AF vet, and frequently frustrated by this taboo. It's so contrary to the interests of everyone except the employer, but folks become visibly uncomfortable whenever talk of comp comes up.

Well, the American folks anyway. I work with a lot of Europeans, and they don't seem to share the norm.

A strong case against being open with the numbers is it that it could limit your ability to negotiate a higher rate with a potential new employer.

In the air force / navy / army etc there is only one employee to choose from so this never comes up.

That's a weak case - friends/colleagues will most probably have 0 effect on negotiations on some new job. As written this hurts everybody except the employer, but if some folks across the pond are dumb enough to play this game, they deserve the effects

I've had multiple employers tell me that it's a firing offense to discuss pay with my coworkers. Most people don't know if that's legal or not however and just remember that HR or the employee handbook said not to discuss what they get paid or they'll be fired.

Europeans are open with their salaries?

European bank. Salaries were confidential and discretionary. Then they adopted a salary grid based on title and business area mostly to reduce the bonus component (a disproportionate amount of the comp was in bonus). Employees were happy, first because it meant a large base pay uplift for pretty much everyone, and because transparency means base pay ceases to be something to discuss about, everyone feels like he is being treated fairly.

Then I believe it triggered all sorts of problems. Front office base salaries is higher than middle office, no one will take a pay cut so it prevented front to middle office moves which is is an undesirable effect. It is also expensive, they liked having the ability to hire more cheaply. They dropped the grid after a couple of years.

But all the time the numbers were confidential (but when there is a grid it’s a matter of minutes before an accurate table circulates).

Some. Brits aren't.

I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here in Germany people have openly talked about their salary with me in several occasions. Granted, it wasn’t any coworkers, it was always a friend or someone I knew.

In Norway this is an open database which gets published annually and anyone can search in it to see what other people make.

It's not a digital wild-west open style though:

1. You have to authenticate using something which identifies you specifically as a citizen.

2. Another caveat is that people who gets looked up will be notified about that, with information about who it was who looked them up. (so it can't be used for direct covert spying)

That said, this system allows for a certain degree of transparency, and makes it easier for journalists, press, researchers etc to dig into issues such as social inequality.

I understand the motivation (even though I fundamentally disagree with it), but I find this rather inconsistent with issues such as 'the right to be forgotten' and other privacy initiatives put out by the EU.

I can see this one being taken to the EU Court of Justice by someone.

In Finland you can go and check how much somebody else earned and paid taxes. You can’t do this online, must visit the tax office in person.

This is balancing between privacy and transparency of tax system.

I don’t think the EU privacy legislation applies to this kind of public functions.

Norway is not in the EU.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct ;)

Pragmatically correct is better than technically correct :)

Norway will be subject to EFTA court, which is almost de-facto Court of Justice.

Granted, how someone might sue and escalate an case is a different thing altogether.

But they adopt GDPR, nonetheless.

Here in Finland people are somewhat secretive (especially the older generation) about their pay but tax records are public information so you can calculate it from there if you really want to know how much someone is making. Though the system is kept offline on purpose and thus you have to go to the tax office and browse the paper records and take notes.

Keeping the pay secret is kinda puzzling on traditional fields as the salary structure is very rigid on those due to strong unions. Doesn’t apply much in IT though where it is just minimum wage set by unions and you negotiate for (much) more.

Saying a curtailment of federal authority is necessarily a good thing makes you sound like an ideologue.

Government isn't intrinsically good or bad, and there is no ideal amount of it. Case by case we should decide when the public's interests are served by having a voice in a marketplace besides the money we spend.

I find this "personal responsibility" narrative interesting (and, full disclosure: also bullshit), since it reminds me of sports discussions--everyone has a strong opinions, they're nearly all un-falsifiable, and they almost always appeal to notions that no one disagrees with.

i.e., no one actually thinks that actions ought not have consequences. Arne Duncan et al weren't trying to 'un-teach discipline' or whatever, they were trying to address secondary problems around discipline.

I love Google's ngram viewer for context here. Use of the phrase "personal responsibility" _skyrocketed_ around the late 80s[1], more or less matching the rise of the right-wing "bootstraps" narrative.

During the period covered in the ngram viewer (late 80s to 2000), the number of people in American prisons more than doubled[2]. In fact, it continued to rise precipitously until--you guessed it--circa 2008, where it finally plateaued (after more than tripling since 1988).

So, I dunno, maybe this is my bleeding heart talking, but if "unteaching personal responsibility" means "putting fewer people in prison," sign me up for the next lesson.

1: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22personal+re...

2: https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Tre...

The highest roi I ever found for critical thinking enhancement was LSAT prep.

Specifically, the logical reasoning section has you evaluate a series of arguments and answer (often tricky) questions about the argument--analogizing, finding flaws, etc.

Formal books etc are fine, but if this were programming, I'd say dive in and write code. Imo LSAT prep is the 'write code' in this instance.

head(less)s up: the links in the footer of your docs are busted. it looks like they all point to an `/en/` route but the actual URLs include no such tier.

Ouch, thanks for the heads up!

He is the leader of the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ryan

My guess is he's being singled out because many (esp. on the left) view him as intellectually disingenuous. He came to prominence as a 'thought leader,' leaning heavily on Ayn Rand's objectivism to inform his 'small government' politics.

ETA: actually, it's more likely the author thinks Ryan's preferred policies are cruel, not that he's disingenuous.

What's dangerous about Objectivism is that you can seemingly be both sincere in desiring better welfare for all while excusing an utterly selfish and debased ethical system, not to mention destructive social policies.

It appeals to people by (1) showing how good but naive intentions can lead to immense suffering (i.e. communism) and then showing how (2) free market policies seemingly predicated on selfishness counter-intuitively can lead to greater welfare for all. It's wrong because both the original narrative and inverse narrative are obviously hyperbolic rhetorical retellings (both in the book and in the more popular narratives) that in many respects fail to reflect the most substantive aspects of the political and cultural history. But counter-intuitive narratives are so very, very appealing to certain generations, partly because they seemingly expose others has hopelessly naive fools while creating a special class of people who can see the truth.

Any takes on what FL's incentive is here? With no state income tax, and with the relatively modest # of people employed by funds, why target investment funds?

States with no income tax make a lot of money off of property tax. The more businesses and employees they bring physically into the state, the more they make.

Florida loves poaching people from high cost of living states. Typically they are moving later on in life, so they don't overload the public education system.

I view the absence of JSX as a liability. I like flutter, but I find a lot of the syntax to feel 'different for the sake of different.'

As I understand it, this was the rationale behind the courts' decision to prohibit LinkedIn from banning people from scraping public profiles.

Basically it was anti competitive to grant certain privileges to major players around 'public data,' but to block smaller players.

No telling if/when ramifications from that decision (last year) hit existing anti scraping measures, though.

(I use FF developer edition and chrome, but not chromium)

I find Firefox Dev tools to be a bit nicer,esp. the network tab. Firefox also has a few experimental features that are okay, but the fact that they're experimenting is worth something (eg the JavaScript scratchpad feature).