Your profile says you're in Lithuania. Lithuania is part of NATO.
IF this was an officially sanctioned mission by a NATO country, then you're part of the "we".
That's kind of the deal with alliances.
5,477 karma · joined June 27, 2015
IF this was an officially sanctioned mission by a NATO country, then you're part of the "we".
That's kind of the deal with alliances.
* Twitch: Essentially invented live streaming. Fantastic.
* Amazon Interactive Video Service [0]: Essentially "Twitch As A Service", built by Twitch engineers. Fantastic.
* Prime Video. Same exact situation as Netflix: original expertise is all in static content. Lots of growing pains with live video and poor reports. But they've figured it out: now there are regular live streams (NHL and NFL), and other channel providers do live streaming on Prime Video as a distribution platform.
Except they're not.
They're saying "These things happen, and it's important to KNOW that." Nobody is telling people that they should feel bad for it, but if it doesn't feel fair to those that were harmed by it, that's cuz it's not. Feeling like hey the world isn't fair, and maybe we should do something about it, is a good thing actually.
The right meanwhile IS actively trying to repress information and education about these subjects.
The problem is there is a segment of people who when you tell them something like "Hey you did a bad thing and it hurt me. Could you apologize and then we could move on with our relationship?" respond with "OH So I'm the WORST PERSON IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD am I? Noone has ever hurt you as much as I have, have I? You just want me to keep apologizing for the rest of my life do you? When is enough going to be enough?"
When you haven't yet received even a single acknowledgement of their error.
We call such people narcissists and they dominate the modern right wing.
You can see it here in how you describe your scenarios. Of course I've seen people criticize societal-scale meat production's carbon footprint. And suggesting that we all eat less steak. Some people say we should stop eating meat entirely. But "You ate a steak? There's starving children in africa, you GREEDY BASTARD" is not even a real life single tweeter. That's just a person you made up.
There has to be a middle ground between what I'm advocating for (education, but with optimism, agency, and hope) and what you are (denial, rejection, anger, gaslighting).
But one should understand what that term means before doing so.
This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)
For one, keeping the economy going and growing is actually our only chance to tackle climate change and fossil fuel egress.
The reason the western nations have been able to reduce their per-capita consumption is because of accumulated wealth during their booms (and colonialism) that they were then able to spend on efficient infrastructure, whether nuclear, solar or wind. China is smart and collectivist enough to achieve the same, but the rest of the world isn't yet.
There have been incredible advancements in efficiencies and costs of things like solar, making it cheaper, but to truly migrate the world still requires massive expenditures and investments into energy grid upgrades, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, etc.
All of this requires wealth, which requires a growing economy, which requires optimism. Because the economy is only as positive as the optimism of the populace.
Optimism isn't rational. There has never been a time in Human history (maybe for less than a decade in the 90s between the fall of the cold war and 9/11, as long as you weren't in the balkans) when the logical decision would've been to be optimistic about the future. Yet people did anyway out of necessity/obligation to their children, out of religion, out of greed, out of empathy. Whatever is the reason it is required.
And this is what I see lacking today - especially with Gen Z, who's education we (well - their Gen X parents, but in the society) fucked up by telling them the truth.
We told them the world is going to hell, that anything good they had is based on generations of blood and exploitation, the world is unfair and is full of rich people getting richer, and nepotism.
And, I actually believe everything in that sentence is true! But it's irrelevant. Because it's no foundation for actually DOING something about the problem. Instead it's an exercise to disengage, to decide not to participate in society, to sink deeper into online social spaces that this generation was raised on by being exposed to screens & social media too early. So what do they get attracted to instead? Red pill, manosphere, 4chan, and eventually Trump.
Because here come people with solutions - there IS a problem, but it's not your fault - it's THEIR fault (women, immigrants, foreigners).
How can you not be attracted to it?
The left has no alternative answer for this. They/we/me want a better world, but we focus on equalization of justice - to bring up the disadvantaged to the level of the dominant class - but no plan for what to do next. If western prosperity was borne out of exploitation, you can't simply raise the formerly-exploited to the high water mark, and expect to be able to continue growing it at the same pace. (That's before even getting into ongoing exploitation that funds the entire western world by taking advantage of the 3rd world)
And yet, you also can't sink into apathy. You need awareness of the realities of the situation, but you need to empower people that they can make a change...that they can participate. And that they can overcome.
Some of this requires self-delusion, but ultimately it needs inspiration. Of which the left is extraordinarily low on right now.
If Trump makes empty promises, and doesn't deliver on them, nobody cares. They'll still come to vote for him to spite the dems.
The right splinters in public (many turned on Trump 2020-2024) but unites in the voting booth.
The left splinters in public AND in the voting booth.
I had sincerely hoped that the reason Trump was going to lose this year is too many people are tired of his b.s. and would simply not be radicalized enough to come out and vote at all - even if they thought Harris was trash.
Boy was I wrong.
you mean fraud
> providing a social media platform that doesn’t suppress conservative viewpoints
Now amplifies ONLY them, which if you were claiming to be an impartial champion of free speech (as Musk repeatedly said) is equally as bullshit as what was happening on the platform before.
