Most of what I learned in college was only because I did homework and struggled to figure it out myself. Classroom time was essentially just a heads up to what I'll actually be learning myself later.
Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.
If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard" education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of money that I'd be much dumber for it.
> but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.
If the concept is too foreign for them, I'm sure we could figure out how to replicate the grade school environment. Give them their 15 hours/week of lecture, and then lock them in a classroom for the 30 hours they should spend on homework.
It's got the same vibe as going into a circle of people having fun and telling them they're trying too hard. What's the effect you're going for?
You're not being stopped from having an opinion - your comment is visible - but sharing one that'll only serve to bring down people's moods makes everything a little bit worse I think.
If you're in a circle of people whose moods can be brought down because of a shared opinion, you're in a circle of prepubescent children who haven't learned to regulate their emotions like a grown up.
Are you claiming that the detainees - assumedly primarily illegal immigrants - are taking part in the voting process and that's why the governor is "grandstanding"?
That's the story I hear from certain folks and as far as I can tell, it has no merit. I'd be interested in any actual stats here.
Michigan found approximately 12 non-citizen voters after going through their rolls. Texas claimed to have found nearly 1000, but opened 100 investigations.
those kinds of numbers should make you understand why we have to give up on this whole constitution thing.
One of the more egregious stories that made national news and captured the zeitgeist of this situation was the alleged illegal immigrant that was working as a sworn police officer in suburban Chicago:
So given that this was allowed to happen, you want me to believe it's impossible for an illegal immigrant to cast a vote in an election? In Chicago? Where the dead people vote?
So there aren't any stats for illegal immigrants voting then I take it.
I would expect they don't check for citizenship when becoming a police officer. I do expect them to check when a voter is registered. Frankly, given the amount of hubbub about illegals voting, I would expect there to at least be a notable amount of it happening that can be pointed to.
Please do not make these sorts of claims based on vibes. They have wider consequences on the amount of hate towards foreigners - illegal or not - that is completely undeserved.
Yeah? What about being a sworn police officer is it that you think qualifies you to vote? Have you ever worked a shift as an EJ? Do you know how the Illinois/Cook County voting system works?
Is it your contention that if someone was an illegal immigrant as alleged, and in doing so able to pass a local government background check without arousing suspicion, someone wouldn't be able to outsmart some 80 year old election judge who is volunteering her time that would otherwise be spent watching reruns of Judge Judy?
The system is not as airtight as you purport it to be.
From this I can infer your answer to "have you ever been an EJ" is no.
As a starting point, citizenship is not in fact a state requirement for service as a sworn police officer. In my muni, it's explicitly not: all that's required is authorization to work.
Second, it's not the job of EJs to judge whether people are citizens or not. The median EJ in Cook County, for what it's worth, is 45 years old.
Do you think it's impossible that there are undocumented folks living under false identities and/or stolen SSNs casting votes in elections? It's a yes or no question.
To put it another way, do you believe non-citizens in this country illegally (and thus already breaking the law), have some sort of deference when it comes to obeying election laws?
Thankfully we have the spry 45 year old election judges to oversee it all.
No, having served as an EJ a couple times in Illinois now and understanding how the system works, I'm confident that there is no material amount of non-citizen voting happening in Cook County.
Is (like the article said) this information really not taught in electronics curriculum anymore? It's been a while since I was in school, but this was all covered in my undergrad EE 2XX/3XX classes. Do modern designs use fewer diodes and more ICs in their place?
I’m sure it is still taught, but a lot of power designs do often now swap diodes out for actively controlled mosfets, for example in power multiplexing (there are integrated chips called ‘ideal diodes’ or eFuses which use mosfets that do it all for you), or swapping the diodes in DC/DC converters with mosfets (called ‘synchronous rectification’).
I didn't find the specific article you're referencing, but I did find this[0] "SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown" with the usual conservative-created strawmen about poor people getting mad that the government's not taking care of their kids and quoting stereotypical ebonics.
You can see the effect is has on their base here[1]. It looks like they changed it sometime to say "AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral"[2] with a small note at the end saying they didn't mention it was AI. This is truly disgusting.
I appreciate the links. Though I think OP got some wires crossed mentioning that Fox was reporting the SNAP->Drugs conversion - since that video with the Fox reporter came from Tiktok. Though they did end up incidentally reporting other fake AI videos as real, so... yea.
Regarding your second link - it's pretty surreal to see. Reminiscent of "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy".
I'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
They take huge personal, family and financial risks to move for a job. When you are getting rid en-masse people, you are ruining local communities. There is a real societal cost.
It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive. Not to mention that once the company has established a reputation of a revolving door, then nobody gives a shit about it. They will exploit it for the short term and let it die.
