caseydurfee

"it is still much lower than what it would be in an unregulated environment."

Counterfactual. The article you link to is laughable on the face of it. "A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" carries about the same intellectual heft as "A new study for the Eat More Beef Center at Hamburger University."

You seem the sort of person able to recognize others' ideologies while incorrectly assuming your own beliefs are rational and well-founded. Are you generally tolerant of or convinced by counterfactuals when they don't support your ideology?

Any list of "free" countries that has [the UAE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Ara...), Chile and Singapore in their top 10 is using "free" in the Orwellian sense.

"Labor Freedom" is perhaps the most galling. One might think it would cover the right of laborers to organize and collectively bargain. Or the right to have safe working conditions, sick days, severance pay, access to childcare and healthcare.

In fact, it's the exact opposite. A perfectly free workforce in Heritage Foundation's verbiage would be one with no worker protections or individual rights of any kind and a 100% labor participation rate - to them, quite literally, "labor freedom" is slavery.

Maybe France does have to many workers' rights to compete with other countries, who knows. Heritage's numbers aren't granular enough for me (or you) to assess that. But re-defining the meanings of basic words so one can accuse people who disagree with you of "hating freedom" is pathetic. Please try to find some other way to make your case that's befitting educated adults discussing a serious issue.

Point of clarification: Pai was appointed to the 5 person FCC commission by Obama. He was named chairman by Trump. FWIW, the previous chairman, Tom Wheeler (ostensibly a Democrat), probably would've dismantled net neutrality if Obama hadn't come out strongly in favor of it.

I find it incredibly frustrating that people clearly see the need for referees in sports, but not in business. Nobody's saying that the NFL or the NBA would have better competition if there were no refs.

What's the point of content-free, incoherent, misspelled comments like this one? There's nothing even remotely like what you're describing in the actual article.

"The government hardly ever creates wealth. They can create the conditions for wealth creation by getting the heck out of the way."

Yes, we're aware that's how it works in shitty novels about trains from the 1950's.

Here in the real world, every single technological innovation in the iPhone was created by the US Government, or with the assistance of US government-funded basic research. This book breaks the whole thing down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State

Google Maps is a particularly terrible example. It wouldn't exist without GPS, a technology invented by the US government.

Hong Kong's government puts billions of dollars a year into technology research. That's not a good example, either. Furthermore, HK has lower income inequality than Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Burundi, The Gambia, Swaziland, Botswana, CAR, Sierra Leone and Namibia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... . So your statement "everybody else has just about the same as everybody else" in sub-Saharan Africa is total bullshit.

Japan and Scandinavia have relatively low rates of income inequality (especially compared to sub-Saharan Africa). Are you saying those countries are less innovative than Namibia (highest income inequality in the world)?

Finally, the idea that the sole difference between "Sub Saharan Africa" (a region that encapsulates over a billion people and over 40 countries which you regard as a monolith) and Hong Kong is due to "government policies" is childishly ignorant. Africa is not a country.

All the truthering in this thread is a bit much.

Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm getting more than a whiff of that here.

I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry Salieris in these parts.

"your poor lifestyle decisions."

Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?

The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.

I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.

The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."

Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.

For some perspective here, the maternal mortality rate in the USA is 28 per 100,000 births. So skydiving is about 50x safer than giving birth.

Inflation also took off like a rocket in Switzerland in the early 1970's: https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/inflation-cpi

Switzerland was on the gold standard until 1999. Since abandoning the gold standard, inflation in Switzerland has been minimal.

Clearly abandoning the gold standard does not necessarily lead to inflation. You haven't even shown a correlation here, much less causation.

"If you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech."

I get that the guy is angry. I would be too if I got locked out of my accounts, but this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." The idea that google is waging war on this guy because of election predictions he made 12 months ago is absurd on the face of it.

Our society has been completely taken over by Hofstadter's [paranoid style](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...). Everything is taken as evidence of some vast conspiracy of fascists or communists. (A couple weeks ago there was an article posted here alleging that google was suppressing anti-communist websites.)

Replace "freemasons" or "international bankers" with "social justice warriors" and we're right back in the 1950's again.

Comcast is the most hated corporation in America. There's already a big competitive opportunity for non-terrible ISPs.

A lot of products start with half the population, though, and it's not considered weird. The old euphemism is "shrink it and pink it" - originally design for men, then put out a women's version.

If Spectacles take off, they can always "grow it and bro it" later. Starting off with a focused target market seems like a reasonable approach to me.

Apparently, a company with a 644 Billion dollar market cap, co-founded by a man whose parents fled the USSR for political reasons, is secretly trying to promote Communism.

Isn't the control group the part of the graph from 1993-2000ish, where perception and reality are fairly closely correlated?

