sheepmullet

> Are you implying that Europeans can't see through propaganda? That, somehow, only Americans have this gift?

I’m saying reality is a hell of an antidote to propaganda.

I’m certain French people are far better at recognizing biased and misleading reporting concerning France than I am.

> Americans are not somehow less susceptible to pop media influence than, say, Europeans, simply by virtue of being Americans.

Of course they are! Propaganda is much less effective when you constantly see conflicting evidence with your own lying eyes.

There is a reason why trust in the mainstream media is at an all time low in the US.

> contrast to the USA, Australia etc, where no-one can tell you are not a citizen by simply looking at you.

Yes America, Australia, the UK, etc are all running a great experiment to see if multiculturalism can work.

The rest of the world might follow if multiculturalism ever ends up working.

> You need to bring something special: capital or knowledge/skills.

Unfortunately that is not really true. But it’s certainly a good idea!

I’m not sure if you are joking or not but Cleveland is nothing like a concentration or re-education camp.

> Insurance for a family is now > $20K a year.

The real question is why is it so expensive?

When I was growing up in my town with about 1000 kids we had 1 kid who was diabetic, 1 attempted suicide, and 2 serious car accidents.

We had plenty of minor problems like broken bones but you didn’t need insurance to cover these.

So it was maybe 800-1000 working adults covering a handful of serious cases over a 14-16 year time period.

> People are hiring more women because it improves performance and productivity [1].

I think the hbr article has cause and effect backwards.

It’s obvious that wealthy stable high margin businesses can afford to focus on diversity initiatives.

If we were actually confident that diverse teams were better then gender and race would no longer need to be protected groups.

> False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave.

Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well.

There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.

> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable.

99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.

> would listen and judge system stability suggestions based on participation in supposedly optional activity unrelated to system stability.

In my experience they are closely related.

> You also openly say that you trust people work based on Friday beer

Sure - there is an incredible depth of research on trust building via outside of work/after work activities.

> That sounds like horrible workplace

Strange considering I work at companies regularly listed in “best companies to work for” surveys.

> Does that not sound manipulative to you?

You seem to be assuming there is a lot of peer pressure placed on you if you don’t want to do it.

Why?

I’m simply saying there are always social costs. For example you probably won’t be listened to as much when there are conversations around improving system stability.

It’s like our after work Friday drinks are entirely optional - but lots of people build friendships and trust there and this can often lead to higher productivity.

If you can build these friendships another way or have a different path to an equivalently high productivity then not going doesn’t have an impact on you.

I’m not sure your two links have any substance to them.

A few history buffs couldn’t find anything to support it....

I’d be interested to know how they did test bridges etc.

> If on call is optional what's with the social penalty for people not wanting to do it.

Because many optional activities have an impact on your peers and they are unlikely to judge you strictly based upon your job duties?

IME developers will go where the career growth is and it is up to the company to make sure that fixing a race condition on a Friday afternoon is rewarded.