pytester

The only issue before the New York court in the disciplinary case was whether, taking as true that Donzinger tried to bribe a judge, etc., whether he should be suspended. That did not require a hearing

And it also relied upon the testimony of Alberto Guerra, who later admitted that he was lying and was paid by Chevron to lie:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witn....

more cost-effective to use solar panels, batteries, and large scale reverse osmosis systems

I can't imagine why you'd use batteries at all. Storing fresh water efficiently is cheap, storing power efficiently is not.

I have a hard time believing that they suspended him without a hearing, describing him as an "immediate threat to public order" but they fucking did it anyway.

Norway actually does this and it's fairly effective.

The ever so slight downside to this is that, while Norway's state investment fund is vastly wealthy shareholder of many companies that can throw its weight around, I am, regrettably, not.

One solution for this is for you to give me money.

Unrealized wealth is just a number on a ledger.

Be serious.

There have been a number of shareholder fights over executive pay (it is their money, after all, so it's only natural they should try to claim it). They often end up losing thanks to the trend of passive investors and fund managers (principal/agent problem) with unhealthily close relationships with executives.

realized capital gains

so, the amount of wealth they convert into yachts, but not the amount of wealth that they actually accrue which is usually many multiples of that...

This is what the job is worth, if you want someone competent and responsible for thousands of employees and billions in revenue. Nobody is doing that for $1m/year when one wrong decision could end up costing 1000x more than their salary

I'll do it.

It's not like that one wrong decision ends up affecting them. Even if they get fired (which they often don't), they can exercise golden parachutes that will pay out many multiples of how much an average earner gets in a lifetime.

It's a job that gets paid a lot of money because the people who do it come from a fairly tight knit community that looks out for each other, not because of merit (CEO pay actually correlates slightly negatively with performance). Being an alumnus of McKinsey is actually one of the ways to enter that community.

Implementing an end to end testing framework on a badly written although heavily relied upon production system whose quality was getting steadily worse over time. It arrested and reversed the decline in quality.

Anybody who might want to back up uncommitted changes and files you can't check in to your repository?

I don't do it personally, but I know people who do and it's not entirely illogical.

you’ve repeatedly talked about apartheid which is a highly inappropriate

There's a wall with guard towers. I've been there and seen it myself. The existence of some 2nd class Arab citizens that they couldn't ethnically cleanse or expel any other way while the world was watching doesn't change that fact.

I ask you to recognize that these things are complicated

It was never complicated. Israel was a racist European colonization project just like South Africa. The fact that it screams anti-semitism until it's blue in the face and asks you do to the same does not change that fact.

Wirt said "I did not wanted to say its antisemetic, I wanted to say that we don't want to see either antisemetic _or_ antiisrelism" (sic)

Deleting messages that express specifically anti-semitic views is anti-racist.

Deleting messages that express specifically anti-state views, where that state imposes racial apartheid, is explicitly pro-racist.

This was the latter.

Don't bring geopolitics into everything.

A general ban on hosting conferences in geopolitically sensitive hotspots that covered Israel would be the non-hypocritical way to achieve this aim, supposing it is the true aim.

However, hosting a conference in Israel is inviting political posturing. Message censorship is political posturing. Using anti-semitism to censor non-anti-semitism is political posturing (and, usually, a form of anti-arab racism itself).

Are you serious? There was an article on HN just yesterday about how Turkey censored Wikipedia for two years.

And yet it would maximize those who would be able to attend. Both Israelis and Arabs can fly to Turkey pretty easily.

I think a lot of Israeli engineers would just like to be able to host conferences without it turning into a geopolitical debate

I'm sure a lot of North Korean and Venezuelan engineers would love that too, but until the Israeli government ends racial apartheid the chances of it not turning into a geopolitical debate are zero.

Making the decision to host a conference in Israel in the first place is a form of political posturing, as is message censorship. If they truly wanted to be apolitical (and it appears that Alexander Wirt very much does not) they could have held it somewhere more neutral (e.g. Turkey).

I think it doesn't affect not-yet-open restaurants nearly as badly as existing restaurant owners. NRA doesn't represent the restaurant market as a whole it represents a % of restaurant owners that currently exist.

Restaurant workers are, of course, going to be fairly indifferent to restaurant bankruptcies especially if an existing restaurant is swiftly replaced by a new one that pays more.

This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers.

Trust is highly transitive for highly technical developer focused products though. The core of stripe's trust, even among non technical decision makers, is down to their killer APIs and docs.

This is why the National Restaurant Association always lobbies furiously against minimum wage hikes - it will never destroy the restaurant industry but it sure as heck destroys actual restaurants.

It will discourage hoarding. Unproductively using land in high value locations that are growing is currently rewarded - with asset appreciation.

If it is discouraged - with taxation, that land will be yielded to more productive use.

Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it. Either we can let that revenue stream fill up government coffers or it can go into private pockets. It's our decision.

Potentially we are if an even more polluting investment becomes more profitable and they go for that. Gas, for instance, usually emits less CO2 but emits a lot more methane, which is ~90 times more warming. This is what coal is typically being replaced with.

I'd like to know what is the point of giving investors a pat on the back for engaging in selfish behavior? It's like thanking a full tiger for not eating you.

People doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is just fine.

It's not laudable though.

>spent more money on research to make them safer

It's a very common opinion among people who have researched this significantly

The nuclear industry has spent a lot on PR to convince the public that they're safer but so far criminal liability for accidents is still minimized and the liability cap (i.e. free government insurance for accidents) is still incredibly low.

I'd personally be more convinced of their frequent protestations that they're 100% safe if they lobbied to increase their own liability rather than engaged public relations firms to put a happy face on their industry.

Actions do speak louder than words, don't you think?

Moreover, if you raised the liability then the research into making them safer ought to more or less take care of itself. The greatest incentive for executives is avoiding criminal liability.

Untaxed as a verb. E.g. California reducing property taxes to absurdly low levels with prop 13, diverting the spoils of the land to the owners instead (in the form of ridiculously high valuations and streams of rental income).

This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more.

While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.

It would still make these things more affordable. And, save perhaps childcare, increasing the cost of low waged labor would not have an outsized inflationary effect on them.

Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.

YAGNI is about not adding functionality until it's needed. DRYing code isn't adding functionality.

If the it's neoliberal journalism surely the market, rather than ideology, should decide how it should be paid for?

Currently, the market seems more keen on ads.

Personally, I'd be happy to pay for investigative journalism (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations)... but not the kind of journalism which cites "tweets" as research and doesn't think enough of its journalists to give them a byline.

This is why I prefer to turn the problem on its head and ask the business how much time they want me to spend working on 'quality' (i.e. refactoring/tooling).

If it's on a spreadsheet that their boss can see saying that they asked me to spend 0% of my time on quality then I'm ok with it. If they can justify putting that zero down then presumably there IS a good reason.

If they're going to put me under implicit pressure to deliver as many features as possible and then cry havoc later when they get bugs then I'll lack sympathy.

Product managers are often resistant to the idea of tracking this number, however, since it provides a new angle through which they can receive flak from above.

MBA culture introduced us to the meme of "management is a generic function" meaning accountants with an MBA degree could manage engineers, software developers, doctors or teachers using the same tools (e.g. performance metrics).

There needs to be a broader cultural backlash against the cult of MBAs first.