No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing, document when those workers don't meet the standards of performance, and reference those documents when they fire someone.
This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good work or people don't want to work with him.
This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out
I worked in fast food and this resonates extremely with me. There were only 4-5 people in a kitchen during the busy rush, and there was a list everyone knew of people they didn't want to get stuck in a shift with. If someone sucks to work with, it really sucks, and because everyone is pitching in and working together, there is no indication that the person was bad at their job. If you were fired, it was usually because your fellow workers said you were bad.
I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.
One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.
"law" is an incredible term used for "an observation a physicist made about the author citations of academic papers at one point in time", especially when you try to extend that to software development, and realize that there's other competing theories with supposedly better fits. I have not independently re-run the analysis myself, but lotka's law claims to be better an in general these are all special cases of zipf's laws, which is admittedly where I personally first heard this concept.
...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).
Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.
(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)
Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"
> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true
Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!
Heck, there's companies where standard practice is "fire the lowest x% of workers on a regular basis". Doesn't even matter if they're doing a good job or not; just that someone else is doing a _better_ job.
Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.
And don't forget that the percentages are not global, but in small buckets. This makes the worst performers extremely valuable, because not only you have someone to get rid of, but if they are bad enough, the rest of the team knows who will be laid off, so they can be far less tense.
It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company
And the problem with slow to hire, slow to fire is one day you might be incredibly slow to hire.
And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.
The looser overall firing rules are, the harder it is for the union to protect members from e.g. firing for insisting on adherence to safety/security/contractual/employment policies/laws. Threat-of-firing-backed pressure on all those fronts is incredibly common outside companies with strong unions.
If they are meeting the metrics set to judge their performance how are they bad employees? If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.
> If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.
Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.
Like in the cases of US courts defining obscenity or fair use, there isn't necessarily a set of metrics which can be used to perfectly taxonomize something.
Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".
The original comment was regarding employees currently being judged via metrics bringing up whether certain jobs can or cannot be judged using metrics is pointless.
Your analogy only works when applied to the hiring stage, as that is when the publishing house decides to work with you. If the publisher accepted your manuscript, assigned you an editor, gave you a target publish date, and gave you advance and then suddenly booted you and said “your work isn’t good” you’d have some questions, and rightly so.
This sort of thing happens all the time? Many manuscripts and screenplays are stillborn. Movies make it halfway through production before the plug is pulled. Software projects fail left and right, with millions of dollars spent (sometimes billions!)
Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.
Well the comment I was responding to specifically called out employees meeting metrics and still not being considered good employees, so your point is a little moot to my comment but I will reapond anyways.
How do you measure a better writer? It depends on what the purpose of the writing is. If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold. If it is an online publication you can conduct surveys to determine the impact of a particular writer on subscription or view rates. If it is a techincal writer doing product documentation you can measure based upon meeting schedule, number of defects and by conducting customer surveys.
There are no objective criteria as to what is "good" writing vs "bad" writing.
> If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold.
This is a fairly lousy metric. It depends enormously on the marketing campaign and the ability of salesmen to sell it.
For example, I read an article about the author of the "Slow Horses" book. It languished for years selling at a rate that was indistinguishable from zero. Then some journalist read it, wrote a glowing review of it, and it took off. Now it's a best seller, with sequels, and a miniseries.
Good writing is writing that allows the publishing house to achieve their end goal and bad writing is that which doesn't. The end goal is the same as for other businesses to make money. If you don't sale books you are a bad writer for their purposes.
It is possible to both have some metrics and not have them be the only way you determine if an employee is doing a good job. Because some things can't be measured, and some can.
They meet these metrics while they are under formal process just before termination. I used to work with a couple people clearly working multiple jobs who switched focus when they were PIPed.
If they are refocused on their job and now meeting metrics why terminate them? People can become unfocused for a variety of reasons beyond working other jobs. Life happens. If they don't remain focused and again don't meet metrics they have already been given an opportunity and should then be terminated.
> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true.
Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...
Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.
You can still be pro-worker even if you think sometimes a certain worker is bad, or hard to work with, or otherwise a "bad employee." It is more something political and something about how you view the world/humanity in general. It is not an "identity politics" where the discussion is around certain kinds of people or not. That would be kinda silly anyway on its face, we are virtually all workers!
>If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so.
Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.
> Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line
It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.
I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".
Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.
> I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".
You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things.
Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.
So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?
Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
> Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?
This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.
The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.
This assumes that evaluations can be neatly defined and tracked. There's another front page post right now about exactly this. The soft (often difficult to define/measure) skills required of a manager are the same skills that are required to make the decisions to fire people.
