> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problem
Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.
Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.
The prior is stating an extreme case, eg "comical extreme".
One problem is that if you behave as if a person isn't the cause, you end up with all sorts of silly rules and processes, which are just in place to counter "problematic individual".
I agree, but in this hypothetical situation the HR part needs to happen, despite the fact that most people don't want to be the squeaky wheel that explicitly starts pointing fingers..
It's way too easy to pretend the system is the problem while sticking your head in the sand because you don't want to solve the actual human problem.
Sure, use the post mortem to brainstorm how to prevent/detect/excise the systematic problem ("How do we make sure no one else can make the same mistake again"), but eventually you just need to deal with the repeat offender.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
"Smart" in all other classes of purchases typically means IoT / Internet connected.
The computerization of formerly mechanical features making it harder to DIY repair is a separate but also valid concern, though I'm not sure how it applies to EVs.
The health consequences of inhaling exhaust particulates are far more harmful than the equivalent CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect warming unfortunately.
All in all, a well tuned ICE is better for everyone than a poorly tuned one, if you had to pick between the two.
> The health consequences of inhaling exhaust particulates are far more harmful than the equivalent CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect warming unfortunately
Short term for the individual definitely, but long term for all individuals affected?
At least soot from ships is an issue in high latitudes, as it turns out that the soot reduces the albedo of the ice and it thus has an outsized global warming impact.
I can't help but think of a video of a talk by someone- uncle Bob maybe?- talking about the origin of the agile manifesto.
He framed it as software developers were once the experts in the room, but so many young people joined the industry that managers turned to micromanaging them out of instinctual distrust. The manifesto was supposed to be the way for software developers to retake the mantle of the professional expert, trusted to make things happen.
I don't really think that happened, especially with agile becoming synonymous with Scrum, but if this doesn't pay off and craters the industry, it seems like it'd be the final nail in that coffin.
We have mandatory identification for all kinds of things that are illegal to purchase or engage in under a certain age. Nobody wants to prosecute 12 year old kids for lying when the clicked the "I am at least 13 years old" checkbox when registering an account. The only alternative is to do what we do with R-rated movies, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, risky physical activities (i.e. bungee jumping liability waiver) etc... we put the onus of verifying identification on the suppliers.
I don't think that's quite right. The age-gating of the internet is part of a brand new push, it's not just patching up a hole in an existing framework. At least in my Western country, all age-verified activities were things that could've put someone in direct, obvious danger - drugs, guns, licensing for something that could be dangerous, and so on. In the past, the 'control' of things that were just information was illusory. Movie theaters have policies not to let kids see high-rated movies, but they're not strictly legally required to do so. Video game stores may be bound by agreements or policy not to sell certain games to children, but these barriers were self-imposed, not driven by law. Pornography has really been the only exception I can think of. So, demanding age verification to be able to access large swaths of the internet (in some cases including things as broad as social media, and similar) is a huge expansion on what was in the past, instead of just them closing up some loopholes.
When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.
We can't trust every private company that now has to verify age to not store that information with whatever questionable security.
If we aren't going to do a national registry that services can query to get back only a "yes or no" on whether a user is of age or not, then we need regulation to prevent the storage of ID information.
We should still be able to verify age while remaining psuedo-anonymous.
> If we aren't going to do a national registry that services can query to get back only a "yes or no" on whether a user is of age or not, then we need regulation to prevent the storage of ID information.
Querying a national registry is not good because the timing of the queries could be matched up with the timing of site logins to possibly figure out the identities of anonymous site users.
A way to address this, at the cost of requiring the user to have secure hardware such as a smart phone or a smart card or a hardware security token or similar is for your government to issue you signed identity documents that you store and that are bound cryptographically to your secure hardware.
A zero knowledge protocol can later be used between your secure hardware and the site you are trying to use that proves to the site you have ID that says you are old enough and it is bound to your hardware without revealing anything else from your ID to the site.
This is what the EU had been developing for a few years. It is currently undergoing a series of large scale field trials, with release to the public later this year, with smart phones as the initial secure hardware. Member starts will be required to support it, and any mandatory age verification laws they pass will require sites to support it (they can also support other methods).
All the specs are open and the reference implementations are also open source, so other jurisdictions could adopt this.
Google has released an open source library for a similar system. I don't know if it is compatible with the EU system or not.
I think Apple's new Digital ID feature in Wallet is also similar.
We really need to get advocacy groups that are lobbying on age verification bills to try to make it so when the bills are passed (and they will be) they at least allow sites to support some method like those described above, and ideally require sites to do so.
> If we aren't going to do a national registry that services can query to get back only a "yes or no" on whether a user is of age or not
And note that if we are, the records of the request to that database are an even bigger privacy timebomb than those of any given provider, just waiting for malicious actors with access to government records.
> When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.
Beer, sure. But if you buy certain decongestants, they do log your ID. At least that's the case in Texas.
