phd514

Fair question and I don't think there are easy answers to the problem. I think the actions you suggest tend to result in a market environment like Europe's where there are more regulations but businesses are generally less competitive than US businesses and wages tend to be lower than in the US.

I work for a mid-sized, publicly-traded tech company that has been inching towards profitability but the last couple quarterly earnings results have been disappointing (and rank-and-file bonuses were slashed to 25% of target) and the company had its first-ever round of layoffs last October. The CEO's last two years of comp were $20M and $10M which is obviously completely incongruous with the size, profitability, and stock performance of the company. It seems that there is a distortion in the market forces around executive compensation that functions in a similar way to venture capital -- investors are willing to pump outsized cash amounts into either funding rounds or executive comp since the occasional home run can result in stock returns that cover losses in other companies. It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.

Maybe get out more? I know _lots_ of people for whom this is true and who take multi-day road trips rather than deal with air travel.

I routinely flew for business before 9/11 and would typically show up about 15 minutes before boarding time at one of the three busiest airports in the US and typically got through security and would then had to wait 5-7 minutes before boarding would start. Air travel is radically different than it was pre-9/11.

Unfortunately, Benedict is conflating fundamentalism with literalism here. It's a common mistake (and "fundamentalist" has become essentially an epithet) although one that I am surprised to hear from someone as otherwise erudite and thoughtful as Benedict. Theological fundamentalism came out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...) and none of its earliest and strongest proponents (Machen, Van Til, etc.) were literalists. In fact, they were quite the opposite.

While certain strains of fundamentalism have literalist tendencies, there is nothing implicit literalist in fundamentalism. Some might look at the Five Fundamentals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...] and consider them implicitly literalist, but most of them are contained in the creeds and confessions that Catholicism and Protestantism hold together and so denying any of them would place one outside of either Catholic or Protestant doctrine.

> We did fine for a century without any of that.

Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.

I commend you on your careful consideration of the costs and potential benefits of various college choices. I didn't think that far ahead when I was 18 and unfortunately for many high school students, that choice can have a pretty significant impact on the trajectory of, at the very least, your early adult years.

That said, I did my undergrad at MIT about 25 yrs ago. I met my best friends there who, along with a lot of other students there, expanded my horizons in terms of ambition and possibilities in a good way. 20 years later, having MIT on my resume (along with a track record of solid tech work) still gets me a pretty incredible hit rate on job applications. I was offered a decent amount of financial aid but still came out with ~$80k in student loan debt which was a lot 25 years ago. Even in the early 2000s, I was able to pay that off pretty easily. I think that in the case of many career choices, the cost of a degree from an elite university is not worth it, but in the case of tech, I think the MIT degree is clearly worth it.

The one minor proviso I would add since you mentioned graduate work is that doing doctoral work at MIT is typically more difficult if you've done your undergrad there. On the other hand, doing an M.Eng. at MIT is quite easy if you have reasonable grades. The one-year M.Eng. _might_ be worth the extra year, but outside of narrow specialties, the opportunity cost of doctoral work relative to 3-5 years building experience and earning money in tech tends to favor the latter.

There's a huge difference between The Chosen and LToC -- while both may present a "gritty" and imaginative narrative including fictionalized accounts that are not canon, The Chosen does it in a way that does not contradict anything canonical while LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross. As such, it should come as no surprise that The Chosen is popular and well-received among believers and LToC was widely criticized.

How is disappearing someone in order to intimidate them into operating "on a short leash" anything other than plain evil?

> our Puritan values run deep

The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."

Yes, others can contribute, but significant feature development on large-scale OSS projects tends to be driven by developers paid to work on the project full-time and coordinated by an organized steering committee with clear governance (or company if the product is owned by a single company). I don't see any of that in place for OpenSearch and getting that all started up is not at all a trivial endeavor.

From the announcement: "You should consider the initial code to be at an alpha stage — it is not complete, not thoroughly tested, and not suitable for production use. We are planning to release a beta in the next few weeks, and expect it to stabilize and be ready for production by early summer (mid-2021)."

Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'm guessing they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch. Given that, I doubt they will be well-equipped to keep pace with new feature development.

I think it's helpful to point out that the Bible contains a variety of types of literature including historical narrative, poetry, etc., some of which uses figurative language that is not intended to be taken literally.

We all understand this when we use modern language such as "sunrise" which is not literally true (the sun does not actually "rise" in the sky though it appears that way to the casual observer) even though we're educated enough to understand basic astronomical phenomena such as the rotation of the earth giving rise to daytime and nighttime.

A Biblical literalist who takes figurative language in the Bible literally would end up making the same mistake that someone taking "sunrise" literally would. This is not at all an attempt to classify as figurative language all controversial or supernatural claims of the Bible (its claim that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead is clearly supernatural and impossible to classify as figurative), but so many of the lists of contradictory claims in the Bible rely on wooden interpretations of what is pretty clearly figurative language.

I'm not sure where you're getting some of these ideas. Paul was very much a Jew. He trained under Gamaliel, one of the most prominent Jewish rabbis of the time. He did also have Roman citizenship, but those two things were not mutually exclusive.

Also, James, while prominent in the early church, was not in any sense Jesus's choice to lead the church. The closest thing to a single designated leader of the church was Peter though that is a point of contention between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Nowhere are circumcision or kosher foods required for Christianity, either.