I think almost everyone has worked with someone who they know shouldn't be there, but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance". And yet they are clearly a huge anchor for the team, and everyone knows the team would be better off without them.
I wish we could perfectly evaluate what it means to be a good employee, and we could show the exact measurements used to do so. But this simply is not realistic, never has been, nor will it likely ever be. The spectrum of possible behaviors and the intricate interplay unique to various teams makes such a task impossible. I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, but that these decisions are often highly subjective, without much hope of arriving at something more objective.
I've worked at places that had stringent requirements for firing people. The net result was that good people all leave voluntarily instead of being stuck with the problem individuals, ultimately resulting in teams full of mediocre-to-awful teammates.
Managers can both know how to evaluate quality and fit while not having any hope of perfectly defining and documenting those evaluations. I'd rather work in an environment that has at-will employment with all of the downsides that come with that than a place that can't fire employees without spending a year creating a mountain of paperwork that ultimately doesn't get anyone much closer to the objectivity people are striving to achieve.
> but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance"
Remember that homework assignment or group project where you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on not doing the work as intended in some silly way? This is the adult version of that.
Yup. And while it's cutesy when you do it when you're young and in school, it's really quite mystifying when someone with ample career choices does it at work.
I've noticed it is entirely possible for code to be written that absolutely conforms with every good coding style rule, and is utter garbage (even if it works!).
Comically, the entire world basically has no idea how to evaluate the quality of management. Not with metrics, anyway. It's all vibes and guesswork, or else it's "data-driven" but transparently bullshit.
Good employees make the company successful in spite of bad management. If you don't want to do this, fine, find another company to work for where you do want to do this.
...crazy that pro-labor has gone for "reasonable wages and hours please" to "there cannot possibly be a lazy employee." Sure, sometimes there's a lousy manager or exec. But honestly people aren't expected to be particularly "motivated" beyond salary, incentive pay, etc. Like what do you want, the kindergarten-style pizza party tactics? The cringey corporate slogans? Are those actually motivating anyone? There are garbage managers who de-motivate people but that's something of a different problem and hits the whole team rather than just one person. When there's a bad, lazy employee, or when there's that one guy who's just a jerk, fire him. Contracts that say you can't do that are dumb, and they are bad for the majority of workers.
It's not "just asking for due process." Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing. Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.
This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers. If I have to try to hit a deadline and my coworker is garbage, I want my boss to be able to fire them and start finding a replacement, not start a six month process of paperwork, meetings, and HR CYA bullshit with the sole purpose of avoiding some bogus NLRB complaint.
I read a statistic some years ago that public school teachers have the lowest rate of firing of any profession. The union has been successful in instituting a "process" for firing a teacher that is so onerous, time consuming, and complicated that it never happens.
The only way a teacher can get fired these days is for showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student.
(And yes, in spite of this, there are some gems of teachers.)
> showing up drunk or high, or having relations with a student
having worked in a school district and staying in touch with colleagues afterward, I can honestly say that most people would be surprised at the number of teachers aren't fired for misconduct like that, particularly showing up drunk or high.
it seems that getting shuffled into an administrative role or a year of paid leave are the goto solutions whenever an incident can be handled quietly.
back in my grade school days, there was one teacher who would routinely lose her shit and scream at people.
when it inevitably escalated beyond that (usually throwing objects.. chalkboard erasers, garbage cans, even the occasional chair), she would simply end up teaching at a different school in the same district.
they managed to keep that game going for over twenty years.
There are multiple unions involved with teaching, depending on the state, not just one national one (the NEA or what have you). In some states teachers unions are effectively toothless and aren't even part of the contract negotiation process.
This should make it pretty easy to see how union strength affects firing rates (no, I don't happen to have the data on hand). IME schools tend to avoid firing teachers even when they easily could, in favor of pushing them out, because they don't want the bad press from a firing, so my guess is firing rates for teachers are low everywhere.
We might further hope to see whether union strength affects education quality, but there are too many confounders—the states with weak teachers unions tend to be red states and to have weak economies, either or both of which may have stronger effects on educational outcomes than union activity. But, on the specific question of the effect of teachers unions on teacher firing rates, we can maybe get something like a useful experiment out of these state-by-state differences.
“Union teacher” isn’t the distinction, as unions also provide useful professional insurance even in states where they do practically nothing when it comes to employer/employee relations, so many teachers are still members. Do states with strong teachers unions have lower firing rates than those where the unions do almost nothing? I’m saying we may have to look elsewhere for the explanation, if the firing rate in states with nearly-useless teachers unions aren’t closer to where you think they should be.
