What a terrible analogy. This strike didn't hurt anyone, it cost the employer money, which is exactly what they're supposed to do! A strike that doesn't cost money isn't a strike, and a union that can't strike is a social club.
The idea that strikes are intended to cost the company does not lend itself that workers can do anything that damages the company. Are workers allowed to blow up the trucks using TNT (as long as no one gets hurt)? Can they steal all the gasoline in the trucks and sell it on the secondary market? No.
Strikes are intended to lose the company money in a very specific way - by a lack of labor. They are not intended to lose the company money by intentional destruction of property (nor should they be intended to do that)
You sound like you're arguing with me, but all of the rules you described seem to suggest that what the strikers did in this case was legal. They didn't blow up anything or steal anything, they quit working at an inconvenient time.
Also, I think you're imagining a set of gentlemanly Marquis of Queensbury rules around strikes that don't exist. This isn't an elaborate ritual like the filibuster; labor dispute precedents are written in blood.
If you intentionally fill up a truck with material that destroys it and then leave it, that is property destruction. That is equivalent to blowing something up (the concrete expands and blows up the truck) in that it is property damage.
Another example to help you understand:
If I came into my office in the morning with a highly flammable liquid and put them where the sun shines in the afternoon, and then intentionally left for "striking" - the ensuing office fire would be property damage on my part.
It's an extreme example. There is a difference between just not doing the work and intentionally causing harm: That's the difference between surgeon that refuses to schedule operations and one that intentionally delays the strike to walk out mid operation to maximize the harm. I used an extreme example because nothing I saw in vice's position on how the cause should have been decided appeared to exclude it.
But absolutely I agree that destroying millions of dollars in equipment and supplies is not equivalent to killing people, but the examples share an underlying principle of sabotage.
There is difference of losing money because employer can't sell something for duration or some sort of expected stoppage happens. And pure waste of material and possibly equipment.
Imagine if software developers took a service down for maintenance and then just decided to strike at that moment. Or maybe unloaded some servers from truck and then left them outside in rain.
The underlying assumption here, that there are some areas that decided to lockdown and others that didn't, and each had different pros and cons, seems wildly inaccurate.
The reality is that almost everywhere in the world did a lockdown of some kind, but in some areas it was effective and in other areas it was not; and, while everyone has suffered consequences of some kind, the consequences suffered by the latter group exceed those of the former by a wide and obvious margin.
I can imagine that on a slow, lazy flip with a big coin, but is this realistic with what I think of as a "normal" flip, i.e. a US quarter, flipped rapidly end-over-end with the thumbnail, 2+ feet in the air? It's hard to believe that even decades of practice would get this reliable, and I don't think I've ever seen a stage magician rely on it in a routine.
For comparison, the other method (where the coin rotates about its vertical axis) is something you can learn to do tolerably well in a few minutes, and to do very well after a month or two at most. The motion of the coin will look perfect, and you can even get the "ding!" noise of a real flip. The only giveaway is the hand position; a real flip is done with the thumb under the coin, and this trick (for me, anyway) requires the thumb to be on top.
Source: taught myself to do this many years ago. I'm not a magician and have never used it to win money, I just use this to settle arguments between my kids.
Watching Urbit through the lens of HN comments over the last few years has been utterly fascinating. The hatred it attracts is unmatched - no topic has reached the front page only to be brigade-downvoted off of it again so regularly.
And yet, for all the indignant posts about how it's performance art, a scam, or the ravings of a madman, it just kind of keeps on keeping on. It gets a little more stable and adds a few more features every year, like a regular old open source project.
My position on it has remained unchanged for 5+ years: I hope it succeeds because it aspires to solve a use case that I genuinely want to use, I don't care about the (ex-)founder's politics or his old blog, but seeing as the existence of the latter seems to have destroyed any chance of the former coming to fruition so I'm kind of hoping Jeff Bezos decides to build a clone (presumably, one that has much lower ambitions and elides most of the weird stuff).
I agree, and I would add that there is one good subjective way to measure the productivity of individual developers, and that is talking to their teammates.
> In 2017, Pai voted with his fellow Republican commissioners to remove rules that prohibited internet providers from blocking or slowing traffic to particular sites and offering higher speed “lanes” at higher prices. Many major internet providers have not yet taken advantage of that rule change, however.
It seems likely that this is because they consider the looser regulations likely to be overturned in Biden's presidency, not because they don't actually want to make changes they spent millions lobbying for the right to make.
A number of commenters seem hung up on the actual measurement of information, which I think is a little ancillary to the point (which I think is valid). So I'll add that I think the author's point here is that the press has shifted from focusing on surprising news to reiterating things we already know, because that is a good way to reassure and flatter their audience.
Consider a headline like, "Trump says illegal immigration is a big problem." He's said that many times, it's very unsurprising that he would say it again, and hence it contains very little information. However, each time he says it, it affords the press that agree with him a fresh opportunity to talk about why he's right, and the press that disagrees a new chance to talk about why he's wrong.
