sjansen

Scanning the paper, it looks like it does discuss the impact of prior missionary experience on MLM growth.

Having seen it first hand, the relationship between pausing college for a couple of year to go door to door discussing religion, followed by returning to college and paying for it by going door to door selling security systems, solar panels, kitchen knives, etc. has always been obvious.

Don't get the wrong impressions. Only a minority of returned missionaries go into sales. And most quickly become disillusioned because it's harder to stay dedicated to flogging a mediocre kitchen knife. But it only takes a fraction of a fraction of the population.

I grew up outside Utah, but have lived here now for 20 years.

To me, the abstract reads like "water is wet". Both true and obvious to anyone experiencing it. Because I'm not willing to willing to pay for the actual paper, I don't know if it contains any inaccuracies or misunderstandings—there often are when describing Utah's peculiar culture—but scanning the citations it appears very well researched.

While MLMs are unreasonably successful in Utah, don't get the wrong idea. In my experience, the majority of Utahns dislike them just as much as everyone else. It's just easier for MLMs starting in Utah to target the willing minority and expand globally.

Update:

Having read the paper thanks to the free links in the comments, I can say it's pretty accurate. The description of Church programs is a bit idealized compared to messy reality, but that's to be expected. I really only disagree with one statement:

> In addition to the social capital and cultural explanations, legal institutions may also be contributing to the prevalence of MLMs in Utah.

It's a generous statement, but as a local I believe the opposite to be true. The prevalence of MLMs has co-opted legal institutions resulting in more friendly laws.

You seem to be suggesting that would be a mistake. But if we're not willing to prevent thought crime, who will?

With a little work, we can ensure that future generations don't even know what a "double plus meanie" was. In fact, maybe we can even forget that the bad times happened.

> SCI is a US-based company with over 33 years’ experience supporting OpenVMS, Oracle Rdb, and CODASYL DBMS database environments.

Looks like they have an existing relationship / shared customer base.

Yes, in the same way I miss creating an `XF86Config` or `xorg.conf` by hand.

The same way that a good case of food poisoning brings back memories of past travel abroad.

Are you punning on Common Desktop Environment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

I for one don't miss CDE.

Most people replace their phones and laptops every 2 to 5 years. Too fast to see any problem under normal usage.

Most game consoles and TVs are unlikely to do enough logging to wear out their storage. But if they did, especially if they cost as much as a car, it probably would make the news.

Cars tend to last a decade or two. They shouldn't stop working because of something as silly as excessive logging.

I agree. It's no different than building good software. If most of your users misunderstand your interface, you fix the interface not the users.

> Linux & SCO Group

There are still people who believe this?

Or did you forget to add </sarcasm>?

It probably didn't become a large enough issue until the tail end of last quarter. I expect this will be the quarter that we start to see antagonism between Trump and China have a real effect.

Anecdata: I was going to upgrade my iPhone this year, until I saw the new prices and decided I could wait one more year.

I should have been an easy sale. After a bad experience with Android, I have no desire to go back. Budget isn't an issue. But if Apple is going to price phones like laptops, I'm going to upgrade as slowly as I upgrade my laptop. (Which given how long it took them to get more than 16GB of RAM, I've gotten used to doing pretty slowly.)

If you look past the clearly frustrated tone, what he says makes sense.

It's much more likely that Google was trying to improve their user experience by working around an IE bug, than deliberately harming their user experience for a PR article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

While some people might be reacting based on simple entitlement, I suspect that for the majority this triggers a strong reaction because it is a warning sign. If Docker were a big company, it'd just be part of the normal drift toward customer abuse. Because Docker is still a relatively small company, it looks like a desperate attempt to stay afloat through increased monetization. The unintended side effect is that it makes me less inclined to purchase anything because I don't want to bet on a sinking ship.

Agreed. Every time someone expresses outrage at the lawsuit, I want to ask them why Gawker gets a free pass for their behavior. The truth is, they sealed their own fate by stepping outside the bounds of both law and civility.

It's not a question of worth but feasibility. Just like an ideal schema is fully normalized, but performance concerns sometimes drive denormalization. When foreign keys can't be used to enforce data integrity, the application has to be built to compensate in other ways. Sometimes that means simply accepting dirty data, and designing the application to stay robust when encountering unexpected data. Other times it means building alternate solutions to discover and repair data issues.

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

I thought progressive enhancement was gospel until app complexity exploded. I thought JSX was an abomination. I was wrong.

CSS Grid is better than table-based and float-based layout. JSX is better than templates. A lot of our old school ideas have either been proven wrong or evolved.

Is styled-components better? I don't know yet, but so far I like it.

Since you've been deep diving into OT, you've probably already seen: http://www.codecommit.com/blog/java/understanding-and-applyi...

But just in case you haven't, it has a nice high level overview of how Google Wave implemented rich text on a tree using annotation boundaries.

Because of tech sector demographics, this story is more relevant than other controversies like the wall.

Heh, I came to the comments hoping for an answer. Oh well...

As a native English speaker, there is zero patronizing connotation. Whereas "capable at" is never used, so it just looks like a typo.

Here's the presentation the post is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K6bwikZulI