Rule35

> Guess I don’t have what it takes to do contract work.

No, that's what some rich guy would say. Oh, I wouldn't do "some mildly distasteful thing" for money, I guess I have high standards, haha. No, you wouldn't last that long. I doubt you'd make it through the first early morning. If you did you'd learn that pissing in a bottle isn't a problem at all compared to hours out of your life.

The adults you're talking about, denigrating because they aren't as discerning as you, are making this decision for themselves. They'd rather make wee-wee uncomfortably and see their family again sooner. For them that $4, or $15, matters more than it does for you.

> People also downvote what they find stupid

Also, stupid people vote. So ... proposition undecided.

> boss.

Somehow I don't think you've ever non-ironically called anyone that.

> It's trivial to make it illegal to operate a full node

Right, making something illegal is trivial. But how would you effectively stop someone from doing it? You can tunnel the traffic as with anything. They'd have to go full China to stop it.

And you don't need to run a full node if you're willing to trust a consensus of miners about the current state. (You can see how much work a block (probably) took to mine, so if someone shows you a block with the wrong proof-of-work target you know they're lying, meaning that even this forgery to show to an offline user is 51%-attack level hard.)

> if the government bars exchanges from operating legally, how do you actually trade bitcoin for anything?

Have you ever travelled and bought currency privately? Either just because you ran out, or the listed exchange rate is fixed. You meet someone in a bar and hand them an envelope of cash.

If you used something like the OpenDime offline wallet then it would be easier. They'd transfer to the offline wallet which you would verify, and then you'd do a regular handover of physical items, cash for hardware wallet.

Sure, it's a bit shady, and maybe horribly illegal, but if you were trying to get out of the country with your family's wealth all of a sudden it'd seem pretty easy compared to the alternatives.

Right, that's why they need to be terminated regardless of their specific style of employment.

This is driver flexibility. They choose the amount of deliveries they take. The drivers do this because they want more money.

People generally courier as an in-between job, like construction laborer, and they appreciate the ability to earn more, quickly. As a laborer I used to put in 14h days with cleanup. But that kept me from losing income during a career switch so it was a choice I was happy to make.

> It seems equally as likely that it is an issue of over-expecting what a worker can reasonably perform. Why is under performance the more likely scenario in your mind?

If other employees can meet the quota but you can't, why would you assume that the quota is wrong? Maybe it's the wrong job for you.

> I would be more inclined to take the route of "a few bad workers". However, these stories have consistently made news since at least 2018

Perhaps it has something to do with the attempts to unionize?

> like 74% of respondents to a survey conducted by Organise reporting that they avoid using the washroom for fear

Is there a cost for saying that? If this didn't rise to the level of fear, but only apprehension, would they be censured for overreaching rhetoric? If not, how trustworthy is it? And it still leaves 25% comfortably hitting quota showing that the quota itself is fine.

It's getting buried because people downvote what they can't argue. Amazon isn't doing anything different than any other company, or anything that has been a problem before now.

Unionists are lying, conflating contractors and employees, and everyone here is buying it - probably because it fits an existing narrative. I'm being told, by privileged SF types, that I need to educate myself, when they've apparently never worked a day as a contractor, or perhaps never even worked a real job (ie, uncomfortable) in their life.

The pee bottle is being used as an excuse to unionize, even though it's something contractors choose to do in all driving jobs.

Also, when I say "drive for another company tomorrow", that's the ground reality. If you show up sober and well-dressed at any courier company you'll have a magnetic sign on your car and a load of packages right away. (And couriering is generally to offices with a ton of washrooms so you can weigh that in the calculation.)

You don't know, they might be of the opinion that a good life dedicated to Jesus may be enough, regardless of how you dress it up.

But, from outside, they appear to be at least half right.

The catholic church seems to be less CHRISTian and more ... Trinity-ian. I assume it's a fairly large difference on the ground as one is all about a single person, born a regular man, who brings forgiveness for unintentional sins. The other, a story about a much more conscious god who manifests himself in a young body and proceeds to lecture on morality and the afterlife.

> have had to pee in bottles for years

Contractors can choose to pee where they want. But employees can sue so easily over this sort of thing. It's a specific OSHA violation.

