CharlesColeman

Is this a genie that can be bottled back up? Lets say you enact these magical regulations. Will the corporations stick around or will they focus on other countries where they have more clout? Similarly, will they use international levers of pressure to "fix" the issues any one country poses?

If you try to bottle the genie back up, you'll have to work all those levers simultaneously or you'll have the problems you describe. The new set of regulations would also need to curtail the ability of corporations to move to avoid regulations and limit the kinds of political pressure they can apply, for instance. Otherwise it'll be like closing one barn door while leaving the other wide open.

We've gone so far down the road in one direction that we may have to turn around with a shock. It it's probably too late for some kinds of small, incrementalist course corrections to be effective.

I agree with this analysis, and find it overall reasonable, but it seems to need a little more evidence, e.g. do we have any data that shows companies who put "generic managers" on top on regular fail more than those who put engineers on top.

That could be hard data to gather systematically. It's not like businesses fail immediately when you put a "generic manager" in change. A company can coast for decades before problems become obvious, and generic management confusing things even further by focusing on manipulating the most visible metrics (e.g. stock price) while taking actions that damage long term prospects.

So "modern capitalism is not a system that will magically fulfill customer needs in the absence of competition".

But modern capitalism, at least in the American context, is a system being drained of competition. Competitors conspire to destroy it by merging and acquiring each other, and the deregulatory economic zeitgeist that's been in force for 40 years means the government has done little to foster it.

Markets tend towards equilibrium, and bitter competition is a kind of disequilibrium.

If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?

Because modern capitalism is not a system that will magically fulfill customer needs, despite propaganda to the contrary. The way the system actually works is that the wants/needs of the capital-holders take priority over the wants/needs of other stakeholders (e.g. customers and workers). The other stakeholders are often forced to accept minimally acceptable deals, as long as the capital-holders are able to maintain barriers to entry (like large investments in capital).

A new market entrant will likely be tempted (eventually, if not immediately) to implement DRM just like Deere has. And Deere can always drop DRM temporarily if it will let them fend off a competitive threat.

Or create a new NATO that does not repeatedly exclude the Russians[1].

It seems like accepting Soviet/Russian proposal would have had the effect of 1) limiting the criticism of Soviet human rights abuses and 2) weakening the ability of democratic western countries to resist aggression by the authoritarian Soviets.

I think it was the right call for NATO to reject this proposal. If it had been accepted, maybe we'd still have the Soviet Union around in 2020.

From your link:

Molotov wrote. “The USSR joining the North Atlantic Pact simultaneously with the conclusion of a General European Agreement on Collective Security in Europe would also undermine plans for the creation of the European Defense Community and the remilitarization of West Germany.”

But Molotov did foresee problems in the event the Soviet Union became a NATO member. NATO would likely insist on democratic institutions while the Soviet Union considered the Westphalian concept of sovereignty sacrosanct. “If the question of the USSR joining it became a practical proposition, it would be necessary to raise the issue of all participants in the agreement undertaking a commitment (in the form of a joint declaration, for example) on the inadmissibility of interference in the internal affairs of states and respect for the principles of state independence and sovereignty,” Molotov wrote.

Why would we fight the Russians?

Ask the Ukrainians.

That's awesome. 16:9 monitors only make sense for watching video, and are an abomination for pretty much any kind of work involving text.

I will be very happy when 4k 16:10 or 3:2 desktop monitors become widely available at an affordable price.

The LF hasn't been about tools and software for quite a while. It's disappointing. I wish they'd change the name at this point. At least it would be honest.

> 100% of donations received go towards funding diversity programs.

Are there any organizations that use their donations to focus on supporting developers of actual open-source projects?

Diversity is great an all, but it makes more sense to focus on the people who are actually doing the work rather than the ones you hope might do the work.

I wonder if they would perform better if they routinely fired the top 10% of their employees (by org chart, not by performance ratings) and let talented new blood bubble upward.

IIRC, the US military follows something like that practice. It's called "up or out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out#Military:

...the 1980 Defense Officer Personnel Management Act mandates that officers passed over twice for promotion are required to be discharged from the military.

IIRC, the idea is to prevent people who lack greater potential from hogging the intermediate positions that others need to advance.

