I've been wearing a watch every day for years and I have no interest in this stuff either. Honestly, I like the idea that my watch is just a stupid thing that tells me the time, having it beep at me every time I get an email would just feel like I'm being tethered to a computer even more than I am already.
No matter what, you're always going to be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to sacrifice more than you, whether that be health or family or anything else. I liked the article but it completely danced around the obvious conclusion which is, "maintaining a healthy relationship with your family is going to cost you time and energy which is going to at least somewhat lessen your chances of success and you have to be okay with that."
Edit: I've realized that my last sentence was somewhat ambiguous, I want to make it clear that I in no way support neglecting your family for a chance at economic success. When I said you have to be okay with it, I meant being okay with the risk of failing.
That's nonsense. There are 5 creative hours in the day if you are generous. Some companies are build so poorly that it takes staff 12 hours of being present to access those but that's the failing of these businesses and they will likely die.
There are two solutions to the issue, avoid the issue and hire people crazy enough to put up with the hours or actually build a great company without the flaw. First one is way easier and seems to be working in places like NYC and Silicon Valley, it's really a pity.
No matter what, you're always going to be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to sacrifice more than you, whether that be health or family or anything else.
Not always. If you're in a line of work where your own competence matters, sacrificing your health or family life will burn you. It doesn't take long.
The relevant issue is that most white-collar workers (even programmers in many dysfunctional organizations) are private-sector social climbers by trade and practice, and competence matters a lot less than image for them. If appearance matters more than capability, extreme sacrifice can help you.
There was an important word there that you seemed to miss. I didn't say that he who sacrifices more will always win, but they do have more options available to them, so to speak. Please don't think I'm advocating sacrificing health and family in the name of success, far from it. I just don't like this post facto moralizing that glosses over the difficulty of choosing between working late on something that might be critical to the success of your enterprise and going home to see your wife and kids.
I think this discussion highlights something very important about any Darwinian system, be it inter-species rivalry or free market competition: evolution has no higher ideals. Whatever is best at domination will dominate; whatever is best at spreading will spread.
People put so much faith in evolutionary processes as if they believe that evolution honors some kind of Platonic ideal. Evolution is a cold process, and it does not give a shit about you or anything you hold dear, unless what you hold dear is conducive to dominance in the specific arena under discussion.
Not to say natural selection is bad or good... I'm just pointing out that it's a value-neutral process, and I think it's a good idea to remember that, especially when we get the urge to derive norms of behavior from evolutionary evidence.
>Aww isn't that cute! A musician/artist having an intellectual idea that isn't completely terrible
I think it's less to do with him being a musician/artist than with him being will.i.am, notorious "My Humps" backup singer. If it had been Thom Yorke or Getty Lee or someone then I think they'd probably have been (reasonably or not) treated with a little more respect.
No, I meant the respect part. Thom is known for his cryptic ambiguity and often surreal sentence formation, so it's doubtful his opinion would be held in higher regard than anyone else's.
It's not that he doesn't believe this happens, but rather that the presence of a story about it in NYT where chick-fil-a is mentioned directly in the first paragraph is not an accidental matter. Chick-fil-a being the main restaurant talked about in a feel good article like this is great PR for them, discounting the possibility of it having been arranged deliberately just because the op was overly cynical is a bit petulant. PR is almost never about making things up, but rather the timing and the tone and the things mentioned in the periphery of the story. PR firms know that a straight-up story on how chick-fil-a is great is not likely to do much for them with world-weary americans, but a feel good story about people helping each other (which may very well have happened) with chick-fil-a strategically placed just in the background is great.
Given the leanings of the NYT, I cannot imagine a feel good article about Chick-Fil-A will ever appear in their pages because of money. They have refused advertising several times because it doesn't jive with their editorial policy.
[edit] also see Natsu's comment for an additional thought against it being an ad for Chick-Fil-A.
You can't believe it would happen for money, but you'd believe it'd happen for free? Anyway, PR is far more complex and subtle than "I give money, you write article". Someone posted a pg essay below that might be instructive.
As to why I think this might (I make no claims to certainty) be a PR-influenced article:
1. Chick-fil-a is mentioned in the first paragraph, no other restaraunt is mentioned until the fourth.
2. The first 3 paragraphs are a visceral imagining of what it would be like to be part of a "pay-it-forward" chain at a chick-fil-a specifically, complete with giggling cashier. Other restaurants are mentioned only in an detached and objective manner.
3. There's a direct quote in paragraph 5 from the chick-fil-a "director of hospitality", the only other quote from a restaurant owner is from a smaller local shop 3 or 4 paragraphs down. The chick-fil-a representative’s quote is a comment on the value and reasoning behind pay-it-forward, the other's is simply a factual one about a lady at his store that does it.
