Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.
Having managed teams in Asia from the US, let me provide the alternate view.
You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.
You are faced with:
- being blocked all day till US business hours
- trial and erroring your way through the problem
My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."
That sounds like the company really hasn’t set up their teams for success. There are a lot of assumptions here that it’s on the individual contributors to solve these issues at a high cost to their personal lives.
Counterpoint, I work in an international company where teams in Europe often need to liaise with teams in the US. The policy is: if it needs to wait, it waits. If it can't wait, you need to reorganize your teams' responsibilities so that those who are reliant on each other are timezone-aligned.
> If it can't wait, you need to reorganize your teams' responsibilities so that those who are reliant on each other are timezone-aligned.
I'm not a developer nor a manager. The team responsibilities; we are one of the most efficient. Our teams cross over the globe: Hong Kong, China, Japan, America's,
My manager is spot on. The team are fine, it's just the nature of work.
Is there anyone on your team that just isn't around? Keeps a strict schedule - I've found that even working across time zones with tight deadlines, some people just have a hard stop.
This is sort of the fundamental building block of many socialist and anarchist movements.
The concept of "mutual aid" as put forward by folks like Kropotkin is basically we should build communities that help one another, offering our communities excess when we have our, and gracefully accepting aid when we need it.
>This is sort of the fundamental building block of many socialist and anarchist movements.
It's also the fundamental error that all of the "self reliant, self sufficient" doomsday prepper types make. When the apocalypse comes, your little homestead will be nothing but a supply cache for raiders. It doesn't matter how many guns you have. Without a functioning, hierarchical, tight knit community to aid in defense, you and your family will be sold off to the first band of roaming slavers that come through.
That was the way of life for any community before industrial revolution. It appears that all attempts at creating such communities have more or less failed, because they eventually become coopted either for or against capitalistic economy.
I don't believe this behavior has ever been observed in a regliously and ethnically diverse population. People have to be basically related to one another, sharing a core common belief for it to work.
We are all related to each other. A pandemic can wipe us out. A major climate event or a nuclear accident can wreak havoc, increasingly high tech wars can eliminate billions.
We choose to downplay our common dependencies and exaggerate the differences. Its a social game we have learned to play when the stakes for our collective survival were lower.
on the contrary, everyone of us needs to realize that we are part of a global community and that all of our actions accumulate to have an effect across the world. so instead of saying that this will never work because we are to diverse, instead we need to strive and MAKE IT WORK! put aside our differences, find common ground and build a global cooperative community that includes every human being on this planet.
Did a milquetoast motivation speaker write this? "Everyone just needs to realize that we all have to be nice to each other and we all succeed" rarely even works in a kindergarten classroom of 15 students, there's not really even a system for scaling that up to a city of a million people.
Imo it's naive to think that this is ever achievable given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is.
> given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is
this is true as a general behavior, but its practical relevance is highly variable and culture dependend. For the longest span of our existence tribes routinely attacked eachother, decapitating for fun, enslaving for profit, and it was deemed ok.
by and large we dont do that anymore, though this is the instictual behavior being tapped to support, e.g., organized large scale war.
anything as large scale as organized war, any form of economic and political organisation might be building on primal behaviors but is not equivalent to them. a lot of cold calculation, ideology and even trial-and-error is involved and the end result is highly variable.
education, factual information and candid discussions between people is what will help us ensure in and out-groups are confined to sports and games and do not put our collective welfare at risk
education, factual information and candid discussions between people is what will help us ensure in and out-groups are confined to sports and games and do not put our collective welfare at risk
exactly that. but also, finding an in-group really just means that we want to have a social environment where we are recognized and supported. there need not be any out-group. the goal here is to develop relationships such that neighbors and the local community become that group (or one of them), which again, as the article suggests, can be achieved by helping each other out.
i didn't say "just", because it's not that simple. it obviously takes effort and rethinking of our life and our purpose. but doing that, and showing others how and why to do that is how i live my life. and i am not the only one. slowly more people are picking up and are spreading the idea. it may take a few generations before a critical mass is reached, but i am confident that we can convince the world that global cooperation and unity is necessary for our future.
I believe the reason many people refuse to recognize the evident reality of our interdependence is an implied "all or nothing" simple mindedness that dismisses the required changes as unachievable.
