malandrew

If you’re going to make those assertions, bring data. Certainly some have done well, but the assertion that most of the boomers have done well or even disproportionately well relative to other generations should be supported by data not handwaving

I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue. Population is still steadily growing. What isn’t due to childbirth is being made up with immigration.

You need social hobbies on the weekend. I just wish weekends were three days so I got two days for hobbies and one day break for rest, errands and other life necessities.

> But so many kids are left to their own devices without parental oversight on this subject.

It's very "Lord of the Flies", isn't it?

We used to solve this problem by teaching people to have thicker skin so that we control the outrage regardless of the forum in which it occurs.

However for the last 10 years or so grievance culture has taken root and not only excused outrage, its proponents have actively encouraged it.

It makes me think of that scene in Star Wars where palpating is like “good, good. Let the hate flow through you”, expect we now have millions of people encouraging this.

How I wish we could rewind things to a world where foregiveness was still a virtue and we were all taught that sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us. Without such virtues, a world with outrage is inevitable.

I personally find the personalized advertising great. A lot of the time I am shown things that are actually useful/valuable to me.

I think a lot of the value really depends on the individual. If you're engaging in productive activities like hobbies, you get valuable targeted ads. If you're engaging in activities that are low value like signaling to others in myriad ways, you probably get adds for things like disposable fashion.

Personalized ads are basically a mirror. They feed what the person already wants to engage in. If you want less of the bad types of advertising, then you need to start at the root which is getting people to stop being interested in activities and behaviors that are lower value.

I find this kind of comment fascinating because it's illustrative of how humans can form intentional blindspots as to the utility of a person or institution when when all they care about are the negative aspects of that person's or institution's existence.

    op: "I don't care about thing X disappearing"
    re: "While you may not care about it because of Y, X also provides benefit Z to other people"
    op: "But would there be any drawbacks?"

yeah, there would be drawbacks, other people would lose Z, which may matter a lot of them even if it doesn't matter to you. Someone just told you about Z, and you just responded as if you weren't just told about Z"

These days I find it incredibly frustrating to deal with people who have conclusively decided they don't like something and that renders them incapable of acknowledging other benefits that said thing provides even if those benefits aren't relevant to them or are less relevant than the things they vocalize caring about.

For me, they are "informal" exit interviewers. I'm not a manager. I'm not in HR. I'm an IC that has asked people informally with whom I've developed good rapport. I generally don't ask people that I don't expect to be candid with me because I don't know them well enough. No one has a motive to lie to me about why they are leaving.

And the few that don’t leave for higher pay, leave to go work with those that left for higher pay or because morale is low because of people leaving.

By my estimates from hundreds of informal exit interviews I have done with colleagues that have left, I’d wager 60-70% left for higher pay or due to second or third order effects caused by those that left for higher pay.

Half of the remaining engineers left to pursue new opportunities. Almost always these were engineers whose first job out of school is at the current company and they hit 4 years. Many of these won’t cite pay, but almost all got offers way higher than what their first employer out of school is paying them four years later.

Those that left because of a bad manager were in the minority. Most engineers frustrated over a bad manager transfer teams within the company instead of leaving the company.

> They dont make assumptions about anything unless its in the rule book, as a rule.

I'm curious. Is this in any German rulebook? (I secretly want it to be).

> "We are X. We have the resources to do anything."

Management will say this and in the next breath say that we either don't have headcount to alleviate an understaffed team or we don't have budget to retain some amazing engineer that they want to see how long they can underpay before they leave. I've lost track of the number of times I've told management about how import it is to retain certain individuals and how they absolutely should make sure those people are happy with everything within management's control, and then they ignored those warnings and then the talent left. These losses happen slowly and then suddenly when enough of the remaining talent looks around and realize that most of the good engineers have abandoned ship.

> Taxes are the % of your "output" used to keep the commons going.

The commons includes bombing other countries and waging unwinnable wars?

I have no problem paying taxes if they were actually used for the commons, but only a fraction are used for the commons. Far too much is going to benefit special interest groups such as defense contractors, public sector employee benefits and pensions that are far above what private sector employees get.

First thanks for your response

> A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.

I left out a lot of details, which I know means that a lot of assumptions will necessarily be made. I think you're reading into my comment something I didn't do. To give more details on the interaction. There was no phone support, only email and support took almost 2 weeks to response to my dilemma, which exceeded the response time expected by US Customs and the stuff I purchased was returned. They didn't respond to 3 additional requests within that two week period. When they finally responded, they couldn't solve the problem. The only real failure of the support team was that they were grossly understaffed. There's no reason for two week wait times, especially for a customer that just placed an order for multiple thousands of dollars which they charged the customer for when it was shipped, not delivered.

