TheBobinator

This is what I miss about the internet from 15 years ago.

You looked for a recipe back then you'd get a bunch of simple websites with concise instructions that made a fair amount of sense. People wrote it like an old cookbook. Wanted diet advice? Sure there were a few snake oil salesmen but the nutrition information you could find was pretty decent for those people who had put things up.

Today you have a bunch of food entertainers who have turned the entire gambit into such of an utter clown show. You can get a recipe but you'll have to wade through 10 half-page pictures of food that are completely unrelated to what you want to make and clickbait in a scrolling never-ending screen. You can find a video, but instead of it being literally someone's grandma making it with real expertise, it's some 20-something insecure chef emulating what they saw on TV. This level of FUBAR goes way beyond marketing; we have people competing in a race to the bottom.

You try to find a cookbook today, and you've got the same garbage. 90% pictures, 10% text.

"Eat this Much" is just a continuation of this trend; you aren't marketing this as a resource for me to use, if you were, it'd be named something else. The first thing I see when I visit your website isn't something useful. You've got a completely useless webapp, then a bunch of assurance crap below that. If this were a website being shown in the 90's everyone would think you're a scammer. You're marketing this to me like I'm a child and must be instructed on what to do; your brand is looking for guillable people, that's why it's marketed as an instruction, not a tool.

You're doing that because once you have people eating, literally, from your hand, you will !@#! them hard by making marketable suggestions that you will get other companies to pay you top dollar for because they are building relationships with guillable people.

The last thing I need is an app interpreting my cravings for me; It's bad enough you have food companies hiring nutritionists and psychologists to figure out what to put in their products to addict their constituency.

It's a digusting business model and pollutes the information supply for profit.

All Fines are bribes; the entire concept of a fine in of itself is fundementally a corruption of the law.

If you want to stay pro-business, sentancing the executive management to public service, or probation, or anti-corruption workshops like they do for those with DUI works fine for me. I'm all for a 3 strikes program. First strike, you pay for the workshop and pass or get probation. Second strike you're on probation and if you don't like it, go to jail. Third strike, you're a felon.

Intel owns their own manufacturing process so they can crank out more volume than TSMC can on the smaller process nodes. TSMC Has a roadmap to 3nm by 2023, Intel is looking at 7nm by 2021.

Unless Intel manufactures on TSMC's line, AMD will have a clear, near double to triple performance advantage for the next 2 generations. You're going to see Intel become the value brand for awhile and they're trying to avoid that because they are used to a cash cow.

Google is interested in building an AI that is designed to turn people into its products.

What do you do with a product when you're done with it? What do these people become?

All you need to do is search google for weight loss advice or anything that could remotely have a commercial interest and what pops up? Pages and pages of irrelevant clickbait. If you ever wanted to build an encyclopedia of nudges, persuaders, and other such exploits of the human mind, now would be a good time.

The entire game is forcing you to take actions, like answering "yes" to a sales guy over and over to build the habit so you'll agree to the sale. It's taxing on the mind, and like television, it got to the point you had to see 30 minutes of garbage ad's for 20 minutes of entertainment, that it's no longer worth it.

The "Trinet" is dieing because it has become useless; something far more useful will come along to replace it because people are viewing the recent infestation of marketing people as damage and are routing around it.

Today, It's possible to purchase a VR Headset and be in a different reality and that's on Gen 1 hardware; Gen 2, with varifocal lenses, will change the way we compute and live radically.

For a modest expense, you can purchase a supercomputer capable of fitting almost every book, major production movie, and TV show ever made on its storage and you can download it with your internet connection over months or years. More than enough to last you a life time.

You can fit enough knowledge to educate yourself for the rest of your life on a piece of equipment the size of a bottle cap.

You can, tomorrow, go to an airport, sign up for a passport, and fly almost anywhere on earth.

You can call almost anyone on earth.

And, on that internet connection, you can find out about the myriad of challenges we humans face, including global warming and alternate forms of pollution like deforestation.

I'm in my 30's and I've come to the conclusion that the youth needs to begin investing in government en masse (special interest groups and also investing in their own livelihoods), but more importantly, moving to places that are younger or have a good balance of people. That requires passion and a lot of work, but its doable and if you do it, you can largely ignore all of the things you've stated. Furthermore, as more people realize this, a cultural change will happen, and that is inevitable.

You can already see that with the "OK Boomer" crowd; the problem has been recognized and that is the most important piece of dealing with it.

This story is an example of why "mainstream media" (The big 4 outlets) need to have all of their major and minor publications banned from this site going forward or be reduced to being allowed to post 1 or 2 articles per week, tops.

When I come to HN, I come here to learn about some cool doohickey someone is working on or a study that someone published about a different approach to security. I come here to learn about a bitcoin heist or something novel and new and most importantly, to learn from the comments. Lots of interesting people here with interesting views to contribute.

I don't come here to read about MIT flamebait; there's no in-depth study to read, no conclusions to draw, just a re-hash of CPI numbers which are at best horribly inaccurate, aside from the name, this might as well be a short novel. Worse, we're re-hashing something that's already there; CPI Numbers. This article is utter trite and a total and complete waste of time.

