adjkant

I've very much liked what my company/team/office is doing so far:

1. No hard rules on when to be in the office, simply that you must be close enough to make it into the office when you need to.

2. All meetings are remote first unless everyone is in the office (protects disadvantaging people who don't choose to come in)

3. A slack channel for people to coordinate when they will be in the office. This is big as it means that people can group together when they want to socialize easily, so it's 20 people in on one day vs 4 diff people in a day in a week. I've seen team coordinate this as well, often with social activities after.

4. Cross-team social events that encourage people to go into the office without having any professional consequences when you don't come in. In person hackathons, a many game long Catan tournament, etc.

I think there's much more to sort out, but generally this seems to have few complaints. Everyone gives up a little here, but it is very flexible. Some examples:

- The people who want to be in for social reasons can be

- Those who work better in an office / separation from home can come in whenever they want

- Have a new hire? Everyone can try to come in for the first week to help onboard and get to know people, then go back to mainly remote.

- The people who want full remote get most of what they want and don't get professionally disadvantaged by not being in the literal room. The only downside is having to be near an office, but they can easily do a few weeks working from completely remote location X still.

I think many full remote people who want to get out of major cities will have qualms with the last one, but I think those people are looking for fully remote companies without any hybrid model. I'm all for that existing and becoming more popular, but I think we have to realize that the hybrid model simply can't fully accommodate these people, and the answer is to split our models. One open question then is can you split that model at a team/org level, or does it have to be at the company level?

So are you against all defamation lawsuits? This is more or less just an extension of that train of thought: people deserve to not have their reputation ruined unfairly by powerful structures. There's a big difference between gossip of people you know and a Hollywood movie.

Seems like a good sign it wasn't a good source or story. In other words, we should not try to remember it...

No, it says that a someone or a few people tried to attack and flag a post to death, and all their comments from others were also downvoted. Nothing says that this got "widespread approval". The top comment could be +0 -12 and it just means all the others are worse. Only an admin can know if any comment got upvotes.

From watching this thread out of curiosity of why it was attacked so viciously, I saw every post go immediately down, no positive time.

All this successfully did was attract a bunch of anti-vaxers, people pushing it, and a few stragglers who saw it before it was flagged.

Off your link: "It would appear as though Resident Joe Biden and his team of treasonous usurpers may be responsible for at least one of the campaigns, and this through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

Saying "there is a public health campaign to increase vaccinations" does not make the risk real. Please link to sources that actually show that instead of something that calls people "treasonous usurpers" and links to InfoWars.

> The story was genuine, but didn't include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.

I am not against dating someone even of a different income level, let alone social class, I think my "I avoid these flags" was taken to mean every one individually when I meant the sum of all when it comes to age gaps, so sorry for the lack of clarity there. But if you do have a strong financial difference, it is something I think people should be aware of as a potential imbalance.

We don't need to get silly with millionaires vs billionaires or reductive stereotyping. Every situation is different and nuanced, and literally all I have said is:

1. Large age/life stage gaps create more statistical vectors for abuse

2. It's worth reflecting on how these factors affect relationships in order to make them as healthy as possible.

1. You're applying my statistical factor at the individual level re brain development. It's a risk factor, not any sort of rule.*

2. I didn't say anywhere the 18 year old can't decide for themselves. This is not me saying "all 18 year olds dating 25 year olds should break up". I am saying that those relationships are more ripe for abuse and they warrant more reflecting/examining for the health of all involved.

* I think my "I avoid these flags" was taken to mean every one individually when I meant the sum of all when it comes to age and life stage gaps, so sorry for the lack of clarity there.

> Is it a hard and fast rule? No.

Nowhere did I say to apply any of this as a rule. Literally all this is for is the potential for power imbalances. Plenty of relationships have a mix of these factors and can be healthy. I tried to make this clear but to say it plainly, none of this is proscriptive or prohibitive.

> greater potential or likelihood of abuse or any degree of taking advantage of people.

