I live in the UK, where we've had instant, free, interbank payments for the last few years (we've had free interbank payments for > 10 years, but the instant part came in a few years ago as part of the Faster Payments scheme).
Spoiler alert: it has not eliminated the need for credit cards. The credit card system has a lot of flexibility and integrations to make for a superior user experience in a number of situations. For example, a lot of banks let you create virtual cards for specific purposes (eg: I have one for all my online subscriptions, and another for merchants I've not dealt with before). Not to mention Apple/Google Pay and their integration into basically every single online payments platform.
It sounds like this person has worked with some truly mediocre product managers. I’m a PM, from a self-taught engineering background, and I’ve worked with many mediocre folks too across all disciplines.
I view my job primarily as risk management. A great team of engineers and designers will face a huge number of risks to shipping great products, like not having the right skill set to articulate their vision to get others on board, or having lawyers impose requirements or restrictions on what can and cannot be done. My job is to manage that, to help bring out the best in the team so they can get on with the actually important work of building and shipping great products.
I judge success by how redundant I am. My goal is to not be needed, for the team to have the right context, confidence and support to make good decisions without me.
I love working with engineers to level-up their skills so they can do just this; I work with my EM partners to understand the strengths, weaknesses and goals of each engineer, and try and find ways I can help them progress.
In an ideal, utopian world maybe I’m not needed. I can understand that argument. But in most cases, doing truly great things will run up against challenges and risks, and a good PM works in partnership with their team to overcome them and is a net value add.
I’m a PM too and I agree; I judge how good a job I’m doing by how smooth everything runs for my team - how they have everything they need to do their best work, they have all the context, requirements, insight, metrics, goals….etc they have an understanding of what problem they’re trying to solve who we’re solving it for and crucially why we need to solve it.
A good PM creates an environment where engineers like OP thinks the PM is not needed because “PMs do nothing” or whatever. It’s short sighted and frankly insulting
The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/). Clean layout, no ads for subscribers, native mobile apps that perform well. Overall, it's my favourite source for general news.
You’re not wrong; that is the blog’s style. I enjoy the format for exposing me to a cross-section of opinions from across the internet, on topics I find interesting, with very little work on my part. That’s probably more an indictment on Twitter’s product stagnation than a shower of praise on this blog and it’s author.
I can guarantee that the vast majority of implementation time was more likely due to verification and auditing of the solution, rather than the solution itself.
In a former life, I worked as a stage and orchestra manager, including a few contracts with some of Australia's most well-known professional orchestras and opera companies. tl;dr: They work harder, for longer hours, than the vast majority of people in tech.
They will spend a full working day in rehearsal, then go home and spend a few hours doing solo practice. They will spend hours of time (often uncompensated) notating scores ahead of the first rehearsal of new work or production.
As others have pointed out, the economic model for orchestras and just about any live performance cannot support high salaries. Many musicians will have instruments worth thousands of dollars, so they will have loans against them. Then there is the venue and equipment hire, the transportation costs and the wages for the crew behind the scenes - people to set up the stage and run the show (like me), lighting and sound designers and operators, etc (14+ hour days are not uncommon).
It is a very hard way to earn a living, and on top of it all most jobs are contracts measured in weeks or months, not full-time positions. Not only do you have to be unbelievably talented and passionate about it, you also have to possess superhuman resilience to handle the lifestyle. I have nothing but respect to people who do this job for a living.
Amongst other reasons, lack of support for anti-cheat systems (like EAC and BattleEye) have stopped big-name games like Destiny 2, Fortnite and others from easily porting to Linux. The Steam Deck has started to change that, prompting the ecosystem to slowly come around.
> The fact that they were both unpunished for finding loopholes in employment law
Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes? By definition, loopholes are perfectly legal. They may be against the spirit of the law, but they are still legal.
>Why should companies or people be punished for finding and using loopholes?
You answered it yourself. They're against the spirit of the law.
In any other circumstance where rules or obligations are enforced, exploiting loopholes is completely unacceptable behaviour.
(To clarify, I'm not arguing that the judge made the wrong decision in this particular case. Instead, I don't think this type of behaviour should be tolerated by the system at all.)
Now it’s the responsibility of people to judge the spirit of sets of laws? It’s not enough to navigate the spaghetti of modern legislation, you have to rationalize the intent across several strands and ensure that you’re following it?
> You answered it yourself. They're against the spirit of the law.
This is not right. If the spirit of the law is obvious, write it down.
Otherwise you're just advocating for people having to know the letter of the law (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money), and the spirit of the law, whatever that is.
If a state's only job in this regard is to write down some rules that let it get free money from workers, it should take responsibility for writing the rules down properly.
Most laws have some ambiguity, it's the reason we have courts that have the ability to make somewhat arbitrary rulings, so that they can enforce a fair and just outcome that supports, 'the spirit of the law'. It goes both ways too, sometimes someone breaks a law in literal terms, but by the spirit of the law it isn't actually important. Courts dismiss cases of broken laws all the time based on that.