Instead, this bastion of free speech now considers "cisgender" a slur.
It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts.
Let's start with your analogy:
> Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right?
If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right.
But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn't cost $50,000,000, but only $500,000, unbelievable, right?"
Same ratios, but deeply different implications.
Today, the idea of setting up a continuously settled Mars colony - hell even a Moon colony - is unfeasibly expensive. It's ACHIEVABLE - we have the technology and the money - but it would cost an intolerable percentage of the GDP of the world to accomplish.
A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify.
We're still talking about generations - maybe a century - away from someone being able to just pop over to Mars for a summer vacation, the way that a college student could to do today with an intercontinental flight.
> Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality.
For a very generous definition of soon and for a highly implausible definition of what a "cruise ship" is - it'll never be as accessible to the average person as earth cruise ships. Not as long as you keep using rockets.
Regardless of reusability, there are realities of fixed FOSSIL FUEL costs associated with getting into gravity. They're not cheap, and they're not frivolous. If you want to be able get things into orbit as cheap as you're suggesting, you need to start investing in a space elevator, which noone is right now.
> Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space
Cool, yeah, that's true, that becomes more available.
> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
..why?
> We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
And the final cherry on the cake. Humanity becoming inter-planetary is important on a macro scale. And trying to go further and further into space will INCENTIVISE research into these concepts.
But in no way does getting to orbit cheaper make it easier to figure out any of these concepts. There's nothing we can do from Mars or on the way to Mars in terms of this science that we can't do from Earth.
We've gone from "You don't get promoted if you don't show clear visibility for the things that you do" to "You can get fired for not showing clear visibility for the things that you do".
The first is true. The latter isn't.
There are dystopian black swan events like the richest person in the world going on a ketamine binge and buying your company and dragging everyone into a meeting room with printouts of examples of your code.
Unless you're involved in one of those, noone gets fired for doing a lot of things but not tracking them enough in JIRA to cover your notes.
Most teams know who on their team gets shit done and who doesn't. They also know the ones who get things done without a clear track record of it. They are asked to help with every problem, and are constantly too busy to get their own stuff done because they're helping everyone else with theirs. Yes, they struggle to get promoted, but they certainly don't get fired.
The people who get fired are the ones who THINK they're in that group, but they're talkers, not do'ers. They get fired and everyone shrugs and goes "oh well, anyway."
Then they go and write blog posts like this to help precisely the wrong type of person that needs this advice - cargo culting impact. Becoming allegiant to process for the sake of visibility.
It'll certainly lead to more clutter and confusion in the world and in the tracking systems.
Might as well write blog posts about how to pad your line counts in your pull requests so that people looking at your Github graph at performance review time think you did more than you did.
Yes, climate change is a massive problem, and humanity is ignoring it to our own peril.
But peril here means the unnecessary deaths and displacement of hundreds of millions of people - a civilization-defining tragedy no doubt, but ultimately nothing so serious as to cause our extinction.
We have the technology and knowledge to adapt, change course, finally get of fossil fuels, and enter into a new age of sustainable renewable energy.
We're gonna do it too late, and whole ecosystems, species, and far too many humans are all going to perish. Sea life may become extinct.
But at no point is our survival as a SPECIES in question.
I think at the scale of the universe life even thinking capabilities life is almost certainly inevitable.
What's not inevitable is that it can thrive, and survive to a galactic scale. That's not even yet certain for us.
Universe is too big, we're all too far apart. Civilizations come, civilizations go. Some may not be on a planet where even rocket travel may be possible - no source of energy dense enough. Some can get wiped out by disasters. Asteroids. It's happened on this planet a bunch of times.
It's like the Birthday paradox. It's likely 2 people have the same birthday. It's not likely that someone else has YOUR birthday.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
This is a lukewarm take shared by most, but it at best doesn't cause outrage or go viral, and at worst gets you accused of being a bootlicker for the C-suite.
So none of us speak up and the dominant perspective continues that nobody wants to actually go to the office.
Because people didn't actually embrace the hybrid model, wasted time on petty protests like this, undermined morale and the hypothetical benefits of in-person colocation.
If everyone actually tried 3 days a week, and had the benefits of in-person collaboration (instead of people coming in to the office to just sit on Zoom calls), then maybe the company could've kept doing 3 days a week instead of forcing everyone to 5.
Going through your routine:
1) Noone forced these workers to live 1 hour from the office. In fact in the beforeCOVID times, people made an effort to live closer to where they work. Sure many can't afford to, but we're not talking about baristas here, right? But highly paid IT staff.
In the cases like Google the office is far from shitty.
In the cases like Amazon, the offices are more mid, but located central to where people live in cities. (We'll come back to this)
2/3/4) Legitimate problem, that exists SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF HYBRID. If everyone RTOs 5 days a week like Amazon did, it's no longer an issue.
6) If it's a nice office like Google the food isn't shitty. If it's a mid office like Amazon, it's downtown surrounded by the best restaurants/cafes the city has to offer.
