The US supports Israel and itself causes terror in the Middle East. US citizens are safest if we withdraw completely and sanction Israel, like we would any other country violating human rights.
I do agree that Iranians are nice people. The people who are in power, however, may have a different vision (and that concerns both Americans and their own people). This is the sad reality of many Arab states.
It simple actually, Iran has no impact on my life where Israel has a very negative impact on my life. I barely want to remain in the tech industry because all of the VCs are pro-genocide. My tax dollars, military and political capital all go to cover Israel. I do not think Israel should have ever been created. It does not benefit me, only harms and endangers.
A broader perspective might suggest that in order to continue your life without adverse impacts, it is in your interest that Iran be prevented from developing nuclear weapons. Israel is doing a lot of work on your behalf in retarding that outcome.
So, even if you are not sympathetic to the plight of our ideological fellow travelers, from a purely utilitarian view, it is in your interest to support Israel.
You support Iran having nuclear weapons in order to keep Israel in check? You're delusional if you think you'd like a world with the people running Iran in charge.
MAD is a well established doctrine for deterrence. The people running Iran are running Iran, not the world. The people running Israel however have undue influence on my and many other countries.
All humans have a will to live, Hamas is fighting against occupation not to commit suicide. The Israeli theocracy however seems to have lost control of all logic and instead is operating in the death throws of an apartheid state coming to its end. The world would be safer with more opposition to Israel.
I'd add d) when all of the gains are captured by execs and investors, if you don't do everything you can to maximize your return and minimize your input, you're being exploited.
It's strange to me that anyone would care about people cheating at job interviews and not say CEO pay that's 1,000X the average employee. More power to those who can balance things in their favor against those who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
It's interesting that you think the promotion of an engineer would have any effect on the CEOs pay. Someone was going to be promoted anyway, the CEO couldn't care less about who. The problem here is that it should have been supposedly someone else who actually earned it.
Is there any evidence, other than these people using unethical methods to get hired on initiall at companies, that they didn't earn the raises they received?
I don't have any evidence, but that's the premise of the article. Whether it is evidence based or not was not the topic of my comment.
But to answer your question subjectively, yes, in my experience cheaters will cheat. If they used unethical methods to get hired that's a strong indicator that they will also cheat their way to raises and promotions.
I’m saying that it’s pointless to get upset at someone getting a raise when the person in charge makes orders of magnitude the amount of money you do. That is the problem, not labor doing what it can to eke out a microscopic amount of leverage.
Cheaters getting ahead of honest people is of course a problem and I don't understand how you could possibly say it isn't. Those cheaters are taking away jobs and promotions from people who deserve it more.
If by the cheaters you mean the executives and investors who personally capture all of the profit, then I couldn't agree more. The reason that we're suffering from "inflation" and see record high wealth inequality is because the people at the top are hoarding all of the capital and profit leaving little for the vast majority of people.
It’s not about impacting the CEO’s pay, it’s about exceeding maximum value from a job that is exploiting you in order for them to get that pay and benefit shareholders. Other than a few SMEs run by genuinely good people, capitalism puts us in adversarial position because if we don’t take one we’ll be hugely taken advantage of.
I think more people are waking up to the fact that the corporate ladder is a joke. Hence all the whining about WFH, quiet quitting, and GenZ not being subservient enough.
It's not true that all of the gains are captured by investors.
Alphabet's CEO makes about 1000x the average googler, but that's only about 1% of salaries. What I mean is that for every $100 a Googler makes, about $1 goes to the CEO. It's not like top executives are claiming ing most of the value for themselves, the majority of the value a worker generates is returned to them in their compensation.
There are reasons beyond direct redistribution of the CEO's salary to take issue with the vast inequality represented by that 1,000X. The board and CEO will place all of their network in the executive ranks, cutting off access to rank and file employees. These people also use their out-sized reward to have a huge impact on society at large outside of the company. The negative externalities created by exec compensation are borne by the public.
> It's strange to me that anyone would care about people cheating at job interviews and not say CEO pay that's 1,000X the average employee.
When people cheat at the job interview and end up on my team or interacting with me but are not competent at the job, that directly and negatively impacts me and my work life, as well as my productivity. The fact the CEO makes more money than me does not directly impact me (although it does indirectly through larger society).
I like being part of a team that is high performance and competent and linked to other high performance and competent teams. Cheating makes this less likely and damages the quality of the work life and creates the need for more process that slows does the productivity and performance of the team in order to account for and hedge against incompetence.
I've never seen "productivity" tied to compensation. Those with connections and the ability to self-promote receive the most pay. Those who don't understand this focus on being "productive" to help improve their boss' bottom line at their own expense.
If you like to excel, the best choice is to preserve your energy as much as possible while working for your employer and build something amazing that you own with the energy that otherwise would have been given to them.
> “I strongly believe the office experience should be at the same level as luxury residential and hospitality,” Shvo previously told The Chronicle. “In the last two years, we’ve made our homes into our offices, now it’s time to make our offices feel like our homes.”
