stone-monkey

>The adult world, even at the highest levels of authority, largely consists of the same petty cliques, backstabbing, lying, and whatnot that you'd experience in high school

I'm not a fan of claiming this type of behavior is childish and something we leave behind after high school. Before advances in mass transportation that made it feasible for people to uproot and move to a new community, most people were stuck in the same ingroup for most of their lives.

High school is just a cultural relic that mimics this previous social grouping. It's not necessarily something that kids do that we grow out of - it's the other way around - modern society has broken the existing communities we had in place, but in return gives us the freedom to find new ones anywhere we want.

>I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people, but insisting on citizenship would make it easier to charge us with particular crimes if the need arose

Hm.. I definitely feel it's easier to mitigate some risk by using US citizens. One of the goals is to limit possibility of foreign interference via these citizens. By using your own people, you can track their interactions with foreign entities via their trips outside of the US and their self documented contacts with foreign nationals. It'd be a lot harder to track these things when you hire someone from a different country because you're not going to have as meticulous records and all their friends and family are liable to be foreign nationals.

It's not about brand marketing - it's about having cheaper options. I don't know where you go shopping, but at those prices I just listed, those name brand products are still cheaper than comparable products, local or otherwise.

It's not just removing the markup - they're usually priced at a discount relative to competitors. Also, in my area (SF), local products tend to be priced at a premium relative to standard rates for national brands. So for the ice cream example, the local pint normally would range anywhere from 5-10 dollars, whereas buying a pint of Haagen Dazs would run you about 4 bucks. Now, when I go to grocery outlet to pick up a two dollar pint of ice cream, I'm not buying the pint because it's brand name product for cheap relative to its normal cost - it's cheap relative to the cost of any ice cream. There's no comparable product at two dollars a pint.

It seems to me like their reach might be exceeding their grasp with their expansion intentions, but I'm hoping they just see a hidden opportunity that requires this large cash infusion to handle.

What I'd like to see them do is use this scaling up to put dedicated resources towards extensive scouting of regional vendors, leading to further differentiation of Grocery outlets by location. Or maybe even just give them greater variety of sales items in general.

Totally different business model - more like the grocery equivalent of Ross, Marshalls, or TJ Maxx. Kind of similar to Aldi if you're familiar with that chain.

Basically buy overstock or items near expiration date for bargain basement prices and pass the savings to consumer. Think toblerones for a dollar, a pint of Haagen Daaz for two bucks, and occasionally some more eclectic health food products that bomb out of whole foods. They used to have these coconut milk chia seed puddings 2-4 for a dollar depending on how well they were doing. Hits the skinner box model of shopping by having variable inventory at cut rate prices with a selection of stable items like bread and milk, meat, vegetables, household cleaners, etc.

A heads up: your home icon links to localhost:3000

I think the indirectness of the payment makes it acceptable somewhat. In your example, I wouldn't take the 5 dollar job either. But the difference there is in the directness of the relationship - the person receiving the benefit isn't the one paying you. It'd be more akin to your boss seeing you help your neighbor somehow and giving you twenty bucks in recognition of your deed after the fact.

However, there isn't an infinite amount of advertising spend and consumer time on the internet - people who spend those things in Amazon and Facebook's + etc's ecosystems can directly and indirectly chip away at Google's advertising market share.

For me, one of my biggest hurdles was self direction. Trying to commit to hitting the gym twice a week always floundered even though I was following a relatively well defined course (Starting strength). I go to martial arts classes now and have zero mental overhead besides reviewing what I learned in class. Not great for building up muscle (these types of classes are usually more cardio based vs resistance training) but better than doing nothing.

Same with my language learning. I've always done better with the structure of classes compared to self study. Now I just schedule weekly 1:1 sessions with online tutors and only worry about doing the homework. I then try to practice what I'm learning organically when I run into potential practice situations.

I also find the less free time I have overall to commit to things, the more productive I become, compared to having more free time to execute - I'll otherwise waste a bunch of time on fluff.

> Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

Is it markedly worse in any area? Seems like for any business that's already entrenched in slack there isn't much incentive to move off. I'm assuming in your case there must have been some large benefits in order to spend a multi-month effort forcing a migration.

