"...get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore."
"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics...and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military."
This is a groan worthy interpretation. He’s saying you won’t have to vote based on those issues anymore because they’ll be fixed.
In the second he’s talking about managing physical discord, not rounding up people minding their own business in their homes or saying whatever on twitter. And he’s saying it specifically in the context of protecting the election process. He’s literally advocating for safe and harmonic voting.
This is why anti Trump rhetoric is exhausting. People grasp at the shortest of straws and make claims that basically feel like I’m being lied to.
There are endless real things to attack Trump on. Please stop lying to me and telling me he’s literally Hitler. He’s not, he’s just racist and shitty.
How does "R language" compare to searching for one of the popular R packages? Searching for "tidyverse", "dplyr", or "ggplot" seems to get a good chunk of hits. That being said, yeah, there does seem to be a trio of skills that often go together (R, python, SQL)
How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"
Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?
I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.
For homelab (but not only) you can install Proxmox Virtual Environment on your physical machine. You end up with a way to create VMs and containers with a web UI. It supports cloud-init too. If you have a spare machine it's excellent for experimenting and learning.
I wanted to self-host more of my Rails projects and Dokku comes with nice Buildpack support so I can just push a generic Rails app and it'll run out of the box. That plus that I had to set up a new server after many years made me look into that more.
That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason
cloud-init is good, but it assumes that you treat your VMs like containers and that means you will need a lot more VMs that you constantly create and destroy and you will have to deal with block storage for persistence.
If all you do is ssh into a system with docker compose installed, you will hardly benefit from cloud-init beyond the first boot.
I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors.
I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.
Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.
I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.
A lot of the optimism seems to rely on this statement and...I'm not convinced? But I also admit I'm not well informed on the topic. Does anyone have suggested reading on 'market discipline', as they're calling it?
I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos, who is actively dealing with an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC regarding Amazon's frequent and regular push toward monopoly power.
I really want to love this manifesto. This is my one sticking point. Regulatory capture, monopolies, and cartels are the fatal flaw in this techno-optimism, and they break everything. Let's say I subscribe to this wonderful story Marc tells. Please tell me the purpose of government if it is not to destroy cartels and monopolies. They are every bit as bad as the government, which is a type of monopoly itself.
Isn't that them speaking from multiple sides of the mouth? It's a manifesto by... venture capitalists. They have a very specific and diverse audience that they want to read this.
I mean, there is not going to be any low-interest capital flowing in to fuel all these techno-optimist ideals if the start-ups can't later be acquired by the existing monopolies.
Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one. Free markets are naturally resistant through free competition (startups!) and, you know, laws.
Were those government supported monopolistic behaviors? Does the "free market" mean that a competitor could have simply made one company that produced an entire laptop, OS, and CPU from scratch to provide the consumer a cheaper choice?
Why would the "free market" lead to vibrant competition, rather than monopolistic hoarding of power?
Government's action did had zero effect against Microsoft. Slap on the wrist. Their monopoly was naturally made irrelevant by the market moving onto the next tech frontier: mobile & cloud.
The free market lead to that. Countless startups trying everything under the sun made sure incumbents like Apple or Google had to innovate, acquire and evolve to avoid Microsoft's fate. In a free market there is always a chance a new startup will spring up and upend the order. Tons of VC money are continuously trying exactly that.
Apple survived thanks to Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs alone. He could've built his vision in any company or startup though, when he took over Apple was a few weeks away from bankruptcy.
Without Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, the Mac would have been dead. Gil Amelio negotiated their continuation (as settlement for the old Look & Feel and QuickTime lawsuits) with Microsoft and Jobs closed the deal by letting up on some of Amelio's demands. Microsoft could have just said no and the Mac would have been useless to both education and business and they would have been dead in weeks as you said.
NeXT would never have built the iPhone, they had given up on hardware.
It’s not possible to know what other factors would’ve or wouldn’t have come into play, who would’ve done what else in this alternate history of yours. It’s just speculation.
Indeed, maybe Microsoft would’ve created an even better smartphone, putting us today in a position with 3 major competing mobile platforms! And just imagine what else after that…
> Free markets are naturally resistant through free competition
That's circular logic. Free markets are defined as those in which competition happens. Unregulated markets often tend towards cartelization and monopoly.
