>not only can't do anything about it, but you'll never know.
And what would you do if you are there in person? Challenge them to a duel?
This whole scenario sounds very paranoid to me.
In my experience if you treat people decently and perform OK most co-workers won't talk negatively about you behind your back. Or maybe I just never noticed...
it did have 0 impact on me though if it happened.
I dont see how one anonymous poll at a FAANG company proves that.
Just because you are doing busywork doesn't mean it's efficient.
FWIW I agree with your other points.
Longevity isn’t really about adding more years. No one wants to live another 10,20,30 more years how we currently do. But, if you can improve everyone’s health span, the amount of healthy, able bodies years, why wouldn’t you? It would be a great relief to our health care system. People can spend more time doing what they love without worrying about their body giving out on them.
Being someone who lost two immediate family members before 30, I’d do anything to have had them live longer and healthy instead of watching the slow and fast decline of the human body.
I'll raise my hand and say I'll gladly live another 30, 300, or 3,000 years longer than we currently do. Why in the hell would I want to cease existing?
Yeah - I don't get this take. Always rings a bit fanatical where you believe in some heaven, or suicidal at worst. I enjoy my neurons firing, because if they weren't, i wouldn't know it.
I was referring to how a lot of the elderly live where they have no community, their body is shot, their mind is going, and modern medicine just keeps them in pain longer (if you were commenting directly to me)
Almost everyone is afraid of death. Like, if you point a gun at someone, most people will feel fear. The main exceptions are people who are so sick with age-related diseases that they can't live happy lives anymore, but, of course, aging interventions would help with that.
Not sure if you are kidding, but death is bad. I assume you don't want to die now, so why would you want to any other time? And don't say 'because I'm old', because obviously aging is part of the problem. Being 20-30 forever is the goal.
Can't wait to be a perpetually 20-year-old immortal Wal-Mart cashier because all the good jobs have already been taken by the other immortal 20-year-olds. Cleaning public toilets for the rest of eternity.
Death is not bad - without it life makes no sense.
Being 30 forever and immortal would be my definition of hell.
Death is doing a great job, leave it alone.
you are reading something into my comment that is not there - I was saying immortal life would be a meaningless existence and no panacea to the human condition.
Trying to escape death is not only futile, it is a waste of life.
You are right of course, we should all touch grass more (I.e. really live) instead of trying to "solve" the human condition.
You misunderstood me too. Go touch grass and see what is so great about living. Then I don’t think you can fairly say we should have less years to live.
As a big science fiction fan who has been reading his whole life about fantastical possible futures for humanity, I'm not so much afraid of death as just super bummed that I'm going to miss out on things like exploring the solar system and hopefully beyond. The universe is such a mind-bogglingly fascinating place, and we know so little about it. I'm intensely curious to know how that's all going to pan out.
That is, if humanity doesn't destroy itself before then.
He was already on parole for a previous violent felony. The police literally arrested him at the scene of the murder where he was half naked and covered in the blood of the victims. He also admitted to having committed statutory rape on the 15 year old that he murdered.
Just about every single person on death row will suddenly claim to have found yet another round of evidence proving innocence when their previous appeal doesn’t work out. It’s a classic delaying tactic, and in this case I agree with the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decides what types of arguments can be made, they remand the specifics of individual cases to lower courts. It would have been perfectly fine to say your guilty as hell, but feel free to argue your case indefinitely as there aren’t enough death row inmates to matter.
Except a state judge had already given them the option to a retrial (based on ineffective counsel, not "evidence of innocence") before the appeal was made to the federal courts.
They apparently didn't like their chances at retrial, even with "effective counsel".
That’s irrelevant, I expect the both the guilty and innocent to try any argument to get free. Saying you don’t get to make an argument is problematic independent of any specifics because making the argument isn’t winning the argument.
"We couldn't simultaneously argue two conflicting theories of defense"...
Isn't quite the same argument when your revealed preference shows you not to believe either theory to stand on its own (or together).
"Your honor, we'd like this conviction thrown out because we couldve/shouldve claimed 'defense option B'." Retrial granted. "No! We don't actually want to retry with 'defense option B'! We just needed a reason to throw out conviction based on 'defense option A'!"
It’s perfectly reasonable to argue you don’t want to waste time in prison waiting for a trial if you think the evidence is clear enough.
An appeals judge should be able to make that call the same way a trial judge can dismiss charges before trial. That appeals judge can easily say, it’s relevant but not clear enough for me to dismiss the case.
