candybar

It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.

No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.

The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding

If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Also on this:

You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

My point here is that she's doing both.

Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.

It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.

I think you're misreading that last line. I'm pretty sure what the author is saying is:

the evening we found the love letters my mom said to me, "he wasted his entire life, his entire life, and mine as well."

Also, I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.

Aggression and building rapport aren't mutually exclusive - a lot of this is subtle negotiation for relative status. Just because all parties are okay with these as a way to get to a reasonable common ground (and if done right, can lead to strong rapport and relatively equal status) doesn't mean aggression isn't there. I don't think most of this is conscious, but you will also see conspicuously high-status people use self-deprecating humor to lower their perceived threat level, or conversely, people targeting other conspicuously high-status or threatening people to take them down a notch (to some extent, this is what we're seeing here). Or in a more hierarchical situation, high-status people might target lower-status people to reinforce their higher status.

How are you defining groceries here? I suspect that some people are being fairly expansive and including everything that they'd buy at a grocery store, while others are being much more restrictive. Using a more expansive definition (mostly because I've literally broken things down by items), we're close to $500 per person, the few times I've spot-checked our spending. I think it's difficult to be well-below $200 per person without being highly budget-conscious, avoiding expensive categories altogether and/or eating out all the time.

Labor participation rates among women haven't changed drastically since the 80's. Also:

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/06/22/us-household...

In fact, this is also a period when the number of two-income households shrunk, from 35% in 1987 to 32% in 2020. During this time period, overall household income increased by 18.5% (inflation-adjusted with the CPI-U-RS). For households with just one earner, income increased by almost the exact same amount (19.1%). Income of two-earner households did increase even more (37.7%), so seeing the full distribution would be very useful.

If you find yourself having to hit the brakes hard frequently because a pedestrian stepped off the curb while being distracted, you probably also need to pay more attention while driving.

My general experience is that in practice, in most areas, most drivers don't yield enough and most pedestrians yield too much because the pedestrian has a lot more to lose. It's also important to remember that driving is a privilege specifically granted by the state, walking is not.

You're wildly off the mark here. From the study quoted:

In 2017, over 60% of 110,531 US veterinarians were female, and in 2016, approximately 80% of students enrolled at US veterinary medical colleges were female.

The PMRs for suicide for all veterinarian decedents (2.1 and 3.5 for males and females, respectively), those in clinical positions (2.2 and 3.4 for males and females, respectively), and those in nonclinical positions (1.8 and 5.0 for males and females, respectively) were significantly higher than for the general US population.

So no, this has nothing to do with vets being disproportionately male (which isn't the case to begin with).

Sure, but at this point you're no longer talking about why vets are dying from suicide at a higher rate. We don't know if vets tend to deal with more "distress and hopelessness" than the general population.

Yup, suicidal attempts are often impulsive, so any barrier (in this case literally) even if it's relatively easy to get around, reduces suicide rates. Here's another study, this time on firearms:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-owner...

The researchers found that people who owned handguns had rates of suicide that were nearly four times higher than people living in the same neighborhood who did not own handguns. The elevated risk was driven by higher rates of suicide by firearm. Handgun owners did not have higher rates of suicide by other methods or higher rates of death generally.

Suicide attempts by firearm are far more likely to complete than most other means, ergo, suicide death rates are higher among those that have firearms.

We can talk about other negative aspects of being a vet, but the primary factor is that they know how:

But that reality of the job can also colour the way veterinarians view human lives – including their own – and for those already experiencing suicidal ideation, it can provide a simple justification: death is preferable to suffering. In a 2021 survey by pharmaceutical company Merck, 12.5% of the veterinarians surveyed said they were "suffering". And nearly half of the respondents were not receiving mental health care.

"There's an idea that veterinarians work on the belief that it's right to euthanise a hopeless case," says Volk, "and we are seeing ourselves, emotionally, as hopeless cases."

Death is a routine and repeated part of the job, and while it's never easy to end a life, Volk adds that it is easy to start seeing it as an option to alleviate their own distress. "I have medications in my clinic that are called 'Euthasol', and I euthanise all the time," she says. "Literally like five or six times a night."

