Ididntdothis

“Attractive, fit, intelligent men get a completely outsized proportion of the interest on apps like Bumble and Tinder, while even median men are mostly ignored.“

Is that even true? I am not very pretty (but fit and some level of intelligence ) . When I did online dating I had no problems connecting to women around my age and with similar attributes. Most guys who were complaining wanted a supermodel half their age. And they were surprised that they only attracted crazy people that way.

Due to slow business my company has introduced a 32 hour week with corresponding pay cut in order to save cash. Management higher up is taking bigger cuts and the CEO is taking zero salary until end of the year ( he is making >10 million usually so I think he will be ok). Lower paid workers can keep their 40 hour week. Overall I think this is a good way to handle it.

I think a lot of companies are using the current situation as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway. I am pretty sure that during the boom of the last ten years ( the “Obama/Trump” boom ) a lot of excess people have been hired who are now costing a lot of money. I wonder how things will work out in Silicon Valley. The bubble looked already fragile before COVID.

“You get paid the minimum your employer thinks they can pay to get someone who does the job well.”

Very true. Most of us also aren’t paid for the value we produce. We get paid for the replacement cost.

401k owners generally have no say due to low number of shares. And most likely they are not in a position to make a judgement of the decision a management makes.

Who is looking out for them? Not the CEO and I don’t think the board either. You need to have a lot of shares before you have an influence.

Almost nobody who has a say has any incentive to think long term. For a CEO the next few years are important, shareholders can jump ship anytime. It’s a total alienation of somebody’s actions from the long term consequences.

I have listened to a podcast about the F-35. It has touchscreens but they also put a lot of the critical functions onto the stick so the touchscreen doesn't need to be used when things are shaking. I imagine it's the same here. The astronauts probably don't have much to do during a launch and can't do much when things go wrong.

I always wonder what system the LA area is using for their signage. They seem to have a rule to mark exits as late or confusingly as possible. This leads to people suddenly swerving across all six lanes. It requires a certain skill to mark that badly....

"Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!"

That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?

I am generally a little down on online shopping. With fresh food you definitely want to see it first (not all tomatoes are the same). I have tried Instacart a few times but almost very time I was disappointed with the quality or the replacements so I won't do it again.

With other things it's the same. I have bought backpacks online that had a weird fit. In store I would just have tried the next, but online it's an ordeal to return things. Same for watches, phone cases, clothes and a lot of other stuff.

“Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.“

Agreed. Congress should be ashamed of themselves.

The line between fact and opinion can become very blurry. Whatever you do there will be a lot of issues that can’t be fact checked.

They set up a commission in 2016 and found nothing so they closed it quietly. But they are still making the same claims. To me this shows that they have no interest in establishing hard facts. Trump says whatever benefits him as long as he can get away with it.

You can’t have hard rules to achieve this. In the end it’s a matter of integrity and ethics to guide actions. You can’t write that down as an algorithm. Unfortunately it seems the system is set up for psychopaths who don’t know no limits as long as they can profit.

The C# preprocessor is unnecessarily restricted. It has a few features but it feels very arbitrary what they include or exclude. I think they didn’t like the idea but couldn’t avoid it totally so they did something half assed. I bet a lot of frameworks that need reflection could be replaced with macros if the preprocessor had a few more features.

This is not the first time that what was thought of as satire was actually an astute observation. This happened a lot under communism. A lot of jokes were just plain facts.

“Fact checking” is a nice exercise and somewhat helpful but a lot of people say half baked or stupid things all the time, including myself. Part of a healthy discourse is the ability to say questionable things and having a discussion.

Once you start fact checking where does it end? A lot of people have different views on different things and there is no clear right or wrong.

What I would like to see is that the US political system starts fact checking itself and stop spreading misinformation. This should be done out of self respect.

I don’t believe that at all. Thiel just wants whatever makes the most money for him. He isn’t looking out for the rest of the country.

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they started disbanding quietly after finding nothing. And now publicly spreading rumors about killing somebody.

It’s insane how little respect the US has for the integrity of its political system. As long as it may hurt the “other” side everything is ok without regard to the damage they are constantly doing the health of the system.

It has a lot of mechanisms but they are usually way more complex with more code. For example when I do data binding in WPF I could write a five line macro that fires change notification events as needed. There are other approaches but they are way more complicated.

They go for entertainment and selling ads so they have to make it exciting with a lot of controversy. News is actually quite boring and uneventful if you read only reuters or apnews.

All I can say is that I really miss the preprocessor. There are so many things that could easily be done with the preprocessor but instead have to be done with reflection or code generation in a more complex way.

Sure, it can be be abused/misused but I am not sure that's a good reason to take it away completely like for example in C#.

I never look at CNN, MSNBC or FoxNews. I feel sites like reuters.com or apnews.com give me a good level of news without the emotional content.

I agree about local newspapers. We should worry more about what's going on close to us versus Washington.

" To me they've always felt like a forum with a handful of mega topics that go on forever with worse (or no) pagination."

After using Slack and Teams I have concluded that good, old forums would probably be a better solution. You can discuss a topic in focused way instead of big discussion threads that never end and have tons of things mixed with each other.

Problem is that you can't propose such a thing in a company because something old can't be good.

"While I definitely had more opportunities to network and hobnob with management while in the office, the reality is it didn't matter in the long run. My salary hasn't gone down since moving, and I save money on tolls, lunches, gas, and now especially rent which is pretty significant."

I think being in the office can be very beneficial if you have the ability to talk to management and be viewed as some with potential for promotions. I have tried this but somehow I don't have the ability. My path was always to deliver stuff without needing much guidance. So now I am remote. I will probably not move up much but I have carved out nice niche for myself.

I used to be like that but it completely changed once I hit my 40s. Now coffee (even decaf to some degree) makes me anxious and causes sleep problems. Going off coffee improved my life a lot.

I think most things are "good enough" these days. And usually the changes are just different but not really better.

"non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is"

They do tech and know it, just a different kind.

I always wonder how well these systems will do once they become legacy. It seems to that if it's difficult to maintain old COBOL apps then maintaining such a complex architecture a few decades later will be a lot of fun.

It’s supposed to balance it out.

I don't understand the comment. Wim Hof has a very specific program.