I work for a mid-sized, publicly-traded tech company that has been inching towards profitability but the last couple quarterly earnings results have been disappointing (and rank-and-file bonuses were slashed to 25% of target) and the company had its first-ever round of layoffs last October. The CEO's last two years of comp were $20M and $10M which is obviously completely incongruous with the size, profitability, and stock performance of the company. It seems that there is a distortion in the market forces around executive compensation that functions in a similar way to venture capital -- investors are willing to pump outsized cash amounts into either funding rounds or executive comp since the occasional home run can result in stock returns that cover losses in other companies. It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?
I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?
(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)
> I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population
Just because market failures exist, doesn’t mean a non-market approach will work better. Our markets have a lot of issues, but so do our public policies. For me, the perfect example is land use and housing regulation. With the best of intentions, government policies have made housing costs sky rocket. Meanwhile in places like Tokyo where I used to live, limited zoning laws and straightforward building codes has led to dirt cheap apartments, wonderful, walkable neighborhoods, and clean air. Where I live in California, we’re drowning in parking requirements and environmental reviews. Nothing gets built. Air is dirty, traffic is horrible, and you have to go everywhere by car.
Like you, I’m not at all opposed to government regulation or intervention. But the devil is in the details. Would a government enforced pay cap be better than the current system? I think the only honest answer is we don’t know. We need to be humble when approaching public policy, acknowledging that how we intend our policies to function is often quite different from their actual effects.
Fair question and I don't think there are easy answers to the problem. I think the actions you suggest tend to result in a market environment like Europe's where there are more regulations but businesses are generally less competitive than US businesses and wages tend to be lower than in the US.
I get that there's an argument for "if we make sure innovation can thrive and make sure people have a lot of resources to work with, we'll come up with lots of solutions to problems and people will be able to access them". But if that were true, wouldn't it be coming through in our societal outcomes? In life expectancy, or crime, or social stability, or a general feeling of peace and safety and security?
We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare. We even spend more public money on healthcare, by far. We're in worse health while we're alive. Our life expectancy is ~the same as it was in 2001, in an age of medical miracles. Our homicide rate is close to the global average, and trailing many poor countries. We have the fifth-highest incarceration rate on Earth, many times higher than countries we think of as having terrifyingly oppressive governments, and on par with several of the world's worst dictatorships. Our citizens don't feel secure: that's one of the few things almost everyone in America agrees on, and part of why we're reaching a level of instability that hasn't been seen in a rich country in a long time.
That doesn't sound like a thriving country to me - certainly not given that we started as a superpower, have had 150 years of relative internal stability, are the beneficiaries of a global brain-drain in our favor for the entire postwar era, enjoy some of the world's richest natural resources, have tons of space to spread out, have friendly neighbors who haven't made war on us in a century, invented the stuff half the world runs on, operate the world's reserve currency, and have both literal and figurative mountains of capital.
We should be a shining utopia, the envy of planet Earth. But we aren't. How can that be if we're doing everything right, or even if we're closer to right than our contemporaries?
> We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare.
Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.
This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on. I'm not saying that these things you list aren't legitimate, but they are hardly pan-American.
The Deep South is a third world country that happens to be part of the United States, and there's not much the rest of us can or will do to fix problems that Southerners themselves have no desire to fix.
> Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.
It's less true, but it's still mostly true.
Even the highest life-expectancy state in the US (California, at 80.9 years) isn't very good by rich-nation standards. It ranks below - deep breath - Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, French Polynesia, Andorra, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Malta, Sweden, Macau, the UAE, Iceland, Canada, Martinique, Israel, Ireland, Qatar, Portugal, Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Germany, the UK, Bahrain, Chile, and the Maldives, coming in just above Costa Rica.
> This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on.
Rhode Island is the US' safest state at 1.5 homicides per 100k per year. That's seven times Japan's, triple China, South Korea, or Italy's, double Malaysia, Norway, or the UAE, and 50% higher than Denmark, Iceland, or Belgium.
Colorado is the US' least obese state at 22.6%. That's triple South Korea, double France, and 50% more than Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands. (I'm including only high-income countries in this list, since many poor countries have low obesity because food insecurity is a problem.)
Even the most cherry-picked favorable stats are still awful. Does the South drag most US averages down? Yeah, but not by that much.
