Fun game! My personal answer to the Fermi paradox is that multi solar system civilization is very very hard, and multi galaxy civilization is functionally impossible. Speed of light is slow, space is big, and resources are concentrated. If there is a species with the capability to spread through their entire galaxy, they aren't in this galaxy and they aren't close enough to reach us.
Mine is they got too advanced and went multidimensional. Sticking to 3D is very primitive thinking when you can manipulate higher dimensions. Primitive 3d species will always think to conquer 3d things.
We know enough to know that macroscopic higher demential spaces connected to our apparently 3 dimensional space aren't a thing.
Having limits to our understanding doesn't mean all things are equally possible.
For instance there aren't any 2 dimensional beings because it's impossible to slice a mathematical pure plane and have macroscopic objects exist in that plane even fields surrounding a singular atom exist in 3d.
For sure, what I mean is they could be playing with different universes. Or found a way to manipulate time. It’s crack pot stuff but it all looks like it till it happens. Show a cave man an DJI drone being controlled and sending back live videos, they will also say it was impossible due to their understanding
I'm honestly not sure how this was missed, the influence is obvious and the author's bio makes it explicit. By the way, if anyone reading this comment has not read the work in question I highly recommend it. "A Memory Called Empire" is one of the best sci fi books I've read in the past 5 years, and a very fresh take on the well established "galactic empire" trope.
The developers providing everyone with free tools are or course welcome to write those tools in whatever languages they want. But to me, the comment definitions are longer to type and more difficult to parse than inline type definitions. I would much rather use one of the quick TS compilers that don't actually type check when I want to make and test a small change to my source code. But to each their own!
If a person value- TypeScript's inline syntax so much that they disagree with the developers that build steps are a nuisance, then surely they can put in a build step for themselves—one that takes TypeScript syntax as input and then "compiles" it into the equivalent JSDoc so they're never forced to type out those long, long comments. (If this is disagreeable, then your position is a lot less consistent than you think.)
Religious or not, I think one of the best philosophies on giving is Rambam's 8 levels of tzedakah. The highest is doing something to materially improve someone's condition, the absolute lowest is giving with a poor attitude. That he doesn't even rank "giving with the intention of getting something yourself" shows how far this is from any sort of good act.
This is the key bit of information that is always missed in discussions of "10x engineers". 10x better than the absolute worst, but probably 2x better than average. This lines up with my informal, anecdotal experience where the absolute best engineers I've worked with usually perform 2-3x better than average.
I've seen the charm suite on HN before, and everytime I see them I wish they had bindings to other languages. I'm just not interested in Go, but I'm really interested in learning to create ssh applications. Its an application runtime with a lot of potential for the dev space, but almost no quick-start frameworks!
Why not? There's a lot to hate about every language, but one advantage about Go is that it's fairly easy to context switch in/out of, which makes it great for side projects, because it's cognitive load while using it is really low.
I'm only really interested in learning a language if it excites me, or if I'm getting paid to do it. I don't hate Go, and would be fine to learn it on company time for company projects, but there is no spark that would lead me to learn the language on my own. I've written some basic Go, but if I'm using it in personal projects, I'd would have to invest time to understand the ecosystem, runtime, standard lib, best practices, etc.
People tend to disagree on that. But it depends on what you value. If you like a language that helps you write robust and expressive code, Go doesn't score as high as any language with sum types, and good "generics" support (which 1.18 does not have).
It's not really very pleasant if you are used to modern type systems. It feels antiquated in a limiting way, for no good reason.
With C at least it's clear to me that it's literally (very literally) a 50 years old language, and I've gotten used to it after decades. It's far from ideal, but at least there's some deep familiarity, and that coupled with the fact that it's everywhere makes me feel more tolerant of it.
But learning a new language which is, in some ways, stuck in the same past as that established 50 years old language is not very pleasing.
When a language has some property that surprises you, consider whether it might have been designed that way on purpose, not simply because the creators were ignorant/lazy/negligent/drunk/lost a bet/etc.
I did. Rob Pike said that Go was purposefully made similar to C (and by extension other languages similar to C), in order to be familiar and get new engineers who are already familiar with C or C-like languages to become productive without having to learn too much.
And while I can totally understand how that makes sense in the intended setting, I don't consider that pleasing at all. "Pleasing" for me implies that I like a thing because I like the thing itself, not because external constraints impose (perceived) limitations on other choices. Especially in this context, where we were talking about learning and using a programming language by choice, instead of assembling a team of programmers from an already common pool.
I think your critique, if you examine it closely and deeply, is fundamentally an arrogant one. Sorry for the harsh claim, but I truly do believe this.
You are a new developer too. Everyone is. When it’s easy to learn something, it’s easy to relearn it, and it’s easy to learn things around it (because you don’t devote as much brain to the language).
All languages should target new, dumb devs, because all devs (including Rob pike) are new and dumb.
I’ve certainly learned things that were harder and more time consuming to learn, for a payoff that was and continues to be well worth the effort. Including programming languages. I did not claim it was easier for me, so how is that arrogant?
And I absolutely reject the notion that an easy to learn programming language is better. Especially so because Go was made “easier to learn” in large parts by its similarity to C, so it’s really easier for people already and only familiar with C, and that was explicitly stated by the creators.
> creators were ignorant/lazy/negligent/drunk/lost a bet/etc.
This is not a well-intended comment, but then why didn't they add generics at the start? It's not like it was a surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with PLs that they will have to retrofit it sooner or later. Also, function-scoped defers instead of surrounding braces-based one? Come on...
