matt_o's comments

That's somewhat of a misrepresentation of what Marx wrote.

When Marx lived in 19th century England, he saw first hand the effects of laissez faire capitalism: workers working themselves to death, workers dying by the score in industrial accidents, children working and dying in mines, etc.

He predicted with certainty that this trend would continue and lead to a revolution of the many (workers) against the few (capitalists), after which the world would become a classless society free from oppression and exploitation.

Except that never happened.

Workers gained many rights, like limits on work-hours, social insurance, free education for their children (who were banned from working dangerous jobs). Most governments creates successful interventionist policy that "de-fanged" the worst parts of capitalism. I would venture a guess that 19th century workers would kill to live or at least send their children into the 21st century. I presume even terrible jobs today would look positively heavenly for someone who was forced to inhale coal dust and destroy his body for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Marx's "theory" was proven wrong by the events that took place since his times. Nothing he predicted came true. This even became apparent during the 19th century, when pro-worker reforms were being introduced in Britain, which caused Engels, Marx's sponsor, to first explain this away by pointing out that Britain's riches originate from its colonies, making Britain "the burguoise of the world", and then blame Britain itself for not going along with his and Marx's grand theory: "It seems that this most bourgeois of all nations wants to bring matters to such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie."

(I can almost hear him getting more and more upset at the unruly masses who, instead of misery, revolution, and utopia, chose reforms and democracy).

It must be said, at least, that Marx was coming from a place of good. His heart went out to the suffering masses he lived amongst. His writings are full of compassion. But we must be fair and accept that he was wrong in his theories and predictions.

Now, because I know this will come up, as it's a popular doomer trope: there is suffering in the world. Children sew tshirts in 3rd world sweatshops. Factory workers jump from roofs working for Apple, the world's most valuable company. Numberless people live lives of quiet desperation. Without a doubt, all of that is true.

But, comparing the world of Mar'x lifetime and the world of today, it would take some hardcore rhetorical maneuvering to ignore the fact that more people than ever before live comfortable, safe lives with plentiful opportunities for self-actualization.

This can be interpreted in many ways. For our discussion, I want it to serve as evidence that we shouldn't give Marx's writing more credibility than they deserve.

Personally, I chose to interpret it in a way that means that we're simply not done yet. We've made great progress. But our work is far from done--there are still many humans out there that enjoy the most meager fruits of this progress. This must be remedied.

This idea was completely alien to me until I experienced it first hand. The F in FAANG puts emphasis on putting things like weekly/monthly status reports, incident investigation (even minor ones), and other useful information into 100-500 word posts. This has created a wealth of historical documentation about projects and problems that always helped me debug problems. What's more, it made discussing plans easier because participants had hours/days to think things through and shape them into paragraphs.

I've heard that Stripe and Amazon have writing coded into their cultures as well. I wish I knew more companies that did this because it's absolutely a different level of communication that helps ease so much friction (at a small price of reading/writing).

This is why I get my general news from the likes of Reuters and Associated Press. I've found that these have more facts and much less opinion.

Then, when I want someone's take on something, from someone I trust, I get it from substack. Eg. Matthew Yglesias on policy, Noah Smith on finance/economics, etc.

In contrast, most big newspapers seem to me to be pushing opinion masked as fact. They never actually lie, but they are selective in what they represent and imply connections where there are none.

You picked a small fragment of the OP's argument and turned it into a strawman. For example, you dropped the whole "making an informed assessment of the risks" part, which is pretty important to the whole message.

You bring up "your freedom to swing your fist, etc." - how does this apply to lockdown measures that were proven to be ineffective, such as cleaning surfaces[0]? We've poured a lot of money and people's time into cleaning surfaces even while knowing early on that this is a very minor source of transmission. These resources could have been invested in proven measures, such as getting more people more N95 masks.

The way I understand OP's argument is that it's against how heavy-handed and inflexible these lockdown measures have been, limiting individuals effectiveness in dealing with the pandemic. Turning surface cleaning into security theater is one example. Another is the initial official messaging that people should not wear masks because they are not proven to be effective against COVID[1].

These restrictions made it harder to respond to the pandemic in an effective way. People wearing masks early in the pandemic or those choosing not to drown themselves in disinfectant did not, in fact, "pollute the air you breathe."

If we are to face similar disasters in the future, we have to be honest about these things so we can act better next time.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

It seems to me that, if negotiation leverage is the crucial factor here, then wouldn't the US and EU be in a similar spot?

