Thank you for writing out that extremely clear sequence of inequalities. I love a good Unicode style debate, but regardless you absolutely nailed it with conceptual clarity.
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In the US, the easiest example to take is the three tiers of fashion produced by Old Navy, The Gap, and Banana Republic. As far as I'm aware, it's always been the same ownership, but each brand is clearly marketed to different price ranges. And also as far as I'm aware: all three brands use offshore sweatshop labor. Right now, rough prices for jeans:
Old Navy: starting at 25USD The Gap: 40-60USD and up. Banana: starting at 120USD
If I had to pay 200-300USD for one pair of denim jeans, I would make damn sure it's because it was machined by a highly paid local artisan. (I don't really care that they're local. I'd still have to think about the cotton sourcing, I guess. Everything about the supply chain is problematic.)
You're right that income inequality is shaping the market, but I think the reverse is true too. The only go-to-market strategies anyone seems to use are: 1. dominate the market with razor thin margins (or even at an initial loss), 2. well differentiated luxury products at outrageous margins. Changing the subject from cloth, Apple is the only company that doesn't seem to operate barely above margins for their low-end products. But of course they benefit from fierce competition on margin with their suppliers. And electronics recycling is a lot more profitable than clothing recycling. I don't know, I guess I was never talking about clothes anyway, and always talking about Late Capitalism.
The 63x64 binary canvas is made of integers on the order of 2^4032. (Please forgive my approximation notation.)
ln(2^4032) ~= 2795
log_10(2^4032) ~= 1214
So, I'm curious how tall the phone-width image needs to be before the required noise exceeds 64 bits (aka a single row). And the answer is... Too tall to be calculated quickly with my brute force method of "try bigger numbers until you get too impatient to wait for your desktop to calculate the natural log".
I'm sure if I spent enough time drawing the parameters out, I'd eventually agree that there's no representation of this problem where those factors ever become relevant.
BUT.
If the problem we were calculating involved log base 1.0001 instead of the natural log, those factors would become relevant at much smaller canvas sizes. I would love to hear an intuitive explanation of logarithms that would convince me to not bother making calculations like this in the future!
I looked very hard for the article I read recently about a woman (in US) who just straight up stopped buying clothes gendered for women because they fell apart immediately. I am extremely curious whether there is a similar cost/construction problem in Europe.
Applying market theory to labor/employer relations, says that wages should tend to go up, if the demand (job openings) for a particular kind of labor exceeds the supply (pool of people who can & will do those jobs). But talking about how labor gets priced by markets doesn't explain anything about why governments choose the minimum wage (if any) that they do. Minimum wage is an explicitly moral consideration where we compel the demand side to observe a floor on the price of your time.
> If everyone could do it, and there were no demand, the value would be low.
That just muddles the separate mechanisms. If everyone has the skill for a job, the potential labor pool is as large as it possibly can be, so supply pressure is naturally higher. You are correct to say that demand pressure is what then drives a negotiated wage. But that's just table stakes to understand what an economy is actually composed of. Does this region have a highly skilled workforce, with demand outpacing the supply of workers, thus driving wages up? Congratulations! This means your region has a proportionally lower supply of low skilled workers, which creates upward market pressure on wages. Using the lens of supply and demand means you now need to look for explanations when the demand for unskilled labor doesn't go down, which is what it would take to keep wages constant.
And the value a supplier (worker) assigns to their own time? Demand pressure only indirectly influences a person's perception of value. People get born into a variety of different financial circumstances that alter their negotiating position.
> A quick way to check this is to look at expensive college programs where people come out making much less than the cost of their education. If you were correct, then such situation would not occur.
As respectfully as possible: this is nonsense. There are all sorts of externalities involved in paying for an education that would never be captured by the labor market model. If somebody is paying a lot of money to develop some skill that has low ROI in the labor market, the only thing that signals is that the person getting the "useless" degree must value having that skill for non-monetary reasons. This kind of thing is always a problem when talking about economics as the science of rational agents. Even if the market demand for a particular skill is zero, some people will use money to develop that skill anyway. This observed fact does not remotely invalidate anything I've said.
edit: My story is about developing the opportunities to leave several different mediocre bosses, sometimes more than once! It really did work out for me, even when I made the decision to go back to the devil I knew.