Private bathrooms for every employee? No commute? The office can never "feel like my home", my home doesn't have my co-workers in it. It's an environment 100% of my design.
I think I will go into the office if it is nice enough. A few years before the pandemic I started working for an old school company with offices including doors, windows, nice furniture and privacy. Now we mix in office and remote work but I don't mind going to the office because I can be more focused there.
When I look back over past jobs, the question I wish I had asked more in advance is where will I sit here? I am never going to work in a barn again. It's not just about open plan seating, which has pros and cons. But when the company stacks people like boxes, it turns out they think of you as something fungible.
Ironically, my employer, which is starting to demand RTO, is taking away many office amenities and even forcing people to alternate days and share desks. The higherups are making the offices worse and thinking people want to come back to that. Their heads are so far up their own asses it's amazing.
Same, I built my own private office and I don't have to deal with traffic to get to it, or deal with constant interrupts because other people have decided they're not working so I shouldn't either. My productivity is through the roof since going fully remote 6 years ago.
I’ve been fully remote since before the pandemic, and I have a dedicated home office, but a private office space would help me at least consider spending some of my time in the office. Being away from the responsibilities of home can help with focus. Wouldn’t consider a mandatory or full-time return to office, though.
I've never had to work in an actual cube farm or open concept (the one time I was technically in a cube farm was when I was one of five people in a farm built for 50+) but a private office is nice in ways you just can't really articulate.
We had a nice setup for awhile that was a central meeting/conference/open area, with offices all around it, each of which had a large window looking at the meeting area. You could close a curtain if you really needed to, but otherwise it was sound-proof; people could easily see if you were available but you could work privately, make calls, etc.
I'd be willing to consider commuting for something like that again in the right job.
I wouldn't mind working remote if my commute is walkable. I purposely live in Boston to have access to the T, but many companies in Boston are opening up offices in Seaport which is the most awkward place to get to using public transit.
The issue is that most offices (especially the bio/chemistry ones) are at the far end, also the silver line blows; unless your office is less than a one mile radius (even then depending on the street it can be painful) it's just a bad time.
Owners who hate the lack of oversight with WFH are not the ones who like private offices with doors for workers. They don't mandate RTO out of concern for your privacy and ability to focus.
> It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.
I think the message is that these people were created by throngs of investors, media and fan adulation. There's an entire culture of revering people from SBF to Elon Musk to Bill Gates to Marc Andreessen. Some of those people have exploded more spectacularly than others, but the mechanisms and culture that create them are the same.
Those people are complicit with all of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the royal family. Without them, the monarchy could be abolished. They are the very source of the problem.
We aren't born with rights unless there are people living at the time of our birth willing to fight for those rights. I mean, monarchy exists with supporters today despite being against the basic human rights you assert we are all born with.
Speed limits on roads exist; if someone's speeding, it's a question of enforcement.
Similarly, we're born with human rights as ratified in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. To your point, they're moot if not enforced -- I get that. But it's easier to enforce what exists than to fight for the original law.
We could be born with human rights as ratified by the Flying Spaghetti Monster and it would be just as meaningless. Enforcement is equally meaningless if there is no recognition of authority.
Why does the UN get to dictate human rights and not some other body? Did those human rights exist before the UN or not?
As someone who is anti-monarch I have to admit that this seems like the logical extension of monarchy and exactly what democracy is meant to help with. Can I ask why someone wouldn't be anti-monarch in 2023?
Let's be clear here, the UK isn't a monarchy, we just have a monarch who has effectively zero power and simply serves as a hereditary head of state.
As for why I support this, I think it makes sense diplomatically to have an apolitical head of state and I also believe the British monarch functions similarly to second amendment in the US. If the UK ever needed to revolt against the government the monarch serves as way in which the public (and armed forces) could side with the state over the government. I cannot express how much I like that our armed forces swear allegiance to a largely powerless Monarch that represents the state rather than Rishi Sunak.
However, getting back on topic here, the fact the UK has a monarch in my opinion has zero relevance to the fact the UK is becoming a place increasingly hostile to protest. Instead, it seems to me to be far more to do with the fact our two major political parties both have authoritarian tendencies, which I suspect stems from the UK having cultural values which lend themselves to certain kinds of authoritarian social policies.
Specifically, laws around limiting "improper" behaviour like rowdy protests, being rude online, and consuming porn that's a little too edgy seem to be ways in which our dislike of improper behaviour manifest politically. In most ways we're quite a liberal society, but there are certain ways that our conformist and overly polite nature seems to work its way into our politics via democracy – protest perhaps being the most clear example of something that people here seem to struggle with since freedom of expression requires an acceptance of impoliteness.
> Let's be clear here, the UK isn't a monarchy, we just have a monarch who has effectively zero power and simply serves as a hereditary head of state.
