It would just be replaced with a new shiny organization having a new name, more freedom to do more harm (given its lack of baggage) and probably end up employing the same people.
Sadly being on the brink of destruction is likely going to be the only motivator for real change.
Sure there is. I've seen them. They wear back suits, black sunglasses, and drive big black oil guzzling SUVs that move in tight groups travelling at the exact same speed. I've also seen their leader too: http://bit.ly/1Y5Irgs (whom is shown reading this thread).
Comments for the sake of humor are generally frowned upon on HN. The exact same topics are usually posted on reddit, where anyone is welcome to meme and joke all day. HN tries to stick with substantive, interesting commenting. I am not trying to speak for everyone, this is just what I have viewed.
Jokes will sometimes fly, but it's usually in pretty inactive subjects and they aren't political like yours.
Humor's fine, it's just that the bar is higher. Most internet humor is lame, and that stuff grows like crabgrass. scott_s expressed this well a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.
By the way, if there's a clique we personally invite you and everyone else to be part of it.
FYI: 'no such agency' is what people used to call the NSA.
So, it was a substantive if simplistic comment, and a joke. Basically, 'Yea not the first time there has been a secret organization within the US government before.' + 'Sounds like a job for the NSA' + the double speak joke' of of course they would never do that.'
People who "actively" avoid churches often do so for reasons other than their personal life challenges.
Also, you're painting a picture as though you can come for the other benefits and not have to deal with their primary purpose of existence; kinda like a time-share salesman who offers $500 and a free lunch provided you listen to the 3 hour brainwashing session. It's a disingenuous statement. I know this from being sold the same free lunch - many times :)
There's a huge flaw in there. When I rent a unit, I will do some client research and to the extent I can I will block the rental based upon my findings. For example if I read their blog and they come across as a risky customer (a profile photo with machine guns, money, and drugs or postings showing a they have a lack of character). Now it could be they also happen to be black, but when they create a fake profile and then get accepted it does not mean I blocked them due to race.
At a minimum you would need to make sure you fake both profiles to ensure everything but skin color is the same.
Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but how do you account for the renter and Airbnb having vastly different sets of information to work from? Also your sample size would have to be huge to rule out coincidental outcomes, which I dare say would rarely be found for the average property.
For example my property gets about 100 customers per year. I'm guessing in the last 4 years I've had 3 black customers, all accepted by the way, but if I rejected all 3 can an algorithm reasonably rule out coincidence having such a low sample size? It just seems like it would be the kind of algo doomed to fuck it up.
It's like spam filtering. It may be hard to imagine but it can work. Algorithms look at multiple signals and produce a confidence score.
Consistently rejecting the one black customer you get every year would probably raise your score enough to prompt an investigation, and the outcome of that (like a fake white test booking) would give more confidence that it's not just coincidence.
> ... entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough...
I don't see how this is an 'entire category' replacement nor do I see how it will happen any faster than say automated checkouts that also replaced droves of clerks. Sure people complain, but it happens so gradually (or gradually enough) that people will just eat crow like they always do.
However it is possible that the perfect machine ends up being largely the same as human beings with a built in evolutionary path for advancement. Such machines would then face the same problems.
Side question: what prevents a basic income from being a driving force behind an inflation jump making the system less stable?
For example: rent. Wouldn't landlords managing properties at the low end of the market price, raise those prices knowing people both 1. have more distribution control over their money (cash vs. coupons for things) and 2. More people in their target market have cash to pay.
I see it as defending the free market economy. I don't think any of them deserve hundred million dollar pay checks, but really the supply/demand of talented CEOs is so out of whack that the pay scales have ballooned. Welcome to capitalism. What I don't understand is why this general problem with CEO pay has to degrade into targeted Mayer bashing.
CEO pay has little to do with the free market and everything to do with the principle-agent problem.
In 1983 the average CEO was paid wages equal to 50 average employees. Today the ratio is over 300:1.
If this is the free market at work then our economy and society is doing something profoundly wrong to produce such an enormous shortfall in qualified CEOs. Clearly we need to identify what's wrong with our upper classes that they no longer seem to be able to produce qualified senior-executives. Maybe they're being educated improperly? Perhaps social problems endemic to that type of person can explain the executive skills gap? In the meantime, at the very least, we need to have a temporary guest worker program to ensure our companies aren't crippled by senior executive shortages.
