fidgewidge

It's really common in any industry that isn't the tech industry, because as the article clearly states the root cause is that "business people" i.e. the non-programmers don't understand programming work and (more importantly) don't want to understand it, not even a little bit. In fact they may take open pride in not understanding it. Note that although the title is "I've been employed in tech" his examples are not tech firms.

People in that environment quickly realize that their bosses can't tell the difference between someone who is hard working, motivated and skilled, and someone else who is a lazy incompetent bullshitter. Indeed they'll probably prefer the latter, especially if that person is the Right Sort Of Person. Nor will they listen to the right people, and often they have no idea even why they employ developers at all except that they are expected to be innovative in some abstract way. At some point this realization dawns and the devs discover that they can just ... not work ... and nothing happens. Nobody notices, nobody cares. The salary keeps rolling in. At first they may think, OK, I'll use the extra time for something work related, like taking online courses. The article mentions Coursera. They first take courses that seem maybe relevant, then they move on to skills their employer doesn't need but might look good on their resume. Then they exhaust the potential for using work time for learning and if they can get work-from-home, may start to just spend time taking care of the house, watching TV or sleeping.

I've seen this happen to a friend. His motivation is gone years ago. His project is nearly a sham that loses money hand over fist and likely and always will, his bosses don't care because he's there to tick the box labelled "we are innovative", decisions get made based on ideology first and what makes sense second, and yet he is very well paid. So, he just enjoys it, whilst dreaming about maybe leaving and doing his own company.

She was easily winning polls of the members. The idea that conservatives are racist is a left wing slur, not reality. She lost because she is too conservative for the Tory MPs, who are well to the left of the party membership.

https://conservativehome.com/2022/07/16/our-next-tory-leader...

In the opinion of the ONS, who are the ones who were publishing the bad figures originally? They're the people being criticized for generating garbage statistics in the first place, of course they're going to claim there's no real problem, so you'd have to test their reasoning.

Their attempt at justifying this bizarre claim is that maybe 2 million people applied to live permanently in the UK but don't actually live there. Literally the first criteria for applying to the scheme is that you live in the UK and the purpose of applying is that you want to continue living there. This reasoning is idiotic on its face and just makes the ONS look even worse, even if we didn't already know that their population statistics were hugely inaccurate from other sources.

Maybe, but I've never heard anyone I know in Europe ever refer to making a chargeback or even raising the possibility of doing one. It certainly isn't common. Perhaps it depends on what country you're in.

Note that chargebacks are mostly a US thing. In Europe you basically can't charge back and last time I enquired about even blocking a company from making new charges I was told that doing this required me to block the entire card and get a new one issued.

It'd really very odd to see Americans insist that they should have the right to take a service, get the money back for it from the business i.e. get the service for free, and then go back and get service again! That's pretty unfair towards the business.

I don't know what your last paragraph is supposed to imply.

It's pointing out that the left hates libertarianism and Peter Thiel, leftism is literally the opposite of libertarianism, and so you would expect a left wing news outlet to try and trash Thiel and libertarians whether or not the argument makes any sense or whether it's actually their fault. It's a bias warning.

since you imply that a publication somehow automatically loses credibility on this topic by leaning left

Funny how so many of the replies are shocked by this idea when virtually every single story posted to HN from a right leaning outlet is flooded with comments of the form "you can't trust this story, it comes from a right leaning outlet" and the post itself will often be quickly flagged to death. What goes around comes around.

Paint me ultra skeptical about all such claims. It might be true or it might not. The error bars on these metrics should be enormous but none are given. In reality the British government has absolutely no idea about even far more basic stats like the size of the population, and calculation of things like GDP/capita and productivity are all heavily influenced by errors in that sort of base figure. Official population estimates are massive under-estimates and there's now lots of evidence that this is true.

Until about 2020/2021 a lot of the case for this had to be built on things like mismatches between expected electricity/water consumption and population claims, but since Brexit and the vaccine rollouts there is now far clearer evidence.

For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.

