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confluence

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The world is more complex than you think it is.

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I don't have that impression. I do believe we need a coalition that builds towards the ideals promised. The closest we have is the FANG cohort, but even then in only a few verticals (with some "progress" not being particularly helpful long term), with the rest of the economy improving drastically slower than they should. Science is the same - outside of some fields.

What I am saying is that if we do want to achieve impressive results at a massive scale, it's gonna require everyone to up their respective games by an order of magnitude. Globally we need everything to get better, much faster, period.

Difficult to bring about the singularity without historic levels of technical competency and financial investment. Anything less is simply being contemptuous of the true challenge that must be overcome to achieve even 1/10th of what could be possible. A bunch of lectures, or sci-fi-esque stories really aren't going to do anything to achieve it past the first batch that really opened it up, but they do have an effect on what people care about, and what motivates them, so they aren't totally worthless.

Imagine if scientists approached bringing about the Manhattan Project without also demanding 10% of US GDP for five years, multiple state spanning test sites, absolute discretion, and the work output of hundreds of thousands. Same goes for the Apollo project.

Achieving the promises of the Singularity - whatever that happens to be exactly - is bigger than all of those nation spanning projects combined.

And we will only get there through enormous quantities of technical and organizational blood, sweat and tears spanning decades, and more likely, centuries. The work required is bigger than every research org, every country, and every company, so it looks less like "hard take off" and more like faster plodding.

Not holding management responsible makes me think you might have owned a company.

Let me spell out the compact that undergirds capitalism: employees don't take risks and are paid a constant stream of cash, owner's do take risk, and it is up to them to ensure there is enough capital buffer to meet their constant stream obligations. Employees do the work, management/owners ensure they get paid.

As an employee of a company, I'm paid salary for my time.

I'll take a pay cut for more equity if I want it, not for nothing.

If I take risk, I get rewarded with ownership, but if I'm paid cash, why do I honestly care what happens to a company.

This isn't some fairytale, we're all here to get paid, and employees​ aren't your buffer for bad cash flow management, that's the responsibility of owners and management.

Strongly concur.

Also make this a yearly habit, so you stay on the ball, know where the market is at, and become comfortable leaving at a moment's notice to avoid this life changing anxiety you might be feeling.

Once you do it regularly, it's no big deal. Companies hire and fire dozens of people a year, it shouldn't be that different for you.

Pretty much. Ever notice that anytime anyone wants to "fix" hiring they end up developing systems that are just cancer.

If you can't figure out if you want to hire someone in < 1 hr talking to them, you suck at hiring.

So you see a high developer attrition rate, and go, I know, I'll fill it with 3 month code bootcamp graduates?

No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.

He was very clever with that wasn't he?

Everyone should be free to consume whatever they want, so long as they know what they want is killing them, and there are no distortions by the purveyors of such products that they are anything other than what they are - namely bad for you.

You want to smoke? Go ahead. You want to get obese and severely shorten both your life and its quality by consuming caloric dense nutrient deficient drinks/foods? Go right on ahead. It's your life to screw up.

But don't you dare stand there and tell me that letting these corporations that profit from the damage people do to themselves be free to run around going "OH NO cigarettes are totally fine! OH NO diet isn't the issue - just exercise more - here have a coke". Kids are literally dying because of this shit, and I frankly won't stand by it.

What I am against is systematic and dirty propaganda operations that directly harm the national interest for trivial sums of profit by lying to the population through their teeth and in turn inflicting untold amounts of misery on millions of our citizens.

They can't win because they are on the wrong side of history and they are fighting dirty by using stealth operations to turn the conversation from diet to exercise. As if the average American can, or will, exercise enough to even burn off 1 additional can of soda on top of their already caloric rich diets.

What they are doing is no different from the various operations Big Tobacco did in the past to misinform, dissuade or deflect the conversation on cigarettes.