You simply can't codify everything, just like in software, there are bugs in law, and people will take advantage in weird and unusual ways. Courts come in and remedy the outcome of the bug, and that ruling is used in future cases to make better decisions, so you can consider that a hotfix.
> (even when paying more money is against the spirit of the law, that will not matter; only when it's about paying less money)
The literal law is to not pay people below Australia's legal minimum wage. It's not a "target wage", so going over it is obviously not relevant, it is the bare minimum. The spirit of that suite of laws is to stop companies from exploiting workers.
Well, that would be ideal :) But I think a loophole isn't "something that's not yet been interpreted by a court". It's "something that's agreed to be the case, but the people writing the rules to get money didn't foresee."
A whole lot of people would love to but legislatures across the globe are colluding with oligarchs to impede the legislative process.
Writing down law that would close loopholes with specificity is bad for business, which has symbolically been expanded to include other skin colors and genders so it can be argued the people having their agency back is actually regressing gains for some (gains in an intentionally manipulated ledger of exchange value thanks to loopholes).
Never mind the industrial mess threatens the species. The tribal fractal anyone happens to live in must never change!
It’s become a truism we want this because no alternatives are allowed to be.
In a system based on the rule of law the only way to make people stop using loopholes is to close them by changing the law. People are entitled to do what's in their best interest by staying within the law to the limit. If the issue is one of interpretation of the law then courts are there to decide.
Finding the spirit of the laws is usually just trying to judge how it matches with the ideals of the society as a whole (at least, best case scenario), as interpreted by the courts, so if you're against the spirit then you're probably against some ideal of the society.
Taking the idea of wage theft as an example, the spirit of the law is that as a society we typically don't want to be exploited by companies, but there exists no shortage of capitalists who are against the spirit of that suite of laws. I would call them antagonists to those ideals of society.
It would be interesting to hear about a law who's spirit you are against, and to try and match it up with a societal ideal. I can't come with anything myself right now. Perhaps weed? It's still mostly illegal here, but I think many courts in this day and age would be lenient, as it becomes clear that society's ideals have changed in that area.
(edit: I edited this comment a lot as my thoughts evolved on it, sorry if anyone caught it mid-edit)
> The law maker is at fault, if there are loop holes.
It's very tough to distinguish loopholes that were added accidentally by lawmakers, and loopholes that are added intentionally to appease corporate donors.
Same reason people breaking into a website using a bug should be punished. The bug shouldn’t be there, and if you find the bug and do a responsible disclosure that should be fine, but to ezploit the bug for your own gain is not ok.
Do you live your life by the idea that anything not specifically illegal is acceptable for you to do?
Probably not because a lot of societal norms are regulated by shame and shared ideas of decency. This decision was made by a person or small group of people inside Amazon. Maybe those people wouldn’t have made that decision if their identities could become public?
> Do you live your life by the idea that anything not specifically illegal is acceptable for you to do?
This seems like deliberate silliness. Someone somewhere is writing down rules about how much money they get from you. If you don't obey the rules you get locked up. If you do obey the rules you don't. This isn't about doing things not specifically illegal; this is about how it's okay to obey the rules someone wrote down.
Where do you draw the line? When religion gets a foothold in a place then popular sentiment, imparted by religion, can be made law. Examples: Homosexuality, women showing their faces, women travelling without a male family escort, all illegal.
There is a saying: "Legislate in haste, perish at leisure". Not all things should require legislation, and those that are to be legislated should be fully and thoroughly considered. Often times it can be best to rely upon the moral will of society to impart a desired action than it is to strictly enforce compliance with that action. Its not perfect, but neither hard-line or soft-line is.
I hate to godwin this, but you realize that a lot of atrocities that have happened throughout history have been legal, right? Japanese internment was legal. South African apartheid was legal. The trail of tears was legal. American slavery was legal. The holocaust was legal under Nazi law. Legal != perfectly acceptable.
It wouldn't be called a loophole if it was legitimate. Loophole implies there's some kind of something wrong with it. The fact that you can't quite point out what it is is what makes it a loophole.
It absolutely would be. Labeling things as loopholes is politically motivated. It also absolves lawmakers of the responsibility to create functional laws when they can label people who follow them abusive.
Loopholes are legal in theory but not necessarily in practice. They could have just as easily ruled that the use of a private truck requires compensation on top of pay.
For what it's worth, etymology of the word "arbitrary":
late Middle English (in the sense ‘dependent on one's will or pleasure, discretionary’): from Latin arbitrarius, from arbiter ‘judge, supreme ruler’, perhaps influenced by French arbitraire .
I’d go so far as to say it is one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, and a poster child for how OSS should be run. From the beginning, it has cultivated a welcoming community that produced a range of tutorials and learning materials for all skill levels. It’s evolution has been steady, and it has seemingly found a way to be successful and impactful in a space where closed-sourced competitors are vastly more well-funded.
I distinctly remember how incredible it was when Big Buck Bunny was released with all assets and project files freely available. I learnt so much from that, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was a catalyst that led to many, many people gaining the skills and drive to produce new creative works. I hope Blender continues to inspire and enable many future generations of creators.
