ImSkeptical

Where I work the security guards greet you as you walk through the gate. I've always thought this was a mechanism for making sure the guards were paying attention. If someone comes in you have to look at the screen that shows their name (and image) and then look at the person to greet them. You are forced, in other words, to do a basic visual check of the image on screen versus the person walking through the gate.

An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.

Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.

I think it really depends on the team you're on at Amazon. (well, the vesting, free drinks etc doesn't).

I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).

No, I couldn't live in such a city. If there was nobody to take out the trash we would have to raise more money to increase salaries for garbage men, etc. Some of it, I could live with less of, and some I'd pay more for.

Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.

To me, that reads as passive aggressive. "It's unfortunate you didn't do your job..."

I think it's a better approach to say "The problems are X. We know this because of Y. My proposed solutions are Z. If you agree, let's get together and figure out how to do Z. If you don't agree, let's get together and figure out where our analyses diverge and how we can come together."

How about "Mind Makers". I think many people will have a natural resistance to joining a community named after how smart the members are. Imagine wearing a button that says "I'm the smartest".

The unnecessary verbosity of these books makes me so mad I could just tug on my braid.

Earlier today I was reading an old AMA by PewDiePie on reddit. A recurring theme was asking him how he got so successful. He talked about how he was there at the right time, had a good niche, great fans, got lucky, etc. Someone replied to him, reminding him that he also uploaded videos three times a day for years.

I agree that instant gratification is a problem, but it doesn't strike me as bad that kids might think YouTube or social media or whatever is an easy way to make money, and then try their hand at it. I think they'll quickly find that success still takes effort and perseverance.

If you’re a single mom and the landlord is harrasing you for sex to pay the rent, is that okay? Where do you place that on the exploitation scale?

People are in that situation where prostitution is illegal and they do it anyway. What's your alternative? To force the woman to do it in secret? To punish her and the John if they get caught? Should she be kicked out? The landlord made to accept no rent? The woman forced to spend another 20 hours at work away from her kids where she might've spent one or two?

It's a shame generally that people have to work for a living. I think that's one of the things "we" are racing to solve by improving technology and automation. I hope there'll be post-scarcity society with a basic income and nobody will be required to make any bad choices. We aren't there yet, so we should try to get there.

I'd agree with you if people were forced into prostitution - and of course what you say does apply correctly to victims of human trafficking who are forced. But I don't think that's always the case.

Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.

I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.

I have thought about building a project that would try to maintain wealth after my death. I imagine the components of this as being...

1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains.

2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment.

3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money.

4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets).

I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions.

After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.

I don't think anyone is opposed to having a high-speed rail line. What people are opposed to is the insane cost, the schedule delays, and the poor output. If you compared this to high speed rail in Japan or China - it would come out looking horrible for California on every meaningful metric.

Regarding your point about Rome - I'm not an expert, but I'd bet the aqueducts provide a valuable service. What are your estimates for how many passengers would need to ride the rail in order to make it worthwhile, and your estimates for how long it would take to serve that many passengers?

Think about the huge amounts of money and the value of the rail (delayed by when you could get that value) and then compare that to other ways you could use that money - for example by leaving it in the hands of the taxpayers.

Suppose the shooter was shooting at public buses though. Would you still expect nothing to happen?

The key difference between your car and a bus is that with the bus the safety of thirty people is involved, plus the willingness of many more people to use buses which the city has an interest in. Your car is you and your family's safety which is a fraction of the importance.

While in New York, I was frustrated with my cousin because she got caught multiple times trying to get off the subway. People kept getting in her way.

I told her to just walk out the exit confidently and directly. If people get the sense that they need to move or be bumped, they will move.

I forget what my cousin said to me, exactly, but it made me realize that she was a slight woman whereas I am a not slight man. People really will move out of my way if it appears I will plow through them. If they don't, I will push through them. For her, that strategy doesn't work as well.

My point is - there are some situations, for some people, where fighting is an option. Just like there are some people and situations where fighting isn't an option. Beating someone isn't always an option.

Why is it ethical to ship a low quality product to generation one customers? I think you're breaching ethics anytime you aren't providing a decent quality of product.

Some products are a great fit for releasing something quick and fixing it later, like a free website. Other products, especially physical goods (car parts, medical equipment, etc) this is obviously a terrible strategy.

I think there is probably something to this explanation. One reason I've seen for why women prefer not to go into start ups, for example, is that it's more of a high risk, high reward, gamble - which is typically more interesting to men. Likewise, ideologically conservative people are likely disposed not to make such risks.

The question isn't, or shouldn't be, "Do we have representation of women/conservatives/whatever in proportion to demographics?" Instead, the question should be "Are we treating people unfairly?"

