Expect that this Hacker News thread will be overrun by Swedish patriots who will, with tooth and nail, argue for Swedish exceptionalism and downvote all criticism. War is Peace and all that.
I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.
I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.
I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.
I've never met a group of people who did not see themselves as special, this view is common in all countries I've lived in. I wonder if someone has tried to measure it objectively.
I am a Swede and I think most of my peers are delusional fans of our institutions and leaders. The leaders tries to cover up everything, and holds no accountability. People are such fans of Anders Tegnell - the man who uses an extreme amount of words to say almost nothing, in addition to almost never admitting to failure or being wrong. They go hand in hand with the politicians on this part.
I seem to remember that he did publicly admit certain policies were poor in retrospect - a bit of googling e.g. finds this, just months after the start of the pandemic: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717
I think you are thinking about this in the wrong way.
Sure Lat/Lon is the common presentation format for this particular coordinate system.
Right now in Sweden the time is 10:41 (it would be great if it was a couple of hours later, then I could say it's 14:41 to demonstrate the 24 hour time format). Yet, in software, I would represent that as time in UTC. Only when presenting to the user would I convert that to the users time zone.
My last name contain the letter "ö". In software, I would use an unicode string internally, then when writing out I would encoded that to utf-8. (20 years ago, I would have used an old character encoding called ISO/IEC 8859-1 or something like that, but you get my point).
For some damn reason I till don't understand, the decimal separator in Sweden is the comma and not the period. Still I would represent numbers internally as an integer or maybe float, and then when printing to to the user would I convert that to "123,4" (123.4) or something like that.
In Sweden, WGS84 is not the only common coordinate system. There are many others: SWEREF and SWEREF TM for example. Yes internally, depending on usecase, I would probably use a representation of WGS84 as reference, then convert that to present to the user...
> For some damn reason I till don't understand, the decimal separator in Sweden is the comma and not the period.
I'm curious to know the history of why (some?) Euro countries went with the common and the Anglo world went with the period. Some details:
> In France, the full stop was already in use in printing to make Roman numerals more readable, so the comma was chosen.[13] Many other countries, such as Italy, also chose to use the comma to mark the decimal units position.[13] It has been made standard by the ISO for international blueprints.[14] However, English-speaking countries took the comma to separate sequences of three digits. In some countries, a raised dot or dash (upper comma) may be used for grouping or decimal separator; this is particularly common in handwriting.
(Fellow Swede here). I really want to agree with you, but in practice, the difference between "internal" and "external" is not always clear. For example, if I was producing a printed document in Swedish, I would definitely use decimal commas. (By the way, the time now is not 10:54 — it's 10.54, if you are to believe "Svenska Skrivregler" :-) ) However, when printing output in a terminal window, a comma means that I can't copy-paste that number into that interactive Python session in another window. Coordinates as lat, lon means I can't copy-paste into PostGIS. Makes one long for those LISP systems of the legends, where the system kept track of where things on screen came from, so if the program printed a coordinate and you copied it from the terminal, it was copied as a coordinate, not as text...
So this is sorta above my pay grade but I think this is a tangential issue.
Even if you are reading exotic data in some parochial format you internally probably wanna use one consistent format. If you have some massive data sets and don't wanna convert on read-in then there are way around that (you can setup a memoization system to convert and cache on as-needed basis). This format should be intuitive and convenient. I proposed a South/East format.. but you're free to choose whatever you want here. But the point is that Lon/Lat is likely never a good choice at this junction. It still has issues and you generally can do better.
At the interface the default we've arrived to as a society Lat/Lon WGS84 :) The merits here are irrelevant. If you want to support other i/o formats then you may. That really depends on your usecases - but they shouldn't map to whatever format you've decided on internally. And even if they did, you probably shouldn't be using Lon/Lat internally anyway
What you use internally really depends on the application requirements. Different projections have different properties. Depending on the area you need to cover and the questions you need to answer you may need to use multiple projections and to match performance requirements you may need to store all of these projections so you don't always need to convert on the fly
> In software, I would use an unicode string internally, then when writing out I would encoded that to utf-8.
I don't understand what distinction you're drawing here? UTF-8 is Unicode. In what way would you be modifying it at the presentation layer? (Unless you're dealing with true UI code, and are saying "I would map the characters to font glyphs according to the UTF-8 standard".)