All of these mediocre bosses were well-intentioned former engineers and I have no lingering ill will toward any of them. The part I left out of the story, is that behind the scenes in all of this, was the layer of management above and around them. I was incredibly fortunate that a Voltron had sort of built itself around me. Other engineers I barely got to know, noticed my work. The executive overseeing the departments at both companies paid attention to what his reports were doing. He didn't want to listen to me lament every possible bit I ever might have to twiddle, but he was a significant guiding force in my career for years before I even realized it.
It is possible to develop relationships like this, through good faith efforts. But I honestly don't know how I would pass along any advice about this, other than by being as honest as possible about what happened in my life. Essentially: Look Around.
I am explicitly arguing that value and wages are not tied to each other, today, with examples.
Generally speaking, we treat the value of labor in accord with the cost of developing a skill. Whether by correlation or accident, this seems to mean we dramatically undervalue softer skills involved in working with other people. (NB: This is related to, but very different than the customer service face front-of-house puts on.) There are kitchens where the entire morale of the restaurant staff rests on the good natured attitude of the dishwasher. That person leaves, and soon afterwards, everybody hates working there, and nobody can figure out why.
I think any sane businessperson knows this, and does agree with me. Most businesspersons also know that everyone in a restaurant is completely replaceable. Right?
My story: I was given the option to change my boss for the first time in 2006 or so. At this company, I'd already been promoted several times, ostensibly on merit, which involved a different boss each time. This event was different. The team was growing and we simply needed more people doing similar things. I decided my relationship with a (somewhat older) peer-turned-manager would be better off if I didn't report to him.
Had he been a bad boss? Not really, but he wasn't a good boss. The new boss wasn't any better or worse. Old boss and I both spent the next year slightly miserable, but I wouldn't have known how miserable he was until he suddenly left the company. And then he hired me away a few months later.
He also fired me a couple years later. Why? I was sick of the job, and I mostly deserved it; we were also at a smaller company now, where more egos were crammed into one room. I'd also literally been given a second job and a second title, complete with a second boss, who was also my boss's boss. (No pay increase, of course.)
Was it more work than I could handle? Not exactly. Was there a mismatch between my responsibility and my power? Absolutely. Did losing this job damage my career? Not in the long run, and I learned far more valuable lessons about the need to simply work differently with different people.
I think stories like this are close to the best possible outcome when you have a bad boss. And I think the moral here, is that a Voltron Manager is something everyone should have regardless of how good their current manager may be.
No, it isn't.
You don't have to agree in any substantial way with anything else Marx says, to recognize that "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is eminently reasonable and fair.
Everything you're saying to glorify front-of-house roles is also true of back-of-house roles. True, the best possible server in a restaurant can improve the bottom line X% more than the best possible dishwasher can. But comparing the worst possible dishwasher with the worst possible server is also important. Can you say with any confidence which "problem employee" will have a larger negative effect on the bottom line? Probably not.
What if it's just a slightly below average dishwasher? What if the server is "only" sexually harassing coworkers a little bit? Gauging the range of human performance by the wages they use for sustenance is stupid, but apparently necessary.
> Well, their purchasing power is about to go down because when they go out to eat they're going to be paying for $15/hr dishwashers instead of $12/hr dishwashers.
Again, a claim missing some crucial substance. How much is their purchasing power going to go down? Will the price of a hamburger or an apron really go up more than a couple of pennies?
The converse is also true in software engineering. Questions like whether programming is "more difficult" than graphic design are largely irrelevant. Humans will always be playing status games, but denigrating labor based on some perceived skill level is a habit we should actively be trying to get rid of. Meanwhile...
> There is a knock-on effect although depending on the spread it might be small.
Can you provide more specific detail where knock-on effects like this have been observed? It's nearly guaranteed that a decrease on low end rents will be vanishingly small. Margins can only go so low, which is why developers are attracted to luxury projects in the first place.
(Likewise, a million dollar paycut from a CEO can only raise 480 person-hour-dollars in wages. But those margins matter a hell of a lot more for the line worker's lifestyle than upper management's.)
An unfortunate aspect of all this, is how few good implementations of these algorithms exist outside of big commercial GIS packages. I'm extremely grateful that a public university financed this particular research originally, or we might not have gotten a well funded open source library.
A lot of the stuff I'm wanting is stuff I wouldn't expect Uber to care about, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Did you look at implementing pathfinding? (As I recall, Dr. Sahr said A* should be easily implementable in this scheme. Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned that joins are not easy. Any other tidbits like that that came up?)
This looks like a completely new implementation with none of the original DGGrid source. (Unsurprising for some license prohibitions of parts of it that would prevent Uber from using it.)