PS: Thus various standards of evidence “beyond reasonable doubt” vs “clear and convincing” vs “preponderance” etc.
What is the standard to be used by a court sitting in appeal on issues of fact not presented at trial to a jury of a defendant’s peers when throwing away that jury’s verdict?
No, deciding to (not) call an expert witness to present a different theory (that conflicts with the rest of your defense claims) isn't "found evidence". It's strategy.
It's the same buyers remorse, no-true-scotsman argument. Case lost, therefore ineffective assistance.
The lawyer could have presented a different argument, but didn't. Convicted now wants to make a different argument on appeal.
'That injury shouldn't have killed her that quickly.' isn't new medical evidence. Just an argument not made.
'Also I forgot I saw a boy hit her with a pipe. It must have been that injury. Even though I just claimed the same time frame was impossible if I had hit her.' Isn't new evidence, just a new argument.
This is on top of him not allowing the mom to bring her to the hospital until the next day, after she was already dead. Eta: Oh yea, also on top of the admitted statutory rape stuff.
>where federal investigators found evidence suggesting he was innocent
No, they just decided (with the benefit of hindsight) that they would have used a different defense strategy.
That's not "found evidence suggesting he was innocent."
I didn't know the details of the case or am a lawyer; it just seemed this was what op was talking about. but looking into it the case seems pretty clear cut.
Who says a life without (or even just with less) alcohol is boring? There’s millions of things to do besides drink. There’s thousands of hobbies and sports to enjoy. There’s vast areas of natural and cultural beauty to explore. There are countless cities and cultures to visit, cuisines to taste, music to enjoy.
Seriously, people who think that drinking is the only thing to do are the boring ones.
To be fair most people can't visit countless cities weekly, can't visit or don't care for the nature you like, and the increased injury risk of many sports (compared to just cycling for cardio and doing resistance training) is probably as bad as the risks from moderate drinking.
Imagine if your life was just going utterly wrong. You're working hard as you can but you can barely make food or rent, and you're so tired every day that all you can do is just lie there like a dull sack remembering constantly and inescapably mulling at just how wrong everything is in your life. There's no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel, your existence is just this until you are broken and thrown out.
Now imagine there's a magic potion that make it feel like it all goes away even if for just a little while.
Then that life is already insufferable in my view. As a non-drinker, I would focus on fixing some of the root causes versus trying to dull my misery.
The fact one chooses to imbibe instead is not the thing bringing you joy, it’s escapism. So the fact you would conflate that to others that are content and have no need to escape is ass backwards logic.
If the criticism was phased as, “a drink really helps me unwind after a stressful day/week” I’d get it. But it’s usually projected outwards as “you must be boring/miserable for not drinking”. That’s the rub.
But many times you can’t fix the root cause. Maybe one of your parents is dying. Maybe your relationship with your spouse is falling apart. Maybe you bought a house in the last year and now you’re $50,000 underwater.
wait til you find out some people prefer their faculties dulled by a hangover than being fully present and in the moment for their dreary morning-midday routines.
Strangely some of my faculties are actually made keener by a mild hangover. I'm more empathetic, have keener hearing, and am in a reflective, more receptive frame of mind.
Unfortunately these effects are inseparable from less desirable ones: guilt, anxiety, upset guts, hypersensitivity to smells, hair-trigger impatience, flop sweat.
As a casual drinker, it's bizarre that there is this rather prominent belief from others that you cannot enjoy your life more if you drink from time to time
That’s like saying your drinking status is immutable. I’m a non drinker but that sure as hell doesn’t mean I’ve never drank in the past and know exactly how it affects my enjoyment in life.
Also I say I’m a non drinker as I think it’s the most accurate description but it’s also not a law or taken super duper literally. Middle aged Me probably averages 3 drinks a year. Some years I might have ten, some years zero. I had a few years where I drank every day. I partied a lot as a teen (regular shitface drunk), quit for most my 20s, then started drinking wines when I was in my early 30s, and quit again and have been super infrequent drinker since (about last 12 years). I’m always surrounded by people drinking, I know they enjoy it, I don’t frown upon them for imbibing. It looks like a hobby to me, people talk about whiskey/wine/brewers like they talk about sports teams. I’m just not very interested in it. Sports either for that matter.
That's a straw man though. Nobody said that you can't enjoy life when you drink from time to time. The thread is a response to someone saying that a life without alcohol would be a boring life (and a life focused on consumption, which is an even weirder argument).
