sheepmullet

Are you implying that Europeans can't see through propaganda? That, somehow, only Americans have this gift?

I’m saying reality is a hell of an antidote to propaganda.

I’m certain French people are far better at recognizing biased and misleading reporting concerning France than I am.

Americans are not somehow less susceptible to pop media influence than, say, Europeans, simply by virtue of being Americans.

Of course they are! Propaganda is much less effective when you constantly see conflicting evidence with your own lying eyes.

There is a reason why trust in the mainstream media is at an all time low in the US.

contrast to the USA, Australia etc, where no-one can tell you are not a citizen by simply looking at you.

Yes America, Australia, the UK, etc are all running a great experiment to see if multiculturalism can work.

The rest of the world might follow if multiculturalism ever ends up working.

You need to bring something special: capital or knowledge/skills.

Unfortunately that is not really true. But it’s certainly a good idea!

I’m not sure if you are joking or not but Cleveland is nothing like a concentration or re-education camp.

Insurance for a family is now > $20K a year.

The real question is why is it so expensive?

When I was growing up in my town with about 1000 kids we had 1 kid who was diabetic, 1 attempted suicide, and 2 serious car accidents.

We had plenty of minor problems like broken bones but you didn’t need insurance to cover these.

So it was maybe 800-1000 working adults covering a handful of serious cases over a 14-16 year time period.

People are hiring more women because it improves performance and productivity [1].

I think the hbr article has cause and effect backwards.

It’s obvious that wealthy stable high margin businesses can afford to focus on diversity initiatives.

If we were actually confident that diverse teams were better then gender and race would no longer need to be protected groups.

False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave.

Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well.

There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.

I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable.

99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.

would listen and judge system stability suggestions based on participation in supposedly optional activity unrelated to system stability.

In my experience they are closely related.

You also openly say that you trust people work based on Friday beer

Sure - there is an incredible depth of research on trust building via outside of work/after work activities.

That sounds like horrible workplace

Strange considering I work at companies regularly listed in “best companies to work for” surveys.

Does that not sound manipulative to you?

You seem to be assuming there is a lot of peer pressure placed on you if you don’t want to do it.

Why?

I’m simply saying there are always social costs. For example you probably won’t be listened to as much when there are conversations around improving system stability.

It’s like our after work Friday drinks are entirely optional - but lots of people build friendships and trust there and this can often lead to higher productivity.

If you can build these friendships another way or have a different path to an equivalently high productivity then not going doesn’t have an impact on you.

I’m not sure your two links have any substance to them.

A few history buffs couldn’t find anything to support it....

I’d be interested to know how they did test bridges etc.

If on call is optional what's with the social penalty for people not wanting to do it.

Because many optional activities have an impact on your peers and they are unlikely to judge you strictly based upon your job duties?

IME developers will go where the career growth is and it is up to the company to make sure that fixing a race condition on a Friday afternoon is rewarded.

It translates to loyalty (albeit weakly) in that a woman who is older has better self awareness and knows what she wants in a relationship, where a younger woman might still be figuring that out

Than why are there clear correlations (for women) between # of monogamous relationships and likelihood of divorce? As well as between # of sexual partners and likelihood of divorce?

So it's more valuable to have a woman who isn't independent?

Of course! More flexibility and dependence up to a point is certainly better.

Of course the idea that this means a woman can’t have her own hobbies seems to be taking things to the extreme.

Seriously?

Yes and honestly.

I married young and I think the troubles we went through together have deepened our relationship in a way that would never have been possible if we were both “emotionally mature”.

I’d also question whether people really do mature “globally” that much - vs maturing in specific contexts and relationships.

For example if women matured significantly in a “global” sense between mid-20s to mid-30s you would expect a big drop in obesity as women started taking better care of their health. But you don’t. Etc etc.

if we do X we can sell more' which has naturally aligned incentives.

Even then there are agency problems which mean that once a company gets over a certain size there is no natural alignment.

I know plenty of managers tweaking A/B tests until they get the results they want.

being a climatologist is what makes you qualified to speak on the climate

If you don't have a PhD in the field, you don't belong in the big discussions where consequences matter.

