krellor @ krellor @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

So take unsolicited internet advice with a grain of salt, but my understanding from friends who work at AWS and from my own time spent working with AWS folks is that most of this return to office policy is focusing on those positions that were in person before the pandemic. They still have remote only positions, and positions with enough travel that they report to be exempted from the badge metrics whole on travel status.

Whether AWS is a good place to work really hinges on the team you are on and the manager. Most teams at AWS have a lot of flexibility in their work, and aside from this return to office reset of work norms, I would expect that to continue. I also predict that the badge monitoring and policy will fade in a year or so as the new norms are established, and individual team managers will have more discretion on it again. This policy is the company trying to shift the current default and culture which takes some top down directives. Once that is done, they won't spend the effort on the detailed tracking I don't think.

I don't see how this change represents de-regulated capitalism any more or less than the status quo. Currently there is a single nonprofit corporation that has been the sole recipient of the primary government contact for over 40 years. Just because they are a nonprofit corporation doesn't mean they can't have many of the conflict of interest issues that for profit corporations have. Indeed, it sounds like there is evidence of that as there is overlap between the UNOS board of directors and their oversight board.

The change doesn't impact the fact that the government is contacting out for services. What it does is allow the government to contact out more ala carte since it seems the current organization has allowed aspects of the service to languish.

I would be worried if the government was moving responsibilities from a government agency to an outside bidder, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

That's interesting. Any chance your ISP could have been qos'ing streaming video? Although Singapore would be about the one place where a VPN concentrator would help; it is pretty much the big fiber hub in that local region for East, West, North connectivity.

Fiber map

I've only ever used Oracle cloud in an enterprise environment, so I don't know what features you have available. I'm also much more familiar with AWS. But you should be able to create a proxy endpoint in your present region, and traverse the cloud providers internal network. That would likely improve your streaming. You could also create a VPN endpoint in your current region and terminate your traffic inside your cloud providers network, but that would add protocol overhead.

I would look at tools like iperf to look at your packet loss because being further from your server will increase latency, but shouldn't impact the streaming unless you also have packet loss.

I used to oversee WAN and peering operations for a large multi site. Residential ISPs almost never respond to reports of inefficient routes unless you are one of their peers, big business customers, or you really know your stuff and send in a detailed report showing asymetric routes, bad bgp info, etc.

As far as a VPN goes, that probably wouldn't help either. You will probably increase the number of hops and latency. Your route will still egress your isp gateway, to your VPN provider, then travel over the Internet and to your remote server, while adding additional protocol overhead. Yes, it is remotely possible that there is an improved link from his regional VPN node to his remote provider, but unlikely from my experience with traffic engineering.

Here's a great podcast from NPR about the expiration dates, and what means what in the world of best by labels.
Link: Best by sell by use by

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/15/1111850221/best-by-sell-by-use-by

I don't know your age, health, etc, but there are lots of reasons we hurt other than age. Ergonomics, repetitive stress injuries, regular old injuries. It doesn't take much to compound these issues into something that interferes with your life.

I spent the last twenty years sleeping on a mattress that wasn't right for my sleep style. It didn't feel great sleeping on my side and it has a slight divot. I didn't wake up in pain, but it definitely impacted the quality of my sleep.

I recently moved and bought a new tempurpedic. I went in, went through a calibration test of sorts and tried the top recommended matches. Ended up buying the top match, which was way expensive, but I now consistently get the quality of sleep I used to get at best once a week.

Two things: the mattress was $3k, and I still have chronic shoulder pain I manage with home physical therapy.

I guess my point is, the best mattress won't fix a problem not caused by a bad mattress. You might need PT, stretching, or some other physical routine to help manage your particular pain, just like I have special exercises for my shoulder that if I stop, it will start hurting again and prevent me from sleeping on my side, no matter the mattress.

So before you throw down money on a mattress, make sure you rule other reasonable things out, and make sure you understand the return policy. E.g., of you remove the tags you can't return, of there is any discoloration, no return, etc. Just make sure you have the details down pat.

I tend to agree in that I think much of the perception discrepancy is based on the belief that a greater proportion of the country is suffering, or that the suffering happening is preventable. To your point, inequity shapes people's perception and it's hard not to feel like big companies and execs are screwing people for a few extra percentage points. The general feeling that people are suffering and it is particularly avoidable compared to the (perception) in the past could explain negative attitudes towards the economy and inflation.

Thanks for the great conversation!

Gift article: I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible

That's likely true, but is also always likely true. The question is why are the proportion of responses on individual household stability different than prior years with similar economic measures. It's something affecting perceptions, or are we missing a measure of the economy? Some l since the study is a long ongoing one done by the fed, and it is 73% doing at least ok, it seems like there is some interesting questions to form for further follow-up.

Gift article: I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible

If recommend looking at the article since it looks to the survey details. The survey I mentioned was specifically polling household's and 73% said that their household was doing at least ok. This is a long running study done regularly by the fed, and the proportion of responses doesn't fit with historical trends. So either something is missing on how we measure perceptions or how we measure the economy. Both lead to interesting questions.

Gift article: I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible

Yeah, the survey responses seem out of whack compared to historical data. It's odd, and worth thinking about.

