They spend a billion or twenty persuading everyone that they need more RAM, and software developers bloat their apps until it's true. The market for memory continues to thrive.
The US is the most successful country in human history, as measured by the current in vogue metric of excellence, which is how much stuff (food, housing, cars, toys, etc) everyone has.
There are two kinds of wealth - private wealth and public wealth.
Private wealth is the things that you own, the money in your bank account, the car you drive, the house you live in, etc. For that kind of wealth, Americans are very well off, especially compared to the rest of the world.
Public wealth is the things that you share with others as a society, and how good those things are. It's things like the state of infrastructure, the ease of getting healthcare, the quality and safety of public spaces, how people feel when they're not in their home. For this sort of wealth America is a low way down the rankings.
Unfortunately for Americans, it's the public wealth that actually makes you happy unless you're in the 1% of the 1% who can afford to avoid public spaces entirely. If you own a luxury car but the roads are terrible that's just a reminder that your wealth can't solve all your problems. If you can afford to go to the fanciest restaurants but you're scared to wait for a cab outside afterwards, you're not going to be very happy with the meal. This is true for most aspects of life. Society needs to feel safe for people to truly feel happy.
You also can't ignore the mechanisms behind the private "wealth".
Air conditioning and central heating isn't a luxury when you live in a climate incompatible with human live without it. Having a car isn't a luxury when the infrastructure to bike, walk, or take public transit to your destinations does not exist. Having a three-thousand-square-foot home with a two-car garage isn't luxury when it is literally illegal to build the kind of mixed-use apartment building you actually want to live in. All of that is of course made worse when you're being forced to go into heavy debt to sustain this "luxury" lifestyle.
And as the article points out, it gets even more obvious when you look at day-to-day life. Sure, working that 9-hour-a-day job with a three-hour-a-day commute might mean you can afford another iPhone per year, but wouldn't you rather give up that iPhone for a 7-hour-a-day job with a 30-minute-a-day commute? Who care about wealth when you don't have the time and energy to spend that extra cash on things like meeting with your friends, cooking the meals you love, or enjoying a hike in the forest?
Plenty of seemingly asset-wealthy people are cash-poor, and even the cash-rich are usually time-poor. No wonder they aren't happy: they are too busy working to actually live.
I contend that American Unhappiness is manufactured and sustained by the constant onslaught of misinformation, broadcast by special interest groups, all of whom have it in their general plan to make you feel an unmet need, a base emotional response, a tickle in your amygdla.
Likely, your life is not that bad.
Likely, the fear you feel, waiting for a cab outside your favorite bistro, is a response to programming you ingested from the culture that tries to nurse you into a permanent state of semi-consciousness.
Fear is sensational, a proven sales tool, a political football, click-bait 'journalism'. There are whole armies of professional and amateur fear-mongers out there, who make it their life's mission to plant the seeds of fear into your imagination, to sell you a product, a candidate, a policy.
>> fulfillment requires more than material wealth,
Agreed, but...
>> which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten.
Reject the programming. Whether it is fear or desire that the advertisers/liars attempt to trigger in you, recognize the effort aimed at making you feel wants/needs that do not actually do you or our society any good at all, and reject the unhappiness they are trying to program into you.
It is an individual responsibility. An individual has authority over their own emotional states. Defend yourself from the onslaught of lies and liars.
> Society needs to feel safe for people to truly feel happy.
I don't disagree with this. But whose is responsible for 'feelings'?
Yes. The forced two-party system inevitably leads to an us-versus-them mentality. Everything gets divided into Good Things done by Us, and Bad Things done by Them. There's no room for nuance, everything has to be pushed to the extremes in order to get a handful of voters to flip.
In a healthy democracy with at least a handful of political parties the small groups of lunatics aren't going to poison the entire spectrum: they are mostly contained into the tiny extremist parties served by heavily biased extremist media. The vast majority of the population, however, is served by more moderate parties and more neutral media - where misinformation and blatant corruption is heavily frowned upon.