The EU's economy is roughly the same size as the US's[0], but the EU has roughly a little over 445 million citizens compare to the US's ~330 million.

I would imagine that EU countries paying for the healthcare of 445 million citizens would be considered as quite a large "customer" for pharmaceutical companies and could strike a good deal.

How does the US get an edge in negotiations over the EU? It feels that military power wouldn't factor here, but I'm having trouble coming up with other ideas. What else could it be?

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/10868691/2-1...

> I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square.

I wrapped a 2-year stint at Facebook recently and my experience was similar to yours.

Some tools were amazing and cool and I really appreciated how they evolved over time to manage huge amounts of resources. But most were subpar when compared to OSS tooling - outdated, deprecated functionality, very little documentation, very few people working on them. The common approach was to learn about "the duct tape" way to make something work, then pass it on to new engineers.

An example would be tool X for working with diffs (PRs). It's the latest and greatest, except that it only covers 75% of its predecessor's, tool Y's, functionality, so you end up learning both. Tool Y has been "deprecated" for the past 3-4 years. Some of its features don't work, but you'll only know when you try and execute them.

> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US?

To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."

The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.

> Listen, personally I would recommend you visit countries abroad for a change - like China, Russia, India or Europe (pick any they are all nice) and leave your US bubble.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008[0]. Russia has taken over Crimea, a part of Ukraine in 2014[1]. Sweden plans to increase their military spending because of Russia's actions[2]. Estonia is upping its sea defenses[3].

I'm sure that the majority of Russians would prefer not to go to war. They have their own problems - a drug epidemic, a demographic implosion, and a quickly declining economy. Then there are the oligarchs. But, given the right carrot and stick (mostly stick), I see no reason why they wouldn't invade a neighboring country. Because, the small group of people you mention, those gangsters at the top, they have a lot of big sticks to motivate people to sign up for the army and do terrible things to their neighbors.

FYI, I've lived half of my life in Europe. Eastern Europe. The threat of Russia is always present in the back of people's heads. And they like NATO safety. No, they wouldn't prefer to welcome Russia and learn Russian. They like their life, they like their cultures, and yes, they are even so barbaric as to want to defend their life and culture with their lives by standing up to Russia.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/10/16/sweden-to... [3]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/10/01/estonia...

SEEKING WORK - remote - expat in GMT+1

Hi, I'm Matt and I help people out with their legacy Python application problems.

I squash bugs, refactor code to increase development velocity, upgrade application components, troubleshoot performance issues, and do code reviews. In essence, I make your application work well for your users and a joy to work with for other developers.

Some things that I've worked on in the past year:

- Set up deployment and backup scripts for a web agency to use on all their projects to make their developers happy and clients safe.

- Secured a legacy Django application and its dependencies against intruders (mainly cool sysadmin stuff).

- Took over a gnarly MVP stub, refactored it, added the missing features, and deployed it to production.

You can contact me at matt+hn at mattscodecave.com

+ Github: http://github.com/sirMackk

+ More info: http://mattscodecave.com/hire-me.html

+ SO Careers: http://stackoverflow.com/story/matto

Tags: Python, Django, Tornado, Legacy, Postgresql, ELK, Saltstack, Debian, Nginx, Ubuntu, AWS, Elixir.

Django does have some really clean code and it is very easy to navigate. I feel like I only grokked Django after I started going through its internals.

I also highly recommend giving Tornado[0] and Bottle[1] a read. Outside of the the web stuff, Sqlalchemy[2] is good

[0] - https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado [1] - https://github.com/bottlepy/bottle [2] - https://github.com/zzzeek/sqlalchemy

I had to fill out this form: "Fragebogen zur steuerlichen Erfassung" and I have to report my VAT using the Elster system monthly, even though my VAT is always 0 (my clients are all outside of the EU).

I went this way after consulting some other folks in Berlin and a tax consultant that I found myself. I'm kind of surprised that there's a different, easier way to go. Thanks for sharing the information.

Well, my "self-employement" form was actually 8 pages long and it featured a lot more items than address, name, purpose and processing it took about 4 weeks. To be fair, I could start my business as soon as I sent that out, but I could not invoice clients until I got the reply, which included my new tax number. This is how it works in Germany. Add on top of that the mandatory monthly VAT tax reporting.