Not adding generics, if you dig through the archives, was a pragmatic choice. Partly it was to help the process of language design, partly it was project management, and partly it was due to technical constraints. Generics is a big, complex feature. The team was prioritizing getting the most immediately valuable features shipped first, and didn’t want the introduction of generics to hit their limited resources too hard or distract from getting the fundamentals right. Generics implementations in existing languages at the time also made trade offs/interactions that weren’t appropriate for go.
That’s not how language design works. You can’t just postpone such an elementary feature with a TODO, it will interact with every other feature of the language, and if you haven’t left a place for the interactions you have to introduce breaking changes, which will shook the whole ecosystem.
There is zero point in postponing a feature so that you can build a community, which you will burn down later. It’s not a startup that has to be ready in X months or it will fail.
They were very clear about why generics weren't there for a long time -- they weren't sure how to do it and keep things simple and build quickly. I'm just a simple code monkey but I think they did a decent job with it.
Obviously we all have our preferences. I think of Go as the love child of C and Python. It's simple, batteries included, and has good tooling and is "good enough" for a lot of tasks (as evidenced by its adoption).
It is simple enough to learn quickly so the investment isn't that demanding. I'd like to learn Rust but the learning curve is much steeper and it seemed to be subject to changes. I'm not shitting on it, just lazy with too many distractions to hunker down and do a real investment of time into it. Someday.
I just can't get past the fact that Go doesn't have sum types. As someone who dabbles in category theory, it makes no sense to me that so many popular languages have product types but not their categorical dual. The lack of sum types leads to so many hacks and weird design patterns in the language, like returning two values when you only want the caller to read one of them (that is actually Go's error handling strategy!). To work around the limitations of not having sum types, Go has a "zero" value for every type so you can for example only set the fields relevant to your particular use case, and just hope that no one reads the fields you didn't set.
The problem is that sometimes the zero value is valid, but not special in any way and doesn't make sense as the default. Go has arbitrarily decided that one particular value is special without your blessing or the ability to override it. This leads to bugs in which the zero value shows up in places where you don't expect it, simply because there is some code which doesn't explicitly set it. That's a very easy mistake to make, which makes writing Go an error prone activity.
I shudder to think that there's probably some Go program that deals with money, and a user's balance might be cleared to zero simply because some operation forgot to explicitly set it in some struct.
In order to implement "optional" fields in Go where you want to distinguish between zero (a valid value) and none (a missing value), the common solution is to either put the integer behind a pointer (which can be null) or use some "sentinel" value like -1 to indicate that the value is missing (as long as that sentinel value isn't actually valid in the domain of discourse). These are terrible hacks, but exactly what you'd expect from programmers who spent the majority of their careers writing C.
This design also leads to another kind of issue: sometimes you don't want people to be able to construct values of a particular type without going through a constructor which ensures the relevant invariants hold. This concept ("smart constructors") is widely used in other programming languages, but it's impossible in Go because Go allows anyone to construct an inhabitant of any type simply by declaring a variable of that type.
A simple example of that kind of issue is pointers: in (safe) Rust, references are guaranteed to be non-null, and you use sum types to implement optionality. This is great because you can always dereference a reference and not worry about handling the null case. In Go, all pointer types have that nasty zero value (null), and there's nothing you can do about it. The billion dollar mistake.
I like the fact that Go encourages simplicity, and for the most part the language is fine. But I'm convinced that having every type be pointed rather than supporting proper sum types is actually more complex in terms of the implications it has on writing and reasoning about code. They have mistaken minimality for simplicity.
> These are terrible hacks, but exactly what you'd expect from programmers who spent the majority of their careers writing C.
As an embedded firmware guy, I'll try not to be offended by that line :) I agree with you, though. C is a really good language when you consider its original purpose and the time period in which it was created. Ignoring 50 years of progress in type theory/category theory in the name of "simplicity" is inexcusable.
Not directed at you, but here we are in a post about a CLI for Go, discussing Rust. It seems like every discussion of something related to Go requires someone to screech about safety (again, not you) and how Go is a terrible choice.
I use both weekly, for different things. There are numerous people who don't use Go at all that are in Go specific forums. They read Go specific threads here on HN just to make their Rust points. I poke fun at them with my statement. You just gave me the hook.
if you need a fun language to learn to make TUIs, haskell has the brick library :) . I've heard very good things about it, it's declarative, only downside is that it doesn't support windows.
I think there is a lot of potential for creativity in the terminal space, and warp has some cool ideas. I'd honestly even be willing to pay directly for a terminal if it went above and beyond in terms of efficiency and functionality. Unfortunately I cannot try warp, as I don't have an osx machine. I understand that cross platform (in particular Linux ports) is a challenge, and I usually don't expect that from consumer products or open source projects. But a VC backed product made specifically for developers should have a Linux port imo, especially if your business model is to impress developers and get them to convert their teams.
We do want to support linux once we get the product experience right. We decided to build in Rust and set up a UI framework because we wanted to make it easier for us to port to Linux.
For now, every platform we support entails additional engineering overhead that takes away from getting to product-market fit. Once there, we will invest resources into supporting Linux, Windows, and the Web.
It's a shame that the comments here are laser focused on the tipping parts of the article, and not the bigger picture items. The author outlines the struggles of getting service jobs filled in high CoL areas, the vicious cycle of turnover in these jobs, and all the commenters here want to discuss is the 2 paragraphs on tipping.
Is it the only aspect of the article that most on this site can relate with? I take it most have not worked service industry or it was a very long time ago.
I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.
An outcome of little to no consequences for actions.
