The Five-Eyes agreement allows the UK and US to share any intelligence material immediately. This is 100% orchestrated with American intelligence agencies to allow them to get American data.
When push comes to shove, the US government will probably side with the UK.
Although I agree — and also left the UK in part* because this law was clearly going to blow up like this — I would add that the US and China are about equal now, so look at what gets done to Chinese tech firms that don't play nice.
* the other part being Brexit, whose saga still isn't over given the Reform party opinion poll rating and them wanting to also leave the European Convention on Human Rights which has bad things to say about government surveillance
All work (in-office or remote) is inherently transactional. If I am in an office, I have to pretend to have genuine social interactions with people. Social bonds made between colleagues have will happen organically. No in-office mandatory fun.
I never pretend that co-workers are my friends. I just understand they are co-workers and treat them as such. so then if I was forced to have mandatory socialization and fun I would quite despise it. if I wanted to interact with them, I would reach out and schedule one-on-ones as would happen IRL
The further I go into my career, the more see the it the opposite way. I think business people are overvalued compared with most software engineers. If software engineers take the time to learn the "business", they can build their own companies that eclipse those started by the typical MBAs who view engineers as "pampered and coddled" cost centers. I think after the bubble pops, we'll see new companies that led by engineers and creatives conducting orchestras of AI that will allow them end the need for the typical corporate business people.
I hope you are right, and I think looking at the past there is some truth to this. After the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 crash, those are the times when a lot of strong engineering-focused tech companies were started.
Funny, when I was a software developer I thought the same thing.
While there have been a few developers I have worked with who were total stars, most of them were distinctly average (unsurprisingly) and lacked basic curiosity. Even of the great developers, there are very few I would trust to do anything other than write software.
The other thing I have noted over my career is how developers consistently underrate the skills, experience and intelligence of non developers.
This is an incredible take, and I have no idea where you have seen this, as it's entirely counter to my own personal experience. I have never, in my life, met a finance bro or management bro who had any non-work curiosity about anything beyond sports, cars, and sex.
Most engineers I know are immensely curious about how the world works, how the universe works, etc, and are constantly trying to learn and understand.
The “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why” trope exists for a reason.
I’ve worked with a range of engineers in terms of their curiosity. In my experience, the ones who cared enough to ask or push back on decisions were exceptions, not the rule.
This doesn’t mean they weren’t curious people. It just means they weren’t curious about The BusinessTM or The MarketTM.
> “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why”
I suspect that insofar as this exists, it's because when junior engineers question the utility of the requirements or user stories, they are told specifically to stfu because nerds don't understand business. Over time, the message get received?
That said, I've very rarely seen an engineer like this. In fact, I frequently encounter the opposite: the sterotypical asperger's who doesn't know when they're being rude with their probing.
It's not that skills prevents starting a company, it's the amount of risk & uncertainty people are happy to live with.
Programmers like predictability because what you'd do if your compiler gave a different result every time you compile your code?
A rational person getting a 300K salary would be better off on average than a small business owner after 5 years.
Sales people are paid a high percentage of the deal they close because they need to produce a consistent result in inconsistent environment. Also businesses can easily measure the output of a sales person, but it's way harder to measure a programmers output in a larger team.
Thanks for the comment!!
Can you elaborate on "multimedia heavy"? Do you mean photo/video contents?
WDYT about using PWA-s for something like chatgpt mobile clone?
Can you share the thought process a bit deeper?
Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this. A major AWS outage due to striking employees could hit them where it hurts and make Amazon's management realize how stupid they are to consider this policy change.
I mentioned unionization on my personal social media account and was approached by legal that I should “consider my public statements about my job carefully.”
It is well known that Amazon hires organizations like the Pinkertons to break up unionization efforts at all levels, even going as far as to bait union supporters into signing fake union interest forms on false pretense and then attrition-fire individuals who signed by giving them no hours, pushing them into ineffective or frustrating conditions, PIPs, etc.
The actual answer to your question, besides the fact that all of us SDEs consider ourselves exceptional at our jobs, is that there are a lot of people whose immigration status depends on their job. They can’t strike.
For that and other reasons, Amazon knows they can do what they want.
I would love for labor to get a win, but it’s easy for me to say since I don’t work at Amazon. Someone else should bell the cat.
I just joined Amazon but I’m definitely on board for unionization. Just need to figure out who else is. It seems like the real solution here is a collective unit to bargain with management to say no 5 days is not necessary. And probably get some other benefits too. But given amazons anti-union tactics in the warehouses I can’t imagine they’d be friendly to a corporate union either
>Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this
Because the people most likely to unionize are exactly the people Amazon dosn't care that much about. If you are a star performer, you are paid gobs of money and treated like royalty. If you're even a decent employee, you make tons of money and are given lots of leeaway.
