drblastoff

It’s incredibly difficult to run a large social platform without it quickly devolving into a cesspool of hate speech, pornography, extremism, misinformation, propaganda, etc. It’s a never-ending tightrope walk, and you ultimately need to empower a team to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of the site and its users. But you can never please everybody. People who leave comments like this only reveal their naivety. But leaving comments like this today reveals something worse than naivety.

This assumes the staff engineers work more hours (not my experience)

The card check at entrance and “club” concept serves another purpose: it deters random people from going to Costco to steal or cause problems. Retail theft is a major problem for most stores these days, unfortunately.

I’ve fallen victim to this, though perhaps fortunately with digital synth plugins that take up no physical space.

This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.

On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.

I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.

If the city says “You cannot live on the sidewalk, in public parks, or in Bart stations,” that’s a far cry from putting a gun to someone’s head.

The city can offer other options:

- shelters in the city

- shelters outside the city if shelter in the city are full (this is my controversial opinion, but if you can’t afford housing in a specific place, you may need to live in a different place until you can afford it. I’d love to live in Malibu, but I can’t afford it. I don’t think it’s my right to plop myself down on the sidewalk and shoot heroin until the city of Malibu builds me free housing. That’s not a realistic expectation.)

- bus fare return to family

- treatment for addicts

The point is that you don’t incentivize moving to SF with no money and no job and no prospects and living on the street until you get free housing.

Newsom tried this while he was mayor. His conclusion was that for every person they put in housing, two new people showed up on the street.

Another issue was that most people they put into “temporary” supportive housing never moved out. A significant portion of SF’s budget goes towards paying for the housing of formerly homeless people. The city won’t put them out on the street, so why would they ever leave?

Do you let the shelters become drugs dens? Because many chronically-homeless people in SF are addicts, and they prefer to live on the street than give up drugs to sleep indoors.

Addicts should have a choice: shelter, treatment, or jail. If you bring drugs in the shelter, your choice becomes treatment or jail. Drug encampments on city sidewalks should simply not be an option.

Some chronically homeless people in SF also suffer from mental illness and cannot look after themselves. They may also not do well in shelters. But leaving them outside is not humane. Institutions had a reputation for poor living conditions, but leaving them to suffer in the street is no better. And institutions can be improved.

Yes, tags, and really anything illegally spray painted on public or private surfaces. No problem if the city or a building owner wants to commission or invite graffiti artists.

I spent time in several European cities recently (and in the past), and Zurich was the only place where the amount of graffiti really stood out to me. Maybe there was an expectation that a wealthy city/country wouldn’t have tagging, which made it stand out more. Berlin had a lot of both good street art and tagging, but the tagging seemed more concentrated in specific areas.

The graffiti stood out more to me than billboards, but as an American I’m surely desensitized to billboards.

The IQ of the average college student has dropped from ~120 to 102 over time.

College no longer the domain of a people pursuing intellectually-demanding careers. It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public, costing them a fortune not only in tuition, textbooks, boarding, etc., but also in the opportunity cost of delaying their earnings and career advancement by 4+ years. We’re now stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.

By ignoring the problems, and actually making them worse by lowering academic standards and pushing the student loan burden to taxpayers, it reeks of either gross incompetence or corruption in our government.

If they want to limit “visual pollution” they should crack down on graffiti. Zurich is covered in it and it’s really ugly. Local Swiss claimed it’s no worse than other cities, but it was worse than any place I’ve seen.

Why are you pretending that $100k-$200k is the ceiling in the defense industry, when the comment you’re replying to is specifically pointing out that it’s frequently a stepping stone to more lucrative career options?

Not to mention that those nominally earning more in SF/SV often have worse quality of life than those earning less elsewhere due to housing prices and overall cost of living.

> My point is the world will develop whether or not that is in the interest of those in power.

I didn’t get that from “if the rest of the world is allowed to develop.” But yes, parts of the world have been developing much faster than the U.S., for instance, and in many cases now surpass the U.S. by many metrics.

I don’t believe the U.S. has actually done much to prevent this. In the case of China, actually just the opposite: the U.S. government and U.S. industry have repeatedly traded away its long-term advantages for short-term political and financial wins in a series of unforced errors over the last 30+ years. But who knows, maybe this is a good thing for the world.

You think the rest of the world has not developed? Have you been out in the world?

My God, what if a glut of middle managers and PMs delegating to LLMs is all we need?

Cities are not all alike. I enjoy living in my current city, but would never move back to San Francisco.

Exhibit A

Studies have shown (take this with a grain of salt because I heard this from a podcast), that dividend stocks and non-dividend stocks have roughly equal returns in the end, with dividend stocks faring slightly worse.

This is because dividend stocks tend to appreciate less.

So taking $X in dividends every six months ends up being the same as selling $X of your portfolio every six months in the end.

That wouldn’t be a problem for engineers who are good at networking or the interview song and dance, but plenty of talented engineers aren’t particularly good at those things.

The company will lose some talent, sure, but let’s not pretend this isn’t a strategic time for a layoff or pay cut.

You should report this to VAERS if you’re in the US and it hasn’t been reported already. Indicate the batch number, which should be written on your vaccine card.

I’ve had four Pfizer shots. For three shots, the side effects were mild. But after one, I had chest pains for about a week. It turns out that shot was from a batch with many cases of serious illness and several deaths reported on VAERS. The other batches had almost no reports. It could be a coincidence, but the more data they have the better.

A layoff is motivated by business reasons, but where does it say that performance can’t be considered when deciding who gets cut and who stays?

“Sometimes, job performance does play a role, too; for example, if a company has to fire one-third of its sales force, those with the lowest numbers will almost certainly be more on the chopping block than those with higher numbers.” - https://work.chron.com/decides-employee-gets-laid-off-12311....

“Nondiscriminatory employee selection criteria should be developed and used to select the employees who will be laid off. Common factors used to identify criteria are seniority, redundant roles, skills based criteria or other clearly delineated standards. Performance criteria may be used and employers may consider previous performance reviews and other performance documentation” - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

“Microsoft Uses Layoffs to Push Underperforming Employees Out” - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-managers-p...

“They will often assess the work performance of team members and rank them against their coworkers using a curve (a practice known as stack ranking) in order to retain the top performers, all while identifying and weeding out lower performers.” - https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-companies-decide-who-...

> layoffs _must_ be done without regard to performance

Do you have any citation for this? I’ve never heard this before, and a quick search pulls up many sources that contradict this.

Looked him up, it says he kept $7.9B for himself.

I heard “batch” used often in grad school by my non-American classmates, but “class” seems far more common in the U.S.

He manages the fund to pay himself the highest annual compensation in the UK, $200M-$450M+ a year.

Whites dropped from 75% of the United States population in 1990 to 57% in 2020. That’s a huge demographic shift in a very short time span.

But I haven’t belonged to a tech team or department in the last decade (mainly at larger tech companies) that was composed of close to 57% white engineers. Black and Latino engineers were similarly underrepresented, or more so.

East Asians (esp. Chinese) and Indians are massively overrepresented in US tech companies relative to all other groups. There’s not much companies could do to address this because explicitly hiring fewer Asians to balance things out would be seen as discriminatory (see Harvard).

This is because “diversity” in the US really means “not white. You don’t get any diversity points by hiring fewer non-white people. You just open yourself up to lawsuits. Nor would they want to “fix” this because East Asians and Indians are also massively overrepresented in engineering classrooms and the pool of qualified job candidates.

You’re conveniently ignoring a couple thousand years where China bullied its neighbors relentlessly.