Cederfjard

I think Enginerrrd is saying that there could be a larger supply of other artists, that would satiate fans and make the demand for any one performer less impossible to meet. I’m not sure I think that’s true, but that’s my interpretation of their argument.

See my response to your sibling comment.

I was mostly asking because the explanation in the parent comment seemed overly simplistic, and to indicate that this approach would destroy the scalpers’ business model entirely. I’m totally open to the idea that this is a good solution that would improve on the status quo.

What if the kid passes at $30 because money is tight, they’d prefer to pay $20 and want to try for that, but scalpers snatch up all the cheapest tickets before the kid is able to. The kid still really wants to go, however, and is willing to actually pay the scalper up to $40 when push comes to shove, even if it hurts a bit?

Or if they weren’t organized enough or able to commit to going early on, but still have the purchasing power to pay a higher price?

WhatsApp had like half a billion monthly active users when they were acquired, that could be considered fairly large scale, no? But I agree with your point in general.

You only do voice calls six times in a year?

Your logic isn't really valid. It could be that the glue is indeed effective in facilitating waterproofing and was put in place for that reason, however not to the extent that Apple wants to make any promises that it will survive being submerged.

I don't know what the truth is, I just disagree with your conclusion based on the logic you present.

Not their salary per se, to be clear. They will tell you how much income someone paid tax on in the previous tax year.

The point is that what you think is true might not necessarily be true. So only reading things you like and believe to be accurate could mean you’re getting the truth, but it could also mean you’re getting a feedback loop of misinformation and indoctrination.

This is from their website: https://www.postman.com/trust/security/

Depending upon its sensitivity classification, customer data is AES-256-GCM encrypted at the server-side before storage. Postman environment variables are covered in this classification and we strongly encourage you to use them to store your authentication keys and passwords. We have also added sessions in the 6.2 release onwards of Postman. We recommend using session variables for any data that you do not want to be synced to Postman's servers.

First off, I’m very sorry about the suffering your mother (and you, I’m sure) had to endure because of this.

The idea isn’t ”if we legalize opiates and opioids, no one will ever get hurt from them again”. It’s ”when they are illegal, even more people get hurt”. Just like how alcohol is a substance that causes a very large amount of direct and indirect damage to its users and those around them, yet its prohibition in the US increased the net suffering substantially.

As long as there are opiates/opioids around, they will be abused in a self-destructive way by some (and they are cheap and easy to make, so they will be around as long as there’s demand). We’re currently trying to limit this through enforcing prohibition, which is not particularly effective and has well-known drawbacks. We could instead try to do the same with increased spending on education and treatment. Through that, we could make people less likely to want to use them, we could make people use them as safely as possible when they do, and we could make it so that less of the people who use them start to abuse them in ways that affect their lives negatively. Perhaps this would have better effect than criminalization, while increasing safety and decreasing associated violence.

Of course, this is all very complicated and messy, and every possible policy has negative effects and causes collateral damage. I’m open to arguments saying that this is not how it would play out. But I think the chances are better than with the current approach.

The comparison to Canada and prohibition doesn’t pass the smell test. Given that the war of 1812 wasn’t predicated on getting the Canadians into a drunken stupor as a tactic of economic warfare.

Since we’re speculating freely anyway, why does the revenge have to come in the same form as the initial affront?

This seems relevant, although it doesn't explain everything:

How pay is determined

"This is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment. "In companies like Microsoft or elsewhere, usually the bonus is something between 8, 15, 20 percent of the basic salary. In Valve, I'm told, there's no upper limit to bonuses. Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage." "Gabe [Newell] had this view from the beginning. He wanted a community of partners, he didn't want to be the boss of anyone or to be bossed around by anyone."

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-i...

So this is the crux of the disagreement. You believe that you either need maximum possible security or none at all, so when you need to be secure, it doesn’t matter if you have to use an inconvenient solution, because it’s that important. Whereas in reality there are a ton of less severe threat models that can be countered with more user-friendly methods of communication. Advertising companies, ISPs, local cops, etc won’t be able to read your Signal messages or find out who you’ve been talking to, and that can be important to many people. NSA or equivalent probably can, if they’re interested in you already, but that’s a concern for far less.

Just because you hide a big bag of cash where no one can find it, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours, just that you have it.

If the US government says that it has lawfully seized your bitcoin, then by law the US government owns the bitcoin, even if they don’t possess it. If you’re successfully keeping it from them, they can and will punish you for it. Again, as FormerBandmate said, that’s the basis of their power.

>> One may even wonder why a police officer accused of rape was not only still on duty, but even training other officers.

> Because accusations are cheap enough to be weaponizable as a denial-of-service attack.

Police officers are not held accountable commensurate to the incredible amount of power and influence they enjoy. They should be held to much much higher standards

Surely the context of this exchange is whether a police officer who has been accused of a crime still should be on active duty? Also I didn’t say ”punish”, I said ”get rid of”, which is effectively what happens if a cop is taken off duty pending investigation and potential court case.

This is the problem. Blaming it on people being programmable instead of looking at real issues of rust belt dwindling into starvation, shipping manufacturing overseas and letting our cities crumble into infrastructure rot.