I know UTF-8 isn't the only way of encoding Unicode codepoints, for what it's worth. I'm just struggling to see how you would be using just 'Unicode', as opposed to a particular encoding, at the storage layer. It's still just bits and bytes.
I think it would be more accurate to say that UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format which by its name is logically distinct from Unicode itself. There are good reasons to store and process Unicode in UTF-8 format internally in many cases, but UTF-32 / UCS-4 would probably take over for internal processing if it weren't for memory usage and efficiency issues.
I have a hard time following this article because it's so obviously one-sided and ranting.
FWIW the Stockholm Metro is also privatized in the sense that operation, planning and maintenance is done by MTR Corporation, the same company that owns and operates the Hong Kong Metro. MTR also operate a lot of other subway systems in the world, for example Sydney. I don't see any problems inherit in the privatization: Stockholm is excellent and so is Hong Kong.
Tokkaido Line in Japan runs at 187 percent capacity according to a quick googling.
The rest of Seoul's transportation infrastructure is so well managed and universally liked that the problems with Line 9, taken in that context, make it look hysterically bad. I have to say that the labour issues sound awful, but as someone from the UK, the profiteering and overcrowding issues sound quaint and almost laughable. There's no doubt that this ownership structure was setup as a grift for juicing citizens. But from the perspective of a user, I would describe line9 as "more overcrowded at rush hour than the other lines" but on the flipside, the rolling stock and stations are newer and nicer...
The proposed price hikes were a scandal at the time and public outrage was tangible. But the relevant context here is that the Mayor of Seoul is second only to the president, and usually it is someone with aspirations to run for president. There's things a Seoul Mayor a cannot do if he likes votes, and one of those is piss off everyone who uses the metro (which is everyone).
I think with privatisation, it just depends on the specifics. If the system can be privatised without bilking the ridership, compromising safety, or abusing the employees then, by all means, have at it. But if you're writing from the US, or the UK, especially if you work within the transportation system, it's understandable that you would get ranty when you consider how badly privatisation has fucked things up there.
I was so confused of the flow of writing and one sentence made me understand what just happened.
"I grew up in Seoul in the 1990s before coming to the United States, so I missed all of Line 9’s construction and operations."
The media in South Korea have criticized any privatization of public service for so long time. Trust me I have lived in this country more than 25 years. Even though author asserted that "I will list all sourcing as best as I can, all from media outlets in South Korea (of both left and right political leanings) I have vetted and determined as legitimate."
Yes, the sources of articles are from both left and right leaning but the thesis of this post is villifing semi-privatization of Line 9.
To me, the cause of Line 9 chaos is not from privatization but from the intervention of political campaign in this problem. Conservatively expected passenger numbers can go wrong, but they must not make mistakes on back-up plans, and they just did make mistakes on purpose for the sake of winning election.
so the guy never rode line9 and is writing this article... hmm-teresting...
And the article mentions "it's not economically feasible to add more cabinets due to the extra construction work required..."
...but the line9 stations are actually built to accommodate 8 cabinets (instead of current 6), and there are even screen-doors ready for those cabinets...
> I have a hard time following this article because it's so obviously one-sided and ranting.
Same. The author also discloses his own biases against privatization.
Given the other reports here of well-operating metros run by MTR, could it be that this one failed because of french technology and involvement? (side questions: are these other MTR metros also join ventures with french companies?)
I read on his blog that 2 french companies were involved: Veolia and RATP. During a short 2 weeks visit to Paris in 2019, I was shocked how bad the metro was, even when compared to NYC which has a similar aging infrastructure
I was not expecting something as shiny and comfortable as in DC, but the seats were minuscule, the stench overpowering at times, and the general decay made me feel queasy about health risks (even pre COVID!). I then learned what RATP means for Parisians: "Retre Avec Tes Pieds" ("Walk Home")!
I also note a pictures captioned as "Line 9 employees on strike in 2017, holding the sign “Hold the French corporations responsible!”" so given my personal experiences and the employees signs, I'd first suspect french incompetence over "privatization can't work".
The Stockholm metro is run by MTR, but they don't own it.
