techdmn

Different people are motivated by different things. Some people are motivated by pressure. Some people are motivated by rewards. Some people are motivated by solving problems. The trouble is, if you blanket apply a strategy that some people find motivating, you risk under-motivating and even demotivating people who are motivated by different things.

Personally I am motivated by solving problems, which strongly implies shipping working solutions. I find artificial deadlines, theatrical recognition ceremonies or financial rewards that amount to a rounding error on my compensation to be demotivating. Everybody is different.

I am happy to bear the cost of providing care. I am NOT happy to bear the cost of the huge profits generated by the U.S. healthcare system. Insurance companies are increasing profits by denying care.

A separate issue is consolidation. In my area, what used to be locally owned clinics and hospitals are being bought up by national conglomerates. Their first move is often to reduce staffing and cut costs, driving up delays and driving down quality of care.

You left out one of the most important products of our system, profits!

Depends on infrastructure and traffic conditions. My commute includes several on and off ramps that are routinely backed up somewhere between several blocks and several miles. If you are in line for the ramp, you can choose to A) maintain a gap no larger than one car-length between yourself and the car ahead of you or B) attempt to maintain a larger gap, only to have it immediately filled by people who were too important to join the back of the queue. In this case you are back to less than a one car-length gap, and the only thing you've accomplished is to annoy the people behind you by making space for queue jumpers. (You can of course repeat option B as many times as you like, until cars in queue behind you also start going around. I assume the end game is that you end up parked on the sidewalk or shoulder as traffic streams by.)

I understand how we got here. I read a study somewhere several years ago that found that even in emergency situations, a significant percentage of drivers will not use more than roughly 60% of the braking force that would cause a lock-up or engage ABS. They brake harder than they ever have before, they just don't have any idea where the limit actually is.

The average person is a poor driver, so we increase overall safety by mandating automated systems that perform below the level of a skilled driver. Of course even skilled drivers make mistakes, and even if I could outperform the automated system 99 times out of 100, I wouldn't bet that I wouldn't get the book thrown at me if I were in an accident with the safety system disabled. Grin and bear it I suppose.

As a fellow cyclist, I feel your pain. I learned to drive on cars that didn't even have ABS. I wish I could buy an electric car that was as dumb as a rock. It would be illegal to make and sell one, but maybe I'll build one when I retire. ;-)

I can adjust the sensitivity in a way that is persistent, but I believe the emergency braking feature has to be turned off manually for every drive? I'll double check, but I have turned it off several times.

I have a Tesla with AEB that drives me up the wall. I'm often driving in heavy traffic, and occasionally need to quickly, but smoothly, stop within a few feet of the vehicle ahead. My car decides I'm cutting it too close, engages full automatic braking, jerking the car to sudden stop with a 10 foot gap. Sometimes the vehicle ahead will even start moving before my car is stopped, but it has decided to stop and stop it shall. Cannot override even by flooring the accelerator. I miss cars that did what they were told, when they were told to do it. For the record I've never rear-ended anyone.

If this song isn't proof that Paul McCartney is a psychopath, I don't know what is. It is absolutely the most insipid, uninspired piece of garbage ever to be recorded.

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing work". However, pointing it out made that person the enemy of the greater cohort that was "performing work". The results were not important to them, their metrics about units of work completed was. I see this pattern frequently. And it's hard to say those "performing work" are wrong. "Performing" is rewarded, "doing" is punished - Perhaps right to the top, as many companies are involved in a public performance designed to affect the short-term stock price.

The thing that strikes me about the question is the underlying desire to control the user. The creator wants people to figure things out rather than look them up. For a good game, make it the way you want. That's your choice. If someone solves the puzzles themselves, great! If they get stuck, or just want to blast through the game and use a wiki or guide, so what? That's their choice. As an author or creator you can choose how to make art. You do not get to control how people experience it. That would be creepy, though it doesn't seem to stop people from trying.

Needlessly gendered, and the last sentence reads as rather condescending.

Also, the defect rate on children is surprisingly high, around 3% if memory serves. As the parent of a child with disabilities, my experience has been one of complete devastation. I'm not in a good enough place to have a conversation about this, but also feel an obligation to others in a similar position not to be invisible.

Some days I'm really happy that I kept at least one analog car.

Those were my thoughts. I view the price cap as overwhelmingly positive, but start the countdown until the courts / SCOTUS invalidate this. Exploiting the downtrodden is the American way.

