asuffield

There's a big difference between "not authorised" (the current reality) and "disempowered". You are not authorised to send emails that place the company in legal jeopardy. You are disempowered from doing so if every email that you send has to be reviewed by a company officer first. The norm today is that you are trusted to not exceed the limits of your authority.

How about every line of code that you write being reviewed by legal to make sure it was within the bounds of the law?

There's plenty of scope here for a far more defensive position on ensuring compliance. That is what you would expect and desire from any attempt to massively increase the liability of errors, no?

That's not unreasonable in principle, but then it gets more complicated: do you propose to hold the entire company accountable for the actions of a small part of it? If not, then it devolves into the kind of accounting complexity that results in random internet outrage because it's beyond the understanding of most people.

If you do propose to hold the entire company accountable for any action taken in its name, then consider what you are enforcing: this would mean companies would be immediately obliged to disempower their entire staff from making decisions at any level, and require review and approval for all actions, to make sure that nobody ever makes a mistake that could be punitively expensive.

Neither of these is going to turn out to be a simple solution to a complex problem.

Worse, you can't even use a simple rule here, because what do you do about companies that aren't making a profit? Do they effectively have carte blanche to violate the law in order to improve their situation? That's probably not what you want, so you'd end up with some complicated mix of both systems.

I'm not interested in defending Verizon here, but your math is wrong. Comparing fines (or taxes, the other popular variation of this error) to revenue is meaningless. You need to compare them to profit. The amount of money that they handled but didn't benefit from is irrelevant.

Verizon's profits for 2015 were $4.22bn. That makes it a 0.03% fine.

But that's still not close enough, because this infraction was in "Verizon Wireless", not the entire company. So to really get a sense of its relevance, you need to figure out what the profit of that arm of the business was.

I can't find that number anywhere. Anybody got a hint?

They may also have been the save for the game you had almost finished (oh hey, cookies). The most important thing is to think twice before taking any irrevocable action, and be sure that it's really what you wanted to do.

The answer to all of your questions is approximately yes (names vary). I've also done a lot of work to address these problems when they come up, and I've read the data on the current state of the economy. How many of these things have you done?

Have you ever had people pleading with you for food/money and, instead of berating people on the internet, got them into the drugs treatment programme that they desperately needed? Have you ever got people to correctly file appeals when the jobcentre made a mistake and didn't give them the money they were entitled to? Have you ever taught people the skills they need to be productive members of society and provide for themselves?

Because I've also done all of those things on multiple occasions, and I think I have a much better sense of the problems that we face than you do. I also think that your refusal to admit these are the real problems and put work into fixing them is one of the major reasons why we still have them. It's very easy to say "I want more, it's not fair", and much harder to figure out why things aren't working when there's plenty for everybody and get something done about that.

I've dug into this in more detail in some past political events, and I've always found that the people making the strongest "there should be more for me" demands had incomes above the median. I never had much sympathy for them, and I do call them on it when I see them.

I can't really do it here, unless people in this thread would care to share what they earn.

It is certainly true that a common political tactic is to attempt to convince people that there was some time in the past when they were better off than today. Remarkably, people are far more willing to believe this (even in the face of all the data which inevitably shows it isn't true - in the UK we've been on a near-vertical climb for a century with even the recent economic messes being little more than a quiver), than they are willing to believe that things could be made better in the future.

There are plenty of places in the world where living standards are low. The UK is not one of them. If you live here, even if you are the poorest person in the country, you are rich beyond the dreams of half the population of the world.

I'm not buying into any of this "life is terrible, you should give me more" meme.

The main flaw in your argument is that living standards are better than at any time in history before now.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on YouTube)

There is a big difference between paying for one of the support offerings, versus being a free user. The status of free users is approximately: free access to the product but no support. If you want customer service then you need to open your wallet.

It's important to separate "I think the support was bad", which would be very interesting to a lot of people who work here, from "I didn't pay for the product so I didn't receive it". Did you pay for support?

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on hangouts)

These problems are largely resolved by using chrome. Pop out any tab into its own window, notifications will work reliably, the security model is far stronger, and most important of all: when one tab crashes, it's an independent process so it can't take any other tab with it.

I use this every day without seeing any of these issues.

(Tedious disclaimer: not speaking for anybody else, my opinion only, etc. I'm an SRE at Google.)