Come visit my local grocery store. Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls, there will be 2-6 vehicle using the clearly-marked "Fire Lane - No Parking" lane as their personal parking spots plainly blocking the doors of the foyer (and this is not drop-off, not pick-up, not having their spouse load up in a rain storm). Have "About 12 Items or Fewer" - well have fun, there's two carts loaded for bear ready to use the checkout lane.
The manager will watch it all and dare not life a finger nor raise a voice.
The restaurant at which my S/O works, it's in the nice part of town. The nicest part of town you could possibly not afford. For the lunch crowd, there will be a dozen or so regular folks filtering in with absurd, demanding, bespoke requests (I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu). The owner will not let them refuse a request. Ever. Regardless of the problems it will cause for everyone around. Regardless of how long it will waste table space. That $18 lunch order must be fulfilled.
The local pizza joint, my go-to spot for two NY slices and a PBR for a cool $7 - they're not allowed to refuse service to rude patrons regardless of how awful. I once had the barkeep slip me a note asking that I (a large, eternally angry looking man) please wait at the bar for another patron to leave and that my drinks would be comped. Why? The belligerent customer refusing to leave, who entered the facility screaming at (we assume) "incompetent cunt" of a secretary.
It's a bit fascinating and frustrating. One makes an off-color joke on Twitter[0], or an elected official makes a frustrated comment about double-standards[1] and a lynch mob forms to harangue a corporation into punishing the textual predator. Some of those same companies (See: [1]) will not oust a belligerent man attempting to start a fight in the produce section over a road rage incident.
Self-checkout, bag-your-own groceries, return your cart...
Can't help but think this is simply a means by which the grocery cartel can get rid of jobs that high school kids have traditionally benefited from. I guess I have never seen the "cart return" thing as something you do out of politeness.
But if they're not going to pay the high school kids enough, maybe this is the. future (present) we deserve.
You may not know this, but custom orders slow down service sometimes by an order of magnitude.
I worked at a takeout teriyaki joint in college, and it was as fast a food as you could find. There were 5 menu items, and I could really get in a rhythm dishing rice and chicken and coleslaw. But as soon as anyone asked for something non-standard, then suddenly muscle memory was gone, and I actually had to think about what I was doing. Just asking for no salad could halve my serving speed, especially if they asked for at the wrong time of doing the order.
I can only imagine how much worse this is in a setting with multiple people and multiple handoffs.
On top of that, if the restaurant isn't being run like a short order joint, they're going to have other issues with mixing and matching menu items, like now they may have 2 less dishes they can serve, because, believe it or not, ordering for a restaurant can be a very precise thing, and they'll likely order quantities proportional to the menu ingredients. I'm not saying don't do this, but I am saying be polite when you request these kinds of things, and be willing to accept "we can't do that" as an answer.
I'm not arguing for or against allowing special orders. But that's on the manager, not the customer.
The server having an issue with it (when the manager doesn't) is a problem, and blaming customers for making requests is a problem, especially if policy is to allow them.
It's not just the waitress. It's also the kitchen staff, which has to fulfill the orders. Low-cost special menus like brunch menus make their money on volume. At least half the food service equation relies on the kitchen to whip the orders out in time. Special requests slow the entire kitchen down. Not a problem if, say, there's not a huge rush. But a huge problem if the staff is slammed.
Maybe you should take after the former labor secretary and go try your hand at a service job.
All factors baked into the managers decision to accept special orders.
This is just the server disagreeing with both the boss and customer, and then wondering why they might be having a problem with a satisfaction based compensation system.
I agreed with your earlier comment and was disappointed to see it in the grey, but both your follow-ups have been lacking, esp. on staff having a problem with something that the management doesn't voice a problem with.
You're ignoring circumstances where the boss okays the thing but doesn't adjust their perspective and still holds the staff to the same expectations—to deliver as if under the same parameters, when the parameters have obviously changed.
Like, if you're Waffle House and short-order is your bread and butter, sure. But a lot of times the kitchen will pre-set up things so they can get them out as fast as possible. There's a lot of management and prep that goes into cheap Sunday brunch that gets tossed out the window.
Like I said earlier, it's fine during normal biz hours. But the 30 seconds of extra time the kitchen staff has to put into your special order during a huge rush puts all the orders behind it 30 seconds more behind. So a whole family ordering special orders can hold up 20 people's orders for 5 minutes. And that just builds up the more it happens.
That's a capacity and thus a management problem: Invest in more capacity.
I'm sympathetic with the staff, which in every business takes the bullets for management's decisions. Tech support is similar - frustrated with long wait times? Don't take it out on the person answering the phone; it is management's choice.
Regarding growing incivility. I moved from the US to Poland around ‘05. Not long ago I went to the US, Bay Area, for the first time in ten years, on a business trip for my employer. I didn’t expect such a culture shock but the incivility was striking. Every day I would run into absolutely savage behavior while just commuting or getting food. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and this here is the first time I’ve seen Americans discussing civility.
It also might be that once in Europe you started soaking in our values and standards and today behaviours common in USA you might see in a different light.
I moved out of Poland to the UK many years ago and have the exact same experience as you. I'm a very different person now and many things I had thought were normal I now do not accept.
I think this Reddit comment from a use called TheMagecite on parenting during the pandemic might get to some of it:
"No.
So lets take my example I have two children one has autism.
What my son desperately needs is social interaction, how do you teach social interaction well without peers? He can't see other children and right now he has such limited exposure to other children he is about to start school and it is a nightmare.
