I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D

The reason for the rules seems like common sense to me. There is a certain distance needed to stop or change lanes when driving at highway distance. If the truck breaks down just over a hill, cars won't see it early enough unless the warning signals are put further back where they can be seen coming up the hill.

I seriously doubt that these rules were just shit someone made up. The NHTSA has so many studies regarding road regulations and guidance. They might be outdated for modern technology, and might be worse than newer alternatives - I don't doubt that hasn't been studied yet - but I would absolutely wager that there were studies done to justify the original numbers.

Furthermore, when congress delegated regulatory power to these agencies they included laws dictating how the rules needed to be determined, specifically so you can't have a bunch of political hacks changing them on a whim. Changes to the regulation need to be justified, and there needs to be comment period to gather any information and concerns that the agency itself might have overlooked, respond to the comments and incorporate any changes as appropriate. I don't want regulators to be able say "this is just some crap" and change rules every four years because they shoot from the hip. That means that changes take 1-3 years depending on how complicated and motivated the agency is, but it is worthwhile to end up with better regulations and avoid being constantly jerked around.

Precisely. If you make mistakes like this expensive enough for the police station then the problem solves itself. The real problem is that someone promised the police and the school a magic new technology that would make their schoolyard safer. So far the system probably has zero wins, and one spectacular failure. If the political and economic fallout for the failure is high enough then the school turns off the crappy system, and it encourages other schools to do the same. Potential new buyers for the system disappear and the vendor of the system goes out of business.

And we all win.

Eventually the school might even end up with an effective system that does roughly the same thing, but it will likely be structured in a way that makes it less likely that Doritos wielding young adults get assaulted by the police. It's hard to argue against safer schools. In any system like this false positives are going to be a potential problem. If you make false positives expensive enough, however, then you likely get the outcome that you want.

The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.

There are three factors that define productivity:

• Toil (T) - The time spent doing random s**t that nobody wants to do, but you have to do, but that probably doesn't contribute much to productivity. This is a constant reduction in productivity at the bottom of the graph.
• Energy level (e) - A curve that declines over time for each day and does not fully recover in subsequent days without days off.
• Error rate (E) - A curve that is inversely proportional to energy level, and becomes exponential at high levels of fatigue.

Raw output in a given time period is proportional to energy level. Useful output is raw output minus the error rate, because erroneous output has to be redone and cancels out its benefit. And the time spent is then reduced by the time spent on toil.

So the equation looks something like f(t) = (t - T) * (e - E). That's why small reductions in bulls**t make a big difference, and the sweet spot for time spent ends up being hard bounded by when the error rate exceeds the useful output, at which point productivity goes negative.

Hope that helps.

Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.

More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.

So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.

And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.

Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.

See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.

I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.

I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...

Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.

No, not even then. Options in a startup that has a 2% chance of making it to IPO are worthless, as is your equity stake. Working yourself to death for a lottery ticket is stupidity.

Startup or not, hire enough people to do the job. If you're pushing people to work crazy hours, you're a moron, and your company is all but guaranteed to be in that 98%.

And people will keep using it, because that is their standard corporate email client.

Seems like they've been doing it since 2008. Is there a ten year statute of limitations or something?

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

I was explicitly talking about what would happen if Russia launched nuclear weapons specifically at the United States, not an arbitrary non-nuclear NATO country.

NATO would still be obligated to retaliate in an attack on other NATO countries, whether nuclear or otherwise, and Russia's military would still almost certainly lose very badly and very quickly, given their current levels of force depletion, but I do agree that it would probably not involve a nuclear response. It wouldn't need to.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

The reality is that if Russia launched nuclear missiles at the U.S., the U.S. would wipe them off the map. If you honestly think otherwise, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you're really that detached from reality, you're right. There's no point in this discussion.