Prosecutors will argue exactly your point, that no innocent person would take a plea deal or confess to a crime they didn't do. But lots of research is demonstrating the opposite. Keep in mind that once police and prosecutors believe you probably are the one who committed the crime, they will usually stop investigating any alternate theories or people, and only focus on building their case against you - and sometimes, even withhold exonerating evidence. So if you do choose a trial, everything that is presented will be pointing at you and you alone, you can try to raise an alternate theory but nobody in authority will back you up. It's a very difficult spot to be in.
No doubt it's difficult, and in countries like Russia it's downright impossible to defend your innocence successfully under such circumstances. But I think if you ever find yourself in such a situation, you have no choice but to stand on the truth, on principle. It's better to go down fighting than to submit. And in game theory terms, there is at least a potential upside to fighting the charge, even if the potential downside is worse. There is no further upside to pleading guilty to something you didn't do.
I'll tell you this... the judge could tell the jury to ignore it, or declare a mistrial, but if someone had offered me a plea bargain for something I was innocent of, I would tell the jury that I'd refused it. Whether that was stricken from the record or not, at that point you're a political prisoner and you've done all you honestly can.
The point of the plea deal is that you aren't pleading to "the exact same crime." For example maybe you're charged with 2nd degree murder, with extenuating circumstances of using a firearm, and that's what you'll be on trial for, facing 50 years. Unless you plead to involuntary manslaughter, with a 7 year max but the prosecutor will recommend 4 because you cooperated. Just an example, I'm making up the numbers. The whole thing is very slimy and coercive, not defending the system, I'm simply explaining why your argument is flawed.
Sure, but just asking you is different than lying to you, such as claiming the radar gun clocked you at 98, subject to something like reckless driving, when it was actually only 82, a speeding ticket.
Designers can be the bane of usability. Small text is an example. There's a strong conflict between "design for usability" and "design for looks". Function versus form.
And I'd bet that after you left, your system was ignored or fell apart while those "chaotic" employees with their spreadsheets just kept chugging along fine.
a) because you yourself wrote "sometimes we just failed" and "I don't think it's fixable", and
b) because in many years of corporate experience, the vast majority of systems built with the intention of replacing Excel processes fail to achieve that goal.
It is true that knowledge workers are often disorganized and messy - in large part, because actual business is also messy and changes very quickly. When you start with the attitude of "unfucking" and "sheer amount of crap", it's obvious that you actually aren't respectful and aware of the actual day-to-day demands of business, their bosses, presentation requirements, messy input sources, etc. Pure, testable code may be more elegant but it simply is not as flexible and UI-friendly as Excel, which is a large part of why these types of projects fail at such a high rate.
I am not respectful of excel at all, true. I could see your perspective, if it wasn’t a client who comes by itself(!) begging to do something with their spreadsheets cause key roles spend all day maintaining these, blocking further growth or mergers. Maybe I should not have called it crap out if respect to a client, but that’s what it was from the design pov, no reason to spare a word. I didn’t like it cause no one likes to dig in such sort of legacy. You treat the failure rate as an excel good indicator, well that may seem true until you get yet another call for help. It’s a failure rate of excel. I agree that we should have just bailed out by default and left them to sales sharks. At some point that’s what I did basically, said no to yet another “project”, cause these were crappy low hanging fruits that no one else wanted to deal with, not interesting jobs. Idk how it all assembles into “excel good” in some minds. As if companies just called integrators out of boredom because everything they’ve built in excel works.
You're saying Excel failed, when the work was mostly getting done, if inefficiently.
You showed up, unburdened by Excel, and soon quit ("bailed out" -- your words) because the projects were "crappy", "not interesting", "no one wanted to deal with". Yea, boring, crappy projects are a big, but essential part of business!
Lets be clear, YOU failed. Processes built upon Excel are often messy and inefficient, that's well-established, but just like in this example, attempting to replicate the processes without using Excel often implodes entirely.
My success rate was around 2/3. That after I finished they returned to excel is your unfounded assumption (also demonstratively ignorant of what it takes).
Anyway, if you advise your clients to build on excel, I wish them luck, and wish you, when they fail to grow or simply sustain, to be successful in explaining them that it’s alright and integrators bad and they must just continue. Cause clearly this strategy works for you somehow. Make it work for them with the same energy as here and it’s done.
I'd suggest the quality of McDonald's ingredients is superior than the vast majority of restaurants that rely on Sysco or US Foods. Just my opinion, I know it's not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up about McDonald's.
aww man dont tell people about sysco. Once you learn to spot unmodified sysco foods it's impossible to stop and the illusion of sitdown restaurants is tarnished forever.
One option might be to visit your local Jetro or Restaurant Depot, if you live in the US. If Sysco has showrooms/open warehouses I’m not aware of them, but Jetro and RD are of a very similar ilk.
Sure you can have french fries made from the best fat and potatoes but it doesn't change the fact that you're eating a burger with french fries instead of a steak with baked potatoes.
I don't think Uber's estimated time-to-arrival is a statistic on which a database vendor, or development team, should brag about. It's horribly imprecise.
