jlangenauer

I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red flags you can watch out for.

- The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the interview ends immediately.

- Another one is, if you do hire a person, they suddenly want to be paid through some unrelated company. ("Oh, it's my brothers company, I do this for tax reasons").

There are other red flags which aren't as certain, but should definitely raise your suspicions:

- The CV has been professionally designed or laid out.

- The most recent job entry is a vague "Remote contractor" or similar which doesn't list specific companies they've worked for.

- The name on the email doesn't match the name on the CV.

- You get a series of emails following up after a few days, as though someone is running a drip email campaign.

- The application email is sent directly to any of your employees, rather than to your standard recruiting email address, almost as though someone has used a sales tool to find internal contacts.

These last 5 points can occur in legitimate applications, but when you see them, it's a sign that additional suspicion is warranted. These fake employees are generally not individuals, but professional operations.

I'm glad you put "mountain" in quotes, because we sure as hell don't have anything which counts as a mountain in this town - and no, that tiny hill in Humbolthain where the nazis built anti-air guns doesn't count.

Significant portions of the Berlin to Munich route run at 300km/h (the section from Halle via Erfurt and then to Bamberg). Of course, you have to be on one of the ICE3's that are actually capable of 300km/h - the others max out at 250km/h...

There are so many people who want to see ordinary Germans suffer for decisions their government made. Do you think the pensioners who will freeze are the ones who decided on energy policy?

There's a difference between strong consumer rights for things like products being faulty, or not being as described.

But there is no EU consumer right to simply return an item because you've decided you don't like it, or no longer want it, which are open to abuse.

Here's another one: assuming that each point on the surface of the earth belongs to exactly one region.

An example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinst%C3%BCcken

Steinstücken was an exclave of West Berlin located in East Germany. It turned out to be inconvenient for the residents to cross borders to get to the rest of Berlin, so a land swap deal was arranged for the road linking Steinstücken to the rest of West Berlin to become part of West Berlin, and some other land elsewhere was given in return.

This road, however, crosses a railway on a bridge, and the East Germans didn't want their railway to pass through West Berlin. So the border actually runs under the bridge and above the railway, and if you stand on or underneath the bridge, the actual region you'd be standing in depended on your altitude, even if the latitude and longitude was the same. This is still true today - although the regions are the Bundesländer of Berlin and Brandenburg.

In most countries, they simply conscripted them. There was no "convincing". Australia is one of the exceptions, although certainly not because the government didn't want conscription.

All our apps are down as well. And it seems (and I really have to almost laugh here) that https://status.heroku.com no longer loads.

Wait, someone stole a washing machine? I have to know more about this.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Australians - and I speak as one, now thankfully living elsewhere - but "I got screwed, so someone else should get screwed too!" is a big part of the national psyche, along with "How dare someone get something that I'm not getting!".

It's cheaper from the point of view of entire societies, or the planet. But it's much more expensive from the point of view of a company to stop emitting now, compared to having someone else in the future pay to pull carbon from the air.

Why? The creators created the software, they can put any conditions they please on how others might use it. They're under no moral or legal obligation to allow people to use the fruits of their labors, except as they permit.

You're not allowed to leave your state or your country with the permission of some bureaucrat, and you're claiming that you haven't given up any civil rights?

I guess no-one had given up their civil rights in East Germany, or the Soviet Union then either.

I'm well aware of the "lucky country" stuff (and even have Donald Horne's book on my shelf). For those who don't know what we're talking about, the full "lucky country quote":

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."

It got in because quarantine is a complex system (unless you completely seal your borders, and don't accept things like medicine), and complex systems do not operate perfectly forever.

Australia foolishly believed that they could choose if and when Covid entered their country, which explains the sheer complancy at all levels of government in dealing with it. This was never true.

The result was that Australia purchased, at enormous cost, some covid-free time, and then proceeded to piss it up against the wall.

(As an aside: I'm Australian, and live outside Australia. I do not want to be "repatriated", I want to simply be able to visit the country I'm a citizen of, without being banned from leaving again, and without spending thousands of dollars on quarantine.)

I'm from Australia, but live in Germany, and have been just horrified at what's happened back there. It's as though the country has lost its mind.

My personal theory is that it's a manifestation of fear and insecurity. Australia, and many of its citizens have always had a certain lack of confidence, which is often covered up by bravado about being "the best country in the world" (as if there even is such a thing) and things like the tall poppy syndrome, currently often directed at expats("Too good to live in Australia, are you?")