I guess that raises more questions than it answers. What about the rise of cable news? That tracks the change in the graph more closely than the rise of social networks. What about 9/11 and the war on terrorism? A significant portion of the US population lost their shit and never got it back. I'm not sure we should pin all or even most of the change on social media.

I think you have a point that the "good old days fallacy" has been around since forever. But it also seems like something dramatically changed 15 years ago or so.

Century: Spice Road would be an obvious match for Splendor.

Having regulations doesn't turn this country into a "state-run economy". Is America currently a state-run economy because of the existence of the FDA, the USDA, etc? What are these countries you believe have no regulations, and have "produced virtually all the wealth we see around us"?

"so little trust and understanding"

Assuming smugly that people who disagree with you don't understand how capitalism works is childish and totally out of line.

In general, please try to make your point in a way that doesn't assume people who disagree with you are ignorant or stupid. Nobody here is saying that regulation makes everything better. It's a strawman.

For anyone who didn't read the entire article, this is the part that these comments are complaining about:

Since all new creativity is held hostage in the hands of insensitive investors who promote the development of White business leaders to the exclusion of any other forms of creativity. Seventy five percent of all investment dollars are placed into the hands of White men. In the tech industry, most companies are run by, lead by, and pay the bulk of their company’s value to White men, the primary beneficiaries of such investment effort.

1. This certainly doesn't posit that all white people live perfect lives.

2. This is 74 words out of a 2600 word long essay, for crying out loud.

3. He's not wrong. If you're concerned with "wealthy vs not wealthy" it's entirely relevant that one particular cohort is far more likely to be in the wealthy group rather than other cohorts.

I get so tired of people looking to get offended by things like this.

Yeah, the article would be much more effective and useful if the advice was "if you hear these phrases, don't assume the developers are lying/bad at their jobs/etc. but do take it as a cue to ask about the business/customer value of doing ____".

Being technical or nontechnical is orthogonal to being able to ask the right questions about customer value. Nontechnical managers will go "framework? well if you say so" because they don't understand the tech. Technical managers will go "new framework? well if you say so" if the plan is technically well thought out, ignoring whether or not it actually creates business value.

As a product manager, do you have developers formally reporting to you? That seems like a bad idea. If a PM doesn't have formal authority over developers but thinks of themselves that way, that's also bad.

Hearing "Alinksy playbook" in 2017 is like hearing "Who Let the Dogs Out" in 2017. https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/01/29/ally-ally-alinsky-ri...

If you wish to be taken seriously by intelligent adults, maybe try to find a way to make your point that isn't just a word salad comprised of decade-old shibboleths.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Are you sure the jobs that rely on soft skills and experience are more routine than other jobs? What experience do you have to support that?

I've found that once you throw humans into the mix, nothing is routine. I think CS schools do their grads a huge disservice by creating the expectation that the coding is the hard part.

There are a lot of people who can reverse a linked list who can't coordinate a huge project, or build a product from the ground up that people care about. If those are soft skills (implying they're less challenging to pick up), why do most engineers only develop them after they're pretty skilled technically?

In my experience, it's not because they're forced to in order to make up for declining mental horsepower. It's because what you're calling the "hard skills" have become routine to them, and they want to do harder things than they can accomplish as an individual contributor. They want to do work that's less routine.

Why label soft skills as "not thinking"? Humans are way more complex than computers.

I've had similar experiences, but I also think your answer could be paraphrased as "conferences are good because extroverts like them." Some people who are otherwise really good developers aren't going to get much value from a bunch of forced socialization.

Also, in context of "companies should pay for their employees", none of the experiences you note benefitted the company. If you had left the company because you met a new connection at a conference, not only would the employer be out $3K to send you to the conference, they'd be out $50K or more to hire your replacement.

I use a little shell script to send iTerm2 proprietary escape codes to change the color of the terminal window based on the value of $*.

https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

My frustration is that the right wing has been doing this to people on the left for 70 years.

It's not OK that the left has started doing it to the right, but the people I see going on about "liberal witch hunts" and "Literally Hitler" and "This is why Trump won" I didn't see having a problem back when Jonah Goldberg wrote a bestselling book about how Hillary was "Literally Hitler", or a problem when Limbaugh/Hannity/OReilly were saying that anti-war protesters were terrorist lovers.

These people didn't have a problem when entertainers who spoke out against George W Bush were blackballed. Or when people who opposed the DOMA were accused of being anti-Christian. Or all the bullshit about Vietnam vets getting spit on (it never happened, but it's still accepted as conventional wisdom that it did.) People have gotten threatened and fired from their jobs for supporting gun control - why no outrage about that? People who are pro-choice still get accused of being baby-killers. Where's the outrage about that from the frozen peach lover community?

Being accused of being a traitor to America or to Christianity for holding leftist political beliefs has been the social norm since the 1950's in this country. I wish people would quit acting like some 13 year old liberals on Tumblr started this shit.