> and, you know, laws.
Which need to be enforced by governments.
> Point me to a resistant monopoly or cartel and I will show you a government granted/supported one.
The whole robber baron era is a counterexample - the likes of Standard Oil getting broken up by the goverment. Market competition is powerful but it only works when the government is actively enforcing a competitive market, which there is sadly little enthusiasm for lately.
Nobody said anything about not having governments. Rule of Law is required for societies to even exist.
Read some more on the robber baron era - you'll find out Standard Oil was already losing to competition before government action. For another great example how the free market broke a cartel, read up on how Dow Chemical fought the German bromine cartel:
Please don't put words in my mouth. Government's role in a free market economy is quite essential: upholding rule of law (specifically contract law) and taxing externalities. Overreach is the problem though (like regulating the charging port on my damn phone).
> Reducing profits defeats the purpose of becoming a monopoly, while any sliver of profit is the startup's opportunity.
Only if you ignore the concept of loss leaders, or the very act of competing in the market itself by undercutting competitors' prices. Companies are very happy to receive less money in the short term in exchange for guaranteed recurring revenue in the long term, it's only rational after all, and applies as much to a yearly subscription being cheaper than 12 individual monthly subscriptions as it does to established companies accepting reduced revenue in the short term to guarantee their share of the market in the long term.
This is all pretty obvious from a basic understanding of how companies work TBH.
Loss leaders, price dumping and price wars are as old as the world and free markets are perfectly capable to deal with them. Here's how how Dow Chemical fought the German bromine cartel's price dumping at the beginning of the last century:
Countless ways. From sheer governmental incompetence like when regulating the competition out of markets. To simply not understanding second order effects when “helping markets” with patents and humongous copyright terms. To not understanding supply and demand when pressed to fulfill voter promises like when attempting to control and fix prices. To being captive to interest groups that end up controlling a huge chunk of economy like in heath care.
But most of all through sheer, pure corruption. Because why else would someone become a politician - a relatively low paid position - if not to be in a position to transform all that power and influence into money, for the highest bidder?
Corporations, in America, where the travesty known as Citizens United exists.
(I'm not claiming that other countries don't have money in politics; but America is the one where it is most clearly enshrined with an actual name to the philosophy)
Incumbents, of course. The ones holding the largest interest in preserving the status-quo and freezing competition. Professional organizations needing power to preserve the barrier of entry. Huge, trans-national Unions.
But other power brokers as well. Other politicians with more money. Their own stock holdings. Foreign powers. Well moneyed interest groups. Ideological organizations siphoning old money.
Occasionally even the scrappy start-up trying to game the system. These usually fail, see SBF - but they are not saints either.
There is no shortage in interests vying to corrupt politicians. Somehow they never mind and always succumb.
Right. Land and air telecommunications are almost totally controlled by Verizon and AT&T. They are also some of the largest cable companies, although Comcast is a competitor. Although Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and we can start getting into the media monopoly.
We can go through business by business and see the rise of monopolies and oligopolies. Universal owns half of the US music market - Universal, Sony and Warner own over 80% of the US music market. Accounting is done by the Big Four, advertising by its own Big Four.
Just down the line - consolidation, oligopoly, monopoly. That is what markets produce. Standard Oil reversed its breakup into ExxonMobil, as did the Baby Bells into Verizon and AT&T. Even the government intervention into the monopolies gets reversed.
What organization has a media monopoly? You have access to the internet, with which you can access media from individuals all the way up to multiple large corporations.
On the national level, there are multiple sources of news (NYT/News Corp/Disney/Comcast/Paramount/WaPo/LATimes/etc). There are lots of sources of professionally and amateur produced entertainment. Apple/Amazon/Comcast/Disney/Sony/WarnerBrosDiscovery/Paramount/etc.
If anything, the monopoly exists on wired broadband to peoples homes, which is usually only available from one seller.
Disney/Comcast/Paramount represent the consolidation of an industry that used to be hundreds of independent newsrooms into a dozen or so corporations. The murdoch family's New Corp is regularly analyzed as a political force on par with individual elected leaders, if not more so.