This story depends on confusing the issue about who is and isn't a contractor, doing this to themselves.

The contractor should be let go. As the response notes, they represent the company and represent it badly.

That driver was a contractor, deciding to pee in his own bottle. He chose to take more packages than he could deliver and is rushing to cut corners.

As well as conspicuously dumping piss outside customer houses he probably speeds through school zones.

Contractors don't get a wage, that's key to this whole discussion. And if contractors don't make a profit they shouldn't take the contract. This kerfuffle is in the middle of big cities, not some tiny company town in the outback. They have all the same options anyone else does, it's not like they're forced to drive for Amazon.

Amazon's drivers are contractors if anyone is pushing them to pee in bottles, it's themselves. So there's no actual answer to this issue. Are they not being paid enough, such that they can't pee, or are they making an reasonable decision to pee in a bottle in order to save 15 minutes and make more money. Considering they keep taking the contracts one has to assume that they're profitable, at least usually.

> I can't imagine you'd get to hold on to a job at Target if you poured pee out in the parking lot in front of customers.

No, nor should anyone want you to. Even beyond any hygiene and smell issues, it's bad PR and that's not what you're paid for.

There's a rash of blaming companies for being reasonable. Including one of a CVS manager being threatened with doxxing for calling the police on a thief. This concern for the driver seems more like a larger narrative of pro-unionism.

Most people in this thread are intentionally misrepresenting the issue, using the words 'job', and 'living wage'. These are contractors and if they don't make money today they can courier for another company tomorrow. If they don't it's because they voted with their wallets.

> why can't citizens of prosperous democratic nations also liberate people living in dictatorships/theocracies/other bad circumstances? - Because we are only human, not Minds, would be my answer.

We humans are also all that we have to rescue us humans. Decrying that we aren't gods doesn't help. If someone is screaming for help, how can we not go?

> So our forceful interventions are much less likely to avert more suffering than they cause.

I think that's the nature of force. Use very little.

> basic understanding of logical fallacies

Did you spot one here?

> I have a basic understanding of statistics

Perhaps an intermediate understanding would help. Entire schools tend to score higher or lower together, also wealth correlates to IQ and scholastic success and zip code. There are also other reasons an entire group would be biased higher or lower.

> I deal with this kind of sounds-good-if-you-don't-think-too-hard "insights" all the time

Uh-huh.

Says a person who presumably never met RMS, or saw his "behavior".

The EFF is a lobbying organization, RMS is an actual person.

Also, there should be a higher bar for them because they're a faceless organization attacking RMS. If RMS attacked them, as individuals, I might agree to some equivalency.

True. They can burn a lot of credibility in a single unwarranted witch-hunt against a named individual.

But, but, but, USA bad, man.

> It can either refer to their sex or their gender

That seems unlikely and definitely unproven.

We're told gender expression is individual, so the gendered concepts you hold for 'woman' aren't going to be the ones I hold. Thus is seems unlikely that we're referring to gender or nobody would be able to understand each other.

Also, we refer to people by the same pronouns whether they're awake or sleeping, cross dressing or not, which changes their gender expression, but not their sex.

> If we refer to sex, a woman/lady is someone with a vagina.

Which we do. Yes.

> So yes, if you call someone a mail lady, you literally are describing her as a mail carrier with a vagina.

No. I'm also not describing her as a bipedal humanoid. Some things are just expected unless you say otherwise.

> the cute ginger mail lady with blue eyes

Yes, lady. Okay, so no suggestion.

> But in most situations, that would be quite inappropriate.

Right, right, human attraction is verboten.

That can't happen. When a tool like this gets complicated enough to fully specify a complex problem it becomes unusable by the semi-technical people it was made for. Best Figma knows their strength and stays with it, leaving the extensions to other companies so as to compartmentalize the difficulty.

Developers aren't just people who know a programming language, they're people who can examine a problem in detail. If a designer was capable of this they'd be a dev who designed and they probably wouldn't use a GUI web design tool.

That's not a technical problem, but a political one. Imagine if I said "yeah, solar sucks because people burn down the solar farms" and then you saw me sneaking away with a can of gas...

