If your superior is managing up well, then it truly doesn’t matter if subordinates lose respect. Probably laying groundwork for new ones well in advance of that becoming a real issue for their status.
I honestly don’t know many companies any more that are going to give easily on moving past the sales team. I have seen Sales Engineers, Product Managers, and executive sponsors come to sales calls once you’re a pretty qualified lead and at a certain spend point.
Tbh OP, if you’re looking to scale, selling to people like the above commenter isn’t going to get you there. (No offense to said commenter.)
I am nervous that this will add more toxic fuel to the “breast is best” movement because context isn’t being considered and pros and cons aren’t be weighted appropriately.
Breast feeding is an exhausting endeavor. And I have been surprised by how much guilt is layered onto mother’s who choose for mental and physical health to stop breastfeeding and move to formula.
My hope is that these studies actually lead to better formula as well as the other discoveries these researchers are gathering.
Social shaming is so watered down these days. Used to, if you stepped out of line, society would shun you and nobody would patronize your business or whatever, and you'd have to move out of town. Nowadays you get some mean online comments and downvotes. Nothing in your actual life changes, because modern society is so bureaucratized (in a good way) that most social functions operate independently of your social approval rating. Yet so many people live in fear.
People need to mentally toughen up, stop being "influenced" and just make their decisions and live their lives.
Either breastmilk has health benefits or it doesn't. This shouldn't be sensitive information. We should not care whether this adds "toxic fuel" to some online idiot fest. People who can and want to breastfeed, do it. Who gives a flying fuck what facebook commenters say or how much "guilt" they are "layering" on.
If you're going to live in a modern bureaucracy and take all the shit that comes with it, at least use the advantages boldly!
I'm not saying this information shouldn't be shared or anything, but I certainly understand the sentiment expressed by the person you're replying to.
I don't know what your personal experience is, but your comment comes off as cold and unrealistic. Pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period are incredibly difficult. They deprive people of sleep (often starting many weeks before birth), and frequently come with depression and complicated feelings about one's body. Breast milk seems best for infants, but the way that information is conveyed is often filled with judgement--even from trained medical personnel working in obstetrics and pediatrics!--and absolutism which doesn't adequately balance the degree of benefit it provides with the likely already fragile mental health of the breastfeeding parent. Babies fed with formula turn out just fine, but you'd be surprised how rarely prospective/new parents get reminded of that.
> from trained medical personnel working in obstetrics and pediatrics
This I would agree is a different situation because of the implicit trust involved. But the solution there is much simpler and easier than reforming facebook trolls: just train medical professionals better. In the same way doctors don't judge you for coming in for a drug overdose or treating you for an STD, don't judge people who don't breastfeed. Medical pros have a code of ethics that they abide by.
I realize that my comment comes off as cold, and I certainly would not talk this way to someone whom I know has had trouble in this area. But part of growing up in the 21st century is learning how to recognize and dismiss worthless comments, and I feel that that skill is not being taught to people. By all means, compassion and love should rule in specific interactions. But part of love is equipping people to be healthy, and sometimes being healthy is being extremely dismissive (towards online comments).
> But the solution there is much simpler and easier than reforming facebook trolls: just train medical professionals better. In the same way doctors don't judge you for coming in for a drug overdose or treating you for an STD, don't judge people who don't breastfeed. Medical pros have a code of ethics that they abide by.
I think that's easier said than done. We do train medical personnel to make decisions and give advice based on science, but they're human. I don't know about STDs, but I've known of people who've been treated poorly by medical staff after overdoses. People have bad days and work exhausting shifts, and some are just jerks.
> But part of growing up in the 21st century is learning how to recognize and dismiss worthless comments, and I feel that that skill is not being taught to people. By all means, compassion and love should rule in specific interactions. But part of love is equipping people to be healthy, and sometimes being healthy is being extremely dismissive (towards online comments).
I can appreciate that. It's certainly an important skill. However, some of the most harmful comments can come from the people closest to you, not strangers online. When a parent or sibling says something disapproving to a stressed parent struggling to feed their babies it's rough. I'd just like more writing to convey that formula is fine, and what really matters is feeding your child in the hopes that it could permeate the culture a bit more and thus help in all of these situations.
> I am nervous that this will add more toxic fuel to the “breast is best” movement because context isn’t being considered and pros and cons aren’t be weighted appropriately.
The article isn't about breastfeeding at all is why I assume people downvote.
What? It's about breast milk, so breastfeeding seems at the very least highly relevant. Moreover, several parts of the article talk about breastfeeding in the context of babies and the benefits it provides them.
That seems really excessive. Another set of informed eyes? Sure. But if you told me that was the process somewhere, I'd tell you I had better things to do.