Then, the entire community begins discussing this Trite, which lets be honest, there's some interesting studies and observations in the comments but at the end of the day, the discussion has no direction or conclusion and that is dangerous because it invites an scopeless conversation. We should be talking about how this professors study is or is not accurate or interesting sidebars, which is useful to the professor for feedback and to the reader for coming to a conclusion, not talking in generalities and in circles because someone at a Big 4 wants to stay "relevant" and thinks getting the geeks talking to each other about their topic is a good way to do that.

Leave the trite where it belongs; on CNN or NYT or on any big 4 publication.

Citylab is owned by The Atlantic media Group.

The Atlantic was sold in 2017 to the Emerson Collective.

The Emerson collective is a philanthropic endeavour of Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of late Steve Jobs.

Literally this article was published by the wife of a silicon valley tycoon.

This is why I only read IPCC Studies and pay attention to them. If the world burns out because of global warming, it'll be due to Scare-articles like this one.

You are woefully incorrect.

The real cuplerate is that when a bank creates a loan it creates a loan check, and through a confluence of politics and leverage, businesses are motivated to use other people's money to make investments and pay only the interest. As the sum of the interest on accumulated loan checks build, you end up reducing the velocity of capital (people's willingness to spend money) because eveything becomes too expensive due to price reflecting the businesses load of interest, until, eventually, you end up with a liquidity problem; too many loan checks and promises, to little returns, and cash evaporates. Everything becomes too expensive when resold through the bank a dozen times.

Governments have tried every system known to man kind to constrain this including war and genocide. The Privately-owned federal reserve has in their corporate charter a requirement to keep steady interest rates and they refuse to maintain them; The 2% yearly inflation is artificially caused by the continuous expansion of credit and prices never correct or deflate because they always capture the correction by printing or lending ever larger sums of money they never intend to collect. They disregard their charter and do whatever they want because they have the money to do so.

By having this monetary policy, you enable equity pirates, often led and initially funded by foreign countries who harbor the viewpoint that enslaving and killing your population is no big deal, to expend vast sums of capital asset stripping everything; businesses, machinery, people, equipment. Fertility rates are down to 1.7 today in the US; when the USSR collapsed they were down to 1.2. 2.1 is replacement. You have 60-100 million men who will never have kids or get married if GAO Retirement security studies are to be believed; they break out demograhics in some of those studies and there's a double digit and growing demographic of men who cannot make enough money by the age of 45 to have a family. Over 50% of female Latino immigrants (illegal or otherwise) do not have kids. Some of that is 3rd wave feminism (half of men with an 80th percentile income or higher never procreate, and a lot of that is, when you have money, girls throw themselves at you, and you lose respect for all women due to that). CDC had a statistic SJW's forced them to take down in 2011; quarter of women with bachleors degree's don't have kids (her school debts become a dowry most men can't pay), but a heck of a lot of it is profit motive. Turning people into products for corporate executives also turns them into trash once you've consumed them; you take from them the concept of self respect and dignity, and as we've found with C-PTSD research, once the structure of the brain has changed due to trauma, it takes a large investment of time and energy to get it back to normal. Historically, People who do not have those concepts don't know how to engineer a society with those values which is how you get the pattern of the french revolution and subsequent reign of terror repeating thoughout history so often.

There's 2 ways you constrain this.

The first is bankruptcy. You shred the loan checks and let the rot fall out of the system.

The second is by limiting the revenue of private companies through income tax like we did in the 60's; you make more than 250k a year congrats you've won the game, every dollar you make more is going to be taxed. Now. Go do something nice for society. You also require public companies to have 66% or more their stock owned by employee's. Doesn't have to be voting stock, but total stock and allocation of revenue. We figured out in the 30's when you pay people a "keep what you catch" wage, they work really hard and efficiently and when the downturn comes, they stick with the company and survive it well then on the upswing, they invest. If constrains who goes bankrupt during the boom\bust cycle.

Getting there, however, means putting a lot of executives and rich people in jail (for fraud, so they can't keep comitting fraud or spending their money to interfere with the process), and pruning a lot of large companies. It also means widespread rehabilitiation and family education and planning resources. We are well over the point where all of that can snowball into a violent political revolution; the consequences of that is are all bad.

The idea you don't need to trust society and the government is very attractive when ridiculous abuse has been done to you and you've had to manage the fall-out.

When information you are recieving has been "anonymized", how do you tell it is accurate? If you are the person collecting and storing said sensative information, you will know what is and is not accurate, but nobody else knows.

For some kinds of information, like medical records, the information is deadly not to have accurate, but also deadly to have accurate and public. Once the information leaks, employers might decide to not hire high-risk people or insurers might decide to pass over certain people as too costly.

I'm of the opinion "anonymizing" data is something that enables grifting; if enables the collectors to placate the people they are pulling data from, and it allows the grifters to make the argument the information they have means nothing.