COVID made the problem even clearer. In some age groups more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed in the country at all. The government claims 9% of the population is unvaccinated but an opinion poll run by the BBC yielded 25%, a likely more accurate figure. The ONS recently had to admit in writing that their vaccine effectiveness numbers were meaningless garbage (and always have been) because if you take them at face value, vaccines are magical elixirs of invulnerability that make you much less likely to die for any reason at all including things that aren't health related, like workplace accidents. The ONS pretends it must be because they missed some confounding factor despite adjusting for some crazy number of them, in reality the explanation is simpler: because the population estimate is far too low, they think there are far fewer unvaccinated people than there really are, and thus the calculated death rate is far higher than it really is. The size of the vaccinated population is known to a higher degree of accuracy and thus the death rate in that group is actually accurate, creating this apparently nonsensical effect.

After 10 years they tried to do a new census, but did it in the middle of lockdowns and the resulting figures were massively out of line with other known figures:

https://www.cityam.com/census-2022-london-population-funding...

"CLF, a group of 12 local authorities, stressed that the figures were “skewed”, with Westminster missing 30,000 residents (15 per cent of the population.)"

So the chance to repair the data was flunked. Although the ONS is in denial, in the past the government has taken some steps towards admitting this. The official population size was downgraded to "experimental" (lol) and could no longer be classified as "national statistics".

A government that can't even count how many people exist on an island is in no position to accurately measure the output or productivity of those people, a far more subjective and complex set of statistics to compute. In reality nobody knows how the British economy is doing. At best they can measure a subset of it.

Not exactly. The membership are only given a choice between two candidates. If the membership actually got to choose who ran the party then we'd most likely have had the first female black PM of the country (Kemi Badenoch), who would also have had computer science training. The MPs unfortunately had other ideas and so members got a choice between Sunak and Truss.

"Brexit means Brexit" was clearly meaningless. However "Get Brexit Done", "Take Back Control" and "Stop The Boats" are all pretty clear as far as three word political slogans are. They're certainly more specific than "Make America Great Again".

They aren't really getting their act together, they aren't doing much different to what they were doing before that poll lead. That lead is the result of the Conservatives having constant leadership turmoil and appointing unpopular people to the Cabinet. It's a consequence of ruling party dysfunction rather than Labour suddenly improving.

That's apples and oranges. With RAID the server is never retired and you don't need to set up auto-scaling and all the scale-out complexity that comes with it. It just keeps running. The replace/resilver cycle may degrade performance whilst the data is re-replicated, but bringing up a new VM will also degrade performance for a while whilst it replicates data from some other node onto itself.

"While there may be differences between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, I've struggled to see them in practice"

I don't think either are actually implemented in practice at the moment, although you can argue that certain aspects of certain politicians or their agendas lean libertarian, and that some societies have in the past been a lot more libertarian than they are today.

The primary difference is this: anarchists of any kind, ancap or not, see no role for the state whatsoever. Libertarianism requires a state to exist, but has a very clearly defined set of roles for it such that anything outside those roles is considered more properly the role of the private sector. At a minimum, the state is expected to implement:

- [Border] defense (armies, navies, passports)

- A violence monopoly within their territory (police, courts, jails, laws against murder, abuse, etc). Yes, this doesn't always sit easy with the US specific gun culture, but the "out" is to say you can own a gun only for self defense, hunting and overthrow of an out of control state, which doesn't infringe on this principle.

- Contract law (civil law courts, ability to levy financial penalties)

- Property rights (land registers, stock markets, bond markets and other financial infrastructure, also quite often IP rights)

- Sufficient taxation to fund those things and subsequent state functions

- Anti-monopoly enforcement

And a bunch of other things that are less well agreed on, but in some interpretations might involve attempts at limiting externalities.

So a libertarian state still has a relatively extensive civil service, it would still have a parliament or congress, tax authorities and so on, but it's smaller and more tightly focused than a non-libertarian state. It is actually implementable in the real world, today, without violating any of the known basics of human nature or government. Libertarians accept that some current roles of the state have evolved for sound reasons but propose that those roles can be done equally well or better by the private sector (e.g. instead of bank bailouts you have narrow banks). We know such countries can exist because they have also existed in the past, for example the early US government was much closer to this ideal than the current one.

Ancaps on the other hand propose a theoretical society that has no government at all yet is also peaceful and prosperous. No such society has ever existed, not even anything close to it, and there are many obvious open questions with no known answers. It's very different.

The ToS forbids that sort of use case.