4. Getting a bit more abstract here, but this is exactly the kind of ideal that chick-fil-a probably wants to be associated with, "good-old down home people helping each other out small town america &c.". Note the jab at starbucks at the end?
5. Like op said, chick-fil-a took a bit of a beating in the press awhile ago. People might not remember what happened exactly, but they probably came away with a slightly worse impression of chick-fil-a. If PR was involved in this article then it's probably to try and repair that damage.
You so desperately want this to be a nefarious PR job.
Why was Chick-fil-a mentioned first? (Puts on Sherlock Holmes cap.)
1. Maybe the writer was fishing for pageviews?
2. Maybe the writer wanted an eye-catching lead? Aggregators pick up the first sentence.
3. Is it a coincidence this is trending on a Sunday after millions of Christians just ate Chick-fil-a after church? How many priests/pastors injected this story into the sermon today? How many Christian moms did a "share by email" on this? A ton!
4. Sometimes these stories take months to write. Maybe the writer first discovered the phenomena via a Chick-fil-a related conversation.
5. A good article must have quotes. It's possible the Chick-fil-a quote came first which got the always-difficult first paragraph rolling.
6. Maybe this was an underhanded jab at Chick-fil-a patrons. "See, it's not just chicken-eating Christians that are generous." NYT's political slant is no secret.
7. Maybe the writer just likes the chicken? Is that so far-fetched? LOL.
Those are just as plausible, if not more plausible, in my opinion.
>You so desperately want this to be a nefarious PR job.
And you seem to desperately want me to be some bitter chick-fil-a hater. IF chick-fil-a was involved in the writing of this piece then it's nothing more than what hundreds of other companies do everyday, PR involvement is an integral part of the modern press. I may not like it but I would not call it "nefarious". I'm not commenting because I have a hate-on for chick-fil-a but because there seems to be a lot of wilful ignorance here on just how much the media we consume is manipulated by PR.
On to your points:
1. I don't really see why chick-fil-a would get more pageviews than another restaurant so I'll skip this.
2. Of course the writer wants an effective opening, but the "you're part of a pay-it-forward line" fantasy could have easily been written at a generic restaurant.
3. Other people have said it but chick-fil-a is closed on sundays. Also I don't really get what this has to do with how and why the author wrote the story.
4. I'm pretty sure a fluff piece on people paying for each other's fast food didn't take a month to write. And I think the author probably did discover the phenomenon after a chick-fil-a related conversation, one with a chick-fil-a sponsored PR representative.
5. It's impossible to say assuredly whether any article was PR influenced but that quote seemed awfully convenient.
6. You seem to be very concerned with christianity when no-one else has mentioned it, least of all the article. I would not personally assume that chick-fil-a patrons are particularly christian, it seems strange to me that this is immediately the thing you jump to. Same thing goes with the source's political leanings, I don't consider fast food to be a political matter and I don't think NYT or chick-fil-a do either.
7. Sure, but if that's the case it's interesting that most of the other restaurants mentioned are coffee shops and a bagel cafe (which aren't really chick-fil-a competitiors) rather than popeyes or mary brown's.
so in conclusion:
1. I'm right
2. You seem to weirdly have tied up a fast-food restaurant into some christian right wing identity you hold and it's preventing you from acknowledging the very really possibility of PR manipulation in an NYT fluff piece.
I won't respond to all of that but I think we can both agree the business of news is interesting. Also I'm fascinated by the PR world and no, I don't have much experience in that area. My perspective is more pageviews & software oriented. How the New York Times operates, how the editors make decisions, it would be fun to be a fly on the wall there. I bet they're ripping out their hair trying to keep up with the pace of the Internet.
Anyway, you made me look it up because I wasn't sure exactly what happened. As far as I can tell, this is what started the Chick-fil-a controversy. I believe this is the full text - http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=38271
In particular, near the end of the interview:
"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that."
Which I suppose is why you think they need ongoing PR help in the New York Times. My first wife, we won't talk about her! LOL.
indeed. journalists: even good ones, are under pressure for time and stories, and will often take excellent copy from a crafty PR verbatim. Such is capitalism.
It's not indeed (protomyth below) a matter of journalist or NYT deliberately giving column advertising to this company, but more the PR-fu of getting them to mention them anyway by feeding them the story in the right way, knowing that the journos will want to feel independent and objective. Clever PR people, upright journalists...
(I couldn't see a reply button on your comment just now, and now I see there is one. weird)
I think the whole point is that "should" and "shouldn't" simply aren't very useful concepts when dealing with corporations, like talking about what a slime mold should or shouldn't do. Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to. Individuals will respond to moral accusations, but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation.
> Getting morally outraged at WalMart is like getting really indignant about what plantar fasciitis is up to.
Except plantar fasciitis doesn't have a CEO, board or steering committee. Or a public reputation.
