jtolmar

31 ms·

301.
by jtolmar 7y ago
Unions are democratically run by the workers for their own benefit. They should be mostly upside, or tradeoffs in your favor, since they're doing stuff that you voted for on your behalf. People make a lot of noise about union dues, but
302.
by jtolmar 7y ago
> 2. Is it possible to build a hybrid database schema? For example, SQLite+JSON? Postgres and MySQL both have JSON support that can do fancy things which includes indexes, but it's extra work and I don't think it actually gains
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Try adding an occasional pass that rounds or truncates all your floats (maybe once a frame, maybe less). It's not really "supposed" to work in any bulletproof way, but for a given game there's usually a reasonable roundi
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by jtolmar 7y ago
That's markets, not capitalism. Capitalism is specifically the arrangement where the means of production can be bought and sold (on the market). It's only been around since the industrial revolution - prior to that the means of pr
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by jtolmar 7y ago
If the only defense of capitalism is competition, why not market socialism? As in, markets, competition, and entrepreneurship still exist, but all firms must be worker-owned.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I'm certainly one of those people. What is the boundary between "politics" and "not politics?" Who gets to decide? Your employer probably has more effect on your day to day life than your government does. Why would
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by jtolmar 7y ago
These "arrogant" Googlers aren't changing the magnitude of Google's impact on people's lives. Google's impact will still be there if they go away. There is no option that makes it go away. The choice is between
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Read No Shortcuts [1]. But in summary, determine the group of people you want to organize (a bounded group, not "everyone"), reach out to people (face to face conversations), identify community leaders who are on board, try doing
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Voting is the victory lap. Organize.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
You could restructure all externalities taxes to pay a dividend back out of what they raise, but you could instead skip a step and use the money to reduce the amount you need to raise via other taxes. Presumably your general-purpose tax is
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by jtolmar 7y ago
The workers also shoulder the risk. If a business goes under, they lose their jobs. Ability to buy large quantities of shares is not "non-exclusive." Not everyone has money.
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by jtolmar 7y ago
A huge part of Kropotkin's arguments are about what's possible with the technology of the time. This is even more relevant now with 100 years of improvements. It's a strong contrast to the futurist "everything will get b
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by jtolmar 7y ago
https://thebreadbook.org/ - Peter Kropotkin argues that there's now enough industrial capability to feed, shelter, and clothe everyone, but this capability is poorly distributed. Notably he wrote this over 100 years ag
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Modern unions that only represent one type of skill or workers in one company (or both!) are far less effective than historical unions that aimed to unionize as many workers as possible under the same umbrella. Being able to represent your
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Most time estimates aren't necessary in the first place and it's aggravating that we need so many of them. Yes it's mostly a stick to beat devs with. But since folks reading this will probably need to make estimates anyway, t
316.
by jtolmar 7y ago
Some thoughts on the problem, not intended as a complete proposal or argument: * Indexing is expensive. If there's a shared public index, that'd make it a lot easier for people to try new ranking algorithms. Maybe the index can be
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by jtolmar 7y ago
You could put in a set amount per day (or week), choices weighted by the votes since last time, and get some of the benefits of dollar cost averaging, plus more reason for continued engagement. Maybe introduce sales after it's been aro
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Concentration of wealth won't cause a lack of buyers for stocks. The wealth is still there, the very wealthy will just buy more stock. The value of a stock stacks in a way that the value of additional giant houses doesn't. (Being
319.
by jtolmar 7y ago
If you enjoy the idea of propelling space ships using nuclear explosions, look up nuclear salt-water rockets (NSWRs, or Zubrin Drives). The idea is to dump pipes full of sub-critical amounts of radioactive salts out engine, combining outsid
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I don't think we even know that a planet that's had life twice as long gets twice as much evolution. The rate of evolutionary change is far from constant, and whatever factors affect that rate might be different on some other plan
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Regular old Kalman Filters are the best (literally perfect) when your problem fits all their requirements. They also have a lot of nice properties if you're dealing with a problem that mostly fits their requirements. But the linear-gau
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by jtolmar 7y ago
I threw that part in there because I was expecting someone to confuse themselves into thinking there's no motivation for progress under such a system. Under the hypothetical, even if you want your current level of pay, you may want to
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by jtolmar 7y ago
1. Profiler. There's a standard tool that tells you what part of your code is slow. Over half the time it'll find something dumb and easy to fix instead of whatever you expected. 2. SQL / relational database schemas. Persiste
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Automation itself is a good thing. The way our economy is structured to respond to automation is predictably bad for the workers though. Consider a hypothetical world where, every time a job was automated away, the person who lost their job
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by jtolmar 7y ago
You trust snail mail carriers not to read your mail. The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier stil
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by jtolmar 7y ago
They're looking at cheap off-peak electricity sources, one of which is excess wind power at night, so they're likely to be operating when the wind is blowing anyway. (Not that they need it - gas diffusion is fast - but it's a
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by jtolmar 7y ago
Housing prices can increase faster than wages/inflation, that just means that the share of wages spent on housing has to increase. This can continue until nobody has discretionary money left, since shelter, being an essential part of l
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by jtolmar 7y ago
It's probably the regulars upvoting it. The occasional memey or off-topic post is a lot of fun and key to having a community with its own culture instead of an interest group with the personality of a dictionary entry. The problem is t
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by jtolmar 7y ago
You could go around asking successful mathematicians to write out some of their favorite unsubstantiated hunches and post a compilation of them as an alien message.
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by jtolmar 8y ago
Unions are the immediate solution. We need an industry wide union so it's hard to hire scabs and easy for us to refer each other after layoffs. The longer term, better solution is to be owners. Worker owned tech companies only don&#x27

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