lacey

This sort of argument comes up all the time, claiming governments somehow screw everything up but private industry has some sort of amazing track record at producing value.

There’s a continuous stream of evidence to the contrary, particularly if you’ve ever worked for large companies and seen the kind of wasted resources that go toward pet projects and other high value items that fail miserably.

The difference of course is that one costs tax payers whereas the other costs shareholders, and in one case (government and tax payers) there is some hope of oversight and accountability. If shareholders actually knew about this sort of waste I am not sure they would ultimately care because they may chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war.

There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.

They try to address this up-front:

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion.

Questions like this, although very interesting, just don’t fit the Q&A format they are promoting, where they aim to be free of debate and opinion.

Around the time of Occupy Wall Street I was predicting that we would either see populists start winning elections and/or a violent uprising sometime in the next couple decades.

I still think we’ll continue headed in that direction until we start to heal some of the fractures in the US and start to find some common ground and work toward common benefit rather than strictly towards short-term selfish interests.

I'm not sure exactly how to interpret "the bulk of commercial photographers' work are weddings".

Do you mean by total revenue, or for a given photographer?

I ask because in general people who do weddings tend to focus on those almost exclusively for their income (the same is true for some of the other categories I mention below).

The way I think of it is that there are perhaps only a few sources of steady income that pays a livable salary with photography:

- weddings

- headshots

- real-estate

- advertising / marketing

In many cases either photographers are being asked to do more these days (e.g. write the editorial that the photographs go with) or people who wouldn't traditionally have photography as part of their job are being asked to do the photographic work on top of their existing responsibilities (e.g. journalists who are asked to bring a camera along and snap some shots for a story).

[EDIT: I am not sure where the day and a half of work figure comes from, either. It is typical for something like an edited/touched-up photo album to be delivered a few weeks after a wedding shoot, with the photographer doing a few shoots in between and then sitting down and editing several in a batch over the course of a week or two until they are happy with the results.]

My observation is that a lot of teachers knew they were going into a profession known for low pay but lacked the financial literacy and practical experience at college age to understand that “low pay” meant “struggling to survive” rather than “you’re not going to own the biggest house on the block.”

As a result they walk out of school with debt, find it difficult to find a position (because e.g. some high school level positions in the US have very few vacancies), and end up taking whatever they can get or if they cannot get anything in teaching take some other low-wage job after following their passion led them to a short-term dead-end.

I’m a photographer by hobby and you very often see people wanting to hire someone good but who isn’t expecting to make a living at it with offers like “I’ll let you shoot my event to help build your portfolio, and all you have to do is give me a copy of all the photos.” Or alternatively offering something like $100 for four hours to do lifestyle street shoots.

I don’t know how often they are successful at getting photographers for these types of things but I know that if I were going to shoot for those kinds of wages I would rather donate my time to a charity that I support.

No they don't, they just hate harmful pranks.

If that were the case, why don’t we have several of these prank days per year? Maybe monthly?

It’s because on a scale of 0-10 these pranks usually rate somewhere between 0 to 2 in terms of humor and > 2 in terms of annoyance.

“Your mailbox is empty!”

What?!

“Haha, no, April Fools!”

I’m rolling on the floor now. Oh. So. Funny.

I recall reading an article several years ago where they pointed out that 50% of PhD candidates in Biology who were surveyed were hoping for tenure track positions in academia. The other 50% expected to go elsewhere. Of the 50% wanting a tenure-track position, the expectation was that there were enough positions available for 1/6th of them.

For what it’s worth I was told at one point that PVCs are the leading indicator for sudden cardiac death, so it may have been worthwhile to get checked out either way.

It was definitely surprising to me to see grown men in suits throwing up on the streets nearly every one of the seven nights I spent in Tokyo. I don’t recall seeing any of that in the three nights I spent in Kyoto but having said that I didn’t have many late nights there.