I've come to a similar place after doing graduate work in Christian theology. The theology, philosophy, and literature of the Bible is the most-studied of any book in the last two millennia and pretty much any question or objection that can be raised about it has been addressed by some of the greatest minds in history. You might not find their conclusions satisfactory, but a serious criticism of Christianity must at least acknowledge and engage with that work.

Translations are usually done directly from the original language into the target language. The study of early Hebrew and Aramaic and Koine Greek remains an active field and there are lots of people who can read those languages fluently.

Case in point -- an AWS enhancement to PostgreSQL's connection pooler that could have been released as OSS with essentially no impact on RDS Postgres and yet: https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch/issues/3

AWS, Google, and MSFT are among the top sponsors of OSI*. They are not neutral arbiters in the OSS space.

[0] https://opensource.org/sponsors

Core authentication and security features in Elasticsearch have been free and not Enterprise features since last May: https://www.elastic.co/blog/security-for-elasticsearch-is-no...

The FCC has obscenity regulations for broadcast TV in the US under the idea that the broadcast spectrum is owned by the people. Cable television has no such restrictions. That rationale holds up a lot less now than it did in the early days of broadcast television, but it's still a far cry from Canadian hate speech laws in which the expression of certain points of view is deemed a crime.

The expenses involved in the response to the pandemic aren't in any state's budget. All the states are going to petition the federal government for aid and the Fed is going to print money to cover it. In other words, we're all going to pay for it through inflation. Honestly, that's probably not the worst outcome, but there's no way any individual state, high tax rate or not, was going to be in a position to respond to a severe pandemic like this.

The state tax rate in NY has nothing to do with this response (that seems quite good) to the COVID-19 pandemic. The labs that will be performing these extra tests are private labs, not labs funded by NY state taxes. I wish people could separate their criticism of the different governmental responses to this pandemic from their preferred stance on domestic tax policy.

> There's some nice discussion to be had there about Calvinism and the general relationship between religion and the attitude towards individual achievement.

I don't know where the idea that Calvinism links individual achievement to individual value comes from, but it's found nowhere in Calvinist theology. If anything, it teaches the opposite in that it asserts that every person is implicitly valuable, regardless of race, gender, status, or occupation, by simple virtue of being made in God's image, an inseparable quality of being human.

On the engineering compensation factor, I interviewed with BAMTech (the successor to MLB [Major League Baseball] Advanced Media and the underlying video streaming platform for Disney) a few years ago. Their comp was considerably lower than Netflix. I got the impression they expected you to be willing to work for less because you were working on something related to MLB.

Well, it was nearly 20 years ago and with SoX and all the other regulations, the fintech industry now is essentially unrecognizable from what it was then. I worked for a bulge-bracket investment bank whose business today is dramatically different and a hedge fund that is no longer solvent. The reason it was good for me was that I was an inexperienced developer and I got to work with much more talented developers in an environment where results mattered. I learned a lot and became a lot better myself.

No. And, thankfully, I had not early-exercised any of my options, either.

I was ~1.5 years out of college and at a small dot-com with a niche SaaS at the time. I distinctly remember 9/11 and the chill that came over our office that day. That passed in time, but our economic prospects never recovered. I used to hit the gym in the mornings and then work ~10am-7pm and I distinctly remember the day ~9 months later when the VP of engineering called me on my cell while I was finishing up my workout and asked when I would be in the office. He said to come straight to his office when I got in. About 85% of the company was laid off that day and I was among the "lucky" ones who was not.

What followed was almost straight out of the Silicon Valley sitcom. Management know our existing product was a dead-end, but with 85% of the company laid off, our remaining VC funds gave us a decent runway, so they decided to pivot to ... something. That is, the entire company (about ~15 of us) would sit around in the boardroom and try to come up with new product ideas. Needless to say, that went precisely nowhere.

The CEO was pushed out fairly shortly after that and I had been brought in through his network. My layoff came about ~6 months later in the second round of layoffs which constituted only me. Thanks to the VP of engineering going to bat for me, I did get 3 months of severance. I spent 9 months looking for another job and finally found one in fintech in NYC which turned out the be, to this day, one of the best jobs of my career. I also met my now-wife and many of my best friends there. That time was both the most traumatic experience of my working career and the best thing to happen to me at the same time. I know it was much harder on many other people, but it turned out for the best for me.

There's been no license change. For years, Elastic has had a set of commercially-licensed features on top of Apache2-licensed Elasticsearch. Within the last year or two, they made those commercially-licensed features source-available. Ironically enough, making the source available seems to have prompted a bunch of claims that they changed their licensing model.

I don't see them on Home Depot's website any more, but they weren't pre-drilled, pre-hung, pre-primed, or mortised for hinges, none of which matter for desk tops, but perhaps that's why they were that cheap. I thought about replacing some of the hollow core doors in my house with them, but I don't trust my ability to install anything more than pre-hung doors. I already had a motorized standing desk, so I wasn't in the market for a cheap desk top, either.

At least where I live, solid core slab doors are $40 at Home Depot. You could almost certainly build a desk top from lumber that would be cheaper, but not by a significant margin.

>>I can reasonably guess that you are the owner of some business for whom labor is just a cost and taxation to support public goods is going to cost you more than it benefits you. That includes everyone from corporate interests down to small business owners. The rest of the republican base is those who can be induced to be allies of the above on the basis of race.<<

Frankly, this is just an example of the type of polarization the article describes. "If you support some X that I oppose, it is not because you have a principled reason for believing it to be beneficial, but rather because you are racist/sexist/etc."