They're only staffing the trains and platforms, not to different from e.g. a police station paying a sub-contractor to sweep their floors and manage the reception desk. The police station is still mostly a government run thing.
For example, MTR doesn't invest any money in new lines/tunnels, or buy/maintain the trains.
I don't think it's fair to compare it to this Korean line, it's not apples to apples.
Yes MTR here in Hong Kong is quite respectable: the subway works well, the price is cheap, the company redevelop a lot around stations, it's a model of proper corporate management of public infrastructure.
The only snag they faced in my 7 years here is when they were caught in the crossfire during the protest: at first they would help evactuate protestors during police intervention but then the police asked them instead to help them capture them which led to widespread destruction by protestors.
My own anti protest stance is mostly due to the wanton destruction of MTR properties which I found distracted from the original issue by the angelic democrats turned subway destructors.
MTR Corporation is 75% owned by the Hong Kong government and receives subsidies in the form of land leases granted below market value and a monopoly on rail infrastructure. I really appreciate the MTR, and am also a part of the 25%, but it's not really a truly private company.
> MTR Corporation Limited is a majority government-owned public transport operator and property developer in Hong Kong...
> Owner: Hong Kong Government 75.09%, Others 24.91%
As far as by privatization goes, I don’t much care for it with busses. But I’m having trouble seeing the issue here with the train, other than the financials which seem favorable to the corporation.
Here in Nassau Co, NY there was a lot of discussion that Viola was interested to take over running the bus business, because it would give them a toe-hold in the county and chance to get contracts for a sewer project, which the parent company was also into. I don’t know if it’s gone the way they wanted, but you can get the play.
* Combine this with the sudden appearance of subreddit "Antiwork".
Are people depressed or anxious because of covid, or what's wrong?
Trying to be a better person every day, in combination with the wonder of creativity and building, is what made the internet interesting in the early days. Who are these people who are turning communities into sad opposites of these values?
I think people are just burnt out and maybe lockdowns/covid has made them realise this more as they are unable to do the things that used to put some much time into.
Life cannot and should not be just about doing work, being productive, attaining goals, being useful etc. I think the problem is with a standard job and a normal adult life, we have little time for anything else and life just seems like an endless stream of things we need to do in order to be worthwhile or to reach any level of competency.
Like with most things though, there is a balance. It's good to work on yourself, make improvements, obtain goals etc, it's not so good if your entire life just becomes this and balance is exceptionally hard with the lack of time and energy that exists compared to what is required to do all of this.
What's wrong is wealth inequality. It all rolls downhill from that. Minimum wage is not enough to make ends meet and rent + food is through the roof. That's what is wrong. Imagine being scheduled to work 39 hours on purpose to avoid being full-time and getting benefits. That's just one problem in a laundry list of problems.
An entire generation was sold a dream and now people are waking up.
Used to be scheduled 38 hours a week as a part timer but at least I sometimes got overtime pay for special occasions. I'm not sure if an entire generation was sold a dream, a lot didn't dream to begin with. As someone at the edge of being of being a millennial nearly gen z. I think a lot of folks never expected anything good per say, but perhaps many starting poorer made us have much worse mental health to begin with. I'm in a good spot now and worked into STEM with little education but I know many who will likely never get better. There is a lot of problems with the workforce that lower end people have so little power over. Requiring more of companies is a good place to start.
The problem you describe is poverty, not wealth inequality. While they are correlated, they are not the same. Some countries have less poverty and more inequality than others.
Lowering "effective" wealth inequality might help, and probably happens to some degree. Distract the rich and suck their money into pissing contests over status goods whose commerce does not infringe on the supply/demand of goods for people down the ladder. The problem comes when that wealth sets its eyes on acquiring or monopolizing assets and pushing up prices of real estate and rents, for example.
I grew up feeling it should be a sin to waste money on fancy cars or fancy vacations. I now think we need more abstract art, NFTs, and something real compelling and scarce in the metaverse to absorb all that money.
Just some ill-formed thoughts with plenty of holes.
For me it's the sense that the world is rapidly heading out of control, with big companies and governments everywhere performing a mass stitch-up, and if you haven't already made it you're probably not going to. And they're driven by greed alone, and those trying to build a better world are losing. And it's got a lot worse since covid started.
