No, no. You are going in the right direction in analysing the morality of such proclamation. The point is, you can a) give others and collect reward in terms of other's people perception/rewarding of you (what the Bible passage above suggests is bad), b) do the same because someone just convinced you you'll get a reward from .. someone important, worthy of respect/awe (what the passage suggests is good, though I'm sure there will be those who say it's just parabole for being humble in giving, which of course the text could say but somehow doesn't), c) for some another reason. We'll get to c) in a minute.
When you think about what this is really easy to see is a = b. That I am rewarded with promise of heaven for a deed, or hope of being well-respected by others who see what I've done, affects the same object: ego. It's not driven by desire to help others (compassion, love or else), but desire to be seen /judged as good by others.
There is a c) (and more for sure). The much more mundane reason c) is "give to people and let your reward be the feeling you get that you do a good thing". Good thing can be in this case simply the result of mental congruence of your act with, say, your utilitarian belief that "helping others by decreasing their suffering is good".
If I tell people "a good act is when you help others to help them maximize utility", it's a moral stance. It's a very different moral stance than "a good act is when you do what someone says you should do in order to get eternal life".
The former is far better from ego-point of view, and less prone to corruption, and focuses on the values and reasons why somethign is good, in other words - promotes understanding and is clear why it's good. The latter promotes blind following and subservience to anothe person/being becomgin the guide of y our actions.
It's clear that most people need a guide, but be careful what kind of guide you pick.
I wasn't suggesting OP's mother wanted to manipulate. I wanted to express that it's a very common situation in relationships of all kinds that there's assymetry in desired closeness and it's difficult / non obvious what to do there (i.e. no easy solution).
Many people cry, shout or even try to manipulate you when you tell them their behavior (based on excessive attachment or dependency of some kind) is an issue for you. Many of the same people's loved ones realize that and are in a clinch: do I distance myself, hurting them? do I not distance myself, hurting self? It's not something you can just ask about: "I'm not as attached to you as you are to me, what do we do?"
If you were running a business, and wanted someone to do tech talks, or design/run interviewing for tech candidates, or have mentoring for junior devs, would you prefer non-developers to do it?
If that's the case, I could write an article "Company X developed technology that enables people to see individual atoms and hear the explosions on the other side of the Earth."
Clickbait :( It's a device that plays back - through headphones - specific normal-range sound which is crafted in such as way as to help you locate a source of another (ultra)sound which you normally wouldn't hear. Nothing in this thing enables people to hear ultrasonic sources. They still hear sound from normal range.
When you say "then walk into the center", you do realize you are talking about a (edit) 20-30 minute walk one-way. A car could cut that in 2 minutes.
In my lifetime I was a driver in a city where it took exactly 5 minutes door-to-door from my home to ANY location in the city (at night). During the day it was maybe 8 minutes.
Then some years went by.
I now live in a city where at night it's 20 minutes, and during the day it's 45-60 minutes.
From 5/8 minutes to 20/45-60 minutes.
It's the same city.
Things change, I get it. It just feels like things are getting worse and worse and yeah, it elicits serious questions like "is this going to be my last car, ever?" etc. :)
In my town you have largely 4 options:
- walk
- drive
- take a bus/tram
- bike
Walking is too slow and cumbersome for most people (e.g. 6-8 km one way to work seems like too much to do every day), and impossible if you want to go shopping anywhere except on your way to work.
Public transport is really slow and not as flexible as you want (many places without good connections, wait times 15-20 minutes, transit times 20-50 minutes).
So you are left really with bike (flexible, constant travel time regardless of traffic, keeps you fit -- but very susceptible to bad weather) and car (flexible, fast, great for transporting items -- but very susceptible to traffic).
I am presenting a counterpoint to the claim in the article that "it's just 1 more block" in a real world scenario (under somewhat different condition though: non-grid street network).
Do you think the phenomenon I described does not exist, or are you saying it's not relevant?
While I don't know of the safety impact of removing left turns, the actual trip time impact in a busy city is severely understated. In my city (700k people), an old European town, city center has seen the removal of a few key left turns in the past few years.
Consequences for traffic outside city center: probably none.
Consequences if you want to drive from within the city center to the outside (e.g. go back from a shopping mall / restaurant / business meeting): walk further (many places to park are inaccessible) back to the car, drive a block or two more than you normally would. Extra time: +5 minutes to walk, +10 minutes for those 1-2 blocks (traffic is heavy).
Now the "best" part: Consequences if you want to drive into the city center: you need to make a sequence of correct turns 1-2 kilometers before your target, and if you don't, you are punished with extra 20 minutes in traffic at least (and still won't land where you wanted) - there is simply no route to where you wanted to go unless you pick 1 specific ideal route which many drivers don't know. Results: if you know the city / have good gps (Google Maps sometimes gets it wrong) +10 minutes in traffic, if you don't - + 20-30 minutes in traffic.
[edit] You may ask "why you can't do a triple-right-turn?" that's because the city center is not a grid. Many streets are don't have cross-paths for long stretches around historical part of the city.
