Jochim

> Sweden might rank top for happiness and health but that's not going to make my bank numbers get higher for my annual two week holiday.

The US seems to expect service workers to pretend to be happy in the hopes of receiving enough money to get by. Whereas the Nordics seem to take the approach of "let's make sure your service worker is happy" first and foremost.

The Nordic model seems more stable and less stressful for all parties involved.

Competency is a myth put in place to explain why they pay themselves more than most of us.

I appreciate the good intention behind this post but it seems dangerously naive to the reality that most workers face.

Many employers simply do not care about worker safety. They'll claim to but the pressures they put in place ensure that it's treated as a secondary measure at best.

Most employees cannot afford to be fired for speaking up about safety. Legal protections and compensation often take months/years to come through. They are useless when you have no money for next month's rent.

Not to mention that in many places the company that fired you is often the only major employer in your area.

Both can be bad. Even more so when you don't know which party established the idea as bad in the first place.

A purchaser who insists they only see white employees in the office is bad. Anyone that forces their non-white employees out of sight to secure that purchase is just as bad, if not worse.

To play along is to accept the notion, to contribute to it's perceived validity, and to harm anyone who happens to be honest. The result is that people we'd be better off without are pushed upwards in society.

I believe such behaviour is harmful and that we shouldn't be rewarding those that engage in it.

The reality seems to be that if you tip below the expected amount, you'll be treated poorly, judged, or berated for doing so.

What's more, from the discussions I've read, the expected amount has increased vastly over the last decade.

Azure offers a lot of instrumentation/telemetry out of the box compared to AWS.

The more time I spend with AWS the less I like it. Simple issues are left unfixed, implementations are half baked, tooling incomplete.

e.g:

Their configuration extensions package still doesn't support loading a single SSM parameter, despite someone going to the effort of submitting a PR nearly a year ago.

There's zero support for YAML cloudformation templates in their VS extension.

There's no package that allows you to send OpenTelemetry data directly to XRay, they expect you to run an entirely separate container.

The whole platform feels like a jumble of half baked, and poorly exposed services that end up being outright painful to work with.

The other reply to this from zeroonetwothree hits the nail on the head. The major difference is in the capacity for serious harm. That's not to say that there shouldn't be more oversight of manipulation in other industries.

> At the end of the day, there needs to be some level of personal responsibility.

Why is it that the concept of personal responsibility is never applied to those employing the psychological manipulation tactics? My belief is that it's their personal responsibility to refrain from such behaviour.

> There've been PvE missions for a few months now. I think part of the reason they were initially cut/delayed was because of all the shakeups at Blizzard after so many people left and/or got fired for misconduct.

The missions they released have nothing in common with what was discussed. PvE was meant to have persistent hero levelling, skill trees, and a proper story. What they eventually released wasn't far off what would've been a seasonal event game mode in the past, in addition to being laughably expensive and horribly broken.

> Also, you mention unpopular balance patches, but "Blizzard sucks at balancing" has been a complaint since the early days of OW1 :P I remember when the first Mercy rework dropped... and the Bastion rework... and everything about Brigitte...

The OW2 changes went beyond a broken hero. They made fundamental changes to the way the game is played with the reduction in team size and changes to tanks.

Companies like Big Fish expend huge amounts of effort researching how to make their games more addictive.

They are criticised because they have created something expressly designed to develop compulsion in as many people as possible. They aggressively tune their products to increase that compulsion and to prevent their victims from breaking it.

It's one thing to enjoy a vice, it's another to intentionally manipulate someone else into falling deeper and deeper into that vice to your benefit. Prohibiting that kind of behaviour isn't the same as prohibiting the vice itself.

The sociopaths that gleefully exploit human psychology for their own financial gain should be stamped out.

> Most addicts love their addictions; most of the ones that don’t eventually stop.

Source? This doesn't match up with any addict I've interacted with or seen in media. The majority seem to fall between being unaware, in denial, or deeply unhappy about it but are unable to break their dependency.

> In contrast, if my government was the only bank I could use, they could debank me entirely and totally fuck me.

Digital government ID doesn't make the government into a bank. It also doesn't confer any powers that they don't already exercise through your physical government ID. Most countries already require some form of government ID in order to open a bank account, presumably they already blacklist these.

> Your question is valid, why do we only care about this specific form?

Why do you think people only care about this specific form? It's definitely one of the most discussed forms but I'd think that's mainly because it's a relatively novel medium.

I feel much the same way about betting shops, luxury brands, etc. as I do these "games". Luxury brands are often particularly detestable. It has become almost impossible to determine whether you're paying for a good quality product or just burning money. Even when of good quality, brands often go far beyond what could be considered moral. Hermes springs to mind in particular, convincing people to debase themselves in the hopes of being offered the chance to purchase an overpriced bag.

> It doesn't sound as wrong but the community still hated it.

It only seems odd if all context is left out.

Blizzard's whole pitch for Overwatch 2 is that it would introduce single player and co-op PvE content. It didn't do that.

Overwatch 2 was much stingier with rewards for gameplay than Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 started locking new heroes behind a paywall, where they'd previously been entirely free in Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 charged much more for it's items, and limited specific items to bundles in an attempt to force players to spend much more than they would for the item itself.

Overwatch 2 made multiple changes to balance, that weren't always well received.

The sad thing is that people seemed fairly excited for PvE Overwatch. That excitement was strangled through a combination of hubris, corporate greed, and an inability to deliver.

