> I did also come to them with a job offer from another company that had a larger dollar amount associated to it.
As far as I know, this negotation strategy is orders of magnitude more effective than voicing feelings about being treated unfairly. Unless OP comes with better competing offer, there is likely nothing that can be changed in his situation.
A major school of thought is that as soon as someone goes to the effort of getting another job offer, they've psychologically checked out, so you might as well let them go.
I did this once got the raise etc. The director at the time voiced the opinion that in general people leave anyway in a year or 2 time. I did leave in 1.5 years .
Is it? EU talks a lot about national carbon footprint, and GCP launched carbon calculator https://cloud.google.com/carbon-footprint. Sure, noone asks this in explicit way but given current trends it feels like we are going in this direction very fast.
well, EU talks a lot about national carbon footprint and normally the solution is to send the carbon footprint overseas, then the national problem is solved.
Have they fixed the wood burning loophole, where you can burn overseas wood without recognizing any carbon emissions because the carbon accounting places the emissions at the place where the wood was harvested?
>In 1996, scientists at the United Nations devised a method to measure global carbon emissions. To simplify the process and avoid double counting, they suggested emissions from burning biomass should be calculated where the trees are cut down, not where the wood pellets are burned.
>The EU adopted this methodology in its Renewable Energy Directive, allowing energy companies to burn biomass produced in the US without having to report the emissions.
>The accounting method– which was never intended to assign national responsibility for carbon emissions, according to climate experts has created a lot of discussion and disagreement among advocates, scientists and policymakers. But ultimately it is not the accounting of carbon that is the problem, it's the emissions.
>"It doesn't change the physical reality." said Tim Searchinger, senior research scholar at Princeton University. "A law designed to reduce emissions that in reality encourages an increase in emissions... has to be flawed," he said, referring to Europe's directive.
I don't think wood-burning is a real emission issue since wood growing/burning is a carbon-cycle and not a fossil taken in the ground and injected forever in the atmosphere...
As long as the wood is coming from tree plantations, not from deforestation of course, which I expect to be mostly the case in North America and Europe.
Even if the forest is replanted and eventually stores the same amount of carbon as was released in burning the wood you end up behind. You release a bunch of carbon today and it takes decades for the new growth to recapture that. Plus you burn additional fuel for the harvest, processing, and shipping, which is never recaptured.
Burning and replanting forests is not carbon neutral. Not even close. It's an accounting gimmick that the EU uses to make themselves look good.
I would be careful with "actually being changed". They pushed it to start on 2024, so there is nothing being changed. They still can rollback it because of the war, because of the economy, because we have to protect our kids, because Hungary doesn't like it, you name it.
In another hand, it's a market, as stated in their website, "It is the world's first major carbon market and remains the biggest one."[0], so for sure it will be a huge source of income and therefore the countries will have much more incentive to do it. I saw already the same in another countries and the results weren't so spectacular, but instead the whole supply chain just got more expensive, which meant the prices raised to the customers.
Raised prices are an expected result of these changes. You're paying for the emissions and it becomes part of the cost of production, so in effect raises the price.
That's a good thing and helps "green" products compete.
The example why "nothing is being changed" just because EU signed a compromise to do it in 2024. https://www.euronews.com/2023/01/10/belgium-extends-life-of-.... Belgium extends life of its nuclear power industry by 10 years regardless of previous European agreements.
Yeah it could be a cultural thing though - in our culture this kind of stuff is squarely up to the parents. I remember always BBS'ing from midnight because my daily connection time renewed at midnight :) As long as it didn't affect my school performance it was not a problem for my parents, and it was a handy time because they didn't make personal calls during the night so I didn't tie up the phone line for them. It would have been unthinkable that the government would decide I should be in bed at that time.