The government failed to do its job since 197x. The growing income disparity is the result of free market let run completely free by the government. It is the basic example from statistics 101 - in completely symmetric odds situation that thus looks fair at first ("free market"), the player with deepest pockets wins with higher probability. The government by not increasing minimum wage provided for much significant disparity between the "depth of pockets" and thus the resulting increasing income gap.
I see it as defending an "old boys club(now including women!)" who sit on tons of overlapping boards and conspire to "keep it in the family" and "reward" the "successful" businessperson.
The reality is that CEO pay isn't based on performance. its based on some bizarre dance done in the highest boardrooms designed to extract the most wealth possible for the 2 - 5 years someone is CEO regardless of how they run the company.
The dynamic seems to be a) if things are bad, we need to pay top dollar to keep valuable executive talent to fix it, and b) if things are good, we should shower rewards on the executives who made it happen. Heads I win, tails you lose. It's a nice place to be.
Welcome to corporate America. I agree with you, but the people on this forum are not writing comments defending the old boys club when they suggest her pay is not abnormal in the market. If we want to change these things it requires changes in government and regulation so we need to lobby for that change.
you "dont understand" why the chief executive of a company should be targeted with criticism based on how said company performed ? So they should just get paid and not have any responsibilities whatsoever ?
But maybe she did a great job responding to the crises and swerved the ship in the right direction, out of harms way, but just not enough to prevent the crash. Maybe she did a better job than many others would have done. What would you expect them to do... give up?
I don't understand the engineer comparison at all. Every person in her role adopts much more responsibility, takes on a huge risk of failure that can be career ending and they can face a media frenzy that attempts to bash them into the ground. Why would anyone try to compare her salary to an engineers?
Bleeding a failing company dry with a huge comp package is the complete opposite of taking responsibility. If Mayer stood to lose $300MM of her own money (i.e., money that she had before she joined Yahoo), then we could talk about leadership with consequences.
The comment has context. So read: adopts much more responsibility than an engineer. On a day by day basis she makes decisions that have a more significant impact. She has to cover much more territory for understanding aspects over the whole organization.
Her severance would be due to a sale. There are lots of regular employees that get severance packages when they're let go due to a sale.
What's her severance in proportion to her annual salary along with tenure? The norm for my area/role, as an engineer, is 4 weeks per year of service. So 6 years would get me half a years salary, but you know what - it's only two weeks per year for "lesser" roles in my company such as support.
I agree they are paid generously and even overpaid, but they deserve to be paid more than an engineer. How much is debatable, but that's really established by the market. I just don't get the engineer comparison.
It isn't really, tho. It's established by the compensation committee that is convened by the board and comprises of board members.
Starboard bitched about the compensation committee since it only had 2 members on it, and they were favorable to Mayer (giving her credit for what is effectively a rise in Alibaba).
Starboard got 3 of it's own board members onto that committee now, so the fun times are over.
The conflict of interest in the process has always been that you have your own board members, some of whom you bought into the board, deciding compensation. A lot of these directors are themselves the subject of compensation committees at other public companies - so there is a quid pro quo amongst those who serve on each others boards.
It takes an outside activist investor to break up these friendly and circular compensation cliques.
I like Mayer, but it is really difficult to justify these compensation packages when the core business she is running is performing so poorly. I don't think many people would have any problem with her earnings hundreds of millions of dollars - but only as a portion of gains made by rescuing Yahoo's decline.
I agree people should get rewarded for performance and that there are people often taking advantage, but still the entire ballpark area of pay that she gets is guided by market comparisons. There are other comparable compensation packages out there, she's just getting hammered for hers because of the fall. I don't think it's uncommon for failures to result in compensation packages that cause a public outcry.
If they get sued then potentially yes. Think about Fred Goodwin, ex leader at RBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Goodwin
I think there are legal cases coming against him that would need to be paid for, and it is questionable who pays those fees.
Fred Goodwin didn't fall on hard times. He seems to have been directly responsible for some very questionable dealings.
But the bottom line problem with CEO pay is that you get a huge pay packet just for getting out of bed, no matter how badly you do; pay is completely decoupled from performance.
When Leo Apotheker was at HP for just under a year he received $13m in comp, severance of $7.2m, shares worth $3.56m, and a performance bonus of $2.4m - all while losing $30bn in value.