I’d guess the rates remain low even with weak unions because schools are piss-pants scared of bad publicity, due to the public’s role in (indirectly) hiring and firing the top of their pyramid, and in allocating funding. But maybe I’m wrong and rates of firing are closer to whatever you consider a desirable rate, in states with weak unions. I did go looking, but couldn’t find datasets tackling that in particular. Frustrating, because with that we could get at least a strong hint of the actual effect of unions on this specific thing.
> Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement where they can continue getting taxpayer money for doing nothing.
Everyone who has interacted with a large company has met a more highly-paid negative-productivity employee than even the worst government worker.
> Just because there's a process to get rid of someone doesn't mean it will ever happen.
If managers aren't competent or motivated enough to follow a process, I sure as hell don't want those same managers firing people just on their say-so.
> This is a ploy to make it harder to fire bad programmers.
No, this is about making it harder for management to fire programmers who do pesky things like informing other employees of their rights, or refusing to work unpaid hours.
>Everyone has interacted with a government office with an absolutely worthless employee who is just sitting around counting down the days to retirement
This is not because "it's hard to fire government workers" as often stated, but simply because government runs on a shoestring budget and cannot hire only good people.
Also because a shocking amount of people working in local government didn't realize Ron Swanson was a fucking satire character.
> No, I want management to develop a system to determine who is low-performing
The system here is going to be something like LoC or tickets answered, things that are objective and easy to measure. We know these don't reflect real productivity, but because they are objective, that's what will be used in promotion and firing decisions. Anything subjective, even if it's the opinions of peers or experts, will be contestable in due process hearings, creating risk for the employer, and will be deemphasized or eliminated. One reason why the US government and European software companies are relatively uncompetitive in hiring is because of the difficulties created by due process in firing bad employees and promoting good ones.
Mild issue with this. Mostly, cause it's a one size fits all. There's a certain kind of productivity worker that actually responds relatively well to that type of metric. That vagueness results in stagnation and analysis paralysis.
Those workers tend to actually respond better to what the game community almost considers the grind mindset. Give us a well defined hallway, with well defined tasks, and then we'll walk down the well defined hallway. It may not be "super creative" productivity, yet it's a "form" or "type" of productivity.
Part of the issue also, is a lot of the time, people seem to always want to be the Einstein of the company, and nobody really wants to deal with the day-to-day shit. It's simply not status enough, or management visible enough, or high-level content enough, or similar.
That might by what YOU want or what you hallucinate the demand is but most reasonable interpretation of what we know is that they in fact want to prevent being fired for low performance.
if you can be fired "only for misconduct" and low performance doesn't count as misconduct means that you cannot be fired for low performance.
Granted, the actual demand might be more nuanced but going only by what was reported, they don't want to be fired for low performance.
No, what's reported is that the tech workers are asking for a "just cause" provision. This is a well-established legal concept that explicitly includes what GP posted. The reporting you're reading that fails to mention this happens to be from the New York Times. Can you guess why they don't mention this?
It's incredibly hard to quantify "low-performing" for white-collar workers, because any measure is either easily gamed, actually creates roadblocks and bad incentives, or both.
Now companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire.
> companies are wary of hiring people because it's harder to fire
This is another one of those obvious "unintended" consequences. The harder it is to fire someone, the correspondingly harder it will be to get hired. Companies will be unwilling to "take a chance" on someone.
On the hiring side, I felt US and Asian companies were a lot more wary and had tougher "on the paper" requirements to enter.
For comparison most French companies I've seen can hire an engineer within 3 interviews.
I entered a company in the past in a single interview.
In comparison talking with an US company's HR, the plan was 4 rounds with a coding test, for an average of about a month to go through the whole process and there's still a probation period.
Requiring management to document these decisions is already itself placing low trust in management. I do not want to work at any workplace where trust in management is so low that low performance needs to be documented with a paper trail. I'd rather work at a workplace where the management is consistently competent and people place high trust in the management; so that when management fires someone everyone else agrees without having a need for documentation to prove low performance.
Disclaimer: this is only my opinion on where to work. I'm fully aware there are many other good reasons why management needs to document low performance.
I'm genuinely curious, are there any employees that work with a company that has good managers? I have heard so many bad stories of poisonous corporate culture its hard for me to see how there would be good managers. I haven't worked as an employee since the early 2000's.