Why?

I think what we need is accountability - there should be serious negative consequences for being wrong proportional to how strongly you stand behind an idea.

Were all the climatologists who were confident we were facing global cooling driven from the industry? Stripped of their academic standing?

Then why would I trust the industry?

positively correlated, especially loyalty

How does a string of short term relationships show loyalty?

flexibility means (ability to adapt to change?

Yes and the willingness.

I’ve known plenty of early 20s women who will drop their careers to follow their boyfriend overseas and very few in their 30s who will.

I can't understand how emotional maturity is of no value

Why should a man find it valuable in a partner?

Imagine how a man might pick a woman if attractiness was completely off the table

Loyalty, playfulness, flexibility, kindness, intelligence, high energy levels, ability to have kids, doesn’t already have kids, etc.

None of which are positively correlated with a woman’s age.

I would venture to guess that the majority of domestic violence is male against female

Why?

The data suggests it’s close to 50-50.

option of dating men who followed the same path as them

No they don’t. A 35 year old man can date a 25 year old woman whereas the reverse is a lot less common.

As such the 35 year old man has a lot more options than a 35 year old woman.

as well as the option of dating divorced men.

Divorced men tend to have very different life goals and expectations than early 30s women.

and they have an astronomically high turnover rate, nobody wants to do the work unless there's huge money involved.

Maybe because Ontario has ridiculous housing costs?

Id be happy to work for $15/hr if I could get a decent 3 bedroom house for $70-80k.

I mean seriously mortgage costs + $11/hr on top and I would be happy.

Yet even somewhere like London it will cost 400k+ and just forget about Toronto.

I'm skeptical of this, but I don't know that it's wrong.

It depends on what you mean by “worked”.

1) Have they allowed a slower and more humane shift of workers to other more competitive industries?

Yes. The GM bailout is a great example.

2) Have they helped keep certain skill sets in a country?

Yes. Undoubtably.

Is this important? I think so but there are opposing arguments.

It can take decades to build up an industry from scratch vs a few years to pivot into a related industry.

Think of how long it would take Germany to swap its automotive engineers and factories to producing tanks vs how long it would take a services based country to start producing tanks.

3) Have they lead to the revitalization of an industry?

This ones a lot more murky and it all depends on what time frame you are looking at and what you think the future will hold.

There are certainly examples of it working between first world countries for limited time periods (a decade or two).

Everyone gets sicker and medical issues start to crop up as they get older.

I disagree. I’m old enough to have been around before we had so many health problems.

It is one of the main drivers of our quickly increasing health costs.

When I was growing up we had smoking and that’s pretty much it.

It seems you've managed to miss the point entirely.

Most people will change their lifestyle to help their immediate family when they wouldn’t change to help taxpayers as a whole.

I hope your family never gets ill

It’s far too late for that - I’m an old man and I’ve seen lots of people I love pass away.

Doesn’t really work in practice though, because you rapidly deteriorate into a ludicrously invasive system

In practice there is a small core group of activities that cause the vast majority of the problems.

Coordinated and sustained public health programs can reduce the adverse effects of lifestyle

In practice we don’t have the stomach to use techniques that are time tested.

Take obesity - fat shaming works but it’s rough on the people who are being shamed.

Instead of fat shaming though there is a fat acceptance movement.

Because you have made the choice to look after your sick parents?

I haven’t made the choice to look after your parents.

The OP was talking about working class families. That’s a far cry from extreme poverty.

My parents were cleaners and although we were often tight on money we were miles away from extreme poverty.

completely unwilling to act in a way that is remotely moral or beneficial for the greater good.

So have many governments.

Even well intentioned regulations have unintended side effects.

I don't think there is much dispute that developers tend to come from upper middle class families, which is exactly what the parent said.

I’d love to see some data.

Of course if you work at the kind of companies that only hire people with a top CS degree then you might be led to believe that.

In my experience though it’s not the case. The majority of people in my office grew up lower middle class.

What exactly confuses you about these terms?

I’m not here to play word games.