It's even worse in my area. The main grocery chain here (Safeway) started charging for grocery bags a few years back. So, not appreciating being nickel-and-dimed to death, most people (inluding myself) now bring reusable cloth bags (Which, to be fair, are also more environmentally friendly and all that... yay.). But it's totally bulloxed up the self-checkouts even more. When they could rely on customers mostly using the free store-provided bags, they could at least rely on the bags all having the same weight and pre-program that into their system. Now the cloth bags are heavier and have more variability in their weight, which gives the scale, thats there to make sure you're ringing up your items before bagging them, no end of issues. So when I start checking out and bagging my stuff, that scale messes up and gives me the "unexpected item in bagging area, please wait for assistance from an associate" error every... goddamned... time. It does it to just about everyone else too. And going to the real cashiers is seldom an option, because the stores are also trying to cheap out on labor and understaffing, making those lines unreasonably long.
I've taken to making sure I scan something really heavy and non-breakable first and, wenever the self-checkout stops for that weight discrepancy, picking up my bag and slamming it down from a couple feet a few times in mock confusion and not-so-mock frusteration. This usually prompts the employee overseeing the self-checkout to quickly override the scale from their terminal to make it stop the nonsense. Hopefully, I'm also knocking it out of calibration, making the employee more likely to also quickly override it for the next guy and making things easier on everybody, and hopefully costing them at least a little bit more in maintainence.
That system exists, and it's why medical billing is a speciality in and of itself. It's called the ICD-10, and has been around for decades. The pushback is because the latest revision, which went into effect two years ago, is hyper-specific to the point of absurdity.
Pecked by a chicken? There's a code for that: W61.33. But don't you dare get that confused with getting pecked by a turkey or bitten by a duck, which are W61.43 and W61.61 respectively. Don't like your in-laws? That's Z63.1. Injured? It's very important for proper diagnosis to know if you were at the library at the time (Y92.241) or at the opera (Y92.253). Shredding it on water so awesomely that your skis catch on fire? Not only is there a code for that, there are three sub-codes to describe the diagnosis in greater detail. I am not making this up.. You know all those Imperials who died when those two Star Destroyers collided in Rogue one? That's V95.43. And it only gets more wacky from there.
But where exactly is the line between state and local affairs?
Access to, and usage of, public roads is generally regulated at the state level; even where said roads are constructed or paid for at the city level. I don't goto a city or county agency to get my driver's license or to register my car, for example. The DMV is a state agency and, so far as I'm aware, that is the case in all 50 states. Cities and counties get to set speed limits and other traffic control rules; but only within limits. And I've never heard of a city passing a law along the lines of "FedEx may drive their trucks on the roads in city limits and deliver packages, but UPS is forbidden.". And I'd bet that any city that did so would get slapped down pretty hard, even if they tried to be clever with the wording so as to give plausible deniability the way Austin did. (In this case, the law would be more like: "Trucks and drivers painted or wearing that puke brown color may not drive on the roads or deliver packages in city limits.). So why should it be different when the city is legislating that Yellow Cab can operate on the roads, but Uber and Lyft cannot?
They weren't just trying to *regulate* Uber and Lyft though. The ordinance in question specifically targeted them and was crafted so as to be so onerous as to drive them out of the market. Tellingly, it didn't include the legacy taxi companies in the regulations; only "transportation network companies".
And it wasn't just background checks. There was a requirement to open up local offices, restrictions on Uber and Lyft picking up passengers at "special events", restrictions on automated surge pricing, a requirement to hold "community outreach events" whatever that was supposed to mean, a money grab, and (perhaps worst of all from a tech company's POV) a demand that Uber and Lyft hand over access to their internal rider and trip data to the city.
And let's not forget: This was not a case of Uber and Left moving into an existing regulatory structure and demanding that the rules be changed because they were special or whatnot. Both companies had already been operating in Austin for some time. The city then imposed entire new regulations after the fact to target and drive away Uber and Lyft. That's corruption and regulatory capture (Remember, the ordinance targeted TNCs only, and excluded the legacy taxi corporations.) at it's worst. Perhaps this state law was not the best way to go about it; but Austin's city politicians really did need to be slapped down hard on this one.