What will delay UBI adoption is that governments can't afford the current welfare systems, many of which are unsustainable, let alone a much bigger one. France can't even raise the retirement age by like one year due to massive protests but they have to, as the current retirement age is unaffordable.

Yes it does. Why do you insist on stupid word games? The entire book claims to be about libertarians who moved to one specific place - that is literally in the title - and is using "freedom-loving citizens" to refer to them. It's literally about a "town" where nobody else is living, who else is it going to refer to?

It’s a very rich and complex story about many different people

It's about "a barely populated settlement with one paved road" that was taken over by anarchists. Not surprisingly they ended up living in tents, as anarchists are wont to do.

I edited out a comment in my original post asking why some people insist on lying about libertarianism but then took it out, thinking it was overly harsh. Now I wish I'd left it back in. I don't believe you're arguing in good faith, the misrepresentations in that post are just so blatant.

Smart + experienced != productive and valuable. It's possible to be good at your job and also dead weight. Motivation matters.

They're both entirely feasible. The usual canard is that without fractional reserve there is no lending or not "enough" lending, but with full reserve there is still lending of course because people would like a return on their assets. There would be less bad lending but that's what we want, even if it leads to a temporary drop in GDP.

Fauci: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

WHO: "wearing a mask can provide a false sense of security, say experts, leading some to become less vigilant in more important hygiene measures, such as hand washing. Additionally, removing a mask so it no longer covers your nose, or touching the outside of the mask can make it less effective."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/who-should-wear-a-fac...

And they were right! Masks didn't work, it can be clearly seen in graphs of case numbers. But they later reversed that position. To say now that it was all misinterpretation of the never-wrong scientists is revisionist history. Their words were plain and we have the receipts.

it should appear clear that fear is very contagious

This can be true, and the Fed's move can be the right one, and it can still be case that the system has been dishonestly socialized by the back door and that this will have terrible long term consequences. It can also be that the Fed's fears were overblown and that in fact letting SVB and a few other similar banks fail would not wreck the entire system.

Equity and debt holders have been completely wiped out.

Only those who were bag holding at the moment of collapse. There will have been plenty of equity and debt holders who profited from SVB's risk-taking behavior and got out in time to realize that profit. The lesson bank equity holders will learn here is not that banks need to be more careful. It's that you can set up a bank, drive custom and profit with hyper-risky tactics, and as long as you sell your stake before the fraud collapses you'll not only get away scott free but nobody will even care because the large numbers of angry people who might organize politically to get justice will all be bought off by taxes on everyone else.

Libertarianism isn't the same as anarcho-capitalism. If some people are claiming they're the same thing then, well, see above.

No it doesn't. When private healthcare is included the UK spends about the same.

That's the rate which causes people to argue it's being "defunded".

The care home vaccine mandates were far more impactful than Brexit. There were mass resignations when the government forced care home workers (and only them) to take the COVID shots.

Such banks would be highly popular if paired with the other half of the proposal which is to not bail out depositors at collapsed banks.

This book isn't about libertarians. It's about anarchists.

"Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government ... They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity."

Nobody who knows anything about libertarians and is trying to accurately represent it would write that, because the whole reason it exists as an independent thing from anarchism is that libertarians do not want to eliminate the government. They have very clear ideas about what exactly the government should do and that role is much less expansive than in a socialist country or even in America of today, but it's not literally nothing and it certainly doesn't involve living in tents. That's much closer to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in behaviour than libertarians.

Definitely not. Most libertarians I've encountered want hard money i.e. full reserve banking with no central bank money printing. In FRB you cannot have bank runs and with a restricted central bank which can't print more money you can't have ZIRP and the wild swings all over the financial system that it had caused. Instead you have a system in which bank accounts don't pay interest but that's acceptable in many cases because there also isn't any inflation, and if you want a return you invest in a fund that exposes the liquidity constraints in its terms.

The above scheme requires far less government regulation as well, but it does need some, mostly an extension of the idea of theft to encompass fractional reserve banking.

Yes!

I'd say testing/CI is one of the best cases for renting dedicated metal because of the huge speed increase available, everyone hates slow CI, and CI workers are easy to setup so if hw fails (it probably won't) it's not a big deal, you don't need to scale up again immediately.

Way fewer people hate you at the end, which is a meaningful disincentive otherwise.