On top of this, a huge amount of fear has been manufactured over the Covid-19 pandemic, both by the media seeking clicks, and by politicians seeking electoral advantage. This is one of the most shameful aspects of the entire thing to me: the deliberate emotional abuse of the population. The contrast between Dan Andrew's daily fear-mongering and berating of "rule-breakers" and Angela Merkel, most of whose public statements during the pandemic were about reassuring the German people (with occasional expressions of "concern" at most when things were going badly) has been stark for me. Even Jactinta Ardern has been much more measured in her statements, although NZ wasn't immune from madness like banning the delivery of fiction books.

And so, yes, I think a lot of Australians are on board with the border closures, the lockdowns and the like, which is astonishing to me, but I think the degree of fear there is what fundamentally explains it. As for government snooping, hardly anyone in Australia cares.

I believe the governments in Australia do benefit from the lockdowns. I'm from Australia, but live in Germany, so when I look back home from here, I'm shocked by how deliberately the fear of Covid has been stoked and played up in Australia. Constantly in and out of lockdowns, daily press conferences about death and case numbers, no path out and no hope.

It feels to me that Australia will be a country suffering from PTSD once it finds a way out of the pandemic and impossible dream of zero covid.

(For comparison, here in Europe, the pandemic is largely over, and our vaccination wall is looking strong enough that even what's coming over winter shouldn't be too bad.)

I'm not sure what your problem is with using harnesses on roof work - it's basic safety equipment, and even with Australia's (very good) safety laws and (mostly good) safety culture, there's still around 50-60 people killed each year in the construction industry.

You do realise that you have paid that $3000 in higher prices, right? The credit card companies and banks are not giving you free money.

I've developed a rule over the years which says that any startup that has an "ideas guy", "visionary" or similar is one to avoid.

Astonishing that a mere corporation thinks they have the right to negotiate with a nation-state and "come to an agreement."

Would that I could negotiate having to comply with laws that affect me.

Any UBI is not going to be "in addition to" whatever other money you might earn, but is more likely to look something like a minimum income, below which you cannot drop (even if you stop working).

Reward being tied to risk is only for the little people. One can point at numberous executive compensation packages where they have plenty of exposure to upside, and almost no risk (or even negative risk: a golden parachute if you get pushed out).

A lot of this sounds like some of the highest paid people in the world complaining that they are unable to practise lifestyle arbitrage by combining their high salaries with a low cost of living. This is simply not an option for the vast majority of the world.

So we see this "pay me, but no-one else, for the value I create" nonsense, as though programmers alone should be exempt from the dynamics of supply and demand.

If we're going to go down this path, then let's pay nurses and doctors for the value they create, which has been proven to be extraordinarily substantial this year. Let's pay supermarket cashiers, truck drivers and shelf-stackers - the people who had to literally risk their lives so that the rest of us could have food available during this pandemic - for the value they created in the rest of us not starving. Let's pay child care workers and teachers for the value they create, which I wager will often be far greater than what some programmers contribute.

It shouldn't be up to people to have to spend time and money to correct Google's errors, and to stop Google inconviencing them. Somehow, it has become completely accepted for Google/FB/et al to make profits while shifting costs and externalities onto society.

Why do we allow these tech giants to treat us so disgracefully?

I'm not entirely sure the world is getting worse, but I am certain that it's becoming more complex.

And when the finite cognitive capacity of every human being must manage that complexity just to survive (let along propser), it sure feels like it's getting worse.

I may be privileged, but I am neither young nor overpaid. I started programming on something called the Commodore 64, so my opinions have been refined over decades. And if I say programming has become joyless, it's because I've been around long enough to remember when it wasn't.

I think you are right to say that the methods are vastly improved, but the ends to which those methods are applied have become ever more uninteresting (for a lot of people), and often morally suspect. We have built exquisite tools, but we use them to extract profit, to manipulate behaviour and often for no discernable purpose at all.

Programming has become joyless.

There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to build something novel - something that's state of the art, that's creative, that taxes their intellect and brings the pleasure of achievement forth. It seems that for every developer working on rocket guidance systems or self-driving cars there are a hundred toiling away on yet another CRUD app, or wrestling with a hydra of microservices. It pays well, but fun it is not.

My solution to this is to rename that table/column to “table_deprecated” or “column_deprecated”. This has the nice property of being reversible, causes nice visible errors if something unanticipated is actually using the column/table, makes it obvious that it shouldn’t be used (well, one would hope), and makes it easy to find for permanent deletion later.

Why is it unfair? No-one is forcing anyone to accept development work for 50k per year, yet there are plenty of people happy to do it.