The traditional credit card companies have one crucial advantage that's lacking in all of these fly-by-night alternative "paynent systems": A legally mandated maximum of $50 liability in the event of fraud. And I think all of my cards but one waive that $50. Without that buffer, good luck getting your money back when WeChat or Venmo or whatever gets hacked and your bank account's routing & account numbers are stolen. And even if you do get it back eventually; you're still without the money for the duration. With Visa/MC/AmEx in the mix, the money never leaves your bank account. Disputing a false charge is, increasingly, just a matter of a few clicks the issuer's website. And they can usually get their own money back merely by reversing the transaction on the merchant account.
Sure, the interest rates are ridiculous if you're undiciplined enough to actually carry a balance. But if you have your own shit together, the value they offer in fraud prevention alone is fantastic. And if you know how to play the points game, they just get better.
Once money changes hands, the hardware is yours to do as you please. Repair it yourself if you want. Pay someone else to do so. Swap out the SIM card and use it on any random cellular network. Leave it in the box in the hopes that it will one day be a collectors' item. Use it in a "will it blend" video. It's all the same. You already have the right to do any and all of these, and Apple can't do a damn thing to stop you.
What these laws are about has nothing to do with your personal rights. What's going on is that third-party corporate interests want to force Apple (and, to be perfectly fair, others) to help them, gratis, build their own businesses. They don't want to bother doing the work to establish relationships and supply chains with components manufacturers in Asia. They want to take a shortcut and glom onto the work Apple has already done. They don't want to learn how to do things themselves, or even to do a Chilton's style teardown. They want Apple to give them free access to their intellectual property.
There's no rights issue involved at all in these "right to repair" laws. People have rights. And you already have every right to do whatever you like with your hardware. This is about businesses wanting to take shortcuts. And screw Citizens United with a rusty sideways crowbar. Businesses aren't people. They're a convenient legal fiction sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere. They don't have rights.
How do you figure Amazon uses government services the most? Because of shipping and delivery? Well, you're way off. Here's how it works: Amazon pays UPS, FedEx, etc., to deliver packages. UPS, FedEx, and so on buy gas to fuel their trucks. When you, or anyone else, buys gas, you pay tax on it earmarked for road construction and maintenance. It's hardly Amazon's fault (Or UPS's or FedEx's, for that matter.) that corrupt politicos loot that gas tax and piss it away into dubious general fund projects.
To be a stats symbol, there has to be some rarity or exclusivity.
The Apple Watch was a status symbol for maybe the first four months; when that Burberry castoff severely under-forecast the demand, you couldn't get them in stores, and they were going for 3x the price on eBay. Now? Every third barista you see has one, as do probably 90% of my coworkers. It's thoroughly mainstream and not a status symbol at all.
It's the standard slashbot line though. To people like the GP, if Apple were to invent a device that transmutes cancerous tumors into 24-carat gold, but it had no wireless and less space than a Nomad, it would be lame.
Fox claims to be a news channel. More than that, Fox claims to be fair and balanced. Colbert claims none of that. He's never presented himself as anything but an entertainer and comedian. In fact... Not to say that Jon Stewart speaks for Colbert. But when he ran the Daily Show, and Colbert was a cast member, Stewart openly mocked the notion that it was journalism of any kind.
How may gay people do you actually know? Not many I bet.
As a gay guy myself, I found Colbert's monologue to be neither offensive nor homophobic. None of my (mostly gay) friends whom I know have seen the show and have heard from on the matter found Colbert to be offensive or homophobic. And I would bet with a good deal of certainty that if I took a poll of my (again, mostly gay) friends in general, I'd be hard pressed to find a single one who was offended.
The father "propagating his like" and all that does matter in some cultures though. And it's not just a matter of shame, which can be considerable, for the parents. Bastardy can carry a stigma for the child as well that may even persist into adulthood.
I'm not endorsing such beliefs, mind you. Nor am I accusing these parents of holding them. Hell, I neither have nor want kids, for that matter. But the cultural attitudes I described do exist in the world. And they can cause significant problems for the child beyond the, not at all insignificant, medical questions that may arise from unknown parentage.
Where Obama was fairly forward-looking and Hillary appeared to have a similar outlook; 45 is overtly hostile towards the technology sector and its interests in general; and the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in particular. Given said hostility on the part of the executive branch, it does make sence that Google, Facebook, Apple, and company, would look to buying themselves some congresscritters as a defensive move. Perilous times, and all that.
