phabora's comments

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Facebook is pushing back on Apple’s new iPhone privacy rules

Small business is just a propaganda tool. The idea has some allure, maybe because it reminds Americans of their priomordial beginning as settlers, homesteaders, yeomans, craftsmen (or so the stories go).

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Facebook is pushing back on Apple’s new iPhone privacy rules

We all agree about what taxes are. Some just attach more libertarian sensibilities/fears/paranoia to that word.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

My mistake. I thought you were upper-middle class.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

Your dream has two outcomes:

1. You get outcompeted by other companies that look out for Number One, namely the bottom line

2. You get surrounded by an entourage of corporate sycophants that nurture your lie about how your company is so benevolent that no worker representation is necessary

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

High-performers (read: well-payed workers) like to complain about the nefarious corrupting influence of unions but seldom consider the case that the high-performers (read: upper-middle class) might have a vested interest in the corrupt status quo where the majority of workers facilitate their high-performing (read: privileged) lifestyles.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

Yes, for shame! When will America get to hear the side of the employer?

Mabye the executive of Amazon could be allowed to post a little column in paper like the Washington Post. Maybe the owner of that paper wouldn’t object to that idea.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

The meaning is pretty straightforward to interpret.

Vampires suck blood.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

Not really euphemism. More of an Orwellian term.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Amazon Sends ‘Vote No’ Instructions to Unionizing Employees

Some people are privileged enough to be able to get jobs where they don’t need collective bargaining to get decently fair compensation and decent working conditions.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Hundreds of workers at cybersecurity agency vote to strike

> ethics

Debatable.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

Do you have a lot of experience with multiple EU countries?[1] Or are you just using “outsized influence” to extrapolate that non-English speaking countries can be neatly categorized as being a homogeneous contrast to English-speaking countries?

[1] The only anglophone EU country is Ireland.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

That’s not the case where I live in the small non-American West.

We’ve all seen the American TV show/films where some Mega Loser has failed to move out the year they become eighteen and graduated the year they become twenty-two. Maybe it comes off as a trope for non-Americans.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: The unusual ways Western parents raise children

Westerners are from Saturn, Orientals are from Pluto: Rapsey’s five definitive sociological facts™

phabora | 5 years ago | on: M1 Mac owners are experiencing high SSD writes over short periods of time

I think Spotify insist on using 10% of my drive. I can’t configure it as far as I know (any more). The only solution that I know of is `rm -rf <cache>`.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

> I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education.

Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself.

Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

You can’t use teacher as a synonym for researcher, they’re two completely different things.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

> In many other countries, top academics and researchers are at large public universities.

But that’s not even terribly relevant to the average student. An undergraduate won’t benefit from going down the same hallways as the world’s foremost expert on Nigerian guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having studied at the top university (in terms of research, not teaching) matters a lot.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

How is this an example of an efficient market when one of the outcomes is to simply get a “name-brand degree”?[1] Ideally it should just be about the other alternative, namely what you learnt.

Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity.

And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks.

[1] Try to justify that without circular logic.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Four Basic Truths of Macroeconomics

That’s the stupidest theory I’ve heard this week. This is a forum hosted by a startup accelator where programmers and founders (as well as other professionals) gather. It’s not exactly a hippie resort.

Libertarians are also the most ideologically pro-capitalist people that one is likely to meet.

phabora | 5 years ago | on: Four Basic Truths of Macroeconomics

That governments act more in the benefit of business owners than workers was observed by Adam Smith and is still true today. Further that’s a sociological fact and not a “conspiracy theory”, but I don’t have time to write ten sentences to refute your single sentence of bullshit so I won’t bother.