TheBeege

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

It boils down to cash.

Companies can make money off penicillin. Governments can readily allocate funds to visible, common disasters.

Disasters that have been a century in the making and require whole nations to change the way they do things for an observable result decades down the line is almost impossible to get money for. Our shortsightedness is our downfall

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Edit: wait, you might be right. As I understand, net neutrality is for the last mile ISPs, not the L1/L2 providers. So uh... what I explained below isn't relevant. Eh, I'll leave it in case people wanna learn stuff.

It was a bad explanation, assuming you had knowledge of network infrastructure things, but it does make sense. I'll explain things if you're interested.

Net neutrality is the idea that ISPs must treat all content providers equally. Your phone is not a content provider (most likely. You could run a web server on your phone, but... no). YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, TikTok, and your weird uncle's WordPress site are content providers. Without net neutrality, ISPs can say, "Hey YouTube, people request a ton of traffic from you on our network. Pay up or we'll slow down people's connections to you." The "neutrality" part means that ISPs must be neutral towards content providers, not discriminating against them for being high demand by consumers.

For the L1 and L2 part, that's the networking infrastructure. The connection to your home is just tiny cables. I don't recall how many layers there are, but it's just "last mile" infrastructure. The network infrastructure between regions of the country or across the ocean are giant, giant cables managed by internet service providers you've never heard of. They're the kind of providers that connect AT&T to Comcast. These are considered L1 or L2 providers. The data centers of giant companies, like Google for YouTube's case, often pay these L1 or L2 providers to plug directly into their data centers. Why? Those providers are using the biggest, fastest cables to ferry bits and bytes across the planet. You might be pulling gigs from YouTube, but YouTube is putting out... shit, I don't even know. Is there a terabyte connection? Maybe even petabyte? That sounds crazy. I dunno, I failed Google's interview question where they asked me to estimate how much storage does Google Drive use globally. Anyway, I hope that gives you an idea of what L1 and L2 providers are.

I'm not a network infrastructure guy, though. If someone who actually knows what they're talking about has corrections, I'd love to learn where I'm wrong

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I haven't worked a union job, so I know nothing about this. But a family friend always rails on unions and how they do more harm than good, citing these kinds of situations. I generally like the idea of unions because I've seen how companies abuse employees without them. So I'm torn.

Can you explain to me how the union prevents you from getting promoted/a raise? I'm specifically curious about how the mechanics of it work

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Not the original commenter, but I would guess that the goal would be to reflect the population. Women are about 50% of the population, so assuming all things created equal, they should be about 50% of any other population, like those with a specific job title.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not a matter of reward or punishment. It's a matter of the skills required for continued success.

Early startups require big risk-taking, progressing at an absurd speed, charisma to get investor capital, and really just being a little crazy.

Once the concept is proven to be viable and potentially profitable, the focus needs to shift from proving it can work to making it sustainable. This involves less risk, process improvements to avoid issues like getting sued, better money management, more careful time management to avoid burnout of non-founder employees, and generally just being more rational about things.

It's rare that a person can exhibit both of these sets of behaviors, so companies will often swap out the former for the latter as a company matures. If they didn't, the founders might unintentionally drive the company into the ground by taking unnecessary risks after finding something that already works.

Does that answer your question, or did I miss the mark, still?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And I'm guessing a smaller chip makes it even harder to detect. Makes sense. Thank you

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Can anyone inform me regarding the purpose of preventing China from producing these more advanced chips? Is it protectionism? Is it anti-China policy? Is there some kind of particular military application?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

This community is on lemmy.ml, which explicitly leans hard left. Maybe a memes community on another instance would be less like this

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, sorry. I realize I wasn't clear at all. I wasn't agreeing with the previous comment. Just mentioning how it was a problem. This author sounds like they don't know much

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Haven't read outliers, but I live in Korea. Weak people in authority here is a serious problem. See the Sewol ferry incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol

The culture of saving face and not causing disturbance compounds the problem. For example, some married couples prefer to not know if their partner is cheating so as to not disturb the peace of the family. Fortunately, this is becoming more rare, but it is still an issue.

Edit: Not agreeing with the previous comment. Just mentioning where the idea may have come from. I don't believe Korean culture impacts plane crash rates. When the chain of command and responsibilities are clear, Koreans make stuff happen. It's actually quite admirable. And cultural idiosyncrasies aside, people generally try to do what they believe to be the right thing, and not letting a plane crash is pretty right under normal circumstances

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you for taking the education angle. I'd like to add another perspective for folks' benefit. I'm not 100% sure it's correct, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Your labor has some value. Ideally, you should be paid a corresponding amount of wealth to the amount of value you generate through your labor. So you do $20 worth of work and get $20 worth of money. This is the ideal.

But how much labor is worth $20? Capitalism takes advantage of this ambiguity. The capitalist, e.g. a business owner or investor or similarly positioned person, pays you $19 for that $20 labor and pockets the remaining amount as profit. Sure, the capitalist likely provides some amount of leadership and direction, which is labor with value, but their compensation vastly exceeds the value they generate. This is why you see CEOs getting >300x the pay of their employees. The labor of these CEOs is not worth that much. One person's labor literally cannot be worth that of 300 people. (Engineers may pipe in on that point, but please realize you're in the same boat.)

If you see capitalism from this perspective, it makes sense why you would be angry. You're literally getting short-changed for your effort. Not cool

So what's the alternative? Well, there's a bunch. Personally, I like the idea of employee-owned companies. This way, you get the advantage of pooling people's resources, and any profit can be invested back into the company to generate more wealth for its employees or be held onto in case of a downturn. Both are better than a CEO's pocket.

One issue is capital investment. Starting a company is expensive, and many companies take a long time to become profitable. If every company had to bootstrap, we'd see much fewer successes and much slower progress. I'm not exactly sure how to solve this, yet. Would love to hear folks' ideas

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