I don't want to cast aspersions on your friends in Seattle, but...maybe you need better friends.
I've been a local and I've been an expat (5 years in western Europe). I feel that the default PNW "mental model" is diametrically opposed from the expat mindset.
Expats don't want to be tied down, they want to see as much as possible, see the world, meet lots of people. Build friendship quickly and deeply, but then move on too.
PNW is nothing like that.
IMO your expats coming to this conclusion that the reason why the PNW locals are the way they are is a failure of imagination of expats - a lack of understanding of outdoorsy introverts.
We're not thinking about our positions in friend groups.
I want to see the hyper-realistic rendered world in as high resolution as possible.
I want to fly around the planet.
But I don't want to be limited to the detailed specifics (and speeds!) of real life planes.
Why can't we have a mode to make a plane as easy to fly as it is in GTA5. Or "superman" mode where I don't even have a plane, and I can just move around at (almost) any speed [i'm sure rendering would become a problem]
It may be the primary responsibility by plurality but it almost is never the MAJORITY of the time you spend, ESPECIALLY in big tech.
I'd say the most likely breakdown is:
* 40% managing reports and judging their performance * 30% managing upwards * 20% recruiting/hiring * 10% team vision/strategy + cross-org initiatives
But you're not.
> Once people there have established their friend groups they’re not looking to add any more to the group
Is an observation
> as they worry too many new friends will diminish their own place in their friend group.
Is an interpretation.
Perhaps you've met someone that told you this is what's happening to them. But that's an individual, not a blanket assumption you can place across all the locals.
Source: I am a PNW local. I wasn't born here, but have been here since I was a kid. Here's the thing about your point about "insincere nice". It's not insincere. It's just delusional.
I met lots of people. I get excited about lots of them. I mean when I say I want to hang out again, or show them around. I can visualize a future where we do those things. I want to leave the door open to that happening.
But I get busy, I get tired. I make tough choices. And this new person ends up getting prioritized at the bottom of the list.
I know the criticism. This is mean. It's cruel. But it feels meaner to say "i'm too busy to hang out" to someone who i genuinely like and feel like if things lined up well, we could become friends.
If I say "let's hang out again soon" and we never do, I wasn't lying to you. I was lying to myself.
* I search a keyword * I see a google result * I see the keyword IN THE PREVIEW on Google * I click on the link * No keyword
And this isn't hidden SEO spam stuff, it was literally removed. The cache doesn't match the live result.
No recourse.
That's such a cynical interpretation of a totally reasonable problem of social dynamics.
A friendship of 2 has different dynamics than 3 than 4, etc. And all of them are different depending on the composition of intraverts/extraverts.
FWIW, the extravert friend groups I know are highly inclusive and are always eager to add new members. For obvious reasons.
And the opposite for introverts who are much more careful and cautious (I am one) because they know how fragile good vibes can be and how new strangers are exhausting and can affect them.
IMO, the Pacific Northwest attracts introverts because the main activities are fairly individualistic (hiking, skiing) and the social aspects happen before/after which you can easily skip. Not so in something like NYC where everything is orientated around other people.
Then extraverts move to the PNW for the hot tech job markets (Seattle/Vancouver) and are annoyed that everyone is so "cold".
They're analogies. The concepts need names, but I think they do more harm than good because people then start with a mental model of a membrane or a surface - something they have experience seeing waves in. And then after 1 or 2 steps where the analogy helps, it breaks down, and people start being confused.
Of course the alternative isn't any better. If they had named it a "Wazoo function" and a "Quantum Flarg" everyone would've just kept asking "OK but what IS a Wazoo? What IS a Flarg" and not been satisfied with a "Yeah, it's a fundamental own thing".
Feynman, of course, has a pretty definitive response on the difficulty of this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs
In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.
They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.
So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.
And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.
If the piano is slightly out of tune, and the orchestra is slightly worse, people stop appreciating it (not realizing how much better it COULD be), and the art dies out, not because it's moved past it's time, or the culture moved on, or people don't want it, but because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY CAN HAVE.
That is 100% the case with Tomatoes. Most people I know (including myself) think tomatoes are bland boring filler. Annoying to cut. Barely add any flavour. Need salt + fat (cheese, bacon, etc) to really bring out their flavour.
And then one day we have a farmer's market heirloom tomato, and it's like our world gets shattered.
"I COULD be eating tomatoes like this on the regular? And I'm not? Whatever happened as a society to get me to this point was a crime, and needs to be undone."
But most people never even get to experience that, I think.
I am scared of the police. In the rare times I have to interact with them I am overwhelmingly polite and cautious because I know that they have the ability to fuck up my day, and maybe my life.
But that's a HORRIBLE status quo. That is a bug in our society that needs to be eradicated.
Plus, I've got basically every privilege that exists under the sun, so luckily I have to encounter this problem only very rarely. I can't imagine what it must be like if you have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place or looking the wrong way, such that you have automatically tense/hostile encounters with the police continuously. At some point it must be exhausting to try to maintain this composure the entire time.