Is anyone else fascinated more about the stories of the people that get into this kind of stuff? I mean, it seems like you must just be destined to be in this business if you are in it. Nobody goes on the Internet and researches how to get started sand trafficking.
I personally think getting into organised crime kind of mirrors the process where corps pick up fresh grads. Someone who fits the profile of being suitable for organised crime is someone without legal opportunities due to a lack of education, illegal immigration status, prior convictions, etc. In similar ways they are "headhunted" in a process that is more about convenience than key skills in a resume. If you're one of these people you'll end up floating around spaces where the "headhunting" happens.
I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.
What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.
Once you’re in, it also gets progressively easier to get in deeper, and harder to get ‘out’.
All your contacts are ‘in’, you have a reputation and people trust you to do what they expect, etc. etc. If you get arrested, even more so, as now people ‘outside’ have a clear signal which side of the line you’re in.
People looking down on you is as much a defense mechanism for them as anything else too, of course, as it provides not only a us vs them mechanism, but also makes it easier to segregate themselves and avoid crossing the line.
The documentary the Act of Killing [1] follows a man who was a regime-sanctioned killer of "communists" in Indonesia. Watching interviews with the director, he talks about how after someone's killed a couple of people, refusing to do more means admitting that the previous kills he's done are something wrong/terrible.
The director helps reveal what's inside the killer's mind by suggesting to him to make a movie of his experiences. In one scene [2], we're at a lush waterfall, we see angels dancing and the victims of the killers thank him for freeing them from communistic godlessness and sending them to heaven, with the song "Born Free" playing in the background...
Having been close friends to some killers (legally sanctioned by the gov’t at the time), the other issue is killing is, frankly, really easy. Way easier than anyone in polite society is going to be comfortable with really knowing, frankly.
Emotional and social consequences from killing are not so easy though, usually, but the actual act itself is pretty straightforward, especially with a little training and some forethought/prep.
It tends to change one’s view of society and other people quite a bit. Which makes re-integrating with society and/or integrating childhood conditioning hard. Hence the flight to delusions or drugs for many.
But often the hardest part for many people to understand is how easy it can be for many to just shrug their shoulders and go ‘ok’ and continue on with their lives with not only no guilt, but feeling good about it. Because sometimes people needed killin’.
Aren’t soldiers just that? Governments sanctioned killers? The only “guideline” is that the victim must be the “enemy”. Just that the definition of “enemy” is vague and arbitrary, enough that it can mean anything needed at any time.
Being government sanctioned it makes sense that it would attract people who find it easier (even enjoyable for some) to kill and live with it afterwards, or at least it makes it easy by providing the moral cover that it was necessary and moral. They were enemies after all.
These people are far more likely to continue to find killing easy during and after the fact as ling as they’re given even the vaguest sense of moral cover.
If you believe [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-ratio-of-combat-soldiers-t...], it varies from 7% to 14% of active military personnel that would be in ‘combat arms’, with everyone else being behind the lines in support roles. At least in the US. That lines up with my understanding anyway.
It’s actually a much lower percentage though. As most combat arms folks will be stuck guarding something and never see action, be in an indirect fire type role (artillery, sitting in a bomber or in a connex piloting a surveillance drone), or even if actually infantry have a super boring tour patrolling some pointless BS in the middle of nowwhere.
It also depends on where you draw the line at ‘killing’ of course. Does being a loader in an artillery battery count? A forward observer? A pilot who fires a cruise missle? A dude pushing the button to fire a cruise missle on a ship? An officer ordering an air strike?
About the only folks who are ‘killers’ in the way most folks would recognize the term though are infantry (of various forms, including mech. inf.), and perhaps some pilots if they have really good optics.
Soldiers follow orders. If they’re good ones anyway. Most have been trained to be able to be killers, and are often armed as such, just in case some folks need killing (per the chain of command and appropriate ROE).
But it rarely comes up, and anyone going into most MOS’s in the military hoping to do that is likely to be sorely disappointed.
It seems to me that business springs up wherever there is arbitrage and this is especially true for "free" natural resources (timber, water, etc).
Organised crime can make it profitable because they already have manpower and equipment, but it isn't necessary.