Now the really painful part...
Your trip outside the city center is only 5-10 minutes.
Losing an EXTRA 20 minutes is a huge loss, it makes the ttrip almost as bad as walking - but inside a car. Bad for everyone really.
My main beef is with the fact that many places in the city become almost inaccessible due to a huge reduction in possible routes. E.g. 7 years ago I could get to a large mall / parking area next to the town square maybe in 5-6 diffferent ways (allowing me to balance the traffic out).
Now there's 1 way only from my side of the city, and I can't balance anything out by going where others aren't.
Guess the "grid" street network is really a hard prerequisite.
As for safety, safety records in the city haven't moved at all in the past 10 years so I don't know. (But traffic has grown so maybe it's ok?)
My point was I didn't understand why making a decision that gives a manager an extra (hidden) benefit is a crime - i.e. it's not money laundering (money laundering is misrepresenting the source of money, right?, and "wire fraud" and "mail fraud" is too elusive to me - it's a name, not an explanation of the nature of the wrongdoing :)
I wonder... what's the actual crime here? I don't know how US law works. In my country there is no "bribe" in the private sector, it's probably still not allowed in some cases (certainly publicly traded companies), but I'm assuming Netflix wasn't a public company during that time. Can someone explain?
If a director is given freedom to make certain purchasing decisions on behalf of a company (private company at that point, I assume), why specifically is it a criminal offense in the US to be rewarded money for it? (I don't mean money laundering i.e. hiding source of income, I mean the actual "bribe")
[Edit] I did just find out that my country also has "management bribery" as a criminal offense within the private sector.
You are wrong about apples and potatoes - the blog post author does mention your story just under different term: utility, which is a standard way to express the notion you touched: the total utility of an apple and a potato in the right hands is higher than utility of them in the wrong hands. So barter increases utility, but economy as a whole isn't any more valuable because of it (externally it'll trade the same). It's also echoed in OP's point about utility of money (and a question whether Amazon actually increases or decreases total utility in the economy).
Bezos claims he created 310 B of value and you say "as shareholder I care about value of the company", but you and other shareholders who own (together) 100% of Amazon didn't get 310 B of value, did you?
That's the thing. Neither did the economy "gain" all this value. If I work for 10 hours and earn a 1000 uSD, my employer didn't create 1000 USD worth of value. We traded my time/effort/exhaustion for money. Maybe there was some actual value created through that work for us or economy/society, or maybe it was meaningless work (and we even stole value from the society by e.g. burning me out).
While 27 minutes nighttime sleep didn't affect outcomes, another effect they observed was that afternoon naps DID increase productivity and well being. So it's not that more sleep can't help -- maybe it depends on specific type of work / life situation?
I don't get why there is no way to edit apps live through the operating system. Before I knew how programs work I didn't understand why I can't recode anything as user - change menus in Windows 3.1, change what they do, change logic of forms, etc. Today I know how this works and I'm even more convinced this would be good for everyone, exposing the actual logic behind all we see in apps (start with text, forms, links, buttons, etc.) would only be to everyone's benefit - would expose bugs, help people learn UIs in depth, suggest better functionalities and have swarms of users contribute to computers.
Same with gathering user feedback -- the fact that we have such ridiculously unusable basic UI elements on mobile especially (people tend to NOT find basic UI elelemtsn of apps for months, sometimes years - how the f* is that even possible) is just one consequence of the fact that even if say 1000 users intend to do something and fail, the authors of the app never learn about that. WE get clubhouse to listen to one more type of radio, but we never get "userhouse" to get instant stream of people's complaints about an app (and a special physical button ON THE smartphone itself to launch that "instant feedback to the app author"mode so it's part of the base aspect of being a user of a smartphone)...
Were you never curious "What did the Romans or Egyptians really think about X? How did they really spend their days?"
I know I am curious and history books leave more questions than answers. Even the most well preserved facts about kings/dynasties/wars are partial at best and leave out so many interesting things out...
My feeling is that archeologists et al would love 10x or 1000x more data about what happened in the past -- not to have to guess everything and never be sure "is that really what happened?"
When you think about what this is really easy to see is a = b. That I am rewarded with promise of heaven for a deed, or hope of being well-respected by others who see what I've done, affects the same object: ego. It's not driven by desire to help others (compassion, love or else), but desire to be seen /judged as good by others.
There is a c) (and more for sure). The much more mundane reason c) is "give to people and let your reward be the feeling you get that you do a good thing". Good thing can be in this case simply the result of mental congruence of your act with, say, your utilitarian belief that "helping others by decreasing their suffering is good".
If I tell people "a good act is when you help others to help them maximize utility", it's a moral stance. It's a very different moral stance than "a good act is when you do what someone says you should do in order to get eternal life".
The former is far better from ego-point of view, and less prone to corruption, and focuses on the values and reasons why somethign is good, in other words - promotes understanding and is clear why it's good. The latter promotes blind following and subservience to anothe person/being becomgin the guide of y our actions.
It's clear that most people need a guide, but be careful what kind of guide you pick.