Market discipline acts as a challenge, and humans figure out ways around challenges to maximize some reward (money). Market discipline is only enforced by humans and they have weaknesses.
This manifesto wants to pretend that the rules enforce themselves by some natural property of the system akin to physics or biology, and not from humans.
The manifesto is completely flawed on markets because what requires people to be discriminatory buyers is scarcity, which is opposite of what this manifesto is suggesting we work towards. It has no plans on how to handle technological abundance's (not post-scarcity) affect on market behavior:
>We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for
> I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos
No, it's an anonymous Twitter account, you read the name wrong, "Beff Jezos" (sic), not "Jeff Bezos".
Also if you look at the purest form of markets, which is probably high frequency trading, there are no monopolies and no cartels. It's an intensely competitive industry with relatively small profits given their transaction volume.
I don't think that's correct. Access to the fiber links or colocation in a facility is not only ridiculously expensive you have to know the right people (the cartel) to get it done.
I can't just offer a crazy amount of money and get access, the other major players have to let me play.
You actually can just offer a (not very large) amount of money and get access. The fees aren't even that large and they are public see [1] for example. The startup costs for an HFT would be comparable to a restaurant buildout, it's really not a capital intensive business.
If that's "the purest form" of something, give me the dirty version any day.
An utterly useless human activity, that does nothing for actual humanity but simply serves as a wealth redistribution technique shared among a tiny number of highly-self-interested individuals ... it might be "pure" but it's not "pure" in any way.
I don't know if you have been on the other side of what market makers do, but its not exactly a day at the beach. Once you gain enough insight to see whats going on the charts you just see it as a graveyard of traders positions, stop losses and their capital. This happens every minute the market is open at every timeframe.
Have you ever wonder why the markets appear so irrational? Great economic data and the worse drop in months or vice versa. These are the expectations, emotions and psychology of the masses that are liquidated by market makers. Have you also just had a gut instinct to buy or sell and market moves completely opposite beyond your psychological limit. Only for it to start moving into profit once you have closed at a huge loss. This is all market makers do all day.
In principle there is nothing immoral here. Participants are all taking risks voluntarily, no one is forcing you risk trading the stock market. But in practice market makers take positions at the stop losses 90% of market participants giving them significantly overwhelming supply of assets at the best prices, while everyone else sees consistent intractable losses.
This is a Darwinian environment where only the biggest, fiercest and most aggressive players will win by killing weaker, smaller and less knowledgeable players. The only way for a small fish to win is to understand the rules the market makers play by. Their strengths, desires, weaknesses, limitations and once you do you realize that this was someone's capital, but it's also capital not going to the market makers.
I think you intended to reply to me (GP), not the parent.
You're ignoring my objection to this stuff, which has nothing to do with immorality and everything to do with with the waste and misdirection of resources. Why do people participate in this stuff? Because someone might get rich. From my POV, that's a waste and misdirection of resources. People getting rich is not the right motivation for pareto or utilitarian optimal allocations.
Capitalism and people getting rich is for better or worse exactly the stabilizing factor that has lead to the success of the modern world we take for granted. Capitalism is the worst except for all the others.
I empathize that it appears the case it's not an optimal allocation, but to say you know it's a misallocation leans overly simplistic.
What you see as misdirection of resources is the product of competitive market forces that drive innovation and efficiency. And the market often finds value in ways not immediately apparent.
Is less efficient resource arbitration (futures, forex) worth the trade-off? Producers can make their own market and set their own prices. But do that in an information vacuum and there will be increased deadweight loss in the form of higher bid-ask spreads, increasing costs, reducing economic activity.
There are more benefits in the form of reducing volatility and increasing liquidity.
It is not at all as obvious as you make it that society would be better off had HFTs and similarly received sorts of "financialization" not exist.
> I empathize that it appears the case it's not an optimal allocation, but to say you know it's a misallocation leans overly simplistic.
I empathize that it appears the case that the market has some emergent properties that allow it to optimize allocation, but to say you know its an optimal allocation leans overly simplistic.
"I think investing in a venture that will do <X> seems like a good idea" may, indeed, have some connection to an at least pareto optimal resource allocation.
"I will offer your $X in N months for <X>" might also play a useful role in resource allocation.
