GabrielF00

I only use Uber/Lyft in Boston for routes where the T would be inconvenient or if the weather is really bad and I don't want to walk home from the T station.

I just hate Uber Pool and Lyft Line - the routes they take are often side streets with lots of congestion and turns, there's a lot of frustration when you're almost to your destination or to a major road and then the driver turns around to pick up another passenger. Drivers often play music I find annoying.

I worked with one person at Amazon who had a significant physical disability. I can't speak for him, but he is highly valued by the organization because of the quality of his work.

As an Amazon employee, I tend to think Amazon's reputation is overstated. Some teams definitely have very high operational loads, but in general my hours have been comparable to friends in similar tech companies and certainly less than friends in industries like medicine, management consulting, etc.

It's very strange to describe Amazon (at least engineering roles) as a sweatshop considering how well compensated employees are.

Echo Show switched to showing YouTube through the web after Google blocked it the first time. Now it looks like Google is blocking the website. https://9to5google.com/2017/11/21/youtube-back-on-amazon-ech...

That's an app. Apps are inherently* limited to a particular OS. I'm asking if a company has restricted a website for competitive reasons.

*Not counting something like phone gap.

Is there precedent for a company restricting access to its website by a competitor's device for competitive reasons?

Amazon didn't employ him.

I think this highlights a big difference between media and tech (or at least big tech companies). In tech, leaking is a cardinal sin. Foer chose to send information about a customer pulling an ad campaign to a friend, who then "excitedly" forwarded it to the New York Times. Foer was using internal company information as a weapon in a personal crusade.

They've also helped millions of people get affordable AIDS medication.

http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/jun/15...

I've started reading the book this is excerpted from: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age It's very well written.

It really varies by manager and org. I had one manager who would pull stuff like that. The other managers that I've had have been very flexible.

I agree that there have been institutional changes after the NYT article that have made the company more employee friendly.

I liked Learn You A Haskell For Great Good, but it's available free from the author online.

I think his point is that standards are inherently arbitrary and inflexible and that these specific standards are only beneficial to a "small group". My point is that these standards aren't arbitrary, but well-reasoned, and that they are broadly beneficial (see my post elsewhere for some more examples).

Some standards are enforced by law - fire codes for instance, or food handling standards. Do accessibility standards merit similar treatment? I'd argue that most people now need to use the Internet for basic functions in their lives. For instance, you can't even get a job at a chain grocery store around here without filling out an online application. Given that, there's a strong social interest in making sure that everyone has access. That interest has to be balanced against other interests - costs to businesses for instance. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should treat WCAG the same way we would treat a fire code (which a government agency enforces) or as we treat ADA building compliance (where customers can sue to force compliance), but I do think that a debate on this issue should look at what these standards actually do, and try to balance the interests. I don't think the parent is doing that.

using the law as a bludgeon to force people into obeying arbitrary design policies

They're not arbitrary design policies at all. They're standards that exist for a reason. For instance, if you have some text, display it as text, not as an image of text, because a screen reader won't be able to read it.

The inevitable effect of this kind of legislation is that technology gets worse for everyone, rather than better for a small group.

Actually, complying with accessibility standards makes the web better for everyone. Here's an example. The giant green table on this website used to just be an image[1]. That made the page useless for screen readers, but it also meant that you couldn't copy the data in the table, couldn't resize the text, etc. A common sense change to display this table as text made the page more useful for everyone.

https://www.boston.gov/cityscore

My experience is that WCAG compliance can actually be beneficial to the company. For instance, an employer of mine saw a very significant jump in sales (as measured by A/B testing) by increasing contrast of certain important elements on a page to meet WCAG standards. I'm not saying this is always the case - the percentage of customers using screen readers is very small - but in a lot of cases, thinking carefully about font, color, or contrast choices can help more than just the disabled.

[Edit] To take another example, 10% of men are colorblind. If you're using color to convey information, you may be making your website very difficult to use for 5% of your customers. If you're operating at any kind of scale, the gains in making your website easier to use for 5% of your customers are going to outweigh the costs of making a change by a wide margin.