Ultimately, I think these organizations should be making sure their information is absolutely accurate, and we should have laws in place, with severe criminal penalties, against the use transfer or use of said information. I would even go so far as to say things like cell phone location records should be fully public as a matter of the law.

Now when you want to get those records, you go to a government website for the "hunt and poke" stuff (e.g. where are my kids going or is my wife spending time with another lover, how long is my commute on average, or where was I at 3 years ago on a day, all sorts of useful questions); the access records are public too.

If you want to study them, you sign a NDA saying you won't, under penalty of severe criminal prosecution, leak the information or use it for criminal purposes. Anyone found having the data and no signed government NDA = instant 20 year prison sentance plus felony conviction.

This way, if, for example, someone signs the NDA and goes on to offer services to executives to help them cherry pick staff, not only does the person offering the under the table services go to jail, but the executive does as well.

When you criminalize certain things, then give the public all the information and tools to do as they see fit, the law works. It's a lot easier to prosecute a company executive for cherry-picking staff with insurance data when the data is well-labeled. It is also a lot easier to sue them when you have an access record that says someone under their employ checked how often you go to a clinic or night club via your cellphone records.

The problem is not going away anyway, and "anonymizing" data to placate our sense of morality isn't going to help. There is no easy technical solution, but if the thinking is not to anonymize but instead track and enforce who has access, things change drastically.

It's funny an article published behind a paywall about facebook and google partnering to track your pr0n use has a message that says, as soon as the page loads, you're in private mode".

NYT has become such a tabloid.

Study is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.06520.pdf

Now we can have a REAL Discussion.

There are three themes driving ageism in tech.

First, upper management and investorship doesn't understand engineering or technology. Accountants understand cost and risk, they do not understand oppertunity or business process. MBA's understand cost and risk, as well as any non-iterative business process with a defined start and end that is quantifiable; they are suited for running a company, not growing a company, and religous application of skills within that spectrum of capibility only creates tragedy and torture chambers (e.g. open floor plan offices). Any R&D process is by definition unquantifiable; you have 10 million workcenters infront of you and have to figure out the right routing, which may be iterative and require adjustments to the workcenter, to produce the widget. Figuring that out requires knowing where the bottlenecks are to constrain the problem, and that requires specialized knowledge and experience.

Accountants and MBA's are taught, religously, to view those things as "key man risk", and because of the ability of people to leave to go elsewhere to work for more money, that training staff is just a waste of money. It is vital to our industry that we take on interns as journeymen for a few years and guide them; the results are much better for all when they are taught how to think. This is antithetical to most organizations.

Any company that thinks this way is doomed to a slow death because nobody who is capible of managing the bottlenecks is going to work there; they will reverse engineer the company, find the bottlenecks, propose them, come across as pompous, then move on. Devoid of the experience of working with talent, the management, often coming from non-engineering management backgrounds, assumes programmers are factory, retail, logistics, or any kind of manual laborer and due to that, equates youth with maximum ROI.

They build torture chambers and hope to capture a few young geniuses then force out golden eggs. Think of MSP's that have no intellectual property or investment in technology, but hire IT folks and force them into bogus non-competes and other slaver working arrangements. Can't tell you how many times I've been look upon as the "whiz kid saviour" by some imbecile in their 50's or 60's coming from a non-engineering background who happens to have money. It's really patronizing, demoralizing, and absolutely disgusting. Nobody wants to work with that, and especially in a company that creates situations where the staff feel the only way out is bankrupting the place.

Second, you have highly levered\financialized companies. Facebook has almost no real world value aside from social entertainment, and nobody knows how to valuate the company. Because of this, goals cannot be clearly defined by the top brass of the organization; there's no long-term vision. Anyone who's seen a Zuckerberg press conference will call him a visionary; he comes across as a man-child trying to make sense of his dumb luck. Old engineers know, most importantly of all, how to have heated debates like an engineer and to discuss like an engineer. That threatens the management in these orgs because engineers, if left to their own whims, will form their own vision and experienced people know what works and how to be successful. They'll do things that can clearly be seen as progress and that reduces the importance of everyone else at the org in the eyes of the investorship. That too, becomes an engine for drama.

Finally, there's a severe shortage of good technical\engineering management around right now. Some of that is the above two reasons, but a lot of it has to do with things like IRS exemptions against allowing IT Staff to bill on a W11 obstensively because too many people were working as FTE at multiple companies working as specialists without benefits. Remember, one of the driving factors behind Austin Stack driving a Cessna into an IRS building was that very thing. Technology changes society drastically, and when you see management and leadership turning the nails on people, it's a response to this.