Layoffs should the absolute last resort for a company due to the disruption they cause. If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
I absolutely agree with your assessment that it should be the last resort option due to the societal cost of a large number of people losing their job. On top of the risks you mention, there's also the mental hit that often accompanies layoffs not just for the folks who were fired, but the increased feeling of paranoia from the people who are left.
But can it not be the case the this /was/ the company's last resort? There's another option of moving people around and retraining them to do another function. What if that was considered and then rejected because there weren't enough departments growing to warrant that? Rhetorically, if they don't have the ability/opportunity to re-assign people, then what?
I understand your argument but it just seems like you’re purposely being contrarian.
Here’s why what you wrote seems needlessly contrarian: Amazon just posted an $18B quarter, so there is no pressing financial pressure. Okay, so you suggest this may be a last resort in lieu of retraining, but we’re talking about 14k jobs across many teams (I know of at least 40 affected), levels, and job families. The idea of needing to cross train is obviously not the culprit at that scale; An SDE laid off from one team can easily perform the same tasks on many others internally. This also completely ignores how Amazon works internally, with managers required to rank employees for pip, and, for events just like this one, URA, regardless of whether or not they deem them to be competent or not.
Of course, Amazon has also been documented to use automated processes for pip/layoffs, and the idea that layoffs involved any ounce of consideration as a last resort is so unbelievable it feels almost inflammatory.
The notion that criticizing one of history’s most profitable companies laying off thousands (at the height of their profits) is the same thing as stating, “every company beyond profit X should never do layoffs” is a blatant misrepresentation and ignores any context.
If you know people affected, then you have more information than me and I'm not going to pretend like I have a better grasp on the situation than you.
However, the "last resort" comment I made was a guess to their reasoning - it wasn't an authoritative explanation. My core point is that Amazon seems to think they can do the same, or about the same, or an acceptable amount less with fewer people. If that's the case, then from their perspective, they're overpaying on labor. That's it.
From the outside looking in, if your "last resort" comment truly was a guess to their reasoning, then I'm rather shocked. We're both on HN, so I have to assume we both work in tech and have access to the same information regarding why Amazon has earned its awful reputation.
Beyond that, I agree with your larger point, with an asterisk on "overpaying", as I do think an American company should have an incentive to prevent laying off workers just to refill them with offshoring and hiring H1Bs, especially at Amazon's scale of profitability.
I think you're missing a more human point: people dislike the effect of hiring and firing thousands of people with zero consideration. They hire thousands because it makes management look like they're ramping up to solve problems, and then they fire this many people because it makes management look like they're cutting costs to be more efficient. It's all about management keeping up the illusion that they're "on top of things", when in reality they're just playing number games.
There's empathy involved in the revulsion toward this kind of process. Please take time to consider that not everyone fired is a $300k/year rockstar programmer who can just as easily walk over to Meta or Google for a job. I know of people who have uprooted their lives and work under the idea that if they do a good job they'll stay on, when in fact the reality is more like gambling and they could be fired at any point.
I'll explain you how it works: upper management needs urgent spend cuts in the next 3-6-12 months to get bonus -> upper management lays off N thousands people in order to reach goal and get bonus.
Because 25+ years of experience in American Capitalism as its evolved and practiced today has taught me that C-Suite and upper management makes FOMO driven decisions on fear, politics and corporate quarterly returns, ie humans forced into a hunger games like culture of lowest common decency and hype driven cycles of management speak - 5 years ago it was Crypto and offshoring and now its AI more offshoring -paying only lip service to employee obligations with no attention to anything beyond that (forget pensions or decent healthcare of the 20 Century)
Ultimately even the most talented people are numbers on spreadsheet strewn aside at the end of the day as MBA capitalist hackers try to optimize every aspect of a short term numbers game to get ahead in stack ranking..
I’ve watched as incredibly talented and driven people are thrown by the wayside and ageism and lack of human decency or respect is has become the norm
Watching hardworking people and the middle class suffer because Billionaires, insane growth expectations, MBAs and Private Equity had burned this country to the ground…
And yes, don’t forget that those type As who worked on NASA missions - “Mission focused” as the article naively trumpets to get attention - once they get cancer, get a little past 50, have kids with needs ie suffer some through life - like all of us eventually do..they get on the chopping block - and are quickly forgotten trust me, I worked in Mission Control too once
Now, Amazon has never been an ethical company—and I’m sure its employees know that to one extent or another but they have indeed been a relentless one and that relentlessness and metric driven culture has driven the humanity out of the tech world (whatever little it had as Autistic or Nerdy edgelord billionaires fund ever more corrupt politics and misery for the masses) as our society is rewarded with even more shorter term thinking and an attention economy with the attention span of a Goldfish.. all these tech companies deserve worse than the skewering they got in HBOs Silicon Valley
Ok end of Rant.. hope some younger folks take heed and try to change up this shitty system
> If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
Look no further than the economies of France and Germany… both of those countries have very stringent regulations around layoffs. And none of whom have the dominance of American companies or breadth of unicorn startups.