They’re tools. This attempt to treat them as luxury goods doesn’t hold with those. It’s entirely common for even people who want to do some home repair—let alone professionals—but aren’t clueless about DIY to spend 2x the cheapest option, because they know the cheapest one is actually worth $0. More will advocate spending way more than 2x, as long as you’re 100% sure you’re going to use it a lot (like, say, a phone or laptop, even for a lot of non-computer-geeks). This is true even if they’re just buying a simple lowish-power impact driver, nothing fancy, not the most powerful one, not the one with the most features. Still, they’ll often not go for the cheapest one, because those are generally not even fit for their intended purpose.
[edit] I mean sure there are people who just want the Apple logo, I’m not saying there are zero of those, but they’re also excellent, reliable tools (by the standards of computers—so, still bad) and a good chunk of their buyers are there for that. Even the ones who only have a phone.
I didn't go for the cheapest option: I'm typing this on a laptop that I bought a few months ago for $1200. It has an aluminum case, 32GB RAM, an AMD Ryzen CPU that benchmarks similar to the M3, and 1TB SSD. I can open it up and replace parts with ease.
The equivalent from Apple would currently run me $3200. If I'm willing to compromise to 24GB of RAM I can get one for $2200.
What makes an Apple device a luxury item isn't that it's more expensive, it's that no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider. The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.
Note that there's nothing wrong with buying a luxury item! It's entirely unsurprising that most people on HN looking at the latest M4 chip prefer luxury computers, and that's fine!
Huh. Most of the folks I know on Apple stuff started out PC (and sometimes Android—I did) and maybe even made fun of Apple devices for a while, but switched after exposure to them because they turned out to be far, far better tools. And not even much more expensive, if at all, for TCO, given the longevity and resale value.
Eh, I have to use a MacBook Pro for work because of IT rules and I'm still not sold. Might be because I'm a Linux person who absolutely must have a fully customizable environment, but MacOS always feels so limited.
The devices are great and feel great. Definitely high quality (arguably, luxury!). The OS leaves a lot to be desired for me.
I spent about a decade before switching using Linux as my main :-) Mostly Gentoo and Ubuntu (man, it was good in the first few releases)
Got a job in dual-platform mobile dev and was issued a MacBook. Exposure to dozens of phones and tablets from both ecosystem. I was converted within a year.
(I barely customize anything these days, fwiw—hit the toggle for “caps as an extra ctrl”, brew install spectacle, done. Used to have opinions about my graphical login manager, use custom icon sets, all that stuff)
> no matter what specs you pick it will always be much more expensive than equivalent specs from a non-luxury provider
On the phone side, I guess you would call Samsung and Google luxury providers? On the laptop side there are a number of differentiating features that are of general interest.
> The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people
Things that might matter to regular people (and tool users):
- design and build for something you use all day
- mic and speakers that don't sound like garbage (very noticeable and relevant in the zoom/hybrid work era)
- excellent display
- excellent battery life
- seamless integration with iPhone, iPad, AirPods
- whole widget: fewer headaches vs. Windows (ymmv); better app consistency vs. Linux
- in-person service/support at Apple stores
It's hard to argue that Apple didn't reset expectations for laptop battery life (and fanless performance) with the M1 MacBook Air. If Ryzen has caught up, then competition is a good thing for all of us (maybe not intel though...) In general Apple isn't bleeding edge, but they innovate with high quality, very usable implementations (wi-fi (1999), gigabit ethernet (2001), modern MacBook Pro design (2001), "air"/ultrabook form factors (2008), thunderbolt (2011), "retina" display and standard ssd (2012), usb-c (2016), M1: SoC/SiP/unified memory/ARM/asymmetric cores/neural engine/power efficiency/battery life (2020) ...and occasionally with dubious features like the touchbar and butterfly keyboard (2016).)
Looking even further back in Apple laptop history, we find interesting features like rear keyboard placement (1991), 4 pound laptop with dock for desktop use (1992), and trackpad (1994). Apple's eMate 300 (1997) was a Newton laptop rather than a Mac, but it had an ARM processor, flash storage, and 20+ hour battery life, making it something of an ancestor to the Mac M1.
Once Arm and battery life shift occurs with Linux and Windows, they'll (ie. Apple) be on the front foot again with something new, that's the beauty of competition.
>The things that Apple provides are not the headline stats that matter for a tool-user, they're luxury properties that don't actually matter to most people.
Here lies the rub, ARE those the stats that matter? Or does the screen, touchpad, speakers, battery life, software, support services, etc. matter more?
I feel people just TOTALLY gloss over the fact that Apple is crushing the competition in terms of trackpads + speakers + battery life, which are hardly irrelevant parts of most people's computing experience. Many people hardly use their computers to compute - they mostly use them to input and display information. For such users, memory capacity and processing performance ARE frills, and Apple is a market leader where it's delivering value.
