jlangenauer

Or even better, push the liability for this clean-up onto the investors. This sort of environmental vandalism is an abuse of limited liability.

I built a new PC about a month ago, and installed it to dual-boot between Pop OS and Windows - this after almost a decade of OSX.

I had intended to make Pop OS my primary workspace, but it's now been 3 weeks since I've even loaded Linux, and have been working in Windows the entire time. The reasons for this:

1. Pop OS had issues with my graphics card. I even bought a AMD RX5600 rather than a Nvidia card due to the existence of open source drivers. Nah, no such luck. I'd get occasional crashes (which seemed to diminish once I'd updated the bios using the Windows software for the card). But that's not all: the GPU acceleration that Google Maps uses would consistently and quickly freeze the entire machine - not just Chrome, the entire machine, and only a hard reboot would get it back.

1.5 (Probably related to 1) Weird pauses of 30 seconds or more. They'd happen when opening alacritty, and also when opening Chrome. This is on a brand new, reasonably high spec desktop machine.

2. Inconsistent shortcuts drove me mad. Want to copy something from Chrome? Use Ctrl+C. But from the terminal? Then it's Ctrl+Shift+C.

3. I discovered WSL2 in Windows. It works pretty much flawlessly, is awesomely performant and tightly integrated with Windows. You get all the parts of Linux you need to develop, and none of the hassles of Linux.

I bought a Windows license for this new PC thinking I'd occasionally need it to run a game or some other software. Yet it's now my daily working system. Who would have thought?

Maybe. I was the CTO of a startup in Berlin until about 18 months ago, and built a engineering team of 13 people. There was certainly competition for engineers, but it never took 6 months to get someone on board[1]. That said, there was definite wage inflation being driven by that competition (at least in Berlin), but it still topped out at around EUR 80k (2 years ago, it may be higher now).

I accept that the Berlin expat market is also a little bit different, where 3 month notice periods aren't insisted upon, and companies know how to move fast. The situation in the Mittelstand software industry could be very different for all I know.

[1] The exception to this, for me, was DevOps, which took so long to hire for that we ended up developing a strong enough in-house capacity that we no longer needed them. Engineering management was also difficult to find.

Be careful what you wish for: if we move towards a genuine globally-integrated tech market, where work can be done from anywhere, then companies might start asking the complementary question: "why would I, as a company, pay US-level (or even EU-level) salaries when I could hire someone from Russia or India or the Phillippines for much cheaper?"

That particular knife cuts both ways.

Despite what you may think, there isn't some nefarious conspiracy keeping tech salaries low in Europe. It's that this is where the market is, an equilibrium between supply and demand for engineers.

It's precisely the same reason that salaries in certain US markets are so high: FAANG don't pay high salaries because they have fundamentally decided that engineers should be paid X amount, nor because someone has read Marx and wants to give engineers more of the value they create. It's because demand has exceeded supply for engineers in those markets, and that has driven up the equilibrium price. I should also point out that the median salary for engineers outside the NY and the Bay Area is something like $100k, not the stratospheric packages often discussed here as though they were normal rather than exceptional.

(I've not noticed too much of a love of paperwork here in Germany, but I could certainly see how the stereotype was formed)

One thing to note is that this article quotes one doctor and one nurse at a single hospital. They have obviously seen more suicide attempts than usual, but we must remember this is a single data point and could just be a statistical anomaly.

It would be interesting to know if this phenomenon is repeated elsewhere in California or the US, but without knowing that, we can't draw too many conclusions from this article.

Why is "overall efficiency" in any way important? As compared to people having stable livelihoods, diverse and wonderful local businesses instead of "efficient" and monotonous chains.

The obsession with efficiency at the cost of other, far more worthy virtues is what has brought us to this point, where "efficient" global supply chains cannot now produce urgently needed goods at a time of crisis.

Atlassian products aren’t popular with developers. They’re popular with managers who don’t understand yet need to control developers.