While my son is brilliant in some ways and could read and write at age 3 however his social skills and general understanding are just so far behind. Due to the pandemic normally there would be spots in a special class but so many kids who would have normally progressed just have gone backwards has meant there are zero spots for my child. It also has meant all of the therapies which make the world of difference (and earlier intervention the better) have either been canceled or moved to remote which is no where near as good.
I used to take my son out every weekend and get exposure to kids or take him to water parks and just have fun with them. Now we are sheltered at home with very little to do and we crack out board games but the ipad has probably been his main entertainer. I have work and we have other children but we do make sure it is educational stuff but we still feel tremendous guilt.
I work, we have other children and well while everyone says we have managed to do an amazing job during the pandemic as my son has still progressed which is different from what most other children in his situation have done. My partner and I feel horrible and honestly we are just completely burnt out. We could have done more, we should have done more but I think depression and being burnt out has just fucked us.
I fucking hate myself for this and I probably will feel guilty the rest of my days. I am sick of being told we have done an amazing job considering. Considering Covid doesn't help my child.
This is where the overprotective nature of American parenting comes to bite you: your kid will be fine playing with other kids outside, why not… do it?
Because you’ll be constantly worried about getting Child Protective Services called on you if anything goes wrong or some random neighbor decides stranger danger is real.
I would hope not, but how realistic of a concern it is depends on your neighbors, the local CPS folks, and how well you’d come across to them at the time. It adds a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
That near as I can tell no one lets a kid out alone is indicating how big a problem it really is. The most I’ve seen here is when they’re paired up and 12+, and here is one of the safest places in the county in a very child friendly place, literally 2 blocks from the police station - and the police here have some of the best reputations in the country.
This absolutely depends on local CPS, and they have wide authority within their lane. As they should, considering their mission and the interactions and choices they have to make in bad cases.
But it does mean that a lot is subject to opinion. And once you're on the radar, how do you get off? How do you prove you're a good, safe, responsible parent when the judging worker believes otherwise and has some authority to make that fact?
By being a good, safe, responsible parent. You all are acting like CPS pulls kids away from stable homes on the daily. That isn't happening. This is a consequence of anecdote over data, where there is one or two widely bad outcomes and everyone reacts to them, when in reality, this almost never happens.
I, and nearly everyone in my neighborhood let our kids out. I see kids walking up and down my street, by themselves and with their friends every day. Let your kids go out, they and you will be fine.
Here in the bay area, I only know 1-2 areas that are like that, and even then you'll only see teenagers. Might end up moving if one is local! I'm in the lower peninsula area.
I live in Washington, Puget Sound Area. Kids out all the time, plus no income taxes, reasonable property taxes, and a great, though limited tech scene.
The PNW isn't for everyone, but we know how to get outdoors at all ages :).
I think I'd ask that commenter whether that guilt is doing any good for him/her/it. If he's simply unable to do more and it's still not enough, then the problem wasn't going to be solved by anything he could do. He probably still did good. That's unfortunately all anyone can do - good. Can't guarantee success when you "swing that bat", but you can try.
The tipping situation is absolutely stupid, but hardly the only problem. And shitty entitled customers contribute to both issues here: they treat employees poorly, and they tip poorly. Businesses should probably just kick those customers out. If you can't behave like a decent person, the business shouldn't have to accept you as a customer.
Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself. If these service jobs are terrible enough, nobody will do them anymore, and those customers will just have to cook their own food, or accept shitty overpriced service from the few companies willing to serve them, and willing to pay employees enough to deal with that shit.
But it will be a loss to all decent people who treat people with respect and want to pay well for good service. If you want to keep those, your only option is to kick the entitled assholes out. Or you'll have no employees left.
What we are seeing is the market correcting itself: service jobs are unattractive, so people leave those jobs. If nobody is willing to pay more and offer better customer behaviour for those jobs, those services will simply disappear. That is how the market "corrects" itself.
I'm all for better wages and labour conditions, but as long as that doesn't, happen, these jobs and services will continue to disappear. I hope people are aware of the fact that they're currently effectively voting for no fast food, no restaurants, and no theatres, because that's what they're going to get if nothing changes.
We already have a portion of that with minimum wage being paid to 100s of thousands of Walmart workers whose workers also qualify for various forms of welfare, and walmart also campaigns against raising minimum wage.
> Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself.
Or it'll be a "market for lemons" situation and someone will need to rewrite the rules of the market in order for the best thing to happen and/or it just won't get better.
I'm not sure how to empirically measure incivility but it seems like it might be... There's certainly been an uptick in things from reckless driving to drinking to drug overdoses. There's a lot of anecdata from nurses, airline attendants, teachers, etc. about bad behavior being on the rise.
Maybe it's all just due to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. But, some of the articles below point out that these trends began before the pandemic.
Correlation is not causation, but we've been on a 50+ year crusade in American culture to destroy any sort of multi-economic-strata commons.
IMHO, the affluent suburbs in the article are both a symptom- and cause-of rudeness. Most of these kids have never worked a customer service job for minimum wage. It's possible even their parents haven't.
And that's not bad, per se, but if the problem is "People treat customer service workers like shit," then you could start at worse places than empathetic employment experience.
Personal vendetta, but Starbucks is emblematic of all that is wrong with American culture. We took the coffee shop -- a local, counter-culture, loitering-tolerant, independently-run staple of American life -- and replaced it with Walmart (+some feel-good PR).
And as a result, any unreasonable adult is catered to, because corporate policy is to make you feel special. When in reality, you should be banned from the premises after your second meltdown. /gripe
“large segment of the population consists of jerks “
I think it starts at the top. People are realizing that companies are run for the benefit of a few and these few also have an outsized influence on politics. It’s not surprising that people are feeling disenfranchised and mainly out for themselves.