The smuggling operations between Guatemala and Mexico go both ways, depending on market prices in both countries for some very unglamorous products like eggs and gasoline.
Makes sense. Being in organized crime must be fucking fascinating. One day, you’re haggling on the price of black market eggs. Next day, you’re arranging the smuggling of sand from Latin America to Australia.
I lost a best friend that few years prior to his jail conviction got his phd in economics. I always knew about his business and he told me many stories about why he was doing it. I even advised him. But I always stayed out of it. One thing got clear to me. The people in that world are similar to our 'normal' world. You have the same hierarchy as in normal society with smart and dumb, nice and not so nice people. His story took place in Europe. He started after meeting some people in his fighting gym. Got a first assignment and things rolled fasr from there. High reward and thrill was an important motivation for him. He occasionally had hundreds of thousands of euros in cash. which we mainly spend on parties, escorts and drugs. Sometimes huge chunks of the money got lost because a person in the chain got caught or stole the money. But on avarage he was making like 200k a month.
He got caught on the highway few years ago with several kilos of heroine and cocaine and has to sit for 22 years.
This is the way it is with everyone. Rarely does someone choose their industry and job. I was into computers as a child because I had access to them through my grandparents' bookeeping business and being taught by my grandfather.
I really wanted to build houses but could never find a confluence of opportunity. I was sucked in by the available opportunities. My family were all artists and skilled industrial laborers. A lot of whom picked up their trade in the military. My opportunity was tech and I consider myself very lucky.
My father was a failed artist turned retailer bootstrapped by his father's GE stock he was granted as a precision welder, and I worked as a retail clerk and manager in the retail business for a time when I wasn't working in tech.
Farmers kid becomes a farmer. Maybe another opportunity comes up and they take it.
I'm never impressed by anyone's professional title until I hear their story. 99% of the time it's a result of the circumstances they were born into. Usually the only people with an interesting story were born into very modest or limited opportunity and had to grind it out until a better opportunity presented itself.
Sand trafficking is a perfect example. It is the best opportunity they have.
your answer was like "tell me you don't live in a third-world country without telling me..."
I am from Argentina so I know: You go to buy sand and are offered the legit one at a price hard to afford, or the "black" one with some discount. This way you learn there is a black market. Maybe for one bag you will get the same price anyway, but when you need an important amount of it, there will be 2 prices.
If you are in a beach town, you hear the rumors about why there is less sand.
I've forgotten the name, but I once watched a documentary on illegal gold mining in Brazil. One of the most successful of them was a German (illegal immigrant?
not enforced in brazil anyway) , who was attracted by the wild west aspect.
There definitely does seem to be a breed of people like this, and Latin America or Africa can present some interesting opportunities (see alo cowboy capitalists by vice).
Wow, coolest thing I’ve seen while doom scrolling this week. I wonder how accurate that is. It must be an especially dense cross section, because it doesn’t leave much room for hallways or other non living space.
Also was hoping to see more of the structural elements… that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams.
> that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams.
In the same way that corrugation gives strength to cardboard, it's possible that the city could have been so dense that it may have been relatively resistant to collapsing.
Every time I hear news like this, I think “hmmm layoffs coming to XYZ soon”.
For some reason, the idea that RTO is caused by out of touch execs is pervasive, but I really don’t think that’s the reason. These companies need people to leave. The cheapest way to do that is for an employee to leave voluntarily after they have gotten another job. Hell, if enough people leave, you might not even have to do layoffs.
We can bitch about it all we want, but these execs know what they’re doing. They aren’t stupid or out of touch.
EDIT: I will add that I’m also curious about the long-term implications of this kind of trickery. It doesn’t seem like a good long-term solution, you can’t just order RTO and then allow remote work year after year. Everyone is going to have to find something that works long-term eventually.
It also means they've done the arithmetic, and know that it's worth losing their top X% of people - the ones who'll have the easiest time finding a better job.
Obviously you've never worked for a big corporation before. Corporations don't want top employees. In a corporate environment, top employees are a nuisance much of the time. Most managers, if given the choice, would rather have an employee who shows up, does their work (but not too much), doesn't care about anything (and thus will do whatever they are told) and will accept whatever is given to them, and someone who is not at risk of leaving and can be laid off or fired easily/cheaply when the time comes.