When I reached out to the executive to explain the problem. They only fault I gave to support was stating that they must be grossly understaffed if the response times were as long as they were. In my message, I placed the responsibility for fixing that particular issue of understaffing on the executive in question (head of ecommerce). Other issues that needed attention was how they were handling international fulfillment was causing them defects and costing them probably $100 or more per defect on shipments to the United States. I had already reached out to the partner company they worked with and was in contact with that company's United States CEO. Together we figured out the issue and I was relaying the fixes to the head of ecommerce for the company so he could fix the problem at the root because the buck stopped with him. I was solving a very real problem for them that was costing them money and I did all the research into the fix and provided the person who was ultimately responsible with fixes. I did this because I was trying to fix the problem myself during those two weeks before US customs sent my order back.

Passing the buck when it's your job and a customer has figured out the problem and handed you the solution on a silver platter is highly unprofessional.

Regarding your recomendation to use the system. It's a good one and one I'm familiar with. I use it often, but in my original example above I did not because the system in question had no interfaces to interact with besides a support email. There was no phone system, no chat system, not brick and mortar store, no support agents, etc. It was a system with a single interface that provided no interactivity (I can't dial 0 or ask to speak with the right person). The only interfaces available were that email address, US Customs and the shipping company.

Has there been interfaces that could be probed and exploited to solve the problem, yes, I totally agree with your approach.

Actually, When I reach out to executives, I'm often trying to get the problem permanently fixed. In the instance I cited above, I knew I wasn't the only person that had this problem as I had found complaints on forums of other customers with the same problem that I shared with them. I also did additional research into why the problem happened and provided concrete actionable steps that this executive was best positioned to enact. I was trying to solve it for me and trying to solve it for others by actually contacting the person that had the power to fix it. It was when they tried to pass the buck back to customer support so "they could wash their hands of the problem" that I raised the stakes by demonstrating that I had the will and wherewithal to escalate the issue as far as it needed to go. They eventually implemented a hot fix for the problem. There's still no permanent solution implemented, but at least no other customers are wasting their time and they aren't wasting their money either (as the problem was burning money by shipping goods from Europe to the United States, where US Customs was rejecting the stuff and returning it back to them).

Not sure why my sincere question about the state of browser execution environment got downvoted, but the general concerns I raised in my first comment weren't about incidental complexity or hassle. They matter and it's great that clojurescript helps with those two. The concern I voiced was about maintaining realtime performance of a responsive user interface. The key issue is that you have a single event loop that all visual and human interactions need to be handled by because that's the only thread that can interact with the DOM. It's just way too easy to block that thread and cause the app to become unresponsive.

Unless something has changed with web assembly since I last did browser development, doesn't it still compile down to javascript in the same execution environment with those limitations?

I see no issues with anyone being an asshole once others have driven them to that point. Should people continue to accept abuse and suffering from those who indifferently inflict it?

I'm all ears (sincerely), but any solution you offer needs to be effective at resolving the problems a company has created for me. I'm also happy to try other less-nuclear options first before I bust out the big guns. As I said, I don't start with this approach. In fact, I resorted to it out of necessity as the clerical mistake of one fortune 500 company was going to personally cost me more than $275k over 30 years. I spent several months and dozens of hours trying to resolve the issue. That one company burnt out all the patience I had for a lifetime. Necessity was the mother of this invention.

I give companies a fair chance to do things right. I said two shots, but my actual heuristic is when a problem starts costing me 4 figures if I were billing for my time instead. Usually that's about two significantly frustrating customer service interactions with long wait times.

Just today I had to call customer service for an airline and the wait times were over 4 hours! I ended up getting around the wait time by calling their customer support number in another language I speak and being able to resolve the problem without hassle. But there is no planet where 4 hours wait times are acceptable and I feel bad for those whose only option was to call their English-only customer support number.

I mean, seriously... wasting the time, patience and goodwill of your paying customers by under-investing in quality customer support and driving down defects??

I know it's popular to diss the "karens" of the world, but a lot of them keep in check businesses that will abuse their customers if they can get away with it. They can be a useful corrective force just like class action lawsuits can be.

As someone that worked at the company that taught Pete Hunt, and other early contributors to react this trick, I wouldn't call it a benefit, but the only workable solution to acceptable single page web application performance in an otherwise terrible development environment (browser javascript).

Proper concurrency support and real mutexes would be way better than having a single execution thread for all your computations that is shared with all the visual and human interaction computations. Plus, the data sharing models between the main thread and web workers is pretty crap for anything serious, so it's not even easy to get computations out of the main thread that don't need to be there.

I didn't say that it is or is not. I'm saying that if we see numbers reach the point that it's no worse than the flu, it becomes a big nothing burger.

I pay for a cold calling service that lets me look up emails and phone numbers for many professionals of import. These days customer service gets two shots to get it right before I start calling the personal cell phone numbers of the C-suite, board of directors and everyone with the word director in their title. I'm absolutely over shitty customer service and it's not fair to subject customer service representatives to well deserved vitriol. Well paid execs getting the big bucks and making the decisions to under-invest in customer service and driving down defects? Fair game.

