rmk's comments

It would not be surprising, because Mamdani's mother is Mira Nair, a renowned filmmaker (who is primarily makes movies for a western audience, but is heavily influenced by Bollywood).

This is why there should be tort law in England and other common law locales.

lol. I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this comment :)

It does mention a previous instance of the Thatcher government failing because the insider had this exact mindset...

And what exactly is wrong with that? Asking for TSMC to be sold to Americans?

The uncomfortable truth Donald Trump is finally articulating forcefully is that Europe built its welfare state under the US security umbrella, but then started getting cocky with antitrust actions, restricting American companies' access to their markets etc, while simultaneously doing next to nothing to secure their own neighborhood by investing in defense (France being a notable exception). Even if we charitably assume that they took 50 years to build back up from the destruction of world war 2, they have wasted the next 20-30 years with zero preparation or thought about their own defense.

No one did a thing when Crimea was taken. In fact, there was simply no firm response after Russia shot down the airplane brazenly. In fact, leaders such as Merkel further increased dependence on Russia by importing gas and integrating them deeply into Germany and many other EU countries' economies! Staggering incompetence and frank delusion!

So, why didn't the judge recuse himself from this case?

You mean, show up in a hoodie at the inauguration of the President? Even billionaires are not exempt from certain social mores.

Besides, suits, if tailored correctly, are perfectly functional garments, and I'm sure all the billionaires have Savile Row++ bespoke tailors.

It feels like a lot of people who joined the workforce after 2008-2010 are experiencing their first "tough times". It's natural to respond in this manner. But there is an important caveat: one must seek out good work and deliver in order to stay employable, and have access to good opportunities. Or, they must develop a good network and essentially hop from one job to another with the exact same set of people (this is much more common than you'd think). For the former, you still need to show up and go above and beyond every once in a while, so getting excited about work is still a prerequisite.

This is a weak argument. The US has a patchy K-12 system whose quality varies from abysmal to world-beating, depending on many factors. It has, indisputably, one of the world's best universities. Lots of people who have gone through the former but are also products of the latter. They can be very well educated, and do better than credentialed teachers (let's face it, the only difference is that; also a known fact that brighter, higher-IQ people do not gravitate toward K-12 teaching).

> At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.

I think this is a problem, particularly for the major tech companies that produce tech as the end product. If you are purely a "business leader" then the continued growth and even existence of the company is in jeopardy. Isn't the part of the job you mentioned better done by the COO or CFO?

> rewrites your codebase from scratch

This almost never happens. It takes a long time and huge amounts of money to come up to parity, and in the meantime, the legacy org is earning money on the thing you're trying to rewrite.

It's more often the case that the technology landscape shifts dramatically helping a niche player (who has successfully saturated the niche) become mainstream or more feasible. Take, for example, Intel. Their CISC designs and higher power consumption is now being challenged by relatively simpler RISC and lower power designs. Or Nvidia with its GPUs. In both cases, it's the major shifts that have hurt Intel. No one can outcompete Intel in making server CPUs of old, if they are starting from scratch.

Take another example, this time, of a successful competitor (of sorts). Oracle vs Postgres. Same deal, except that Postgres is the successor of Ingres (which doesn't exist anymore), and was developed at Berkeley and was open-source (i.e., it relied upon the free contributions of a large number of developers). I doubt that another proprietary database has successfully challenged Oracle. Ask any Oracle DB user, and you will likely get the answer that other databases are a joke compared to what it offers.

Sheryl Sandberg does not have a technical background. A better analogy would be Eric Schmidt or Adam D'Angelo.

> Well, why not? Are they residents of anywhere? If not, do you see how easily that slides into not needing to provide services for them? Not considering them deserving of anything, in fact?

They are not residents, period. They are vagrants, or transients. I do not agree that vagrants and transients lose property rights summarily, but the idea of calling them some type of "resident" is ridiculous.

Whether I am trying to look smart or not is irrelevant. The article fails to be convincing at even a most basic level. By your logic, no company that hires H-1Bs is free to do layoffs, including of people in auxiliary functions that do not call for high-skill, limited-supply workers, which is absurd.

Article does not give a single specific example of a senior engineer laid off in order to hire a (cheaper and more pliant) junior engineer. Is that so hard to do? There is a claim that every department was affected, but again, no specifics. Were H-1Bs hired to replace people across departments, or were they hired in specific departments?

Looks like someone just decided to pick USCIS numbers in support of their argument that the intention is to reduce compensation and exploit workers, but failed to provide any substantive evidence, or even a cogent argument.

The article talks about (well, at least, opens with) instances where Courts have ordered that belongings be restored, but where cities have failed to do so. One example is that of a woman losing her husband's ashes.

I think it is callous to comment about how homeless people happen to be in possession of their belongings without at least reading the article. It is a fair comment, however, to ask if examples are cherrypicked to tug at the readers' heart strings, with an agenda in mind.

I do think this article uses numerous tricks to promote this agenda.

- Referring to residents as "housed residents", as if homeless people should be considered "residents" in neighborhoods they have no business being in, in the first place.

- Saying that people are _usually_ forced to move without any connections to housing or support, but then following up with the qualification "sometimes" in the next sentence.

- Citing an example of a lady whose daughter's picture was taken away, as well as her tent, during a cold winter, while not presenting the viewpoint of people who are affected by homelessness in their midst (people such as you). What about _their_ humanity?

It puzzles me too. But as the other commenter here has said, it appears to be a habit of the yuppies. If you are time-poor but cash-rich, I suppose this is a good solution. However, in my experience, people do not use their time saved by doing this in high-leverage activities!

This is already the case. American states have a lot of latitude in setting policy and governing themselves.

I was fortunate to come across this book in one of the many "Little Free Libraries" that dot my neighborhood. I dip into the massive tome every now and then and am consistently surprised by the quality of the writing. The writing conveys her feelings, and there is a clear "woman's voice" that comes through.