What you're really saying is that you don't pay the external costs of these things, and you don't care that anyone else has to either - people in poorer countries who will be affected by new and dangerous weather, or even your own children.

Not many at all. Wind turbines pose a negligible risk to birds:

http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-sl...

Wait, you have to pay income tax on income you could theoretically receive? I'm fascinated to know what possible justification there is for this?

(Genuine, not rhetorical question.)

A common weakness (and one I sometimes share) is looking for exciting, new, and intellectually stimulating things to do, when seemingly boring, repetitive and hard work is actually called for.

A common example: startup founders who'd prefer to build new features (or worse, explore new tech stacks!) instead of the boring work of sales and marketing.

If I ever get rich enough to do so, I'm going to buy some land somewhere - perhaps old farming land that's no longer profitable, and just let it return to nature. Let the trees and bushes grow, let the insects, birds and whatever else breed there.

I'm beginning to think that's one of the best things one could do for the planet right now.

I’ll add my recommendation for “Poverty Safari”, it’s an eye-opening read.

For me. I'd love to see open borders, where everyone has the freedom to move to where they can achieve their goals and dreams, rather than being restricted to the country where they happened to be born. How many Einsteins have been born in Africa, but denied the chance to make the contribution to humanity that they could have?

(And before the cynics note that open borders are incompatible with welfare states, that's not necessarily true, and the path to open borders is a long one, not a sudden change we can make without massive upheaval right now.)

Well, our Austrian friend had long moved to Germany by 1930.

The problem Jira solves is giving a useless, parasitic class of managers visibility and control of what teams of developers do, because the managers cannot and will not learn what the developers actually do. This is done even at the expense of the productivity of the developers.

Of course, there are good managers of developers. But they neither use nor need Jira.

The get a new doctor, one who values your health more than their antiquated morals.

WHAT!? Here in Germany, my PrEP costs me €40 per month, and I only have to pay that because it’s one of the rare things that insurance doesn’t cover here.

You have to remember that of the $2.5 billion, almost all of that was spent on materials and labour building the new trains. 5% of the total cost as a performance guarantee will be a very significant, or perhaps even total part of the profit the supplier expects to make on these trains.

Germany is a reasonably high-taxing country, but their obsession with using cash borders on the infuriating.

Why must “social housing” be temporary? I have no problem with people living the entire lives in social housing if they do wish, as it’s a good way of distributing the wealth of countries, and the state can provide secure, affordable housing much better than capricious profit-driven landlords.

It can be. Certainly for me, the joy I got from experimenting with tech pretty much declined in the decade or so since I started working full time with computers. Now, after the working day, I try to avoid computers, preferring instead things like cooking, walking outside, or playing piano.

So I can’t give you any advice, other than to say your fears are well-founded.

I am reminded of Thoreau's quote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

The root of the problem is not that we have bots, but that we have normalised lying and deception as part of everyday business. We allow companies to pretend that bots are human beings, and allow call-center employees in third-world countries to pretend (even sometimes though elaborate lying) that they are located in the same country as you. We allow companies to tell outrageous untruths in their advertising - see the Samsung ad which they're currently being hauled over the coals for in Australia.

That's the real problem here, and the one we need to fix on a general level, not by band-aid regulations over whichever dishonesty has managed to irritate enough state representatives.

So you have a moral question: Is it more important that you save a few euros, or that future generations and people in poor countries (who, let's be honest, will bear the brunt of climate change) will suffer?

Rubbish. I've travelled Berlin to Brussels (and then London) by train. It was very pleasant.

Brexit consumed the last Prime Minister of the UK, it has consumed the current one, and it will almost certainly consume the next one too.

What happens to a society when its political institutions are in such a state that they can no longer function?

I read this yesterday, and found it fascinating - I’d like to think I have a reasonably good knowledge of world history, but I’d never even heard or it.

I’ve never understood why tickets can’t have your name on them, with ID checked at the venue. That’d stop scalping.

There was an episode of Hannibal where this sort of thing was part of the plot - using bodies to grow fungi.