That is a significantly higher cost of entry when compared with an Ltd/LLC, not to mention a sole proprietorship.

It's actually 25000 euros. This was somewhat fixed with the introduction of the mini-GmbH (GmbH - something like Ltd.), but a mini-GmbH comes with some extra strings attached, so it's still very far from a UK Ltd. or a US LLC in terms of ease of setting up.

This is indeed an obstacle to creating a company, but there are quite a few more, all having to do with just plain ol' bureaucracy (handling monthly tax reporting, interacting with the tax authorities, handling insurance, etc.) The previous issue of The Economist made a case that these bureaucratic problems are even bigger in Italy.

I've recently been kicking around the idea that it's kind of weird that some hard-hit places in the EU like Spain or Greece sport up to 50% unemployed young folks (18-35) - these people are highly educated, just out of college, eager to build/work and yet they are economically inactive. My theory is that this is because it's hard to set up any sort of business activity due to the bureaucracy. It's also socially discouraged because it's risky.

Good points. I'd just like to add two more points: FNV's storyline is a lot more morally ambiguous and there's a lot more humor in it.

This moral ambiguity is present in most Obsidian games and it makes for a completely different experience when compared to the typical "hero saves the world" storyline. In FO3 it's pretty clear who the good and bad guys are, whereas in FNV it gets muddy very fast. This is pronounced at points where you're to make a choice - in FO3 it's very easy whereas in FNV you're stuck asking yourself "Is this really good/bad? Should I be helping this NPC? Am I really on the right side in this? What if they're manipulating me?."

As for the humor part - FNV is more in line with the tongue in cheek style of F1 and F2. Yeah, the world burned to hell, why not spend the day chasing down a telepathic mole rat?

S. Lem - The Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

I was all of 12 or so when I read it and I was expecting the usual sci-fi hero-space-disaster-monsters-ingenuity-victory thing.

About a third way in I realized it wasn't sci-fi, but a book about life. I few years later I realized that was my first encounter with philosophy.

SEEKING WORK - remote - US expat in GMT+1

Hi, I'm Matt and I help people out with their legacy Python application problems.

I squash bugs, refactor code to increase development velocity, upgrade application components, troubleshoot performance issues, do code reviews, and generally make your application work well and be a joy to work with for other developers.

You can contact me at matt+hn at mattscodecave.com

+ Github: http://github.com/sirMackk

+ More info: http://mattscodecave.com/hire-me.html

+ SO Careers: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/matto

Tags: Python, Django, Tornado, Legacy, Postgresql, ELK, Saltstack, Debian, Nginx, Ubuntu, AWS, Elixir.

I too would like to know of a modern equivalent.

Magazines are able to deliver something that blogs often can't - like pieces of work that have been refined, and then refined again by an editor. Or diverse topics that still fall within a certain discipline.

This is an itch that blogs can't seem to scratch for me.

I think it's bad, mainly because it was built at the end of the 19th century and since then it's calcified. It's like having legacy code and instead of refactoring it when you need to make changes, you build more stuff on that, get more technical debt.

To add some context to what I mean, the current system is largely based on the decisions of the Committee of Ten[1]. If you read that short note, you'll notice that it's pretty much applying the lessons of industrialization to education ie. assembly line approach.

The example of the assembly line approach is especially relevant for me because I don't think that it is applicable to humans. Different humans learn at different rates so it doesn't make sense to group them by age. Additionally, teaching everyone the same things, while making things nice and uniform, takes away the biggest motivation for learning - curiosity.

This is completely anecdotal, but the further away I moved from this assembly line education system (from high school to college, from college to self-taught developer) the better grades I got (college) or more money (work) and the more time I spent learning, even things that are unrelated to my main focus because the world is fascinating.

As for an idea on how to fix this, I admit that I don't have a concrete one. I've skimmed the topic and the thing that drew my attention most is the Montessori system[2] system of education. It proposes a few points relevant to what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but also one that I find particularly interesting to developers: "Uninterrupted blocks of work time, ideally three hours".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Ten [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Elixir has _something_ similar: Behaviors - http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavio...

While this isn't exactly what you like, I thought I'd throw it out there because I find it a fair substitute, especially when paired with Dialyzer - a static code analysis tool: http://erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html

Thanks! I'll look into that!

I'll still have to take care of taxes locally here (tax residency, grumbles), which are the biggest time sink. Maybe I should hop the border into the Czech Rep. :)