I'm not sure that this is the case but I'm not an expert. A recent opinion pieces by Krugman showed survey data that indicated that most people reported doing ok, while also saying the economy was not. Some of this might be related to individuals doing ok but being worried about the prevalence of folks struggling.

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/opinion/economy-inflation-negativity.html

One key point is that at the end of 2022, 73% of respondents said that they were doing at least ok financially. So almost three quarters of households aren't significantly struggling, and yet a majority of people also say the economy isn't doing well, even when they are.

Now, many people are struggling, but many people are always struggling. The question is why is the proportion of people with a negative sentiment towards the economy out of whack with the number of people reporting doing ok financially.

I dunno; Krugman makes some guesses and the article is a quick read. If you hit a paywall let me know and I'll make a gift link.

Edit: I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible

Given the prevalence of bad management, I'm sure some people were lied to, or the manager believed wrongly that it would end up being permanent, etc. However, anyone who moved and signed a mortgage without a signed remote work agreement was making a heck of a gamble. None of my folks did that, and in my overall division I only knew of one person who moved without a signed agreement, and they ended up being let go of. The funny thing was, for that person, they likely could have gotten a full remote work accommodation if they had put the request in because as a developer they had no physical infrastructure to touch.

The article is about people who are moving back after work from home is ending at their company. I'm sure there are people in the situation you describe but that isn't what this article or my comment are about.

I think generally the big issue that people have with crypto is that there are so many irreversible mistakes you can make, not that the underlying security is worse/better than a bank. There are lots of ways to securely manage crypto, but most people don't have the tools, expertise, and discipline to do so. Even simple things like being diligent about randomly generating strong passwords, hardening your accounts and devices against account theft and social engineering, etc.

At the end of the day if you lose your bank password, account details, etc, you can go to a branch with your id and get access. If you are scammed and money is transferred from your account, the bank will generally make you whole or be able to reverse the transaction. None of those safeguards exist in crypto, and many would say that is a feature, not a bug. Which is fine, I get it, I was a crypto early adopter because I liked the math side of it. But it's not what most people need or can integrate into their life.

I will also say that I laughed long and hard about reports of NFT smart contracts being used to execute malicious code sent as an NFT, which is a massive security issue, but I don't think it's fair to lump the whole crypto ecosystem into the NFT cesspool.

I know lots of companies are handling the wfh and return to office situation poorly. But to provide a counterpoint, at the start of covid, I led all the engineering teams in a large organization with dozens of sites. When we went to wfh we made it clear that we were authorizing remote work with the contingent that the team could be called in as needed, not to move outside of the area, and not to travel more than two hours away when on call (1 week every two months) etc. Sometimes things break bad enough you need the team's to be physically present at a location, or doing major border device work, etc.

Either the organizations didn't message properly, or a lot of people moved despite being told that the wfh wasn't a permanent remote work accommodation. I'm all for remote work and hybrid, etc, but on a personal level buying a house outside your commute range while knowing you might get called in someday and being brown to your job... just poor decision making.

Fwiw, I approved permanent remote with for all my staff who didn't have any physical responsibilities. For those whose jobs involved any physical infrastructure, the best a could do was hybrid with no minimum number of days in office, just come in as required for the work.

Some of my favorites:

Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman
Truly a great book that has been influential in how I approach presenting material to other people and in making sense of the world. Daniel and his long standing research partner received the Nobel prize in economics with there work in behavioral psychology. The book teaches you how people think, make decisions, and process information.

Antifragile, nassim taleb.
I won't say much other than to make a counterpoint. As much as I enjoyed the book and his presentation and arguments around making systems antifragile, his witing can be summarized by a quote from Dr. Tetlock: "His witing is like a fine French meal, gently dusted with shit." Taleb is a bit up his own ass at times, but antifragile is imo his best work.

Superforcasting, Phillip Tetlock.
Great book on how to quantify the chance of future events. Famously feuding with nassim taleb, though really it's more taleb feuding with anyone who has different ideas than him.

Man's search for meaning, Victor frankl.
One of the most interesting, heart wrenching and warming books. Whether you subscribe to his exact philosophies, frankl is a wonderful read.

The better angels of our nature, Steven pinker.
Probably the most exhaustively assembled academic book I've ever read on the trends of progress.

Origin story, David Christian.
An excellent history of everything with a focus on the repeating patterns of humanity trending towards more complex social interactions. Am easy and enjoyable read.

That's really interesting given what I mentioned in my other comment about plateauing at 4k calories/day when I was on a running challenge. Once I tracked about 4k calories burned, my energy level would just plummet.

I mean, maybe you exaggerate to make a point but there are practical limits to what you can exercise your way out of. I set a challenge to myself to jog a half marathon every day for a year. From January 2022 through January 2023 I jogged 22km a day seven days a week for 367 days. I also did light weights and exercises for my upper body. I burned around 4000/day, as best as I can track with my Garmin watch. Which throw in a couple of milkshakes and you can blow through 5k calories in a day.

I will say, I did struggle to keep my weight up with such a regimen and a fairly healthy diet and dropped to 150lbs at my lowest (6'2"tall). But if I wanted to eat more calories I could easily get there with fried food and ice cream.

Edit: and for most people this is completely infeasible. Most people don't have the time flexibility to wake up at 4 am every day and put on those kinds of miles.