Feminism, for example, is a response to technology; first wave feminism was a response better materials science producing pressure vessels that created hard alcohol. Men ended up in the gutter escaping hard lives rather than dealing with them and it's no wonder when universal sufferage was passed, the first thing the ladies voted for and demanded was prohibition. Second wave feminism, e.g. equal pay for equal work, was driven by the obsolescance of muscle in manufacturing. That produces a discussion on what gender roles in a relationship are and ought to be (which by the way, the only people qualified to make that decision is the couple). Third wave feminism is a response to contraceptives and social media. GAO Does retirement security studies and did one in 2009 on the impact of fertility rates on retirement security and ended up publishing, then redacting, the fact that men with an 80th percentile income have a 50\50 shot, back in 2009, of procreating. You have lots of women inundated with too much selection via social media, and throwing everything they've got after it using contraceptives. It's logical, then, that intelligent hard-working men with money being given access to any women they want for anything they want would be demoralized about relationships and the quality of the breeding stock. The old addage of "building a family" or "building a man" has stopped being a concept and instead you have Maybelene, Gucci and Pornhub engaging in psychological warfare against young people to sell sex, hand bags, eye shadow and sex as a mental illness.

Government has been far outpaced by tech, and the key realization here is, it can take advantage of anyone irregardless of how smart you think you are. We really do not know what we're doing and it is total chaos out there.

There is a way to handle this, but you aren't going to like it.

Since there is absolutely no penalty for filing copyright claims, you just get together with other large youtube channels and begin filing claims against Disney, CBS, NBC, Fox, and so forth, all the large media companies that have youtube over a barrel, as well as their advertisers.

You simply decide not to play nice whatsoever. And you keep on doing it, as a growing group, repeatedly, until youtube is forced to take action. You do it to any large corporation that wants to post on youtube. And if they take the wrong action, which they will, you bring out RICO statutes and begin filing so many subpeona's they can't financially afford to work with it. You don't stop at youtube either, you get in groups and sue them for stuff they put on cable TV as well. Find yourself jr lawyers.

If Google wants binding arbitration contracts in place and then wants to sexually harass their staff, the appropriate turn-about play is for the staff to get together and plan on sexually harassing the executive management. And I'm not talking in ways they would like; I'm talking hundreds of people telling the execs and upper managers they want to do scat-play, or buying and mailing them used japanese underwear and mini goats with plushines, and so forth. And they get as viscious as possible about this, up to the point of following them around with handcuffs and leather straps in groups.

Because if we're going to be lawsless, it's time to act like total animals. And realistically, there's only one way to teach that lesson.

Students treat college as a jobs training program and as an investment of their time to get into a better life.

However, both the government and the schools do not treat college this way. If the government was wisely investing, they'd decide STEM Folks can get huge loans due to the long-term need for them and their relative scarcity, but "luxury" degrees such as art, history, music, etc majors can only take out tiny ones due to the lack of economic utility, with quota's set for each so that you do not over-supply the market with more labor than it can absorb. You need both long-term and short-term feedback systems and you need to fail people in programs who are unsuitable early on.

Furthermore, because college is about "building character and life skills", there's no control on accredited institutions that do not provide economically viable candidates. Which college students in what programs repay their loans vs do not? Where's that data? Surely that information is a matter of public record but students go to college courses, get A's, and come out the other end jobless or under-employed.

The net effect is children who's parents have never gone through college or continuing education programs, especially minorities, don't know to ask the above questions or how to navigate the system successfully, and the college administrators in order to make their millions, screw those kids and their families over 9 ways from Sunday as hard as they possible can because it's a dog-eat-dog world and screw em'. Think about it; please fill out your FASFA and tell me exactly how much money you make so I know how much to charge.

It's an unsustainable system and the only thing that gives it a some amount of legitimacy is the fact the loans are given by the government and people are allowed to do what they want with them. It's a system that is begging for regulation.

I'm going to say 2 things here that are going to be unpopular for the HN Community, but they need to be said.

First, Non-Competes and Binding Arbitration are legal abhorrations that need to be avoided at all costs. Management is saying "You can't leave and the law doesn't exist here". Google's management, of all people, used these to sexually harass and assault their employee's. The only time signing one is advised is if you have a lawyer, that you trust and are paying, representing your interests, involved to ensure you get paid and there's no weasel words or wiggle room for game-playing. Ask them if the contract is negotiable and if you can go over it with your legal counsel; if the answer is no, you just confirmed you are walking into a company full of psychopaths that would sooner kill you and harvest your organs for a buck than treat you reasonably. There is literally no fine line or middle ground here; when these contracts are rolled out either they are negotiated in good faith or they are not.

Second, a lot of people walk into those contracts on good faith, only to find the nightmare later on. Summarizing the situatuion; the Soap Box is done and over with, the Ballot Box is already empty, and the option for a Jury Box was taken away from you, which leaves only the Ammo Box.

Prudent people will realize the only way out is to bankrupt the business and ownership through making a big mistake or error; They can't pay the arbiters if they are bankrupt and the contract terminates once they are liquidated. And remember, 90% of the reason those companes run like dogsh!t is because the staff there either have lost interest in their lives or are trying to take the place down to get out.

And if that isn't an option , There's a reason we've got a 2nd amendment in this country and nobody did this in the 50's-80's after WW2 (Ex-Soldiers have zero patience for this crap). Remember we're a jury trial country, mob rule reigns supreme, and you get to pleade your case.

