WA _is_ a better alternative to SMS and mail. Outs not the only one perhaps, but that doesn’t make that statement less true.
700 karma · joined March 22, 2015
It may not be a total solution, but it’s a first step. Too many climate activists have this brinksman “no but” approach to changing the course of the political ship of climate change (see nuclear power discussion above), when we really need “yes and” even if the first steps aren’t perfect or big enough. Yelling at people to make drastic changes has never convinced even honest skeptics.
Would you prefer they require basic science education instead so that you can be less misinformed?
In my observation, so many engineers think that because they get paid a lot for being smart developers they are actually just smarter than everyone, and that other fields are simple things that they can master from a weekend of web surfing. It’s probably an extension of the general American puritanical belief that the rich are rich because they are simply better people who have been rewarded by grace. In this demographic, the senior engineers have simply had more time to build themselves up in their own minds.
Quick discussion of the differences is useful, but 15 minutes is ridiculous. Just take the higher value and move on. Eventually you’ll baseline at slightly more points per sprint on average, but they are imaginary numbers anyway and not really comparable across teams.
It’s possible that were politicians only in seat for a short period, some of them would succumb to the incentive to “make the most of it” personally. Since this would leave lobbyists as the most “senior” people on Capitol Hill with the most experience managing these interactions, they’d be able to optimize for providing lucrative payouts to these short-timer politicians.
I’m not saying this is guaranteed, just that there are incentives toward that outcome and also that experience gives power in “repeated game” scenarios. A converse example of this is the lifetime appointment for judges, ensuring them stability to help minimize the appeal of maximizing short-term gains.
Kudos on the community activism; talk about building something of meaning.
Seems like a founder can definitely do that, but then _also_ spend 40 hours a week on the business side. (Only kind of a joke)
“Predictable Success” is one of the few business books I recommend, not because it’s necessarily revelatory but rather because it verbalizes these concepts so well.
It’s definitely never fun when increasing front-end engineering complexity becomes the band-aid for back-end shortcomings. Especially when things are still small enough where everybody should reasonably be able to contribute to anything if they can make improvements.
Sometimes you just want to be able to make choices based on instinct, forgoing deep analysis when you need to move fast and fully accepting that the wrong direction could be the end of the road for the project. But maybe the right choice would have been too; that’s the adrenaline rush of starting things and seeing what you can build. Good luck on this next step.
Probably something like “Masks aren’t proven to help yet, but unless covid is unlike any other respiratory disease they probably won’t hurt.” Yes, this could’ve caused a rush on them (though maybe that would’ve alleviated some of the need in hospitals?) and we would’ve had to deal with that, but lying to people in the name “for their own good” is not empathizing with them.
Getting too deep into technical reasons in the middle of such an event is not understanding the definition of teachable moment. Most people aren’t open to learning deep knowledge when their fear or other emotions are up, but it can take real skill to avoid diving into details as an expert. And I have some sympathy for people getting metaphorical microphones shoved in their face, but that just goes back to my point about public health (and medical people in general) needing to know that their job is as much soft skill as hard.
Earlier in the summer, we lifted mask mandates “because the vaccines were preventing disease”, and regardless of the technical facts behind that decision, the perception was reality for the general public. Now they are trying to walk that back to “vaccines prevent serious disease” in the face of delta breakthroughs but the baseline had already been set.
Not to mention the fact that experts continue to pedantically stick to their definition of serious disease as “needed oxygen in the hospital”, once again out of touch with the layperson’s opinion that a week of debilitating sickness at home followed by a month of weakness until full recovery seems pretty “serious” and something people do not want. Boosters are appealing because laypeople don’t want any serious-by-their-definition disease and experts seemingly are incapable of acknowledging or understanding that, let alone their part in creating confusing messaging (partly to appease a 3rd set of people who ironically don’t really want to hear from them at all).
Public health officials need to understand that their primary job is managing public perception of a situation first and foremost. They can go push their glasses up and pedantically spout off technical corrections behind closed doors as much as they want, but in public they have to connect and empathize with normal humans.
Part of this probably comes from medicine’s continued promulgation of their air of expertise (read: superiority) that they’ve affected for a long while, but things like compassion and bedside-manner at lower importance. I worked in medicine and studied public health, and this status-over-all-else attitude was one of the reasons I left.
I admit I don’t have a lot of attachment to a given plot of land, and understand some people place more value on that. But it’s also pretty selfish for one person/family to claim a plot in a productive market to the exclusion of ten others by standing in the way of densification. It’s a question of singular good vs that of the collective, and there is no right answer there at which point I guess it’s agree to disagree?
This same type of thinking drives me crazy in CA where Prop 13 exists because someone might have to move because they’ve made a million dollars in house value (simply by existing) that they might have to realize.
Following along that train of thought, under-architected solutions are often great to update because you get to make logical cleavages that are informed by time spent in actual production use, giving you a much better basis for any decisions.