Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

More seriously, I don't think that really leads to conspiracy thinking, but there certainly are interesting parallels...

Is it any wonder that so many people believe in conspiracy theories when they grow up with every adult around them (including, apparently, the police) conspiring to *make up a person with magic powers*, just because they think it's fun?

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/22/1150596852/girl-asks-police-to-run-dna-test-on-christmas-cookie-for-evidence-of-santa-claus

If you get so far as to collect a DNA sample, you should get to know the secret,, not have the police send you fake evidence.

@glyph I mean that from the point of view of a person running a corporation, the outcome of their decisions is always massive criticism. At some point they will learn that nothing they do satisfies the public and they will stop trying.

I think maybe a norm of thoughtfulness and charity would make legitimate concerns more actionable to decision-makers. Obviously all of "the public" won't adopt this change, but I don't think it hurts to model this behavior.

(And to be clear, your own writings are often very nuanced and thoughtful and I believe that we'd be on the right track if more people were like you, so this is not a personal criticism of you)

@glyph @hynek @frank @mitsuhiko I don't think I know the right way to run a $XXXB company, so I'm not sure whether the layoffs are required, useful, beneficial in the long term, etc. It's possible that they are not compassionate because they are doing a layoff at all. It's also possible that the layoff was necessary **and** all the super high value people who got laid off were the casualties of some cutthroat executive game of thrones. But I also think that the way the layoffs were effected is consistent with a world where the company is compassionate but the layoffs were necessary (or at least a trade-off worth making).

I don't need or expect my companies to be compassionate or loyal to me, and I don't really believe that it is in the nature of large organizations to really care about individuals, so I don't have a dog in the fight, but I can't help but notice that it seems impossible for big companies to make hard decisions without pretty intense criticism.

I've also seen a lot of criticism in the past that FAANG companies are bloated monsters that are very inefficient with shareholder money, not innovative enough, etc. Probably not the same people complaining about layoffs, but I can't help but feel that we might be encouraging a but of learned helplessness from companies when no one tries to interpret their actions as charitably as possible.

@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I only bring this up because despite it not being strong enough to really budge my priors on the sociopathy of large organizations, it should be acknowledged that this behavior is consistent with what a compassionate entity might do.

@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko Also, I believe corporations by their nature are sociopathic, so this is not the explanation I believe or prefer, but if big corporations were the sort of loyal, employee-focused entities that people seem to want them to be (especially at a time like this), it would kinda make sense for them to fire people randomly or even weight the algorithm in favor of people most likely to land on their feet.

"Bob has been working here for 20 years and he's a superstar in the field, if we let him go we can afford to keep 5 newer, less-established employees, plus everyone who is not Bob who gets fired is now in the pool of, 'Yeah they laid me off but they also laid off Bob, so you shouldn't worry that by hiring me you are hiring an underperformer.'"

@hynek @glyph @frank @mitsuhiko I have no idea what the metrics used were, but if you have a model of per employee profitability where you feel that the standard deviation is low, or where you don't feel you can accurately identify outliers, but you feel that your spending on personnel is too high, it makes sense to either fire people semi-randomly or to fire various people with high compensation.

It doesn't even mean that you feel that high compensation for that person isn't justified.

@nedbat Also easterly / westerly / southerly / northerly: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/westerly

@davidism "So when does Arnold Schwarzenegger come out and start making ice puns?"
"I think you are thinking of *Batman and Robin*."
"Well whatever this is if the armor doesn't have nipples I'm leaving at intermission."

@hynek @jugmac00 I was under the Impression that Germans love to capitalize Nouns.

That said, I remember liking *Murder at the Margin* and the other Henry Spearman "economics professor solves murders with economics" books, so who knows...

> **Critical Chain** is a novel by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt using the critical chain theory of project management as the major theme.

Sounds like a real banger...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Chain_(novel)

@goatsarah Maybe he's just... invisible?

@sethmlarson Also, you never realize how much you've internalized not being in other peoples' way until you have kids, who have no notion of inconveniencing other people and are dubious about transitions like doorways, stairs and elevators.

My youngest son loves walking up and down ramps, so he'll gleefully just walk back and forth on the slight incline at the entrance to a store or restaurant and scream if I make him stop. 😅

@sethmlarson I think the rule for escalators is basically always "stand on the right, walk on the left", but they exhibit phase change behavior at high densities.

At some point, someone stops on the left for some reason or just goes slower than the walking traffic behind them, and then walking traffic is forced to stop behind them, and eventually both sides are full of standing people. There's no easy way to get that line moving again once it spans the whole escalator, so you have a "stand on both sides" escalator until it clears out again.

@jacob Though if it's really just that you are short on protein in your life, you may just want to deal with whatever annoying thing you have for a few weeks and you'll pretty quickly learn how to get enough protein in your meals. If you are not a vegan, egg whites, non-fat greek yogurt and whey protein are pretty easy ways to just inject protein into whatever you are eating without adding many calories. Grilled chicken breast is also basically 100% protein.

@jacob I tried out MacroFactor for a bit. I didn''t *love* some aspects of the interface, but IIRC that was because when I'm dieting I often eat slight variations on the same thing every day, and I didn't see good options for stuff like, "Copy what I had for dinner yesterday to dinner today".

They had some sort of thing where you could use natural language like, "A handful of almonds" and it would try and estimate what you ate. Not sure about the recipe thing, though.