That subreddit has existed for years though? Accepting your life for what it is goes back millennia in some religions, so that is not a new trend either. Greek and Roman philosophy is absolutely filled with people stating that striving for political or monetary gain is a fools' errand, so that is not something new either.
Perhaps this is merely a case of the Baader Meinhoff phenomenon and you suddenly notice it more than earlier?
According to https://subredditstats.com/r/antiwork the subreddit was almost empty 2 years ago, and the subscriber count only started going in the past few months.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know that these last two years have been rough for me. It's not something I feel every day, but when I pause and look back, I see that I'm in a worse shape than two years ago. I still derive most of my pleasure from helping people close to me, this hasn't changed. But I have a hard time finding pride, pleasure or something like that in my day to day work. Maybe it's the disconnect between me and the users (I work for a relatively large SAAS company), maybe it's me losing empathy for strangers due to isolation, I don't know.
This is also selection bias. Yesterday there was immense thread about quitting jobs- the majority of people were leaving for other jobs, not to retire.
I never felt that the Internet in the 90's was about turning yourself into a meat robot. Tech businesses want that from their staff and had been slowly working toward it, but the last 2 years feel like that slow creep was accelerated and a lot of people have had enough.
For a long time we watched businesses get leaner, trying to use frameworks and automation so that the same staff could manage 2x, 5x 10x, 100x the amount of resources. The pandemic saw hiring freezes, wage freezes, from which businesses are still recovering. Market analysis is showing that most non-hospitality sectors have recovered though, which infers that folks are really under the gun to deliver more than ever before.
"Trying to be a better person every day, in combination with the wonder of creativity and building, is what made the internet interesting in the early days. Who are these people who are turning communities into sad opposites of these values?"
I'd challenge the assertion that productivity hacking and the self-improvement hustle are what made the internet interesting in the early days. Creativity and exploration, absolutely!
If your flow is converting your time into productivity for a company, for no increase in shared compensation for the result of that productivity, then that's tots cool for you.
I think many are tired of it and you're seeing them say "no."
I noticed that too, and my initial reaction was similar to yours.
But then I realized there's nothing wrong with "Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life". The paradox is that letting go of the fantasies we have of ourselves can actually help us move closer to a better version of who we'd like to be.
For example, today I woke up and thought "I should just accept the fact the I'll likely waste many hours on YouTube, Twitter, podcasts, etc." The funny thing, it already put me at ease that if the day ends up being like this, it won't totally surprise me, and perhaps I won't judge myself too harshly for it.
Which in turn could change the direction of my day, now that I feel a bit more relaxed and less uptight.
Although I don't agree with the article, I can understand how someone could start hating work and the urge to be always productive. Our economy promotes competitiveness, which of course creates progress and brought us where we are now, but I think covid worked as catalyst for all the pressure the workers were feeling because of this. And when you are so distressed by the system it's way easier to believe that you don't have to work as hard to be happy instead of starting to push harder
There seems to definitely be some astroturfing going on with respect to anti-work, pro-union sentiment, and I agree it seems to have found Hackernews recently, from my perspective it looks like a sudden influx.
That said, I agree with at least the headline in your second point - making any kind of positive change requires accepting the current state of affairs as it is first. I've found that the phases in my life where I feel content and not constantly needing to 'change' were actually those times where I was able to most consolidate the gains I was struggling towards the rest of the time. I think it might have something to do with not being in crisis management mode that allows the mind to relax into new configurations. Of course, YMMV.
From the guidelines: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Thanks..but don't just "word it differently"—don't word it at all. Instead, if you believe some comments are astroturfing, please write to HN with the specific details, as (hopefully) no-one here wants that, but only the mod(s) can and will do something about it.
Maybe people forgot, but we live in the age of the internet, where it only takes a small group of enterprising individuals to astroturf. No elite involvement required.
> Astroturf? Which powerful interest in the world right now wants people to work less?
The CCP. Xi Jinping absolutely stands to benefit domestically from discord being sown in the West, especially if it's of a Marxist nature and broadly in agreement with the doctrine of Common Prosperity.
(Not actually accusing anyone of anything - there's no way their propaganda department could be this competent - just answering the question directly).
