Just give them what they want, it's their job to align that with greater organizational goals.
All this being said I did not love working at a big company, partially for these exact reasons.
Not sure if / who am I quoting, but this thought isn't my for sure: the more layers of management the company has, the more times the incentives are inverted between the planning at the very top and the implementation at the very bottom.
It does often feel like Chinese whispers to the people at the very bottom: the orders make no sense whatsoever due to the distortion coming from the middle management. And, I totally agree with your assessment that OP sounds kind of sarcastic about the whole thing. Also the way they phrase it suggests it: it's not even what your boss wants, it's what's going to make your boss happy (if the boss is an idiot, they might want things that will end up making them feel sad, but that only makes your job harder as now you should also anticipate what would actually make them feel happy rather than dully following their advice.)
My parents were very supportive of me emotionally and I turned out a lot more resilient than many my peers, especially the ones told to "suck it up". The takeaway from the anecdote about children getting hurt on playgrounds isn't to just ignore them, you need to support them if they are actually hurt. My reading is that they aren't forcing kids to stay home and parents can choose to have kids stay home, I don't see an issue with letting parents decide.
It's hard to see where on the line this is between "supportive" and "coddling" without knowing the kids, for example one of my best friends is a woman married to a trans woman and is worried about needing to move states if a conservative wins. She absolutely has a good reason to be upset if conservatives win nationally and in our state as she's worried she won't be allowed to keep her marriage or her wife will have trouble accessing healthcare (it's already hard for her to find doctors who are accepting)
Edit: to be clear I dealt most things on my own growing up but reliable support helped me (and other people in general) learn healthy coping mechanisms and resilience. Who cares if the school lets parents decide for their own kids what they need, kids are different (and they are still kids)?
Some anti-cheat has clients for Linux (the ones that don't generally just disallow playing on Proton). I don't think the Linux ones are kernel level but don't quote me on that.
I would say competitive markets more than capitalism are responsible for that and we've seen many many cartels and monopolies (even with legislation against them) so it's weird to imply that they aren't fairly very common. It also doesn't need to be a full cartel, there is a lot of tacit collusion between companies or other mechanisms where they don't really compete.
Wait, why wouldn't I want my own robotaxi if it's cheap enough? Unless taking taxiw is much cheaper it seems much better to own one, especially for electric cars which have less maintenance requirements.
A lot of people I know like their cars and don't want to take taxis everywhere. Maybe I'm missing how it wouldn't be appealing to regular people.
I'm not say no one would want this. I'm saying that it's odd play. Most people that own their own cars do not want the limits of 2-seaters. 29k is a price point that appeals most to private buyers. If robotaxis exist, a lot of people would opt to not own a car at all.
Hypothetical here, but my mum's 88 and various relatives have had to give up driving around age 90 due to becoming dangerous, so I've been kind of looking out for something like this that could get her around in that event.
Another thing re the price point, in other news "Apollo launched its sixth-generation robotaxi at Apollo Day 2024 in Wuhan, Hubei province today, costing 200,000 yuan ($27,670), a 60 percent drop compared to its predecessor." https://cnevpost.com/2024/05/15/baidu-apollo-launches-6th-ge...
So maybe they are trying to keep up with the Apolloses. Which are actually out there taking rides - they are similar to Waymo.
I mean if the cost is the same then yeah you might as well own it, but that seems unlikely, unless you're in the car for most of the day. Owning means you'll need your own insurance and do your own maintenance (yes, EVs require this). What's the actual advantage to owning the car? So you can leave your stuff in it? Not owning it will force you to take your stuff out, which you should be doing anyway!
> if the cost is the same then yeah you might as well own it
The cost per mile will be the same for whomever owns the vehicles, thus i think many will likely be in the position where they would pay at minimum equal, and likely more by adding in a middleman. For a parallel look into the critical point of usage when renting a vehicle is cheaper per year than owning one today.
> What's the actual advantage to owning the car?
Minimal latency to go. No dependancy on availability of vehicles so you can be fully in control to meet your commitments.
The primary place this is an issue is competition at rush hours or holidays, where a large percentage of the population are all in commute simultaneously all delocalized from each other. An operator would need nearly 1 specific car for each of all of them in order to guarantee each could make their commitment… so, if cost is similar, and one vehicle needs to be guaranteed for you anyways, the questions becomes why wouldn’t people ensure that themselves by owning it?
"Humans and proto-humans have been eating large herbivores as the majority of our diet since ~2M years ago"
I'm pretty skeptical that this specific type of meat was a majority of the diet by itself and I can't find anything to actually back that up. I struggle to find anything to back up most of what you said but the start was what jumped out at me the most.
It seems early hominids gradually went from omnivores to almost exclusive carnivores with a strong preference for megafauna - up until their prey's decline and their subsequent return to other primary nutrient sources. While exact diets are hard to reconstruct and subject of debate, there seems to be little doubt that humans hunted said megafauna to extinction, which also had a significant effect on human evolution in many ways. The development of our larger brain needed lots of energy for example and hunting provided 10x more energy per hour of effort than gathering plant based nutrients. Larger brains generally seem to trend with consumption of more energy dense foods. Our ability to store much more fat and fast for longer times than other primates also seems to have developed from the need to hunt primarily large animals dispersed over wide areas.
I get why it doesn't immediately need a prototype (I feel like there's a pretty obvious situation where someone has an idea and needs funding but wouldn't get funding without a patent). I don't get what the benefit is of never requiring one
People with ideas should be allowed to obstruct others that also have ideas but also the means to implement them. The world is improved by new inventions, not new theoretical inventions. The intent of the patent system is increase commerce and benefit the public.
The world is improved both by new inventions and theoretical inventions. Patents were intended to be a way to ensure that knowledge would spread while still ensuring that inventors get paid. Unfortunately, the chosen mechanism of monopoly for that financial incentive goes against the spirit of patents. A much better mechanism would be compulsory licensing, which would do much to foster competition and fair pricing.
When I worked at Google everyone always said their favorite thing about work was their coworkers but when push came to shove they aren't willing to organize to help them. I get why many people don't want to organize but it made me happy to be gone, without cooperation they've just continued to be yanked around by management. I loved my coworkers, when management was shitty to them I wanted to fight!
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