I think that this is a great point. It's also a little scary when you think about the data sets that exist out there for advertising. Any way that someone targets an ad could be the selection criteria for these efficient wars.
My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.
OK, can I just take a moment to say that cystic fibrosis sounds absolutely awful and I have a newfound horror of the disease coupled with a whole lot of sympathy for you and others who are living with it.
You are heard. I wish you only the best and I am sorry that you and others have experienced what you have.
One of the things that I am trying to maintain in the face of covid-19 is perspective. Generally this has meant that yes, something awful is happening, but that doesn't invalidate the wonderful things also happening and it's OK for me to feel joy. Now I also have some perspective that there are other absolutely horrible things and we should not minimize those either.
Yes, it's classified as a Dread Disease because of what it does to your entire life, not just your health and body.
Thank you for your kind words and good intentions.
But please note that there are good things in my life as well. The past decade or two have been pretty darn hard, but it's not all downside.
And because I have CF, I already do remote work and live like a germaphobe. So the pandemic is, so far, kind of an annoying inconvenience. And I'm trying to figure out how to provide solutions, such as:
In my experience, people feeling sorry for me doesn't pay my bills, doesn't get me any real respect, doesn't get my writing taken seriously or get me traction, etc.
If you are really sorry for what I have been through, then help me make all that suffering mean something. Help me get the word out and get some traction and make a difference.
Turn all those years of suffering into a learning opportunity for the world, not one more reason for everyone on the planet to hate me, treat me like I'm pathetic and generally ignore me and the things I have to say.
Make my pain make a positive difference in the world instead of just being a private burden.
I looked at the writepay link, and then the textbroker site. They said that they paid between $4 and $8 per assignment. Is that true? How long does an assignment take?
The pay varies, depending upon the word count and other variables.
How long it takes also varies.
When I started working for them, I sometimes made like $1.25/hour because I was homeless and deathly ill and blah blah blah and it would take me all afternoon to complete something wroth $5.
You do need to work at it and get good at it, but it can become a middle class income. I was clear it had a lot of potential upside when I began and it worked within the restrictions I had, so I kept working at it and slowly getting better.
I absolutely haven't yet hit any kind of ceiling. I could still work longer hours, increase my rating, etc. There is still a lot more money I could make. It's just up to me to make that happen by getting healthy enough, arranging my life that way, etc.
Then it sounds like it is a good solution for you and potentially could be a good solution for others who can write. I can see where people in IT (that's the typical audience here, right?) wouldn't care about work like that though. Most people in IT would rather do almost anything other than write, and I think most in the IT profession who can in the US can make more than $20 per hour on a 1099 basis, though that seems to vary greatly by type of writing and geographic location (I live in an expensive area so salaries/hourly rates are relatively high, though not the highest in the US).
a. Most people in IT are not the people suddenly laid off.
b. Quote from my post today:
Some years ago, I wrote a blog post trying to encourage people on Hacker News to develop other services on the Textbroker model. It was basically ignored. Maybe this time it won't be.
And maybe I should expand on that in specific. At some point.
I didn't post it here to suggest laid off programmers should become low paid writers. The people most people are worried about are things like restaurant workers making minimum wage.
Just as you replied to something I originally said to a different person, you aren't the only person reading any follow up remarks, nor will I be the only person reading your remarks. It's like a conversation happening on a stage with an audience of indeterminate size, but potentially thousands of people (or even tens of thousands).
It's always hard to figure out how to craft replies that both make sense to the specific person to whom I am replying and to the larger audience.
And this conversation has maybe gone places I didn't really want it to go and it would perhaps be best to just walk away at this point. I don't like being pitied and then people get mad about that and feel I am ungrateful.
Yes, I have a serious medical condition. But I also have a lot of mojo and a lot of accomplishments to my name, though they are accomplishments that don't do a heckuva lot for a resume and that people tend to be actively dismissive of.
I'd rather get real respect from people, not tea and sympathy. That's no doubt part of why the past decade has involved so much social friction
Anyway, thank you for your interest. If you are as brand spanking new as your handle suggests, let's just assume you simply don't have context and leave it at that.
Interest free microloans might be exactly what is needed to keep these businesses viable. The ability to spread out the impact over a year could be critical. This might not be enough, but it's good. Better is better.
There are a variety of reasons why letting the restaurant go under is really inefficient for everyone. The overhead of shutting down one business and starting another adds up to waste.
It all depends on how long the shutdown goes for. If it is a couple of weeks then yes a micro loan makes sense, but if this is something that goes on for many months then not so much.
My guess is these business are just going to sit there empty and the cost of restarting should be low. If the restauranters have the money (provided by their loyal customers) they will probably go straight back into the same location where they were.
The other factor to consider is even once the restrictions are lifted it is likely that we will be in a deep recession/depression. I can’t see there being huge demand for eating out when everyone is broke.
Great to see people coming up with creative ways to support the restaurant community. These efforts should be critical to keep the business running and take out and delivery will keep back of house employees working. I'm still really concerned about front of house employees. What can be done for servers, bartenders, hosts?
I don't think that the devices themselves need to be hackable so much as the protocols need to be open. Any phone I buy works with any router. I think that's the kind of openness we need.
I like this thought. What would it take to certify the form? 10 hours a month? 20? Can you redirect other people on your team to work on this?
When it is broken down to a cost (time) calculation then it might actually become reasonable to invest in a better system for accounting and analyzing expenditures.
How long do you suppose it would take to confirm that it was a part we need, that we don't already have, and that I got a good price on it? And how many such claims do you think each person in the finance department sees each day?
That's why each level of management, and the individual contributor as well, should have their own levels of certification. I can self-certify, say, $50 as essential. My manager can certify $5000, the director might do $50K, and so on.
>I agree, nobody in their right mind would audit every such expense.
I'll bite. Our money counters aren't in their right minds, because I submitted a small breakfast tab (at most $10) from work travel for reimbursement, only to learn it was unacceptable to not include a receipt. My other meals had receipts, but I had forgotten to ask for one this time. The accountant then said I had to call the cafe for a receipt. Luckily, the place had a website with contact info, and there was a helpful employee who emailed me the receipt.
But I spent at least an hour talking with the accountant and getting the receipt. The accountant spent probably 30 minutes with this problem. It was a net loss.
Exactly: you should certify that to the best of your knowledge those things are true so you got it. There might be one in inventory on the other side of the country but still it was better to buy one rather than try to figure that out (or wait for that, and cheaper than shipping it even if it existed).
I dislike Lombok. One reason I dislike it is that it makes IDE navigation, even with a required Lombok plugin, more difficult. A common task in a Java IDE is finding usages. It's harder with Lombok. Generally it's just more friction than plain Java code.
I also don't like that the generated code is not checked in or visible. It makes code review harder. In theory you can have magic change to all Lombok classes just by upgrading the library.
Also it doesn't pass the cost/benefit test for me. Adding Lombok adds complexity to your code, build system, and IDE. What do you get? Slightly shorter classes? Less characters? Most of this code can be generated by the IDE.
I'll give Lombok one win. It will keep equals and hashcode up to date if you add properties. That's a pretty common error.
As others have said, Kotlin is the best alternative. But even without Kotlin I skip Lombok happily.
If you check in generated code, you have to prevent anyone from editing it (so it doesn't become something you have to start testing and reviewing) and include some kind of summary so nobody wastes time looking at it.
My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.