It seems like this is the core of the disagreement. The factors here are complex, but here are some things I would point to as a starting point:

- You often have large financial differences that can start completely accidental power imbalances in otherwise healthy relationships if not managed closely. This can happen regardless of age, but age/life stage will introduce this risk more often. Is it a hard and fast rule? No. Is it a "greater potential or likelihood"? Absolutely. Apply that test to the later things as well as well.

- Housing. What happens when only one person's place is a viable place to stay the night? Again, this happens outside of age related gaps, but happens more often with them. See dorms and roommate situation mismatches. In that 18 year old high schooler situation above, literally parents.

- Brain development. We don't reach full cognitive decision making maturity until we are 25 IIRC. This can literally shape decisions and their framing within the relationship and create a vector for abuse. To be clear, this does not discount people's cognitive ability under 25 at an individual level but is a subtle statistical risk factor.

- I would not be surprised to find statistically that people who date beyond these "considered widely acceptable" boundaries are more prone to these types of manipulations and abuse, and generally more unhealthy relationships + lack of relationship experience. Anecdotally I've certainly found it to be true, but I'm not trying to claim that as data here beyond a single point. It's something that would need research and likely study.

- Whether you think they are fair or not, the social effects are real in today's world. I've seen this personally act as a "multiplier" on existing issues. (There's a better way to approach this as a society, but it's not to ignore the potential risks here entirely.)

- Even when fairly treated socially, social circles can not mix for reasons around age/life stage gaps without any bad assumptions. The lack of mixing friends and circles IMO is a fair place to assume potential power imbalance issues, again when combined with logistics on housing and finances. It's an easy way to harder shift the balance of life sharing in one direction, often the person farther along in life.

If you're reading all these and saying "I know relationships that have all these issues without an age gap" then great, they/caring friends should probably do a self-check on those as well! But it doesn't mean that we should ignore how these gaps can be a statistical risk factor for bad relationship dynamics.

If you think all of these aren't real, I'm sure others can come up with things that fit the bill. Proving the complete lack of statistical likelihood is a tough case to begin with, and there are just so many factors here that I can't imagine any study confirming your argument here.

> But, to be frank, is there anything more to it than the ick factor?

FWIW, ick factor is not a part of it for me at all, or I would have no issue dating a 21 year old college undergrad myself on that test alone.

Even further though, I would argue many people's "ick" is derived from some less reasoned through logic in the same vein as above. It's a subconscious smell test people should absolutely examine, but shouldn't be written off completely as it does come from somewhere. People just need to examine the source better.

> I'm just against the casualness of assuming there's any good reason for this concern

I can totally agree here, but there's a middle ground. Think of it as checking for prostate cancer when you get older. Should a doctor just assume you have cancer? Absolutely not. Should they check regularly for it, more often than with someone younger? Absolutely they should.

I think what may be happening is you're over-applying my original post. I'm not prescribing any ostracization for these red flags, but rather reflection and awareness of potential issues.

PS: At a personal level, I avoid these flags entirely because I have plentiful options without these flags. Why take the risk? But I don't persecribe that in the same way to others, I just pay closer attention if it is someone I am close enough with to care about and the reflection/analysis/opinion is wanted by my friend.

> However, 7 years is not a significant age gap (even when the younger partner is only 18)

I'm going to strongly disagree with that, and not sure how you decided that was objectively true. An 18 year old who's finishing off their senior year of high school and going to college the next year dating a 25 year old adult 3 years out of college is a red flag. As a 25 year old myself, I would probably not even date someone that's still an undergrad.

I would very much question any friend my age dating someone under the age of 21. On paper, that would only be 5 years, but I would have far less concerns over 23+33 both working full time despite the age gap being double. Again, context and life stage matters.

> that varies as much by socio-economic status as it does by the age range in question

You're 100% right, people of different socioeconomic statuses can mature at different rates and get to different life stages at different ages. That doesn't magically up the total life experience from a time perspective, though it does make a great point again for nuance, not hard and fast rules on specific ages.

> Do we hoist the responsibility for self-reflecting on potential past relationship abuse, a serious charge, on anyone who is of moderately higher wealth and life experience than their partner, even when they are the same age?