Just look at our voting count machines. You think something like that would be treated with extreme priority and would have a lot more security around it than it does.

If the priority was to build a good system. However, powerful government factions think that all government development must be farmed wholesale to private business, because of a twisted ideological belief in the market. Those private businesses are ruled by the ideology that shareholder value is the ultimate and only good, so they slap their products together as cheaply as possible.

The result of that toxic stew is that we can't have nice things.

state media has reported

So, is this rumor true, exaggerated, or just the authorities trying to cover their own asses by "discovering" evil agents for the public to blame instead?

It’s funny how people treats unions as panaceas to all problems.

But it is not some grand solution to high level engineering problems caused by stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives and other weakness in quality down the line.

They're not a panacea to all problems, but they could be the solution or part of a solution to many of them. In this case the "stupid cost saving priorities made by C-class executives" were the major issue, and how do you deal with that? You increase the power of other, non-management stakeholders. Unions are the way you do that for labor.

Of course, in this case they're not the complete solution. Increased and more effective oversight by the FAA is probably more important, and there are other things as well. However, unions could be helpful by protecting employees who want to make a fuss over management decisions from management reprisal, for instance.

If the last one was an engineer, why would another engineer restore your confidence any more?

He's probably talking more about mindset than educational and professional background.

You can have a leader with the mindset of an ornery engineering-first engineer. You can also have a leader who's an ex-engineer with the mindset of a business executive. There's a big difference between the two.

I personally do not know which of those categories Dennis Muilenburg fell into, though.

Could you point out where you see a link between unions and the poor quality control that was observed in the plant?

Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management. Empowered employees could have more effectively pushed back.

Also, the union employees were more qualified to do this type of work. However management gave instructions not to hire any, so the Boeing hired less qualified non-union people to assemble the planes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees....

Mr. Barnett, who filed a whistle-blower complaint with regulators, said he had repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the [dangerous metal] shavings [near wiring]. But they refused and moved him to another part of the plant....

Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees. “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly. “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account....

In the interest of meeting deadlines, managers sometimes played down or ignored problems, according to current and former workers. Mr. Barnett...learned in 2016 that a senior manager had pulled a dented hydraulic tube from a scrap bin, he said. He said the tube, part of the central system controlling the plane’s movement, was installed on a Dreamliner. Mr. Barnett said the senior manager had told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He filed a complaint with human resources, company documents show....

But several former employees said high-level managers pushed internal quality inspectors to stop recording defects. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager, said her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on the factory floor after she flagged wire bundles rife with metal shavings and defective metal parts that had been installed on planes.“It was intimidation,” she said. “Every time I started finding stuff, I was harassed.”...

Mr. Barnett was reprimanded in 2014 for documenting errors. In a performance review seen by The Times, a senior manager downgraded him for “using email to express process violations,” instead of engaging “F2F,” or face to face. He took that to mean he shouldn’t put problems in writing. The manager said Mr. Barnett needed to get better at “working in the gray areas and help find a way while maintaining compliance.”

Some people do get a sense of pride and fulfillment out of doing a good job.

But a good job for a CEO is building shareholder value, which is now understood as "[wringing] all the money out of the company that they can [for the shareholders]." That's a different job than building an organization that consistently chooses safety over schedule and cost.

Didn't 346 people die in unnecessary deaths?!

I suppose, but if more people die because of the now well-known management failures at Boeing continue, their deaths will be even more unnecessary.

That's what all your personal information and your identity is worth. $6.

That's not how much it's worth, that's just how much Equifax was able to corruptly negotiate to pay for losing it.

If you really want to know how much it's worth, you could probably compute a reasonable estimate by taking all the money the credit bureaus from your credit file, and divide that by the number of credit files.

Citing whataboutism is often used as an intellectually soft way to avoid responding to claims of hypocrisy. It's pretty much always used like you are using it nabla, to sidestep a challenge of hypocritical behavior.

No, it isn't. At its core, true whataboutism is an deliberate attempt to distract and derail [1] a thread away from its actual subject with charges of national hypocrisy. Derails of all types are definitely things that need to be resisted, because otherwise we'd exhaust ourselves talking about nothing but Donald Trump and the top 10 most controversial American geopolitical activities.