"I will buy this 3rd derivative instrument that reflects guesswork about guesswork about preferences and hold it for 3 hours" is just the financial service industry fucking us over.
I'm pointing out The Economy/Market and its mechanisms is a complex system. I urged caution making conclusions from facile knee jerk first order observables when it's the unknown nth order effects we should probably try to identify and characterize first.
> just the financial service industry fucking us over.
Maybe. But why think you know this? I haven't even tried to quantify the pros/cons, and I'm unwilling to stake a position until I do.
I don't know it in the way that I know about gravity or garbage collection. But I know it in the sense that the end results of this complex system are at best subject to debate as a net win given metrics that include the environment and equitability. A system with the set of pros and cons that the current one demonstrates on a daily basis seems incredibly unlikely to me to be remotely close to optimal.
Now, what does seem true is that it is easy to tell stories about this system that focus on its pros, of which there are many, and thus to construct the overall impression that we should be cautious about changing or discarding it.
In and of itself, that's not a problem. However, combined with the fact stories about the cons are routinely marginalized, discarded as not serious, simply ignored and forth, this is a problem. It leads to a strong bias in favor of the status quo - look at the all the good things we get! we must careful not to lose them! - and an equally strong bias against change attempting to target the much, much less culturally visible cons.
When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged. More pertinently, even if the alternatives do present various risks, we should be exploring "the neighborhood" with an awareness that we may not even be in a local optimum, let alone a global one.
> When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged.
But that's just the brain's bias towards simple explanations and well-defined actors - the Ockham's Razor heuristic you could call it. Truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism where most (all?) nations aren't stably resourced and as such geopolitical strategy and internal unrest can and will undo capital expansion with a stroke of the pen or a bullet from a gun. The need for monopolisable extractative resources such as fossil fuels ensures that capital will trend towards monopolistic behemoths with deep connections to their governments, and that permeates down into capital as a whole.
Moving to a more decentralised model of resourcing means less need for national security to favour and support massive quasi-governmental corporations that are "too vital to fail" and which leads to an environment where the inevitable endpoint of every market sector is consolidation into their own behemoth conglomerates. The more dispersed your resource acquisition is, the less dependent on massive corporations governments will be.
Instead of reaching for this horribly irritating snark (I'm sure GP understands market making enough to understand why HFT exists), why not be charitable and consider the opportunity cost of the smartest people spending their mental energy to create a slightly more efficient market? Is this really a responsible use of this resource?
Consider a similar irritation when seeing those with a superficial grasp of a complex topic oversimplify and make unwarranted conclusions.
And it's precisely the GPs unwavering certainty that HFTs are net negative that accurately informs they do not understand the full implications of what HFTs offer.
Because when you're aware of the full picture, it is not at all obvious society will be better off without it.
HFT is a dance in the shadows of the most highly-regulated practices in history (securities exchanges), I don't think it's a good example of "pure" markets being immune to monopolies.
Each of those regulations is a tombstone for the monopolies and cartels that came before, and there will absolutely be more tombstones to come. The history of the stock market is rife with corruption, stock manipulation, and short-thrifting the general public. The great fortunes of the 20th century were made on the backs of practices that are all kinds of illegal today, and with good reason.
This is worse than the actual Jeff Bezos, who constructed a trillion dollar company that underpins the internet, and is instead just an alt-right NRx troll on the internet.
Yeah. If anything, monopolies and cartels spring into being within a free market. Over and over and over again.
They're so dangerous to free markets because they hack the core freedoms into a positive feedback loop. Collusion beats naked competition; it's why our ancestors evolved to form societies instead of eating each other.
Even absent contracts (which exist to enable collusion) the iterated prisoner's dilemma and its generalizations seem to be solvable by tacit agreement (in the two party case, by tit for tat).
The only people who maintain that markets have the perfect competition property are those who define markets this way. Their existence is left as an exercise.
Free markets allow for and even encourage monopolies and cartels in the short term because those drive up profit margins. But over a longer time scale most are eventually destroyed by missing a disruptive innovation.
I understand and even expect the lack of empathy from RTO executives, but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.
I've worked primarily remote since 2016; but I have the option of going to an office a few miles away when I want to. My wife, forced to work from home, finds the entire experience to be socially isolating and misery inducing.