Go look at Amazon's 8k and 10k filings; If memory serves it wasn't until 2015 or 2016 they turned a profit after almost 2 decades. It's been illegal, under racketeering laws, to sell at a loss in order to capture a market for a long, long time, and that's the real story here.

Republicans and Democrats have let that one go; blaming political parties is a straw-man argument. They expect to utter the words and hope you believe it and not fight what they're doing.

In 2008 after the crash the retail industry switched to hiring part-time jobs only; Wal-mart, Meijer, Kroger, almost everyone and a lot of that was due to pricing pressure from online retail namely E-bay and to a larger extent Amazon. People began working 3 or 4 unstable part time jobs to piece together 60+hr weeks in order to make ends meet and still living in destitution (not having savings for a car or house repair). Many turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the trauma of being in a sitaution where that looked to be a permanent state of affairs. Today, Wal-mart has stopped drug testing new hires, they've implimented a drug rehab program for new hires because they drug test 100 people and literally 99 fail. Other retailers and employers are doing the same.

Any company that views it's customers as the product ultimately is looking to do what anyone does with a product once they are done with it; throw it into the garbage. CNBC is filling your head with garbage and turning you into garbage just like Amazon and the retail industry did to those retail workers I just mentioned; now they get to clean up their mess. Those people get to lose a good 15-20 years of productive live due to this. You have literally nothing to gain by listening to them whatsoever; take a news literacy course and invest a little bit of money on real journalism.

This comes across as far, far more self-destructive than just a social credit scoring system, it really comes across as children playing with fire they don't understand.

All Fractional reserve lending systems replace capital with debt in the form of checks; A Loan made from a cash deposit comes back to the bank as collaterol on that debt, and as a new deposit which can create a new debt. The bank expects to be solvent because it can sell the loan to another bank to raise cash to cover the deposit, but in reality, what ends up happening is the ratio of cash to checks grows rapidly driving inflation. Inflation drives interest rates upward since nobody loans at less the rate of inflation. Interest rates, and the banks propensity not to spend more than they take in from interest, locks society into a game of musical chairs for repayment.

This is a politically unstable situation for bankers because nobody likes the idea of forcing honest people into bankruptcy and stealing their property, except perhaps a few very greedy and shortsighted bankers and politicians at the top of the heirarchy. This produces all sorts of laws and regulations, aka "compromises" which allow the ratio to continue to grow, and at some point the velocity of capital is insufficient to service the interest on existing debts at which point we begin forcing risk into places within the economic system it does not belong. We stopped publishing M.3 when it was at around 56 trillion, that is a ratio of around 56:1. M2 to M0 and M1 to M0 are two other ratio's to watch.

Ergo, we have not deflated the US housing market since 2007, and continue to drive prices to unaffordable levels. Assuming one has the cash to purchase a house, one must now contend with the risk of an impared title and a bankrupt title insurance company. Jobs can't pay living wages because businesses are saddled with business debts, and Governments don't enforce their laws because they too are bankrupt. The stock market is over-inflated from hedge funds and HFT games. List goes on.

Eventually you end up reducing the number of checks in the system forcefully through bankruptcy, such as through an economic crash, or you destroy price signalling mechanisms within the economy which leads to an economic collapse. A good measure of a collapse is fertility rates, birth rates and average life expectancy. When the USSR Fell, their fertility rate was down to 1.2 births per women; the US currently sits at 1.72. 2.1 births per women is replacement. Birth rates are falling because women are having kids later in life, and live expectancy is dropping due to an increased suicide rate. These rates tend to drop suddenly once society becomes too far taxed by the way, as the USSR's statistics shows.

Our discussion about $15 an hour minimum wages is very much so a discussion about forcing rich people into bankruptcy so the average working Joe can have basics in life and society can be stable. We can make correlations to history, but at the end of the day, there's a lack of concrete data to proove out the above pattern of behaivour and the people running the economic system, including doctorretes in economics, don't fully understand these mechanisms.

What China has managed to do here is create a class of permanent underdogs for whom the game is rigged and force them to literally compete against the rich for life and liberty. Literally the rich are eating people alive. This is an unstable, shortsighted arrangement; the chinese do not have a good grasp of how technology impacts society and are not interested in learning about how its has impacted other countries. They risk creating a powderkeg of permanent underdogs and a business culture of not making investments due to the risk or not engaging with the government due to the regulations. All of that will challenge their ability to remain stable and is likely to result in an eventual collapse.

Who's protesting?

Microsoft's employee's.

Why are they protesting?

Because the company mission statement has changed, and they are being drug into a morass of political entanglements they want nothing to do with.

What is their self-interest?

They do not want to be involved on US Military projects, nor do they want to create the weapons systems of tomorrow. That's someone elses job.

I guess their self-interest here must just be "something" to fight for. Being dismissive is not the correct response to what they are doing.

Here's your understanding.