> but corporations are really only effectively controlled via legislation.
That's true, but it doesn't mean we can't publicly shame corporations when they act in bad faith. Incorporation is not some magical get-out-of-ethics-jail-free card.
That's dumb, just because someone isn't willing to go to an extreme measure to prevent something doesn't mean that more moderate measures are unreasonable. Banning all electronic devices on airplanes would be a major headache for everyone involved and would probably be overkill, but the risk is still non-zero and asking passengers to turn devices off for a few minutes during the two most dangerous times in a flight is perfectly reasonable.
Banning all electronic devices on airplanes would be a major headache for everyone involved
I think we've seen that this is not a problem for the Powers that Be. It's not as if the TSA chairman ever has to fly coach.
and would probably be overkill
I'm certain that we've seen that this is not an obstacle for implementation by the government.
but the risk is still non-zero
(Shrug) Zero accidents out of tens of millions of flights in which you can be pretty sure that at least one passenger has left their phone on. Close enough to zero risk for me.
You're still welcome to get a PPL and have as many cell phones as you wish turned on while you fly.
If you think anything that doesn't directly cause accidents aren't worth regulating, you don't truly appreciate why we have such good air safety.
Letting he pilots chit-chat when landing can't hurt either, right? Millions of successful flights before the sterile cockpit environment idea came about, would perhaps seem like close to zero risk for you, yet we are all safer now because of it.
Life offers you no guarantees, and risk avoidance costs money, time, and convenience. How safe do you want to be? Speaking for myself, I was fine about three nines ago.
That's the problem though. You don't fly thousands of passengers each day and have seen several of your peers bankrupted or seriously financially wounded by a single high profile accident, so you might have a different view on the risks compared to the ones running the airline.
By definition I take far more risk when flying a single-prop light aircraft, and I'm fine with that. What I don't expect is to be able to force that risk level on other people.
But you haven't shown that there is any risk, and neither has anyone else. Which (again) is why we're still allowed to bring electronic devices up to and including cell phones onboard passenger aircraft.
You can't run a civilization on the Precautionary Principle. You understand that, right? Most people understand that, but the TSA and (until now) FAA don't seem to.
It's trivially easy to show that there is a risk of interference, the question is just how big the risk is, and whether turning devices off during takeoffs and landings is worth the inconvenience.
And as mentioned elsewhere there had been reproducible incidents of interference reported, which was the initial reason for the ban.
While I have long maintained that the ban is most likely not necessary, I'd much rather have he FAA make that decision and wait a few years until they have done enough studies and collected enough data.
I agree that we can't run the entire civilization on a precautionary principle, but then again that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about 10-20 minutes of inconvenience during critical flight phases. And believe me I hate the beurocracy and often overreaching rules of the FAA (or EASA in my case), but again I appreciate that we would not have he current air safety record without it. In fact, the FAA is usually reactionary in that they usually only act when fatal accidents have happened. (Pilot and crew rest hour limits is one very recent example).
And it's the reason why flying is no longer only for the adventurous willing to risk their lives. Too bad you don't appreciate that and seem to take it for granted.
And I could point to lots of counterexamples like Deepwater Horizon. What's your point, that you would be happier with a riskier aviation industry? As I said, get a PPL, or better yet start an airline and start lobbying against FAA rulings.
And I could point to lots of counterexamples like Deepwater Horizon.
Yes, clearly we should... um, do what?
What's your point, that you would be happier with a riskier aviation industry?
My point is that many of the things that annoy passengers don't have anything to do with quantifiable risk. Suggest reading some Feynman, specifically his essay on "Cargo cult science."
As I said, get a PPL
That wouldn't give me any special authority on the subject. These questions must be answered analytically, not with fearmongering from bureaucrats or anecdotes from pilots without RF engineering credentials.
I've read the cargo cult essay. Would you say that based on their actual performance, you would place the aviation industry or the FAA in that category? If so, could you point to other, more successful industries?
I suggested getting a PPL to get rid of all those annoyances that commercial air transport impose on you to reduce their risk. There is even an experimental airplane category if you want to err on the risky side.
I agree that it has to be approached analytically, but since you can't prove a negative, in the end you have to make a risk assessment. I certainly don't agree with all of them, but there have been enough examples of fatal accidents when the FAA didn't do their job, that I'm happy that they are taking their time to, guess what, do the analytical work, before changing a regulation. As opposed to acting on a gut feeling about what would be safe.
There is no market demand for unskilled labor at $7.25 an hour. Even if you removed minimum wage laws, you would still need to pay people enough to eat and stay functional in the workplace, which nowadays I imagine isn't much lower than $7.25, especially considering the only practical unskilled labor roles today are physical toiling, since almost everything else can be very easily automated away, so you need to fix their broken bones.