Top employees often have an axe to grind, an ego to satisfy or a ladder to climb. This is the last thing a corporation wants or needs. When I was a manager in Corporate America, I was instructed to screen out overly ambitious or eager candidates. They are just too much trouble for what amounts to normally a 10-20% increase in performance over a regular candidate.
It would be really interesting to see if they take that into account when they make these decisions. I’d have to imagine that the top X percent are also the highest paid, so maybe that’s actually a benefit.
I would guess they looked at who is mostly likely to leave based on forced RTO and they liked the answer. Probably something like parents of young children, mostly women, people who are caring for an elder or disabled family member, so again mostly women, and people who have a disability themselves.
A smart employer is already paying their best employees more than they can get elsewhere.
After all, I know Alice gets things done fast and to a high standard, she can be trusted to deliver important projects, and she's very familiar our most important systems.
All anyone else knows is her job title is "Level 17 Engineer", she's got a firm handshake, and she knows how to find a cycle in a linked list.
It'd be pretty absurd for me to let myself get outbid on salary by someone with less information.
I don't think they really care, or feel that they have to care. The way that I've seen it work is they'll make rare exceptions for individuals they absolutely can't lose or wan't to hire but that's it and the exceptions truly are rare.
I absolutely agree that they dont' care on an emotional level, but they're going to find it difficult to run a business when 90% of the senior staff leave and take their institutional memory with them.
Yeah, anyone that assumes these people care if it hurts the company in the long run is just mad, all they want is to see the stock go up after the announcement.
Sadly I think you're right. As some say the cruelty is the point. I also think much of the AI boom is just an excuse to get rid of people and get them to accept worse conditions. At the local IBM office they cut half the staff with the reason given being that AI would replace them, then told the other half they would need to work unpaid overtime to cover the lost staff (what happened to the AI?).
Programmers have been an expensive cost to companies for awhile and it's been obvious since outsourcing attempts decades ago that CEOs would like to do whatever they can to break their backs.
So, you say as a return to office employee, if i boycott local services by bringing my own food, making my own coffee and not going out for lunch, i can render political pressure moot?
I doubt execs care at that point. They, much like most of us, only care about getting people off their back. "Hey, I got the employees back into the office like you wanted, it's your problem now."
I know that RTO is offensive to many, and not mildly so... but if they were trying to force people to quit of their own accord, wouldn't we also see an escalation of tactics beyond RTO? If it's a good strategy, why stop there?
They're not out of touch they know exactly what they're doing, following orders while these centibillionaires are jockeying for position on the Forbes 100.
The strategy was and always will be bottom line: Displacement of American workers through attrition by hiring remote Asian workers -- 1 FTE = 4 Indian workers.
'Most' of these are American companies selling American products and services to Americans. If they like Asia so freaking much, leave the US and go sell your $hitty products and services over there!
I don't disagree with your statement per se, but neither "being more profitable than last quarter" or "the current CEO needs to be successful" imply "these companies need people to leave".
That is one of the possible ways of making "line go up".
But when I hear that a company __needs__ to make an X number of employees go, it gives me the impression they are in the red, and/or the organization will suffer great damage if they don't proceed with it. The organization doesn't even need to be a business per se.
Saying "those companies want to fire employees to increase profits" IMO is more accurate, even if a bit more verbose.
The number of establishments I have seen doing this has skyrocketed. The last 2, I edited my review afterwards to 1 star and saying “this place gives a discount for good reviews”.
Because I'm not going to leave a review, don't really leave many reviews. But I'm especially not going to leave a review before I've received service. But if I don't leave a review, I'd be concerned I would be getting deliberately poor service.
And if I'm going to get bad service, why should I subject myself to that?
If anything, I would leave then give a 1 star review saying they give discounts to people who give good reviews beforehand and the explanation I gave above.
And they delete your review. There needs to be a requirement to archive all reviews for seven-ten years. When it was posted, how long it was up, content and user. This is such a rabbit hole.
