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As someone who has worked in a call center, it's not just that they complain, but they complain a lot and become much more difficult to work with. A customer who has been on hold for a long time can take twice as long to resolve because they spend so much time complaining and refusing to do what you ask them to do.

Wow, you mean to say intentionally pissing off people who are already probably pissed off makes them more difficult to work with? That doesn't sound right.

Yeah it’s almost like purposely frustrating people has negative consequences, which HP completely overlooked.

HP didn’t care, that was a problem for the low level support staff and the customers, not whatever exec was hoping to show reduced call volumes -> reduced staffing levels -> savings.

I believe they are saying their AHT went down (calls take less time) which made other people with longer handle times look bad.

The AHT value indeed went down 3 minutes below the average, which is generally a good thing so long as you are doing everything well still. All outliers get checked and mine was the lowest. I was honest about the tool, including that it was offline. Their supposed policy was no personal tools and as it was during "probation" (first 90 days in Ontario), they could fire without cause, and did, immediately.

A good business would have promoted you to the dev team so they could reduce that metric for everyone.

6 long paragraphs before it even tells you the name of the book it is reviewing or what it is about?

The name London Review of Books may mislead you. Ostensibly, the articles are book reviews, but barely. The books reviewed are more starting points into long-form articles on their subject matter. The articles are uniformly fantastic, though obviously not uniformly interesting to everyone. I find that every issue carries about three to five articles I find really interesting.

I‘ve just yesterday read an old LRB issue where in one article the book ostensibly reviewed was first mentioned after three whole pages!


Am I getting old or did it use to be much better 10 or 20 years ago? Half the LRB feels so politicised to me now, and the other half barely feels erudite. Was I just too young to pick it up back then?

I peeked at the front covers from the archives - 2007 has everything from global warming to the French riots, for example, although there's certainly more current affairs content. I'm not sure what you mean by the other decline in standards, though.

Parent already knows this, but for completeness to the grandparent, the LRB is part of a small genre of literary journal that does this with "reviews of books". The New York Review of Books (which begat the LRB), and the Times Literary Supplement when it's feeling risque.

All I want is an "avoid unprotected left turns" option

I think you meant "avoid unprotected left turns made with Gemini" option

I would like to know how much contraction is normal. I assume there's always some contraction around that time, because the holiday season is ending and the temp workers are being let go. I didn't see any mention of this in the article though (or I missed it).


The numbers are seasonally adjusted- the reports themselves are not very difficult to read, I suggest you go to to the source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

The bigger question is the impact of immigration policies- the US population is smaller than expected due to immigration effects, so some of the extrapolation typically done may be skewed. I doubt this will make the numbers look better though. These numbers may be volatile for some time until the true effects of the lack of immigration are understood and modeled properly.


> US economy >> unexpectedly << sheds 92,000 jobs in February


But this is the full amount of jobs shed:

> Payrolls in the US dropped by 92,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, according to the latest official figures, surprising analysts who had expected hiring to remain stable.

I'm not in any way suggesting the economy isn't taking a shit, but I'm curious about the actual expectation and reality. I know it says analysts expect hiring to be stable, but hiring isn't the same as job losses.


Ok but was the expected loss 60k or 0?

Makes a big difference.


Well the data says:

2022, gained 678,000 jobs in February (Doesn't really count, global economy was emerging from Covid shutdowns.)

2023, gained 311,000 jobs in February

2024, gained 275,000 jobs in February

2025, gained 151,000 jobs in February (This seems to be the point of discontinuity with gains only about half of what were typically expected.)

2026, lost the 92,000 we're talking about. (Obviously, we had expected a gain.)


I believe it was expected to grow by 50k jobs?


A loss wasn't expected at all.


We live in an infinite growth economy mindset - it's always expected to grow


This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2011) https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152646/th...


These reports apply a seasonal adjustment for the reported numbers. This is the fairly standard economics approach, but if you're interested in the raw - they are usually buried deeper into the report. The BLS or other government stat agencies have historically published their data gathering and reporting methodology in detail.