Of course, you could claim both nations’ intelligence services are engaged in a game of rival psyops, but stories like this would seem to indicate there’s worker discontent that crosses borders.
>stories like this would seem to indicate there’s worker discontent that crosses borders
100%, man.
My point wasn't that "China's probably doing this"; just that there are other powerful interests outside of corporate lobbyists that have very different goals.
I can't see a mix of obscene inflation (mainly in rent/real estate prices), a culture of conspicuous consumption and a WW1-style class divide where competent working class people are bossed around by the reject offspring of the upper 20% leading to anything more than mass discontent.
Anti-work and pro-union are orthogonal, and there has been restive pro-union sentiment on this forum for years. It has not really increased during this time, even though the present moment (a local maxima of labor demand) would be a prime time to start organizing.
You should also read "Bullshit Jobs" book. The very purposelessness of this system and the exploitation killed every ounce of creativity from many individuals.
Antiwork is not fueled by lazy people - there's nothing wrong with that subreddit or this movement in general.
Life just got dull and boring and the routine of being a purposeful pushed people to their limits because at the same time, they see a pandemic and the planet's destruction via climate change.
And we support to support this?
Trying to be a better person every day, wonder of creativity and building got destroyed by modern capitalism.
On one hand I’m happy people are wising up about how they shouldn’t take all this crap from workplaces and bad managers. You deserve to be respected and compensated for your work and not abused. All of that is great. I just hope it spurs movement to better us all not just bitching and being shitty just because screw work.
One way to help these people is to assume the best intentions and provide support for them, even if it's just verbal or emotional support.
There are definitely always going to be the "fuck all work give me free stuff" folks, but I think it's important not to let their presence detract from the overall movement. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and all that.
You don't have to work for someone else, but you do need to work. It is how humans function, how they gain fulfillment and happiness. Especially with respect to completion. That's why the virtuous side of video games can dig someone out of depression. Setting a goal, working at it, meeting it, and pursuing the next one is the antithesis of depression. The negative side of games comes from the addiction cycles built into many of them... but I digress. It would be better to set goals in real life, work to meet them, then set the next goal. You have tangible results: a clean room, a meal cooked, a fence mended, a yard mowed, a chair built, a sale made, a customer served, and yes, payment earned.
The "movement" may intend to be about "meaning" and "exploitation," but the likelihood it turns into being about transfer payments and forcing people who do work to support the leisure of those who have decided they have a "right" not to is fairly high. I say this because it's happened before.
Everyone works for someone else. You can work purely for yourself, but if you don’t have a customer you will starve.
Even a solo company works for other people - it’s just that they can fire bad customers and it doesn’t take away their entire income. This is a much different power dynamic than an employer employee, but you’re still working for someone else (customers or investors) or you’re not bringing in money.
I would offer the explanation that it's the calendar. It's January. New year's rejuvenation could be taking hold of more of us than it normally does in other months.
I think it's the end of the business (or hype) cycle around web 2.0 + COVID making one rethink the value proposition of trading time for money (work). Which is why you have the web 3.0 business (or hype) cycle + metaverse + whatever trying to get pushed to motivate engineers again. Once in a lifetime opportunity on the horizon don't miss it! Or even better, you can create it yourself!
I don't think so, but I could be wrong. Japanese-style Niito (NEET), Chinese Tang ping (lying flat) and now the Antiwork movement in the West. They all have a similar sentiment, that the promise of a better life through hard work is a lie. I think the pandemic just accelerated what was already underway.
As soon as many of us went to remote work, suddenly there's this rise of making the "perfect" home office.
Why? why do I need to buy more stuff, take on the extra work of making my home office LOOK like a pristine zen room? Do I need all the LED lights that streamers use?
I thought the whole point of working from home was the flexibility to do work when and where was best for me. Sometimes I find myself after hours in my basement thinking, why don't I just go sit outside and enjoy the sun? I have entires days when I basically go from the upstairs to the downstairs and then back up at the end of the day. No different from going to the office, only the office was my basement.
> Hacker News submission "Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life"
> Trying to be a better person every day, in combination with the wonder of creativity and building, is what made the internet interesting in the early days.
These two ideas seem inline with each other?