Making firing difficult makes hiring difficult, which disincentives risk and innovation.
The leave/fire at-will contracts of most tech jobs in the US is a feature, not a bug.
> It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive.
Sometimes, but sometimes not. Layoffs are important to get rid of low performers who could be replaced with better talent, and they’re important to help companies adjust their labor to market conditions.
Neither France nor Germany have access to the high-risk capital that American startups enjoy.
Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.
If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.
Even if it is the most stringent, California is still an at-will state. You can fire people for any reason at any time, minus protections for discrimination or retaliation, etc.
France and Germany require a lot more bureaucratic red tape (documentation, severance pay, notice periods, and justification). I have not seen this personally in France, but I have in Germany and it was a nightmare. I will be very careful about hiring in Germany next time.
An incredible amount of capital is in the United States for a reason (you're on a website of those capital providers). While termination protocol is obviously not the only reason, it is undeniably one of the many that contribute to the States having the most favorable environment to build a high growth, innovative company.
Well in fifty years, I likely won’t be here judging by life expectancy numbers… so I guess it’s a moot point for me.
Kidding aside, it’s a whole bunch of pieces. Including the dollar, including the friendly regulatory environment, including friendly tax treatment for founders (which European nations are starting to adopt), including small areas with lots of great schools, plus those schools helping to connect founders with capital, plus gobs of money running around looking for high risk opportunities, plus…
It’s not just the ability to fire someone, and it’s not just the dollar.
California prohibits non-competes, which is one of the reasons why so many new start-ups are created here.
So, while it is not the most 'business' state, it is actually very startup-friendly.
> Or the one that has the world's largest startup economy?
The reason there is excess capital is because of opportunistic and predatory behavior. Optimal capitalism, which other countries can't compete with (fully). This doesn't make it a net good for the American public, nor an optimal strategy for other economies.
If you see the startup economy that has minted an absurd amount of wealth for some very talented people as predatory and a net negative for the public, we see things very differently.
And so do most who come to the Valley to be a part of it.
This strikes me as such an abjectly absurd thing to say that I can’t imagine we’ll come to a common conclusion on this.
And by the way, you’re writing this comment on a forum operated by one of the largest “predatory” sources of capital in the Valley.
Is the friction of hiring and firing responsible for all of Europe’s economic stagnation? Only some of it? If only some, how are you quantifying the proportion?
I pulled myself from a recent Amazon interview process because of how bad they are. At first I had the opinion that this could be interesting and exciting, but the more I thought about how they treated people, the more I realized that the internal culture must be terrible. And honestly I just don't need to be involved with any of that.
14k is massive layoff, even for a company as large as amazon. it isn’t about the “employees who aren’t necessarily doing the work you want done” for sure (all the while they are off-shoring by the more thousands while “america first”-run government is bailing out argentine :)
That's 4% of corporate employees going by Reuter's 350k corp employee count[0]. Sounds well within the trimming-the-fat numbers. The rest of your comment alludes to an obligation towards improving the domestic economy. That can be done through regulation, but then there's a balancing act between under/over regulation. Too much and you end up in an EU situation that hinders small tech business growth.
So we come back to my previous statement/question. Above what profit amount should a company be obligated to keep (in their eyes) unproductive workers?
to answer your question - company should have a right to fire 99% of the people if they want at any point in time and there should be no regulation of any kind against that ever.
what america should do is add $250k per year per employee tax for any employee hired outside of the US.
People won't unionize because they don't actually have very much power nowadays compared to corps. People who unionized in the 40s, 50s and 60s could afford a home on an hourly wage. In the labor market its pretty much serfdom, unless you come from money. Look at rents vs incomes for goodness sake
They’re people, not disposable objects. The alternative would be to distribute the cost of the layoffs evenly across the employer and the employees. Right now employees pay a disproportionate portion of the cost.
The cost you're referring to is fairly abstract - I'm not sure how it can be implemented for the employer. The cost to the laid-off employee is a loss of income, mental trauma, potential loss of residence. What would your ideal solution for the employer be here?
Loss of money? Layoffs normally have severance packages that are paid out to the employee - this can be seen as the company taking a monetary hit - though not proportional like you said. But what's the alternative here? 5x/10x'ing the severance package? I feel like that would make the job market even rougher as companies would be even more conservative with who and how much they hire.
Mental trauma? I mentioned it in another comment, but the employees after a layoff normally do have an increased fear of future layoffs which impact morale which would result in lower productivity.
Loss of residence / food? I'm coming up blank here.
