Not the person you are responding to, but as someone who probably feels the same way, I'm ok with someone disrupting my local taxi monopoly by having someone who is not certified driving the car that is taking me to the airport, because I can largely agree that most humans can drive a car. I'm much less ok with the person flying my airplane not being certified.
No. Estimates have a very real purpose, even beyond communicating to managers and customers (whom you should be honest with anyway). Our estimates are used as a team to figure out how much work we can commit to in a sprint. They are also used to determine if you are getting better at things. When we start a project, we don't really have a code base, and many tasks are "new". I expect my estimates to be really wrong at first, and then when I'm implementing things that are very similar to what I've done before, I expect those estimates to get better. I can't really measure that if I'm producing bullshit CYA estimates.
This has always been important to me, and it's one of the ways that I mentally distinguish my "I'm going to go out and be professional" me from my "I'd rather not be working" me. When I tie my tie, I'm thinking about my customers and my employer. When my tie comes off, I don't think about them anymore.
Smalltalk as a language is small ("fits on a postcard"), and anyone can implement this. However, to be usable, smalltalk really needs to live in a full featured IDE. Full featured IDE in the 90's meant expensive software from vendors, and the limited pool of developers made development expensive. Had Pharo come around 30 years earlier, we might have seen a very different result.
I don't feel like being an engineer obliges me any more or any less than any other employee regarding the ethical consequences of my work, nor do I have any stronger obligation than any other employee to not do unethical work.
AirBnB didn't rape anyone, they just set up the platform that enabled the rape, and took a cut of the money the woman paid to rent a place in which she was raped.
Imagine a taxi company that hired a driver, did background checks, who then is arrested for raping a woman in a taxi. The taxi driver makes bail. Does the taxi company at that point say "Rape is a criminal matter, and it's up to the criminal justice system to adjudicate matters like this, not us" and put him back in a taxi? If they did so, and he raped a second woman, would you argue that the taxi company had absolutely no responsibility, and that it's still the job of the criminal justice system?
I think that's a slight oversimplification. Uber wasn't fighting doing background checks in Austin, they were fighting doing background checks the way the city of Austin wanted them to. But at a more meta-level, what they were really fighting was a precedent that would create a patchwork of local regulation on Uber that would make it harder for them to scale.
This is the long standing definition, which has been used in the athletic community for much longer than it has in the "wealthy yoga mom" community described in the article.
This. Many people (usually on the right) argue that increased minimum wages cost people jobs because companies that rely on low-wage, low-skilled will simply automate, because the companies are going to follow basic economic principles. A high wage barrier to H1B workers makes hiring overseas workers more attractive, and if companies can get the model working well (where offshore tech teams do a great job), that's worse in the long run for American tech workers.
Easy things:
1. Ideas
2. Name
3. Website with registration and payment
Hard things:
1. Acquiring paying customers
2. Keeping paying customers
2. Product Management once you have customers
People will pay you more for hard things than they will for easy things (there are, of course, exceptions to this, but execution of "great ideas" is much harder than having those ideas).
This is one of the more fascinating books that I've read recently. The commentary makes the paper itself very accessible. I rather enjoyed the direct reproduction of the paper itself (with typos!) in the book, and the near line by line commentary at points. It's not the way that I would want to be taught about Turing machines, but it's amazing to see them articulated for the first time.
Interestingly, Japan actually has a homicide rate on par with the US if you include suicides (with the delta between the Japanese and US rates being filled by our murder rate).
But for most people, there is no "work permit" to be had. If you're an El Salvadoran national who wants to come to work in the US - good luck. Unless you are married to a US national, there isn't really a path to "come work here legally". If we were to create such a path, then the people who are coming here illegally would compete with random foreign nationals who would love to come and work in the US for sub-par wages in exchange for a chance at a better children for their future. We have a problem with illegal immigration from our southern border because it's porous. Are we going to create two standards - one for people who can manage to get here by crossing the Rio Grande, and a different one for a textile worker from Laos who has no ability to get here physically so that he can become "legal"?
I don't think it's the home brewing equivalent that is the risk. It's more about the relative profits of corn vs marijuana in the midwest. If we were to fully legalize, I would expect that marijuana would have to get at least as cheap as alternative crops.
I don't find your advice to be "crap", but I do think it could be a lot simpler. Run stronglifts, 5x5, or starting strength. All of these involve 3 trips to the gym per week, are very easy to follow, and have well defined progressions.
Your risk is right on. The problem with throwing out dictators (laudable) is what they get replaced with (not necessarily an improvement). If Saudi Arabia were to fall and be replaced by an ISIS style state, we'd be very limited in our ability to respond militarily without enraging significant parts of the Muslim world by conducting military operations on sacred ground.
That then begs the question of "do we even care if there's an ISIS style state in Saudi Arabia?" The answer is probably yes, since an ISIS inspired state would clearly have ambitions beyond the Arabian peninsula.
I have to confess I'm a lot surprised that Luanda and Kinshasa are on the list. If you'd asked me to pick what I thought were the top 10, I wouldn't have thought to put any African cities on the list. I'd have expected expat costs to map closely to GDP plus some factor for housing costs of being in major cities.
What about someone who's primary assets are a couple of houses that (s)he rents out? Should (s)he be restricted from getting a market rate income on those houses?
I disagree pretty strongly that the "rentiers" are protected from market forces. If we look at the case of people who really are in the "rentier class", who are heavily leveraged, they are taking a fairly big risk here that the economy and housing prices are going to stay high, and many are risking bankruptcy should we suffer a reversal.
Hanging on the militia argument is actually a little bit dangerous. What happens if a state, say Texas, were to pass a law inducting every able bodied adult into "the militia" (for some definition of militia, and some definition of regulated). Would that bypass all federal restrictions on firearms?
"I Know First has created an algorithm that is able to make accurate predictions of the stock market and has been able to use it to greatly increase the return on investments for their clients."
Which sort of begs the question as to why you would need clients, since you have an algorithm that makes accurate predictions of the stock market. Once you had that, I'm not sure why you'd go looking for clients - I'd think you would just print money.
I'm not sure of the spelling, and I'm sure I'd butcher it, but Thai has a word for "the overwhelming urge to pinch a baby because it's so damn cute". My wife uses it on a regular basis when we're out and about and she sees babies.
A friend of mine is a nutrition researcher, and one of the things that he said that resonated with me was "The best diets tell you that you don't need to cut calories, but make you less hungry so you do it anyway".
Decriminalization of consumption seems to be the worst of all worlds for countries that are struggling with violence associated with the drug trade. Decriminalization generally removes (limited) controls on market demand, while continuing to criminalize the distribution. If you're going to decriminalize the consumption, there needs to be some mechanism of legal distribution.
That payscale isn't for "posted" jobs. That payscale is for "poached" jobs (no negativity implied by "poached", I just don't have a better phrase). When companies need someone who is going to cost them $500k a year, they already know who that person is.
If the Colombian government knew in 1982 the location of $10B in gold, it seems odd that they would not have simply seized it. I know underwater archeology is hard, but if you're simply interested in grabbing gold, is it really beyond the reach of the Colombian navy?