For me the 2008 bailouts were the turning point. A lot of the Wall Street people who had preached “creative destruction” for a long time suddenly demanded government bailouts when the destruction reached them. And unfortunately they were given bailouts. And they were given the bailouts in a way that mainly benefitted the wealthy while homeowners still lost their homes. Same happened with Covid: the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. No wonder a lot do people don’t feel at home in this society anymore.
Maybe the Supreme Court has been going the wrong way on its adjustment to them, in trying to clarify whether or not they were protected under the First Amendment.
Instead, they could have looked at liability shielding for limited assault in reaction to such language.
If there's a possibility that a server punches me because I berate him or her, I'm probably going to be on better behavior.
The obsession with "intention" as opposed to "outcome" in legal judgments continues to mystify and mortify me.
But I still don't see an easy way to fit the scenario of "I mouthed off to a server and they punched me in the mouth" into a legal framework that supports repeatable judgments in a way that supports civility writ large.
The same way we do auto accidents? Collect what physical evidence is possible, interview witnesses, and attempt to assign fault.
And I'm not advocating for a return to duels at dawn with pistols!
But simple or criminal battery (e.g. I punch someone, with my fists, and then de-escalate) that could not have been expected to result in permanent injury? I can think of worse things for culture.
Auto incidents happen in relatively constrained scenarios, and the resulting damage can strongly imply the actions that led up to the incident. Not so with humans beefing over mundane matters.
My first thought is to re-tool the concept of self-defense, but this would require the acknowledgement that verbal abuse constitutes violence, which I am not sure many are willing to accept, and could get out of hand when it comes to what exactly "disproportionate retaliation" means in context.
I've noticed growing incivility as well and it's a slow moving culture change that I think we're all going to really regret. I don't think it's caused by just one thing and it has been brewing for a while but Covid just pushed it over the edge like so many other trends. Some ideas on the causes:
- The fish rots from the head. Trump was elected in 2016 and he's an asshole. His whole schtick is to mock his opponents and never admit he was wrong. Hell, him being an asshole was a huge selling point to his base. If you elect that guy to the most powerful office in the land then it signals that being an asshole is acceptable. That sort of thing filters down into the culture at large. Politics isn't the only place you see this though, sociopathic behavior seems to be almost a requirement in big business. Where are people being rewarded for kindness and compassion?
- Pandemic burnout. There are a lot of threads on HN about guarding your attention like a currency and I think other emotions work similarly. After more than 2 years of this I know my well of empathy is nearly bone dry. Most issues like some particular thing being out of stock, or slow service because of staffing don't bother me but every once in a while I get really angry at an inconvenience I would normally shrug off. Multiply this across society.
- Being an asshole kind of works? This echoes my first idea but in a different way. All real decision making has been taken away from the people who actually interact with the public. Executives and managers who have the power to change things (like increase wages to bring more employees in) are insulated from the public. There are so many layers of indirection within corporate America that even if you have a legitimate grievance it can be an enormous pain to get it resolved and you have to be kind of a dick sometimes to fix things. So you end up with this situation where powerless employees are being yelled at by a powerless public.
There are certainly more threads here but those are some ideas i've been toying with.
> All real decision making has been taken away from the people who actually interact with the public. Executives and managers who have the power to change things (like increase wages to bring more employees in) are insulated from the public.
Had to scroll down a bit, because I knew this comment had to exist, but wholeheartedly agreed.
Managers in customer-facing jobs don't (and can't!) manage customers anymore. They manage employees.
Used to be, the manager was the one who would come out and say "Sir or madam, I have to ask that you hold your tone and speak more respectfully to our employees." And if the customer persisted, ban them from the business.
That authority has been stripped from them, because it's complicated, requires capable and trained managers, and gets in the way of copying and pasting a franchise.
Instead, corporate policy has been to raise the brand above its employees. If that burns out folks working there, they can be replaced.
> Managers in customer-facing jobs don't (and can't!) manage customers anymore. They manage employees.
They are managers so they do not have to be paid overtime if they work over 40 hours per week. The business owners/directors let the manager hire just enough people, but not at a wage that can afford reliable workers. So, the manager will be stuck covering for the people that do not show, and if something goes wrong, they serve as a nice “fall guy”.
My wife used to work retail and yes, customers have definitely learned they can get their way by raising their voice, demanding to see a manager, and the manager will sheepishly do anything they can to mollify them. All consequence-free. And if they don’t get what they want, they can go berserk and trash the store—again, consequence-free. Store management can’t physically do anything to neutralize the threat.
I can’t put my finger on it but something happened in the last 5 years or so, some change in the country’s moral North Star, that ushered in this era of consequence-free obnoxious behavior. It’s almost as if some leader embodied and emboldened this behavior and normalized it.
> The fish rots from the head. Trump was elected in 2016 and he's an asshole. His whole schtick is to mock his opponents and never admit he was wrong.
Obama roasting Trump at the White House Correspondents likely contributed to his decision to run for President. I agree your points by the way, I just think the fire started prior to 2016.
Another comment somewhere else in this thread mentioned 2008 and the bailouts for banks, bankruptcy for the public, as the place we should look at. With big society wide trends like this it's impossible to have a clear cause and effect. It's all a muddle which is why I've listed a few different ideas all of which contribute in their own way.
Covid is such a unique situation though and I think it will serve as a clear turning point where preexisting trends were shattered and others were turned up to 11.
But ultimately, we didn't start the fire, but we can try to fight it.