I don't think this gap gets to a point of being a problem often, if ever, but there's no harm in reflecting. I don't see why we wouldn't all want to reflect on the health of our relationships of all sorts. You speak of abuse in a binary, but it's a spectrum where some of that wouldn't even classify as abuse but as maybe mildly taking advantage of someone. There's no harm in trying to ensure fairness in your own relationships, as it is actually one of the few places in the world that is fully in your control when it comes to fairness.

> It is a dangerous trend in our society of taking tenuous theories about power disparities and using those to put the burden of proof on men that they are not taking advantage of younger women. And, pardon the hyperbole, it won't end with 7 years, and likely not even 5.

There's no gender bias here, the same goes with all genders. You see this type of power issue in same sex relationships too, to say nothing of non-binary people. This is not a burden of proof though, there are no accusations floating around. The only claim here that this asks on society is that if you potentially are in a power imbalanced relationship, just take care and examine the details. I don't see the danger here you speak of.

Morality just doesn't work off legality, nor is the "adulthood" ever truly clear in reality.

In this very specific case, passing no judgement on the OP here, there's a somewhat notable difference often between 20+27 and 22+29 even because of life stages. Do both people have full time jobs, their own place? Is one still in school? Can one not drink at bars in the US? These cultural markers often have far more important ties to power and relationship dynamics, as well as healthy relationships even beyond romantic and sexual connections.

I'm not claiming to have a clear view of these lines, but I think OP was right to examine their actions, even if it was all "okay" in the end. It strikes me as a genuine and reflective post from someone who cares, and I would hate to see others use "you are both legally adults" to avoid doing similar reflection. Nuance is important and can be very important at the individual level. Zooming out, is that not the lesson of this whole greater situation?

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724699

There's plenty of nuance here, but I must say I am a bit surprised "the tech industry was a contributing factor to SF's decline" needs to be explained in this much detail. With that said, a few points:

1. As you said yourself, no city was a paradise in the 80's in the US for many reasons, and SF, regardless of a massive tech influx, would have risen with the same tide many other cities experienced from the 80's to now.

2. There's an implicit implication here that if it were not for NIMBY's, all of SF's problems would be solved. While I think they would be better, there's a lot of challenges with building housing that fast even outside of zoning. SF has a severe lack of density to start with that would cause issues even with aggressive construction. It's also not a large land area. Compare to NYC who had a huge land area that had way more density. NYC is not an exception here, you can find at least more density or land mass for most other major cities that helped alleviate the problem even with a NIMBY population present.

3. I think again, you're separating the tech industry from NIMBY's when there is much overlap. Many early tech workers wanted the picturesque victorian style house and helped to enact the problematic zoning themselves.

4. The larger thesis here is that the companies coming is a gift to the city, which I think completely ignores the social factors. People come to cities for the people as much as the jobs, sometimes more so in the modern era. It's why NYC has had no problem bouncing back in even the past 6 months despite many offices remaining empty. The decline of SF is very much highlighted by the past few months not seeing the same effect there yet.

5. With point 2 and 4 in mind in particular, it's hard to make a case that first it was a reasonable expectation for people, the flawed beings they are, to simply rebrand/build the entire city to accommodate the incoming industry, and second that even if they did it would have done anything more than slow the decline. Heck, the drastic cultural shift could have even killed it faster.

There are again complex reasons for this, but one of the patterns that is somewhat unique to SF due to the bay area is that you have people commuting out of the city rather than into the city often given Mountain View, San Jose, etc. That adds even more housing pressure on the area compared to the jobs in SF proper. Add in building constraints around earthquakes and the large set of towers in the SOMA / Financial District, and that recipe for disaster is going to be hard to avoid.

Hindsight is 20/20 and no single tech company caused this, but at the end of the day I just don't think it's a stretch to say that a big influx in tech companies was a big part of killing SF and we may have a much better version of the city today if that influx was moderated or even was not there at all. A monoculture of any industry is not good for a city. Cities exist for humans, not economic purposes. They are powered and somewhat caused by them, but a city does not have much value to me if it doesn't serve the people who live there primarily. There's lots of urban theory to back this up looking at company towns and the like.