I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things. I would be much happier to pay taxes if they went to funding schools, infrastructure, NASA, emergency management, poverty relief and other useful things instead of putting undocumented immigrants who could be productive members of society in concentration camps or bombing brown people. Furthermore, I am happy to fund particular defense initiatives like supporting Ukraine, but I want a line item veto on unproductive or morally repugnant things the government does.
I’ve gotten to see some of that at a local level and… I just don’t know. We barely managed to pass a local school levy to recoup from a major accounting error that would have meant massive layoffs for the district. It’s a pretty good district academically, and I was shocked at how many empty nesters (new ones, too) were vocal about voting no just because “no new taxes“, despite all of their kids consuming that very system with great benefit for the past 18 years.
A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.
If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.
This sounds like a good way to accidentally create an industry of reverse lobbyists where the government contracts them to convince tax payers to allocate money to their department.
I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.
Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)
> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.
Obviously, this was supposed to be the job of the person you elected.
But in 2024 we definitely have the technology to let people vote on smaller units of issues that they care about.
I would be completely in support of people self-allocating their taxes as long as (1) the distribution still had to add up to 100% so you can’t under contribute and (2) government offices capped their income and redistributed excess to the general funds instead of letting some feel-good departments waste money they didn’t need but were allocated.
The caps must be high enough that departments are in competition for funds. Presumably the outcome is then that the department for fluffy bunnies is funded up to its cap, taking money away from the department for unblocking drains.
> I've always said people should be able to directly allocate where their taxes go within the government expenditures, or be able to file an objection based on religious or philosophical beliefs to having their tax dollars fund morally objectionable things.
Members of Congress often propose things like this because it sounds good but in practice it's meaningless.
Suppose that Democrats don't want to pay for bombs and Republicans don't want to pay for makework jobs, so they both say they don't want their tax money to be used for this. Then the government takes the money from Democrats they didn't spend on bombs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the makework jobs programs and takes the money Republicans didn't spend on makework jobs and uses it to make up the shortfall in the military, and nothing changes at all.
The only way it could actually do something is if you got the money back you didn't want spent on that thing, instead of letting the government spend it on something else. But then most people would do that with large chunks of government spending because they'd rather the money than the programs.
That always sounds nice until you see how it plays out in universities and other charities. The directed donations don't get sent to where they are most needed; they end up funding large vanity projects.
> Supporting the war in Ukraine is just another example of “bombing brown people”, yet you appear completely oblivious.
How?
Russia invades the Ukraine.
Ukraine defends itself.
Ukraine's allies, incl. the USA, send weapons.
None of the allies, incl. the USA, fight in Ukraine or Russia.
I'm afraid your independent thinking has formed a prejudiced opinion. George Carlin would not be proud.
Of course this time around we have to do the bombing through some middlemen because the brown people have big guns too, and the people aren’t actually brown this time around. They do speak a weird language though and have different cultural values, so maybe that qualifies.
Ukraine isn’t our ally. That’s a silly sentiment. Ukraine is a developing country wholly comparable to say Zambia or Namibia. Our interests just happen to align this way this time around.
The US has no allies, only interests. It interests us to be adversarial to Russia. It interests us to "bomb brown people". None of which is done out of some moral duty.
Is this supposed to be some insight? The very definition of "alliance" says: groups or people who work together because of shared interests. You ally because you share interests, e.g. a specific goal.
We really need to eliminate all these special powers afforded to judges, police and other government officials. They are civil servants and need to remember whatever authority they have is granted by the people and exists only to serve the community. Sadly, most of the people in government don't seem to realize this fact of public office / civil service in any democratic society.
i guess someone needs the power to enforce the law. But for someone who isn't even on trial? that feels like a major oversight if they really do have that power.
Who else would have the power in court room? No one apart from the Defendant and maybe their public defender is forced to be there. They are there by choice and thus should act accordingly. Judge is in charge of the place for duration of trial, so should have rights to instruct any deputies present.
The same people that have the power to remove people causing a disturbance elsewhere. The police could have been instructed to remove them, arrest them, issue a summons for court, and then the judge can have their turn. That a judge can skip that entire process on a whim is a massive overreach.
I see in the news that the judge has been removed from trials for "training". Hopefully they will stick him in cuffs, dress him in prison garb, and publicly humiliate him in front of his peers while they flip a coin to decide if he should spend his "holiday" in prison. But I doubt it.
That's wild that we have to deal with AML/KYC buying a few dollars of crypto but a multimillion dollar real estate translation just goes through without the government sniffing its nose into things. Just goes to show you how unfair the system is towards the little guy.
ISPs got a ton of free money from the government to set up internet infrastructure and have been milking taxpayer money without improving access significantly or reducing costs. They can accept it or get nationalized imo
