passivate

It is a bit sad to see the smartest engineers in the world all working towards implementing and maintaining the largest spying apparatus in history.

We should be focusing on learning from and highlighting people who are working to make the world a better place - and not focusing on employees from these companies. Any online news aggregator could institute a policy to not promote products or services of these companies. Unfortunately, many startups are operating with the hope that these companies acquire them, and so they're all to happy to continue extending this spying apparatus even further into other domains.

Heh, I got a chuckle out of that :) Thanks for sharing.

You're 100% correct. Its mostly about finding a system that works for you. As a format fat person I have internalized the fact that my body's hunger signal is broken and that 'eat when you are hungry' leads to weight gain for me. Focusing on the CO part of CICO, especially non exercise expenditure of energy has helped me keep my weight in check.

A lot of human progress in core sciences and engineering is on the backs of people toiling the midnight hours on sheer passion for little monetary reward. We owe a great debt of gratitude towards them.

In any commercial organization, there are tremendous pressures in high-investment, super high-risk projects and anyone can trivially find things that are wrong with the current system. The much more difficult challenge is showing an alternate path that is superior - based on the results it achieves. The times when you see the ugly behavior of people are times of desperation. Online commenters expend a lot of effort point out how to improve things by "proving" it by linking to random studies - but the more persuasive argument is by implementing those changes in the real world. "Talk is cheap, show me the code." ;)

Except CEOs, apparently they're always overpaid. ;)

There were a lot many years from the time of Amazon's inception till they became a monopoly. It seems like your "what could be" experiment has already been done. There was plenty of opportunity, but nobody managed to build a better competitor to them.

It is a separate argument, but 'more competition' isn't a magical fix to everything. This sort of gating mechanism relies on the end user/consumer having good knowledge, sound judgement, etc. Also what is best for the consumer isn't best for the society. A wild example - For me, as the consumer I'm happy to get an iPhone for $200, but that might mean that Apple pays their employees below US minimum wage.

For me, I am convinced that they create jobs, spend money in the economy, help provide valuable goods and services to society, etc. Amazon is famous for not hoarding money but re-investing their profits. Most 401ks invest in index funds that are buoyed by the tech stocks. I don't have ready citations but I believe these to be relatively uncontroversial statements. This whole talk about "net positive" and what is "net" is a pointless discussion that is going nowhere. There is no way to prove anything unless we have an alternative universe without Amazon to study.

What sort of citation will make you happy?

By that same logic, why should USA salaries be higher than the rest of the developed world? Will you work less hard if you can only get $70,000 versus $200,000? The CEO is an employee. The owners of the company hire him/her to do a job.

That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

The quantum substrate being non-deterministic doesn't mean that free-will exists/doesn't exist. It has to be shown as such.

What is happening at the quantum level, to the extent that we can understand it, isn't directly translatable into a non-deterministic world at the higher macro level. And so, we do expect and observe a certain level of determinism in our macro scale world. For e.g. A topic relevant to this community - Computing. For the vast vast majority of cases when thousands of people execute the same program on the same or similar hardware at different times in different regions we do expect, and observe the same deterministic result. The outliers to this are primarily due to damage to the processor/equipment, software bugs, or other known factors (including alpha particles/radiation, etc).

>Well current scientific thought says yes

Link to evidence?

Wind the clock back to a time when you made a decision. Is it possible for you to make a different decision if you had the exact same mood/context/environment/knowledge and all the sub-atomic particles were exactly identical with the same spin, etc? Current dominant philosophical thought points towards a big NO.

Since its near you, have you tried going there and explaining it to the manager?