> work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?
This one-sidedness is a strawman. Not everyone's home is comfy or has space for working; some people made housing decisions based on one person leaving the home for most of every day (e.g. choosing a smaller apartment closer to city). Not every office is crowded and stuffy; some are quite pleasant. Not every worker gets their social needs met outside of work, and forcing them home ends up isolating them from the primary source of social interaction in their world, with all of the mental health and well-being issues that entails.
Personally, think that "more remote work" is the way to go, but the issue is more nuanced than "why are people resisting this obviously beneficial change?"
Work is not voluntary, there are no alternatives. Unlike other social opportunities in ones free time. So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.
Folks forced into an office cannot choose to opt out of all work. Changing jobs is a bigger lift than picking up some social hobby or activities after work.
I agree hybrid can be nice, yet executives are too often demanding RTO compliance. That's why there is so much breathless enthusiasm for remote work, and angst against attempts to both-sides the issues.
Why do people constantly equate picking up a social hobby after work to an in person workplace? They are not equivalent, and the social needs fulfilled are very different.
I might pick up a hobby and make some friends there - these friends are going to linked to my personal life, not my professional one.
I cannot ask this hobby friend for a referral for a job in the future. I cannot ask this hobby friend for some help if I’m dealing with a difficult boss or a challenging technical problem.
I might ask this friend to come skiing with me or come to the bar with me though. That’s nice, but it’s not a work relationship and I can’t fulfill work relationship needs through it.
Remote coworkers can be a referral network and help with difficult problems.
Perhaps you can strike up friends at a co-working space or a company where RTO is optional. (I go snowboarding with a former co-worker occasionally. Since we live far away it's usually a big trip, yet still no less an adventure.)
Hopefully losing your job won't also put your social life at risk.
Remote coworkers generally don’t care about you to the same extent. It can be generally difficult building social bonds remotely, and there’s mountains of evidence that shows the veneer of internet communication doesn’t actually fulfill them.
That’s not to say it’s impossible, of course, but just much harder. Your professional social network is much smaller remotely. You have to work with someone remotely for months to form the same relationship you could have in an afternoon in-person.
Hybrid work is a good compromise.
Losing my job wouldn’t put my social life at risk - as work relationships don’t and shouldn’t fill that role for me. Again, you seem to be conflating personal and professional relationships.
> But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy.
That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.
This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.
Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.
Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.
My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.
This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.
How cold the world is to make the primary form of communal spaces be working in the rigid hierarchy, abuse, and discomfort of the modern American workplace.
I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.
Not everyone is a single tech employee who lives alone. Some (in fact, many) people have a social life outside the office where not going to an office doesn't result in eternal solitude.
It's not grandstanding, I only brought up social life because someone mentioned social isolation from remote work. That is a real problem and I can empathize with it, but the solution isn't forcing RTO on co-workers to force them to hang out with you.
> So folks who can't get their needs met from remote work can still remote work and find fulfillment elsewhere.
How? If my remote work makes my employer schedule 2 hrs of extra zoom meetings and the workday is now 8-6 instead of 9-5, how can I find fulfillment elsewhere? In that scenario, office seems better because I get to hang out with other people between 9-5. Remote is much worse if one likes to socialize.
If your employer is increasing the workday to 8-6 due to Zoom calls then you are in the minority and that is an issue with your employer, not remote work.
> but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.
You are making the straw man here. People are mostly asking for a right to work remotely if they want to, that's all. And the status quo until very recently was (and still is) the opposite: not allowing remote work for people who want it, without any empathy for their needs. Try not to read it as an attack on the office, but more as millions of people asking for not being forced to commute and go to the office for a miserable experience.
If you read the replies to that post you might think otherwise, it's full of people suggesting the only reason you would go to the office is you don't have a social life, and every time this subject comes up on HN it's the same narrative.
I don't hear the same sentiment in the real world but there you go.
I generally think that we, as a society, should prioritize happiness and human flourishing. Work-from-home has been great for me, but I understand why others wouldn't enjoy it.
Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives. It should be easier to form worker-owner cooperatives and to organize strong unions, and generally promote more democracy in the workplace. And we should, as a society, de-emphasize work a bit. With all the automation we have, most people should be able to work a 32-hour work week and society would clip along just fine. Meanwhile, people would have more time to devote to the rest of living a life (pursuing art, socializing with friends/family, volunteering in social projects, studying an interesting subject, etc).
That's all to say, we are all individuals with different wants and needs, and we spend a lot of time at our jobs. We should restructure society to make us all happier and more fulfilled.
> Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives.
To be fair, this is especially egregious in the United States, where urban design is incredibly hostile and workers have long commutes because of distortionary policies to boost car sales and maximize returns on real estate speculation. Likewise, workers have so few protections and paid leave relative to other developed countries.
I probably wouldn’t care about going into the office in a nice, walkable European city, where I didn’t live in constant fear of being fired, be unable to take sick days, or be constantly forced to work over 40 hours, rarely take vacations, etc. But if you’re going to design society around maximizing my misery to make as much money as possible for someone else, I’m sure as hell not going to want to go into work if I can do my job from my couch with my dog beside me.
Your wife is not "forced" to work from home. She is forced to find her own work accommodations. At the extremes of requiring a dedicated IP address and fiber connection, it's still an option to rent an office space individually. At the less extreme: an individual membership at a coworking space, likely a public library, or a coffee shop. Similarly, whether at home, at a office, or at a coworking space she is not forced to be socially isolated or miserable.
There are also, frankly, a lot more jobs out there where 100% remote isn't even an option. Maybe they should consider changing jobs? 100% WFH is a dream for a lot of people, so let someone else have that spot
It's always more nuanced, but headlines don't have room for that.
If you advocate for "mostly remote work, with hybrid scheduling and hot desking as needed", some unempathetic execs and clueless middle micromanagers are inevitably going to try to turn that into a privilege to be allowed to work from home once a month. You have to open the negotiation by demanding full remote, so there's room for concessions allowing a few satellite campuses and occasional all-hands meetings.
The employee only have to care about their work and paycheck. Is they were paid to accommodate company needs, CEO wouldn't be paid 500 times the media pay and C-suite wouldn't be paid 100 times what I earn.
There is more to life than work and it should never be your entire or even most of your social life. Being socially isolated as a result of not having to go to work is a pretty good sign that your entire existence revolves around your work. Go outside, make friends, have a social life outside of work. It doesn't and shouldn't have to rule your world.
On the flipside, it's pretty sick that we've normalized getting all of one's social fulfillment from wage slaving rather than genuine social experiences that don't involve exploitation of our labor.
> some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life
Do you have any learning recommendations for someone looking to start down this path? I've only ever worked in an infra-renter context, and I've begun exploring the 'rent from Hetzner, manage your own infra' for personal projects, but I would love to learn from the paths of experts where possible.
I'm no expert but hopefully I can still point you toward the happy path: start very small and increase distributed complexity at your own pace until you can fully appreciate the entire end-to-end system and all the processes involved. The book: DDIA is a well-known 101, if a little primitive, and has references you can dig into as well.
Ideally, you also have some exposure to this at $job as simply building DIY infra horrors without seeing the real-world context, tradeoffs, etc. in which they typically operate will be misleading.
This "article" is a 10+ year-old website that's been tracking an ecosystem-wide migration from one style of preparing python code for distribution to another, more robust style of preparation.
I'm cautiously optimistic here. I have a very specific idea that the Vision Pro might make real. There's a great urban park nearby and I so want to just...walk while I work. Not on a treadmill and not 'to get away from my work'. Just: walk on a safe road / trail and do my computer work at the same time.
I've been exploring the consumer AR space --- I have a Viture One and have been eyeing the Xreal Air, but neither seems to solve the problem of "keep the virtual screen stable while I walk through real space".
If the Vision Pro can do that for several hours at a time, my interest in getting one will skyrocket.
(The whole 'how do you type while walking' issue is a separate problem, but one I feel is far more solvable than the virtual screen stability issue).
https://youtu.be/gE7xoHJkgvE?si=MVL_GibOGn2WDpLV&t=18
"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics...and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military."
https://youtu.be/BfSAOPPSYC8?si=C-6ZUrvU0yoFl9Aw&t=22