Deep geological storage, but not in salt beds, is a simple answer. And not entombed, etc. Just sitting on skids. Waiting to be inspected and repaired. I've been in deep hard-rock mines that individually would hold the entire world's waste.

The true answer though is breeder reactors and using 99% of the fuel, not 3%, and the waste being shorter-term byproducts as well.

> Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures.

We're discussing how it failed your way, so I'm not so sure you're presenting a better alternative.

The problem with your method is that two separate companies have deliverables that must be correct, whereas with mine only one does. And my way removes the back-and-forth which is a huge source of errors.

It's fundamentally impossible (absolutely, 100%) to write specs for a complex product before the product work begins.

So you can make it work your way, with a separate firm writing the specs, but you need to couple them with the dev firm and give up on the fantasy of up-front specs.

But that comes with its own problems and increased cost so imho you're better-off just letting one firm do it.

Perhaps they've transcended and work only for themselves? I know a guy who spent years writing complex threading code, but well written, for the simplest things. Turns out it was just practice because we were underutilizing him. When we gave him more (better) work he did it without flourishes but brought the skill from his tinkering.

Sometimes good corporate behavior even looks like sabotage. An old dev said something along the lines of "We reinvent everything because our review process rewards it. If you try to use an existing library you go to a review process and people undercut you and try to convince management you should use their pet library, only available on their stack of course, and you never get anything done. Instead just rewrite the bit you need and move on. Do what rewards you, not what you think is 'right'. Let the company decide." And indeed, some companies favor this because they can't get their process under control.

Once I was in a design meeting and my product had a config file (10-50 settings, tops) which got noticed. A senior architect said I should put it in a database ... and that the DB should be Oracle. "Nothing else is as stable or respected."

I argued a bit but when it was clear he was huffing and setting himself up for a win-by-authority I folded, left, and removed the config file so I never had to speak to that guy again. Now you set any changes in environment variables.

It literally would have quadrupled the work and footprint to add Oracle, or any DB. Had it been a compliance-req and not an idiot-req I'd have used SQLite or something, but Oracle was insanity. And by contract with our customers, had we used it, we'd have had to hire a specific Oracle DBA who of course would do no useful work in any other area.

Years later though, a friend asked me what would have paid better and I had to admit that I'd probably have gotten my promotion a project earlier by pointing to the big expensive parts we used.

> So one of the requirements for SOX compliance is that no one person can unilaterally push code to prod. [...] many risk averse companies who want to be certain to be in compliance is dev and ops are kept separate

Here's an example of compliance setting a user back for no real benefit.

I'm in an organization that did this separation before we were forced to put our socks on. What we realized is that only a dev can usefully check a dev. Gating of code into prod needs to be by a dev, and the gating of infra changes needs to be gated by ops people. But that individuals, and the role, are best as combined as dev+ops.

So we implemented the separation, but not by splitting our worked into two separate groups and putting a wall between. We had other teams so we moved the review inter-team. I develop, maintain, and manage my piece of my team's service, but also do release-review for pieces of an entirely separate project that I have no access to other than to read the code.

Can you imagine the scandal if you fully specified a product and they built it and it wasn't even fit for task. Your contractor says "They never said it had to fly, they just sent us 5999 pages of specs about the logo, the color of the seat, the tray-table latch mechanism, etc." You'd look even dumber because you proved you don't understand your own business.

No organization should expand outside its desired core competency. Specialization is for organizations. If you want competency you hire it as a consultant. If you need to check that consultant, hire another.

Hire one company to write the spec and the product. Hire two others, small firms, one in the problem space (tax, airlines, etc) to check the business requirements and one in the software space to make sure spec/dev/test processes are adequate.

> Can you imagine the headlines

Yes, 100% lies written by a bitter communist. Modern corporate media in a nutshell. But the government already took the brunt of that for screwing up earlier. The screwup you mention would be no worse. Partly because the news is hyperbolic and nobody believes it these days - every problem reported is the worst ever.

When this sort of thing happens, the customers of a company need to sue it for whatever you sue a bad engineering firm for, plus what you sue a crooked accountant for.

