> people who have family responsibilities through no fault of their own ... are ignored while companies fawn over people who (largely) choose to pop out more mouths to feed.
This is really a regrettable choice of words. There is no "fault" involved in becoming a parent. The point you are trying to get across could have been communicated so much more convincingly if you had checked your attitude. "This is a great first step, but many of us have responsibilities to other family members, also -- sick or disabled parents or siblings, for instance. It would be terrific to see benefits that support those needs as well."
EDIT: It has been (correctly) pointed out that my translation was lossy; I dropped the fact that no one chooses to have a sick sibling, and thus it might be even worthier of compensation / support than parenthood. That was unintentional, and I regret it. I still think there's a less caustic, more productive way to make that point.
A key point that I was making (and a point which your rewriting of my comment completely erases) is that parenthood can be planned ahead for (or avoided) to a much greater degree than other situations that require family leave.
I could have made some anodyne choice of words that obscures this fact, but I didn't because I wanted to make the point that if we are giving people support for voluntarily taking on extra family burdens, then it's absolutely inexcusable that we don't extend the same support to people who have had similar burdens thrust upon them involuntarily.
Pretty sure part of the point they were conveying was the irritation with society willing to do things for 'think of the children' but not willing to extend those same things to those in basically the same situation but who are not children.
So no, it could not be made by choosing words that would not offend your delicate sensibilities.
From Wikipedia: "The alt-right has no formal ideology... 'Alt-right' is a recently coined umbrella term, with no clear criteria of membership yet agreed upon."
Would each of the people being banned agree that they've signed on to an admittedly racist and sexist platform? I doubt it.
EDIT: Let me amend "I doubt it" to "I am not sure and haven't done enough research to have an informed opinion." From the article I can't get the full set of people that are known to have been banned or how many of them are professed white nationalists...
The funny thing is that the alt right (at least from the Trump campaign onwards) is based on the idea that if you're not an extremist, you're a "cuck". So, while it isn't a clearly defined ideology, it is a group seeking increasingly more extreme ideologies as time passes.
Twitter's move reduces their platform and reach but increases their cultural cachet — they're becoming the Certified Opposition to all of society's ills.
I'm fairly sure the whole "cuck" insult thing grew out of chan culture. I think it was adopted by /pol/ and then disseminated to the wider alt right community. The funny thing is that while it may have started as an insult to those not extreme enough in their views it evolved (devolved?) into a general purpose insult. Do you like Apple? You're a cuck. How about M$, also a cuck. Google? Yep, cuck. It's basically lost all meaning now.
Even on /b/, which is known for putting up with the absolute lowest quality shitposting on the entire internet, insulting someone as a cuck will now be met with a litany of retorts regarding your "low quality bait". Weird times.
Assuming your interpretation of your manager's motivations are correct, that's horrible and I'm sorry you had to go through it. With that said, would you have had any more protections at a smaller company? The process at those bigger companies, while excruciating for all companies, makes it harder for managers to fire, not easier.
Also, in the future utopia you're describing where no one has to work a shit job that "stifles [future] success"... who cleans the toilets? Who waits tables?
One of the issues basic income attempts to address is increased levels of automation and the associated decrease in the overall number of jobs available. As a society, what should we do about the people who will be driven out of the job market by this trend?
I personally believe basic income is a much better solution than the wellfare systems we have in place to deal with mass unemployment. Traditional need-based wellfare systems actually disincentivize work in that you can often lose wellfare benefits once you start working full-time, whereas basic income has no strings attached, and any work you choose to in hopes of improving your standards of living will actually improve your standards of living instead of being a trade-off.
Maybe these shit jobs will be paid decent wages to attract workers since work will be optional, turning entire orthodoxies about the value of domestic work upside down.
I mean, the reason why this is an issue in the first place is due to rapidly increasing advancements in automating people out of the job pool.
Anyone who looks at the current state of self-driving cars and deep learning (ala AlphaGo) and doesn't recognize we are right on the cusp of a huge sea-change in how many jobs we can automate out of existence (at least in the sense that they won't be done by humans anymore) isn't thinking very hard.
And we are currently so far away from useful solutions to this economic problem that we really need to start seriously considering it right NOW.
Businesses that cannot find people to clean the toilets or wait the tables will not be able to sustain themselves.
This may lead to a family-centric economy, where businesses like the city corner-store flourish because the family owns and cares for the business. The economic benefit to the family in aggregate is greater than the basic incomes afforded to the individual family members.
(Also, edited my comment to remove the reference to crutch.)