I’ll add that the attitude towards things like stimulants that help people with ADD/ADHD is also a bit bizarre to me.

The notion that "it could easily happen" that is being brought up throughout this thread should really only suggests that people aren't doing even rudimentary security assessments

Precisely.

You assume that storing passwords in plaintext is intent as opposed to gross negligence. In many past instances it’s been intentional and gross negligence because the people making all the design and implementation choices were not knowledgeable about best practices.

I don’t think “pretty much”, it’s just inexcusable.

I haven’t had a large number of interactions with unions but I have seen some things that definitely turn me off of them, e.g. requiring two or three people from as many different unions to set up a booth at a conference because multiple skills are required and the unions negotiated with the venue to have each step done by union employees with those specific skills. So eg the people assembling the structure couldn’t plug in computers and the people who plugged in computers couldn’t assemble the booth structure.

What I have heard a couple times now from relatives of union members is that senior people who know union leadership sometimes end up on “disability”, meaning there is nothing wrong with them but they don’t work and get paid. They have doctors in the loop to certify the disability. I have no idea if this is actually widespread.

My own personal reluctance with joining a union is that I feel like I do pretty well negotiating for myself.

Having said that, perhaps a tech worker’s union could result in 30-hour four-day workweeks with reasonable minimum vacation, and that would be worthwhile if it became the industry norm.

Usually operators are defined as being left-associative, right-associative, or non-associative.

So e.g.,

a + b + c is interpreted as (a + b) + c because + is commonly left-associative

whereas

a ^ b ^ c is a ^ (b ^ c)

because languages that support ^ for exponentiation treat it as right associative.

For non-associative operators, parentheses are required if you have two operators at the same precedence, so I believe the grandparent is arguing that e.g. a + b - c should require parens to disbiguate in a language where + and - have the same precedence.

I did file a change address a year ago and yet continued to receive the emails from my previous address. As mentioned in my reply to another comment, I tried unsuccessfully to convince them that this was a problem, and they told me it was my responsibility to also discontinue the emails.

Perhaps they have changed their position in the last year.

I had a similar experience after moving a year ago. I kept receiving the emails for mail going to my previous address.

This was despite my having filed a change of address.

I suggested that this was a privacy problem and was told that it was my responsibility to stop the emails if I didn’t want to continue receiving them. After two or three more back-and-forth emails I still had absolutely no acknowledgement from them that this is a problem.

I don’t think the argument is centered around impatience.

There is a (perhaps wrong) belief that being first to market greatly increases your chances of success if not outright dominance in an area.

People are unconcerned with the possibility that if successful they will be left with a mess to clean up and a system that is hard to evolve. They believe those are easy problems to fix.

How about:

- investing time in things that ultimately do not pay off

- taking risks

- lots of small poor choices that add up

- bad luck (yes, to some extent you can make your own luck but sometimes things are outside of your control)

Honestly I find his list pretty poorly thought through, especially in comparison to the recent blog post by Sam Altman: http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful

Three hours of interviews with Cutler for the Computer History Museum:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/29RkHH-psrY

Part 2: https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss

It seems like the cinnamon patrol comment is related to this, which does seem to indicate the interpretation of an EU law is to blame:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/12/25/256602581/wh...

https://odomojuli.store/products/achromatic-series

$400,001.00

“This is the most expensive t-shirt on the Internet.”

While it is not the default literal type in Haskell, you can use coercion and the Scientific type to compute an (almost) arbitrary precision result. For example this prints 1.0 in the repl:

import Data.Scientific

(9999999999999999.0 :: Scientific) - (9999999999999998.0 :: Scientific)

Do you have specific resources you would recommend for learning to produce better estimates?

I'm also curious what kind of work you do that you find estimating effort to be reliable, and what kind of tracking you do to keep yourself honest (e.g. I often see people say something will take two weeks and the only reason it happens in two weeks is they end up working day and night for the last 5-7 days when they realize that's what it's going to take to make it happen).