But, yeah, still blame it on the programmability of the people.

Yes indeed, because the people affected by those problems tend to vote for the side that, to a much more severe degree than its counterpart, doesn’t have any real vision for solving them, but instead makes its base feel good with populistic propaganda.

You’re basically just saying there are real issues that people care about. Yeah, absolutely. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t also being manipulated and that it’s not something worth trying to solve.

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I wonder how it could translate into practice. It seems like it would be quite the boon to organized crime if you could rid yourself of a meddlesome cop simply by way of accusation.

What legal justification does PayPal use for keeping people’s money when they shut down their accounts? Even if the funds were obtained in some illegal way, they are still surely not PayPal’s. Banks can’t decide unilaterally to just keep someone’s money.

"Congratulations" on typed chat, phone call to boss within 3 minutes, and required a written report to senior senior management. There was unironic suggestions of doctors notes when the reason for the congratulations was their wife had just had their first kid.

I might be dense, what's the issue with congratulating someone? It can of course be for something untoward, but there are surely a lot more valid reasons for giving coworkers props ("congratulations on the promotion", "congratulations on your good work on project X", etc).

”Charles Baggage” made me giggle a bit.

In the article it said that the creator makes around 60% of their income from AdSense, 40% from Patreon (which Google sees nothing from).

A quick search says that Google pays the publisher/creator 68% on the AdSense revenue.

So how does Google make an order of magnitude more of this channel than the content producer?

I think you’re assuming that it’s the value that’s variable, and not the units of stock. That already from the beginning the company has decided on how much stock to give in terms of units, not dollar value.

But the point that’s being made (as I understand it) is that certain companies, including Amazon, first decide on a dollar value, notify the employee of that value, and then later grant the commensurate number of stock units based on the price at that later time.

Using the same argument, it could be said that cash should be banned because its private & semi-anonymous nature allows for its use in transactions for gambling, drug use, child porngraphy, assasinations, & slave trafficking.

If we somehow magically had come up with a cashless system first, and cash instead was introduced now, I am quite sure that yes there would be calls to ban it for those reasons. It is however an ancient legacy system that's deeply entrenched in our societies, so we're living with it for now, although perhaps not forever.

Is your solution to keep the walled garden systems we currently have that benefit proportionally very few people on earth?

Almost every single person on Earth benefits in some way from the current systems over not having them at all. Yes, they tend to let power and resources accumulate with a select few, which is not necessarily the best or most moral outcome. I'd be interested to know why you think this wouldn't be the case with the alternatives - regardless of the intentions of well-meaning ideologues, the powerful tend to get what they want in the end.

Why not give the rest of the world access to the tools for economical freedom too?

If the issue was as simple as this sentence, then sure. In reality it isn't, though. I could flip it and ask "why abandon regulations that limit how capital can exploit labor and prevent criminals from evading laws"?

And please let's not even debate if they work or not yet, I am more interested in the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo where billions of people literally cannot access these tools.

What line of thinking is this? Of course the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo, which is a known quantity, over something new, could well be that you don't yet know if or how the alternatives work? That doesn't mean that they can't be better or shouldn't be implemented at some point, but it's totally valid not to want to run head-first into something unknown and potentially detrimental, just because what we have now is imperfect.

Who are you to decide for whom it does and does not matter? Like others have said, this isn’t a court of law. You have made your standard here clear, cool. Other people have other standards they apply to various situations, and they are using those to discuss this specific topic.

I think the idea is that at the end of the day, the money always come from individuals - that companies aren’t some nebulous, ethereal entities with no connection to real people, and so you should keep those individuals in mind when levying taxes.

(I’m personally pro taxes in general, including for corporations).

Estimates aren’t necessarily accurate just because they end up being close to reality - that could just be chance. The estimate for a project that came in substantially under budget was just as wrong as one that came in substantially over, it’s just easier to live with. If all estimates are wild-ass guesses, then some will come in on time and budget, some will undershoot and some will overshoot.

I do believe that estimates, even for complex projects, are useful and can be fairly accurate, and in a lot of circumstances they can be used as the basis for deadlines, with certain considerations.

I’m sure you’d usually get very reasonable answers when asking about the rationale behind a set wedding date. For one, engaged couples are probably looking forward to being married, so there’s value in having it as soon as possible. You’ll also probably hear about it being in the right season, the venue being available, enough money saved up, etc.

In a business, a deadline should have valid a business case, one that’s not arbitrary - does it help improve the bottom line, or not? One senior manager thinking he will look good to the C-suite by having it done by a certain time probably doesn’t. Agreeing on a rough date with an external client, who have their own considerations to take into account, probably does.

The worst tech team you've ever seen and yet they are generating 20 million a year? I think you should give them the respect they deserve and understand the limitations they have been under.

If the right opportunity is there, you can make a lot of money on an awfully built product that barely keeps it together. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of risks involved with that and that things can’t go south in a hurry.

I’m obviously not familiar with this project, but it sounds like a lot of things many’d consider table stakes are missing, especially for such a large source of revenue. Perhaps I’m not imaginitive enough, but I can’t come up with any limitations they might’ve been under that would justify that. I think it’s fair to call that out, even if they happen to make money despite this.