For example, I'd feel quite comfortable wearing a Burnie Sanders shirt or hat to work. I'd expect that wearing a MAGA hat would cause problems.

Communism is the typical alternative to capitalism.

Why can't we respect human dignity like those communists who murdered and starved tens of millions of people, ruined economies, and consigned countless people to oppression and deprivation?

I have the same experience with ads all the time. Like, I get ads from Google to buy the Pixel XL 2 while I'm browsing the web on the Pixel XL 2 I recently bought from Google on the same account I'm currently signed in to Google with... Or Amazon will give me ads for books and things I recently purchased through Amazon.

I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.

I thought the same thing. It's not just impolite, there are safety implications as well to being revealed as a potentially really rich person. Plus, the person "identified" may or may not have the resources to defend themselves.

I would be curious to know how this failed, if they did try it. Are captcha automatable? You could make it a bit better by challenging every X actions, and have X decline with a failed captcha.

Seems like, if you detect a bot, you should impose a captcha on every x actions. Not enough to ruin your customer's experience, but enough to make botting harder.

Zunger clearly writes that what Damore has done makes people want to punch him in the face. Of writing the memo Zunger says "What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful" and later "its [writing the memo] impact on you: ... a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face." In other words, the impact of writing the memo is that people will want to punch Damore in the face.

Zunger's blog post is extremely obnoxious. Not only does Zunger write something like "everything you say is wrong, but I won't explain any specific way you're wrong, or link to any such explanation" he then goes on to explain engineering to a senior engineer, and grossly misrepresents Damore. In addition he clearly does assign fault to Damore for people wanting to punch him.

but had made tweets like "kill all men".

Personally, I have no problem with people saying things like this, especially in their personal lives. I like banter. But part of banter is that both sides are allowed to play. If someone can express extreme ideas like "kill all men" I should be able to make equally extreme jokes, but in different ideological directions.

What bothers me is not the language, but the unfairness. I can understand not permitting banter at work or in organizations. It makes some people uncomfortable. But what I can't understand is just allowing banter of some ideological bent.

If a product earns money, then hopefully it is providing value to users. If the number of users increase, more value is provided. If the number of users is arbitrarily limited, then people miss value they should get.

I'm sure that plays a part. However, there are small cities around Seattle, with similar climates, that have very few homeless. My interpretation is that these places have less services and the police are more likely to move the homeless. Plus, while living outside in LA doesn't sound so bad, Seattle can't be too high on the list of nice places to live outside.

Another confounding factor is that the workforce tends to be left leaning. Left leaning population, plus new money for taxes means more social services for the homeless. More social services means homeless from less accommodating communities will move in.

I'd also be curious in a study on Amazon's effect on the homeless.

If you want to make this argument, then guns, shelter, food etc have no inherent value, if you don't value survival. Gold, and jewelry, have been appreciated for millennia as pretty objects. Pretty objects improve life quality - and so, if you care about life, you can say that gold has some inherent value.

Finally, you could also reduce it to the fact that possession and distribution of pretty objects can increase your likelihood of reproduction. From an evolutionary standpoint, access to reproduction is an inherently valuable thing.

It's a strange form of chauvinism to assert that the US is responsible not only for it's misdeeds, but also the misdeeds and deficiencies of others. By claiming that the US is more responsible for the problems of Columbia than Columbians are, you tacitly deny them agency.

I would never say the US is without corruption, but it is less corrupt than Columbia. I don't think that's a function of wealth, there are poorer countries less corrupt than the US.

However, regardless of the corruption of the US, Columbia - the government and cartels operating there, are responsible for their own misdeeds. The money comes from America - sure. So legalize the drug trade in Columbia and handle it that way, or stamp out the cartels. What's not acceptable is to allow the cartels to corrupt and corrode society and commit evil on innocent people.

I absolutely think drugs should be legal or decriminalized depending on the drug. However, blaming this on US drug policy is an overreach. The United States has illegal drugs, but no encampments of slaves and child sex slaves destroying the environment to dig for gold. The culprits here are the corrupt and weak government of the countries like Columbia that permit such activities and, of course, the criminal gangs that execute these activities.

In my original example the dilemma was between denying a suspected terrorist the right to consult with a lawyer and risking a nuclear terrorist attack. I gave this as an example of when idealism and pragmatism are in conflict. When you objected that this was unrealistic, I responded by giving a real life example where idealism and pragmatism were in conflict.

The purpose of my example was to create a situation where it should be obvious the right move is to go against idealism. The reason is, if your starting point is something like "We must never deny people their rights" I'd like to show you an extreme example where, actually, we must. If you can agree on the extreme example, then the discussion becomes a matter of degree - i.e. when is it okay to deny people their rights versus when it is not. This is actually the more nuanced and realistic discussion that has applicability to the real world.