We clearly cant be "best buddies" across all 7bln x 7bln pairs sharing the planet at any given time. Nor is it needed.
The minimum common ground needed for long term sustainable survival is just that. A minimum. But it has not been reached and time is running out. Our numbers and techological progress are outgrowing our social adaptations for containing conflict at the fastest pace ever. Unless we address this imbalance things will not end well.
right, i am more confident that we will succeed but otherwise i agree. people see the big change they must go through to achieve the end result, not realizing that even small steps will get us there. look at how far we have gotten in the last 50 years. how much poverty has been reduced across the world. we are not there yet, and there are bumps and setbacks, but this is not all or nothing, black or white, but it's a long road, and as long as we are walking it we can reach our goals. maybe not in one generation, but in a few generations if we all make an effort and teach our children to do the same. but even with less effort it is still possible, it just may take a few centuries longer.
Acknowledging and operating with the group dynamics. Expecting consensus among billions is just as futile as waiting the entropy of a gas to spontaneously decrease.
we only need consensus on the big issues, like pollution and things like human rights. and we should agree to solve conflicts peacefully. trying to achieve consensus on everything would not just be futile but counterproductive. consensus is only needed by those that are affected by a decision. anyone not affected should not even get a say.
Plenty of communes have existed at varying scales historically.
Plus, something like Mondragon exists with a large scale. It's less commune and more workers coop at the billion dollar scale, but it's nevertheless a useful reminder that we can scale up non traditional models.
Historically the progression has been (oversimplified):
some sort of reciprocal/mutual aid economy -> exchange (usually external) -> joining in with currency and capitalism
In my view the clear main factor is external disruption that forces groups into the market/currency based economy. That, plus the difficulties to control bad actors if you had a more informal system at huge scale (millions of people).
Without the external economic disruption you simply just don't get much diversity.
As far as specific events, things like disaster assistance volunteer operations in the West tend to be both religiously and ethnically diverse yet performed independently of expected remuneration. Otherwise it's not like we're observing huge samples if we restrict ourselves to looking just for communities that have both been religiously and ethnically diverse. Is the failure of any such alternate community to last for centuries - when the opportunity has barely even been there for that long - conclusive at all?
I think the trick is to learn how to scale it up. One view of human history is to see it as increasing scales of fellow-feeling and practical cooperation.
That's not true. That's common misinformation, but it's not true. In fact it's not just wrong, but it's the exact opposite of what happens.
You just have to look at pretty much any disaster. Communities come together. They do not become cannibalistic hordes like peppers think. This has been proven again, again, and again. There's entire studies on it.
Both happen, you'll get both neighborhoods organizing as tribes, and the roving gangs of looters and arsonists, the former may spring up in response to the latter.
At least that was the experience in Chile in the most affected localities of the 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake.
We called down the breakdown of social order that happened "the social earthquake". Eventually the military had to instate curfews to restore public order, though it was taken to be a display of cracks existing in society that the looting happened in the first place rather than just taken for granted as what will happen in face of disruption of social order, which is the prepper view.
The Cajun navy, for example, is well documented as going out to other communities including out of state communities that do not share the same ethnicity and have helped people for years in flood conditions. Only helping people out because of the religion they follow is utterly barbaric anyway.
There needs to be some organizing principle for it to work though - some shared belief in a greater good everyone works towards. Similarly, this is how communism could work without bloodshed (some of those hippie communes are close to classical Marxism).
Feminist concerns aside, I don’t think mutual aid has really succeeded in a hard hierarchical society like these who are explicitly patriarchal, even if it appears like it does to external observers.
I don’t say they don’t work. I’m saying that the concept of mutual aid as described by Kropotkin, has not succeeded there. Please refrain to engage in sarcasm if your reading and context understanding is that poor.
Unfortunately, the term mutual aid has been co-opted by democrats to mean "charity". Likely because there is a stigma in our society around accepting help...
You've just committed the same offense you're rebuking someone for. It's not evident that person is republican, it's only evident that they blame the democrats for a problem.
I agree that gray area is optimal, but I don't think you can afford yourself that kind of charity while not providing it to someone else in the very same comment.
Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.
What I did and what they did were very different. They contorted a word in the title of an article to be a political statement, unironically an infactual and harmful one.