Antiwork on reddit seems like slacktivism and whining about work on the internet, wouldn't give it much attention. People have been hating work forever. reddit is good at making vocal mintorites seem louder then they really are. those posts are getting 10s of thousands of upvotes, small in the grand scheme of things.
That subreddit is more about not slaving away your time working 2-3 jobs to barely get by. It's people waking up to the fact that they are always busy and always behind and to the idea that working hard doesn't always equate to doing well in life.
Imo part of it could be the proliferation of easy money. When you see people making millions and retiring off doing nothing in crypto (buying pictures of apes) its hard to be motivated to do things. It all becomes bullshit
And within tech circles, crypto is just a parodic extreme continuation of what we've been seeing for the past fifteen years ago- dumb money being thrown around at wild ideas by investors looking for crazy returns.
A person can be "Antiwork" and still actively engage in the wonder of creativity and building. Most of the antiwork sentiment that I have seen online is drawing attention to very poor and often illegal management practices.
Labour is doing productive things, work is employment. Antiwork and other related things like "the abolition of work" by Bob Black are against wage labour and capitalist exploitation moreso than the need to do things to keep the world turning.
Do they offer any alternative? I'm all for payment shifting from 'buts in seats' to 'paid for productivity' if there's proper allowance for taking time for quality, but somehow that doesn't seem the kind of direction people are thinking in.
Most anarchists don't recognise anarchocapitalism as a legitimate form of anarchism because anarchism is against coercive hierarchy and capitalism is inherently coercive. Plus a real life ancapistan would inevitably devolve into feudalism.
Also a lot of them are Hoppeans and that just makes them authoritarians.
Hopefully capitalism will one day automate everything to the point no labor is necessary and society will evolve into post scarcity rather than communism.
"Company X got state aid and paid Y in bonuses" seems to be one of those cookie cutter news reports that pop up several times per day the past year. The titles seem to imply that state aid directly went to a few senior executives. Outrage, right?
But why not look past the knee jerk reaction?
1) In most cases I'm aware of, after digging deeper, you find out that the state aid is not for the company - it's for the employees. Running a business is no charity and if you have employees that are superfluous due to current market situation you lay them off unless the cost of retraining future employees is higher than paying operating expenses to have employees around that are not working as much as they used to. State aid can affect the decision by offloading expenses to the state, for employment safety.
2) Bonus payouts may be for last year performance and not related to either covid or the state aid at all. Just because you have two large numbers within the same order of magnitude doesn't mean they are related. Bonuses may have been paid of regardless of state aid.
I think what's really crazy here is that Booking.com would rather lose €65M than not pay executives €28M in bonuses (for a total loss to corporate coffers of... €93M?).
Sure, state aid is "for the employees", but in most of these cases: The company obviously could've paid them anyways, since they had this much spare compensation for their rich executives, and that the company continued to benefit from the labor of employees that the government was paying the salaries for.
The government, and by proxy, the taxpayers, end up doubly screwed over, while the corporation gets to continue to enrich itself, and enrich its executives, who are already wealthy.
Rather than give corporations huge blank checks, governments should've sent that money directly to individuals, and allowed corporations to fail or not as per usual. Most of these companies would still exist anyways, since they have plenty of money.
I can't speak for this situation in Europe, but with the US PPP loans, companies basically had 2 months of their payroll paid for. This also means that got 2 months of free labor.
With the no payroll costs, where does that "extra" payroll money that would/should of gone to payroll go? Investors? Executives?
You're correct that the state aid was intended for employees, yet it was given to booking.com and not on the people's personal bank accounts. They were more or less free to do with that as they saw fit; the only condition was that they couldn't fire people for 3 months (did did fire ~25% of the work force after those 3 months).
In this case, they changed their own rules regarding bonuses on account of being an exceptional situation and that, apparently, these bonuses were desperately needed. How many of those 25% of people could they have retained if they didn't pay millions in "desperately needed" bonuses (not all were in shares btw)?
The original reporting[1] was fairly detailed with specifics, subsequent reporting left out some that; you know how these things go... There is some nuance here, but it's still leaving a really bad taste in my mouth.