Also isn't something that a (geo)sharded postgres DB with the appropriate indexes couldn't handle with aplomb. Number of orders to a given restaurant can't be more than a dozen a minute or so.
Especially as restaurants have a limit on their capacity to prepare food. You can't just spin up another instance of a staffed kitchen. Do these mobile-food-ordering apps include any kind of backdown on order acceptance e.g. "Joe's Diner is too busy right now, do you want to wait or try someplace else?"
The reason this happens is because Uber Eats and DoorDash and others have/had this concept where you’d “tip” for the delivery. Which is actually not a tip, but just a shitty way of disguising delivery fees and putting customers against the people that deliver the food. But that in turn has its background in how the restaurant business treats their workers in the USA, which has been wacky even long before these food delivery apps became a thing.
Anyway, regardless of your opinion on “tipping” and these practices the point was to say that there are additional complications with how much time it will take for your order to arrive aside from just the time it takes to prepare the food and the time it takes to travel from the restaurant to your door, even when the food has been prepared and a delivery driver is right there at the restaurant. If the “tip” is too low, or zero, your order could be left sitting on the shelf with nobody willing to pick it up. At least a few years ago it was like that.
All you need for this is a dictionary of zip codes and a rating -- normal, high, very high. Given that ZIPs are 5 digits, that's 100,000 records max, just keep it in memory, you don't even need entries for the "normal" ZIPs. Even if you went street-level, I doubt you'd catalog more than a few hundred thousand streets whose income is significantly more than the surrounding area.
All of this ignores the fact that adjusting a restaurant's prices by the customer's expected ability to pay often leads to killing demand among your most frequent and desirable clientele, but that's a different story.
Few people want to sit idle and just do nothing. We have, in fact, automated almost everything. Dishwashers, laundry machines, Amazon delivering to your door. People have a natural instinct to fill in the gaps and so they take on more activities, responsibilities, and work.
The lie of our society is that the alternative to work is to "sit idle".
That's more time with your family, your friends, your loved ones. More time smiling, more time laughing, more time being creative. This is the "good" time - the part of life you actually care about. The parts of life you will remember when you're close to death. You won't remember meetings, or a commute, or even a project you did really good on at work.
Not a lie at all. Plenty of people remember, and are proud of, their professional achievements.
Time with friends and family is important, sure, but everyone reaches a point of diminsihing returns. There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
Personally, I think being proud of your professional achievements, unless they're extraordinarily impressive, is pathetic. I can guarantee you, nobody else in your life shares that pride. Being proud for the money you earn is another thing all together, people do appreciate that.
> There's a reason most parents eventually want their kids out of the house. Or why Thanksgiving is only once a year.
Right, because people hate their lives and hate their families because they got married without putting much thought into it for financial incentives and then built a life with the intention of ignoring it as much as possible just to satisfy some perspective of white picket life and numbing heteronormativity.
I know many people - both men and women - who don't even like their partners. Forget about love. And they still committed to marrying them and settling down and then they like to work. Not because the work is good, but because it means they get away from their family.
Also, most adults eventually have no friends because nobody likes them, and they waste all their time on work. And, somehow, we're just supposed to be okay with the idea that nobody likes you and nobody is your friend. I mean, if you wanted to, could you even make a friend in the next year? For most, the answer is no.
We, as a whole, have destroyed any sense of community for the promise of a nuclear family and stable job. The end result is people being sad enough to pat themselves on the back for sending an email and hiding in a "man cave" to avoid the reality of having to make small talk with the person closest to them in their life.
Sorry, maybe this is harsh, but it's what I've observed. I mean just ask an older person what the best time of their life was. Most of the time they say college or high school. Sure, being young has something to do with it, but that's not it. Having friends, laughing a lot, doing activities, having a community... these are the parts that make life worth living. My father could recount countless stories from when he was in college, decades and decades ago. He couldn't tell you what the name of the dude hired 2 years ago at work.
Agree. In my observation people have a natural tendency to float towards a self determined 'busy'. Which is generally not that busy. As in there is a plenty of time to watch shows, indulge in frivolous pet household projects, go to wine tastings, etc. Note that some of these indulgences are what leads to the self determined 'busy'. But the point is they are discretionary.
Pascal, in his "Pensées" book, wrote about this: humans keep getting busy, because otherwise they would understand how pointless their existence and suffering and reality is.
And so, in order to avoid the inner void that lurk behind everyone's mind, we run, we act, we play and we do thing, because even the useless is better than the nothing.
From the customer's point of view, yes, it's automated. The task of shopping is mostly eliminated. Instead of spending all afternoon at the mall, a customer can purchase everything they need in a few minutes without ever leaving the house.
Sorry you need things to be explained to you in such great detail.
I’m sorry you don’t consider truck drivers as human beings.
But you only care that stuff is automated from your point of view, right? Other can sweat, suffer and keep slaving away, as long as you don’t have to lift a finger, right?
Yes the customer can click a button and have stuff delivered within minutes… as long as someone else is doing the delivery.
Your lack of empathy really shows the sadness of your soul, and the short sightedness of your mind.
You can be sorry for me if you want, but I pity you.
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