In PA they scan your ID if you buy beer. There could be a full digital record of all my beer purchases for past 15+ years, although I'm not aware of any aggregation of this data that is happening. Not that I expect anyone doing it would talk about it.
> But if you buy certain decongestants, they do log your ID.
Yeah, but many people don't actually think War on Drugs policies are a model for civil liberties that should be extended beyond that domain (or, in many cases, even tolerated in that domain.) That policy has been effective, I guess, in promoting the sales of alternative “decongestants” (that don't actually work), though it did little to curb use and harms from the drugs it was supposed to control by attacking supply.
Depending on the gas station... I've been to at least a dozen in Texas where the clerk scanned the back of my DL for proof of age. I'm assuming that something is getting stored somewhere..
> When I go buy a beer at the gas station, all I do is show my ID to the cashier. They look at it to verify DOB and then that's it. No information is stored permanently in some database that's going to get hacked and leaked.
That's how it should be, but it's not how it is. Many places now scan your ID into their computer (the computer which, btw, tracks everything you buy). It may not go to a government database (yet) but it's most certainly being stored.
We should easily be able to, but the problem of tech illiteracy is probably our main barrier. To build such a system you’d need to issue those credentials to the end users. Those users in turn would eagerly believe conspiracy theories that the digital ID system was actually stealing their data or making it available to MORE parties instead of fewer (compared to using those ID verification services we have today).
The problem is that there is nothing done to protect privacy.
There is already plenty of entities that not only have reliable way of proving it's you that have access to account, but also enough info to return user's age without disclosing anything else, like banks or govt sites, they could (or better, be forced to) provide interface to that data.
Basically "pick your identity provider" -> "auth on their site" -> "step showing that only age will be shared" -> response with user's age and the query's unique ID that's not related to the user account id
Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.
My Vaillant air to water heat pump is "effective" down to -28C, and has a resistive heater element as a backup in case the COP value flatlines (as in if COP is 1, it doesn't matter).
My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed.
While we very rarely have temperatures below -20C in Denmark, i have yet to experience a "drop" in performance from it. Granted, it becomes a lot noisier in very low temperatures, but it "does the job".
I'll add that this being an older house (1970s) we have "other issues" that causes heat loss, so we usually run the log burner for supplementary heat during those few days of -20C. The heat pump can keep the house warm, but you can feel the cold "pushing in" from walls and windows (dual pane).
Sadly the heat pump has also kinda voided all attempts to renovate for saving energy. Our yearly heat cost (heating and warm water) is around €750, and adding insulation would cost around €3500, for a potential saving of around 10-20%, so a total of 20-30 years to earn itself back again.
My area doesn't get that cold, but the insulation is so good that last year we accidentally turned the heat off for a week without noticing despite it snowing outside; our "backup" was our own body heat plus the waste heat from our normal electricity consumption (which also isn't high).
I've seen a demo house in Canada that had a bucket standing in the middle of a room with -20 outside. The bucket had been there all winter and it never froze, a single, huge candle warmed the house. It was most impressive. I never did figure out how enough oxygen made it in to keep that candle burning!
But it really made me realize that even though I'm used to brick houses and stone everywhere that that is a terrible thing efficiency wise. A properly insulated wooden house can indeed be heated almost by body heat and waste heat alone. The big loss is windows so triple insulated and properly mounted windows are a must for such a setup.
Almost no one lives in a location where heat pumps are never (or even usually) inappropriate. Yes, it might get to -20 F, but how often does that happen over a winter, never mind over a year?
Modern air-to-air heatpumps heat at over 100% efficiency even at those temperatures, they are very widely deplyoed in the Nordics for heating. And even where it is sometimes that cold, most of the year it is warmer than that. Still yes, you should have another source of heat just in case.
Industrial buildings tend to be much easier to renovate, because they're filled with big open spaces.
Commercial office buildings are optimized for seating space, so you get a lot more interior walls already built and often shorter ceilings then industrial spaces. That's a lot more renovation to add in all the necessary plumbing for showers and toilets and often laundry in every unit.
New building codes mean that everything has to be done right to today's standards, not yesteryear's, so it becomes cheaper to demolish and rebuild than retrofit, especially if the building has a lot of interior space that doesn't have access to exterior walls for mandated windows.
Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.
Snoopy was more ensuring than Charlie Brown, but even that was more "cute cartoon" than anything to do with any message.
Edit: I see some sibling comments that it's making a comeback, though I've no idea if any of it is all that faithful to the original.
Charlie Brown had a lot of Christian messaging reflecting Schultz's devout beliefs, and I doubt any of that will show up in whatever Apple and Target and current schools are putting together.
> Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.
Yeah, my dad (a Baby Boomer) loved these and would make sure to watch them every year. I and my Millennial siblings didn't really care, it just felt old-fashioned. I had no idea it was still popular at all.
Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.
Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.
reply