"Within the last 10 years" covers several generations of refinement to the interview process. I'd suggest forgetting about anything more than a couple of years old.

The major thing to keep in mind is that these days, your recruiter will ask you up front what subject areas you are strongest in, and you should expect to get interviews about those things.

It's legal because Americans consistently vote for the people who do it over the people who don't. This is democracy in action, in a very real sense.

That doesn't sound plausible. You expect to pay for basic income with net zero money?

The only way this works is if people with productive jobs end up with less money than today.

My job is, in a very real sense, to automate jobs out of existence. How much $fiats were you proposing to pay me, again?

Where did you find that 2.7m number? The most recent data is the Credit Suisse 2015 set, which you can see here:

https://www.credit-suisse.com/uk/en/about-us/research/resear...

They put the 1% line at $760k, and that's net worth: include the value of your home, subtract your debts.

I'm pretty unhappy about this oxfam article. It talks about "the richest 1%" and "the billionaires" alongside each other as if these groups were even remotely similar. This is furthering the myth of some kind of group of "shady rich people" who are behind the global financial conspiracy. Reality check: if you're reading this, you're almost certainly in the top 10% ($68,845 in total assets). According to the same data set, the median wealth in the US is $50k, so about half the population is in the top ten percent. You are the rich people this article is talking about.

Comparing the "richest 80 billionaires" to the bottom 50% is similarly misleading, because the bottom 50% has about 0.5% of the global wealth (which I think roughly answers your question about the top 0.001%). If you lined up the top 80 billionaires, shot them all, and redistributed all their wealth to the bottom 50%, then those people would still be in extreme poverty.

There are serious global wealth inequality problems, and this oxfam article doesn't really talk about them at all, and instead tries to perpetuate a popular meme. I strongly suggest that people skip it and read the Credit Suisse report instead - the data tells a much more interesting story.

Here are the numbers which the oxfam article doesn't mention, and should:

85.65% of the global wealth is held by the top 10% of the population, which is 477m people, of which 113m are in the US, with second place going to Japan at 58m.

32.3% of global wealth is held by the middle class (defined as $50k to $500k wealth); 92.4% is held by the middle class or above. 37% is in the US. Africa, India, and Latin America together represent about 4%.

Funny story: not being american, my red and blue are the other way around. I'd recommend not interpreting this in terms of US politics. I'd even more strongly recommend not making claims about the beliefs of the side which you don't support.

If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".

Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.

Regardless of my personal perspective, this is unfair. He stated a position which is not only widely disputed, but the dispute over which has an entire field of media and academics devoted to it, and which routinely splits the population roughly half and half (look at basically any election result in the western world). And he disagreed with your side. He's in the other 50% of the population from you.

To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)

This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.

Life's too short to argue red vs blue.

There's a secondary dimension to this:

You can still micro-optimise for memory and cpu performance. That's certainly a thing that is possible to do.

Alternatively, you can buy more cpus and memory.

What has changed in the past few years is that for many workloads, the cost of buying more cpus and memory is significantly lower than the cost of all the development work to optimise away the need. Hardware is cheap compared to developers, for many applications.

There are still some applications where this is not the case, and in those cases people still care about memory management.

Agreed. Replacing menial work with automation frees up the people doing the menial work to learn new skills and do other work. The net result is that more useful work is done, which equates to wealth created. If some of those people are incapable of learning new skills, the net surplus of wealth that we have created should be sufficient for society to cover their basic living expenses. We do not need those people to continue doing busywork in order to provide for them.

The more that we can do this, the more surplus wealth we create. This is clearly working by reference to history: this is the best time ever to be poor, compared to all points in history before it.

This isn't quite so obviously true, but it's likely also the case that an unemployed person today has significantly better life outcomes than a menial worker 100 years ago (which means mines or factories). That's what improved automation buys us.

It's basically just a rant. I noticed a few paragraphs in that it was a series of angry statements with no justification offered for any of them, then kept watching and it continued to be exactly the same all the way to the end.

Regardless of whether you agree with PG's essay or not, he at least stated the reasons why he believes in each of his points, and sometimes even gave supporting references. This post doesn't bother to give reasons, which means we are unable to judge it by any measure other than comparing the claims it makes to our own preconceptions.