I'm probably being naive but the assassination of JFK is the most interesting alternative history moment for me.
Should he have finished his term and steered the US clear of Vietnam (I know very debatable) and seen man go to the "moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," I think things would have gone much better.
My history is a little fuzzy but would we have gotten the Civil Rights Act? From what I understand, JFK was having some serious trouble getting it passed (instead of some watered down piecemeal legislation) but a combination of the state of a mourning country post-assassination + Johnson betraying the people who elected him(he was the good ol boy from the south placed there to represent their 'values') provided the catalyst for getting this difficult legislation through. Unfortunately this also had the consequence of further alienating the south and made them run into Reagan's arms a few elections later.
I shudder to think what would have happened if the Civil Rights Act wasn't passed. I may not have even been born in this country.
Alternate history is impossible to prove, and to your point, my history is just as fuzzy if not fuzzier; however, I do remember the reverence RFK had for MLK when announcing his assassination.
I don't know that the Civil Rights Act passes in this timeline, at least not at the exact moment, but maybe it does? However, you get to avoid Vietnam. Maybe it's not helpful pondering these sorts of things, but is trading the Civil Rights Act for Vietnam a good deal, net benefit for humanity wise?
There's this idea of "punching down" and "punching up". I'm fairly sure that in 2012, Obama mocking Donald Trump was generally considered closer to "punching up" than "punching down" (whether that was really accurate depends a lot on the true state of Trump's financial affairs, but in general he projected a persona that involved being uber-wealthy, uber-famous and generally able to do whatever he wanted).
By contrast, Trump's mocking of, variously, Mexican and central American migrants, the disabled, media reporters etc. is generally seen as "punching down".
In our culture, those further up the ladder are generally expected to take a "punching" (i.e. mockery, jokes, satires, ridicule) from below in good stead. We generally expect them to not "punch down" at those less enabled by power and wealth.
I'm having a hard time accepting that the President ever punches up. He's the most powerful person in the world and has the sole authority to authorize the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. The office enjoys the Bully Pulpit and it is valuable to have this arrangement in my opinion.
At any rate, watch the clip if you haven't recently.
It's pretty interesting actually, to me at least, that Obama roasts Biden pretty much just as well for his off-the-cuff remarks and age immediately after his digs at Trump, which are less derogatory than I had remembered.
If the president was trying to "punch up" with respect to national and international policy, I would totally agree with you.
But consider the moment right now. Do you think that if President Biden were to satirically mock Jeff Bezos about wealth, space travel, employee care, or putative drone delivery, that he would actually be punching "down" from the white house? I certainly don't think so.
Trump on Jeff Bezos' divorce: "I wish him luck, I wish him luck. It's going to be a beauty."
I think that's punching down. I'm not sure it's a helpful abstraction, but I think once one becomes President it's impossible to separate the person from the office until their term ends.
I think that it is extremely important that our leaders, and to some extent even our idols, should be subject to satire and perhaps even mockery on occasion. That's what "punching" means in the context we're talking about.
Yeah, I once got screamed at by a red-faced old man driving a mercedes because he had to wait 4 and a half minutes for a McChicken sandwich. Old rich people are just the most sociopathic people.
What really rubs salt in the wound is when those exact same people refer to the poor kids who are just barely scraping by as "entitled". I always think, do you hear yourself?
What's always disappointing to me is how for many the first instinct is "lazy young people" while often times the exact same people espouse "the free market". It seems to me that often times the same people really only care about low taxes for themselves and making away with regulations that annoy them, rather than truly embracing the mechanism and tradeoffs that come with a free market and for sure don't understand the circumstances needed to make the market effective to work towards a given goal.
I naively thought the whole point of the market was to effectively route resources to where they are most in demand and allow innovation from the ground up where it's needed without central planning
Markets in general are quite good at routing resources and innovation. A perfectly free market, or at least free enough that you're arguing we should remove regulators and social safety nets, is worse at all of those things, and only really great at controlling people, which as the point of those you were replying to.
Also, markets can't allow innovations from the ground up by themselves, the require a government to implement a fragile and inefficient intellectual property system, but that's just nitpicking.
Sure, but it has to be understood what resource is being allocated: the labor of the dispossessed. If you don't have dispossessed masses obligated to labor, there's nothing to allocate.
Of course people don't have to face literal starvation to be under control, but the system fundamentally requires that the level of deprivation always be enough to meet the requirement of keeping labor under control.
It's not really that vague. The less resource allocation is affected by non-market forces, the freer the market. Of course, a perfectly free market is not actually possible. My point is moreso that there are extremely good reasons to limit the autonomy of markets.
What constitutes nonmarket forces is mostly a matter of opinion.
Unions? Monopoly power? Government enforcing contracts? Government competing in the market? Natural disasters? Normal weather? Taxation? No taxation? Strong property rights? No property rights?
A "perfectly free market" is a meaningless phrase dressed up to sound like "frictionless in a vacuum". It exists for the purposes of cynical lobbying.
I think that is the idea, but it doesn't work in practice because, well people. Really useful electronics are harder to get or have been hard to get, but yet if I wanted to buy my daughter a twerking llama toy, I'd have no issue with acquiring one of those. A little more meaningful example, we grow pistachios (a water intensive crop), in a place with limited access to water (desert areas of California) and have been doing that for years and years. Seems like if the market just naturally achieved efficiency, you'd grow water intensive crops in places that were not constrained on the resource.
The electronics part might more showcase what we actually value as a society. In the case of things that need chips it also demonstrates how we are unable to plan. Car makers cancelled their chip orders when the pandemic hit. They have lots of skin in the game and know their own industry better than any politician would. Why would politicians get planning chip production better than they did?