There are sooo many confounding factors that it's not even worth discussing.
The EU is a patchwork for 27+ small countries. There is no unique digital market. There are 27 languages to cater to. 27 different cultures which are radically different compared to say, Texas versus Maine. General risk adverse culture after WW1 and WW2 where there are no VCs, even though for sure they could make money and Europe is full of tax loopholes they could use...
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
At this rate it's likely those "market forces" will come from the pitchfork, torch, etc markets.
Maybe get out more? I know _lots_ of people for whom this is true and who take multi-day road trips rather than deal with air travel.
I routinely flew for business before 9/11 and would typically show up about 15 minutes before boarding time at one of the three busiest airports in the US and typically got through security and would then had to wait 5-7 minutes before boarding would start. Air travel is radically different than it was pre-9/11.
Unfortunately, Benedict is conflating fundamentalism with literalism here. It's a common mistake (and "fundamentalist" has become essentially an epithet) although one that I am surprised to hear from someone as otherwise erudite and thoughtful as Benedict. Theological fundamentalism came out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...) and none of its earliest and strongest proponents (Machen, Van Til, etc.) were literalists. In fact, they were quite the opposite.
While certain strains of fundamentalism have literalist tendencies, there is nothing implicit literalist in fundamentalism. Some might look at the Five Fundamentals [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist%E2%80%93moderni...] and consider them implicitly literalist, but most of them are contained in the creeds and confessions that Catholicism and Protestantism hold together and so denying any of them would place one outside of either Catholic or Protestant doctrine.
That's very interesting, thank you for the color there. Especially clarifying the literalist and fundamentalist part. I'd always just sort of assumed that they are one and the same.
I'm not particularly religious but over time I've come to respect the erudite and philosophical side of it. It's so easy to just dismiss the entire thing when looking at the worst of it which IMO tends towards protestant church's that are more a political organization than a spirituality center. Or of course the scandalous and criminal history of the Catholic church covering up so many bad things.
Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
> admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat
One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation.
I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
I commend you on your careful consideration of the costs and potential benefits of various college choices. I didn't think that far ahead when I was 18 and unfortunately for many high school students, that choice can have a pretty significant impact on the trajectory of, at the very least, your early adult years.
That said, I did my undergrad at MIT about 25 yrs ago. I met my best friends there who, along with a lot of other students there, expanded my horizons in terms of ambition and possibilities in a good way. 20 years later, having MIT on my resume (along with a track record of solid tech work) still gets me a pretty incredible hit rate on job applications. I was offered a decent amount of financial aid but still came out with ~$80k in student loan debt which was a lot 25 years ago. Even in the early 2000s, I was able to pay that off pretty easily. I think that in the case of many career choices, the cost of a degree from an elite university is not worth it, but in the case of tech, I think the MIT degree is clearly worth it.
The one minor proviso I would add since you mentioned graduate work is that doing doctoral work at MIT is typically more difficult if you've done your undergrad there. On the other hand, doing an M.Eng. at MIT is quite easy if you have reasonable grades. The one-year M.Eng. _might_ be worth the extra year, but outside of narrow specialties, the opportunity cost of doctoral work relative to 3-5 years building experience and earning money in tech tends to favor the latter.
There's a huge difference between The Chosen and LToC -- while both may present a "gritty" and imaginative narrative including fictionalized accounts that are not canon, The Chosen does it in a way that does not contradict anything canonical while LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross. As such, it should come as no surprise that The Chosen is popular and well-received among believers and LToC was widely criticized.
Depends whose canon you're talking about because there is no canonical canon. Kazantzakis was very influenced by Gnosticism which set him at odds with the Orthodox and Catholic versions. Personally I found the story to be the most accessible and human version of the story.
Where does the LToC contradict the gospels? They aren't a comprehensive diary of his every thought. You can't say Jesus didn't fantasize about a life with Mary, because that's proving a negative. It's just a proposed fiction to imagine Jesus in a more human way than the vagaries of the canonical gospels. I can see how that would upset some people, but I'd be interested to know where the contradictions exist. It made me really consider the gravity of being the son of god in a way that the gospels simply aren't equipped to deliver.
The Last Temptation shows Jesus’ deity as imperceptive and impotent, contradicting his nature: not a sin so much as a denial of Jesus’ nature.