It's very far from an ideal situation. But tech has suffered in the past from not playing "the game". For example, in the 1990s, tech lobbying was minimal, allowing the RIAA and MPAA to blindside them by buying the DMCA. How much time and money, would you guess, has been wasted in tech complying with the copyright cartel on that one law alone? How many tech companies did their lot outright put out of business? It wasn't just Napster by a long shot. You can hardly blame tech for determining not to make the same mistake a second time.
> Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement > on the old script init that couldn't handle modern > features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode.
Yes, because I'm going to hot plug anything besides a keyboard & monitor on a crash cart into a (hardware) Linux box, or put an EC2 instance into sleep mode.
Half the problem with people "hating the mainstream" is that half-baked tools that don't fit the use case are being forced on us. Systemd may ultimately be perfectly cromulent on a consumer desktop focused Linux like Ubuntu or Mint... though I would still argue that it was rolled out there well before it was ready for prime time. But the majority of Linux systems out there are not consumer desktops, are they? And it has no goddamned business at all in a datacenter distro like RHEL, CentOS, or (upstream) Debian. It breaks modularity, tries to do too many things in one service, needs to be updated & rebooted too often, tells us to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in too many places, and is difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong, not least because it also forces journald and its binary logs onto us.
I'm not religiously attached to SysV init scripts by any means. But systemd was not the right replacement for them. It wasn't ready for production when it was launched. And the only reason it's even tolerable now is because the "new way" of doing things is to not try to fix a system that's gone wobbly; but to just unceremoniously kill the instance and launch a replacement. (And even there... you'll note that Amazon has not drank the systemd Kool-aid. Their own (Red Hat based) distro is still happily using init and syslog.)
I'm convinced that the bulk of the "We hate Uber" crowd are from places where they didn't have to rely on taxis in the pre-Uber era. Taxis are really just horrible. And Uber would never have gained a foothold were it not for the fact. I've been a regular Uber customer since they still called themselves Ubercab, were only in San Francisco, and the town cars were their only service with fares at 1.5-2x that of a cab for the same ride. And even at twice the price, Uber was a vastly superior service. And to be fair, in the here and now so is Lyft; which gets about an equal share of my business these days.
Buy the taxi companies? A pox upon their houses, I say. They made their own bed, and provided the opening for Uber in the first place, by having bloody awful and unreliable service at whatever the price.
I know some people who work for Amazon. And they have very little to say about it that's not good. It's a challenging company and you have to constantly be learning their new technologies. But my friends there love it, and are treated very well.
Long time ago, I had a few friends who worked for Walmart. Working there is a dead-end job with no real prospects. The company treated them like crap and they hated every minute.
Easy enough for me to pick which one I'd prefer to win.
Having been in the position of the IT guy dumping crap laptops onto developers; I'll point out that IT understands perfectly how important RAM is to developers... good CPUs and SSD, or at least Fusion, drives too. If IT is issuing 4GB skinny-disk laptops, it's not by their choice. It's because some PHB/MBA type is golf buddies with a sales weasel from Dell or HP; and they locked the company into a contract for (usually) leased laptops in a standard "on size fits all" configuration that was decided on without consulting IT or development as to their needs.
And it's a perfectly sound conclusion to reach if you're actually familiar with the protest scene. I call it a "scene" because that's exactly what it is. Just like you have ravers, goths, punks, emo kids, hippies, and whatnot, you have protesters. And it doesn't matter if he protest is to free Mumia, no blood for oil, food not bombs, or whatever Noam Chomsky's latest book is about; it's always the same people. That's because it's their social circle. The weekend's protest is where they go to hang out with their friends, to have fun, to see free concerts, to get dates, and so on. (Yes, when I first moved to San Francisco; I used to hang out with some of these people myself.)
So yes, when a bunch of strangers show up, nobody knows who they are, and they start causing trouble; it's pretty damn obvious... if you've paid a whit of attention at the protests every weekend previously... that what you're dealing with there is not protestors, but that the cause of the week has touched the nerve of someone powerful and they sent in the agents provocateur.
Are you kidding? The police in the US regularly get their jollies gunning down unarmed citizens... not just adults mind you, but children as well; and the only "punishment" they receive is paid vacation (administrative leave) and *maybe* some negative media attention. Anything they can plausibly spin as an accident of any kind won't even be noticed.
