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This is race to the bottom behavior which we largely got away from him post industrial revolution. It's well and good to want employees who are passionate about their jobs, but no one is passionate 100% of the time. The rest of the time, they're going through the motions of pretending to be so they don't get fired. We know this leads to bad results for society in the long run. Mass burnout isn't good for anyone. Which is why we have (mostly cultural) enforced limits on what employers are "allowed" to expect from their employees (like a 9 to 5.) No one has the energy to go above and beyond 100% of the time, and honestly expecting them to do so is delusional. Of course it's beneficial for individual companies to find ways to compel their employees to work more (whether it's "culture" or otherwise,) but it's very bad for the "system" if everyone is doing it. People need to have time to spend money and engage in meaningful leisure to keep the economy spinning.

The only real exception is employees who are really committed to the vision of the company. Ultimately though that's usually only the executive team and early hires since they're the only ones who (usually) materially share in the actual success of the vision beyond just keeping their job. Most of your frontline employees are not going to get any benefit from sacrificing their energy (and there is a real cost to this) and time to fulfill a vision they don't even really contribute to forming, besides just keeping their job. The incentives just aren't usually there. Furthermore, It's common for founders to be very deluded about how "laudable" the vision for their company is. There are very few companies that act as clearly morally good agents in the world. It's not a given that profit-seeking entities inherently behave in a way that's ethical. I just don't see how anyone could possibly expect employees to be 100% committed to executing on the vision of most b2b or even consumer facing businesses. Especially when they don't really reap the benefits of company success.

And yeah, you can argue that you're buying someone's time and you're entitled to expect 100% of their mental capacity etc... during that time. But like anything else in capitalism, you get what you pay for. There are plenty of other employers that don't expect that or don't have the time/resources/collective IQ to determine that you've automated, and I don't see why your employees wouldn't just go work somewhere where they can get away with doing 1/4 of the work for the same salary vis a vis automation unless you provide some extraordinary benefit just for being a "member" of your company. And if being challenged is important to the employee in question (I'm one of these) I'd just go find a job that pays 4x (or make my own) where I could be challenged. In general, you can't eat a corporate vision and it's just not that valuable for most workers (there really are exceptions, companies that are clearly "morally good", but that's the exception and not the rule.)

Which isn't to say it's fun to work at a place where people are just jumping through their daily assigned hoops. But speaking as an employee, I'm certainly not willing to put in extra effort at a company paying at or below market rate with bland corporate vision/culture and/or uninteresting problems. Which seems to be the expectation of most employers. I'm lucky to work at a company where even though I'm ambivalent about moral character of the product (it's b2b stuff, so morally neutral,) I'm well compensated and enjoy a flexible corporate culture and have interesting technical problems to solve. Ultimately though, most companies are bland (in terms of vision) somewhere on the scale of utterly toxic to tolerable (in terms of culture) and totally boring (in terms of the nature of the work.) If you're not paying above market rate in these situations, it's completely absurd to expect employees to give anything "extra." Speaking from experience, most founders/CEOs are completely deluding themselves about how many of the boxes on compensation/culture/vision/interest their company is checking.

That's because programmers can do management. It's not unusual to see engineers get tracked into management. I have certainly never seen it go the other way (partially because managers usually make more than engineers I'm sure.)

It's to their advantage to do this on their clock, so I agree. If they push this through, they'll be much more prepared than any of their competitors.

I don't know man. I just took a week of PTO to "Marie Kondo" my house. Before I had kids, I used to take a week or a long weekend pretty frequently to work through a book or learn some new tech, so I don't think it's that unusual. Probably at least half of my yearly PTO ends up being me going to conferences (professional) on my own dime.

The whole argument is essentially that if we take people at their word and assume that 50% of the work being done today is bullshit do we believe that if we liberated everyone to do whatever they wanted, would 50% of what they do then be bullshit? I'm inclined to think not, but I'm fairly sanguine about people's desire to do meaningful work.

I both agree and disagree. I've always found an intuitive explanation like the OP to be helpful before diving into a more rigorous study of the material. It helps contextualize the things you learn subsequently.

This. If you can move in with your parents, or don't need to start making money immediately, I'd prioritize dealing with your mental health issues. See a therapist or do some meditation. Whatever you need to do to get centered again. If things are that bad for you, even if you get a job, you're either going to have trouble keeping it or make yourself miserable doing it.

