The "crystals and horoscopes" part is such a cheap jab that's going to alienate a lot of the population. Astrology is a harmless introspective process for most people, they just like having a framework to characterise their beliefs and feelings. You find very few people who feel that it's prescriptive and limits their life.
Contrasted with very rational people who are chasing magical, unmoored valuations in the stock market for instance. We buy and sell equity based not on future cash flows, but on confidence there will be a bigger sucker down the line. This untethering of "value" from any productive work is a greater contributor to the hollowing out of the US economy than anyone buying a piece of amethyst.
The verbs are not the issue. America has been hollowed out by political propaganda, offshoring and growing wealth inequality. Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
The real enemy is the belief that value can be created from nothing, such that an economy of infinite growth can exist. Once you've exhausted all the externalities - exploiting people overseas, domestically, pillaging natural resources - you're left in a zero sum game.
> Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron were determined by a horoscope.
It's in the same paragraph...
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority
Yeah he correctly identifies the outcome, but like I said he misattributes the cause. And his rhetoric is not helpful in getting "common people" around to his cause. It comes across as elitist and condescending.
This is insane overhead if you want to try and run a "leftist" business. It sounds like Scarlett is a trust fund baby with more money than sense.
I've been running a retail business with similar inventory costs for a couple years. I have one employee and I pay them generously. I personally chip in about 20-30k annually to keep the whole thing afloat. It's definitely possible if you keep things small.
Edit to add: 10k in inventory just doesn't add up. In retail you need to turn over inventory multiple times annually to cover your fixed expenses like staff, rent, etc. if you only have 10k worth of inventory and you're burning >10k a month that means you're selling everything in the store every couple weeks. I don't think books move that quickly, although I could be corrected. Usually the retail standard is turning over inventory 4-5 times annually.
Seems like you are assuming they sold the books to cover their monthly burn. But seems it was kept afloat due to donations more than due to inventory sales
My point was that this was indeed a vanity project by someone with more money than sense. At no point does it seem like they had any business plan or conception of how to make money from actually operating the business. It's just cosplaying.
It is rather objectionable to label people with your assumptions. Unless you have some inside information you are just making shit up based on your own judgemental bigotry.
People start "hobby" businesses for many reasons, and those reasons are not always status oriented. All too often I've seen idealistic people with the best intentions crash into reality (often financial reality, but often other causes as in the article).
If you have 120k a year to burn on a "hobby business" I think it's pretty safe to say you're in the top 1%. Calling it a "donation" doesn't change that.
The actual report text identifies the uploaded database as "NUMIDENT".
A quick shufti turned up https://aad.archives.gov/aad/series-description.jsp?s=5057 which states that "NUMIDENT" includes things like "mother's maiden name". Other sources imply that the signatures from SSN application forms (form SS-5) are stored here.
Huh, so if the people going to emergency for the flu had primary care doctors they wouldn't have to go to emergency? That's almost like an argument for public non-emergency clinics and universal health insurance so people can get treatment in an appropriate setting.
Might work. But it just goes to show, no one wants to hear the actual reasons why ER are broken, because the tone you use indicates you don't like the truth you're hearing.
I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".
A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.
Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.
It's not a case of the manager not supporting her, it's a case of the manager putting something that could have been informal - "I'm happy with your performance and if you need to take some breaks during the workday I support it" - and made it a formal thing that is risking getting her fired.
The manager in question has admitted they fucked up and didn't realize how much HR would try to force my friend out for being a problem.
I don't agree. There's nothing 'informal' about someone under you telling you they're suffering from burnout. It's not a water cooler topic of conversation. Legally, going to HR was the correct thing to do.
Nope! Her manager had no concerns about her performance and has expressed regret about the situation because it has made everyone's life harder. The manager likes her and wants her to stay at the company, but because she's a "problem" for HR they want to fire her.
In my experience these hacky changes are usually a consequence of some impedance mismatch in the codebase. Something is poorly factored, the interface (whether technical or personal) isn't suitable for purpose.
It's easy to push back on a hacky change if there's an elegant solution close at hand. But often the business needs and the architecture of the codebase are at odds with each other.
A go slice is a wrapper around a normal array. When you take sub-slices those also point to the original array. There's a possible optimization to avoid this footgun where they could reallocate a smaller array if only subslices are reachable (similar to how they reallocate if a slice grows beyond the size of the underlying array).
Most sublicing is just the 2-arg kind so it would not be safe to truncate the allocation even if the subslice is the only living slice because the capacity still allows indirect access to the trailing elements of the original slice. This optimization would only be truly safe for strings (which have no capacity) or the much less common 3-arg slicing (and Go would need to have a compacting GC).
Of course, the language could also be changed to make 2-arg slice operations trim the capacity by default, which might not be a bad idea anyway.
Yeah I understand why they can't do it for backwards compat reasons. Considering they had the forethought to randomize map iteration order it's a big foot gun they've baked into the language.