Perhaps the culture requires the country to take a stronger role in this, though embedding it into law feels very severe. Even in Europe a lot of this stuff that used to be up to the parents is being taken to central control. More and more countries are proposing laws for a website to verify the user is 18+. I don't like where this is going either. When I was living in Ireland my local provider "Three" routed all my mobile traffic through a super slow child-friendly filtering proxy and I had to ID myself in one of their stores to get past that. People were referring it as the "porn viewers register" and the people in the store were being weird about it, even though it blocked way more than porn sites (also random UDP connections for example so most VPNs didn't work) and it made internet access super slow and quirky.
Luckily the other mobile providers didn't have this boneheaded rule so I simply switched to Vodafone.
I kinda wonder to what extent neo-Confucian norms are widespread among Korea's elites, because that might explain quite a bit about its internal politics.
I consider lack of digital freedom quite oppressive, especially given "software eating the world" trend. The fact that they even can tell the age of person playing games during night time in the first place sounds quite sketchy to me (I guess I'm supposed to tie my gaming account to my real id?).
In Korea you do. In part because of multiple things such as a desire to prevent defamation, which is a big deal in Korea because people take their reputation very seriously and bullying is a big problem as a result, having notably lead to multiple high profile suicides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_cyber_defamation_...
The laws on libel and slander are notorious for being very alien to westerners. In particular saying something true but bad about someone isn't typically libel in other countries, but in Korea it is: true or false, you shouldn't speak ill of people.
It's a very different society where very different tradeoffs have been made.
Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more.
I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages directly inside my apartment at 8AM to say stuff like "there's a farmer's market in the parking lot today (like every week)". I asked them to stop spamming my household via their PA system for non-emergency stuff and they thought I was a antisocial psychopath.
Then I learned and just disconnect the PA system. They don't mean to invade my privacy, but my privacy boundaries aren't the same as theirs.
Wasn't controlled by the landlord, but by the management team which is paid by the condo fee. If you own the condo, you pay that fee, if you rent it from a landlord you also pay it. The management team I believe is hired by the residents committee which is elected by the residents. Sort of like an HOA, I guess? There were elections during my stay and we were invited to participate, but I didn't care enough and this was a temporary situation.
This was in a large apartment tower complex in the semi-countryside. Not sure if it's always like that, it's the only apartment I stayed in. In Seoul I've only lived in villas.
Perhaps it's a countryside thing because I've also noticed noisy public speakerphones in the streets blasting PAs about random stuff, but I haven't seen it in Seoul.
Overall though, the local governments do spam your phone with alerts about all sorts of remotely relevant (IMO) things on a daily/hourly basis. I find it annoying but it's just how it is here. Today they were spamming about possible debris from a NASA satellite deorbiting.
It was very interesting to me that South Korea is a high trust society in terms of crime (cash boxes left unattended, bicycles unlocked, people feel safe to walk the streets alone late at night), however it is very tribal and low trust in terms of providing assistance (less help provided to strangers in the streets compared to the US.. I've had to step in multiple times as I noticed that local Koreans were not helping). Maybe it's a big city thing (above experiences were in Seoul).
Haha, now I vaguely remember something like that in soviet union’s “rest houses” (was a kid, may mistake it for something else). I think I slept next to a speaker on the wall and wanted to kick it.
It’s very nice of you to respect cultural aspects, but I suspect that at least some koreans also simply disconnect it and accept the risks :)
Like Japan, it's a "one and a half party state"; while there are multiple parties and free elections, in practice one party wins a majority almost all the time and there's very little space for diverse viewpoints.
It's more like "two party state" though. Take a look at presidential election results[0]: after Chun Doo-hwan's(전두환) military dictatorship ended, candidates from conservative and liberal parties were elected taking turns.
Funny how all my "nerdy" friends love Gates now. I guess 100B$+ is enough to afford PR team that can convince public you are no longer "more evil than satan himself".
Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing.
Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him.
In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing good things with his money like eradicating malaria and funding bleeding edge climate tech. He's pretty outstanding wrt how he spends his money.