Just because you don't find your life enhanced by something doesn't mean that something is useless... And of course we can live without it. I posit we can live quite a fulfilling life as a hunter gatherer in the kalahari.
Anyway, you can be quite a successful billionaire and have no one likes you. Being right and rigid is boring, sometimes being unhinged is interesting.
Well, I definitely see the attraction. What I don’t get is the projection.
Just because you think your life would be miserable/boring without alcohol, doesn’t mean my actual life without alcohol is miserable/boring. To me, I find people that lean into this projection don’t even realize that their life is already miserable and the drink is what makes things tenable
Translation: "Don't be a cog in the giant capitalist machine, be an adventurous free-thinking rebel, by..."
*checks notes*
"By regularly buying goods from alcohol companies, and especially by making those purchases (and chronic low-level self-poisoning) a core part of your self-identity like a good little consumer!"
Oh wait, was I not supposed to draw attention to that second part?
There’s nothing inherently consumerist or capitalist about drinking alcohol. Making beer for your own consumption is safe, easy, and cheap, which is probably why it’s been drunk since before recorded history. Hard alcohol can be more difficult but entirely possible to do yourself
The guy I was replying to was satirizing beer drinkers as consumerist cogs in the machine. I pointed out that of all the things to criticize someone for enjoying alcohol is probably one of the least corporate. If buying alcohol makes you a monopolist’s bitch then so does buying anything and everyone in the entire world is hopeless.
It’s like claiming solar panels make you a slave to factory owners when they can be used, operated and repaired in a distributed manner. Sure, maybe, but like what a weird hill to die on?
I don't know where you're from, but in the UK, over £50 billion is spent on it each year.
If you've seen anybody who lives for Friday / Saturday night and a Sunday hangover, it fits the consumerist image pretty neatly. Many (obviously not all) are slaves to alcohol.
We've all heard the wine'o'clock jokes from middle aged women in the office, people struggling to complete "Dry January" and similar challenges, colleagues talking about how excited they are to get a drink when they get home.
These people are held under the thumb of a handful or two alcohol companies. In many cases, it's simply a wasted weekend and quite a sum of wasted money, especially when you can't remember any of it.
It feels like you're completely ignoring the comment that started this all, which then throws your comparisons out of whack. Here's what it looks like to me.
______
1 - Luminouslow: "Pfft, health shmelth, the corporations want us to be cowards who don't drink alcohol, and this is playing right into their hands!"
2 - Terr: "That's hypocritical nonsense. If anything, people like you--ones who treat regular alcohol as an important part of their identity and try to ostracize people who don't drink--are the real corporate sheep here."
3 - Subjectsigma: "Alcohol isn't always corporate, people can brew their own at home."
4 - Xornot: "That would be a very different situation than the world we're discussing right now."
5 - Subjectsigma: "But Terr started criticizing people who drink as consumer sheep, which is very unfair because they could have bought locally."
6 - Terr: "Dude, WTF, did you even see what I was replying to!? Where the guy suggested not buying anything was worse!? [Recursion error]
It was more of a reaction to how smug and condescending you came off as, but no I don’t agree with your interpretation of the original comment, which I interpreted as making fun of HN yuppies as opposed to a comment about society. I don’t know how or why (I really doubt Big Weed ™ is astroturfing the orange site) but the way people on HN chomp at the bit to defend weed and other drugs but decry alcohol for being “evil” feels distinctly robotic and manufactured.
That aside - the more I think about it the more I don’t understand how you could look at such a globally distributed and diverse product as alcohol and think its consumers can be easily stereotyped. Not even months ago in America there was a boycott of a massively popular brand of beer on political grounds; how very sheepish of those consumers!
Proponents of legalizing marijuana aren't necessarily advocates for it's use or benefits: for example, I am one. I have absolutely no interest marijuana, and don't particularly care for people who's identity is "I smoke weed" (I mean, the same would also apply for alcohol too).
But that's quite different to thinking the current regime of anti-drug enforcement, incarceration, and generally catastrophic waste of time, resources and lives - is at all a productive or even useful thing to do for society.
I'll discourage everyone from drinking alcohol or smoking weed, but that's very different from thinking any of this should be banned.
Though I'll happily commit to the notion that I suspect you'd get a lot fewer fights among dedicated stoners then drinkers on a friday night.
Funny and there I thought the alcohol industry is a multi-billion dollar business creating lots of value for their shareholders (arguably externalizing the cost for general society).