The water example is pretty bad, given that we don't charge the actual price of water to subsidize businesses. If we'd charge the real price (and ideally tax negative externalities) much farming would likely leave California.
A comment I put for someone else that answers this.
Because those who succeed in a market end up with the money to influence policy. That is why that is important. Policy affects markets which then affects policies. It is a concept in capitalism we are not going to get away from.
>...Seems like if the market just naturally achieved efficiency, you'd grow water intensive crops in places that were not constrained on the resource.
What does preferential treatment by the government have to do with the market? If the farmers didn't get water at a heavily discounted price from the government, they likely wouldn't be able to grow such water intensive crops and the crops would be grown in places that were not contained on the resource. Heck, they even grow rice in CA!
Because those who succeed in a market end up with the money to influence policy. That is why that is important. Policy affects markets which then affects policies. It is a concept in capitalism we are not going to get away from.
Throughout all recorded history those who have been well connected with those in power have unfairly benefited from that. This isn't something that only came about in modern times. It is only in modern political systems with rule of law, property rights, recognition of inalienable rights, etc. where people feel that this kind of political favoritism is bad and work to limit it by constraining the power of those in power. Constraining the the rulers is done by limiting their power by written constitutions, political transparency, etc. One can certainly argue (and I would agree) that there is more political favoritism than there should be, but at least modern economic systems think it is a bad thing and people work to limit it.
> Seems like if the market just naturally achieved efficiency, you'd grow water intensive crops in places that were not constrained on the resource.
In this case the market is up against (arguably irrational) water rights and such, the market is far from free.
> The planning and management of water in California is subject to a vast number of laws, regulations, management plans, and historic water rights. The state agency responsible for water planning is the California Department of Water Resources.
In fact, if you want the labour market to be a free market, universal basic income will help; then you've got a market where people can always say no to a deal they don't like. When the choice becomes: take the shitty deal or starve, it's not really a free market anymore.
In any transaction, there is no distinction between money obtained as UBI and money earned as salary. A landlord is will set his price to what he can obtain from the highest bidder regardless of source.
UBI does not generate competition. It's a supplement. All it does is translate the supply curve rightwards. While UBI might stimulate demand in the short term, it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship. The eventual outcome of sustained UBI is an inflationary spiral.
To be truly effective, UBI needs to be directly linked to the basic costs of living, like food and rent. If those go up, so should UBI. Or as long as there is no UBI, minimum wage should follow those costs.
Not at all. It's a popular claim, but there are many factors for inflation, and money in the hands of the poor is hardly the most important one. Countries with extreme poverty still have inflation. Countries with little poverty can have low inflation.
This is only true if you're looking at the capital market. If you consider the labor market, I would argue it's freer if employees have more freedom to change jobs (i.e. there is some redistribution and social safety net).
Edit: Also, a market with redistribution is more democratic. More actors have money to provide market input (demand or investment) when resources are not highly concentrated.
Free market doesn't mean that actors can do whatever they want. It means that the market has the power to allocate resources. In the labor market, the labor market allocated that employee to a job, and allocated a penalty to changing jobs, that the government in then changing.
Also, even in the labor market, the scenario you're describing is punishing the labor buyer but rewarding the labor provider, so it's not just the capital market that's less free, it's the labor market too.
More actors being able to provide input is restricting the markets. The market allocated who gets to provide input in itself.
All I'm saying is, don't fetishize the market being free.
Free markets are not about just the power to allocate, but also transparent knowledge in a decision. The labor purchaser almost always has an advantage over the labor provider in their transaction and don't actually represent a free market.
Even in the tech industry this is true. People were shocked the other day when they found out that their income data was being reported and sold by the big credit companies in America. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they all share their employees income data with one another through 3rd parties. They have so much more knowledge than you or I and it represents a huge advantage for them when hiring.
Free markets are supposed to transmit information as prices. Access to information has nothing to do with a market being free or not, and the fact that participants with an information advantage have an advantage is a big part of why people think markets should be free.
That happens, but it's orthogonal to the point you're replying to. In other words, Efficient markets and social safety nets are not intrinsically antagonistic or incompatible, we can have both.
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To me, the unspoken and often unconscious nature of the "stick" of vagrancy and homelessness is revealed clearly when people ask, "But who will pick up the garbage?" when you're talking about things like a "post-scarcity" or "abundance-based" society. The clear implication is that without the hell of homelessness there are needful jobs that we couldn't otherwise force people to do.
100% agreed. My ideal is a largely free market (also free from control by large corps) with high, flat tax and high UBI. I think those things go really well together.
The flat tax is a huge imposition, punishment, etc for lower wage workers. If you are say a well paid engineer, a flat tax will benefit you. A billionaire benefits even more. Graduated tax rates with no deductions are a better solution.
Besides the author’s v points about the poor working conditions, I was struck by the points about transit costs. I am curious how much of the current labor situation in the US can be explained by the combination of 1) geographic wealth segregation —- richer consumers clustering together while generally poorer service workers have to live far away —- and 2) high gas prices / underdeveloped public transit. At some point as both of these factors increase, there should be a big drop off in available workers. Is this consistent with the pattern we are seeing?
It's not even just lower class workers. Taking public transit to my FAANG job each day would be ~$20 total and be ~2hrs of commuting each day. That comes out to ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways.
I can eat this cost but I'd feel extremely bad for someone who doesn't get paid as much as I do who had to do this kind of commuting (which MANY people do daily).
