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mrerrormessage's comments

mrerrormessage | 3 years ago | on: The “spreadsheet mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs

Came here to reference Deming myself. One thing I've noticed in Deming's work (especially 14 points, sicknesses) is that by contextualizing and properly understanding the use of statistics he humanizes people in an organization. We must look at metrics/statistics correctly, in a way that humanizes and enriches people, not in a way that turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet.

mrerrormessage | 6 years ago | on: Do transportation network companies decrease or increase congestion?

I agree that many of your points present legitimate difficulties with the use of public transit in the US as it currently exists. However, I think that the first two points are just as true for ride share as they are for public transit. Ride share also has crime (see sexual assault scandals https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexu...) and ride sharing (particularly pool-style) also "forces you too come into contact with people you would not normally choose to associate with"; some people (including myself) see this as a benefit of public/shared transit, not a drawback.

Part of the problem is that public transit scales differently from ride share. The more riders public transit has, the better it gets. The more riders ride share has (beyond a certain point) the worse it gets.

mrerrormessage | 7 years ago | on: Airlines eye crueler ways of making passengers miserable

Am I the only one who thinks standing for shorter flights of < 3 hours would be healthier and more comfortable? I work regularly at a standing desk, sitting for too long makes me feel lethargic and often causes headaches for me (it's much easier to have good posture, neck and back alignment when standing). For longer flights, people need a seat, but for shorter flights I would gladly pay the same price to be able to stand instead.

mrerrormessage | 9 years ago | on: Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis

I haven't read all the comments in this thread, but I'm surprised at the outrage over a one-nickel tax. This seems like a fairly simple, straightforward rule. Is anyone going to decide not to Lyft/Uber over 5 cents? I don't think so.

Let's also not forget that these ride hailing services are MASSIVELY subsidizing the cost of rides in order to attract drivers/users. That hurts business for taxis. In my mind, this is a sort of protection that ensures taxis stay in business as another, publicly regulated option. What happens in other areas of Uber/Lyft kill all the taxis and then decide doing business isn't profitable and leave (or all their drivers leave I've subsidies end)? This might seem like a farfetched scenario, but remember that Uber is still sitting in a large cash reserves. What will change when they need to turn a profit every quarter? If they have established a monopoly (even locally), they can charge users as much as they want. If they've established a monopsony on drivers, they can lower wages. In my opinion, subsidizing a long-standing industry from a monopolistic competitor with gobs of money to throw at the market looks like a good move.

mrerrormessage | 10 years ago | on: Lara Croft Has Company: More Female Heroes Appear in Big-Budget Games

It's relevant for at least two reasons, in my opinion. The first is that video games, like novels, are stories told through the the protagonist/s. If this character is always male, you miss out on a whole class of stories which are women's stories. Just as literature rarely told women's stories upon a time, video games up to the present time rarely tell women's stories.

The second reason is that having a female protagonist changes the entire meaning of the story. Consider Pierre Menard, author of Quixote (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...), which discusses how the particular context of the author effects the meaning of the work.

Wikipedia had an excellent article about gender representation in video games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_representation_in_vid... . One part of the article notes:

> 60% of girls but only 39% of boys preferred to play a character of their own gender, and 28% of girls as opposed to 20% of boys said that they were more likely to play a game based on the character's gender.

So it may not matter to some people, but it matters greatly to others.

mrerrormessage | 10 years ago | on: DLL Hijacking Just Won’t Die

The question that needs to be asked here is how to get all installers using MSI. MSI is a secure, declarative format which runs off MS code in known directory. Because it's declarative, it can also be queried and tracked. I recently packaged an installer using it and it worked really well. WiX has terrific documentation and it was straightforward.

mrerrormessage | 10 years ago | on: I Want to Run Stateful Containers, Too

How much of this could be avoided if the application didn't use mongo? Needing to run a three-nice cluster out of the gate seems like a big part of the problem. Sure, you want backups and redundancy for any database, but there are situations where a MySQL or pg slave that can be switched on makes more sense financially, especially if load doesn't require a three-node cluster.

mrerrormessage | 12 years ago | on: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

What if the pallets formed a mesh network? They would only need to have low-powered antennas (< 100m range) to network effectively with one another, and some kind of reader that talked to one could know all the other pallets that that one had "seen" and at what time. It would take a bit of work, and would be most practical for large pallet storage areas, but it could hugely cut costs, especially for wireless internet.

mrerrormessage | 12 years ago | on: Heartbleed should bleed X.509 to death

Surely if Zuck got half the world signed up for a network that does nothing but suck our eyeballs in return for money out of advertisers pockets, we could get a few million, even say, 10-20 million people using PGP. Remember that Tor was once considered a niche tool as well.
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