I've posted about this general thread before here, and I fear the tech industry has not learned its lesson and is simply moving on to another city to slowly squeeze the life out of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563775

You need both NIMBY's and a large population influx to cause the core issue here. The tech industry indisputably caused the latter. You also imply some/many tech workers were also not NIMBY's as well, as if these two groups are entirely separate.

Growth is not inherently good, and the tech industry absolutely did not help alleviate the issues NIMBY's helped to cause. There was no reason SF couldn't have gone on being the same size city it was decades before in a healthy way. It takes two to tango here, and I see no reason why we wouldn't blame both. The tech industry chose profits for its own companies over the good of the city.

They had no legal obligation to make any other choice, but maybe if they cared about the city for itself or even the longterm health of the area, if not only in self interest, they would have regulated their own growth. That's just not in line with the philosophy that took root there though, which was growth at all costs. These ideas expand out beyond the tech world it turns out.

Not my experience at all with most cities in the US, as someone who has lived in many and visited far more. I wouldn't categorize NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA, Philly, or DC that way when you're not in literal capitol buildings. I live in one of the densest US cities, take transit all over the place and have felt unsafe maybe one time in the past 3 years. No weapon was involved.

Why is your first reaction to any description or decrease in safety to go directly to the phrase "third world country"? Even forgetting the phrase, what you likely mean by it is also not true in all or even most aspects. It's incredibly reductive to use a single category classification of "how nice do I feel something is" for everyone to project on their own ideas how they will.

SF can be both having an increase in homelessness and petty crime at the same time as it maintains a top economy of the US, a big arts scene, many diverse cultures, and more. It's not as simple as "is this a country I would label a bad place".

With that said, SF's latter categories have also slowly eroded, but these symptoms needs to be examined individually. The tech industry did much itself to destabilize SF's arts and culture long before any crime issues. More of a tangent there, but the point is you can't forgo nuance here.

I think this is a pretty decent summary, but I do genuinely have one factual question here:

> Many homeless people defecate and urinate freely in public because the police have simply stopped issuing citations for such behavior.

What was a citation doing previously on this given that homeless people would simply ignore a citation? Has this actually increased in a way we can measure? I haven't been in SF since the pandemic, but none of my friends have complained about this in the area, and it seems to me like this assessment appears to be very much split on agreement by political lines.

I'm also skeptical of this because I've seen claims of this in my current city (NYC) yet have not seen and general increase save one neighborhood, Times Square. From what I gather, the business district of SF (SOMA) might also just be getting a slight increase here, expanding out from the tenderloin which has always had this as far as the past decade is concerned. Is there anything more widespread than that? It seems like that simply was due to the lack of people actually working in both areas now due to the pandemic, not any police enforcement.

> To be clear, "tagging" is vandalism.

In NYC we call that art. I just went to a museum exhibit in Boston about graffiti art on public transit in the 80's. Point being, something so benign being that strongly and violently punished does indeed sound crazy to me.

> but lack of police enforcement has led to greater numbers of homeless people acting without worry, setting up camps, pooping in the streets, vandalism, assault, robbery, etc.

From my experience, homelessness is not affected by police presence/enforcement other than to force them into other areas. An unhoused person has to go somewhere, so using police to approach that simply pushes them in larger numbers into other areas, making it someone else's problem. That seems like a huge waste of resources.

> but doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong

Again, I think you're missing the point. The very specific, non relevant way you interpreted the claim is factually wrong.

To me, the claim read as:

> the military spending is never cut in a significant way

Which again, at an absolute level, is generally true when looking at inflation adjusted spending. Within context, absolute is relevant here though as this is about government process. The whole context makes this claim incredibly tangential to the whole point, which more or less boils down to "government has a lot of inertia".

> doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong

Again, did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out? My point is not to argue about 1990-2000 military spending and the measures of it.