For example see which political party gave handouts too banks, or which party created a cottage industry of fraud during a time of economical and existential chrisis (COVID) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It wasn't the "democrats".
You can judge me as you wish, I have no interest in controlling that.
The point of my reply was "this is how you deal with these people". You make it clear they have been sucked into propaganda, and you give them no quarters for their "views" because doing so legitimizes the sudden rise of fascism in the United States.
Fairness and tolerance is fine in civil society. When incivility reigns, well you can call a turd a turd. It's really the least you can do given what's at stake.
As a former engineer and now manager, it's not easier. It's different.
Like, yes I write much less code, but I also have to show much more empathy and be able to communicate with different people differently. Helping every engineer on the team advance their careers is tough, because everyone heard feedback differently.
Combine that with the one on ones where someone tells you about how shitty their life has been recently and how that's impacting their work. It's tough to go from roadmap planning to someone crying at you over a medical diagnosis to jumping directly to status updates to telling your boss no. It's an emotional whiplash not present in the engineer world.
Thanks for your comment. I'm pretty sick of the low effort takes on this site (read: internet in general). Every role is different. Each has its own challenges and anybody can be good or bad in a given role. Too many people trying to blame upper management, blame L1 managers, blame developers, without understanding, or even attempting to understand, the challenges they face. It doesn't just work like that. I'm 9 years into my career and became a manager 2.5 years ago. I agree entirely with you, it's just different, not better or worse. As a manager you are constantly dealing with a number of situations more varied than what you face weekly as a developer. The challenges are different. You can work harder, or work less hard, smarter or dumber...it's all up to the person and how their organization operates.
Personally, I think ICs complaining about bad Managers is acceptable. The latter have actual power and direct control over the individual’s career and life. It can be a tough job that comes with a lot of responsibility, but lots of us have faced the worst sides of this.
I’m glad you made this comment. I’ve had multiple people lay out very personal and severe problems to me during one-on-ones. I’m in no way qualified nor did I sign up to have someone’s life literally in my hands (suicidal people). It’s disturbing.
Misled implies a degree of intent, the wording is ambiguous but I don't assume ill intent by the author, especially when they later spend a paragraph explaining why they did not slice by covariates.
It is either purposefully misleading or unreasonably reckless. It is obviously ambiguous and screams of ragebait. I wanted to punch my monitor and fire the author of article when I read this sentence because it is just inflammatory racebait.
You should consider checking your humors or mediate or something, because wanting to do violence because of some Internet text is not healthy human behavior.
They talk about that in the paper, noting not police departments but also prisons (eg, Rikers). But the data is collected on a per census block level, so even though there exists some outlier blocks, the overall trends are still quite visible.
So, it's research into a topic you don't think should be researched?
Do you have any problems with the methodology or conclusions? Like, science can still be science even if it's pursued in the name of social justice. If they are cooking the books, then that's one thing, but if they are making a hypothesis, gathering data, and evaluating that hypothesis fairly using real data, then it's just science.
They mention they have some measures to "compensate for non-representative sampling in the dataset"
> we are reweighting the Nexar data sample, which is sampled from a non-representative set of locations, so that it matches the locations where different demographic groups actually live. For example, to calculate the police deployment levels that Asian residents of New York City experience, we reweight the original data sample to upsample neighborhoods with larger Asian populations.
and
> For example, if vehicles are prohibited from driving near protest areas, which also have larger police presences, we will not have images of large police presences near protests. It is not possible to correct for this bias with the data we have because 1) the true distribution may differ from the Nexar sampling distribution along unobservable dimensions which we cannot reweight along and 2) we may simply have no Nexar images in some regions of the true distribution (e.g. if all vehicles are banned near protests). A second potential bias is that police vehicles represent only a subset of overall police activity: for example, they do not capture officers on foot. We return to both these points below.
Not sure whether you meant this by "explicitly" but I guess the answer is that they didn't correct for it.
> Before describing the details of the framework, the high-level intuition is that we are reweighting the Nexar data sample, which is sampled from a non-representative set of locations, so that it matches the locations where different demographic groups actually live. For example, to calculate the police deployment levels that Asian residents of New York City experience, we reweight the original data sample to upsample neighborhoods with larger Asian populations.