I worked lots of places. Never worked for a manager I didn't trust to fire me.
Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.
Nearly all the managers I’ve had throughout my career have been good. Of course people in a bad situation are more likely to complain about it, so the impression you might get from reading a forum like this is heavily biased.
Most NYT-sized companies won't let you deploy a bugfix without a documented rationale and a second person's signoff. It's far from an unreasonable requirement for firing someone.
Except there are people who are extremely good at passive-aggressively dragging their feet specifically such that it's hard to quantify. Metrics are entirely gameable and people know this. In development, this could be the guy who always somehow grabs the easy tickets then says "Hey I closed like 3 tickets yesterday I'm performing." Or he consistently overestimates his stuff - how much time should a busy manager spend assigning everyone's story points just in case they have to build a case to fire someone later?
There are also people who are technically performing but in practice but are jerks. And please don't start with "that's what HR is for" because I have never - not once - seen HR solve, or even significantly help, this sort of problem. Plus everybody hates dealing with them.
Just let people fire lousy workers man. This isn't that hard. Or, employees should push for employment contracts where the commitment is reciprocal: employers promise to keep them on for a few years and they promise to stay on for a few years.
That conclusion does not explain your arguments. The place is over 100 years old and surely have HR processes. This is more likely about the union trying to prevent layoffs
Yes in absence of an employment contract that says otherwise. One of the primary objectives of any US union is to establish guidelines for dismissal of employee members that override at-will.
Due process for employment is probably more important than fair pay in most union contracts.
Your argument is in fact that exact same one that was used to argue against due process in legal proceedings. "In reality it doesn't play out and you get this group of criminals running free on legal technicalities."
If you are in a union shop and have a large contingent of unproductive employees, it happens for the same reason as non-union shops. You have bad management. Just Cause is almost entirely asking management to do a little paperwork and a little planning, things that are supposed to be their job anyway.
What argument have I made other than a question? I would like to see data how it plays out. Now I have some ideas of how it plays out but it would be interesting if there was a way to have a test/control group in these types of contracts. I find the struggles here interesting and its fun to watch them play out.
> Your argument is in fact that exact same one that was used to argue against due process in legal proceedings. "In reality it doesn't play out and you get this group of criminals running free on legal technicalities."
Dumb comparison. Losing a job is not the same as losing a legal action. You can’t just go get a different life if you’re convicted of robbery.
> it happens for the same reason as non-union shops. You have bad management.
No, sometimes employees are just bad and work the system to keep the job as long as possible with no intention of improving.
It doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to. The current job market makes it abundantly clear that people are able to get some form of employment easily, even if it’s not what they want.
The point is that the comparison to due process is shockingly stupid. If the government imprisons you, you are done. Your life in civilization is over for the duration of your incarceration and you have no other options.
Anyone who thinks due process against the monopoly of violence is the same as due process for a payment from a company is completely tone deaf and has never dealt with the impact of government imprisonment.
Being unemployed indefinitely is far better than imprisonment.
The actual development of capitalism around the world has shown that when business is thriving, there tends to be lots of employers willing to mop up any excess labour.
We’ve seen a ton of automation and offshoring for centuries now but employment around the world just keeps improving.
- in a thriving environment, lots of companies are hiring
- some people quit or get fired, and it takes a couple of months to get a new job. This is no biggie in a country where the median individual has a net worth of 192k. [0] (yet another argument in favour of a thriving business environment).
- so some % of people will always be temporarily unemployed.
Loll, youre a pretty funny person. No biggie, ill just sell my house to feed myself.
You conveniently ignore the fact that this is the median family net worth, not individual net worth. Further, this will include retired families, who will have access to social security, medicare, and mature 401k/pension plans. This is not anywherenearthe median net worth of a working individual.
If youre going to quote statistics, please at least do so responsibly.
Beyond complete misrepresentation of basic statistics, you have also failed to contextualize the statistics in a way that is useful for the conversation.
A better number would be: the median time an american in the labor force would be able to live off their net worth, something like net worth divided by annual salary. What's the median of that? We could then compare it to the amount of time the median job search takes, and have a fact-based discussion around the policy implications of that number.
But I expect no such intellectual honesty from you; you've already shown your cards.
When you run up against a fact (see? we’re being fact-based) that doesn’t fit your worldview, that doesn’t mean someone had to “completely misrepresent basic statistics”.
It could simply mean that you are wrong.
A possibility you no doubt spend a great deal of time thinking about, oh even-handed one.
I have yet to come across a fact in your comments! You are literally calling median family net worth median individual net worth, and then making arguments on the basis of that misrepresentation.