Youâ(TM)re quite right about the Alamo. Ever since they opened a location in my city, itâ(TM)s the only one I goto. No babies, no phones, and ZOMG, those boozy milkshakesâ¦
Even so though; the GP is right in that thereâ(TM)s progressively less reason to goto a theater anymore. My TV and stereo are good enough⦠and Iâ(TM)ve learned to replicate enough of the boozy milkshakes⦠that it really takes a highly visual movie that makes full use of the big screen to get me even to the Alamo. Basically, unless Jedi Knights, the USS Enterprise, Iron Man, or Groot are on that screen; Iâ(TM)m waiting for Netflix or Blu Ray.
Except Google, unlike a communist state or Walmart, pays better than restaurants do... including as part of the compensation package stock options that have made multimillionaires out of their chefs. People who make more money also pay more income tax. I'm not going to guess at the numbers, but that would at least partially mitigate the "ZOMG they're not paying sales tax at the restaurants" hit; especially considering that income tax is mandatory where the sales tax could be averted by bringing lunch (prepared from untaxed groceries) from home and whatnot.
Also, if the GP is referring to the Google offices I think he is; the food options in the vicinity were pretty grim before they moved in anyway. A Gordon Biersch Brewery restaurant was the highlight of the area. And that's hardly something you'd want to eat on a regular basis.
I would venture a guess that 99.9% is a low estimate for the number of people who have a phone. Regardless of what the actual number is though, I'd also guess that it is dwarfed by the number of people who live in the states that have refused to implement the REAL ID act and whose citizens are going o suddenly find themselves unable to fly at all next year.
In my experience, most "team building exercises", do involve drinking... quite a lot of it sometimes... following the preliminaries. Sometimes the preliminaries aren't so preliminary, for that matter. We have an office beer fridge for a reason, after all. And you're right. It does build camaraderie and exchange of ideas.
And really... when you're there for a third of your day 5 out of 7 anyway; it's definitely worth finding a job where you like your coworkers enough to socialize with them. I have. (And actually, a few of us were already friends before becoming coworkers.) So I don't mind at all sticking around (or popping down to the pub) for a while to do so.
That's a very good argument for much stricter regulations and enforcement on trucks. But it's a terrible argument for going lighter on cars.
And as I understand it, a software-patched VW diesel is thoroughly nerfed anyway; and will get neither the performance nor the mileage of the one using the Konami code.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even worse in my area. The main grocery chain here (Safeway) started charging for grocery bags a few years back. So, not appreciating being nickel-and-dimed to death, most people (inluding myself) now bring reusable cloth bags (Which, to be fair, are also more environmentally friendly and all that... yay.). But it's totally bulloxed up the self-checkouts even more. When they could rely on customers mostly using the free store-provided bags, they could at least rely on the bags all having the same weight and pre-program that into their system. Now the cloth bags are heavier and have more variability in their weight, which gives the scale, thats there to make sure you're ringing up your items before bagging them, no end of issues. So when I start checking out and bagging my stuff, that scale messes up and gives me the "unexpected item in bagging area, please wait for assistance from an associate" error every... goddamned... time. It does it to just about everyone else too. And going to the real cashiers is seldom an option, because the stores are also trying to cheap out on labor and understaffing, making those lines unreasonably long.
I've taken to making sure I scan something really heavy and non-breakable first and, wenever the self-checkout stops for that weight discrepancy, picking up my bag and slamming it down from a couple feet a few times in mock confusion and not-so-mock frusteration. This usually prompts the employee overseeing the self-checkout to quickly override the scale from their terminal to make it stop the nonsense. Hopefully, I'm also knocking it out of calibration, making the employee more likely to also quickly override it for the next guy and making things easier on everybody, and hopefully costing them at least a little bit more in maintainence.
That system exists, and it's why medical billing is a speciality in and of itself. It's called the ICD-10, and has been around for decades. The pushback is because the latest revision, which went into effect two years ago, is hyper-specific to the point of absurdity.
Pecked by a chicken? There's a code for that: W61.33. But don't you dare get that confused with getting pecked by a turkey or bitten by a duck, which are W61.43 and W61.61 respectively. Don't like your in-laws? That's Z63.1. Injured? It's very important for proper diagnosis to know if you were at the library at the time (Y92.241) or at the opera (Y92.253). Shredding it on water so awesomely that your skis catch on fire? Not only is there a code for that, there are three sub-codes to describe the diagnosis in greater detail. I am not making this up.. You know all those Imperials who died when those two Star Destroyers collided in Rogue one? That's V95.43. And it only gets more wacky from there.
Now do you see why there's been some pushback?
But where exactly is the line between state and local affairs?
