zucchini_head

The article doesn't touch upon education much at all, which I believe is a central part of social (im)mobility. Problems arising in society later on will simply stem from the early life of members of society, not afterwards. It's a common principle that education is the key to societal equality, in some way.

All I can offer is my story on this. I've lived in the UK all my life in all sorts of regions from those of lower working class (my hometown) to my recent years where I've lived in rather upper-class "lawyer-doctor-business owner" regions. The difference in education between the lower and upper classes is stark. Let me explain.

Upper-class children are enrolled in schools of like-minded high-achievers full of entrance exams and interviews (provides a non-zero floor to student "intelligence/quality" at the school), and strict rules/discipline. They are further pushed towards degrees leading to higher paying careers - Finance, Medicine, Law, by their families and the schools themselves. Their families purchase extra tutoring, they have smarter parents (this is a positive feedback loop across generations!) to guide them, and so on...

Compare this to lower-class children, who, in the UK (and i'm pretty sure everywhere else essentially) are enrolled in "state schools" (free). These schools have no entrance requirements (there is zero floor for student quality), the families almost never purchase extra tutoring, and are much less pushed towards "meaningful" degrees. The schools offer equal environments to the best and the worst of students.

This imbalance in education (and by extension upbringing in general) is what seeds everything else. And indeed, in the past few years the UK government has recognized all the above. How they plan of solving it? The reintroduction of "Grammer Schools"! These are state schools (still), but _do_ have enterance requirements, thereby allowing lower-class students of high intelligence/quality a chance to separate from the worst students in state schools and enroll in a more challenging education. There is much debate in the UK whether this will work, or will simply just allow children of rich families to more-often/further separate themselves from poor families. Time will tell.

That's my 0.02c anyway: Education.

Being serious here: What exactly is a "fintech" company? Every financial company on earth that isn't in someone's backyard is at-heart now purely technological (computers, algos, tracking, databases, etc.). So what makes a "fintech" company? Is it a super _ultra_ technological bank?

In summary, what are fintech companies exactly doing?

Part of me believes it's the new version of "crypto-", but i will hold my breath.

I find it quite funny, rather intruiging, that we seem to have gone full circle on trusted sources of information. Historically, a face-to-face meeting was considered as the ultimate legitimate and trustworthy way. Not story or rumors or witnessing, since the courts say people can be "decieved", "traumatised", etc. Then came microphones, cameras, CCTV in the 20th century, and then they became the ultimate trusted sources of information.

And due to AI and it's rapidly increasing misuse by enormous conglomerates, it will be very soon when videos are never trusted but rather treated as comedic rumor and folklore, and we will go back again to how it always was.

...until replicants come.

I'm saddened that there are actual "smart" people who waste their days to work on these malicious forms of AI, be it Google's almost entire arsenal, or anything. However, i'm not surprised they do, but it is still sad.

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all.

Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.

It's about willing to do the job good, and not just for the money I think.

But anyway, I think that maybe my above story is all just gobblewash. Overnight, I was thinking about how all these jobs that pay a lot for rather low-skill labour are all related to real-estate. Wood and bricks are what makes houses. I wonder if the good pay comes from that, rather than not many people wanting to do it.

Regardless, it's the opinion now quite a few of these labourers hold now - that the younger generation aren't able to do what they do. Maybe that's a little short-sighted, maybe it's on to something wrong with the future generations, maybe it's just wrong. Who knows.

I have a little story about this kind of thing, where doing something rather simple and low-skill can make an absolute fortune.

One night I was talking to an older friend of a friend, 50+, around a year ago now. We were talking about what we did for a living and what we got paid. We started off with what he did: He's a bricklayer, nothing more, and told me that they get paid per brick they lay. It's something like £4 per brick. What shocked me was an experienced bricklayer like him usually lays enough bricks to make around £400/day.

"That's almost £150,000/year!" I said, trying to not sound too envious or anything (spoiler: I failed). And this doesn't include the one-off jobs they get every weekend from rich foreigners who have extravagant houses built in the UK all the time. All in all it can amount to some very large amounts of zeros in your bank. In a few years he became a millionaire from bricklaying. I have since then talked to a few others who are in that trade and it all (anecdotally) corroborates, approximately (the older you are the more you get picked for "specialist" properties that involve very rich Chinese and Arabians apparently, which can make you ~£1,000 in one weekend).

I asked, as any sane person would, something along the lines of "why isn't everyone and his dog laying bricks?". And the reply was very intriguing. He said essentially that younger people these days (my age) don't want to lay bricks every day now, or don't have the stamina. They want to go on their phones and become world-famous and important and work on new gizmos and apps every day and be looked at by everyone and be payed attention to, etc, etc.

