andrew_v4

It's a big shift because we have never as a society catered to the most cowardly before. Personal responsibility used to mean if you cared about something it was on you, now its shifted to forcing it on other people. This is really antithetical to western values.

I think it's a direct consequence of media and government trying to remove free will from the equation and present taking the vaccine as the only choice people have. If you're going to essentially force people to do it, a statistically meaningless side-effect becomes more important as reason for people to push back (and the media to drum up false fears).

If you treat people like adults and let them consult their doctors and make their own decisions, the bar is much lower for safety (by lower I mean from impossibly high to reasonable). People willingly take much more risky medicines and treatments all the time and are fine with it. But if you try and force something in them, it's not surprising they push back on anything that isn't guaranteed to be perfect.

(So my point is, I think demand would be higher and concerns lower if you just made it available and let people make their own choice. But the whole pandemic has been more about forcing people to do things than about trying to do things that actually solve the problem)

[Edit- it's funny how any presence of giving people control over their bodies evaporates in a situation like this. And re the strawman that "nobody is forcing you" - if the consequence is severe limits on what you are allowed to do, that doesnt really hold up]

Agreed - the article is tips and tricks to use google effectively, not an editorial about the value of googling

That's not unique to cryptocurrency mining, there are other things that are rate limited by energy costs as well.

Re team structure, most consulting firms are a collection of mini pyramids, with partners or equivalent at the top that are supporter by project teams. Partnere are responsible for sales, client relationship, and quality of the delivery, and are often (for better or worse) very hands on in the execution. I have seen failures result from having a sales org that gets the contracts and writes the scope, and a subordinate delivery org that had to go in and try and figure out to do what the salespeople pitched. When its bespoke services, the people doing the work should be selling it. If it's something closer to a commodity with well defined inputs and outputs, the opposite is true and you might as well have a dedicated sales person/team

This is a question I have had too. One place is LinkedIn, but it suffers from the social media issue that it favors pre-digested flashy stuff, many people don't really go there to do a deep read. And it's not really technical (although oddly I do see people posting journal articles and other deeper stuff there sometimes).

You could use Medium, but I don't know how you get anyone to read it without posting it to some social media.

It would be cool to have some kind of HN style post and mod system for well-written stuff. Or some kind of discovery system that doesnt just race to the bottom like social media or search.

> There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh.

Dismissing a new technology is not helpful. But I think it's valuable for people that understand the tech to debunk proposed uses of technology that are not things the tech actually does. This is closer to how I see the article.

In what I see as the current big 3 - quantum computing, AI, and blockchain - there is a parallel imaginary business world claiming things they can do that at best are misunderstandings and at worst are effectively scams to get consulting money. People who understood what the tech is actually doing should not shy away from clarifying what it does and make it harder for the snake oil salesmen to do their thing.

This is spot on. I have worked as a consultant doing reviews of a handful of diverse government departments, and leadership's priorities were always identical: justify headcount increases. Every one will have a presentation about the changing nature of their work, new legislation, the decline in staff vs some past golden age etc etc that shows they need more people.

As you say, its 100% a function of the incentives. This is a general flaw with "command" economies where resources are based on who can argue for them best as opposed to demand for the outputs. There is a lot that can be done in terms of SLAs for operational departments and discretion to the operational side on how money gets spent, to try and come closer to a market driven system, but there is no political will for it.

I'm not familiar with this specific product. But this is really a dark side to SaSS, broadly defined, that I have not seen a good solution to.

It's not helpful to have a service provider that can renege on commitments when they take issue with them for whatever reason. In this case, it (based admittedly on limited information) feels like Stripe agreed to something and then later unilaterally just decided that they didn't like it and bailed. There is a certain amount of risk in any contract, and what bothers me about this kind of thing is that providers think they are entitled to all of the upside but none of the downside of the contract. As a small business owner myself, if I committed to do something (including for a company like stripe) I would be on the hook for delivery, even if it turned out to be different than I had planned for (within the agreed scope). Stripe should be held to the same standard.

Not sure I completely agree, but I definitely do think this kind of project can be derailed by proponents who want to be uncompromising about it and don't think it's acceptable to compromise in something like location because its harder to get built where people don't want it.

An example people probably won't like is those mixed income buildings (can't remember where now) that had separate entrances for the subsidized units. It's definitely not egalitarian in some sense, but if it allows more subsidized housing to be built for people that need it, is it really better just to not do it?

Yeah, this is an underrated comment. I mean the origin of some of this stuff is to be inclusive and diverse, but ironically it has the effect of making people walk on eggshells all the time and not feel like they can act normally.

It's like that scene in x-men (x-people now?) first class when magneto tells mystique that if she's using half her energy to be someone else all the time, she'll never be at her full potential. If you're constantly screening your code, writing, and speech for increasingly obscure ways that people could get offended, you're not working at your full potential.

Wow, how unhelpful. I don't know the acceptable way to call this out, but how about focusing on substance instead of just bringing pedantic language stuff into the mix. I see this happening a lot, when people can't find a real way to contribute, they start debating the position of commas or whether it should be called inquiry or enquiry or whatever. It distracts from real debate, and maybe gets you some attention (lots of bureaucratic leader types love this sort of thing) but it's really wasting everybody's time.

(Edit, the irony isn't lost on me of providing a low value comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion in response to one I accuse of something similar. But I've seen so much time wasted and so many people getting ahead and in some cases basically build a career on engaging with these kind of language things instead of doing any actual work, I wanted to bring it up)

Safety engineering is a matching between user expectations of safety and actual safety. If there's evidence that this treadmill is disproportionately dangerous for it's category, that's one thing. But if it's just "dangerous" without qualification, that's not a reason in itself to be especially concerned about it.