Basically cars are a huge relative cost for the working class. With our land use and transportation policies we have created a world where the costs of getting around are so high that it can trap you in poverty for life. Sorry for the paywall but this was the quickest article I could find on the topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americ...
If you calculate the total cost of owning car(s) during your lifetime and consider alternative use such as interest bearing savings account some estimates have shown it costs you approx $1M during your life.
Public transit in Austin is terrible, and nonexistent in the suburbs. And there is a lot of wealth (and racial) housing segregation in Austin. I'd say you hit the nail on the head for Austin, at least. Speaking as someone who grew up in Austin poor without a car, and lived there until adulthood. Now work at a FAANG in a city much lower cost of living.
Indeed. The part about getting your income on an ATM card with mandatory fees no matter what you do seems like the best anecdotal example of how fucked things are for the little guy these days.
For many low-wage employees the alternative to this is check cashing fees which is even worse. The issue of why so many people are unbanked is a separate discussion.
Having to pay a free to get your pay is ridiculous and should be illegal. Your pay should simply be deposited in your bank account with no other obstacles to access.
Access to banking is indeed a problem, but pragmatically there is always cash or a non-fraudulent [0] check drawn on a local bank. And for tips specifically, they can just be bundled with the rest of the pay rather than creating a second problem.
[0] for example checks drawn on Bank of America accounts are generally fraudulent, as BoA refuses to pay the specified amount when presented for payment at a branch. They're trying to run a similar scam to the ATM card fee described in the article, but they're doing it with the much older technology of checks and thereby inducing their customers to commit check fraud.
Why single out Bank of America? Nearly every single (big) bank will refuse to cash a check for non-customers. The days of taking a signed check to a local branch for cashing have been over for decades. I'd love to find out why this changed, I suspect it's because they can go after their own customers if a check turns out to be fraudulent but not some guy walking off the street.
It seems like another illegal scam that will rake in a decade of ill gotten gains, then there will be a class action slap on the wrist and a promise not to do it again, while they move on to the next decade's scams. The entire nature of a check is that it is a promise that a third party custodian will pay a specific amount, and the custodian then demanding to take a cut directly invalidates that. I suspect it's monkey-see-monkey-do, unless there is some behind the scenes rule change (Check 21?) that would seem to condone such nonsense.
Apparently it's not just BoA, but also Chase, Suntrust, TD, and Wells Fargo now want to demand a nonsensical "check cashing fee" to cash a check drawn on one of their accounts. But the entire purpose of a check is that it is an order to your bank to pay someone an exact amount of money, and thus subtracting such a fee is impermissable. The proper way to assess such a fee would be to the account holder as an additional amount out of their account.
If you're a customer of one of these banks and write someone a check for "$100.00", they are seemingly unable to present it to your bank and receive $100 as you had promised. As such, you have written a bad check and stand to be prosecuted for check fraud.
Of course only the powerless will get tripped up by this corner case, as it's much easier for anyone with a bank account to present the check to their own bank who will turn around and present it via ACH. But I'd love to see someone in just the right position record their interaction with the dishonoring bank, return the dishonored check to the payer, and demand a proper payment plus a $35 rejected check fee.
Keep in mind that the majority of money these days goes through credit card processors that take a percentage off the top. Not saying they don't provide a service for the money, but it doesn't seem that different.
There's a link further down but tldr, he ran a department that struggled to disperse unemployment benefits to the people of New Mexico during 2021. Hard to say if anyone else would have done better in his place, but his address and family info were getting shared online and a car got blown up at his place of work.
I understand the anger (but not to the point of terrorism or threats), but it's also pretty obvious to me that blaming one guy for the failures is kind of missing the point. The entire unemployment system has been deliberately undermined for ideological reasons, with the goal being making it as hard as possible to get and keep benefits. It's not shocking that one person could fix a decade or two worth of systemic rot when suddenly the system is strained to the max.
> But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted.
Isn't that tautological?
Anyway, it's also not true as a general rule. The comments I see net-downvoted on HN are ones that either contain falsehoods and/or are poorly (often "rantily") written. I've seen many comments about a topic generally downvoted because they fit that pattern, but comments that express the same POV but avoid falsehoods and are reasonably written end up without a net negative.
If you're going to have votes, some things will get net-downvoted. There's no way around that - people have different opinions and scoring systems, and some comments will do poorly with some people.
I agree with the analogy, but for me (and I think most people) processing time far exceeds IO. Once you get to a good enough IO speed, it doesnt make sense to optimize further, as the returns are diminishing.
For programming, I can see that, definitely. But when I'm writing an essay, there are many times where I can't type as fast as I can think, and it drives me nuts. I end up resorting to using a voice recorder and transcribing it later. Because sometimes the ideas can come out quickly, but it's still easy to forget them if they're not written down.
For programming I only see this if you have a language with a lot of unnecessary overhead (not in the syntax but in what you need to type out) no (good) IDE or only solve mostly memorized leet code problems, or only write pretty brain dead code the 100ed time (in which case you could optimize it away with code-gen).
For other thinks I don't see this, not because I think slower then I type. But to some degree thoughts and typing are out-of-sync and while each though is faster then a typing, for much code you have one thought about how to type it, but also many more about contexts of your solutions and interaction with other code and what you do next etc. you type. And I don't think increasing typing speed would change this much. Except if I increase it to a point where I now need to fully focus on typing, which would be counter productive.
TL;DR: I type and thing, not type then think then type. (Though biologically seen I maybe don't do it actually in parallel but micro-task like how multi-threading on a single core non SMT system works, but it doesn't matter much for the end result.)