It's being stuck spending huge numbers of hours on those dead-end jobs that stifles success.
There will be plenty of people that choose to work whatever basic job for a period of time, and leave it later. There will be plenty of people that would take up such a job part-time so that it doesn't stifle them.
In the worst case, you can always pay a good wage.
You can still clean toilets and wait tables to make extra income so you can afford the nice things you may like but aren't needed to live, such as vacations.
If you stopped cleaning toilets you don't starve. That's the idea anyway. You don't have to clean toilets but that is an option if you want to earn some extra spending money.
Not everyone considers cleaning toilets beneath them. I didn't mind having a job where I cleaned toilets, that sort of work doesnt bother me - it's only the pay that is terrible.
I think it's partly a matter of priming the pump with a one or two fantastic initial hires. Go above and beyond to get a couple terrific people on board (offer a title, or an opportunity to earn a title, or a big piece of equity, etc.), and then you have "and we have an amazing team" as a big new piece of your sales pitch to the rest.
Anecdotally -- from my own job search experiences, and from my experiences hiring engineers at a few different places -- a candidate's sense of the people they'll be working is a huge factor in their decision. Make that factor strongly in your favor and you'll be in good shape. Also, don't be afraid to have a rigorous technical interview process -- I think that can double as a sales pitch for great candidates who want to be at companies that recognize and appreciate their skills.
This is great advice. I will try to reach out to some more high-profile people here in the local community. Maybe a nice title and a position with lots of freedom could interest someone.
> You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."
There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia.
As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.).
Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :)
I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.
While I agree that it's true "freedom doesn't mean others should have to meet your needs" I find it a damn shame we can't stand on a little piece of ground hardly anywhere without paying someone.
We are born on earth and we are entitled to a little piece of it. Powerful people shouldn't get to own everything.
> Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."
> Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market. "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.".
Much of our seeming choices are predetermined by a corporation/politician, the de rigueur political/economic philosophy of the day and also by the era we are born into. It's unfortunate this topic is out of bounds in most places. Even here on hackernews you're shutting him down. This conversation is potentially one of the most important we could be having today.
What is a page view on an article worth these days? A couple cents? Less? If the micropayments implementation was right, and if paying for content became a more mainstream idea, I don't think you'd feel that you "[could] read but [couldn't] share" an article just because it charged a nickel to continue past the intro paragraph. I don't see how that would break hyperlinks.
The problem with this model is that the mental transaction (do I care enough to pay for this) is more expensive than the couple of cents it costs for access.
A similar problem exists when trying to decide to pay for an article from a journal you don't have access to. Is the abstract compelling enough for me to fork out $100 dollars for this article? What if the abstract was misleading? Can I return it?
As a consumer, I'd rather just pay a higher flat fee for internet access / browsing and have that collective wealth distributed to content providers based on some metrics. Better content gets bigger portion of the pie. The problem is probably determining the metrics.
Behavior economics suggests that you're wrong[1]. Users do not like metered useage even when it benefits them. An anecdotal illustration of this at work:
> What was the biggest complaint of AOL users? Not the widely mocked and irritating blue bar that appeared when members downloaded information. Not the frequent unsolicited junk e-mail. Not dropped connections. Their overwhelming gripe: the ticking clock. Users didn’t want to pay by the hour anymore. ... Case had heard from one AOL member who insisted that she was being cheated by AOL’s hourly rate pricing. When he checked her average monthly usage, he found that she would be paying AOL more under the flat-rate price of $19.95. When Case informed the user of that fact, her reaction was immediate. ‘I don’t care,’ she told an incredulous Case. ’I am being cheated by you.’
The transactional friction between "free" and "not free" is high, even for very small values of "not free." This has been backed up by experiments[2]:
> In his book Predictably Irrational, Ariely describes a series of simple experiments that offered subjects something desirable – chocolate – at a variety of prices. Two types of chocolate were used – a Hershey’s kiss and a Lindt chocolate truffle. While the kiss is an inexpensive and common treat, a Lindt truffle is a far more tasty confection that costs an order of magnitude more than the kiss.
> The first experiment offered subjects a truffle for 15 cents (about half its actual cost) or a kiss for 1 cent. Nearly three out of four subjects chose the truffle, which seems logical enough based on the relative value of the offers.
> The next experiment reduced the price of each product by one cent – the truffle was offered at 14 cents, and the kiss was free. Although the price differential remained the same, the behavior of the subjects changed dramatically: more than two thirds of the subjects chose the free chocolate kiss over the bargain-priced truffle.