Maybe you don't work in the US, or come from the US, but are a microsoft employee. Maybe you you do not fully agree with the united states military policies or with their use of technology to further US military objectives and began working for Microsoft because, despite their flaws, you love tech and want to improve the world. Maybe you did not think, like the founding fathers did, that a standing army ought to be needed. Certainly, it's a new age and not every ideal is practical, nor what we think to be practical a good idea.

Whatever the reason, you now have a conflict of interest; a change in the corporate mission statement and identity that is sudden and significant.

Furthermore, suppose you do work on the Hololens project. You wake up in the morning to find out the knowledge in your head is now national-security critical, which means your head is now US Government property and you will be subject to a mandatory gook risk assessment. This will affect your ability to travel, send funds abroad, contact family abroad, whom you may be employed by, and all sorts of other requirements you did not sign up for upto and including special conditions delivered by the G-Men themselves to you and if you refuse you, like many others, may become a disappeared persons statistic.

You did not apply for security clearance, and you have not been paid for the privilage. Perhaps you were a H1B working on that project who's H1B was ended by it.

There's a long tradition of companies making a great consumer product, and the military hiring the willing staff or convincing the principal architect of the need, and making a great military weapon. What's going on here is people are being drafted.

Good, creative IT people are hard to come by and they are pretty opinionated about not producing monstrosities because they are more capable than anyone of imagining how those weapons can be abused. Windows, Azure, and Office are all stagnating, dieing technologies at this point; Satya is looking for future revenue 5-10 years out.

Microsoft has to play a certain amount of politics and be in the right circles to be allowed to do things like buy Github or Linkedin, both of which given their history of abusing labor they ought not to have been allowed to do. This problem is not something that is going to go away, and alienating your engineering staff is a great way to lose experienced, critical engineers to competitiors and even foreign governments. Satya is playing with fire.

I prefer moulded ear inserts and wearing actual hearing protection headsets. It gets the message across to your co-workers that their noise is bothering you when you put those on.

The first real recourse is not to invest your money or time in such an institution in the first place. It is foolhearty to ignore researching your busniess partners and I don't, for a minute, think these people failed to do so; they're just trying to recoup their money at this point.

Nobody is forcing you to use google products, and they are not a replacement for the real security in a business of loyal customers and employee's anyway. Why anyone ever consider investing in making apps for a phone given the way the market is today I will never understand.

Your second real recourse, if you can't get away from them and at that point this becomes a responsability, is to resist or fight them. In this case, getting some capital together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Another way to resist; make an app that roots the phone and poisions the data-brokers well by feeding them garbage information in a way that is impossible to effectively filter. Charge $5 a year, update the phone like antivirus updates it, have teams that work on popular vs unpopular apps, and before launching a campaign against a large app or investment firms, short the companies stock for added revenue. Invest in breaking the model of a closed ecosystem, which is required for all this spyware and for abusive EULA's to actually work right in the first place.

And when you do those sorts of things, you create a ruckus, and plenty of economic damage. That tends to draw the ire of law enforcement and government, and you will find that is the most effective way to demand new regulations. In politics, its only when you hit critical mass that change occurs.

And the final recourse, which is also a responsability that nobody likes to talk about. Their business addresses of them and their executive management can be found, and there are 17 guns per man women and child in the USA for a very good reason. You really have to fail as a society for violence to be justified and to be the only effective measure; arguably right now we're failing pretty hard if the fertility rates and life expectancy statistics are any measure. Google might not be responsable for that, but they are part of the symptom of a disease.

One could say the moment Google decided instant search was a requirement and began putting people in a bubble so effective that the only way to really survive was to decide free news is fake news. That at that moment violence became inevitable. I certainly hope it isn't.

But it is going to require people begin acting like grown-ups and taking some risks to avoid that. You'd do well to remember that.

There are systems of operating that are ridiculously profitable; I know the engineering executive of a Forge Shop that implimented a Scanlon plan some 50 years ago. Company is employee owned with the original company ownership serving as chairboard members.

The janitor, working there some 40 years, retired with $28 million in his pocket.

All it took was management and labor deciding on what it cost to run the business, and savings over that, they put some into an expansion\risk fund, and the rest they split. That technology came out of the 1930's where people were starving, there was no capital and debt to work with, riots were commonplace, and people were looking at the management as food.

Funny thing, when everyone is watching out for one another and helping eachother, really awesome results tend to happen. Sure there's a personell mix issue, but personalities can grow and change. Realistically, all corporations should be run this way. We give the executive management immunity and then we allow them to abuse the staff. That's a recipe for disaster. The majority of company stock ought to be owned by the employee's doing the work.

There's this fatalistic romanticism that goes on with being the top dog, alpha male, name your price, et-cetera. This comes from rich people who never came out of their terrible 2's. They grew up leading isolated lives and never spent time with normal human beings, so they develop this superiority complex and go on tantrums. The reason you see so much advertising that makes no sense for executives is, there are so many of these "VITO's" out there and they all sell emotionally because they are literally box-of-rocks stupid.