The imperfect human desires before and during the vision also carry on well past harmless observation and affect the man in a way that would have concerned the one who figuratively(?) advised to pluck out an eye rather than be burdened by sin caused by it. The temptations are incongruent with the refutation of temptation and self-knowledge displayed in the wilderness.
That said! I agree the film is a marvelous examination of human weakness and faith in this life.
Potentially you are talking about different things, the action and the organization.
I can read
> but I don’t believe they are that plain evil
so that the writer does not think the ccp is just evil, meaning they are more than just evil. So the writer might think the cpp does evil things probably including:
> disappearing someone in order to intimidate them into operating "on a short leash"
By "plain evil" I mean a cartoon-like villains that do things (and laugh) just for the sake of being evil. What CCP are doing is playing a game of chess where they are after some end goal, thinking multiple steps in advance. Killing someone this public will have too much bad consequences later.
The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."
The puritans are undeservingly white-washed and praised.
They were extremists by contemporary standards (an insanely low bar).
They barely waited until they stopped starving to start being jerks to each other and antagonizing the natives.
If you want to idolize early settlers idolize Rhode Islanders, they were basically successive waves of people who left Massachusetts because the latter was no place for anyone who let their conscience get in the way of their ideology (amazing how little some things change in 400yr) and they managed to maintain some of the best relations with the natives.
It's more the fringe offshoots of the congregationalists that shattered off in the Great Awakening as they moved west. There's also a strong current of xenophobia in many of the 19th century abolitionist movements, as the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, etc brought their drinking cultures with them.
From the announcement: "You should consider the initial code to be at an alpha stage — it is not complete, not thoroughly tested, and not suitable for production use. We are planning to release a beta in the next few weeks, and expect it to stabilize and be ready for production by early summer (mid-2021)."
Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'm guessing they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch. Given that, I doubt they will be well-equipped to keep pace with new feature development.
I would question the assumption that this is “not suitable for production use” means “everything is broken and we're way behind” rather than, say, “we are being extremely conservative because our customers will expect support as soon as we say it's production ready and we need to test every upgrade scenario for our large number of existing customers”. The AWS-managed ElasticSearch seems to be pretty popular and I would expect them to be as conservative about new offerings as they are with, say, RDS.
> they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch
The bulk of the work thus far has been to strip out the non-OSS components ("X-pack") and the many references to it, nothing to do with packaging, distributing, or even maintaining and developing features.
I for one will be happy when those are taken out. So many headaches trying to get bloated Kibana to start as a docker container before realizing that some random x-pack-disable flag needs to be set for it to start without a random error.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Now that the fork is publicly available, others can contribute to get it ready, which wasn't possible until now.
Yes, others can contribute, but significant feature development on large-scale OSS projects tends to be driven by developers paid to work on the project full-time and coordinated by an organized steering committee with clear governance (or company if the product is owned by a single company). I don't see any of that in place for OpenSearch and getting that all started up is not at all a trivial endeavor.
The fork announcement was announced as a response to the Elastic stuff. I don't think they made any predictions about when it'd be ready in that blog post, so I'm not sure why they would've underestimated anything?
I think it's helpful to point out that the Bible contains a variety of types of literature including historical narrative, poetry, etc., some of which uses figurative language that is not intended to be taken literally.
We all understand this when we use modern language such as "sunrise" which is not literally true (the sun does not actually "rise" in the sky though it appears that way to the casual observer) even though we're educated enough to understand basic astronomical phenomena such as the rotation of the earth giving rise to daytime and nighttime.
A Biblical literalist who takes figurative language in the Bible literally would end up making the same mistake that someone taking "sunrise" literally would. This is not at all an attempt to classify as figurative language all controversial or supernatural claims of the Bible (its claim that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead is clearly supernatural and impossible to classify as figurative), but so many of the lists of contradictory claims in the Bible rely on wooden interpretations of what is pretty clearly figurative language.
Thank you for making this point. It is important to recognize that the Bible does make use of a variety of literary techniques (eg. psalms, parables, etc. especially). However, there are vast swathes of history throughout; it isn't just a book of fictional stories.
I think when people talk about a "literal" interpretation of the Bible, they mean that it uses human language (including figures of speech like "sunrise", number rounding/approximation, etc) to describe literal, historical events with exceptions for explicit fictions or metaphors (such as psalms or parables).