Yeah I’m not sure there’s an obvious/ideal answer.
I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.
I found two, but it looks like the topic was deleted. Kagi had it partially cached as a search result[0]. The first thread in that list seems a bit more ...pushy than the second thread. Though I think you're still right - was probably just a new coder who was excited about what they found.
If you're amenable to feedback, the impression I got from your initial comment was "a hostile comment pointing out another hostile comment". It assumed a negative motivation on OOP based on vibes and you ran with it. Even this comment's parting line:
> But you do you.
- seems like a truism. I get the feeling it's meant to be read as "I give up. You can keep whatever wrong viewpoint you have".
I concede that my original comment here was somewhat hostile, but only really the first line. And it wasn't even all that hostile - especially when the rest of the comment was really just informative and positive about datastar.
And, moreover, is standing up to poor behaviour - even if done in a somewhat hostile/confrontational way - really such a bad thing? It seems quite clear to me that they were not communicating in good faith - they didnt come to discuss features, philosophy about open source sustainability, or actual reality of the messaging on the site and their discord server.
Instead THEY are explicitly saying that Datastar's devs are being dishonest in some way for having a pro license (which, again, they quite clearly say most people should not buy) as a way to bring a modicum of sustainability to something that theyve dedicated years to and given 99% of the value away for free.
They could have said "This looks interesting, but I noticed that there's a pro license if you want to get some features. Are these features necessary? Is this price reasonable? Should we be against there being a 501c3 behind this? etc..."
But they did none of that. I think that all that a reasonable person can really conclude is that they're either the disdainful sort of person who thinks all code should be free for everyone, or that they are just trolling, or perhaps even that they dont like how datastar is challenging the status quo of webdev.
Hence, "you do you" - you interpreted it exactly as I intended.
I'm sorry people didn't immediately take to this financing model as well as you did. The average person is not as invested as you and most people are going to immediately switch off if they hear part of the functionality costs money and this isn't mentioned anywhere on the front page. Doesn't matter how "unnecessary" these features are, it's a bad look.
Plenty of other open source projects make money without attracting this kind of negative feedback. It's curious to me that you suggest everyone is intentionally being negative or malicious here, instead of looking at why the project caused such a response.
People pay for things all the time, why not (almost surely unnecessary) code? Why do you all feel entitled to free access to thousands of hours of very highly skilled devs' efforts (most of which they actually are giving away for free)?
Moreover, it is quite common for there to be pro versions of libraries these days - tailwind, all sorts of component libraries, etc..
> Plenty of other open source projects make money without attracting this kind of negative feedback
We dont seem to be living in the same reality. In mine, maintaining open source projects is a nearly-completely thankless, profit-less endeavour. It is a rare exception that someone can earn a living from it. And datastar's devs have zero expectation that they'll do so, even with this model - hence it is registered as a 501c3, and the funds will cover things like travelling to conferences to talk about it.
I think the pro version and charging stuff is totally fine. It's the lack of transparency that bothers people. I shouldn't have to figure out their profit model from HN comments. If you want to be paid for your work, charge for the whole library or make the free/pro distinction very clear to people. Don't try to hook them in with a free offering while locking features behind a paywall that they discover later.
Or if you want to be altruistic (as you keep referring to nonprofit) make it free and solicit donations/patreon.
The current approach is certainly a new one and I am interested to see if it pays off.
I saw an interesting fact the other day. Not one democratic politician has apparently ever called the GOP Nazis or Trump Hitler. Can't find any examples of "trash" either. There was the infamous "deplorables" example by Clinton, however that was for a subset of GOP voters - not all of them.
It mostly seems to be the peanut gallery which uses that language - but never the leaders. So I'm left to rhetorically wonder, who's pushing the narrative that Dem politicians use that language? I even had coworkers who told me that Pelosi and Schumer are stoking the fires by calling our president Hitler. And yet they never said that...
Strange…when I google “democratic leaders referring to republicans as nazis or fascists” seems to bring up quite a few results. Biden, Gore, Pritzker, Harris, quite a few more peppered about among the Democratic Party elected officials.
I said Nazi/Hitler comparisons. Fascist fits the bill as much as socialist does for Democrats. Gore (retired) said it and apologized afterwards. Pritzker made the comparison yes.
So...that's one? A literally-who to most lay people, but yea, it is one Democratic politician. I see your one Illinois Governer and raise you one US President:
> "These people are running a Gestapo administration. It's the only thing they have. And it's the only way they're going to win, in their opinion..."
> "Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it actually a great badge of honor.... Because I’m being indicted for you"
Granted, this was much less the case in grade school - but if students are going to see homework for the first time in college, I can see problems coming up.
If you got rid of homework throughout all of the "standard" education path (grade school + undergrad), I would bet a lot of money that I'd be much dumber for it.