Access to, and usage of, public roads is generally regulated at the state level; even where said roads are constructed or paid for at the city level. I don't goto a city or county agency to get my driver's license or to register my car, for example. The DMV is a state agency and, so far as I'm aware, that is the case in all 50 states. Cities and counties get to set speed limits and other traffic control rules; but only within limits. And I've never heard of a city passing a law along the lines of "FedEx may drive their trucks on the roads in city limits and deliver packages, but UPS is forbidden.". And I'd bet that any city that did so would get slapped down pretty hard, even if they tried to be clever with the wording so as to give plausible deniability the way Austin did. (In this case, the law would be more like: "Trucks and drivers painted or wearing that puke brown color may not drive on the roads or deliver packages in city limits.). So why should it be different when the city is legislating that Yellow Cab can operate on the roads, but Uber and Lyft cannot?
They weren't just trying to *regulate* Uber and Lyft though. The ordinance in question specifically targeted them and was crafted so as to be so onerous as to drive them out of the market. Tellingly, it didn't include the legacy taxi companies in the regulations; only "transportation network companies".
And it wasn't just background checks. There was a requirement to open up local offices, restrictions on Uber and Lyft picking up passengers at "special events", restrictions on automated surge pricing, a requirement to hold "community outreach events" whatever that was supposed to mean, a money grab, and (perhaps worst of all from a tech company's POV) a demand that Uber and Lyft hand over access to their internal rider and trip data to the city.
And let's not forget: This was not a case of Uber and Left moving into an existing regulatory structure and demanding that the rules be changed because they were special or whatnot. Both companies had already been operating in Austin for some time. The city then imposed entire new regulations after the fact to target and drive away Uber and Lyft. That's corruption and regulatory capture (Remember, the ordinance targeted TNCs only, and excluded the legacy taxi corporations.) at it's worst. Perhaps this state law was not the best way to go about it; but Austin's city politicians really did need to be slapped down hard on this one.
The traditional credit card companies have one crucial advantage that's lacking in all of these fly-by-night alternative "paynent systems": A legally mandated maximum of $50 liability in the event of fraud. And I think all of my cards but one waive that $50. Without that buffer, good luck getting your money back when WeChat or Venmo or whatever gets hacked and your bank account's routing & account numbers are stolen. And even if you do get it back eventually; you're still without the money for the duration. With Visa/MC/AmEx in the mix, the money never leaves your bank account. Disputing a false charge is, increasingly, just a matter of a few clicks the issuer's website. And they can usually get their own money back merely by reversing the transaction on the merchant account.
Sure, the interest rates are ridiculous if you're undiciplined enough to actually carry a balance. But if you have your own shit together, the value they offer in fraud prevention alone is fantastic. And if you know how to play the points game, they just get better.
Once money changes hands, the hardware is yours to do as you please. Repair it yourself if you want. Pay someone else to do so. Swap out the SIM card and use it on any random cellular network. Leave it in the box in the hopes that it will one day be a collectors' item. Use it in a "will it blend" video. It's all the same. You already have the right to do any and all of these, and Apple can't do a damn thing to stop you.
What these laws are about has nothing to do with your personal rights. What's going on is that third-party corporate interests want to force Apple (and, to be perfectly fair, others) to help them, gratis, build their own businesses. They don't want to bother doing the work to establish relationships and supply chains with components manufacturers in Asia. They want to take a shortcut and glom onto the work Apple has already done. They don't want to learn how to do things themselves, or even to do a Chilton's style teardown. They want Apple to give them free access to their intellectual property.
There's no rights issue involved at all in these "right to repair" laws. People have rights. And you already have every right to do whatever you like with your hardware. This is about businesses wanting to take shortcuts. And screw Citizens United with a rusty sideways crowbar. Businesses aren't people. They're a convenient legal fiction sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere. They don't have rights.
How do you figure Amazon uses government services the most? Because of shipping and delivery? Well, you're way off. Here's how it works: Amazon pays UPS, FedEx, etc., to deliver packages. UPS, FedEx, and so on buy gas to fuel their trucks. When you, or anyone else, buys gas, you pay tax on it earmarked for road construction and maintenance. It's hardly Amazon's fault (Or UPS's or FedEx's, for that matter.) that corrupt politicos loot that gas tax and piss it away into dubious general fund projects.
To be a stats symbol, there has to be some rarity or exclusivity.