(Since it makes a few obviously-false claims, like "PG isn't creating wealth, he's just spending it", and "we should keep people doing busywork instead of automating things", I'm writing the whole thing off. If the author can't be bothered to argue their case, I don't see a reason why I should either.)

There are a couple more dimensions on recent (more recent than this article) models running M. There's a TEE (~android TPM equivalent) chip involved in encrypting user data, it knows whether your bootloader is locked or not, and it will not yield the keys to locked user data when running in unlocked mode.

A quick glance at the world of software engineering would seem to disprove this as a claim about engineering. We have the opposite problem.

Perhaps you mean that people don't want much variety and the market responds to this? Better engineering is also the answer there: the more we improve the process and reduce the costs, the easier it becomes for people to service niche markets with more obscure products. Again you can look to the software engineering world for parallels.

In a world of well-engineered food, your personal "farm" is a box in the corner, which you put seed in once a week and it spits out finished produce. The coffee machine of the farming world, if you like.

Interesting. Why?

My default assumption is that "don't try to engineer things to be better" is the wrong answer. If we don't understand it well enough yet, just experiment more until we do. The awesome thing about indoor farming at scale is that it becomes really easy to do lots of experimenting and zero in on exactly what things each plant requires to thrive.

So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.

It sounds like a really cool idea, but to some extent we already have this with Linux out-of-tree modules - it doesn't work very well, but it's there, you can build a new version of the module, unload the old one, and load the new one. I suspect the microkernel version of this would be hard to implement for most of the same reasons, and probably fail in most of the same ways, which boil down to "APIs change a lot so things don't stay compatible for long".

Erm. I suppose I should mention that I'm an SRE at Google, but I'm very carefully not talking about my current job here (which is special in ways I can't discuss). Interpret my perspective as relating to personal projects and a career of working at assorted medium-to-large companies.

> In other words drug addicts really want to be addicts.

That is a reasonably accurate definition of the word "addiction", yes. When they no longer want the drug, then they are not addicted to it any more (this is a good example of how hard it can be to really change your desires).

You appear to have some unstated objection to the notion that a dysfunctional desire is still a desire. I don't think this conversation can make any meaningful progress if you continue to avoid stating it.

The main issue I have with microkernels is that they don't solve any problem that I have.

A robust system is designed such that any machine in it can randomly crash. Crashing machines then only represent a risk that needs to be mitigated by having enough spare capacity to handle however many machines are expected to be down at once. Linux is already stable enough that this amount is too small to care about; making it more stable doesn't help me.

Would I expect meaningful performance improvements from microkernels? I'm doubtful that you'd get as much as 10%, but I'd be interested in seeing evidence if anybody has any.

Do microkernels offer any application-visible features that I don't have today with Linux? To the best of my knowledge they do not.

I believe you are making the common mistake of confusing what people really want (the desires they act on), and what they say they want. What people say they want is usually "the thing that they want to want" - it's a bit meta. You can call that "lying" if it makes you feel better, but pretty close to everybody does it.

> How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms?

As with so many of these things, there's this idea floating around that the factory farms must be "bad" because they are big and wealthy, and that smaller, less efficient farms must be "good" because they are small and poor. Much like with all the other cases, this idea is somewhere between confused and blatant denial of reality.

Money is the unit of caring. The amount of money that you're willing to spend on something is how much you care about having it, as precisely defined by the point at which it's too expensive and you don't care enough to pay that much. The factory farms are big and wealthy because they provide what people care about: an efficiently produced, consistent solution to the problem of what to have for dinner.

If people really cared about their food coming from small, inefficient, "organic" farms then they would pay for what it really costs to produce food in that manner. The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed. This is normal: most people will tell you they care deeply about something up until the point when you ask them to open their wallet, and then they remember that they don't care all that much.

It seems to me that what's really wanted here is better factory farms with modest adjustments to reduce pollution, antibiotics use, and improve animal welfare. That's entirely achievable. It won't be achieved by things like this article; it'll be achieved by somebody who sets out to make a better factory farm and builds a business around that.

This is already happening. http://spread.co.jp/en/ plan to have what could be a game-changing approach to vegetable farming up and running in 2017. Whoever gets that system to work well enough at scale seems likely to sweep the 1990s-style farms off the map. It's the exact opposite direction from what the "organic" farmers have been doing: no low-wage labour, no battles over land, no getting caught up in politics.

The next couple of years will be an interesting time for the food markets.