Food delivery and bike sharing work well in China because of the scale of the cities and lower cost of living. When you have millions of people densely packed together, dumping a ton of bikes everywhere may be feasible. Even then, there's known issues, like how currently the biggest bike vendors are struggling for profitability. Food delivery is occasionally cheaper than buying at the store, due to VC style subsidies and lower cost of human labor. Delivery logistics are incredibly cool to me though. Real time location tracking for food/package deliveries is impressive. It'd be amazing to see something similar in the US.

>>it's mind-boggling how removed from reality people can get, even people with a supposed science education.

There's an old adage that science advances one funeral at a time - The scientific community is far from immune to this problem. People who are trained and employed full time to apply critical thinking and empirical testing still fall for superstition. It's an unsolvable problem until we reach a point where we can replace human brains with cold, unfeeling robots.

> if I am looking to join a group of 3-4 people and they have a code of conduct already defined - I am just not going to come, simple as that.

I don't see why this is bad - groups shouldn't necessarily reach out to as broad an audience as possible. Like a sales funnel, the advertising in the group works better when it serves to filter out people who are incompatible with the group.

Your mindset reminds me of the ask/guess culture post on metafilter, which is a framework where people typically adopt either an attitude of explicitly asking for social expectations vs intuiting them through social context. You seem to prefer the latter, where people are expected to understand the implicit boundaries of the group through personal observation. There's nothing wrong with that; it doesn't mean the other way is inherently wrong, though.

That's basically what happened with S3 a couple years back. Mistyped command caused an outage for large parts of the internet in the US. Now, I dunno if they could make a big enough mistake that would bring down the whole company, but certainly it's been proven that a single mistake can affect major portions of the internet.

I'm sure politicians get as embarrassed as the next person by public shaming, but forgive me if I'm inclined to believe they won't act much on complaints by non constituents.

Even if they flexed their employer muscles, that would only affect local officials. Why would a republican senator from Kansas care if they're going to cut jobs in Virginia?

Edit: that should be "baccarat or slots", not poker. My point is that poker, specifically Texas holdem, isn't strictly a game of chance.

It may still be gambling in the sense that there's a large element of chance that dictates the game, but it's not the same as something like Baccarat or poker which is strictly a game of chance. The element of skill can cause variance in outcomes over the period of play. It's important to make that distinction because you're getting into gray areas here.

Are actuaries and insurance companies engaging in gambling? They're essentially betting on not needing to fulfill the terms of the contract for unlikely outcomes by analyzing the "odds" over time. Often, they "lose" the bet and have to pay out, but they reliably win more than they lose. Of course, good poker players are probably not getting matched up with amateurs, so it's not exactly identical.

Obviously they must know it's a problem, but it seems to be a constant arms race fighting with the counterfeiters, especially with their current business model.

It seems pretty clear Amazon is moving away from being a direct retailer of items and instead fulfilling orders for other stores. Moreover, they're leaving it in the hands of these storefronts to differentiate themselves by having them pay extra to separate their stock from other warehouse goods.

Lastly, it seems as if the end goal is for the retail store to become a platform for a new wave of direct to consumer manufacturers, which you see in the form of Anker, that trending Orolay jacket, etc.

>There is nothing "toxic" about the internet except for the centralization of communication on a handful of corporate controlled social networks that have perverse incentives to censor anything that might impact their advertising or other income.

There are definitely other problems besides a centralized internet. Consider attacks by corporate and state level enemies in the form of astroturfing and fake news. Those issues existed outside of a centralized internet, and arguably can be addressed better by centralized access to information.

Look at the great firewall of China: do you think the Russian disinformation campaign could succeed there to the extent it did in the west? Free access to the internet lowers the barrier for bad actors. Having said that, I obviously prefer the western model of internet access, but I'd like to state that it doesn't come without its own set of problems.

Isn't comparing the scale of the two like comparing apples to oranges? I think most wordpress sites are self hosted. There's wordpress.com hosting, but I'd guess that most of their sites are self hosted for the explicit purpose of customization.

While WordPress still dominates large areas of the web, they have a decentralized model vs medium. It's like comparing scaling web forums to reddit ("why do they have so many outages? All they do is store text!"), but reddit obviously has a way higher load than any single forum. I'd wager the same is true for medium.

To continue on with the metaphor, medium, like reddit, is solving a different problem than the wordpress/squarespace model: you don't have to roll your own. You get a built in audience due to centralization and the cache of the site (For some reason I associate a medium link as being more legit than seeing a WordPress hosting site. Strange, but better branding I guess.)