The CDC's 2019 study identified poisoning as the most common cause of death among veterinarians. The primary drug used was pentobarbital, one of the main medications used for animal euthanasia. The study’s authors determined that "training on euthanasia procedures and access to pentobarbital are some of the key factors contributing to the problem of suicide among veterinarians".

What often stops otherwise suicidal folks is that it's not an easy thing to do - suicide attempts usually do not lead to deaths (https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/psychiatry-... - 5.4% according to one study, and the denominator here is # of people. not # of attempts). Vets on the other hand are trained to put down animals painlessly and effectively - it's not a surprise that those that have the means to complete suicide and have plenty of experience applying this to other animals then die disproportionately from suicide.

I think this is a good take - the legal theories mentioned in this thread (1st amendment, Section 230) seem mostly baseless, but this doesn't seem like appropriate legislation at the state-level either way. I don't know enough about the commerce clause restrictions on state regulations, but I do wonder if that comes into play given that moderation policies will almost always have interstate and international commerce implications.

This is legally nonsensical - nothing about Section 230 precludes any further restriction on moderation by another entity. Section 230 is and has always been about the act of moderation not specifically creating liability for the carrier of user-generated content - nothing about Section 230 grants the publisher any specific right not to be subject to further moderation at another level.

The first amendment angle is a stronger argument, but unfortunately for X, it's also extremely weak and would require overriding decades of precedence and essentially create a crisis - there are far more onerous regulations in place that are still relied upon in a way that having them constitutionally challenged would be extremely damaging.

This is content-free nonsense - it's easy to do the math, but those who are eligible for significant "credit boost" from Obama-era whatever plans are non-factors when it comes to influencing home prices in the bay area housing market for obvious reasons.

You have to be almost economically illiterate to believe any of this - it's sad how ideology shapes thought and transparent garbage like this gets published everyday.

It's even worse than that - $44,356 is the median salary for high school graduates aged 25 or over with a full-time job (it's extrapolated from the median weekly wage of $853) in 2022:

https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...

It's unclear exactly what qualifications apply to "a third of students earn less than $40,000" - I was not able locate an actual source for this claim - but the way it's written, it appears to include everyone, possibly even those that are not in the workforce at all. Also, given a huge increase in nominal income over the past couple years, it's difficult to evaluate this claim without a clear sense of what time frame this covers.

It's also unreasonable to compare college graduates 4 years after graduation to a cohort that includes mid-career professionals decades into their career. Consider for instance, how much doctors tend to make 4 years after graduating from college and how unrepresentative that would be of their full career earning potential.

I would go even further - it's complete nonsense. I'm going to guess the author never wondered why Americans feel uncomfortable asking for a discount at a store and would rather just not buy when they would've happily bought it at half the price, whereas in many parts of Asia, it's common for customers to ask for what seem like outrageous discounts to a westerner. Norms are highly contextual - in every culture there are things you can ask for and there are things you can't - and there's huge individual variation in the willingness to adhere to norms and the willingness to make others uncomfortable to get what you want.

[Because of something something Asian culture] My parents rarely had to make explicit asks of me,

It baffles me how anyone with any kind of awareness could write this.

Btw, your message behind this is that you should work at a startup (maybe yours), is that correct? How do you plan to compensate individuals who do this type of work at your own startup?

Sure but a lot of things don't happen without that one person pushing for it. If Alex is correct that he's the one who pushed for it to happen and created the momentum for this product feature to exist, despite many others actively pushing against it, that to me deserves a lot of credit.

Now, I have no idea if that's true and to what extent it's true - it's common for ICs to be unaware of the work others have done behind the scenes to convince the right folks and unblock their work (not saying that this is what happened, just that it's not inconsistent with Alex's perception that he drove this himself) - but I'm not sure how anything you're saying disproves his version of the story. You could say that about just about every startup founder.

Sure, it's a privilege, but the privilege does not exist for the benefit of its employees.

What purpose an organization turns it's work to is up to the people who make the decisions, and varied.

Just because they can do certain things does not mean it's ethical. Employees themselves are agents, not principals - employees making decisions to enrich themselves at the expense of actual owners is highly problematic from an ethical standpoint.

