Cheaper than building your own datacenter, or buying your own server space and paying a dedicated engineering team to monitor a cluster for you. I can do things on my own or with a small team that would be well out of my reach without AWS or GCE.
This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance.
In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to this quite well!
1. Have they been divorced or cheated on someone before? People who have been divorced before are much more likely to divorce again. The 50% divorce rate in the US is slightly misleading, as many of the divorces are concentrated in repeat divorcees. In fact, among younger (early to mid twenties) first-time marriages, the divorce rate plummets to something like 15-20%.
2. Have their parents been divorced or cheated? Children of divorced parents are much more likely to get divorced themselves.
3. Have they been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as a child? People with traumatic early childhood experiences are much more likely to develop trust issues with long-term partners, especially if they never had extensive counseling.
4. Do they have a good relationship with their family? People who have a difficult or unstable relationship with multiple family members are more likely to see tumultuous relationships as a norm.
This is all equivalent to reference checks in a job.
Then a long dating / engagement period is necessary. How do you they treat you during this period? Do they cheat? Are they abusive? Do they leave you during a period of difficulty? Do you have the same religious views? Do you split housework evenly? Do you both want kids? How do you view money? The three most common reasons for a fight among couples are 1) money, 2) housework, 3) free time (and how to spend it).
People who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted adults who get married and then divorce bitterly after 10 years are not the norm. Most divorces can be predicted. And most divorces happen before 2 years of marriage. If you are aware of the warning signs and are not blinded by a "gut instinct" I think you can definitely minimize the potential for marrying a snake -in-the-grass.
My favorite stat about micromorts is that motorcycle travel and canoe travel pose the same risk when measured by distance. That is, one mile of motorcycling has the same risk of death as one mile of canoeing.
I don't know how the author can draw this conclusion. He seems to say that employees engaging in shady practices is the inevitable conclusion of requiring a certain amount of accounts to be opened, and then blames the employees for doing it instead of those who wrote the policy.
The article quotes:
"Wells Fargo has strict quotas regulating the number of daily "solutions" that its bankers must reach; these "solutions" include the opening of all new banking and credit card accounts. Managers constantly hound, berate, demean and threaten employees to meet these unreachable quotas. Managers often tell employees to do whatever it takes to reach their quotas. Employees who do not reach their quotas are often required to work hours beyond their typical work schedule without being compensated for that extra work time, and/or are threatened with termination.
"The quotas imposed by Wells Fargo on its employees are often not attainable because there simply are not enough customers who enter a branch on a daily basis for employees to meet their quotas through traditional means."
This reads to me like damning culpability. Then he says, "But obviously no one in senior management wanted this." Well of course they don't, now that they've been caught! But it was a pretty good scheme at the time raking in millions of dollars.
The author highlights why Airbnb is the right company to use to talk about it.
> Often arbitration clauses are invoked in cases where consumers feel they have been financially slighted—seeing charges on their phone bills for services they never wanted, for instance—but the Times investigation found arbitrations used in more serious cases of medical malpractice, theft, hate crimes, and discrimination. The Airbnb situation highlights how far the practice extends.
Other companies (like car dealers) have used arbitration for smaller scoped purposes, but Airbnb is essentially opting out of the 14th amendment.
Being held accountable to metrics will incentivize some behaviors over others. It's not surprising that when Arts and Phys Ed are not on the test, they are dropped from the curriculum. I think student, teacher, doctor and patient happiness should be one of the key metrics that is measured and reported along with test scores and mortality rates. That would incentivize schools and hospitals to take a more balanced approach.
I think trust is a bigger deal in the R community than say Ruby. With a gem you can tell pretty quickly if it works or not, and the community has a higher standard of testing.
With R, many of the packages are for complicated math and stats. That particular package might pass all it's internal tests, but what if they implemented a distribution wrong, or calculated 95% confidence incorrectly? That is when you have to trust the developer personally.
Except that prisoners are a captive audience, being held by the Government, and the phone companies get a monopoly on an essential good. So a federal regulatory body absolutely makes sense.
I believe that erosion is a bigger issue than loss of nutrients.
For example, Iowa has lost an estimated 10 inches of topsoil in the last 150 years. There are only six inches left. Dust-covered bedrock does not make good farmland.