That said, I think there's relatively little true whataboutism, compared to similar derails that are exactly the same in form, except they lack the deliberate intent to derail and distract.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=derailing%20...

why would we not assume that there are political factions within the intelligence agencies abusing their training and tools to try to help a particular candidates?

That has nothing to do with what I said, and is in fact completely orthogonal to it.

Also, the CIA may prefer other techniques than spamming social media. There's no good reason to think they're following the same playbook as the FSB.

This. There are both honest and dishonest reasons to seek anonymity. That tension makes this a very difficult problem to solve satisfactorily, in the context of liberal democracy.

The decision is much easier in authoritarian states, because authoritarians typically hate and fear honest domestic political dissidents even more than they do foreign information agents.

...when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda.

...I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem.

This is an announcement of a specific disclosure of information related to a state-backed influence network from Saudi Arabia. Not all statements and articles about state-backed information operations need to be general, and it's actually very helpful to have ones that focus on specific instances.

I think the best thing that can be done is wait 1-2 generations; by then nobody will believe anything they see in the media or in social networks.

That's not the best thing, that's the worst thing. The goal of disinformation campaigns is to make people so distrustful and confused that the adversary's social cohesion is compromised to the point where they become disorganized and less able to respond to threats.

This New York Times video explains it very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo.

The proposition in St. Louis does have a runoff. Seems like a lot of expense.

Honestly, I think there's too much focus on expense nowadays. We shouldn't feel forced to pursue the best cheapest system, or feel limited only to systems that are no more costly than the ones we have today.

If an idea results in a more trusted and effective electoral system, I think it would be worth it even if it costs significantly more.

and almost always equally balanced

Doesn't that also follow from the voting method? A faction will make the political compromises it needs to reliably get past 50% in order to active power, but won't go much past that because it would be an unnecessary political sacrifice.

Oh no, thanks to democratic elections of senators, senators risk their voting decisions being scrutinized by their constituents...yikes!

More democracy more directly is not a salve that cures all problems. Election of judges is pretty crazy, for instance.

IIRC, senators were originally appointed by state legislatures, and were understood to be representatives of the sovereign state governments themselves. Sort of like how the US government sends a representative to the UN rather than having the people elect one.

Approval voting does way better, and it finally has been put into practice in local elections (in Fargo ND), and is being considered for a big city (St. Louis MO).

That looks a lot more understandable and straightforward than ranked-choice voting, which is a big plus to me. Vote counting systems should be so straightforward that even a simpleton can understand them, as the more complicated they are the less I think they'll be trusted.

Even with such a system, I think I'd still like there to be a final runoff election for important offices. It gives an opportunity for correction if a crazy somehow unexpectedly comes out ahead, and it will give a majority endorsement to someone.

BOM costs make or break mass market hardware products. You don't just add 50 cents of BOM to a mass market item without a real good reason.

I guess the question is, why is that so?

IMHO, a valid "real good reason" is fixing a product/technological UX regression. However, it seems American business practices have settled on shamelessly selling the cheapest acceptable product for the highest acceptable price. If cheaper means a little crappier and enough customers will put up with it, cheaper it is. I'm dissatisfied with it because it usually means the stuff I buy is less durable or lacking on some fit-and-finish area.

That's not post-hoc rationalization. That's the stated reason. That's also clearly the reason if you take an inventory of the facts on hand.

The stated reason can obviously be a post-hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible that she crossed a line her employer drew after the fact.

That's not my position and I don't appreciate this distortion.

Well, if you could clarify, that would be great. It's clear to me that there's some moral component to your position, given your language:

>> she's untrustworthy

>> [she] betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.

She doesn't have the right to assert her interpretation of law and morality on the entire corporation.

(I should note that it's not her interpretation, it is the law.)

I would argue her action is narcissim and attention-seeking

I does sound like you feel that her overriding moral obligation was to serve her employers to their satisfaction, and that it was a strong moral violation to take a fairly anodyne action that caused her employers some discomfort. No money was lost, no security systems breached, no confidential data exposed. The only thing that happened was a few people saw a required legal notice that her employers would rather have people forget about.

The tuning chip costs maybe 50 cents or something. Just have 3 or 4 of them and pretune the next few channels.

That's 50 cents the shareholders can pocket, and everyone has already inured themselves to the slower experience.

Isn't progress great?