> Overall, our estimation procedure compensates for two types of potential bias. Equation 2 compensates for a data bias, reweighting the Nexar dataset (which is sampled from a set of locations which does not necessarily match the population distribution; Figure 1) to match the population distribution of demographic subgroups. This is conceptually similar to inverse propensity weighting procedures [4] which are used to compensate for non-representative data in other settings. Equation 3 compensates for imperfect model performance, and allows us to check that model performance is unbiased (i.e., calibrated) across demographic subgroups.
Section 4.1 goes into the mathematical functions they use to address the data set.
Section 3.2 describes the data set and how it is geographically distributed.
> Data was provided to us by Nexar in two phases. Phase 1 consists of 3,987,835 images sampled prior to September 1 2020, and is extremely geographically and temporally skewed. Geographically, it is concentrated within the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and does not contain data from the boroughs of Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx at all; temporally, it overrepresents data from Thursday nights. Phase 2, which constitutes the majority of the dataset, consists of 20,816,019 images sampled after October 4 2020, and is much more geographically and temporally representative: it is sampled at all times of the day, on all days of the week, and also covers the entire geographic area of New York City.
> Because Phase 2 is much more representative than Phase 1, we conduct our primary analysis of disparities using only data from Phase 2. We additionally conduct numerous validations and bias corrections, described in §4.1, to compensate for non-representative sampling in the dataset. Geographic and temporal coverage during the Phase 2 period is very good. Specifically, 100% of hours during the Phase 2 period are covered; 99.6% of Census Block Groups (CBGs)3 have at least one image, with a mean of 168.2 images per CBG; 88% of roads contained within the borders of New York City are covered by at least one image, using data from OSMNX [6]. Figure 1 summarizes geographic data availability; Figure S1 summarizes temporal data availability.
> Two strikingly different types of areas experience high police vehicle deployments — 1) dense, higher-income, commercial areas and 2) lower-income neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents. We discuss the implications of these disparities for policing equity and for algorithms trained on policing data.
You can see the history of police in this. Uniformed police depts were founded by merchants wanting to protect their property and socialize the costs.
Prior to uniformed police, we had town watch/night watch/shire reeves . These folks were drawn from the citizenry and pulled a shift watching things, and it was considered quite a nuisance and unglamorous.
Eventually, wealthy folks started paying others to take their shifts on the watch, and a cottage industry emerged. At that time, watches were still loosely organized and without uniform.
In the mid 1800s, two phenomena occurred that molded police. The first was the idea that a uniformed guard would have a preventative effect on crime in wealthier areas (which resulted in early police depts in London and Boston, iirc). And the second was the increasingly structured and bold slave patrols. The two concepts both focused on protecting wealth (at that time, slaves were property just like warehouses and factories).
Over time, the two merged somewhat. Some police departments emerged directly from slave patrols, others never had anything to do with slave patrols and instead focused on protecting docks and the like.
The results of this research saying, "wealth and race seem to be where police are deployed" is a fascinating rhyme to the origins of police.
(Note, I'm deliberately not saying "cause" or "reflection" here - I do not have the data to say why police are deployed this way. I'm just noting the way it rhymes with history.)
I'm saying the opposite. Originally, enforcement was communal - it was a periodic expectation, something you did but didn't get paid for.
Then the wealthy started paying people to take the unpleasant shift, but even then the pay wasn't to enforce the law, it was pay to take over for some rich guy who didn't want to be up all night.
People whose career is law enforcement is newer and the compensation and expectations are different.
You are saying that for thousands of years of civilization nobody got paid for law enforcement before capitalism? Yeah, that doesn't sound very plausible.
People were paid to protect someone's stuff, those people were called guards, but they weren't enforcing law. Some people were given ownership of a place and the people in that place, they were called lords or knights, but they weren't enforcing laws, they were enforcing their will.
Some communities had expectations and rules, and the community was self policing - if you did theft, the mob would come punish you. They weren't enforcing laws and certainly weren't paid. Their justice was uneven and often brutal.
Sometimes soldiers would be pressed into enforcing laws, but they were being paid to be soldiers.
Eventually we got to some folks who were paid to enforce laws. Some of the earliest were "Shire Reeves" (from which we derive the word sheriff). A shire reeve was a single man who was charged with keeping order in a shire. That's not exactly enforcing laws, but it's close enough in spirit. A reeve would hire temporary folks in a posse if needed to achieve a temporary goal, but did not have a police department.
