thedevil

"We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual web browsing history. We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so."

He didn't say "we won't". He said "we aren't currently" which means "we're keeping the option open but we're trying to sound good right now".

> It's hard to describe how a good salesman can have you saying yes to things you aren't comfortable with.

I recommend a book that describes some of these tricks pretty well. It helps protect me from such manipulation (some of the time):

https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...

I had more of a financial background before becoming a software engineer. I was shocked when I found out "equity" given to early engineers is so puny.

Why would someone work long hours for low pay with higher risk for 0.1% of high-risk small business?

I've got a tie between two books:

1) Design of Everyday Things by Dan Norman

This book ruined my life. I highly recommend it. Every engineer, manager and designer should read this. Maybe every human. I think of this book every time I try to pull a push door, every time I reach the bottom floor of a stairwell and notice the design that might save my life one day, and every time I try to struggle to operate a television or a microwave.

2) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

This book helped me understand myself and everyone else. For example, I now understand why I double down on dumb ideas. I also catch a lot more marketing and sales tricks.

Edit: Sorry, just now realized that I broke the 1-book rule, but it's probably too late to correct this and it's really hard to choose between these two anyway.

"The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger”

Take, for example, a telemarketer selling junk.

Maybe they took the job because some ruling class wants them to not be productive and happy with free time, as the article claims.

Or maybe, just maybe, they do the job because they can make money doing it and someone else can make money employing them to do it.

It's hard to argue with the business sense of pushing out features quickly at the cost of code quality.

But I've learned that that there are two kinds of development teams:

(A) the teams that are "moving fast and breaking things" while "creating business value"

and

(B) the teams that are "only maintaining legacy code", "not getting anything done", "costing a lot of money" and "complaining too much" about code quality that team A wrote.

As an engineer, I've learned that it's less work and more rewarding to be on the (A) teams than on the (B) teams.

Call me an old fart but I much prefer email.

Email gives me a reminder to keep me organized.

And the two teams I worked on that use slack killed productivity by chatting all day and sending animated gifs.

Plus, people expect email to be asynchronous. With slack, I get a mixture of immediate and asynchronous requests. So every message breaks my flow while I determine the priority level.

I see propaganda as very indicative of future conflicts, especially in countries like Russia, where the news stories are more heavily influenced by the government.

I think propaganda is necessary to support a war effort (and avoid insurrection). Think of it this way: If you're a soldier and your government tells you to invade a random country with nice people, how willing are you to fight? On the other hand, if your government convinces you that the target country is full of Nazis that eat babies and plan to genocide your people, then suddenly you're a hero if you go kill a bunch of strangers who never did anything to you.

So if you're running a country and you want to invade another country, you better start running the propaganda months, if not years, in advance.

Edit: As another example, take the Iraq War. The US and NATO didn't just randomly invade Iraq without propaganda preparation. Bush was even calling Iraq part of the "axis of evil" for at least a year before the Iraq war.

I'm not sure why Sweden would be concerned.

I read Russian news/propaganda occasionally. Over the last few years, Russian news/propaganda prepared Russian minds for interfering in Ukraine. And the propaganda includes arguments to justify a military buildup. And it seems to be preparing Russian minds for a possible invasion of Baltic states one day.

But I don't think I've even seen Sweden mentioned in Russian news/propaganda. I don't think Sweden is a target.

It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.

While I think it's important to remember these atrocities, I think that for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth.

Remember that atrocities like that happened in many places that did not grow into giant economies. Stealing land and enslaving people may have given a head start, but clearly something else delivered the big gains.

If you look at the history and the economic charts, the big boost was started by the industrial revolution.

I have the same concern. I've heard arguments, but none that adequately address the issue.

While I'm a fan of the idea of adopting basic income eventually, I don't see how we can fund it now without serious negative consequences.

Unfortunately the studies I've read about here on HN (including this one I'm guessing) seem to only address the positive side without actually comparing costs vs benefits.

I agree that the system is broken. Alimony is usually an atrocity.

But I advise against mentioning gender. Turning it into a gender-issue is going to make people dislike and downvote you and kill any hope for reform.

It's also unfair to women who pay alimony (my half-sister for example).

The funny thing is, I preferred ambitious women, especially when contemplating marriage.

It seems easier to get along with someone who has a career and therefore similar goals and troubles and life-rhythm.

And a wife with a career is less likely to look for long term alimony in the event of a divorce.

After yours and other comments, I suspect my information is just really out of date.

Here's some stories I had heard back when I was in college: no cash back or other rewards on the card for students, $2/month on an unused $500 credit line, a $38 late fee (late = paid the day due after noon eastern time, regardless of consumer time zone), and a rate that skyrockets after any missed payments.

Again, these may have changed since then since there's several replies of people with good experiences.

> I always thought their business model was giving people with starter credit (like college students) credit cards and car loans.

This is what I've seen of them. They offer college students (who don't know better) really bad credit card deals with high fees and high rates and sneaky "gotcha" contract terms.