I'm calling this out to say "arguing over small irrelevant details to an argument is not very productive if you care about the real topic at hand".

Are you trying to make this case because you believe that the government does not have a lot of inertia when it comes to these things? Great, then make that case instead of this rabbit hole. Or is this rabbit hole just about the non relevant fact itself?

There's a nuanced point here that looking at GDP % vs inflation adjusted yields different results depending on the range. For example, from 1982-1990, military spending was up, even after adjusting for inflation. It was actually 1990-2000 where military spending actually decreased, both before and after adjusting for inflation.

Compare that to GDP % which would indicate a steady decline in spending. So now we very much do have to examine GDP here in order to look at the argument specifics if we care about 1982-1990. With that said, the cold war ended around 1991, so the military stagnation is more or less in line with the cold war ending. The context missing on the original claim is simply that spending shot right back up once American mucked up and got itself stuck in the middle east, being involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But hey, none of this relates to the original post at all really - that claim was not actually doing any lifting in the original argument other than to serve as a light illustration of how the military spending is never cut in a significant way, and that is generally true save a small exception from 2011-2015. The best that can happen is an effective slow cut through stagnation. And all of THAT is just to say that the government gets pushback when trying to walk back policies.

So did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out?

Exactly. What about if it was Sanders, Clinton, Kasich, and Trump? As a far left voter, do I have to approve Kasich if I really don't want Trump to win?

In RCV, it's simple: Sanders, Clinton, maybe Kasich to ensure Trump doesn't win. There are 100% problems in IRV that Clinton or Kasich may be the first elimination there, meaning moderates can get screwed even with preference, but it's still way better than Approval IMO. The answer is a better RCV system than IVF, but let's start by getting rid of FPTP. I'd love to see some nuanced RCV methods that combine IRV, Ranked Pairs, Condorcet Winners, etc to basically improve IRV eliminations and take "shortcuts" like steps that consider what % of ballots you're on. Basically, approval voting has its place, but it should be within RCV.

Does it make understanding the tally harder for the layman? Yes. But if designed right, it simplifies the voting end so that people can essentially approval and rank vote together. Rank everyone you approve/would accept, and rank in your true preference order. That's what we should be solving for IMO.

Hey, we do live in a Democracy* after all!

I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP".

I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)

It's genuinely interesting you haven't seen any, or perhaps you haven't used the app in the past 6 months?

There's tons of them today, they've been cranking the ad load hard. I see like Nike and the like all the time. It might be they only show ads to users who use regularly.

Senator, we run ads!

It's a problem if you assume that your infrastructure needs won't scale. For many of the positives listed upthread, it can be a worthwhile trade to heavily invest in infrastructure. It just needs to be a conscious choice, and it also does more or less eliminate any small or even medium sized companies from making microservives work best. Unless you can afford to have an infra team bigger than multiple of your product feature teams, you're not at the point of needing microservices probably.

I just want to give a giant explicit +1 to this sentiment and understanding of how humans learn, and then add a bit from there to connect it back to the problem highlighted in the first comment.

IMO, there's a few ways to try and take a pragmatic approach to the problem above:

1. Make simple ways to do complex things. A library, a language, a framework, they all go after the same thing when designed well: batteries included complex functionality that the end user can't shoot themselves in the foot with. It seems like in this domain (microservices), we are still early and need better support for small companies to spin this up. I've found my current company runs microservices pretty well, but I know it took a TON of infrastructure, support, and education to get it to that point. Few companies can afford to have that.

The danger with this approach is that people who understand the internals become rare, and surface level only knowledge can lead to issues when you get to edge cases. I'll still take it, but wanted to call it out. The linux kernel is a great example of what that looks like down the line.

2. Make as many places as possible for developers in training to fail and make those 5 years of mistakes with low stakes consequences. In some ways, the way the industry hires already does this, but I'm sure there are better ways we can come up with versus the current sandboxes. If your frustration boils over, this is a place to channel it positively.

Surprised this isn't higher, that's basically "back full time" to me but with a shorter weekly period. Very different than what I understood reading the headline.