Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

This is entirely subjective - I haven’t gone around counting things up - but I’ve noticed both more pro-Tesla and pro-SpaceX posts and increased arguments on the anti-Musk posts. It seemed (on lemmy) to be coming from the same small number of accounts, so it could just be an enthusiastic handful of fanboys.

If one of them became a mod, that might explain it. They were very active in the Tesla and SpaceX subs with multiple articles posted within minutes of each other within the past couple of days.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.

Let me start with some obvious ones:

• Orientalism by Edward Said

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• 90% of Chomsky’s work

• 21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.

Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.

Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).

Anything about James Baldwin

The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.

I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.

Manager at a FAANG here. It sounds like you’ve been mostly talking to people at small companies who use terms like “code ninja.” I have no idea what they’re looking for, and I honestly doubt they do, either.

What I’m looking for is someone who can help me solve the problems that I have and that will be coming up. A candidate should be able to answer some basic questions about the programming language(s) they claim to know if they’re relevant to what I need (sometimes people will simply list everything they’ve heard of in an attempt to game resume scanners). They should be able to whiteboard an algorithm (like an elevator controller) on the fly and explain their thinking on it. They should be able to walk me through their resume work history and explain the projects they listed, as well as detailing their roles. I want to know who made the decisions on the project - the tech, architecture, implementation, and so on. I want to know what the candidate did, and what they’d do differently knowing what they now know. If they lost publications, I’m going to do the same (and I might skim at least the abstract). Basically I’m looking for someone I can be working with for at least the next five years, and who can continue to learn and grow.

Oh, and don’t list emacs (or in one notable case, “emax”) as a technical skill.

I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…

Fair enough, and after all it’s not your money.

In any case, it should be pretty cheap to have someone set it up for you. I’d throw it out there as somewhere around $30-50/hour with remote work allowed, or a fixed price of $1000-1500. From your description it sounds like something that could be knocked out in a week by someone with a few years experience, and you have the additional security of having someone else on the hook for, well, security. Just make sure they document everything.

First, if people are winging it, your first problem is going to be standardization and sterilization of the data. If everyone is using excel, for example, they should be filling in the same template which enforces data integrity (eg required fields and allowed values). Don’t allow anyone to roll their own. Standardize everything. At that point your job becomes pretty easy with solutions ranging from converting the data to CSVs or just uploading it to a sql database (eg mysql) with some gui.

I would recommend thinking pretty hard about whether there is a business value in limiting access to data that people “don’t need.” While it does make sense for reporting to have simplified views, managing user level access to specific subsets of data is often not justified for the level of effort required. If you’re dealing with actual (eg government) classified information or if there are highly valuable trade secrets that need protecting, that’s another story. But if it’s just “Jeff in NY doesn’t need to see Jane LA’s sales numbers,” it’s probably a waste of effort and will be a time and money sink. I’m saying that as someone who has worked on very highly classified systems.

Anyway, everything you’re talking about is a solved problem That can be solved using excel and maybe an off the shelf database that an intern could set up for you.

You should probably look into the chemistry needed to do 2 H₂O -> 2H₂ + O ₂

Obviously the biggest problem is making sure you have an even number of water molecules.

Hint: It’s not because this idea never occurred to any of the scientists and engineers involved in hydrogen power.

This the order in which you should try to access papers:

1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

I would have thought that was abundantly clear.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

I have no issues with raising property taxes on non-owner occupied housing, and having them even higher on unoccupied housing.

Being from California (and earlier from New York), that’s very much the intention. Both states (and municipal laws in places like LA, SF, and NYC) make the landlords have to jump through a lot of hoops before an eviction can take place, and the tenants can file for protection.

I know that things vary from state to state, but I’ve only been a renter in NY, NJ, and CA. I’ve also successfully sued a landlord for over $100k in damages and expenses.

I’ve brought on interns/RAs in roles as a professor at a university, as a scientific researcher at a national lab, and as a manager at a large company. They usually pay the equivalent of $60-80k, except for the RAs who get a stipend/room and board, and a tuition waiver (which works out about the same depending on the school). Every position was filled by a person making a direct application, either to me personally or via a position advertised on the company website. One or two might have been from an institutional outreach program, but I’ve never heard of an intern coming in from a third party recruiter.

I’m absolutely not disagreeing with you. Your experience may be very different (my current company doesn’t deal with third party recruiters at all, and my org doesn’t even use contractors). I just wanted to throw my experience out there so that people would realize there’s a variety of opportunities that might require different approaches.

No, they mean the same thing, at least in my familiarity with the phrases. “Cry me a river” means that I don’t care to hear about their complaints, even if their tears were enough to fill a river, because I think they’re not legitimate.

First, squatters of this type are taking advantage of laws intended to protect renters from predatory landlords. Wherever you stand on people appropriating unused property, these laws need to stay in place even if they’re made more specific.

Second, news outlets like this will always quote a “guns and drugs” case and not the mom with three kids seeking employment or homeless vet cases.

Third, with security cams and doorbells being so cheap, there’s no reason why this should be an issue, especially for a large real estate rental company. That alone puts me in “cry me a river” mode. Notice again that the article lists interviews with individual homeowners but is actually profiling the impact on a rental company.

Sorry - I should have realized others would point that out as well. I didn’t mean to pile on.