Well shit, I haven't been going to the all-hands either!

I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire org / company / world.

Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand?

Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.

Trouble is, for people who do realize and care, there isn't much we can actually do. Our two party system is effectively preventing change through the established channels, and I'm not super interested in sustaining a life-altering injury in the process of protesting.

Except taxes are the thing that funds civil society. Letting people work around that by paying $x results in a more regressive tax structure. Overall I would say there are many losers in the above scenario.

My experience generally (in the U.S.) is that our society is built from a collection of systems, that when viewed from a distance, appear to be functional. The closer you get to any one of those systems though, the more it will become clear how dysfunctional it is, how rarely it is doing the right thing, and how much it's just luck of the draw if you end up dealing with someone competent as opposed to a vindictive bully who will do everything in their power to hurt you if you press them to do the job their particular system is ostensibly responsible for.

This is a fantastic question.

In nature, every individual has to fight for survival. The strong eat the weak, there is no justice, only a fight to survive.

Civilized society, in my opinion at least, aspires to be something else, something more. There should be justice. We should not impose on the rights of others without due cause.

Currently, as your question points out, we rely on keeping people desperate enough to do uncomfortable jobs for little pay in order to survive. Our economic polices in the U.S. deliberately keep some percentage of the population desperate, whether that's targeting a 4% unemployment rate, keeping a rock bottom minimum wage, trade policy, healthcare policy, I could go on all day.

What if society didn't function this way? What if the wealth that already exists were distributed in a way that people were not desperate just to survive? One mechanism might be a UBI that was sufficient for bare-minimum housing and food costs. Then we'd have to pay people enough that it was worth their time to do those jobs. Goods and services, especially those currently underpaid, would be more expensive. But the people working those jobs would have a lot more income, which would be spent and re-injected into the economy, probably the local economy. I believe that would tend to bubble up the chain - Why should I deal with all the stress of project deadlines if I could check groceries for a similar paycheck? Things would cost more, but we would also be paid more.

Ultimately I think the goal would be a more equitable distribution of wealth. The counter-argument I usually see is that wealthy individuals have created the wealth they have, and have a right to it. I would disagree, pointing to the same policies above that depress wages and encourage people to take poorly paying jobs.

My first thought is that this is kind of ridiculous. BUT. I bought a cheap pair of tweezers like 15 years ago and they are fantastic. The amount of flex is perfect. They're easy to use, but you can also apply a fair amount of pressure with them. It's just the one pair, and in a panic after misplacing them for a week I tried to find a back-up pair. Well, now I have a lot of tweezers. Cheap pairs. Expensive pairs. Made in Japan. Made in U.S.A. But still only one good pair. Dammit.

I could never begin to count the times I have been grinding away at something, making zero progress, and the right idea comes to me two minutes after I step away from my machine.

As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-)

Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.

Fair. How about: "How long Musk continues to be CEO of Tesla, whether because he is replaced or because Tesla goes out of business."

Hmm, time for the over under. Which happens first: Musk is replaced as CEO, or he drives Tesla into the ground? And in the latter case, how long do we think it will take?

AND if people had viable alternatives. (Sorry, I see now that you mentioned blocking, which would also work.)

As a Tesla owner, couldn't agree more. The interface of the car itself is actively hostile to new users. Without instruction, most people cannot get into or out of a Model 3 without significant struggle. Regular door handles and a regular gear selector would go a long way. And they seem intent on making it worse. Why would I EVER want the car to decide if I should be going forward or back? Happy to have helped (however little) in making electric cars more mainstream. Doubt I'll buy another Tesla.

About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole thing. She was happy, it was her least favorite part of her job and she desperately needed time for other things. I was happy, I was showing that I was worth what they were paying me! (Salaried at the equivalent of $12.50 per hour.) BUT: That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job.

Automation is definitely having an impact on labor demand, with software driving out some jobs much the way cars and trucks drove horses out of our economy. I think it points to an increasing bifurcation, with jobs being high skill / high pay or low skill / low pay, without much in the middle.

Of course here in the U.S. this is also being driven by our monetary policy, our tax policy, our trade policy, our labor policy, I could go on. I'm in favor of UBI, but that seems about as likely as the use of any of those levers to reduce income inequality and spread the wealth our society generates in a way that supports most of those contributing to it.

There are definitely dumb TVs out there. I picked up a Sceptre from Amazon. It's not fantastic, but the price was right, has inputs plenty and varied, and zero "smart" features.