I mean, they were told about a flaw and didn't pass that notice to the product team but sued the reporter of the problem. That's proof that they understood the flaw. Nobody sues over a mistaken bug report, or if they don't understand the impact.

The entire legal team should be disbarred for knowingly conspiring to hide evidence of customer impacting flaws. Every lawyer of theirs who saw the proceeding should never lawyer again in the free world.

And then you should go after the management and board who are always equally guilty in these cases. Directly after the people - all the joys of modern cancellation, with charges of dereliction of duty, fraud, conspiracy, etc. Leave them with a smear even if the case doesn't proceed, like their malicious lawsuit could have ruined the bug reporter.

Get them to say stupid things to cover "CEO: I had no idea" and use those against them. "CEO incapable of managing company, in his own words". Guilty or incompetent. Pick one. There's no way to accidentally sue someone so this whole episode is malicious.

Nobody in management or above from this company should ever have a paying job again without someone swooping in to garnish their wages.

Right, so they also don't have the capability of writing the spec. Knowing that they should just hand it all off.

Right. But the client should never come up with the detailed spec. If they know what needs to be done it'd literally be faster for them to code it themselves.

They should never produce more than a page or two of specs, outside of the central task itself, because most everything will change when under production anyways. A project like this is big enough that apps became a thing, and fundamentally changed twice, in the lead-up to the actual work.

And all the little things they could control are just bikeshedding, best done by an impartial designer or by A/B tests.

> I apologize for my flippant response.

Np. I wasn't offended.

> I don’t know what all the solutions might be but I do know that I am willing to pay in much longer lead times to get a gun if it means the next mass shooter is less likely to.

I wonder how many shooters would have been stopped. I know one recently went shooting the day he received his guns but I don't know if he had enough guns before that. Had he been denied, what would he have done?

> In the countryside do you really need an AR15 for self defense? Surely a shotgun at home makes more sense. And then to protect livestock a high powered rifle?

Defense, against animals, likely no. Almost all animals except moose and bears are smart enough to avoid people. But defense of livestock and property, yes.

Are you saying an AR-15 isn't powerful enough for animals? It'd a moose at defensive range, but isn't what I'd want for hunting. But it'll kill any cougar-sized animal or smaller in a single hit, even at great range.

If bears are an issue you might want a 30-06, or an AR-10 to get the benefit of modern gear.

For defense against people it depends. I think the crazed shooter like in Canada is a pretty rare circumstance and the likely scenario is your wife defending the family against opportunistic robbers. In that case you want something quick and reliable, like a semi-auto battle rifle, with a high-capacity magazine. You aren't shooting at 600m, but perforating a car at 30m. But country defense is handled by the idea of weapons. Simply by being armed you and your neighbors probably won't need to use it, making the tactics of what is ideal somewhat irrelevant. Being that a shotgun is just an anti-human defensive weapon (it'll just anger a bear, very badly) it might not be worth the cost unless you use it for birding as well. The main benefit is the frangibility of the shot and lower wall-penetration which is more of a city concern.

The Canadian shooting happened and took so long to stop because even country people are largely disarmed there. You have magazine size limits, gun limits, have to store the gun locked and unloaded, and you can't intend to use the gun for defense!?

Better PMs do this today by having buffer-features they can cut when needed. It'll handle the not-enough-memory issue as well as a meddlesome VP who think you're over-subscribed and wants you to cut to meet your dates.

Also, don't forget you're hearing decades-later retellings of someone else's story. I don't doubt that they trickled this extra space out as changing requirements mandated it, but that they kept from doing so until the team had actually reached a certain level of product-maturity and reclaimed all of their own waste first.

Remember that the PMs goal is to ship. Them blocking some assets but actually shipping is a success. Better 95% of the product than 0%.

Performance anxiety (or the lack thereof) is a job skill.

Not unreasonably. Like it or not, at else being equal someone with more current experience is probably the better employee.

There's this feeling that employers should just take the next person who fits some quota because to pick and choose is to be biased which has somehow become a bad phrase. My employer literally pays me to be biased. My job skills include having appropriate and helpful biases.