The Apple Watch was a status symbol for maybe the first four months; when that Burberry castoff severely under-forecast the demand, you couldn't get them in stores, and they were going for 3x the price on eBay. Now? Every third barista you see has one, as do probably 90% of my coworkers. It's thoroughly mainstream and not a status symbol at all.
It's the standard slashbot line though. To people like the GP, if Apple were to invent a device that transmutes cancerous tumors into 24-carat gold, but it had no wireless and less space than a Nomad, it would be lame.
There's a big difference.
Fox claims to be a news channel. More than that, Fox claims to be fair and balanced. Colbert claims none of that. He's never presented himself as anything but an entertainer and comedian. In fact... Not to say that Jon Stewart speaks for Colbert. But when he ran the Daily Show, and Colbert was a cast member, Stewart openly mocked the notion that it was journalism of any kind.
How may gay people do you actually know? Not many I bet.
As a gay guy myself, I found Colbert's monologue to be neither offensive nor homophobic. None of my (mostly gay) friends whom I know have seen the show and have heard from on the matter found Colbert to be offensive or homophobic. And I would bet with a good deal of certainty that if I took a poll of my (again, mostly gay) friends in general, I'd be hard pressed to find a single one who was offended.
The father "propagating his like" and all that does matter in some cultures though. And it's not just a matter of shame, which can be considerable, for the parents. Bastardy can carry a stigma for the child as well that may even persist into adulthood.
I'm not endorsing such beliefs, mind you. Nor am I accusing these parents of holding them. Hell, I neither have nor want kids, for that matter. But the cultural attitudes I described do exist in the world. And they can cause significant problems for the child beyond the, not at all insignificant, medical questions that may arise from unknown parentage.
Where Obama was fairly forward-looking and Hillary appeared to have a similar outlook; 45 is overtly hostile towards the technology sector and its interests in general; and the Bay Area and Silicon Valley in particular. Given said hostility on the part of the executive branch, it does make sence that Google, Facebook, Apple, and company, would look to buying themselves some congresscritters as a defensive move. Perilous times, and all that.
It's very far from an ideal situation. But tech has suffered in the past from not playing "the game". For example, in the 1990s, tech lobbying was minimal, allowing the RIAA and MPAA to blindside them by buying the DMCA. How much time and money, would you guess, has been wasted in tech complying with the copyright cartel on that one law alone? How many tech companies did their lot outright put out of business? It wasn't just Napster by a long shot. You can hardly blame tech for determining not to make the same mistake a second time.
> Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement
> on the old script init that couldn't handle modern
> features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode.
Yes, because I'm going to hot plug anything besides a keyboard & monitor on a crash cart into a (hardware) Linux box, or put an EC2 instance into sleep mode.
Half the problem with people "hating the mainstream" is that half-baked tools that don't fit the use case are being forced on us. Systemd may ultimately be perfectly cromulent on a consumer desktop focused Linux like Ubuntu or Mint... though I would still argue that it was rolled out there well before it was ready for prime time. But the majority of Linux systems out there are not consumer desktops, are they? And it has no goddamned business at all in a datacenter distro like RHEL, CentOS, or (upstream) Debian. It breaks modularity, tries to do too many things in one service, needs to be updated & rebooted too often, tells us to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in too many places, and is difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong, not least because it also forces journald and its binary logs onto us.
I'm not religiously attached to SysV init scripts by any means. But systemd was not the right replacement for them. It wasn't ready for production when it was launched. And the only reason it's even tolerable now is because the "new way" of doing things is to not try to fix a system that's gone wobbly; but to just unceremoniously kill the instance and launch a replacement. (And even there... you'll note that Amazon has not drank the systemd Kool-aid. Their own (Red Hat based) distro is still happily using init and syslog.)
^^^ This.
I'm convinced that the bulk of the "We hate Uber" crowd are from places where they didn't have to rely on taxis in the pre-Uber era. Taxis are really just horrible. And Uber would never have gained a foothold were it not for the fact. I've been a regular Uber customer since they still called themselves Ubercab, were only in San Francisco, and the town cars were their only service with fares at 1.5-2x that of a cab for the same ride. And even at twice the price, Uber was a vastly superior service. And to be fair, in the here and now so is Lyft; which gets about an equal share of my business these days.
Buy the taxi companies? A pox upon their houses, I say. They made their own bed, and provided the opening for Uber in the first place, by having bloody awful and unreliable service at whatever the price.