Also even in compute, apple is selling computers with a 512-bit or 1024-bit LPDDR5x bus for a lower price than you can get from the competition. Apple is also frequently leading the pack in terms of compute/watt. This has more niche appeal, but I've seen people buy Apple to run LLM inferencing 24/7 while the Mac Studio sips power.
Lenovo Thinkpad p14s(t14) gen 4, 7840U, $1300, oled 2.8K 400 nits P3, 64gb RAM, 1TB, keyboard excellent, speakers shitty(using sony wh-1000xm4), battery(52.5Wh) life not good not bad, OLED screen draws huge amount of power. weight ~3 lb.
This spec costs 2k euro in NL. Fully specd Air (15 inch) is 2,5k euro, with arguably better everything except RAM and is completely silent. Doesn’t look that much different to me in terms of price.
Also, those things aren't even true about Apple devices. Apple fanboys have been convinced that their hardware really is way better than everything else for decades. It has never been true and still isn't.
Clean os install? You haven't used windows in a while have you?
Im a Linux guy but am forced to use Mac's and windows every now and then.
Windows has outpaced macos for a decade straight.
Macos looks like it hasn't been updated in years. It's constantly bugging me for passwords for random things. It is objectively the worst OS. I'd rather work on a Chromebook.
I think he has different critera on what bothers him, thats okay though isn't it. I get a little annoyed at anything where I have to use a touchpad, not enough to rant about it, but it definitely increases friction (haha) in my thought process.
What metrics are you using for build quality? Admittedly I don't know a ton of mac people (I'm an engineer working in manufacturing) but the mac people I know, stuff always breaks, but they're bragging about how apple took care of it for free.
The doomsday "propaganda" didn't come to pass because several states and localities promptly passed their own net neutrality laws after it was deregulated at the federal level. The larger ISPs couldn't find a workable way to implement their non-neutral bullshit in some markets but not others, and the local ISPs in places with no net neutrality laws never really had enough clout to do crappy things in the first place.
If that didn't happen, and the ISPs started profiting off non-net-neutral tactics, it could have been permanently fucked.
Once someone depends on a legal source of income, if that source of income gets banned in the future, they generally get to keep that source of income "grandfathered in" if they take the issue to court.
> Once someone depends on a legal source of income, if that source of income gets banned in the future, they generally get to keep that source of income “grandfathered” forever if they take the issue to court.
That’s… not true.
Otherwise, all the people depending on selling drugs that were later banned would have been grandfathered in when the drugs were prohibited.
Even when there is a regulatory taking (that is, government regulations eliminate the value of existing property in a way that is considered a taking under the 5th amendment), the remedy is compensation for the lost value of the property, not a lifetime exemption from the regulation.
Hm. I would encourage a different, less intense angle here. It’s possible the doomsday didn’t come to pass because a lot of passionate people worked very hard to make sure we avoided it.
Possible, but is there any reason to believe so? I'm open to hear it.
The whole point was that companies like Comcast don't give a crap what we think and will engage in this anti competitive behavior unless the FCC stops them. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt they would if it was in their financial interest.
But can we agree that it is also possible that market incentives aligned and the infographics depicting tv-bundle-like internet packages weren't actually around the corner? To me it seems like the easier explanation. The incentive could be as simple as Comcast not wanting a new monopoly court case or to start being classified as a utility in areas where they have no real competition.
Sure, maybe those bundles weren’t right around the corner. But the fight for NN probably incentivized the MBA grads to not explore those options with fervor.
And it’s very reasonable to assume that avoiding a monopoly case or being classified as a utility is enough of an incentive.
But I have a preference for putting up the defenses on all fronts when it comes to ISPs and their unlimited creative chicanery.
The null hypothesis is that market forces takes care of it. Like your airline ticket prices. The onus of proof is on you to market forces aren't enough.
Similarly, the FCC net neutrality rules allow telcos to charge any price for the service while disallowing blocking or throttling particular Internet sites or protocols. If such rules weren't indeed necessary, big telcos wouldn't be spending their money campaigning against them, would they?
I’ve bought a number of used cars. Few sellers have the patience to wait for you to coordinate an inspection unless. Some don’t even wait on you to test drive other vehicles first.
Fair point. I agree that many sellers are looking to make a quick sale without much additional hassle. I wouldn't buy a private party car without an inspection and I know that will cause me to lose out on some (good) opportunities. However, it's much more important to me to avoid type 1 error vs type 2. Of course, if you need a car quickly, this can be a problem. But my strong advice is not to be in a position where you urgently need a car in the first place (generally good advice for any negotiation actually). I admit that it's easier said than done in some situations but it's still a good principle.