Temporary posses were not uniformed, and were typically paid for short term labor - arrest this guy or get that property back. A reeve may have guards for his safety or to intimidate local folks, but those guards weren't really law enforcement.
Around the fourteenth century, governments started relying on formal roles known as justices of peace, or conservators of peace, who were explicitly charged with binding people to laws and enforcing laws. They were relatively large in number and the practice continued through to the industrial revolution. Except JPs weren't paid, they were typically gentry who enjoyed the social status it granted them.
The history of US police is really fascinating, and not something most people really every dive into. They believe it was always this way, but it very much wasn't. Police as a concept like we know them is very, very modern.
> People were paid to protect someone's stuff, those people were called guards, but they weren't enforcing law.
So you deny that some people were paid to enforce the law at some point of time somewhere? So the Code of Hammurabi was just a useless piece of stone nobody cared about?
> Some people were given ownership of a place and the people in that place, they were called lords or knights, but they weren't enforcing laws, they were enforcing their will.
Lords and knights is a very recent phenomena. Civilization is much older than lords and knights. In fact, feudalism is a very peculiar part of human history. Most of the time, power was very "centralized" even if "devolved".
> Sometimes soldiers would be pressed into enforcing laws, but they were being paid to be soldiers.
They also were being paid to police, evidently, thus being the police.
> Eventually we got to some folks who were paid to enforce laws. Some of the earliest were "Shire Reeves" (from which we derive the word sheriff).
They weren't the earliest. State monopoly on violence is much older than Shire Reeves.
> The history of US police is really fascinating, and not something most people really every dive into. They believe it was always this way, but it very much wasn't. Police as a concept like we know them is very, very modern.
People believe everything in the US is a consequence of slavery. They can't comprehend that laws and cities existed before 1619, let alone before Anglo-Saxons came to Albion.
Police departments in the US derived from English law, which had a system of unpaid enforcement via gentry. Prior to that, reeves were individuals charged with keeping the peace. Prior to that it was expected everyone contributed via frankpledge.
This takes us back to around the year 1000.
There's not much evidence of law enforcement prior to that in the direct historical lineage of US policing.
In other cultures we see military (gendarmes or "men at arms") and slaves being deployed to enforce laws. (Common in Rome and Byzantine culture.)
In other cultures a leader would create justifications and appoint a single person to ensure the jurisdiction was peaceful. That single individual was paid, and they likely hired guards when they wanted, but I generally wouldn't consider a guard or posse to be law enforcement in the way we understand that term today. Those roles were closer to bounty hunters. This is how the Egyptian pharaohs ran things thousands of years ago.
Hammurabi, btw, isn't like the inventor of laws. He just very famously decided to punish violence with violence. Sumerian law existed prior. But the existence of laws says nothing about their enforcement. If you've got good resources on Sumerian or Mesopotamian enforcement, I'd be interested, but it's pretty far off topic of the US law enforcement lineage.
> Police departments in the US derived from English law, which had a system of unpaid enforcement via gentry. Prior to that, reeves were individuals charged with keeping the peace. Prior to that it was expected everyone contributed via frankpledge.
> This takes us back to around the year 1000.
> There's not much evidence of law enforcement prior to that in the direct historical lineage of US policing.
There is. Police departments in England are derived from police departments in France.
> If you've got good resources on Sumerian or Mesopotamian enforcement, I'd be interested, but it's pretty far off topic of the US law enforcement lineage.
It is not. People in the US like to find idiosyncratic reasons for why things are so in the US and why their country is oh so unique, but the truth often is that things are like that everywhere —even in places where such idiosyncratic reasons couldn't exist.
In earlier times, there was more decentralization. So, such decentralized localities couldn't be what we call states today. Yes, some elders, some wise men, some people with more clan-power, etc., were involved in settling property disputes that arose in their villages, camps, places, etc (whatever such locality could be called).
It was not so much law enforcement, but protection of property. Especially during harvest seasons in old days, farmers pay a share of harvest to protectors. Some kind of such protection has had existed, for sure, without formal laws or without formal law enforcements. It was more of customs, traditions, with some sense of reasonableness.
Which (even to the extent it was true—it wasn't, always) doesn't change the fact that their goals and incentives weren't the same as those of modern professional law enforcement.
Keep to a standard schedule.