Although I may be overly harsh since my impressions of them are all based on their credit cards. For all I know, their other banking services are ethical.

Also to be fair: by the time Capital One acquired ING, I was too old to know many college students so my anecdotes were all from before then.

Amazon's business model is based on great service to customers at a low price. Capital One's business (edit: their credit card business) is based on screwing consumers for as much money as they can legally (another edit: my impression is based on anecdotes from many years ago, before the ING acquisition).

Those aren't very compatible business models. If Amazon wants a bank, there's probably a lot of options with better synergies.

A weird trend became apparent to me, just now, as I started to read this article.

The blog posts posted on HN are generally higher quality than the "news"/"media" posts: less sensational, more informed. I don't feel like this particular articular is uninformed but it definitely feels like it's been sensationalized to try to make me feel one way about the subject.

Or at least, this seems true for the ones that I read. Does this seem true to anyone else? (Or does the opposite seem true?) Does this apply outside HN? (I rarely venture out into other news sources these days)

How freedom of speech has changed in ten years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Freedom_of_speech...

From: "'Freedom of speech' is the concept of being able to speak freely without censorship. It is often regarded as an integral concept in modern liberal democracy."

To: "'Freedom of speech' is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction."

Note how retaliation and censorship might no longer be considered an attack on free speech, if done by private individuals or non-government entities. Also, free speech is apparently no longer "an integral concept in modern liberal democracy".

> Will he be whiteboarded?

I like the way you word it - it makes it sound like a form of torture.

I was on the edge of donating or not donating and your comment was just the tiny push that got me to give a little money.

Peer pressure works, apparently, at least sometimes.

> The tech gains are mostly in areas which don't benefit consumers beyond fancier phones and bigger TV screens.

Mobile payments, video calls, mp3s, social networks, wikipedia, google, driving directions with live traffic updates, Coursera, YouTube, Uber, Upwork.

These are not trivial changes. Coursera, for example, was a life-changer for me as it allowed me to switch careers long after college.

Inequality and inefficient healthcare are big issues, sure, but I wouldn't trivialize the benefits of technology because of that.

The argument that people today live worse than people in the 80s is insane.

Yes, it seems so in the real GDP numbers, but it defies the rising standards of living that surround us, showing up everywhere but the numbers. Would anyone here want to live like the average Joe of the eighties, using only goods and services available then?

Traditional GDP and inflation figures seem to be losing usefulness

They clearly don't capture most of the tech gains (which have been huge).

And I suspect they don't adequately capture quality improvements.

Wikipedia: "a shortage occurs when for some reason the price does not rise to reach equilibrium"

In your example, the price is at equilibrium, even though one buyer cannot buy at market price. Thus there is no shortage.

If we define shortage as one buyer not being able to buy at market price, then you are technically correct.

So theoretically, without pricing controls, there's no such thing as a shortage because prices will rise until demand == supply. So the arguments that there's no shortage of STEM workers (only a shortage of below-market-price STEM workers) makes sense.

But let me pitch a different angle: there are a lot of people who could do their job better if they had certain specific STEM skills (e.g. business analysts who were better at statistics, spreadsheets, and maybe SQL).

It's true that you can get these skills if you pay more. However, the cost of hiring someone with these skills might be >= the business value, even though the business value might be >= the cost of the education for these skills.

So I would argue that we're underinvesting in certain STEM skills.

Yes. If it weren't possible to influence people's political positions, I think we wouldn't have campaigns or other political movements or organizations.

Well, we definitely should not pander to them.

I actually think most people (Trump supporters, you, me, everyone) vote mostly based on identity (liberal/conservative, religion, race, open-minded, well-mannered, etc). I think Trump supporters mostly voted for the party that they most identified with, the guy they thought was on their side. And I think you did the same. (I see myself as unaligned and open-minded, thus I voted for someone else as I found both sides to be extreme and closed-minded.)

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe most Trump supporters are horrible people. But they are still people. Like you and me, they have a dark and a noble side. And, just like you and me, they are not going to listen to the reasons of someone who insults them.

So what do we gain from demonizing them? We only lose influence.

How well do you think the aggressive tactics work in long-term relationships? How well do you think they work when you're in the weaker position (e.g. when your side controls neither congress nor the white house)?

And more specifically, how well do you think they worked in this election?

> I didn't vote for Trump, but I do identify with some of the beliefs of those who did, and I can tell you that the rhetoric I'm hearing from many of the most vocal left is pushing the middle away.

I'm in the exact same boat. I don't like Trump at all and this move frightens me. But my friends who argued for Trump actually had more logical arguments and my friends who opposed Trump actually mostly just insulted the people who voted for Trump.

How is anyone going to listen to us if we just insult them?

There is a book I recently read:

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...

This is a book about negotiation written by a hostage negotiator. It was an eye-opener that I needed.

One of the key principles is that you don't accuse or attack (something I still need to work on myself).