abbasaamer

That's a poor comparison and I think most people understand that, even if the current environment discourages them from admitting it.

For anyone who is really looking to understand how the stock market works, I would recommend picking up a copy of "Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners" by Larry Harris.

Thanks for this informative post. I currently live in the Middle East and was just about to pick these up last night - but I was under the wrong impression they were the same as European truffles.

Does it? Where is the "transformation" happening? In mind of the viewer?

Imagine you are paranoid and you suspect someone is deceiving you. The reality of whether or not they are actually deceiving you does not have an impact on how much pain you feel.

Alternatively, someone with a mental condition that leads them to believe they are in pain would conceivably feel the same pain as someone who is actually being physically hurt.

Just my take on it.

> If you mail a torn banknote to the Treasury they will send you a brand new one.

Torn, yes. Lost/destroyed, no. I don't think the torn analogy represents the scenario being discussed.

> And how does a fork solve anything? You can't just say, hey throw away all your existing Bitcoin, we're starting from scratch and using this new one now.

That's exactly what Ethereum did. The old one was essentially "thrown away" and became known as Ethereum Classic. A small group of people stuck with the old one, but it's not the main one we think of when we say "Ethereum" these days.

> For example, what happens when a piece of bread is worth less than 1 satoshi

That does not seem to be an imminent danger. The price of Bitcoin would have to increase literally 1.4 million times for a satoshi to be worth a penny.

> To make matters worse, if a whole bunch of flames goes up in flames more can be printed to replace it. If Bitcoin goes missing[1], it's gone for good.

Isn't that the same with paper cash? If by a "whole bunch" you mean enough to cause a worldwide issue, then there are solutions to that. Maybe not great solutions, but there are some. Worst case, a hard fork. That's essentially what led to Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic, isn't it?

Out of curiosity, what are you fighting Amazon about on this?

(full disclosure: I work on Alexa, but not on the team that handles skills)

Cool! I use one of your competitors, Fax Fresh. One thing I like about them is that they clearly state they delete the fax from their servers once it's sent. I couldn't find such a statement in your privacy policy (though maybe I missed it). Can you elaborate on what happens to my fax after it's sent? Is it deleted from your server?

Hi there! Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply to this earlier.

So my basic response to that is "it depends". I have previously been in a different team at Amazon and that team definitely had much less room for slack. If you didn't push yourself hard, you probably couldn't get promoted there. But then again, they also had issues with attrition.

The culture in teams can vary quite a bit at Amazon. I think it mostly comes down to the leadership. More than any other "big company" I've seen, Amazon emphasizes ownership. As a VP (and even as a manager, though to a much lesser extent), you get nearly full freedom to define your team's culture and set the direction of your product. So yeah, I don't think every team has a great culture within Amazon; a lot of it depends on the culture defined by your leadership team.

In regards to your last point: > "I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse."

Most weeks I probably put in a bit more than 40 hours. Maybe closer to 45 or 50 hours. That's the average. Have I put in more occasionally? Of course. Do I sometimes check emails on a weekends or evenings? Yep, of course. But there have also been times when I've come to work at noon or left by 2pm if I needed to do something else. And, 90% of the time, I don't respond to emails outside of work hours. That doesn't feel very much like a "sweatshop" to me.

I've worked at other companies besides Amazon and I have plenty of friends who work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. My friends at Microsoft will often put in 50 to 60 hours during a live site outage or near a product release. I have friends at Google who check their email on evenings and weekends. One of my best friends is at Facebook and does the same. I know less about Apple, but I've heard their culture is pretty intense. So, in that sense, I don't feel my team's work culture is any worse.

Overall, I like my team and I think that credit goes upwards through my management chain. Good managers make a huge difference. Perhaps Amazon needs to do a better job in ensuring teams are more consistent in creating a good culture across the company.