The funny part of the joke is people, to their own peril, give respect to these people. We've managed to dress it up with modern marketing\psychological warfare, and we've managed to let the pack of grifters get so large they're now fighting over the scraps. A City of thieves produces no bread. Fertility rates are 1.72 in the US, USSR during its collapse was 1.2. We're halfway there. We need a term to define cannibalistic management; the kind of management there that figures out ways to literally eat people by entangling them in this web of socioeconomic corporatism. We already have "trap" music so we aren't far off, culturally, from defining it conceptually.

Accountants understand risk and cost, MBA's understand Risk, Cost, and Process. It takes someone with specialized experience and skills to figure out how to build an efficient process, or to do R&D because you need to understand bottlenecks and how to cheat at gambling; effectively it takes that kind of person to understand oppertunity, of which the other 2 don't.

So you get into these ridiculous situations where an accountant or MBA is put in charge, with no real understanding of the actual systems at play and its revealed to the staff executive management is really just a bunch of permanent vacationers or grifters. The really great engineers make up excuses based on prior, painful experience as to why they should leave and do so; the existing staff figure no matter where they go, they'll have to deal with the same BS.

Accountants and MBA's always strangle companies, so if you see a new executive manager who's resume doesn't have "line" experience, it's always time to leave for greener pastures.

Who's going to give you the money to buy foods that have not been engineered to addict you, mess with your mental state, or otherwise screw with your health?

Who's going to tell you where the good foods are at, that have not been tampered with, and that are compatible with your body, vs the bad foods?

Who's going to train you to cook?

Who'se going to help you with your mental health? As far back as the 1800's Mormons running insane asylums knew fixing diet resolved mental health issues 50% of the time. Most obesity, especially people hundreds of pounds overweight, are due to mental health problems.

And finally, if you're over the tipping point of these problems, how do you overcome them? A Diet for a 500ib person losing weight has to be engineered very differently than someone who's 200ibs looking to lose 10 pounds of belly fat.

This is a complex subject, with an obecity epidemic, you should be asking the questions of "Who poisoned these people?" and also "Do we have a mental health crisis?". Follow those questions to their root and you'll find most of the answer.

When someone confuses a temporary work permit used to bring in scarce foreign labor to fill gaps in the labor market, with a permanent work permit that brings geniuses to the united states to live their lives, ignoring everything that goes in between including family, politics, and motivation.

When someone appears to be unbelievably naieve, they are often trying to sell you something. Either you're a foreigner who wants to convince us you're worth it, or you're a a corporate plant.

Who pays the abritration company? The employer.

Does the arbitration company make money when the employer doesn't? Nope.

Will the arbitration company force bribe money (Fine, Civil Suite) to make the problem go away? Nope.

Will the arbitration company put someone in jail for comitting a crime? Nope.

The entire point of arbitration is to eliminate the courts. "Tendancy" is the spin word, it leaves open the possibility the arbitration comapny might rule in favor of the employee. They will literally never do that.

E.g. Google's executives harassing women then using binding arbitration to remove their ability to sue them, which irregardless of the merit of the case, would be dismissed by the arbiter every time. Took a company-wide revolt to get them to stop. I'm beyond sure if the could've gotten away with literal beating and raping women they would've, and nobody wants to deal with the horror show executives participating in that kind of behaivour would become when they started down that road.

The problem with this approach is, the courts are there to avoid people exacting justice on their own terms which I'll remind you in our history, we've done quite a few times and it doesn't work out well. Sitting a mob of strangers down and having them pass down a ruling is a much better approach. Remember, 17 guns in america per man women and child and growing.

You do not want the setiment if corporations existing to literally eat people alive or that executives would shoot their own families for money to continue to grow. You don't want to let the faith in government and the courts wane over this BS. We've got a good thing going on right now in the US, it'd be a shame to throw it away over something as banal as executive pay or stockholder income.

The EU has been a deal with the devil; foreigners flooding in, fertility rates dropping, business owners having their businesses traded off for political favors, chunks of the lower classes of society abandoned, government debt. That list goes on and on.

And sure, you can make an arguement some of it existed before the EU but here's the key observation; It's difficult to make an argument the EU is beneficial to its member states because of the political manuvering that goes on behind closed doors is not documented or public and because of that, it's excessively easy to find statistics that blame them for a host of things which they may or may not have any part in.

And that in of itself will be the downfall of the EU. Not just the lack of transparency, but the lack of public involvement in dealmaking and the fact the EU has become one gigantic boot on the neck of the public. And also the kinds of deals made. When you trade your fishermen's business for a political favor, well, why the hell run a business? That act shows a fundemental disrespect for self-interest.

And the public mind you, can react two ways to that; the first is revolution in which, 19 of 20 times you don't get George Washigton. You generally get Pol Pot and Hitler, some group of society gets blamed for all its woes and eliminated, and the new boot takes over and often has a monopoly of force and buries the body count statistics. The second way is their concept of self-respect and dignity is destroyed, people end up with no interest in self-preservation, and without self-interest, they become dis-interested in self-investment. The kings often don't realize they're being drug into idiocracy with everyone else, and that in turn rots society from the inside out. Generally speaking, some foreign power steps in at that point and begins running things for their own profit.