It's not about getting the right micropayment system, it's about overcoming something about how humans understand and deal with price signals. You can either sit around trying to rewire people or you can come up with a business model designed for people. Micropayments as a business model for web content is wishcasting.
The Case anecdote doesn't address her desired usage (at least not as presented in the pdf). Maybe she ends up using the service a great deal more at the flat rate, with it's significantly lower marginal price.
It'd be nice if it laid out her perception of what would be fair (we have roughly one data point, that the hourly rate at the time the conversation happened is unfair) and what the economics looked like for AOL (perhaps they could have substantially reduced the hourly price but were good at math and figured that a flat rate was the more profitable path).
The flat rate would have been a guaranteed higher monthly bill that what she was paying at the time, for as you point out potentially higher usage. But if her desired price to pay was $20, and her average monthly bill was n, where n is below $20, why wasn't she already using the service more, at the rate of $20-n?
And, again, the AOL anecdote was an illustration, not evidence. See the truffle study, we know more about this than your response suggests.
So we have an anecdote about marginal pricing going from $1 or $2 (or more) to $0 being used as an illustration that people don't like metering.
If AOL had costs of $0.20 an hour, her perception that their pricing was a ripoff probably wasn't ridiculous.
(I'm not trying to refute you, I was making the perhaps not very useful argument that the anecdote was not a good illustration, because it left too many loose ends. It's compelling because AOL is famous and her behavior is easy to cast as ridiculous, but it wouldn't be real surprising if it was told in a way that was useful to AOL.)
I rarely take the time to comment on HN or submit content but I'm occasionally really tempted to earn enough karma that I can down-vote arrogant, condescending, asinine posts like this one. Neither side of the political spectrum has anything like a monopoly on "rational people" and "the sheer idiocy of [people who disagree with bitwize]" is not "relevant to hackers as an interesting and difficult problem."
Well... I am not agreeing that his comment was a bit cray. But isn't it common knowledge that generally more educated areas of the country are also more "progressive/left leaning"? Obviously there are exceptions, but even an intelligent man can cling to the wrong idea ;)
That is not true . At least in my experience . All the rational people I've ever met in my whole life was liberal and big chunk of them were disappointed in political system (which makes them out of spectrum in left side ).
For example even Noam Chomsky (which is far left in today US definition) prefer Obama (despite he knows Obama is just another politician who work for wall street instead of people ,but at least he is not going to put country in danger) to some crazy person at the other hand.
I was fairly disappointed when I saw that comment down voted in HN .
And I am from other country , I can see (in compare to my country) how exactly Right wing using deceive people with its control over money/media.
About the monopoly maybe your left wing is Clinton ( which don't have any monopoly on rational people , because all know she is clown of wall street) , but true left wing (like Lessig Lawrence / Bernie Sanders / etc ) completely have monopoly on rational people in compare to right side , specially academic people in human science branches.
I hear where you're coming from, but if he had scrubbed all of that from this post and gone with "professional" -- "I am a self-taught web dev looking for work, I am familiar with Ruby and have recently been doing API work, I want to work remotely and can start immediately" -- would it have gotten anywhere near the front page of HN?
All attention is monetizable. Maybe you become the finance guy who may have laundered money for the narcolumbians, or maybe you become the lawyer that kept the mob boss out of jail. But that's perception, not necessarily reality. In any case, you're the guy that gets to charge more because you have more clients.
I'm kind of curious, if you're willing to give a general corner of industry. I can't think of anything that doesn't have "bad boy" characters. Seems like any federal agent kind of person would attract attention from the CIA. A doctor maybe? Still seems like someone willing to write off-topic prescriptions would command more salary.
It's actually kind of tough to think of a profession that needs to be perfectly ethical, and also appear to be perfectly ethical. Aerospace designers kill test pilots. SEC agents that appear to be on the take probably get bribed more often than the squeaky clean.
Maybe there's some corner of insurance that having a reputation would endanger your employer somehow. Everything i can think of right now implies higher salary.
I mean, I take his point that some kinds of attention are really bad. I knew mchurch at Google and that whole debacle was a pretty up-close look at just how bad they can be.
I just don't think this case is analogous. mchurch became instantly infamous with all Googlers, which made him radioactive in a big swath of the upper tier of the software industry, not just in NYC but also CA and other tech hubs. In contrast, this guy posted one thread to Hacker News that (from what I can tell) is fairly anonymized. Maybe folks close to him will recognize that this is his story, and maybe in his local dev community word will get around that he wrote it. But he's looking for remote work, and I think it extremely unlikely that he'll go to apply for a remote job a year from now and they will somehow connect him to this post.
