Books are not the only form of reading.

Russia is a nothing country with Nukes. That is the ONLY thing that gives them any strength. Pakistan might have just as much influence as Russia at this point for the same reason.

If you think Russia propaganda has any influence on 162 Million voters enough to change anything (2024), please keep spewing that opinion.

"It says EU laws -- which have sought to make it easier for smaller firms to compete with big tech -- have resulted in some Apple features and enhancements being delayed for European users"

Restrictions are not features for users, despite many hostages' Stockholm syndromes to the contrary.

"So unless your sport involve ZERO upper and lower body strength, it makes sense to separate sports by sex"

Per your own logic this is based on the importance of strength only. Therefore this assertion only makes sense if it's a sport where dexterity cannot make up for strength.

You don't know what Ad Hominem is.

It is NOT insulting people.

It is where you say an idea is wrong because someone said it. It may also be accompanied by an insult to attempt to support the argument.

When someone says only an idiot would believe something and then explains why, that is not Ad Hominem. It's just an argument with an insult next to it.

Feel free to object to the insult, but don't make shit up.

That's the appealingly-cynical view, but it's not really correct.

Of course keeping payroll down is important if the business is going to remain profitable, but the other piece of the profitability puzzle is productivity, and in this case that's the more important piece. Raises and promotions are limited because if they weren't there would be no financial motivation for good job performance, because why wouldn't you just give raises and promotions to everyone, or at least everyone you like? Creating that motivation is why raises and promotions exist. The best way to keep payroll as small as possible is not to give any raises or promotions. The best employees will leave and you'll be dealing with a continual treadmill of cheap replacements, of which only the worst would stay, and productivity would be in the toilet, but it would minimize payroll.

No, the reason for giving raises and promotions is the same reason that raises and promotions must be limited: to create an incentive for high performance, and to be very specific, an incentive for outperforming other employees.

In Google, and most large companies, peer feedback is the largest part of the evaluation, so helping everyone else is almost certain to generate lots of good feedback... though if you do it so much that you don't get your own work done and that causes problems for your peers, you will get that negative feed back, too.

As to your question about defending their reports... what alternative approach would you suggest? Let the manager just decide without anyone testing those decisions? Not only would that give managers way too much power, it would result in the corporate equivalent of grade inflation. Why wouldn't I just always rate all of my employees outstanding, except those I dislike and want to fire? There needs to be some pushback, to ensure that the standards are applied as fairly and as accurately as possible. Bonus, raise and promotion budgets are all finite, both because money is finite and because there needs to be some scope for rewarding performance.

A common (perhaps near-universal) strategy is to define a curve and require that curve to be applied at the level of a large-ish organization, say, several hundred employees. Among a large population, you'll have all levels of performers, ranging from those who need to improve or be let go to those who exceed all reasonable expectations. Experience shows what the percentages of each typically are, so, you define a "grading" curve and require that the ratings allocated roughly follow that curve, with any exceptions well-justified.

But, inevitably, because managers generally like their reports and want to reward them, you end up with too many people with top ratings, and this is where the manager has to be able to defend the rating they think their report deserves in a meeting with all the other managers who need to defend the ratings they think their reports deserve. So, the group talks through each case one by one, discussing the details of the individuals' work and the contents of their peer feedback, trying to achieve consensus. Ideally, you want to get consensus rather than decide by voting, because voting tends to produce horse trading (I'll vote for yours if you'll vote for mine, etc.). But either way, the group has to produce a set of decisions that align with the expected curve, or (more often), a set of decisions that mostly aligns with the curve plus documented rationale for the borderline cases.

Promotions require a similar process, except instead of a curve there's a promotion budget; only so many promotions are available.

If this all sounds tedious and time-consuming, it absolutely is. But it's necessary to achieve a semblance of fairness and accuracy in the application of the performance rubric for each job level.

I"m sure someone will get in there, however and bitch that this won't help promote EV adoption and keep ICE on the roads and somehow lead to the end of mankind......

Oops....I'm sure they'd term it "human-kind".....

I've had lambic, no clue on whether it was authentic or not, I didn't enjoy it though. But I still don't think it's bad, it's just not for me.

The evidence was deleted :D

It is and always has been insane that all these governments run mostly on Windows.

A lot of them use to use a lot of IBM mainframe stuff behind the scenes, and there's still a fair bit of it around underpinning things, but pretty much all of the new projects are Windows-based.

They've wanted to conquer the whole Arab world since forever, and they are now attacking pieces of it outside of Gaza. They wrote themselves a book that said it was all theirs, and now they're trying to make it come true. The evangelicals are helping them try because they believe it will bring about the end times. As it happens, there's several of the foretold signs around right now, so they naturally think it's working and are doubling down. In the bargain, we have the tools and equipment to make it happen, and long since furnished the technology to Israel to try to make it happen sooner. But they kicked out Netanyahu and things were looking relatively sane for a while (though the Israeli settlers never stopped stealing more land or murdering more Palestinians) and we're all supposed to believe that none of it is their fault. This would be funny if it weren't actually terrifying that people can believe that.

Foreign actors might cause a minor blip likely to go unnoticed to use in the future. Why DMV? Because with the stupid "Real ID" they can inject documents for their actors on the ground. I've seen at cloud providers foreign actors going absolutely ape shit trying to get into the US budget system. When you know where the money goes, you can figure out a lot of things. But you're correct, likely this is someone that is wanting to piss off government or is looking to hold their systems hostage for ransom.

Soon there won't be any Palestinians alive in Gaza.

It won't take him forever to finish his genocide.

Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

Is it even "backing Palestine" to oppose genocide of Palestinians? I can't stand either religion whose followers lay claim to Gaza, but I don't think that disliking someone's religion is sufficient justification for genocide. Israel was founded on the British partition of Palestine by the USA through the UN and it immediately began literal and self-described colonization of as much land as it could get its hands on, whether or not it was included in the lands which were handed to it.

Hamas is terrible, but it was founded in the eighties and in response to Israeli terrorist organizations which were murdering Palestinians, and Netanyahu has repeatedly and publicly told us that he makes sure Hamas receives funding which is sent to it as part of his Gaza strategy — so not only does history not start October 7, but Netanyahu deliberately made sure that something like the October 7 attack would happen, and then proceeded to go from semi-genocidal behavior to fully genocidal behavior. Therefore it's clear that his goal was always genocide. What did the world expect Palestinians to do, roll over?

To me, both Hamas and Israel's terrorist organizations are the enemies of not just all people who even believe in morality, but also the future of humanity because this conflict increases the chance of nuclear war day by day. We are closer to it today than we have ever been because the US-Russia cold war was between two nations with some things to lose. But Hamas was also inevitable and the blame for their successes falls on Netanyahu's willful insurance of their funding. And We The People of these United States of America have in turn enabled both him and Israel to do what they are doing in the region.

On that basis, we've already picked sides, and we've chosen the side of genocide.