People cheer when government makes a rule like this but there is a huge costly enforcement mechanism that goes with this. That has to be implemented and maintained. Making the rule is step one, and there are hundreds more steps that have to happen any number of times, forever. Good luck. Making laws that cannot be enforced just increases the cost of government without having the intended effect. I can't think of anything that the prime offenders would like more than that.
It is truly difficult because you do have people who leave fake negative reviews as well. And fake reviews, whether good or bad, should be deleted. They are useless, they are only there to affect review scores.
It's a convoluted problem with no good answer so far.
I use Orion exclusively because Kagi is the default search engine. It does have a few more bugs than chrome / safari, but they're well worth putting up with to get native Kagi support. Thank you.
It's interesting though - what is Apple's vested interest in only having native support for certain search engines? I now no longer use their browser because of this - I would think that is _some_ kind of loss for them. Maybe not, since I'm on macOS anyway.
Under these circumstances, it is appropriate to ask who is the customer. Then presume that the company is trying its best to make the customer happy.
Apple has clearly defined that the customer for the "default search engine selection" option is Google and not the users. There is obviously some mediation by regulators in Europe and elsewhere (hence Google's major competitors being included on the list), but the customer is Google. I think that from that fact flows two further inferences:
A) the customer might not want to write down everything, or even communicate in any non-deniable way, all of their preferences (due to those regulators), but can presume that Apple understands their preferences
B) The customer is happy to the tune of 20 billion dollars with the current set-up.
Even if not explicitly conditioned, which I don't believe came out as being the case in this case, there's still an inherent motivation. Google will pay more for a default on an OS where it's hard to switch the default than it will for a default where it's easy to switch away. Google might pay $20 billion for defaults on iOS as-is where 99% of people stick with Google, but if Apple started asking users if they were sure and offering alternatives and Google only remained the default for half of people, they logically would only offer maybe $10 billion to remain default on the same actual terms.
It seems plausible. Mostly I think people should be explicit and clear about their accusations.
Something that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me in this theory is that, despite it being hard to add a new engine (which is not great), it is easy to switch away from Google on iOS. And the big search engines are in their pre-populated list. So it seems Google and Apple have engaged in a conspiracy to keep people from switching… just to the niche engines? That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
My first guess is that Apple lived through the era of confused non-technical people adding a bunch of scam search engines and didn’t want a repeat of that.
> That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
Google certainly should be more scared of Kagi than Bing. Bing is a known quantity that's not going to suddenly shoot ahead of them. A smaller, newer competitor might. Just like how it wasn't Lycos or Jeeves that dethroned Yahoo, it was the two guys in a garage.
No, I’m supposing that Apple knows they have more control if they obfuscate the ability to switch. And more control is more valuable to Google or whoever else wants to pony up to be the “default”.
This is one of those "a wink is as good as a nod to a blind person" situations so that plausible deniability is maintained while getting the desired results
As long as it’s an ongoing relationship nothing needs to be said. Apple knows that if more users swap away from the default then the default setting is less valuable.
If that is what the (vaguely described) conspiracy is, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense, because the pre-populated list of search engines already includes most of Google’s main competitors.
You’re misconstruing the argument. American citizens don’t elect Chinese politicians, I don’t want the Chinese government to have my data. I don’t want the American government to either, but at least I can vote for my American government.
This gov't must really make you feel safe then. I remember people saying Bush made them feel safe. That played out well. You know what makes me feel safe? Making my own decisions.
"Programming" as a career is in an interesting position right now. Due to demand and the job itself, you can make a lot of money, work remotely, in a medium-low stress job, without interacting with the public, solving puzzles. That's the dream right? It really doesn't get any better than that for most people. The problem is that there are two types of people: those that enjoy coding, and those that don't. The people that enjoy coding are living the dream. I know I am. I mean I have it fucking good. All the benefits above, to the max.
The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.
This implies that all people who don't enjoy coding are also not very good at it, which doesn't match my experience.
There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
> well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders".
Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
> It's easy to assume you're great especially working under "passion coders" who keep stuff afloat.
i work on compilers+hardware so that's the backdrop here.
here's a real hypothetical for you (ie it happened but i'm not going to use specifics): our internal proprietary compiler is spitting out incorrect atomics instructions that deadlock our internal proprietary multi-core DNN accelerator. this incorrect code is downstream of a big, lucrative, customer's (you know which one) LLM model.
now the question: is it the "passion coder" that will solve this or the grinder?
I didn’t mean to imply that, my entire post should be caveated with “on average”. There are certainly good programmers out there who don’t really enjoy it.
I enjoy programming and write bad code constantly. Sometimes it is decent, but I am rarely completely happy with the result.
Also in day-to-day work you don't really research the best solution for non-critical systems and instead implement the first solution that comes to mind. It will mostly never be touched once it is in production.
Over time seeing systems you implemented working is the largest reward for me. You have forgotten how they work anyway, so bad code is less of an issue then. And if you do look it up again, you might be angry about your stupid past self. Meh, at least it means you know better now.
> The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
IMO this is the natural mood of all industries. We don't seriously expect that accountants love doing tedious work over Excel? Telling people to fall in love with work is not a healthy attitude. Only a small subset of people in any profession can fall in love with work. Everyone else must make their lives outside of work.
I really hope this is true again later this year or next year but every junior developer I know has been unable to find any employment. From my network of people that have lost jobs over the last 6 months:
20+ years experience: found a job the same month
5 to 20 years experience: found a job within 4 months
0 to 5 years experience: have not been able to find an entry level position
Of course, this is anecdotal and my sample size is only my network. But I've also seen a lot of people sharing similar experiences here on HN, Reddit, and Blind.
One problem I see for junior developers is that there is so much more churn in tech nowadays. It's just about manageable for seniors who already know the basics to keep up, but as a junior it's hard to build good basics if you've already exhausted all your brainpower learning $JS_FRAMEWORK_OF_THE_DAY.
Seniors' resume-driven-development is (even if unintentionally) making it much harder for any newcomers to break into the field.
I see this sentiment all of the time and it just doesn't register. What new "frameworks" have you had to learn in the past 10 years beyond React, Typescript, and maybe next?
Yeah, people like to think there’s all kinds of grand conspiracies out there when it comes to insurance companies. But they’re all actually very, very boring. All of these pricing algorithms are filed with the DOI, and are public. There is nothing crazy in them. The reason prices to go up at renewal is because that’s just the optimal economics of insurance companies. Get you in at a competitive new business rate and then increase rates at renewal to offset the losses that new business policies incur.
The product the OP is talking about made quite a buzz in the business when it was first released (I do think it came out for a while). It was a price comparison tool, and the reason it failed was because it was hard to get the big brand names on board. The big brand names didn’t want to compete on price alone, because they spent so much money on their brand. They already had a ton of customers coming straight to their website.
Sorry for any formatting or spelling issues here, I’m using voice to text.
I had a very similar experience as this author. All throughout high school and college, I was prescribed Adderall. After graduation, I got a job, and realized Adderall wasn't good for me long term, so I switched to coffee. This alone helped with my anxiety, ability to sleep, and social interactions.
After a while, I started to wonder if coffee is good for me also. So I quit cold turkey for a few weeks as an experiment. I couldn't believe the effect it had. I am angry at myself that I didn't just do this earlier. I sleep fine all night now, I don't have to pee as often, my anxiety is basically gone, I feel better about life in general, my brain fog disappeared, and I no longer have "good days and bad days" mentally, just good days.
There is no more powerful drug or therapy in the world than:
How much did you drink? I found the same effect when I didn't know how to use coffee and drank at any hour, multiple times a day, from the office's coffee machine, and couldn't make it at home. Obvious result: bad sleep, anxiety, and a crash every weekend. They all got better after I quit, also obviously.
Then I looked into it more, bought my own press and grinder, started taking one cup a morning with the dosage I want, occasionally a small extra but nothing after 2PM. The effect is pretty nice. On average, I feel a bit better with it than without.
I started out drinking a lot, usually 2 cups per day, one at breakfast and lunch. But eventually I just weaned myself down to one cup at breakfast for a few years, and I was still having trouble sleeping.
I feel like caffeine is a *results may vary topic, every time it is discussed many people have wildly different experiences.