Developers like to speculate about 10X programmers. But ahere's no industry acknowledgement at all that the 0.001X CEO or manager is a real phenomenon. Anyone working at that level seems to be completely protected from business consequences.
I'm not sure how it works; does that insurance still cover you after the event? And if you have made a stupid mistake(not defending or even giving a view about Fred here) you are personally liable, aren't you?
If you are referring to engineers getting let go in a sale, I would guess that many senior level or higher engineer would get 2-3x salary on the way out the door due to things like accelerated stock vesting plus 60 day WARN act plus a separation package.
I don't know the details, as I'm not a Yahoo employee, but it's not uncommon for that to be the case.
I went from 190 lbs. to 138 lbs. over 6 or 7 months. The only exercise I did was jogging for 45 min a day. What I noticed was that jogging made me feel better, which somehow got me to consistently eat better. After a days jogging I didn't want to put crap food in me and ruin what I had accomplished and by doing it everyday I felt good enough, often enough to stick with it.
So, based on my experience, I simply can not agree.
This is very true. Exercise has more of an effect than the calories burned. It improves your health and you feel much better than when you had a sedentary life. As always the answer is that decreasing calorie consumption with moderate exercise is key to maintaining weight loss.
Just as exercising cannot offset massive overconsumption of food, massive underconsumption of food will make one that is dieting feel terrible, and thus not as likely to continue.
In addition the amount of exercise done is never going to really offset a sedentary job. Someone walking on their feet all day vs me being at a desk is going to consume much more energy than me even if I workout after work intensely for an hour. So I am still going to need to consume less than them. But if I did not do the hour of exercise, my body would break down from not being used, and my overall feeling of health would decline.
From my experience: I didn't have a sedentary life, well at least lets just say I wasn't sitting at a computer all day. I was always out and about. My extra weight was from a mix of overconsumption and poor food choices.
I noticed there were unforseen changes in behaviour due to diet that I still find strange. Things like quitting pop. I used to grab McDonald's food more often, but since quitting pop I avoid the place. Sometimes I still grab a burger from there, like 5 times or so over the last 14 years, but I'll never get a pop and I don't have a desire to go there and still avoid it with ease.
I still think diet changes are the single most important thing, but I just don't think I could have gotten there without exercise.
I have also decided this past Jan 1 to stop Soda. And I've phased out sugar in my morning coffee. Not being a big juice drinker in the first place, I think I'm better off as a long term goal to limit the amount of sugar i "drink". I'll stick to just "eating" it, focus on cutting out more processed sugar and being smart about balanced diet in general.
I do crave it still tho, I have not found myself avoiding fast food either. With two kids under 2, it just kind of makes life easier when I make them good meals and can pick up something quick.
One trick I've learned is to not have pop in the house. My girlfriend hates me for it :). Honestly I couldn't have quit pop if I did have it there. At one point she would buy it for her, but somehow I found myself drinking it so we had to have a discussion; thankfully she accommodated me.
Ideally you and your family can get on the same page in terms of diet, but I imagine with kids that can be extremely challenging. It's worth it if you can do it.
Addiction doesn't really work like that. Surely water is better for you, and also "feels" better after a good work out. But put coke in front of people who are semi-addicted to it, they will choose coke.
BTW, almost all water served at restaurants in China is lemon flavored. The best halfway point I've seen is flavored soda water. Fizzy, slightly flavored, gives you some of the feeling of pop without the sugar. Still, put coke in the same fridge, and it requires some willpower to take the flavored soda water.
One more tip. Finding substitutes really helps. Soda stream is awesome provided you don't add the syrups. I do 90% soda water with 10% orange juice or grape juice and I love the stuff.
I think you're nitpicking the article's message. You're saying that exercise caused you to eat better, but the article (and the data) are suggesting that it was eating better, not exercising, that led to the weight loss.
We can agree to disagree regarding what decision gets the credit for shedding those pounds, but in any case, congratulations on your weight loss. That's a real accomplishment.
I should note I spent the first month ramping up from 20 min of jogging to 45 min of jogging which is why I put 6-7 months. If anyone decides to start jogging based on what I wrote, please don't go from nothing to 45 min a day. I didn't do that.
I'm about to start something like this as I have the 'losing weight but losing it from the wrong bits' issue mentioned in another post.
