I'm torn. In my heart, I absolutely did not want Amazon here due to how it would obliterate any shred of culture we have left, decimate anyone who didn't work in tech, and paralyze the city's traffic completely.
On the other hand, as a developer and a home owner, it would have been amazing for my pocket book.
Except with property you have the utility value of having a place that keeps rain off of your head and with the S&P you have the utility value of.. getting to be obsessive about numbers on a screen every moment of every day. Whether that difference is worth the extra points is an individual call.
Do you not think that once in 30 years one the ~50 rich, seemingly very intelligent people that live on that street didn't step out onto it and think, "Hey.. this is a nice private street we have here. The property taxes on it must be killer. Hmm.. I wonder who pays those.. maybe I'll bring it up at the next HOA meeting."
Why do I get the feeling that the same people defending the residents of this street wouldn't bat an eye at condemning a poor person whose electricity gets shut off because the bill was sent to their former address and they simply forgot abou tit?
Well, for at least a single year. I mean.. Work twice as hard for one year, and get paid close to what I can reasonably expect to make in 20.. yea, seems like a no brainer.
I actually don't think this is particularly heinous as long as they are completely transparent and open about it. Hell, if they wanted to be even more above board, they should provide a slider that allows you to allocate a percentage of CPU usage you are dedicating at a given time.
Now, whether it'll be worth it is the real question. But I'm hopeful. If we can find an alternative to obtrusive, obnoxious ads I'm all for it.
I enjoy them. It strikes me as extremely odd that the main complaint against open floor plans is that they kill productivity. This is such a complaint that there's people up and down this post moaning in agony as if it were literal torture that they're unable to be as productive as possible. Personally, I don't think that a company is entitled to me working at 100% productivity constantly, because I value my sanity too much. Yet, here are people begging, pleading for their employer to make them be able to produce more for their corporate overlord.
M'eh. I work at the efficiency that is comfortable for me. Occasionally I chat with my coworkers about stupid shit to keep my mind loose and give it a break. If I absolutely need to be in the zone for a couple hours, I put on headphones, find a private room, or work from home. I'm completely ok with open floor plans.
About the only things that would draw me to a private office job is, first, the prestige of having your own office, and second, the sense of ownership of space. I imagine it to be very comforting to go into work and have one little 8'x10' space which is "yours". If we're being honest, I think these two things are actually what the anti-open office people want. They just use productivity as a way of masking it and making it appear better to their employers.
This. I had a problem where I needed to scrape roughly 20,000 html documents daily, which is normally a pretty slow task. You have to open the file, load it into memory, parse the DOM, and then run all of your selection methods. Sequentially, it took about 60 minutes daily. Multithreading slowed it down because it was CPU bound. Multiprocessing allowed me to run 12 processes across 8 cores. That took the total processing time down to about 4 minutes or so. And I was able to write the code in a day. Writing something similar in Java or C++ would have taken me a week.
Its not bigotry. Its demography. Bigotry would be me, upon hearing someone is a welder, asking them why they voted for Trump. Demography is the realization that welders work nationwide, multitudes in rural areas, multitudes in traditionally conservative industries such as oil and gas, and therefore a person is much more likely to find people who share political culture than in an industry that is clustered in major coastal cities.
I don't think I implied that at all. If you felt that way, you might be revealing your own cognitive biases. I don't think any form of labor is morally superior to anything else, mainly because I disagree with the whole concept of the labor system in general, but I disgress.
My point was that you can't denigrate people asking to share their opinion peacefully and without verbal assault, ie a "safe space", while simultaneously complaining that your viewpoints aren't allowed to be shared peacefully and without verbal assault.
Which, btw, I believe is a load of bull. I've been party to multitudes of political conversations in the workplace and a negligibly tiny percentage of them have I seen actually get out of control. You may feel that your viewpoints aren't aligned with the culture, but that's my entire point. You have no reasonable expectation to force the culture to do anything, leading back to my point of I wouldn't go to to work at, say, an oil rig with the expectation of my political culture aligning with theirs.
And before you begin, I'm not saying anything against people who work on rigs. I am saying that there is evidence that it overall is a right leaning culture.
I grew up in small(ish) town Texas with those exact viewpoints. I wouldn't say that my viewpoint was exactly ostracized, but it was definitely "odd" and Other. I never really suffered any physical intimidation for my viewpoints, but that's probably because I'm a giant ogre that people tend not to feel like they can mess with. But I did have my fair share of heated arguments when refusing to pray before a football game or counter-protest the abortion protestors, etc.
Wasn't the passivity and meekness of the opposition the exact reason fascists were able to rise relatively easily in the intrawar period?
Personally, I think the concept that there aren't ideas worth throwing a punch over is equally as repugnant as saying you should punch anyone you disagree with.
Yes, I was mostly being flippant there. I've known several welders and iron workers and they tend to mostly be apolitical and when they have opinions they're a fair mix of both left and right.
But welders is what came to mind first when I was thinking of "stereotypically right wing jobs". Whoops.
Aren't these the same sort that will moan ceaselessly about the ludicrousness of "safe spaces" and "snowflakes"?
I don't particularly care. You're free to speak your mind. You're not free to force people around you agree. Either get over it, or move on. I hear welding is an in-demand industry and I bet they'll find more receptivity to their viewpoints there.
The isolation aspect is.. problematic, yes. But I'm much more worried about the cheating aspect. Its a fairly routine occurance that if we're interviewing an East Asian, they'll contact current Asians working in our department and ask for the answers to the interview questions, with absolutely no shame.
On the other hand, as a developer and a home owner, it would have been amazing for my pocket book.