Yes. With regards to it being a call to arms for business leaders against Marxists/communists, that's accurate to a certain degree. If you look at what gets lumped in with marxists/communists though, it becomes pretty apparent that the memo was meant to be an assault on everything that could be "unfriendly" to business.

In the Powell memo, you can see some of the precursors to what's happening today. For instance, I think the demonization of academia in right-wing circles as well as the death of organized labor (unions) probably start with this memo (I'm not the only person who thinks this. Chomsky as elaborated on this at length.)

The Powell memo was also started the process of making lobbying both widespread and acceptable to society (even when it was legal, it used to be frowned upon.) I think most people would agree that lobbying is a cancer on our democracy.

I often wonder whether this has a lot to do with how we treat our kids. I often catch myself acting uninterested in my daughter's interests (she's two and often wants to show me things for the 50th time that were pretty boring in the first place.) She doesn't have any attention or behavioral issues in general, but I was amazed when a friend of mine came to visit who is an early music educator. They didn't do anything music related, but watching her interact with my daughter was eye-opening. She was very present and respectful with regards to my daughter's interests and what my daughter wanted to do. I guess more or less she treated my daughter more or less like an adult. Thinking about it, it's so easy to be flippant or dismissive about what our kids are doing or are interested in without even noticing.

I was really amazed to see how much my daughter reciprocated the attention and my friend was able to get her to pay attention to this or that or be much more engaged than I usually can.

This is obviously a very small sample, but it really made me think about the ways that we don't treat our children like adults (and how maybe they act like children because we treat them that way.)

That's a little overstated. The Powell memo all but declared a war on the working class.

IMO, I think this is all baseless moral panic. I saw a video the other day in which a psychiatrist claimed that choosing to play video games over seeing other people/friends or family is a sign of obsession. People literally do that all the time with all sorts of other hobbies. It's only a problem if you would honestly rather do activity X but have a compulsion to play games instead.

I prepare close to 100% of my food from scratch, though not for health reasons, I just enjoy cooking. If you're cooking for taste, I find myself adding sugar/honey to compensate for produce not being up to snuff (hard with supermarket produce sometimes) with some frequency (maybe a couple times a week.) Most often I'm adding sugar to fix sauces made from fresh produce that turn out bitter or sour just because of the produce.

I can't imagine most packaged food companies are using amazing produce. I would bet that most packaged meals would taste terrible without some added sugar.

I have worked remote for a company that's primarily in the UK and South Africa for almost 2 years now (I've been with the company for longer than that and am located on the US west coast.) My advice would be to try to convince your current company to let you go remote or at least partially remote. It's important to get some remote experience, because it shows you can be trusted to get work done away from the office to other future remote employers.

This. I personally don't feel that I spend all that much time in the "trenches" when programming. Most of my work is thinking and then hopping over to the computer to tap out a few lines. Or sometimes interacting with something through the debugger/reading the code to get an idea of how something works. I very rarely have my nose in the keys trying to grind out a solution.

Also stew is culturally omnipresent. Every culture has stew, so it makes sense it would be omnipresent in fantasyland.

I'm not sure about age-limiting old people, but I'm starting to think a basic technological literacy test might not be out of place.

I'm not sure why this is so heavily down-voted. Pensions are surely a problem, but they are clearly a drop in the bucket compared to the revenue that states miss out on when they let corporations pit them against each other in race to the bottom behavior.

Amazon's co-mingling causes so many issues. I'm really into board games and would love to be able to rely on my Prime subscription to pick up new games (and get them quickly.) The board game market is kind of perverse in its own way in that publishers often do not publish enough to meet demand and supply gets snapped up in the first couple days/weeks of release and prices skyrocket on account of scalping.

Because of this there's a huge glut of counterfeit games on Amazon. Even worse, sellers also pretty clearly are also selling damaged "new" product at full price. I've received $100+ board games that were clearly damaged before they were shipped. It's a huge PITA when you can't even exchange since the game you wanted has gone out of print between when you ordered and when you received.

I would love to shop local, but my personal collection exceeds the stock of most FLGS's in size and they very rarely stock things I want at prices that are reasonable. I've mostly switched to buying from coolstuff unless I'm buying a game that's evergreen (that I somehow don't already have.)

Amazon needs to sort their inventory out.