What we're currently doing is creating a permanent underclass of "criminals" who are viewed as subhuman and used as political fodder. The status quo benefits wealthy people by providing cheap labour and a convenient scapegoat. People who have been incarcerated are impoverished and cut off from careers and social lives, so they can't function outside of prison.
There's lots of evidence that maintaining connection to family, and providing skills training reduces recidivism. You should be asking for studies proving that what we're currently doing is effective or humane.
Do we have conclusive evidence that causality isn’t actually reversed here in a large percentage of cases?
As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits. They just happened to roll a 1 at birth on many attributes at once, and are stuck with it for life. Assuming humans are not a blank slate, many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social. They will cause mayhem and misery to those around them unless isolated, humanely, with dignity and compassion, from the rest of society. Given a large enough of a denominator, that’s potentially millions of people.
And fair point around social ties being important here, I wonder what percentage of imprisonment that would prevent.
>Do we have conclusive evidence that causality isn’t actually reversed here in a large percentage of cases?
>As in, a certain % of the population is, very unfortunately and not of their own volition, born with innate antisocial traits.
Assuming the certain % is something meaningful and not like 1% then:
Yes, given that America and the world has run the largest ever social experiment, America imprisoning a higher percentage of their population than any other country and most other countries continuing to thrive with lower crime numbers than America (in cases where countries do not thrive obvious external and environmental factors are seen) it follows that America, a nation of immigrants with higher heterogeneity of the population than other nations of the Earth, does not have a population with a greater percentage of the population genetically predisposed to anti-sociability.
America has a population where 1 in 3 adults has a criminal record. If criminality was in any significant way genetically hard-wired in Americans it seems difficult to believe the country would have lasted as long as it has, although I admit my argument here may be slightly weak given the current state of things, but I think one can argue that is not the fault of the anti-social population.
In short: humans are not inherently good 'uns or bad 'uns. The social interventions made by friends, families, community, state-run programs, have a discernable effect on reoffending rates.
“Discernible effect” doesn’t really refute their point, it affirms it. Some aren’t responsive to any of that.
I think it’s logical that you’re both right, with the disagreement being in the ratio. If you honestly think all humans are born equal, I suggest visiting a mental ward, or more relevant here, watching some interviews/analysis of mass murderers. There’s a well accepted, by the medical field, by objective metrics, spectrum of self control, awareness, autonomy, and intelligence, expressed in humans. We’re not all the same. You typing here suggests you’re on the relatively extreme end of the “genetic luck” spectrum.
I don't. But in addition to genetics, babies pop out of rich and poor vaginas. Socioeconomic status is a much stronger indicator for being incarcerated than genetics (not counting "male vs female"). There is also the theory that the children of prisoners grow up without fathers and are more likely to go to prison, thus perpetuating the cycle. Children that lose both parents (to imprisonment, drug addiction, abandonment) and enter foster care or become wards of the state have terrible life outcomes. Not genetic, but familial due to disrupted social support networks.
I also think that if, for example, you get addicted to heroin, and you don't have a good support network, that will be your only life until you're dead. But if you do have a good support network, you have an better chance of getting clean and staying clean.
At least in the US your race is stronger indicator for being incarcerated than your affluence levels. E.g. Black Americans are somewhere 10-30x more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than Asian Americans of similar poverty levels. Race here, similarly to economics, is again a confounding variable for something else that is actual causal to this. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 . And again, the direction of causality here isn't obvious either.
Most likely it's a combination of genetics, cultural expectations, social support networks, and a litany of other elements that all come together to affect the ultimate outcome. Which aligns with your thesis around one's support network making a huge difference. But it's just important to point out that poverty by itself is not causal of crime, it simply makes it more likely given many other factors such as culture and community. It's mildly predictive, but up to a point.
Funnily enough, as a side-note, the stats show that most white-collar crime is committed by well-educated and affluent white men in their forties or older, causing a lot more financial harm than your everyday street crime added up.
I agree, and I think the other person will too. You’re correct.
But they’re also correct. There will be some subset of the population that will be, and remain, harmful to society. This isn’t even a purely human concept, and can be found in all species with collective/social behavior.
If this were true, sociability wouldn't be so incredibly overwhelmingly correlated with trauma, and to the extent that trauma & poverty are related, poverty. This is a full and utter complete fact, it is foundational knowledge to social science, psychology and psychiatry.
People. Are. Not. Born. Bad. They're born to traumatized parents raised in a society that squeezes them for all they're worth.
> many said humans will not be re-trainable to be pro-social
The vast, vast majority of people absolutely could be, but they will never receive the resources (time, attention) to be better. It is not that we don't know how to help people, its that its /expensive/ and we /would rather punish them than help them/.
In most cases people just want any inheritance, this is the backwards way the Golang devs decided to implement it based on their 80s view of programming languages.