Since then I've not really been able to get my head around it all. It seems like although we talk about automation stealing jobs and everybody will have to be a "techie" to make any sort of decent living, there is definitely a small "elite" minority doing these very old-fashioned jobs that no-one wants or can do anymore. I fear sometimes that we (the younger generation) are slowly going mad with technology, and forgetting about the practical skills. What our own two hands were made to do so to speak.

We never got on to what I do in the end funnily enough.

Anyway, more relevantly, this lumberyard article is just a (slightly Americanised) theme of the above. It's these jobs that were done for a pittance in the past (sometimes even by slaves and prisoners), and now are these trades that sometimes are paying exorbitant salaries, just simply because nobody wants to do it, because no-one can be bothered anymore.

Apologies if this was long and off-topic, but I hope it's left some kind of thought somewhere.

The parent comment wasn't saying that nobody was saying otherwise...

I suppose. I come from the C and C++ world, before I moved onto webdev (quite rare for a young millennial like me to be dinkling around with static C-related languages, I've been told by older colleagues), so I guess that I don't see it from the most understanding point of view.

Wow. That's disturbing!

Not having the same code on paper and on machine so to speak does make debugging typescript a little hard. It's a little bit of a black-box.

I code typescript for Angular 2/4, and although yeah, the aforementioned debugging pains are annoying, the time saved on having types to enable linting and strong predictable variable comparisons, is much greater.

Also, needing console.logs everywhere should be discouraged. Your code should be clear enough that you don't need a console.log debug line to print the boolean result of a comparison, for example. This is the whole point of typescript like I said, to make variable comparision and management easier so that you don't need that console.log line...

I don't know what you MEAN, I read it just FINE.

It's certainly a phenomenon that exists, we've all seen and heard of false accusations to damage people's reputation, business, and such. "Scandals" have been around since humans have, it's gossip, it's libel, it's whatever you call it.

Question: did they provide you with any substantial evidence?

Anyway, ultimately your case and many others is why the law is at it's very core based on an innocent until proven guilty paradigm. Once you take that principle away, you put all the power in the accuser and none in the accused, which is objectionably unjust.

I've recently seen a few very disturbing comments on HN and from similar people (above-average education, born into privileged conditions, politically left, etc.), who naively believe that this is a bad or somewhat ineffective paradigm, and that we should "just believe" rape accusations, because ???? shrug. It disheartens me that some people can be so blindly ignorant about the law and human nature. We only need to take a short walk down history lane to explicitly see that if you give one side of anything human-related an enormous amount of power (like in this case if accusers are believed before evidence), there will be many who abuse it. It is human nature, and the law prevents it from reining free and causing utter chaos.

In your case, by the sounds of it they did not present to you any form of evidence (right?) to show you your misconduct. No sexually harassing text transcripts, no internal email transcripts, no witnesses, nothing. What this is is chaos and injustice, under the guise of some very malformed concepts of "progressiveness", and it's unfortunately ever-more prevalent.

I agree that whenever these political topics arise on HN, you generally get the same situation - a few politically unpopular comments being downvoted to oblivion, even if the comment was well formed and wasn't snarky, unnecessarily cruel, etc. Simply saying "I think that this isn't an event that should be encouraged because X, Y, Z reasons", should not be downvoted if they provided interesting insight, reason, logic objective angles, etc.

And as we've seen in this thread, the usual few HN snobs come in making insubstantial points-seeking comments deriding how toxic all those downvoted comments were. I'm rather tired of how a growing number of HN users like to play "morality-police" on these kind of topics.

If anything I found your comment rather insightful, and it's sad to see it downvoted. It has an interesting links to the ongoing Facebook moderation debacle where their ridiculous "minority-ness" rules have been complicated so much that they can be gamed so that you can hate on a certain group because they don't score enough "minority" points, but another very similar group gains "protection status" from hate.

Come get me downvotes, I'm ready!

There could be some hidden costs that the publishers incur, no? I'm just playing tenth man here.

I'm not the most knowledgeable about scientific journal companies, but hosting thousands of papers online/offline and having to vet all these individually may be quite an expensive process, right?

OTOH, the infamous Alexandre managed okay with Sci-Hub, but maybe it was because she didn't have to vet these?

In the end, seeing the profits these companies make I suppose nullifies any devil's advocate position here. Some of the upper-echelon positions in these journal companies are multi-billionaires @_@