For math majors, baby Rudin is the standard. I would say though that it's probably too terse for most students. I like Pugh's book quite a lot. I think it strikes a good balance between not being long winded while providing enough explanation. Checking the whole answer as you mention is not going to be that helpful in general. There's more than one way to write most proofs and the nature of proof problems is that you have the answer at the beginning. Just make sure you're familiar with basic proof techniques.

I think you're probably listening to the wrong Bach. I don't think that newbies should generally approach Bach's keyboard repertoire first. I'd recommend starting with the cantatas and maybe parts of St Matthew's Passion. Also, even amongst people who make classical music a living, Bach can be an acquired taste, so I wouldn't feel bad if it doesn't click. I studied piano performance in school many moons ago and only recently have come to appreciate Bach's keyboard literature, and even then only in part (I quite enjoy the Goldbergs, keyboard concerti, and dance suites. I'm not sure I could be paid to listen to WTC in its entirety--though I obviously heard and played quite a bit of it on account of studying piano performance.)

Agree on Hammerklavier. I have a pet theory that Große Fugue is an elaborate troll on Beethoven's part. I kind of think that it was constructed in such a way to be as analytically rich as possible while being horrible to listen to. I have to wonder if it wasn't deliberately constructed by Beethoven to con future generations into listening to awful music.

Where Brahms is concerned, very few composers matched his mastery of the craft. That being said, Bach is one of them.

I think Bach is so consistently regarded as the GOAT because (AFAIK) no one has matched his output while maintaining the high level of quality he did.

Also, he wrote St. Matthew's Passion which is arguably the greatest piece of music in the entire western canon. I can think of very few other reasonable contenders for that spot.

As far as composers being greater than Bach in any particular area, I 100% agree. Brahms was probably the best chamber composer, Chopin wrote the best music for piano etc...

I studied piano performance in college. I do not recommend learning without a good teacher if you plan on taking it seriously. There's a lot that can go wrong. Also, in terms of information sharing, it's very difficult to find accurate/good information about playing the piano correctly without a good teacher (these are in pretty short supply) as a lot of that information just gets passed from student to teacher and isn't typically shared all that openly.

Took me a second to get the white paper joke lol...

Thank god. My neighborhood has a forum run by the HOA. It's flooded with posts about neighbors running their own "crypto-businesses" trying to get other people in on it. Based on a quick read, I'm pretty sure none of them are in tech (not that that's prerequisite to understanding the technology) and most seem to think BTC is magic internet money. If/when BTC tanks, the ensuing bloodbath is going to be nasty.

I've gotten to a point where to me "results-oriented" is a four letter word. It's just a bad way to go about your life. Both for your sanity, and because it's more often than not just a wrong-headed way of thinking.

I pay for Prime yearly, so this does not affect me. However, in the last couple years, the quality of service has decreased dramatically. When Prime first rolled out, it used to be that I'd receive my packages on day 2 like clockwork. These days, I'm lucky if I receive packages in 4 or 5 days. Additionally, with inventory co-mingling, Amazon has become a dumping ground for counterfeit and damaged products. I've wasted so much time this past year sending stuff back (sometimes repeatedly) because I've received something that was damaged (usually not during shipping) or clearly fraudulent.

The upside of course, is that Amazon's customer service remains top notch and any issues that I have are ultimately resolved to my "satisfaction." It'd be nice if I didn't have to spend so much time in chats with Amazon customer service.

Splendor requires focus? It plays pretty algorithmically in my opinion.

1. Is someone else about to win the game? Reserve their card if possible. 2. Can you buy a card? Buy the highest point value card you can. 3. Will taking two chips win the game? If no, take 3.

Splendor is all about efficiency (Which is why taking 2 chips is baaaad. Reserving is situationally good, but usually bad.) At higher player counts, the most efficient player almost always wins. At 2 players, reserving becomes much more strategic and isn't such a generally terrible action.

Side strategic note: Aim for the nobles with the most overlap with each other.

I'm pretty liberal, and I believe that there is some truth to the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. The issue here being that there isn't a real way to inject more competition into the ISP space. Soooo, we are just getting less regulation. Which will inevitably lead to abuses.

Yeah, or something other than react is seriously screwed up. I said a couple of days just to have time to do styling (assuming design is already done.)

This is largely what we do, except with Angular. We generate the angular dynamically server side and then serve it up on a per-user basis.