It's also quite telling that you consider not drinking a boring life, in my experience (obviously this is anecdotal) people who are not drinking are more active and are typically more open to try new things.
I understand this point of view and I used to share it, but I see it from the other side now:
I used alcohol to cope with stress at work/life and when I stopped, the switch flipped and I saw how much I numbed myself to the pain that was necessary to change any of it.
I basically grew a pair over 90 days. Now, none of people's manipulation or crocodile tears affect me.
If you are stress- and anxiety-free, you don't have this problem and can afford it, but I highly recommend to people to quit drinking and doing drugs who recognize themselves in what I described.
How much did you drink? I went from 2/day during my phd - clearly to cope with the stress - to 1/day to 3/week...
I however really love the taste of good specialty beers and the meme of drinking a beer while cooking&eating food. Not sure if I want to cut down any further, I enjoy drinking too much. But investing any technique to increase anxiety resistance sounds worthwhile to me, otoh...
Indeed, don't drink beer and wine. Don't eat meat, just eat bugs instead! Don't eat white rice, oh wait, don't eat brown rice instead! Don't eat gluten! Don't eat dairy because it was not suppose to be this way after infancy.
Jesus, where is the line. I'm tired of other people to tell me what to eat and drink on a weekly basis.
Are you seriously complaining that some academics are advising you about the health consequences of some habits, while you constantly are bombarded by commercials and other media trying to influence what you eat and drink?
policy is forced on you, advertisements make suggestions. one is communism, the other is free market. if you value individual freedom, you should care about these things.
Bread is an absolutely massive number of calories for what it is.
In a pastrami sandwich, about 50% of the calories will be from the bread alone.
People can eat bread, but when they wonder why it's hard to lose weight they tend to ignore this unconsidered contributor (conversely if you're working in a field or at hard labour job, breads a pretty great, compact calorie source).
> but when they wonder why it's hard to lose weight
Dude but it's their problem. You can get heroin and crack on the streets right now. I do not want things to be banned just because some dumbass is doing it wrong.
Literally reminds me of the anti-cannabis activist who's biggest argument was that "I smoked some weed, went home and they said my relative died and I laughed. Now I think nobody should ever use cannabis and it should be banned completely."
Dude literally no one is calling for a bread or alcohol ban in this thread.
You have been complaining about a study which suggested that people who care about their health might want to re-evaluate their risk appetite in light of updated data.
All bodies are different: some people react well to a vegan diet, others get so broken by the FODMAPs in plant-based proteins that they can only eat meat and greens. When you interpret dietary advice not as "this is what you should eat and drink" but instead as "this worked for me; it might work for you too" it brings a whole lot more inner peace. The basic tried-and-tested ground rules are pretty simple: cover your nutritional needs, enjoy vices sparingly. How that looks specifically is entirely dependent on your own body and mind. Maybe the minor physical-health hit from social alcohol consumption is offset by the mental-health gains from socialising with friends.
Sure zoom is still used, but I would be surprised if it's on the same order of magnitude.
I'm not trying to argue that commuting is more environmentally friendly, it's very likely not, only that I need a bit more substantiation than "it's obviously true," and I particularly would want substantiation on the long term. I also would want to understand if electric cars are being accounted for.
The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.
Definitely a USA problem. Cars are poison, literally and metaphorically. I don't think the average American has experienced what car-less living is like and how much better it is.
My critique of your original post is that there are many reason's remote work might be better, but environmentalism probably isn't the strongest.
> The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.
Not anymore. Most jobs in a city are not in the center, they are in the suburbs as well. If you want a short commute you have to live in the suburbs.
Note that in most cases (US - other countries are different!) there are zero places to live within walking distance of the office. Suburbs don't have mixed use zoning so it is illegal to live near where you work. While city centers might allow it (not all do) in theory, in practice rent is so high in the city center that common people cannot afford to live within walking distance of a job there. At least the city center has a form that supports transit, but you still can't walk there from home.
Note that I said form not not density. Suburbs have plenty of density to support transit, but the way things are built mean a transit can't get to enough people.
My team is located in 3 different timezones. Using zoom/meet is a requirement for absolutely every single one of our meetings, whether we are in office or at home.
Situations like this are extremely common in the industry, at least common enough to justify almost every company I've ever word equipping their meeting rooms with video-conferencing hardware.
This may not be universally true, but voice-only makes a difference, too.
