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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think we should be careful. It’s certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that’s terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.

    I don’t recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.

    The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we’re actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.





  • Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

    In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

    But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.











  • All of those questions are entirely unreasonable, because they’re all manipulative.

    Many years ago my old boss gave me an interview before I got a promotion and he asked me if I was still going to be working for the company in 20 years. And I lied and said that I thought I probably would. But why did he ask me? I believe he was trying to pressure me into saying that I would be there, knowing that I have integrity, knowing that if I said it then I might be less likely to quit.

    Except that he didn’t have any integrity, and he had on other occasions promised employees that they would get promotions and then delivered them nothing, or even let them go when the contract ran out.

    And that’s normal. Every medium to large sized company in the world has bosses like this.

    Anyway, so if you’re in a situation where they make you lie, then you lie, and then you ask them to improve the quality of the workplace. You just said that you’re planning to stay there for many years into the future, so now you’re wondering what concrete steps the bosses are going to do keep your wonderful co-workers happy enough to stick around and build that bright future together with you, bearing in mind that the best way to retain employees is to pay them more.



  • I love the mixed levels of irony here. On the one hand, it’s been 4 years, so it looks like a failure. At the same time, $15 just isn’t enough. What a joke. Also at the same time, if he could actually push hard on raising the minimum wage now, he could probably drum up some votes in the election.

    It’s cool that all of those facts are at play in this one little statement.


  • I don’t see how it could work in theory. Let’s assume you have a public and a private system and somehow the private system magically performs better than the public system. Then people cut support and funding for the public system and all you have is a private system. But now everyone is stuck with it, so at best you have to have a large body of regulators watching over private companies that are trying to flout the rules as much as possible because that’s their profit margin. And this must all unavoidably drive up the price, because of the profit margin and the extra people involved.

    And that’s all assuming that you can properly regulate the system, which you clearly can’t, because the more money it has then the more power it has, and healthcare is a massive industry.