Measuring an employees "worth to the business" is usually very difficult unless there's in the top or bottom 10%. Hence human beings almost inevitably use proxies.
And like it or not, one of those proxies is engagement. And one bit of evidence of engagement is that you can *see* a person paying attention.

We can complain, but it's simply humans being human.

This is just posturing.

Everyone knows it will be reversed some 5 years out if there's even a modest backslash to it (or if the economic cost turns out to be too high).

Choose 2027 so that this is a real issue in the next election, and that's a gesture worth making.

> There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

Just wanted to say how much I liked your signature. Made me think.

Quite true and thanks for pointing this out. I over generalized.

There are a raft of restrictions, but it's not a matter of prohibiting doing any business at all.

I will say that the US is not always in a hurry to make crystal clear what is legal/illegal, which makes many businesses leery of doing any business at all with sanctioned countries.

Again, the embargo prohibits you from doing business in Iran and the US. If you're a foreign company and you do business in both, then you risk prosecution.
And of course, this applies to the entire corporate hierarchy. No creating a subsidiary that deals exclusively with one and another that deals exclusively with the other.

Want to deal with Iran? The entire corporate hierarchy cannot touch America in any way.

But of course, everyone wants to do business with America, which is why the embargo works.

I'm not a big fan of extraterritoriality, but this was a pretty clear example of the mechanism in action.

Surely everyone understands that *anything* kept on a major vendor's server is scanned for problematic files unless the backup is also encrypted by the client (in which case the server provider cannot decrypt the files to scan them.). Currently none of the major providers offer this capability and would be in deep trouble with the government if they did.

So, at the moment, the on-phone scanning is essentially meaningless. Far more intrusive scanning of everything that is backed up (i.e. everything on your phone) is already performed.

Apple was foolish, unlike Google, DropBox, etc. The others understood that as long as they don't advertise the fact, they can scan everything far more intrusively on the server, and since everything on your phone ends up on the server, they scan everything, but with no oversight at all. Apple tried to publicly codify how they would scan your on-device files and of course people freaked out. We don't care about privacy, we care about the appearance of privacy.

Any marketer worth their salt would recognize we are okay with leaving the door wide open to our house. But you don't advertise that you are going to allow people to peek through a window, and try to ameliorate their concerns by telling them the window is shaded. They won't care. You can even tell them this is in preparation for closing the door. They don't care about the door.

This seems like another case of engineers trying to increase welfare (in the long term) while not understanding how human beings actually work.

> People can code, but the design and planning isn't happening.

I've noticed that as well. The coding gets done, but the innovation on projects that require more than a single coder has basically died for the last 2 years.

Maybe if we were all young ace coders earning 200K a year, but for our crew, it's just too hard to get seriously engaged over a voice call in Teams. So it ends up that one person does the real meat of the work on a given project, and the rest try to engage, but likely just end up nodding along. (Different people, different projects, it's not one person carrying us.)

Also to be honest, thicker accents are harder to handle over iffy Internet connections (our team is about 10% native English speakers), which means more cognitive effort spent on listening to the words of some members and less to the larger architecture problem. And of course, our younger staff members are trying to concentrate while their 10 year olds are running around in the background of their apartments (which is charming for me as my kids are grown, but really hard on them).

And the sad part is when we were all white-boarding in a single room, we had amazingly dynamic discussions that were like a verbal ballet...

I don't look forward to the commute - but I dread permanent work from home.

And yes, the pandemic has got our international company taking a serious look at moving more of our operations to India. Not to cheap outsourcing shops at 1/10 the price, but hiring more of their completely competent Indian programmers that they can get for $25K/year instead of $75K/year. Again, maybe if we were doing cutting edge stuff it would be different, but if our tech stack is 10 years old, then knowledge on how to use it isn't that hard to come by. I suspect the reason it hasn't happened yet is that management hasn't been able to get big projects like this moving in the pandemic either :-).

Sigh. A polite response to my fairly sarcastic response. Now I'm feeling bad, so I owe you a proper response.

Anyway, yes, this may indeed be a good time to look for a new job. However, for a quite a large number of people, switching jobs is only slightly less traumatic than switching marriages, etc. It's a major life instability point, and they will suffer a *large* amount of unhappiness in order to avoid searching for another job, which is why I am acutely aware of the inequity when employers change the conditions of a job after the fact. The "forced to accept" element of the changes are pretty high for a large percentage of employees even when jobs are plentiful. Again, a case where philosophy runs counter to the actual human condition.

That said, I have only limited sympathy for those who were hoping that once the plague is over, the epidemic might be an opportunity to rewrite the employment contract (once the pandemic is cleared) that was initially agreed to by both parties. It would be nice if both parties would agree to a change, but my feeling is that in the absence of an agreed upon change, the original conditions should apply.

Just to make it clear, the ongoing epidemic right now is a temporary rewrite of the conditions of employment (in that going to your place of work might kill you, which most of us didn't sign up for), so I feel it incumbent on both parties to try and reach a fair accomodation to this (we hope) temporary fact.

> If the worker is paid less, they should provide less work effort. If a commodity (labor) is worth a certain amount, and you pay less for it, you get less in return.
> That's how capitalism works.