I just recently bought a pair of ANC Bluetooth headphones and received the same email. One interesting thing to note is that I received the email from an outlook address instead of an address affiliated with the company. It was already flagged as spam, though - I only found it by chance. They did offer a free pair of upgraded headphones instead of the same pair, which is a nice touch I suppose.

> Experts were consulted, and ignored.

This led to my point, though I made it in a roundabout way. None of these laws are made in a vacuum. When you get a law that seems to cause undue harm to industries or to general consumers, it's unlikely the case that lawmakers wrote up something due to negligence of the issues, but because another entity specifically pushed to have these laws written in this way.

To be fair, this is basically the software developer's dilemma in reverse. You're building out systems for areas of business with no domain expertise. End users constantly wonder why the developers built the software in such profoundly stupid ways.

Lawmakers face the same problem in that they're barraged with constant problems from completely different fields that they're unlikely to be subject matter experts in. How do they learn about it? By consulting subject matter experts. Who are these subject matter experts? Well established businesses in their field. This can lead to laws that are incentivized towards large businesses. That's just considering a situation where everyone is working in good faith.

Now consider lawmakers having to cater towards what is currently trending with the populace, kickbacks from companies, pull from different governments/organizations/political parties etc. And it's easy to see why politics is the way it is.

>testing whether someone is willing to prepare for a thing is a relevant work skill test too.

Is it, though? I could understand if algo questions had some relation to the work you're doing, but your comment on why they're good is independent of the actual material. If we replaced the algorithm question interview with an interview testing obscure presidential facts, would it really be a useful test to have devs take? I guess it is a relevant work skill test in that you get people willing to put the work in/game the system, but it doesn't seem to be much of (if at all) an improvement from ad hoc conversations.

Not OP. Also not saying it doesn't happen, but the incentive structures are different in both countries. A lot of private industry in China is defacto government owned due how business works there - You can't build a business there to scale without having ingratiated yourself to some higher ups of the party at some level. While the same thing may or may not happen in the US, we also have the option of being able to grow obscenely large without being tight knit with the government - See Facebook and a large chunk of Silicon Valley.

It's commonly touted that the purpose of forcing foreign companies to submit their IP to a Chinese owned branch as a prerequisite to conducting business in China is so the government can exfiltrate foreign IP back to China. The government isn't in the business of building out all these industries themselves - they anoint some select chosen in their cabal who profits enormously from getting the blessing of their local party members, while sending generous kickbacks their way. There's some Chinese billionaire who talks about it on YouTube - I can't recall his name off the top of my head.

Cheap swipes like this article really bug me. It's fostering snide comments and continuing the negative connotation with the manji symbol which was a religious symbol predating its nazi appropriation. If a company were to have the angled swastika displayed prominently in their logo, then sure - but not only is this not the case, but it's also just white space that they're projecting their prejudices on. I don't think there's anything wrong with criticism, but sometimes I feel like instead of contributing anything valuable to the internet, the majority of writers on these media sites are paid to either shit on things or to advertise it.

The second is my favorite by far as well, but I find it funny how it's described as amazing Sci-Fi when I have to describe the plot. Half the book is

spoilers

The result of granting a nerd all the resources of the Earth at his disposal. He promptly uses it to find the perfect waifu and seduces her in his idyllic European villa.

That's not Sci-Fi; That's a power fantasy as old as time.

This is why for me, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft were my fondest memories of playing online games. The standard multiplayer was always going to be competitive, but the real wonder was in the custom games. This was before the big wave of indie game creators, so you had a bunch of people churning out interesting and creative games with the WC3 editor. The custom games were most famous for DOTA, but you had genres like Tower Defense which blew up in a big way in the custom game scene.

You had maps like wilderness survival and troll tribes, which, if you've played Don't Starve, feels largely derivative. Footmen Frenzy, Dark Deeds, Sheep Tag, Uther Party (Mario Party ripoff), LAOP, Parasite, Mars Survival, Risk knockoffs, etc. It didn't matter if you sucked at these games, because most people sucked at them; the playerbase for each custom game was pretty small. A good time for novelty - I'm hoping reforged brings back some of that magic from that scene. I played LOL after moving on from Blizzard games (Wow was never my thing), but it wasn't the same. Also, very toxic. Not a great game for casual players.