A lot of people in this thread seem to be confusing the fact that employees acting for the benefit of shareholders is not strictly enforceable and the benefit itself does not have to be monetary in nature with the idea that employees can do whatever they want with the power that they have. This is simply not the case - sure, employees don't have to maximize for the short-term profits or stock price, or even in some cases, companies can be mission-driven, with a long-term mission that's prioritized ahead of profit-maximizing.

None of this means it's reasonable to make a decision to hold on to employees for the employees' benefits, rather than the corporation's benefit, except to the extent that it helps the long-term mission of the company.

Banks don't know which of their borrowers are insolvent - in a credit crisis, the problem isn't merely that the banks aren't paid what they are owed, but that there's a systematic increase in the perceived default risk of their borrowers on average. Giving money to everyone substantially lessens the overall risk of their loan portfolio. This encourages, of course, more lending.

The rest of what you're talking about is fairly standard economic stimulus and it's not that controversial or unprecedented and has little to do with debt jubilee.

I'm not necessarily against any of this - the point is more that the mechanism proposed (giving money to everyone with the intent of helping people pay off their loans) does not match the rhetoric (GP decrying too much debt and socialism for the rich).

everyone gets the same nominal payout, debtors must use the payout to pay off debt

I'm generally supportive of these types of measures especially in a financial crisis, but keep in mind that economically, this isn't too different from a bank bailout. The primary net effect of giving people money to pay off their loans is making lenders whole.

Once again, this doesn't even make the slightest bit of economic sense and you're once again failing to understand extremely very basic points. No one is saying saying FAANG only competes against each other. It's just that you're completely unable to articulate any actual theory as to what's going on and why anyone would do it. Like which companies are talent-starved vs which companies are part of the cabal? How does the cabal even know which other companies are talent-starved and which other companies are trying to do the same thing they are? How do they even coordinate this? Even assuming your theory (which is simply mathematically impossible) is plausible, do you think all these big company CEOs meet and decide on quotas, so that everyone has to hire X amount? Everyone benefits from hiring less, right? What is the enforcement mechanism here?

Also, it's simply not economically possible for the cabal to be so threatened by the talent-starved companies as to engage in completely self-sabotaging actions to increase their own cost, while these apparently exceptional talent-starved companies are unable to outbid companies that derive no actual value from the talent.

Anyone who's familiar with any type of organization (and even have cursory knowledge of economics) should be able to see that overhiring has mostly to do with the fact that managing a larger team confers status to the manager while the cost is borne by the organization, so there are systemic incentives for managers at all levels to increase and compete for scope, which is inherently inefficient with respect to the goals of the organization at large. Ignoring these dynamics and focusing on implausibly airtight collusion between large entities that are made up of 10s or even 100s of thousands of people that constantly leak everything is just pure naivete.

But it absolutely calls in question the notion these companies wouldn't do something just because they're "competing" against each other.

This doesn't make any sense and you're misunderstanding the original comment. The point is the idea that they are hurting their bottom line by overhiring, but the whole thing works out because it prevents their competition from hiring is completely nonsensical, when you're alleging that they are all doing it. If they are all hurting themselves by overhiring, they can't be deriving any benefit from keeping the talent away from your competition. Your competition is also overhiring and doesn't need the talent either. So keeping them away from your competition helps your competition at your expense.

Sure but that collusion actually makes sense from their perspective and is literally the exact opposite of what's being alleged, which is that Big Tech is essentially keeping the cost of talent artificially high in order to hurt their competition.

I mean this is true in that large organizations are internally wasteful - a lot of people are just there to shuffle resources around and a lot of the decisions are bad, entire teams are working on worthless projects, etc.

But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it's just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste.

Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.

This is and has always been nonsense. FAANGs (and more) all compete against each other and if they do not derive significant value from these hires, it doesn't make any strategic sense to bloat your headcount just to prevent your rivals from also bloating their own headcounts.