I know some people who work for Amazon. And they have very little to say about it that's not good. It's a challenging company and you have to constantly be learning their new technologies. But my friends there love it, and are treated very well.
Long time ago, I had a few friends who worked for Walmart. Working there is a dead-end job with no real prospects. The company treated them like crap and they hated every minute.
Easy enough for me to pick which one I'd prefer to win.
No good. Then you'll be there with the tweakers.
Having been in the position of the IT guy dumping crap laptops onto developers; I'll point out that IT understands perfectly how important RAM is to developers... good CPUs and SSD, or at least Fusion, drives too. If IT is issuing 4GB skinny-disk laptops, it's not by their choice. It's because some PHB/MBA type is golf buddies with a sales weasel from Dell or HP; and they locked the company into a contract for (usually) leased laptops in a standard "on size fits all" configuration that was decided on without consulting IT or development as to their needs.
And it's a perfectly sound conclusion to reach if you're actually familiar with the protest scene. I call it a "scene" because that's exactly what it is. Just like you have ravers, goths, punks, emo kids, hippies, and whatnot, you have protesters. And it doesn't matter if he protest is to free Mumia, no blood for oil, food not bombs, or whatever Noam Chomsky's latest book is about; it's always the same people. That's because it's their social circle. The weekend's protest is where they go to hang out with their friends, to have fun, to see free concerts, to get dates, and so on. (Yes, when I first moved to San Francisco; I used to hang out with some of these people myself.)
So yes, when a bunch of strangers show up, nobody knows who they are, and they start causing trouble; it's pretty damn obvious... if you've paid a whit of attention at the protests every weekend previously... that what you're dealing with there is not protestors, but that the cause of the week has touched the nerve of someone powerful and they sent in the agents provocateur.
Are you kidding? The police in the US regularly get their jollies gunning down unarmed citizens... not just adults mind you, but children as well; and the only "punishment" they receive is paid vacation (administrative leave) and *maybe* some negative media attention. Anything they can plausibly spin as an accident of any kind won't even be noticed.
Youâ(TM)re quite right about the Alamo. Ever since they opened a location in my city, itâ(TM)s the only one I goto. No babies, no phones, and ZOMG, those boozy milkshakesâ¦
Even so though; the GP is right in that thereâ(TM)s progressively less reason to goto a theater anymore. My TV and stereo are good enough⦠and Iâ(TM)ve learned to replicate enough of the boozy milkshakes⦠that it really takes a highly visual movie that makes full use of the big screen to get me even to the Alamo. Basically, unless Jedi Knights, the USS Enterprise, Iron Man, or Groot are on that screen; Iâ(TM)m waiting for Netflix or Blu Ray.
Except Google, unlike a communist state or Walmart, pays better than restaurants do... including as part of the compensation package stock options that have made multimillionaires out of their chefs. People who make more money also pay more income tax. I'm not going to guess at the numbers, but that would at least partially mitigate the "ZOMG they're not paying sales tax at the restaurants" hit; especially considering that income tax is mandatory where the sales tax could be averted by bringing lunch (prepared from untaxed groceries) from home and whatnot.
Also, if the GP is referring to the Google offices I think he is; the food options in the vicinity were pretty grim before they moved in anyway. A Gordon Biersch Brewery restaurant was the highlight of the area. And that's hardly something you'd want to eat on a regular basis.
I would venture a guess that 99.9% is a low estimate for the number of people who have a phone. Regardless of what the actual number is though, I'd also guess that it is dwarfed by the number of people who live in the states that have refused to implement the REAL ID act and whose citizens are going o suddenly find themselves unable to fly at all next year.
In my experience, most "team building exercises", do involve drinking... quite a lot of it sometimes... following the preliminaries. Sometimes the preliminaries aren't so preliminary, for that matter. We have an office beer fridge for a reason, after all. And you're right. It does build camaraderie and exchange of ideas.
And really... when you're there for a third of your day 5 out of 7 anyway; it's definitely worth finding a job where you like your coworkers enough to socialize with them. I have. (And actually, a few of us were already friends before becoming coworkers.) So I don't mind at all sticking around (or popping down to the pub) for a while to do so.
That's a very good argument for much stricter regulations and enforcement on trucks. But it's a terrible argument for going lighter on cars.
And as I understand it, a software-patched VW diesel is thoroughly nerfed anyway; and will get neither the performance nor the mileage of the one using the Konami code.