So I'd argue the open market in the US don't have enough demand for physical human labor at the bare minimum cost to keep people alive. The consequence is a lot of people are just not working. We have nothing for them to do at the given price that anyone is willing to pay.
So if the market has no unmet demands for toil, then guaranteeing a minimum wage job means you are wasting that persons time on some task that nobody needs done, at least not for the price he is paid, and you are not only biasing away the labor market you are wasting that persons time on some task that isn't valuable to be done.
Even if you have some market demand, the given rate is dropping annually due to the cheaper and more efficient automation of physical duties. I guarantee you once automated vehicles are entering the market and are legally allowed, there will be an absurd displacement of menial labor driving delivery trucks.
Other industries rife for that kind of displacement are farming (considering most farming tasks are procedural, automated farming machinery is practical, even if it needs high precision to harvest using computer vision), retail (with automated vehicles, you might as well buy all your goods online, shipped directly to your home, with no need for an intermediary store except in rare conditions like furniture and cars where you want to "sample" in person the goods), and construction (if you plant factory made homes, might as well build a foundation machine to excavate and lay a foundation without human intervention).
And then you have no use for human meat sacks moving their arms. We are already approaching that - it is why this problem even exists today. What happens when we get there?
Humans are not ready for the post-work era, and probably won't be for a few generations. When there truly is no more need for actual labor to make the world run, humans will have to reform their notion of "unemployed". As of now, we define people based what they give to the world, and so far the easiest way to measure that is through work. That's why it's such a huge deal that our unemployment rate is high, we have these immense conceptual blocks that we'll need to shed for the post work era.
In the mean time, we have to accommodate the current generations of people by subsidizing work. It's the only way to sustain our current paradigm and give people livelihoods, instead of leaving them desolate in the transition phase with callous explanations of technological progress.
You're describing a situation where most of the economic work of producing the necessities of human life can be done by robots (food/clothing/shelter/electricity/transportation of those goods to the humans that need them).
When that happens, the human race will be able to retire -- communism / Basic Income will actually work in that world, everyone will be able to get the necessities of life, and the small proportion of people who are willing to work for fun, or unnecessary luxuries that aren't necessary for survival, will be very small compared to today's pool of human labor, but still enough to maintain the robots and do the remaining jobs that robots can't do.
Offering money to drop out of high school would cause the drop out rate to increase further. Besides, I get the feeling that most high school drop outs aren't really looking for work. This is a hard problem to solve.
The money would be unconditional, not in exchange for dropping out of high school. You may as well say that soup kitchens are offering soup to drop out of high school and are causing the drop out rate to increase further.
It has some advantages over more traditional welfare systems. For instance it could be implemented with far less bureaucracy and would help improve labor mobility in the middle class by decreasing the friction of changing jobs and moving to different areas with better jobs (improving labor mobility would benefit the economy at large).
18 is probably too old. We want the child support handout to be separated from the parent as early as possible. Giving 12 year olds their own income is probably better than either welfare queens or fertility police.
If you are an economist (a field is already more an ideology / spin machine than science -- the science part in it is basically math), and you are more into entertainment (e.g making the NYT best selling list of shallow books) than science, then you can "prove" a lot of things, without actually proving anything.
Start with a few unexamined wrong assumptions, select the data that fit your conclusion, dress them up with anecdotes and prose, and there you go!
1. No one ever said that only women are faced with high performance demands, you're very obviously making a strawman and you should feel bad for it.
2. Arguments like "This is a very common argument and it is false" and "it is simply not true that..." are merely bald assertions of fact and would not be convincing even if you were arguing against an opinion that someone actually held
3. "Many or even all men can feel this same expectation in performance-based professions, but they will not blame their sex" is dog whistling for the idea that women are somehow conspiring to use anti-sexism to apologize for poor performance. Also, how you can claim to know the feelings of "many or even all men", and compare them to the feelings of women is beyond me.
4. I have never seen a man complain about sexism in tech, but many women have. There are only three explanations:
a) women in tech are somehow unreasonably seeing sexism where there is none, which given that it happens to numerous women but no men requires an explanation that isn't cheap handwaving
b) women in tech are trying to use complaints of sexism to get ahead unfairly, which I will happily dismiss as being needlessly cynical and misogynist
c) there is sexism in tech, which given that sexism exists to some degree in most every place is not an unreasonable thing to think
>I think programming is bound to drop more specific syntax and become increasingly like natural language
Why do you think that? Programming has never been like writing in a natural language, nor would it be useful for it to be. Natural language is inherently filled with subtleties and imprecision, both of which are anathema to the typical process of programming. When I write something for the computer to consume then I want to be able to know with 100% certainty what it is going to do, the probablistic parsers typically used for NLP couldn't guarantee that.