Audio is very low bandwidth, but for work it is usually more than adequate. Screenshare, where important, is mostly just a matter of providing small diffs over time, it's usually much cheaper both to encode/decode than normal video streaming. You can also run it point to point in smaller calls, which means fewer hops and datacenters (more routers, perhaps, but you were going to need them anyway)
That's a nice excuse for when I want to just do what I want instead of staring at stupid camera just so someone can see me looking at them in the square on their screen.
Because if you don't have to drive to work in the city every day you're not going to care if your house is a 3 hour drive away. So you buy that new giant single family home with the large lot instead of the two bedroom condo that's in walking distance or the older townhome that has a sub-45 min driving commute. This might be a very North America problem but with the pandemic and the rise of WFH it's something that's been observed. The prices of homes outside the city have risen faster than those inside the city at least in Canada [0].
>heating an office space with 500+ people is much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses
Citation needed.
I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this.
In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
I said I'm not convinced, it obviously isn't a general thing.
A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
A 2kW electric heater can heat up any reasonable size office room up to a temperature where you are going to have to strip to your underwear (or turn it off) in under an hour in my experience.
Even if it's on 8 hours a day constantly, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that's 320kWh or just over £100 a month at UK energy prices.
In comparison, we have a 1600 sq ft home and only have $50 USD gas bills lately. It's definitely been higher (at least double), but we've been learning to live with a colder thermostat.
Granted this is the US, and natural gas is considerably cheaper here than in a lot of countries in Europe right now, so you probably need to at least double what I said anyway for Europe.
Is that € 500 for just the working hours? Because homes are also generally heated for other uses than work. Those reasons don't go away if you work at the office. If you've got a spouse working from home, or kids coming from school, that house is going to be heated anyway.
The norms are different in different locations. Where I live (Sweden), I'd say pretty much everybody sets a comfortable temperature and keeps it at that.
OTOH, our houses are generally heavily insulated, so while heating a house is expensive, keeping it heated is relatively cheap. I'm always amazed at the lack of insulation when I travel abroad. I never freeze as much as when I leave Scandinavia (no joke).
For those of us who live in a place that reaches freezing temperatures for months on end, there's no choice. If I don't heat my house, my pipes will freeze and I'll be out thousands of dollars in repair work and damage.
I turn the heat down to 55 or so (the lowest the thermostat will go) when I'm away for a few days. But I've never heard of anyone not leaving their heat on some setting for this reason. Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
> Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
Grew up in a place that reaches -25c pretty often and never heard of that. It's in europe though so we probably have better insulation. I could leave my house 3 days and no pipe would burst, I've never heard of anyone having burst pipes now that I think about it. When I went to school and my parents were at work we'd shut down the heating completely, we were pretty poor so there is that, but I don't remember being cold
When I was in california we'd have to run heating full blast 24/7 to maintain 16c indoor so that my explain a few things
Woah, that's wild! I've lived in mostly wooden houses in the Northeast for most of my life, and it seems to happen to one or two people in every community per year.
It's mostly a problem where I come from during power outages -- if you don't have power for 2-3 days, you might not be able to run even a propane-based heating system. But maybe the prevalance of water baseboard heating systems contributes; I imagine they're the most vulnerable pipes in the house to freezing, since they by nature sit closest to cold exterior temperatures.
One more thing I assumed was a worldwide problem, that it turns out is just a result of shoddy American building quality. Sigh.
We lower the heat if nobody is home. But, that's the difference between 70* and 65*. With no heat, the house would eventually be 32* in the dead or winter.
And we only do that because smart thermostats exist and use our phones as presence sensors. Without that, we'd have to manually lower the heat and I doubt we'd bother/remember.
I certainly wouldn't heat your home when nobody is home, but most people do return home after a day at the office, and many people don't live alone. That's what I'm referring to.
Or do you demand that they live in the cold while you're at the office?
> The most common way of heating here is that you have radiators set up
Most people here would need to actively tweak it every time the leave the house and every time they come in. And do it separately for each room. Just from the way how heating works - you have valve in each room that you turn in order to adjust heating.
I do. I turn up the heat in the morning and turn it down again in the evening. Smart thermostats can do that automatically, but my home office doesn't have a smart thermostat.
I work from home full time, my gas bill is a fraction of that (~GBP100/month), and that's even accounting for the crazy energy cost increases we've seen in the UK.
And what would you do if you are there in person? Challenge them to a duel?
This whole scenario sounds very paranoid to me. In my experience if you treat people decently and perform OK most co-workers won't talk negatively about you behind your back. Or maybe I just never noticed... it did have 0 impact on me though if it happened.