Looking at seasonally adjusted somewhat longer term trends, unemployment appears to be rising somehwat continuously for two years now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

I'd say the article overstates its point somewhat. The numbers (rise in unemployment) don't look to be caused by Trump alone (trend started before), but he most certainly did not improve the situation in his first year (numbers grew worse instead of better).

But the absolute numbers (<5%ish unemployment) are not especially concerning for now despite trending in the wrong direction (and all of Trumps policies seem to make things worse so far).


I have shoulder issues and use a Kinesis Freestyle 2. It lets me keep my shoulders square while I am typing. I would love to get a keyboard with a trackball, though. Moving from the keyboard to the mouse and back starts to irritate my right shoulder after a while (have had rotator cuff surgery on that one).


When I tried using a coding agent it felt like the AI was stealing my dopamine hits.


Care to enlighten? Google has nothing meaningful.


[flagged]


These files are a never ending quell of evilness. It’s really fascinating. One day people are going to realise the upper 1% are just that—very few….


And those 1% elites are very rich and very powerful.. so they can do whatever they want.. (and that includes funding and controllimng unethical scientific experiments)..

World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly,” says Oxfam: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...

World's richest 10 percent holds more than three quarters of the world's total wealth: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1417996/wealth-held-rich...

Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub...

Over the past 30 years the U.S.’s top 1% got richer, and now hold nearly a third of the nation’s wealth: https://fortune.com/2024/10/08/congressional-budget-office-w...


For the most part, they only have the power others give them.


Slight correction: the power others gave them a long time ago, and now nothing can help those others take it back without uprooting the whole civilization in the process. Current power is a malignant formation too advanced to heal without destroying the whole organism.

Or so it seems, I'd really like to be wrong here.


It's not a slight correction, those claims are the exact problem - the propaganda of the powerful: Give up, there is nothing you can do.

People in democracies can easily vote to change where power lies (that is, power lies ultimately with the citizens), if that's what they want, and it's not hard to see how: The current situation is highly unusual for democracies; there is a long history of what to do and how to do it.

A major reason they don't do it is that they keep reading and believing they are powerless.


The concept of "police" came up through "private militia" hired as.

Most of the world enjoys 5-day workweek (40 hours work per week).

But the world got this work schedule only due to workers (mostly working in mines and railways) and labor unionists who fought and died for favourable work conditions and fair working schedule.

The rich elites even sent Pinkertons to assassinate the "rebel" leaders.

It was Henry Ford who finally saw the writing on the wall, and he announced the 40-hours workweek in his company, and thus ushered in the modern era of work-life balance.


*hired as private army/security for rich powerful elites.

"Police force" was created not for liberty, justice, and public good - it was created to brutally quell poor folks rising against rich tyrants, it was created as a weapon to ensure the rich stayed rich.

History of how the world got the 40-hours 5-day work week: https://firmspace.com/theproworker/from-strikes-to-labor-law...


*collusion


I have one. The cards are pretty well made and it's a nice deck. Decent playing cards do tend to be expensive.


Eh. I have a math degree. Aced all the advanced maths. Was the only one to get an A in Diff Eq. I love math. I've never been able to do simple math in my head. I can't even remember the times tables half the time. Simple math isn't really problem solving.


People who major in mathematics are really good at mathematical abstraction and are _notorious_ for their inability to do basic arithmetic. To the degree that it's a stereotype with a strong grounding it reality.

In college we had a rule for splitting the check at a restaurant: the youngest non-math major had to do it. Not being a math major, I'm not sure what happened when the table was all math majors. It wasn't a frequent occurence; there was a strong likelihood of a physicist or an engineer being around.


That's absolutely valid but running a simple query to an LLM uses the amount of electricity as running a lightbulb for 15 minutes

It would've been faster to open up the calculator app and type in the numbers and get an instant response instead of opening up the ChatGPT app, typing in your question, waiting dozens of seconds, and getting a long response back.


But you could if you wanted to, probably.


It’s one type of problem solving.


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