With the last company whose customer service messed up badly, I reached out to the head of e-commerce for the company. I was nice and pleasant and explained the dilemma, but then he tried to pass the buck back to support which did not have the resources to solve the problem to which I replied "You're the head of e-commerce for company X, the buck stops with you. This is your problem to resolve. If you don't take ownership, I'm perfectly capable of escalating this issue myself, first to A, your CEO (personal cell number (xxx) xxx-xxxx and personal email foo@bar.com), then to B (...), C (...), or D (...) on the board of directors, then E, the CEO of the company that owns your company (...), and then F, who is on his board of directors (...) and happens to live 2 miles from me.".

...boom, problem resolved immediately. Not just for me but for other customers. Changes were made to their website within days. When warranted, you just have to go absolutely nuclear and make it clear as day that solving your problem personally is far cheaper than you escalating the the issue to anyone and everyone with power at the company whose customer service is jerking you around.

You have to make the cost of not providing customer service well the first time around so expensive that they don't see any other option than to invest in doing things right the first time.

And if we don't see a rise in hospitalizations that is any worse than a typical flu season, then it really doesn't matter that no one is testing.

child comment I was replying to was deleted so adding this to this parent comment:

Likewise I've met plenty of engineers that are not profitably replaceable.

Almost every SWE is replaceable, but many it makes no sense to replace and that usually correlates with their tenure working on a particular system.

I myself have several years of knowledge I've accumulated working in a specific problem space at the company. It would take a new hire minimum 2-3 years if not more to accumulate the specialized knowledge I have. So if I were to leave tomorrow over pay, they would have to hire a replacement at the market rate (salary and a 4 year equity grant). That replacement would be far less productive than me for minimum 2 years, so they pay out 4 years of equity now to see equal productivity 2 years from now and if they continue the same pay strategy, that new hire will leave after 4 years of equity has vested. They basically get 2 years of productivity 2 years from now for the price of 4 years of equity today. It's just stupid to play chicken with salary when there are considerable opportunities costs for doing so and you're essentially paying double for half.

It's not just me either. I see it with folks across the board at the company. The only ones I consider relatively fungible are those that team hop every 1 to 1.5 years.

One thing to consider is that cable TV with many channels proliferated 1-2 decades earlier in the US than most other countries. We had 40+ channels and the resultant social splintering of interests much earlier as a result. It wasn't until satellite TV became a thing that many parts of the world could get more than a handful of over the air channels.

Now they have the analytical tools given to them by the tech industry to say "Yes, we need more of this depressing stuff because it's most profitable"

To make matters worse, journalism is not longer a career that provides a path to a respectable middle to upper middle class life, so you have an entire profession where those working in that profession have generally depressive prospects in life.

Want to make society content? Keep journalists content.

Relative to pretty much all other markets, it's practically impossible to solve homelessness in San Francisco. There are at least two major considerations. The first is the one you pointed out that there are far too many barriers. The second is that San Francisco is a fundamentally hard city to succeed in. Even competent folks with good educations and no real personal problems struggle to do well in San Francisco. If it is hard for such people, it's only going to be far more difficult for people without the same education and with many personal problems.

With these two major constraints in mind, it boggles my mind that we continue to try and solve the problem in San Francisco, instead of directing all the resources to other markets without these constraints.

Providing resources elsewhere and removing support in San Francisco will serve to incentivize the homeless to relocate to places where programs like housing first can be tried and where they have a chance of actually getting on their own two feet because they aren't in a hyper-competitive local market.

Last time someone asked me to donate money to the homeless problem in San Francisco, I told them no, but then proceeded to donate money to a homeless program in another city (at the time I chose a program in Sacremento) because it's beyond stupid to keep putting money into trying to solve the problem in San Francisco if you actually want to see results from the money you spend on the problem.

People working on this problem in San Francisco either have more heart than brains or they are part of the San Francisco homelessness industrial complex and have a vested interest in keeping these programs in San Francisco because they want to live in San Francisco and are employed in this industry.

Social worker salaries in San Francisco are $60k to $100k a year. If you can pay for two to three social workers in other markets instead for the same price, why pay for such people to work in San Francisco.

It's not just a mindset that has been passed on but a mindset that is caused by circumstance.

I used to teach in China and one of the things I noticed that doesn't get attention is the impact of the one-child policy on that one child. You had a largely socialist system that turned largely capitalist so you have all these parents nearing the end of their careers without much to show for it (because they grew up in a largely socialist system) and their main shot at a better life is a single child that they expect to support them beyond what the state provides as they age. This is a recipe for a ridiculous amount of pressure parents put on their single child, and that single child is aware that they have the future burden of supporting two parents in the future. It was really enlightening to witness these consequences first hand.

What's the causative link here? That parents will have only one kid because they will put all their resources into that one child instead of having more kids if they didn't feel the need to put all resources in one kid?