That is the point here - that what we call "news" has shifted from spending most of its energy informing us of things we don't know towards reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know. If that trend is true, then certainly it represents a reduction in information (in the Claude Shannon sense as well as the everyday sense).
When you say "reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know" is honestly concerning. That is a common tactic in propaganda. Especially when you consider propaganda's goal is a systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs and attitudes. Using different events to reiterate the same thing is just trying reinforce whatever idea/fact is being reiterated.
It's even worse when what is being reiterated is not true because reiteration effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect). This can be even aggravated further since a lot modern news is not just a statement of facts, but can also include various opinions which may be only partially related to that fact, but get reinforced as well.
However, repeating something over and over will decrease information density. Heck it's used in error correction when dealing with noisy/lossy channels the information theoretic sense. So reiterating things of course will reduce information density.
Lotteries, mortgages, and public securities are heavily regulated to make it nearly impossible to get ripped off. You can lose your life savings by buying AAPL, but you can't lose it despite AAPL going up because you didn't read the fine print on the brokerage website.
The reason for accredited investor requirements is that it's not realistic to do the same with small businesses. It is perfectly legal, and not totally uncommon, for startups to have very unfavorable terms for investors. If the LLC paperwork says the majority partner can choose to buy back your shares against your will for a dollar any time they like, then they can, and it's your fault for not reading it more carefully.
I've heard of many cases, and personally witnessed one case, in which an accredited investor put a lot of money in to a startup, and lost it even though the startup did well. The requirements may not be perfect, but I don't think it's fair to suggest they don't serve a purpose.
>>Lotteries, mortgages, and public securities are heavily regulated to make it nearly impossible to get ripped off.
The poorest households in the US spend something like 11% of their income on lotteries. There isn't any way lotteries could rip them off any more.
In a hypothetically free market world, they would be dumping their disposable income in stocks sold over the counter in convenience stores, or directly through their phones, and perhaps traded without intermediaries on the blockchain, and would be developing some skills in investment analysis, along with an asset base, over time, instead of developing new lottery number picking techniques based on mathematical quackery and superstitions.
> In a hypothetically free market world, they would be dumping their disposable income in stocks sold over the counter in convenience stores,
I would not be so sure about that. The poor (who buy lottery tickets) have a lot less ability to delay gratification.
And if you compare the chance to double your $10 in the next year (e.g. invest in $QQQ) to having the chance of being a millionaire next week, the bet to gain $10 is not an appealing option. Firstly it takes a year and secondly it's not enough to escape their current life.
>>And if you compare the chance to double your $10 in the next year (e.g. invest in $QQQ) to having the chance of being a millionaire next week, the bet to gain $10 is not an appealing option.
There are many offerings in the DeFi/token market that offer the prospect of massive payouts on those time frames.
Penny stocks can have a similar appeal.
These markets are replete with 'scammish' offerings and outright scams too, but over time, I strongly suspect you'd see retail investors become more discerning, as they learn through a process of trial and error what works and what doesn't.
> And if you compare the chance to double your $10 in the next year (e.g. invest in $QQQ) to having the chance of being a millionaire next week, the bet to gain $10 is not an appealing option.
the odds of winning a powerball lottery is about 1 in 290 million to win about $130million. The expected value is therefore $130 x 1/290m = $0.44 , for an investment of about $10 - very small indeed.
The small chance at escaping poverty is great, but the money is not well spent. if that's how they really think, then they will find that escaping is even harder.
Investing is not gambling - investing generates equity/capital growth. You only "lost" in investing if the asset crumbles. By investing in QQQ, it's concentrated, but it's unlikely everything in the ETF crumbles at the same time. So the chance of loss is much lower than lottery.
State lotteries are rigged: marketed to the gullible & have far worse payouts than casinos. (Have you seen stare-sponsored Keno games like "California Hot Spot", with draws every 4 minutes, offered in only the very finest neighborhoods' liquor stores to extremely wise gamblers?)
Mortgages were pushed to sketchy credit risks for years, wiping out the the poor's earnings & equity with unsustainable housing costs in (temporarily) pubic-policy-inflated home values - and even now, there's minimal protection against over-concentrating in unwise housing markets.
Plenty of public securities go to zero, often in fraud. But with easy-to-get investing leverage, any amount of initial capital can go to zero with only small moves in public prices. You can lose any amount of money after a small move of AAPL up - if you purchase enough (or leveraged) securities which bet on it going down, which are available to anyone without an accredited-investor-like wealth test.
(Have you seen the promotions, and easy on-ramps, for daytrading & foreign-exchange trading & Robinhood? Or how easy it is to channel any amount of money into crypto trading?)
There's a lot of risky investments. Anyone over 18 can bet their life savings on roulette. That has nothing to do with this. "Well other investments are risky too!" does not apply here because "Investing in startups is super-risky!" is not the reason why accreditation requirements exist.
> Trail of Bits recommends using Curve25519 for key exchange and digital signatures... it is implemented in libsodium, which has easy-to-read documentation and is available for most languages.