I haven't had a ton of time to dig through the source, but haven't seen some of the utilities for things like bulk binning of coordinates. (Hopefully the bloggers will talk about this a little bit.) When you worked on it, was Dr. Sahr involved with any of the new API adaptations? [edit: Yes, I see!] He and I had chatted about feature wishlists, and iOS / mobile bindings was at the top of our list a few years ago, but neither of us had much time to work on it. :-)
I can't find anything that explains how the partitioning in geohex works, but the Uber system makes it clear that they are using Dr. Sahr's partitioning scheme: https://github.com/uber/h3/blob/master/docs/doxyfiles/h3inde...
edit: Oops, that only explains the tiling. For explanations of how the hierarchy descends, Dr. Sahr produced some GIFs that give a little bit of an overview of how the resolutions overlay: http://webpages.sou.edu/~sahrk/dgg/images/topogif/topogif.ht...
There are several options for partitioning your grid, and the geometric consequences on your index. This overview in particular should be accessible even without a deep GIS background: http://webpages.sou.edu/~sahrk/sqspc/pubs/xuzhouKeynote13.pd...
There are a lot of tools that should work better offline. But a remote collaboration tool is not a good example of that. I've done work on secure private P2P messaging systems, and when you want that feature set, you really want that feature set.
But when I use Slack, it's because I don't want to have to be in the same building as all the people I'm working with. There is no way for this to gracefully degrade with a network partition. My argument is that central coordination and audit (with Slack) is not an edge case, it's the primary case.
If you are sitting in the same room with your colleagues, what do you do when there's a power outage? Sometimes there really isn't anything to do but wait. If those kinds of outages were less rare, you'd need to figure something out to smooth productivity. Whether that is buying a generator, or finding things to do regularly that don't require electricity depends on your business.
We have distributed systems that are used by normal applications to solve issues like this. When we need to, we put an ActiveDirectory replica in every satellite office. Frequently organizations forget why they spent the money on so much redundancy in the first place, re-centralize stuff, and it might be years before they experience a big enough outage that reminds them why they were "wasting" those dollars on redundant systems.
As you say, there are plenty of systems that could be made less fragile than they are. Slack is specifically interesting because they made a number of "more central" design decisions, even though chat as a protocol is easier to make "more distributed". What did they get out of this tradeoff? A ton of well packaged features and integrations with other systems.
Could the same thing be recreated in a more decentralized fashion? It is theoretically possible, but it could be years before we see a product/system anywhere near as functional. I would love to see an on-prem Slack product. Atlassian offers the closest suite I've seen that fits this bill. It is not easy to operate these systems at scale.
In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them.
Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
My only email volume problem anymore is entirely opt-in / self inflicted. Some percentage of global bandwidth is still wasted on spam, but it is a vanishingly small proportion of traffic for that to matter anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We still haven't squared Zooko's Triangle. What is the practical way to get a function like "document was sent with best effort for some legal purpose to a known party"? Are we just stuck with "login to the secure messaging site" emails from our banks?
Something more like: For the next 5 years, all copyrights before 1970 become subject to the "author's lifetime" standard, and nothing else changes. If the experiment fails, then those rights are automatically restored to any corporations/estates that owned them. (With some mechanism to shield copies made in that interim from future litigation.)
That sounds like a more balanced version of the experiment, and I still think it has very little chance of coming to pass. I'm not good with Bayesian formalism, but my priors are something like: status quo most likely, permanent (but small) concessions to get a little bit more old stuff into the public domain next most likely, all other options highly improbable.
Finally: maybe it's sensible to try to shift the Overton window by calling for the abolition of copyright. But I don't know how one does that kind of thing ethically if you don't really want to go that extreme.
Good catch, though. GitHub is a candidate because their core business model, like Most Linux Distributors, is built around aggregating and re-distributing open source software in a trustworthy fashion. (And support contracts around that.)
No acquisition is also a possibility. Neither Docker the tech nor Docker the company is too big to fail right now.
VMWare is an interesting possibility! Docker seems like it would cannibalize too much of their existing product line, but VMWare's existing products are already kind of self-cannibalizing. (This is why many engineers find the enterprise market so confusing. Nobody differentiates products well, because past a certain size, networks of human relationships [sales, support, etc.] matter more than branding.)
But from that "good for us" perspective, VMWare looks as bad as Oracle these days. I would still "vote" for Microsoft.