But to be fair, I find it hard to blame just booking.com for this because it's the entire culture that's just rotten IMHO. It's all "free market" this and "no government interference" that but then also "plz government help us" when things go belly-up. When people point out the hypocrisy it's "for the employees, not the company!" True, but misses the larger picture IMO. "Running a business is no charity", well apparently it is because the tax payer will happily get you out of trouble with the "but think of the employees!" emotional blackmail argument only to have them turn around with "free market!!!" a few months later while swimming in their obscene and unnecessary stacks of money.
And to be clear, I'm actually quite in favour of the free market and capitalism (moderated to some degree), but this doesn't strike me as either.
Paying execs huge bonuses (whether in cash, gold, shares or whatever), while taking huge sums in state aid and laying off thousands of employees is morally despicable behaviour at best.
It does matter what they got paid in. If they got paid in anything other than shares, I would agree. But the point of shares is that it aligns the economic incentives for the executives and the company. Shares are directly dependent on the economic success of the company. And the ability to employ people and pay them salaries is also directly dependent on the economic success of the company.
If they sell shares and pay employees, then they're not helping the long-term sustainability of the company and its ability to continue hiring people and paying them.
It matters what they got paid in. If they got paid in anything other than shares, I would agree. But the point of shares is that it aligns the economic incentives for the executives and the company. Shares are directly dependent on the economic success of the company. And the ability to employ people and pay them salaries is also directly dependent on the economic success of the company.
If they sell shares and pay employees, then they're not helping the long-term sustainability of the company and its ability to continue hiring people and paying them.
Privately or as a business? If privately, I'm very curious what kind of things you order.
Even if I'd replace all my store visits (grocery store, hardware store, electronics store are the main ones) with online orders, I'd probably still not oder more than once every five days (or maybe once every 10 days during covid, now that I go to the grocery store less often).
Or are you talking individual items, like you buy groceries from Amazon and every item is a separate order because they all ship from different sellers?
90% private, 10% business. Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape. Food only for shelf-stable stuff since I live next to a grocery store.
> Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape.
I think this explains it. Cheapest ducktape on Amazon is like $3.48 with free shipping for Prime users. Ordering one such tape every other day only costs $52.20. At some point you stop caring how much externalities it might be causing by clicking "Order Now" in Tuesday 3:40 AM just for a single M4x20 screw you forgot to add earlier in the day.
You are being downvoted, but this is not as off-topic as it may seem.
Simone Weil had a brother, André Weil. You may not know his name on the top of your head, but I guarantee you that you've heard of the pseuodonym he created together with some other mathematicians: Nicolas Bourbaki.
I'm sure Weil and/or Bourbaki has lots to say about these topics.
I wonder what the unintended consequences are with this measure. Here are some:
1) I can imagine weird situations where a multi-leg flight could be broken up by this ban, especially if you are traveling from the middle of nowhere (connected to a smaller airport in France) and you are flying to another middle of nowhere place (connected by _another_ smaller airport in France). Instead of having one flight, you now have two flights with a train trip in the middle, which can of course be inconvenient in case the first flight is delayed and so on.
2) Say I live in one of the larger French cities, but not Paris. I want to travel to northern Japan, for example. Previously I could go to my local airport and transfer in Paris CDG. However now there are two other options viable for me because I can no longer fly to Paris: I can either take the train to Paris (Charles de Gaulle), hauling my checked luggage on the train and possible taxis (skis, travel gear, lots of duffels)... Or I can just go to my local airport, dump the luggage on that airport, and transfer in Frankfurt.
The key point of the article hinges on one particular statement: "These gender differences cannot be explained away by gender differences in qualifications or a lack of qualifications,"
How the heck is Facebook supposed to know about someones qualifications?
Facebook _obviously_ have a set of standard data points they use for ad targeting, such as location, gender, age-span and so on together with dynamically updated data who have interacted with the ad.
Just because the outcome is not what the journalist want doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong or discriminatory.
Sure, it could of course be that Facebook algorithm is explicitly discriminatory, but it's more likely an algorithm such as this one is actually fairly neutral (compared with pre-trained data that can have built-in bias, for example photographs of people with mostly white skin - ad targeting is probably keyword based, and should be trained on actual data from what actual people click on).
Is it discriminatory? I don't think so. Is it "filter-bubble-reinforcing"? Yes, that's more likely. As more men initially click an ad, it will be shown to more men. And vice versa.
I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.
I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.
I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.