I actually tried a daily slack bot instead. The team HATED it with a passion. And the amount of productivity lost on other teams to a backend engineer blocking a systems designer being blocked by a UX flow etc is insanely large. We have never missed a deadline, hit all our revenue targets, and get much. much larger features done in 2/3rds of the time of the next nearest team. Part of that is because we’ve made sure to reinforce the concept that we are a single team instead of a group of server engineers, backened engineers, frontend engineers, system designers, [removed to protect identity] designers, econ specialists, UX designers, UI artists, and QA working in their own bubble.

I mean it really depends on the team. My role is as much translator as anything else. I have:

Infrastructure/Server

Backend

Frontend

Designers (three different kinds)

Performance/Econ specialists

QA

Hearing “Oh I didn’t know that, yeah we need to sync” is a common occurrence and on a team of nearly 20 people we never take more than 15mins. We have shared deadlines, shared goals, and work on shared user stories. Having that moment in the morning to go “okay, am I blocking anyone without realising it?” or “I gotta remember to make sure design knows the spreadsheet won’t have the thing they were expecting today, it’ll be Tuesday instead” is well worth the time.

On top of that, with WFH it’s a really good way to cement the team aspect. I wouldn’t care so much if we were in the office, but all being remote means we lose the “human” behind the screen a lot.

As I said, different teams and different projects need different things, but I’d argue the reason my team is the number one performing in the entire company is, in part, due to this morning time to get that alignment.

Depends on the team. My team do daily standup and it helps. A lot. “What are you working on today and do you need any help to get it done” is a super powerful question to make sure we’re all focusing on the same priorities and sharing the knowledge we have, especially in a team of mixed disciplines.

AbeBooks was bought by Amazon in 2008.

Removed by mod

“We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don’t understand. So if it’s important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work.”

Then what is the point of this new calculator?

Fantastic comment, from the article.

Fascist and populist are not mutually exclusive.

Found my wife on Hinge - it actually felt like an app to match with people you’d like. Having to actually comment on the profile instead of swipe left or right based on the feel really helped.

Work laptops in particular suck, I find. My first one was lagging, freezing, and crashing within months. The second one is three times as expensive but the same brand and is still not happy.

I also use Windows at home and haven’t had the same experience. I think it’s really manufacturer dependent

I think this is a common misconception based on survivorship bias and the high cost to entry. Taking your hypothesis as true: you have to have a product that can be sold to ten users as easily as 1000 users (this in and of itself is not a given). That’s where the cost is: the starting up of the business where you have no customers and won’t have any for several years.

It’s a matter of scale. For co-op where we are, you can get “investor loans” but they tend to have a fixed return. Capital wants to gamble more than they want a 5% APR for 10 years.

What we’re currently exploring is an angel loan from someone sympathetic that has historically lived higher up the corporate ladder and we’re applying for some government grants, but Credit Union may be a good idea!

That’s nice and all, but only works for people that already have money. Food isn’t free. Housing isn’t free. Heck, water isn’t free

EDIT: want to go through the maths to extrapolate this privilege.

Let’s say you need one small team to deliver a novel product, say 5 people. Let’s assume they all live in Europe and just need enough to survive - say, 20,000 euros a year. A lot of ground work has been done, so it’ll only take two years to go from concept to R&D to something to show a potential buyer.

So you have about 100,000 euro per year cost to just keep everyone fed, housed, and clothed not including any equipment, software, licensing etc costs. Assuming there are no costs but just keeping everyone fed and alive the co-op needs 200,000 euros in the bank or alternative funding to get the product in a sellable (note: not finished) state.

In project management in tech (my background) a good rule of thumb is staff cost = 1/3 of costs. However, let’s say we’re being super lean and can self-source the more expensive equipment and just have to think about licenses for core software so let’s make that number 1/2 of cost.

So for the two years of operation to get the product into a position where it can be taken to potential customers, the business would need approx 400,000 euros before a product hits a shelf.

And that’s why funding is a problem.

The rise of the worker co-op is definitely something to watch! I’m currently exploring a worker co-op for a tech start up. Biggest problem? Funding. No investors want to touch a co-op.

You’re conflating liberal parliamentary representative democracy with all types of democracy - I was very specific in my post as to which I had the problem with (and it is equally as specific in the UK’s new definition of “extremism”).

I have no problem with democracy and do think it’s the best system. I have a problem with the idea that electing our overlords from a curated list with little to no fundamental difference (i.e. liberal parliamentary democracy) to then dictate to groups tens or hundreds of millions of people strong is democracy.

Just reading it - the constitution of Canada is mostly about land and parliament setup more than anything else (though Constitution Act, 1960 & 1965 are kick-ass).

The rest is “unwritten” and “interpreted by courts” - exactly like the UK.

Germany, from my understanding, is a really different beast from most countries in how it works thanks to the East-West reunification.

That said, it sounds similar to the US Supreme Court, is that right? What are the checks and balances on this court? What’s to stop the bad actor work as seen in America?

I don’t think the judges would like it, but what recourse would they have if the government passed an act such as this in Canada? I could see a judge saying this act breaches X treaties, but then just withdraw from the treaties (edit: which this act is likely a precursor to).

The system of parliamentary liberal democracy is an inherently flawed system.

The idea that a government can instruct the courts to ignore human rights legislation shows how fundamentally broken the liberal “democracy” system is.

This from the government that just made saying “I am intolerant towards the idea of liberal parliamentary democracy” an example of extremism but saying “foreigners don’t deserve human rights” is not extremism.

Ahh just misread then, all good :D