Strong disagree. I started software dev in the late 90's and among everyone I knew in tech MS was uniformly hated, even the DOJ sued them. They did everything they could to stomp out open internet standards. Untold amounts of money, business, etc. were lost by all of us fighting this scourge. The fact that anyone alive thinks anything remotely positive of him could only be due to PR. IMO even if he gave away every cent, I'd just consider that restitution for all of the damage he's done to the world. Then he'd still owe us.
Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thousands of dollars (my uneducated guess is somewhere in 10-100k$ range). To what end other than working on his personal brand?
Speaking of malaria, after googling for 3 minutes it seems he spent around 2B$ on it. Does it really matter? Yes and no. Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter. It will not affect his quality of life in any significant way. He could give away a few dozen billions more and still will spend rest of his life living in luxury that I could only dream off. Sure, better to fight malaria than buy another yacht, but still, it's easy decision to make when you have that much money.
> Is it not enough for you that he went out of his way to improve other people's lives?
How did he went out of his way?
> How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?
I don't think snark is necessary here; probably there are no 100B$+ users on HN.
But it's not hard to extrapolate from where am I. I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change). Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no. I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more. Would then I be a good and trustworthy person?
> I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change).
Yes, you could. Do you?
> Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no.
It wouldn't. But also because there are no good and bad people. There are good and bad actions. I use Linux and absolutely hate what Bill Gates was doing wrt the whole free software ecosystem. I still commend him for his charity work.
> I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more.
Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position?
My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!).
Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives.
Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".
2, 3 or 5 billion don't matter if you still have tens of billions left.
I'm not saying he shouldn't outsource his videos. What I'm saying is that this looks more like a professionally made commercial (advertising his personal brand). I'm pretty sure it cost O(hours) of his time (consider even getting to the set - you can see this is a professional set, so probably in some studio; I also doubt this was done in one take given how there are other actors around including the skating Santa Clauses). All in all, it really feels artificial and dishonest. What kind of person would even come up with idea of creating such a video in the first place?
There are somewhat diminishing returns spending money on philanthropic causes: if he were to spend 30 rather than 3 billion the result wouldn't be ten times better. I'm happy he's trying to make the world a better place while still keeping an eye on the money being used efficiently.
No, we've just realized that they're just less evil than all the other current behemoths.
Sun tried to be "cool" but was really just a money loss machine and now Java and MySQL is the property of we-will-audit-you-Oracle and Mr I-will-sue-people-when-I-need-another-yacht-Ellison.
G had a motto of "do no evil", that motto is long gone. I've always disliked their handling of the Android platform (the handset manufucaturer/carrier dominance over application stores back in the J2ME days was horrible, Google's quest for marketshare let that go on for a few more years and allowed for some bad fragmentation for developers).
And this was just the start, their "AI-handles-support-so-we-don't-need-to-talk-to-humans" combined with accounts being suspended willy-nilly just leaves people stranded (anybody remember how an indie guy making an Stadia exclusive game was shut out of his Google account?) and speaking of stadia, what's Googles cancelled product body-count up to now?
Apple has had some pros on the privacy side but they've stumbled even there, and apart from that they've been quite a heavy-handed player with a clear my-way-or-the-highway attitude (vs Epic,Spotify,etc).
Amazon busting unions, fleecing people on AWS and copying popular products on the marketplace needs no more mentions.
The Ubers, Spotifys,etc of the world might've made things cheaper and more streamlined but there's been at a cost of distinct monetary pressure on drivers,musicians,etc.
Facebook facilitating genocides (Rohynga), election fraud (US/UK) and general lax privacy (Cambridge Analytica).
MS might have gotten worse in terms of privacy and ads(start menu ads,wtf?), but in general they've mostly kept to making money and actually supporting developers and opensource.
NPM/Github costs might be fractional for MS but would've probably landed the rest of us another SourceForge (remember the spyware they added to make money? That was probably what got GH off the ground more than anything) because we've not yet sorted a way for developers and distribution to get paid for our "free" contributions.
As far as I know, this negotation strategy is orders of magnitude more effective than voicing feelings about being treated unfairly. Unless OP comes with better competing offer, there is likely nothing that can be changed in his situation.