Further, this thread is about the labor force, not retirees, who generally have more assets, all else equal.
Stop making clownish claims and you wont be treated like a clown.
>Middle class Americans have high net worths; some in stocks, some in cash, some in home equity.
>All of the above can be leveraged when cash is needed.
And what percentage of Americans are working middle class? What percentage of those could liquidate their home equity or retirement portfolio (what you actually mean by "stocks") without causing a huge change in life plans?
I think DEI as implemented is worse than this. It’s a calculated, prepared defense against the possibility of future bigoted behavior.
Corporate America (which increasingly includes universities whose primary business is endowment investment) don’t just want to wash away our past, they want to ensure they can keep operating business as usual.
DEI is insurance. Yeah the bad thing may happen but we paid for it before hand so we are insulated against further repercussions.
One thing I worry about is how normalized this will be for children and countries without regular internet access as they get regular internet access (or even have had it for a while: the report from OP states that 71 percent of traffic on Irish sites are bots).
The experience of the internet will be bots and because the usefulness of the medium isn't going away, they will keep using it. Everything being bots will be normal.
At some point things like ubiquitous ads, smog, light pollution or dozens of corporate microphones in our house was something humans first started experiencing and having trepidations about. Then it got normalized. Sometimes we fixed it like smog or CFCs and sometimes it became one the largest sectors of our economy (ads). Statistically, it seems more likely that dead internet is here to stay
You have it reversed. The color of your skin determines how much UV protection you get. Skin color is 1-1 correlation to the average hours of daylight a population experiences. High melanin skin is required to live in the equatorial regions to prevent over exposure to UV rays. Low melanin skin is required in the northern regions to prevent under exposure to UV rays.
We saw a mass migration of eastern Europeans to the middle east mid 20th century and the result was the catastrophic increase in skin cancer rates.
We saw a mass migration of middle Easterners to great lakes region in the same period and we saw a catastrophic increase in depression rates.
It's probably worse with Musk. His executive style seems to be, from his biography, ignore a thing for a while until he gets in a maniac phase and then over the shoulder manage a thing until it's done, regardless of time or context.
I can just take the scene of Musk being on a roof yelling at the crew to change how they install solar tiles late in the night and translate it to him berating a programmer in the office to make it look like x.com and not caring about the details.
It is not the primary source of their weapons, nor is it the primary source of their explosives. It might be "a primary source" now as your linked article mentions, but certainly not THE primary source. Hamas is primarily given weapons by Iran.
They claim to be producing a lot of them locally in the Gaza strip, based on russian or iranian design. They've proudly showed videos of factories producing al-Ghoul rifles, Tandem anti-tank grenades, light artillery grenades, rifle ammunition.
This is an explicit ideal in the 'Resistance Axis', to develop the ability to produce military equipment locally and not be dependent on brittle trade routes or smuggling.
The West Bank seems to get rifles from several sources, both american style that probably comes from PA or IDF and russian style, probably smuggled through Jordan from Iraq, Iran, Russia. They produce IED:s locally, quite crude ones, not the directed type with concave copper plates favoured by iraqi militias. Eventually they'll learn to make those too, I'm sure.
That's an excellent point actually. In the current day, more-or-less every watt of crypto is actually on top of the traditional financial system and totally reliant on it.
That's not intrinsic to cryptocurrency, but it is part of the reality we're living in, which is what I want people to be looking at.
Precisely. I don't know how people can argue crypto power consumption against the banking industry when you can drive down main street in any city and pass 15 bank branches and see ATMs every 100ft.
Bank of America alone has 69m customers and real people have real needs - things like going to a branch occasionally, calling customer service, taking out cash, etc. Not only is BoA itself larger in terms of users than all of crypto (I've done the analysis, checked block explorers, etc) it's actually usable by real people in the real world for real activity that contributes to the real economy and actually provides value and utility other than pancake swapping your doodle coins for poodle coins.
That comparison is also interesting because the same people who make those comparisons are also perpetually perplexed about why statistically nobody uses Bitcoin, and it’s like … BofA employs thousands of MBAs, they have McKinsey consultants, so you really think they’d have all of those employees and infrastructure cutting into their profit margins if their customers didn’t find those services useful? Focusing on the transaction mechanism is leaving out 95% of banking.
A lot of your complaints are with the libertarian nature of our government.
The constitution protects private dictators from interference by the government, not citizens from interference by private dictators. It’s an important distinction to remember in the USA
It's just asking for due process.