admiralteal

We can’t claim to know it left them with “bad” employees. I think there’s vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the “good” employees effectively – I’m pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office – it’s possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?

What this “return to office” stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

I bet you win every argument once you’re taking a shower.

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.

I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.

It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it’s the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.

Absent an idiotic carrier/mfg skin that disables the feature, you just long-press power then click “lockdown”.

Or reboot the device. Rebooting the device will also leave it encrypted if your device has encryption (the PIN/password is needed to decrypt, essentially).

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Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it’s given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.

It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.

Wow, on top of that wild crotch it is also ugly. Wild.

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

I’ll never argue with someone who wants that true, rural/countryside/homestead life. The appeal is there for me too, even if my own calculus says the cons wildly outweigh the pros.

I’m pretty skeptical you’re going to find it 5 miles from a healthy town, though.

This entire question is completely distorted by the poor-qualtiy postwar urbanism that is rampant everywhere.

The reality is, there shouldn’t be much difference. Lowrise cities – 2-4 story buildings/townhomes, small apartments, walkable neighborhoods/mass transit, corner groceries, all that stuff that people think can ONLY exist in big cities should be the norm for nearly all towns.

I don’t think many people would describe a place like, say, Bordeaux as a “big city”. 250kish people in 50 square kilometers is hardly Paris. It’s a small city, or maybe a big town. And it has everything you can want from a city and more. Shows, museums, beautiful multimodal neighborhoods, a robust tram system, restaurants and cafes and bars. All this kind of stuff.

The problem is we’ve all been mentally taught you can either live in island, R1A zoned suburbs which require driving to do ANYTHING or else you need to live in a huge metropolis like NYC. Or else we’ve been trained to think of a “city” like the bullshit they have in Texas, where it combines all the worst features of those island suburbs/car dependence with all the worst parts of city (crazy prices, noise, exposure to nearby-feeling crime, etc).

While a lot of the US big cities are trying to sort out the knots they’ve tied themselves in, your best bet to find beautiful, livable urban-ism is in those much smaller <500k cities that don’t even show up on the typical lists of cities. Especially if they are historic, since the more historic a place is the less likely it got bulldozed in the 60s to make room for more highways (destroying local neighborhoods in the process) Some kind of a big university also tends to be a plus, though it’s a mixed bag. Check for places that do not have an interstate carving through the middle of the city.

We can only get the amenities of modern urbanism in the biggest metropolises these days because of how badly the “suburban experiment” has distorted and destroyed our community life. And there can only be so many metropolises, so they’ve naturally turned absurdly expensive. People can’t afford to live in them because of how much people want to live in them. So they settle for suburbia, since financial poverty feels way worse than poverty of community.

It IS a cultural thing, but you’re placing blame on bad actors when it’s a systemic problem – a systemic problem with the culture of US road engineering. That is, US road engineers do not have a robust culture of safety. The priority is and always has been speed and “level of service” (aka throughput) in the designs over safety or cost effectiveness or even pleasantness of the urban landscapes.

I’ll never buy the idea that a wide set of diverse people across an entire continent are all just worse than the rest of people around the world. The fact that the problem is widespread is proof the issue is not bad actors.

The US does have more people who shouldn’t be driving driving though, I’ll agree with that much. But it isn’t because they’re reckless lunatics that don’t care about other road users, and I’ll never buy the covid arguments that people all went NUTS during covid and started mowing down pedestrians – because no way that would’ve happened in JUST the US and nowhere else. It is, again, a systemic issue. The same one. Since driving is essential for most people to live their lives in the US, people who had no business driving are driving. Because of our INCREDIBLY terrible philosophy towards urban design and road constructions, we have pigeonholed ourselves into an expensive, unsafe urban landscape.

A lot of mass transit got downsized during covid, for example. That could’ve put more bad drivers on the roads – but it isn’t because they’re monsters, it’s because they have no choice.

Nah, we know this isn’t the reason because in other countries that have better road design that actually takes psychology into mind for design speeds, they did not see the same uptick. Also, other countries are seeing gradual decreases in road deaths while the US continues to see increases.

You can also look at e.g., the dangerous by design reports and see very clearly WHERE the road fatalities are happening. During covid it was all over the map. Post covid, it is clearly skewing away from the blue cities.

It’s a very clear natural experiment with an obvious conclusion: the US has fundamentally unsafe road engineering. We focus on speed over safety in our designs, which in low congestion works perfectly (i.e., makes roads fast and unsafe) and in nominal conditions achieves neither.

Load up all of AASHTO into rockets and shoot them into the sun.

Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.

Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was… congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.

Trains are not the solution to every problem.

Light rail intercity transportation is a good option, but it only makes sense on well-traveled routes. And while it is true that the trains induce significant demand – that is, the route they are on will BECOME well-traveled because the train access is so valuable that people want to be near it – this is only solving a few very narrow commute problems.

Trains ARE the solution to major commuter congestion, though, and for many well-developed metros are probably the only path to reducing congestion since you cannot just continue to add more roads.

Your autonomous shuttle idea might make sense for less-traveled routes, but pavement is incredibly expensive to maintain compared to rail and vehicles that have to carry around their power source around are seriously inefficient compared to a pantograph, not to even get in to rolling resistance. Busses are useful as a start, but in response to growth they should continue evolving sensibly – car to bus to trolly bus to tram to fully-separated light rail is a logical progression as a city grows, but a city that knows it is growing fast is often wise to skip steps to save longterm cost.

The actual full solution to the issue of cars is the same one it has been for all 10,000 years of the human urban experiment (less the last 60ish) – build towns that are primarily navigable on your own power. Don’t create robust social policies that cut off infill and multifamily residence. Don’t push all business and work sites to some far-flung corner compared to where people life. Don’t subsidize a fake-rural lifestyle in islands that cannot sustain themselves at the expense of the poor people living in old-development neighborhoods. Don’t build more roads that you can afford to maintain and don’t permit road geometries you know are going to kill people – zero routine deaths is the only acceptable number.

A city you can get around under your own power is less expensive to maintain and more pleasant to live in for most people.

Not to even get into the relative safety (or lack thereof for cars & roads).

Yep, and the technology to operate that fleet is only 5 years away. Just like it has been for the last 15.

Anything to make communities think it is safe to refuse to invest in any other transportation mode.

I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.

It’s just nuts. Used vehicle prices are through the roof in no small part because new vehicles are now ABSURDLY big and expensive.

AAA is now rating the cost of a new car to be something like $0.50-$1 per mile to operate. Or an average of $12k per year. When you carefully do the math, a lot of people are finding that the rideshares aren’t much more expensive – plus now they don’t need to deal with the non-monetary costs of car ownership (maintenance, parking, fear of accident/theft, etc). And you can get blackout drunk to try and tune out the chaos of a dying planet and still be able to get home.

Not to mention car accidents are still, last I checked, the main killer of young people.