In case someone goes "but what about the startups" - it doesn't make sense for any individual large tech company to hire people just to prevent them from starting startups or being hired at startups, given that most startups don't compete with them and often help create moat for their own business, not to mention that their own hiring (as opposed to big tech hiring as a whole) has a negligible effect on the talent pool as a whole.

First, companies want their stock price to go up. This is more important to them than profit margins, because the people making decisions (as are most employees) are renumerated largely in stock. Simply keeping a business profitable and stable will not increase stock prices, you need to convince investors that you have great plans which will make the company stronger. Hiring more employees makes this look more convincing.

Your other points are valid but this part is completely incorrect - Wall Street investors are extremely sensitive to costs and love high-margin businesses. No investor believes that just because you're hiring and increasing costs, that you will magically grow revenue. The cause and effect are almost in the opposite direction - strong past revenue growth (and consequent high stock prices) cause executives to be over optimistic about other opportunities, which lead to overhiring, which then allows the other effects you mention (which are valid) to take hold. But the root cause isn't stock prices going up because of overhiring, but as a rational response to past success.

One very easy way to disprove this is by looking at the experience of startup employees after acquisition. Now the product is no longer offered by a startup, but by a big company. Do things get easier now that they are at established companies? Do you now have clear requirements?

Of course not - in many cases, things get drastically more difficult. Instead of being able to pursue a clear vision, you often have to deal with tons of inter-organizational politics. You have all these extra stakeholders that are trying to influence you, some with good intent, others not so much. More processes need to be imposed, there's more pressure for standardization/integration both in terms of the product features, implementation, not to mention processes.

And this is about apples to apples it gets.

Another way to think about this is that there's a reason why startups are successful despite the massive advantages incumbents and larger companies enjoy. It's because certain things are harder at bigger companies. Then how could it be that being at a startup is uniformly harder? Startups exist in large part because they are more efficient or make things easier. If you flip that around, it means trying to do some of those same things at a big established company can be objectively harder.

You still need to aggregate and contextualize these in terms of overall business and product strategy. Yes, engineers can do that too and some percentage of engineers are good at this as well - and being able to understand and formulate product strategy can be an important part of an engineering leader's skill set - but that's not that common and ultimately you need some level of specialization and you can't run an org expecting everyone to be able to do everything.

I've done both Eng and Product and most engineers don't have sufficient understanding or appreciation for the importance of product strategy. It's also important to be able communicate strategy coherently at some scale, especially if execution isn't expected to be completely top-down. At some point, engineers just have too much else to do and you need coordination.

Edit: I'll also add that engineers aren't the only ones doing work - Product Managers are expected to be able to coordinate across functions and get everyone on the same page, not everything is about just providing input to engineers.

I'm not making a grandiose claim that being at a startup is indescribably hard. There are lots of hard jobs.

I've also had executive roles at startups, personally know tons of founders and tons of people that have worked in executive positions at startups and tons of other people that have worked in big tech companies, management consulting firms and investment banks, big law firms and so on. An executive role at a startup is simply not some type of outlier experience from a difficulty perspective. It all comes down to core competencies.

The issue here isn't that Tracy hired someone who doesn't have startup experience, but more that she hired someone who had been removed from day-to-day technical execution for decades, whose core competency at this point was dealing with bureaucratic complexity at a scale that simply didn't exist at her company and expected him to operate effectively at a level where you need to be significantly more hands-on.

This has nothing to do with startup vs big company. If you put this person as a line manager at a big tech company, it wouldn't go so well either. On the other hand, big tech L6/L7 type managers would be perfectly fine in these roles.

Not quite what I'm saying here but a similar perspective:

https://a16z.com/2010/04/21/why-is-it-hard-to-bring-big-comp...

I'm not moving the goalpost, you are. You're not the only one with lived experience and having had a job and founded a couple of companies doesn't allow you to generalize to come to the conclusion that:

Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Because this simply isn't true. The point is also not that my experience trumps yours - the point is that this isn't generalizable and you're not comparing apples to apples.

Being at a startup doesn't have to be hard, at any level. And you and Tracy are certainly ascribing difficulties that arise from having responsibilities that are at times beyond your own capabilities and being extremely emotionally invested in the success of the company to being at a startup.