Um no. You are paid what it would cost to replace you.

I go to the store and and buy an item for $10. Then Amazon becomes available, and I can buy an equivalent item from anywhere Amazon sources it for $5. I don't expect the $5 item to be any less efficient than the $10 item. And if it is, I'll stop buying it an purchase another item on Amazon for $5 that is better.

Like those local retailers who charge high prices to help pay for high local rents, and now face competition from the on-line world, we're going to find ourselves in steep competition with every programmer in the country (and once we really get telecommuting working, every programmer in the world).

I fully expect over the next 5-10 years that most businesses will stop offering a premium for living within commuting distance. As we see with people's behavior with Amazon, it's highly unlikely that the benefits of face-to-face will make up for being able to find takers for open positions at half the price.

Telecommuting may be the biggest driver of profits that the tech world will see in the next 10 years.

What is obvious to humans, but perhaps not so much to Libertarians, is that forced-ness is a continuum.

At the top, a super-pedant could claim slaves weren't forced to work, they could choose to be beaten to death.
A little below, you aren't forced to pay taxes, you could always choose to go to jail.
Somewhat lower, you're not forced to work, you could choose to condemn you and your family to a life of penury
Even lower, you aren't forced conform to social standards, you could choose to live in utter social isolation
etc., etc.

Libertarians choose to pretend there is a bright line between something with direct physical consequences, and everything else, when pretty much every other human on the planet understands the reality of forced-ness being a scale. (I'll admit that I find it especially baffling given that economic harm often leads to physical harm, but apparently that doesn't count...)

So when we non-Libertarians use the word force, we use it in a context that reflects both the decision being made and it's consequences. "I was forced to eat Fish and Chips because that's what everyone else wanted" is a perfectly legitimate sentence.

And yes, I know artificial bright lines make for nice elegant philosophies that can fit on a napkin, but if philosophies are actually supposed to influence real-world policy, perhaps the philosophy should actually apply to real-word humans?

There is no way of doing the wide-spread instant testing for anti-bodies that you are referring to here.

I would also try to assess your risks rationally before nay-saying the booster.

At least for me, the calculus rests on a few figures, along with my highly subjective guesses as to what those numbers are:

- Chance of catching Delta while not vaccinated: 50%
- Chance of catching Delta while vaccinated: 10%
- Chance of Delta causing bad cold symptoms while not vaccinated: 50%
- Chance of Delta causing bad cold symptoms while vaccinated: 10%
- Chance of Delta causing hospitalization while not vaccinated: 3.0%
- Chance of Delta causing hospitalization while vaccinated: 0.3%
- Chance of Delta causing death while not vaccinated: 1.0%
- Chance of Delta causing death while vaccinated: 0.1%

Looked at that way, I'll take the discomfort of a shot every 6 months...

You, of course, may have your own guesses as to what the numbers are.

> Evidently some people enjoy being constantly judged on the basis of irrelevant proxies for actual productivity, while others don't.

Except that there are no relevant proxies for work (or at least interesting work). Lines of code? Meeting delivery deadlines which are all mostly WAGs anyway? Answering questions quickly so that everyone else on your team can maintain their flow?

Measuring employees value is incredibly difficult and subjective, and almost always ends up as just a "feeling" that one has about one's staff. (Or we can be "fair" and select a bunch of almost irrelevant measurements.)

It's irrelevant proxies all the way down.

Many of us who trust that out work speaks for itself are not so coincidentally in the fortunate position of fitting the cultural and visual expectations that their boss may have about people in their position (perhaps the most powerful proxy for productivity there is) .Those who are not so fortunate need to find other irrelevant proxies by which to be evaluated, such as hours in the office or emails sent out, etc.

Sneering at others for being aware of this reality shows a blindness to human nature. Indeed, if one happens to conform to the boss' expectation in culture or appearance, I might say blindness to one's privilege.

(I say this as one who liked to think that my work spoke for itself until I finally understood that what *really* gave me credibility in my boss' eyes (over multiple organizations) was that I conducted myself as a geek who could communicate effectively. And why shouldn't they use that irrelevant proxy? They had no means of telling which 5 lines of code were brilliant insight, which 5,000 lines of code were cut and paste, which architecture change was from Stack Overflow and which were innovations that would save man years of effort over the long haul.)

I tried to assuage my friends complaints about how everything is gradually getting worse by pointing out that it's not that things were getting worse, it was simply that as we aged, we were growing increasingly irrelevant as a meaningful economic demographic. It wasn't that they were designing to annoy us, it was that we were no longer mattered at all.

However, instead of calming them down, it seems seem to have made them more agitated. I don't know why I bother trying to reassure people that world isn't out to get them.

Nice try, throwing your billionaire imposter buddy under the bus. You have to be the other imposter.

A question: What value does a particular ISA provide?

Is it mostly compatibility (i.e. the ISA is nothing special, but it's important to be compatible with everyone else)?

Or is there real value is the design of the ARM or x86 ISA that make them valuable outside of simple compatibility?

In other words, if you are designing a chip from scratch, outside of compatibility, is there any reason to use the ARM or x86 ISA?