I don't mind having a phone call, it's the multiple layers of screening interviews with ill prepared questions that feels like a giant waste of time. I'd rather answer all those questions in an email and have the phone call as a formality. I do recognize the need to confirm that the person writing is indeed the person you are speaking to but I should at least be able to get a straight answer on salary and comp before I pick up the phone.
This. I don't mind having a phone call, but I do mind wasting time on it by repeating everything that they could have learned about me before the call and running into sanity checks (e.g. salary expectations) that they could have done beforehand. At that point, it's just laziness by the recruiter and comes off as an attempt to pressure me it doing something they couldn't justify rationally.
> I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time.
Or "I read the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
> Screens are excellent for keeping children occupied, keeping them happy in healthier ways requires a lot of energy.
It could also be that the parent wants to be on their screen at the same time, or wants to be on Instagram later into the night. There will be some correlation with work, but I doubt that explains most of it.
> Of course he's not allowed most of the time, but the pressure is always on.
Definitely. We have similar, although have never given the kids portable screen devices (well, they had a tablet in the house and it was still too much, so we took it away). There are our phones, which they can rarely use and only for specific tasks like "play music on the speaker" or "do fantasy football", and there's a game console with a PIN, and there's a TV with a PIN. So everything requires us to do something, and uninstall games is on the table as a severe consequence. The only autonomous device is a Yoto, which is a card-based story playing device.
It's not perfect, but they definitely want screens less than they used to.
There is definitely the trend of "allow more, they whine about it more".
At some point they're very absorbed indeed. Being stricter is harder at first but certainly becomes easier than them feeling they always have the option to maybe get screen-time (when it's maybe they strongly feel that whining may win them something, of course that has been the struggle of raining kids since forever), imho.
> At a certain point you have to start jailing people for long periods of time. I don't mean the Milken, Belfort, or Skilling treatment. I mean being placed away for 30+ years in medium-security facilities at the least.
Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, if that counts. But then he had committed a crime, which is the usual "certain point" we wait for.
> Board operates behest of stock owners, executives operate behest of board
These are often both weak signals, though. They'll govern very high level decisions, but all the day to day is inside the company. Just as I want a return on the money in my bank account (as I was promised) investors want a return on their money too, and as you say, the executives and board should care about making sure the people who put money into the company are getting a decent deal out of the arrangement.
Yes, because when you sell it, you get cash and profit. Profit is taxable, in Germany they tax it with 25% + Solidarity Tax + Church Tax (if you are a member of a church).
After, you can go ahead and buy another fund, but in between you "shed" a significant amount of money.
I don't find this reassuring, because Elon's playbook is to force the public to purchase anything of his which doesn't do well on its own. Maybe a nice $1.776 trillion dollar tax funded investment into "unwoke" AI. :D
Yeah, his current playbook is to get the public to fund his Nazi propaganda machine of X + Grok. Letting a billionaire tie that heinous stuff to critical space infrastructure and use 401k money from all Americans to fund it is a criminal indictment of our entire system!
Well, apparently Anthropic became "profitable" last month, because of some 1-time deal with xAI.
I wouldn't bet on either Anthropic or OpenAI being profitable, we'll find out soon enough what this house of cards has inside, as they both want to IPO.
Though with the current US administration, as proven by the SpaceX IPO, laws are mere recommendations.
> That’s $15 billion a year in compute costs, but reduced to an indeterminately-discounted level for the precise months that Anthropic is using to tell investors and the media that it has an operating profit. That operating profit is a result of accountancy rather than any improvements to its business model.
> While I wouldn’t say this is cooking the books, it’s definitely a shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers. Anthropic has deliberately leaked a quarterly “profit” where it knows it can suppress its costs
Is it a loaded question? If you ask and I reply with a curt "no" and you vanish back into the ether without replying, what does that gain both of us as well as anyone that reads these comments later?
To your point, I'm both not a lawyer and based on what I've read/seen, no, they aren't breaking any laws. But what they're doing is overall very shady.
Fairly sure most of what banks did during the 2008 GFC wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal. Robbing banks in Minnesota wasn't illegal in Illinois, either, until we made it illegal. Allowing the Titanic to leave with life-rafts for only 50% of its maximum capacity wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal.
If it were quartz it would be needing to justify why it costs more than $10. The Swiss government doesn't do anything to get people to buy Swiss watches. They're good status symbols, so rich people buy them.
This is not a choice and it's not about labour, as usual. It's about the product, as usual. Instead of buying any quartz watch that keeps basically perfect time, people pay thousands of times more for a watch that's worse at timekeeping as a status symbol, or because they appreciate watches as art or as constructions. You would have needed your analogy to say why these same reasons would apply to hand-made software.
The correct argument is, again, about product and not labour. Hand-made software still is a better product, and so it's worth paying for.
But why? If they need to convince someone you're a good hire, they will want to talk to you.
reply