Weren't Apple one of the ringleaders in the conspiracy to suppress wages between the large tech companies a few years back?

Motivation and visibility is the problem, not ability.

People only have so much time and even insignificant barriers reduce participation.

The Emacs example is a bit more involved but still demonstrates this. There's nothing particularly difficult about submitting patches by email but the thought of doing so does put people off. The same goes for the copyright assignment, not difficult at all but reduces participation.

Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

It's undeniable that Israel lies brazenly and repeatedly about it's attacks.

See their murder of Shireen Abu Aqla last year for example.

The time footage leaked of one of their gunboats shelling four children playing on a beach still stands out for me.

The number of people who unquestioningly believe Israel's propaganda is genuinely concerning.

We have people referring to the kindness of a military that dropped more bombs in a week than were dropped the first year of the Iraq war.

A military that openly targets children, journalists, and medical personnel.

The unquestioning acceptance that every target struck is a Hamas militant/base.

The leaders of Israel openly referring to all palestinians as non-human animals and invoking bible verses that openly call for their genocide.

The generosity of the IDF was made plain when one of the hostages revealed that they shelled their own villages, killing both Israeli hostages and Hamas indiscriminately.

I understand what you mean, I was saying that having to use such seating is likely to result in customers not returning to your coffee shop.

That might be ok if you're a tiny shop that only really wants to do takeaway but to me, most coffee shops are a place to relax and have a conversation with someone. A chair that becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes is in direct contradiction to that purpose and indicates either hubris or ignorance on the part of the owner.

Not using it increases the barrier to entry. Potential contributors are likely to know git and be relatively familiar with the contribution process on Github.

Hosting it elsewhere means people are less likely to find it in the first place.

Using a different VCS means people are less likely to pick it up. Instead of starting on their contribution they have to install and learn new tooling that is irrelevant to the project itself.

Emacs is a pretty good example of this. There are plenty of people who would be interested in making improvements to the project but a much smaller proportion are willing to engage with the email-based process that's required to do so.

The crux of the issue is that the social element of an approach is just as important as the technical merit. A technically superior solution will quickly languish if no one can bear to work on it.

Top down decision making, typically by non-technical people who often have no idea what software development even involves.

Eventually things get so bad that there's no choice but to abandon feature work to fix them.

The business loses out multiple times. Feature work slows down as developers are forced to waste time finding workarounds for debt and bugs. The improvements/fixes take more time than they would have due to layers of crap being piled on top, and the event that forces a clean up generally has financial or reputational consequence.

Collaborative decision making is the only way around this. Most engineers understand that improvements must be balanced with feature work.

I find it very strange that the industry operates in the way it does. Where the people with the most knowledge of the requirements and repercussions are so often stripped of any decision making power.

Sounds like a dual purpose design that ensures 80% of people don't return to your coffee shop after their first visit.

Making your coffee shop an uncomfortable place to be seems like a great way of discouraging the majority of your customers from returning.

Low tables and lounge-style chairs are comfortable but they can't reach anywhere near the density of the standard arrangement.

Software bloat isn't the entire argument at all. Hardware also fails.

If it fails in your macbook, or any brand where it's soldered on, you're left with an expensive brick.

I believe that being able to easily and cheaply replace those components matters.

CEO has a track record of making damaging statements.

CEO pushes though decision on a monetisation plan so stupid that people are screaming internally about it before it's released.

The changes in question destroy the brand's reputation and decades of goodwill.

Many customers actively port their games away.

It's characteristic of short term thinking. The only concern is "what might raise revenue this quarter". If they'd thought beyond that they'd have seen that the damage to the brand is likely to be far more costly.

This line of thinking seems to have become pervasive. No thought is given to producing something people want to pay for. Instead, they squeeze until people get fed up and the product dies.

They miss their intended target all the time.

There was a story just last week about a man who lost multiple family members and was injured when they struck his house instead of their target a few hundred meters away.

It took a while to start on my phone but the splash screen displayed instantly.

Much of the cost in the NHS is due to creeping privatisation and a mountain of PFI debt that could have been funded for a fraction fo the cost of what it bought.

NHS consultants working at their hospital privately. Hiring their own companies.

You're an NHS nurse, your pay has declined drastically in real terms and the job is increasingly stressful due to a staffing shortage. You spend part of each shift teaching a clueless agency nurse, who's costing the NHS 2-4x more than you, how things work.

The government has over the last two decades, gradually shifting more work to private services, despite paying more for less each time they do so.

The people responsible should be in jail.

It's not an OS, it's a client-server application.

Ignoring physical appearances, it presents large libraries nicely and allows you to use your phone or remote instead of needing to fiddle with a laptop.

A few other nice features: can stream different content to multiple devices, users can be given access to specific libraries, and content can be age gated.

You're not incorrect in your sentiment or definition but fairness is often misused in order to downplay an individual's responsibility or to justify their actions.

An illustrative example where the use of the phrase "to be fair" would be justified:

Person A: "Brian has been very rude to me lately!"

Person B: "To be fair, he's been in a lot of pain since the surgery."

However, in this case originally, GP's request for fairness read to me as a pre-emptive dismissal of concerns regarding the ceo's performance, given that the examples did not address any criticism.

When I say I have no interest in being fair to the ceo of Mozilla, it's not to say that I believe they should be treated unjustly. Rather, it's that I believe their behaviour to be inexcusable given the context. Admittedly, this does veer a little from the dictionary definition.