Suggested Reading: Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, by Sean Hannity The Crucible, by Arthur Miller Literally any post on Breitbart, ever.

"800 ms time to first load to 80 ms"

It's a mistake to equivocate TTFB with being 10x faster for the user. It's clickbait. The vast majority of that speedup is not from using static files, but from putting the data on a global CDN (Amazon's Cloudfront in this case - Netlify didn't build their own.)

Put it this way: if you have caching, and a page on your site gets hit 1000 times, 999 times it's going to be as fast for the user no matter what the backend technology used is because it's not going to the backend. So if the first hit takes 800 msec against Wordpress, then the other 999 requests take 80 msec, then using the static file instead of Wordpress only makes it 1% faster, not 10x faster.

For the record, the new Smashing Magazine design is visually complete in about 4.5 seconds: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_MY_PJ5/1/details/#...

The old one is visually complete in about 5.8 seconds: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170318_T8_Q2D/1/details/#...

So, in both cases, time to first byte is a small fraction of how much time it takes for the page to look done to the user, and by no reasonable criterion should it be considered 10x faster now.

By putting their stuff on a decent CDN instead of whatever the heck "auslieferung.commindo-media-ressourcen.de" is, they made their page 25% faster. That's great! But it's bizarre to see something that is pretty much how Movable Type worked in 2002 as a breakthrough in web performance or technology.

The secret sauce here is using a global CDN, not being buzzword compliant. Setting up Varnish is not particularly hard. Setting up Cloudfront or another CDN is not particularly hard. You could do that and still use Wordpress, if that's what you like.

Sadly, I feel like a great number of comments in this thread could be summarized as:

If a woman prefers a man with wealth or status, she's a gold-digger, and feminism is wrong about women -- they want traditional gender roles. Women are just naturally drawn to wealth and status despite what feminism says they should want.

If a woman has sex with a man regardless of his wealth or status, she's a slut. Feminism is wrong about women -- they are naturally attracted to "bad boys", not "Good guys" who are responsible and work hard. "Good guys" are being cheated out of sex by women. If they support feminism despite the fact that women no longer value social/economic status, which reduces their chances to have sex, they are "white knights".

If a woman won't have sex with a man, it's because she's a frigid bitch -- feminism has made men irrelevant. Feminism is responsible for suicide bombers and spree killers because they couldn't get sex from women.

It's amazing to me how much pseudoscience and entrail-reading comes into discussions of gender. It's so tightly linked to our experience of the world that it's almost impossible not to spin one's own experiences into quasi-rational explanations.

For example, this quote from the article: "A substantial number go on to have children with a second partner, or even a third, creating complex and unstable family lives that are not good for children."

Says who? Human beings have pretty much always lived in extended clans with "complex family lives". The nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in the history of homo sapiens. The whole article seems to be trying to paint a picture that humans lived in nuclear families from the dawn of time to just a few years ago -- that it is taking children away from the way they are meant to be raised. In fact, this is bringing humans closer to the way they've pretty much always lived, in extended clans with complex family trees, with incredibly complex language for describing those relations.

"This creates challenges for the people (usually women) who have to raise a child without the economic or social support of a partner. Their struggles are why the authors see such an uptick in children living in poverty in the aftermath of a decline in manufacturing employment."

This is just terrible writing. Women raising children without support of a partner would, by definition, not be affected by the decline in jobs for men. The whole article (and many of the comments here about it) are filled with these kinds of self-refutations and self-fulfilling prophecies. People just start with a conclusion when it comes to gender and work backwards.

I'm wary to offer my own opinions on these issues, because they might be just as full of confirmation bias, question begging, and social proof-seeking. Maybe human beings are just really bad at discussing this topic.

The webpagetest of the blog post is pretty telling: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170215_26_MSDP/1/details/...

6.5 seconds to fully load the page in a desktop browser over cable modem. Over 18 seconds on a low-end Android phone. 9 web fonts loaded. Over 1.5 MB of javascript downloaded. Tracking beacons from ads-twitter, multiple "netlify.com" subdomains, addtoany, segment, intercom, mixpanel, twitter analytics, double click and GA, most of them blocking the load of the page.

TTFB is kind of a vanity metric. If you're serious about it, the way to achieve that is using varnish + edge caching rather than switching to static HTML pages. You can have good TTFB and still have a slow rendering page, as this illustrates.

(edit: spelling)

You're going to get a hernia if you keep straining that hard.

What other diseases related to "inflammation and immune activity" do you think that people can just think their way into and out of?

Do you believe I can think my way into and out of a sprained calf, for instance? How about rheumatoid arthritis? IBD? Alzheimer's?

What medical training do you have to make claims like the ones made above? If none, what do you think you are contributing to the conversation?