Turns out when people have a genuine alternative, they don't just stick with whatever shit they are trying to pull this time just because "the other guy is even worse".
Why would it make a difference? Offering developers a salary to contribute to an open source project is a good thing. Leave the developers to be free if they want to work for the offered amount.
There are often different incentives, constraints, and pay scales. Nothing against public organizations doing this obviously. Just don't see a lot of evidence that it works well in general.
if we are fully down, rest assured there will be no available hands to keep the status page updated
There is no quicker way for customers to lose trust in your service than it to be down and for them to not know that you're aware and trying to fix it as quickly as possible. One of the things Cloudflare gets right is the frequent public updates when there's a problem.
You should give someone the responsibility for keeping everyone up to date during an incident. It's a good idea to give that task to someone quite junior - they're not much help during the crisis, and they learn a lot about both the tech and communication by managing it.
Assuming Oracle did decide to go down that route, who would they sue? No one really uses the JavaScript name in anything official except for "JavaScriptCore" that Apple ships with Webkit.
My bad, after reading more it seems Deno is trying to get Oracle's trademark revoked, but I found out that "Rust for Javascript" devs have received a cease and desist from Oracle regarding the JS trademark, which may have triggered Deno to go after Oracle.
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
Firstly, in 'proper' servant leadership as taught by Greenleaf the leader is supposed to put the church before their own needs and wants. It is not about serving the people who report to you; it's about serving the organisation first. In a business context that's horribly toxic and a great way to spend years being exploited by a company that will grind you to burnout for very little money. Thankfully most people don't actually follow what Greenleaf teaches because they think it's about the people.
Secondly though, people don't bother to read much about it. They hear the term and a basic summary, and then fill in the blanks based on their own biases and assumptions. Consequently when someone says they practise servant leadership you can't know what they mean unless you know them well. People who practise their version of servant leadership assume other people mean the same thing by it, and automatically align themselves with that person based on (probably) false assumptions. It is not a helpful term because it's used for a huge range of leadership styles.
no, it has to be organisation first. it's no good to put people first if there's no job to go to. if you put the organisation first, you get a good working environment since it requires a leadership style that gets the best out of people. any leader or any employee should ideally be replaceable.
it's not "horribly toxic" as you say, because if that is the case your company is terrible in the first place.
Servant leadership is about the big lines, not only the company but being a positive force in society as well. If you truly understand it, it's probably the hardest kind of leadership to aspire to.
In fact, servant leadership is about turning the organizational chart upside down, where the leaders serve the other employees, making sure they have what they need so they get the best out if them
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
>I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
Wouldn’t the opposite be rather cooperation of self-organising autonomous people, gathered around common goals?
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”
End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.
For me the useful bit of servant leadership isn’t the religious origin, it’s the reversal of default: you’re not “above” your reports, you’re in service to them and the mission
All these trendy management things either go back to straight-up bullshit (this is the more common case) or some non-bullshit thing that's been ripped out of its original context such that it becomes bullshit.
It depends on what purpose you think prisons serve:
- If you believe that they're a punishment, then probably nothing.
- If you believe that prisons are there to rehabilitate people into being good members of society, then things like libraries, televisions, and other educational things should definitely be there.
- If you believe prisons are there mostly to protect the public from people who have committed crimes, then they should really be quite similar to life outside of prison just with the freedom to move around in public removed.
It's probably some combination of the second two. Prisons as a punishment only serves to create worse criminals who are suffering some deep trauma when they leave, which causes them to commit more crime. But also, people who have committed crimes that don't demonstrate a risk to others probably ought to receive non-custodial sentences and then prisons can be much smaller.
That's not an entirely fair measure though, considering Microsoft lost an antitrust case that was brought because they were unfairly leveraging their monopoly in operating systems to give them an advantage in browser adoption. The DOJ threatened to break up Microsoft over it, and eventually only stopped when Microsoft added an option for users to pick a difference default browser over IE.
By that time IE's dominance was beyond Mozilla's reach and it was only when Google leveraged their monopoly in online advertising that a real alternative option for users became viable.
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