The article we're commenting on makes it very clear that the UK is a monarchy and that the monarch has the power to disrupt public life at great expense to the public and to have said public arrested for offending them.
> The article we're commenting on makes it very clear that the UK is a monarchy
It absolutely doesn't. The article doesn't even mention the word monarchy.
It was written before the recent arrests at the coronation.
We can talk about what influence the monarchy may try to exert on the government behind the scenes (and I believe there will be some - and there shouldn't be) but back channeling aside, our democratically elected government is the body which runs our country, not the monarchy, and therefore is correctly the target of this article.
Your statement is somewhat contradictory. The monarch has zero power but also controls the military and can violently oppose the government? He’s also powerful enough that people can be arrested for protesting his coronation. Democracy was created precisely because history shows people will be consistently oppressed when they don’t govern themselves.
> Specifically, laws around limiting "improper" behaviour like rowdy protests, being rude online, and consuming porn that's a little too edgy seem to be ways in which our dislike of improper behaviour manifest politically.
Jimmy Saville was way worse than any porn, yet his main enabler just became king. The outrage about the “impolite” seems very unevenly distributed.
> If the UK ever needed to revolt against the government the monarch serves as way in which the public (and armed forces) could side with the state over the government. I cannot express how much I like that our armed forces swear allegiance to a largely powerless Monarch that represents the state rather than Rishi Sunak.
> Can I ask why someone wouldn't be anti-monarch in 2023?
The sibling comment by kypro [0] answers this question much better than I could have. But at the same time, I'm not the British Royal Family's most diehard supporter by any means.
> While I agree that disrupting a ceremony now is in poor taste
Most people would consider coronating Jimmy Saville's BFF king to be in extremely poor taste. The protesters are the only respectable thing about this farce.
I think unless you're firing the executives that overhired, you're not fixing the root cause of the problem which is bad leadership. There's a "hack" that's causing the market for leadership to be highly inefficient and distorted and that's class solidarity between the upper classes. Executives are mostly placed for the favors they can offer capital owners, not their "performance".
Making a mistake is not in-it-of-itself a problem. Mistakes are inevitable, if nothing else because people cannot be oracles. If you bet into the river because you have a flush draw, you'll lose around 75% of the time - but that doesn't mean it was a mistake in those 3/4s of a time.
If as a board you unduly punish executives when bets they make don't pan out, you risk causing a culture of fear that prevents innovation and big bets.
Obviously there's a limit, and the reasoning is important behind the bets.
That being said it's not like all of the tech ceos were perfectly competent - that's not what I'm saying. But the knee-jerk "well, fire them too" reaction from the internet is mostly an emotional response.
If the executives are "just human" then they should be paid like humans along with everyone else. They shouldn't have their cake and eat it too. If you get paid orders of magnitude more than everyone else, you should take on orders of magnitude more risk (including going to prison when the company breaks the law).
That's not really a correlation that exists anywhere else. A white collar office worker on average makes significantly more than a blue collar worker but they don't particularly take more risk or anything.
People are paid based on opportunity cost. Executives are paid very highly because the cost of them making a poor decision, or not making a good decision, is very high. Meanwhile, the cost of hiring me and me not performing to expectations is low. It's not because they're God's or anything. The supply of people with leadership experience is also definitionally low.
Of course there's a lot of old boys club in executive roles in reality but that's the boards and shareholders problem when they do a bad job.
I've seen a few 'old boys clubs' form, and the conclusion I've come to over time is that a large part of this is due to two characteristics. The first is that it's very hard to find credible talent. Think about the people you've worked with - there's probably 100+ or so of them, yes? Now think of how many of them you think are really exceptionally good. Probably only a few, even amongst people with the same role, and it likely took you quite a while to realise that. So, when you come to hire someone, you look at your network, because you've worked with a lot of people, and have opinions on who is and is not good. You simply have more information. The second is that once in a more senior role, it's much harder to judge whether a peer is doing a good job or not, because you don't see a lot of their work and you're likely more reliant on self reported state of world. That tends to weaken your decision making ability on the above, while heightening the importance of doing it correctly. Neither of those things are excuses, but they're certainly reasons. I think it's relatively straightforward to find incompetent executives who've wasted money and who are known for this.
A layoff doesn’t mean you over-hired for the market conditions which were present when the hiring happened.
And under-hiring today because your crystal ball says market conditions will deteriorate in the future is also not always the best course of action.
The myriad causes which lead Intel to this point exist at many levels from individual, corporate, competitive, and macroeconomic.
It’s overly reductive to assume a layoff is due to some mistake, that a layoff is due to over-hiring, or that a layoff’s root cause is the executives who mapped out a past hiring plan.
For starters, the hiring plan will be based on revenue projections which will be based on technical market analysis overlaid with a technical roadmap. This is a distributed effort and major analysis at the level of a corporation like Intel spread across potentially dozens of business units. The hiring plan could easily have been “perfect” based on faulty product roadmaps / product performance projections or any number of other factors.