Or they just wipe the whole society out and kill everyone. That happens too.

We've got a whole thread on this board going about Russian involvement. Keep in mind, if the Russians understand anything really well, its what happens when society collapses and what oppertunties that collapse presents.

It is however easy to imagine "royalty employment": 1 executive employing 20 "clergymen" who don't work a lot but keep the executive happy, and who's needs are then maintained by 200 "peasants".

Firstly, identity politics and group politics are a lie, and they keep you from being all you can be. Please ignore them. You are clearly too intelligent to waste your time with such garbage. Jordan Peterson does a good job prooving that out logically.

Secondly, you have to decide with what you are happy with in your life and seek that out. Literally, you have an entire group of rich people who have made the poor decision in life to tie their ego to a literal number, whom actually behave exactly like WOW or EVE gamers chasing the next shiney. And worst of all, they think its a great idea to run people around. Why are you wasting your time trying to get in with these people? Go somewhere else where you are respected and admired and be happy. Some of the best managers I've had were women, including one of the mechanical engineers who I work with who has showed me so much about how act, think, and question like an engineer. I have had people who have really inspired me in life and she is one of them.

You have a gift they do not have; you have a creative mind and a soul with drive. You cannot buy that with money or any amount of training. They are afraid of you and due to that, they view you with contempt. Ego is a nasty drug. Leave it behind.

Finally, If someone really is subjugating you, then either you have wronged them seriously and did not realize it and you need to appologize and get out of that social support group, or you have become an obsession of them because attacking you gives them something they are missing in life. Instead of being indignant, or allowing them to get reactions out of you, deal with the situation. Find someone sympathetic, spring a trap, document their statements, and take the individual to court and ensure the evidence will stick and the evidence is loud and proud on public record.

Do not be one of those people who is so hurt they are incapible of thinking straight and makes overly-broad statements like "OSS just craps over writers". Such behaivour is not befitting an engineer.

That entire post sounds an awful lot like the kind of 3-year old tantrum someone at Microsoft would have if employee's decided to negotiate for themselves, or to work together through collective bargaining.

Also, condoning grift is unbelievably short-sighted. A fraction of people are badly taken advantage of or get trapped in bad situations, and when you allow that to happen around you, you are also condoning the <I>violence that inevitably ensues those situations and the violence that becomes a part of the local community, of which you may be a target</I>.

There are 3 fundemental problems with open source.

First, documentation. There's no more or less standard way to document systems and the kinds of people who think to spend 9 months building Widgets are usually doing it as a learning exercise. To pick up and maintain a large solution, you need documentation, and the OSS community has not, by and large, focused on utilities to automate the process and make that happen. It is a tough problem, but I would think developers would be self-interested in building the best possible developer tools and libraries. Instead I see Vi and Vim, and people talking about how visual studio is better.

Second, forever-copyright. The US has a forever-copyright which fundementally does not benefit the public as it does not meet the criteria of enriching the public domain. A key thinking exercise is, when has any commercial software, ever, involuntarily entered the public domain? Someone somewhere owns the rights. Literally you have Nintendo sueing ROM sites for stuff they made in the 1980's and largely on the argument "we need our customers playing new games to drive new sales". Without that flow from commercial to public domain, private companies are, over and over and over again, making the same mistakes and the same software. It's a subsidy to dim-witted management. Illustrating how ridiculous this is; Government thinks removing encyption from everything is necissary to secure the public, without realizing ensuring databases have horribly inaccurate and incomplete data with varying schema's is what drives labor expense in the software market; because of forever copyright, they now have a stenographic exercise when they wiretap.

Third, lobbying. The OSS Community views lobbying as something that people aspiring to be mass-murderers do. What they need to do is view lobbying as a personal investment oppertunity that far exceeds the return of 401k, ira, or any job change. If 1 million people donated 10% of their internet bill to the EFF per month just to bring anti-trust against ISP's and restore net neutrality, it'd take 5 years of investing to wrangle the beast, but after that, your internet bill halves and your speed doubles and the speed doubling is really key, that creates a cultural revolution. Similarily, if 100k developers donated $100 a month to a lobbying firm who's job it was to fix just copyright for software, the net payoff would be far in excess of the upfront investment. The correct question to ask here ultimately is "What would Ghengis Kahn give to see a nuke go off from a safe distance, or King Charles the V for a shot of Penecillin?". The monetary returns of the investment make sense, but ultiamtely, what DBA's and Systems administrators do are largely stewardship positions within organizations and their time is spent maintaining glue. Remove the glue, and you get a renissance. You want them engaging in inventive and academic exercises for organizations, and finding ways and spending time selling technology to the organization, whether OSS or not. To do that you need a market that supports models and standards.

And I honestly think the OSS community, if it doesn't start lobbying, is rather irresponsable. I think traditional labor organizations such as the AFLCIO\Teamsters would benefit tremendously from standing up labor collectives for IT People.