I am physically active, I don't drive, I walk around 3 to 4 miles a day as part of my commute, I go up and down three or four flights of stairs quite a lot of times a day (I'm a teacher and timetabling systems seem to have a Saltationist bias as they have us jumping between lessons) and I work mostly standing up and moving around a large room. So I imagine a vaguely similar activity profile to the hunter gatherers mentioned - I'd love more detail on miles walked per day &c.
I know knowledge is power and the plan you linked is probably good advice, but for my personality type I don't think that would've worked. It's simply too much work :).
During the first month I did 5 min of stretching and then 20 min of jogging in one shot for the day. Every 3 days I would try to add 5 min. Sometimes I could, sometimes I had to back off and try a few days later. After a month I got to 45 min. I then did only 30 seconds of stretching before the jog. I did't think I needed it anymore (probably should have).
As I understand it the first 20 min of jogging doesn't really help you lose much weight, it's every minute after, for the session, that really burns fat.
As for miles walked, this was 14 years ago I didn't think or care about miles walked.
Probably not helping you, but that was my experience.
I've been riding my bike a lot lately, and I have lost weight. I find that exercise, for whatever reason, also makes me want to eat healthier. Sometimes it also actually takes the hungry away: I recently did a 6 hour bike ride, leaving at 1000, and getting back at around 1600, and I was not all that hungry, despite having eaten only a few energy bars during the ride.
I do agree with the feeling that doing exercise makes you feel better, and that this feelings motivates you to eat better food.
I don't see how you say you simply can not agree with the article tho.
The article stipulates that exercise itself has less effect than diet. Maybe exercise helps to keep a good diet, but exercise + keeping same crapy diet won't be as effective as what you did yourself.
Less effect is what i have a problem with. Dieting requires less effort. Cutting portion sizes is much easier than changing your schedule to accommodate a workout.
I didn't set out to change my diet or even diet+excercise. I set out to excercise alone. I changed my diet long before that, but it didn't lead me to excecise and it I wasn't able to do it long enough for it to be ingrained. So my advice would be to excercise even if without a diet change because you are more likely find your diet change as a byproduct and actually be able to sustain it.
Whenever I tried doing cardio exercises, I remember I would come back from the gym so hungry, I would eat a horse. And, I did. I couldn't stop -- I would eat whatever I could lay my hands on.
A couple of weeks later, my weight had in fact, increased. In my life, I have found I have been able to reduce weight only through two methods:
1. Strength training exercises + Protein (read meat) heavy diet
2. Small amount of vegetarian food three times a day
Not for me. I may have stopped working out for long periods, since then, but the 6-7 months of diet change stuck which was enough to maintain the weight loss (approximatley). 14 years now.
Forgot to mention what you did, 45 mins of continuous activity will trigger endorphins. Cheapest way to feel euphoria (even in low intensity).
Just last week I walked back from the grocery store, taking random turns, with a steep hill at the end. Google Fit[1] tracking some data. 5 miles only, but I felt sweating in a good relaxing way.
[1] Google Fit is a very low barrier way to start tracking your exercises. It interprets accelerations good enough to distinguish car, foot or bike move. And you're happy when you get that notification buzz telling you did your planned distance|time.
The article title is kind of clickbait-y, isn't it?
I kind of agree with the article that the diet changes are more important for the weight loss angle. However, when it comes to being healthy overall, I actually think exercise is more important. You can be overweight by BMI, physically fit, and better off overall health-wise than a thin person who is a couch potato. http://healthland.time.com/2012/09/05/can-you-be-fat-and-fit...
Anecdotally, I know someone who has gone from 300lbs to 140lbs using a combination of exercise (walking) and diet changes (Weight Watchers). I think both were equally important to her success, personally.
Some of the article to me was, er, a bit of a stretch. Take point 7: "Exercise may cause physiological changes that help us conserve energy". And the only linked citation is to a paper outlining that people with different genetic composition respond differently to exercise, and a meta study that involved both diet and exercise? "Starvation mode" to extreme diets is well documented, so where's the paper that links to just exercise causing slower metabolic change? I mean, perhaps it's possible, but it runs against the consensus I've heard, so basically, [Citation needed], because what was provided doesn't say what that paragraph said.
I do agree with the article that policy should focus on the low-quality food angle.
Sadly being on the brink of destruction is likely going to be the only motivator for real change.