I've gotten around this (at least a little) by tracking pages read instead of books read.

This actually sounds a lot like Donald Trump's campaign message.

The Helsinki Metro was built in 1982 and has 17 stations, of which 6 are underground. The New York City subway system has 472 stations, almost all of which are either underground or above grade. It was first opened in 1904. The difference in cost and complexity of providing universally accessible service is massive.

This bill is under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn rules enacted by the executive branch in the last 6 months. A joint resolution of disapproval under this act can't be filibustered.[1]

[1]https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43992.pdf

This was done on purpose - the individual specifically said he was doing it to cause a seizure. It's not comparable to hypotheticals you described.

Currently, social security takes in $801.6B in revenue and pays out $750.5B a year, and social security has a $2.8 trillion trust fund. After 2022, outflows will exceed inflows, and social security will have to draw down on that trust fund, which will be exhausted by 2035.[1]

From the charts in the NYT article, Puerto Rico's fund is taking in <$400M a year and paying out >$600M, and their trust fund is less than $1B, and will be exhausted by 2020.

Social security is still running a surplus, and still has a massive trust fund. It definitely seems plausible to make changes that will make it solvent well into the future.

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html

I was talking to someone who worked as an engineer for NASA for decades. He said the work he was proudest of was on the GOES satellites, because they save lives every year by providing data on extreme weather. It looks like weather satellite operations are going to be hardest hit by these cuts.

If you work in tech or academia, you probably know many immigrants. This issue is just as important to the tech world as surveillance.

Not true. Managers are required to work in fulfillment centers (not necessarily during peak season) for a couple days as a means of giving them experience with that part of the company. I think is only for managers above a certain level, but don't remember the details. There's a similar program for customer service call centers.

IANAL but skimming through the complaint, they're basically acting as a "private attorney general". The lawsuit alleges that Google's policies violate state law. Normally, the state would sue the company, but in this case, the law firm is saying that they'll handle the enforcement for the state. If they're successful, they get a percentage of the penalty.

I don't know how damages are divided up in cases like these, but I'd guess that the state's cut would be distributed (at least partially) to affected employees.

Actually a lot has changed since the NYT article (I don't know whether any of it is related to the article):

1. Much better parental leave

2. Easier to transfer internally (no longer need to wait 6 months, transfer can't be blocked by the current manager)

3. At least in my org, more transparent promotion process.

To be clear, my point isn't that central planning is good. My point is that people may prefer centralized control for certain things even though they understand what non-directed processes can accomplish.

To use the author's example of the post office, there may be reasons why one might want the post office to be a public entity beyond "only government could build such a complex system". For instance, it might be reasonable to wonder whether a postal system that evolved organically would cover everyone in a society, or would rural people or others who are expensive to reach be left out. Mail delivery probably qualifies as something we want everyone to have access to in order for a lot of our systems to function.

This piece gets posted here occasionally, and I really disagree with the conclusion that people think that we have to have government because they don't understand the capabilities of non-directed, bottom-up systems.

Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."

It's possible to understand that non-directed systems can produce impressive results and still believe that a directed system might be the right choice for certain situations. Plenty of biologists were Marxists for example (JD Bernal, Steven Jay Gould was very left wing). Surely, they would have understood that complex organisms don't arise from central planning, but from an undirected, emergent process. Yet they also believed that government should play a major role in human society.

Oh come on. I just watched the video again. He says "now the poor guy, you've got to see this guy" and then he starts flailing his hands around and imitating the reporter in a strange voice: "'uh uh uh I don't know what I said ah ah ah I don't remember' he goes like 'I don't remember maybe that's what I said'". I've watched plenty of Trump speeches and have not seen him use hand gestures like that, and I wouldn't associate that gesture with not remembering or hedging on something. I would definitely associate it with a disability like cerebral palsy.

It's definitely not just manufactured by taking a freeze frame. Look at the video.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/...

I think Google risks taking a huge hit to its credibility if the most prominent result for a topic is an outright lie. I'd guess that the loss of credibility/constant PR problems would more than offset the revenue.