> I am aware how HR works, the question was about the whittled down 100. Appreciate the word salad, though.
Apparently you aren’t aware of any sort of common courtesy. Or how HR works.
Edit: D&I is a deliberate, well-documented effort by many HR departments across many, many large organizations now. Any attempt to reduce this to a cutesy analogy about fractions is highly suspect at best.
I’ve said this above but I don’t think this is an incompatible view with what the article says. But the predominant attitude is that everyone just ought to move to the suburbs eventually because it’s just “obviously” so much better, with the bigger living space and the lower density. We’re seeing this attitude pop up with COVID-19 once again.
For me, I so heavily despise the experience of being in a car for even half an hour. So unless I find a neighborhood where everything is nearby or maybe I can bike everywhere (not so easy in the US!) none of these supposed quality-of-life improvements will outweigh the downside for me.
(And yes, I have owned a car and used it for day-to-day stuff. I universally hated every single moment I sat in that car.)
I don’t think that’s the thesis of the article. Rather, I think the article is saying that nice things alone don’t compensate for the opportunity costs and negative second-order effects you incur when obtaining _some_ nice things.
To use the article’s example of living in a city versus a suburb: If you can get a house in a suburb and can commute 15 minutes or so and are within walking distance of the stuff you care about (including your friends/family) and don’t value any of the perks of living in a city environment (or heavily dislike the downsides), then go for it. But a big house in the suburbs _alone_ isn’t automatically going to make your life better, yet in my experience that’s a very dominant mode of thinking.
> Living in downtown Palo Alto probably costs 100% more than living in Pleasanton, which is roughly a one hour commute.
As I understand, there’s heavy resistance to building any sort of density in Palo Alto. That will, of course, skew the cost of living. I believe that people are constantly priced out of the city as well (i.e. they wanted to stay but couldn’t).
> I wonder if this is one of the reasons big tech companies run buses — to make the commute less painful and blend into the background of life.
The American perception toward public transit is that it is unreliable, crowded, dirty and/or filled with poor people. Knowing that there will be a seat on a clean bus to take you home without much worry is a major sell and can convince people to ditch their cars (whether or not the equivalent public transit commute actually matches the above perception).
When I was in a situation where I could take the “tech buses” regularly, they for sure helped make a long commute bearable.
Bus rapid transportation could be a better fit, given existing freeway infrastructure. But good luck taking away two lanes of highway anywhere in the United States (true right-of-way separation is necessary for any effective _rapid _transit). A lot of other BRT ends up most of the time being express buses with fancy stations/shelters that still cost a bunch of money.
Honestly I think that the way we plan cities in North America is broken to the point where any transportation strategy is doomed to result in sprawl and congestion. To use a train analogy, I’d say that city planning is the true third-rail of American politics.
That being said, I was under the impression moka pots require a lot of cleanup. For drip, there's a lot of competition, notably the AeroPress, that's only slightly less convenient than the Mr. Coffee machine. But I'm not aware of a product like that for espresso-like drinks.
> It's like saying "Delhi is too Indian"
No, it’s like saying “Delhi has too many Hindi speakers” or “Delhi has too many Brahmins” or “there are too few Muslims in Delhi” or “Delhi isn’t doing enough to combat colorism”.
> or "Beijing is too Chinese"
No, it’s like saying “Beijing relies too much on unregistered rural hukou holders who effectively form an invisible underclass unable to build wealth” or “Beijing is mistreating its growing African minority” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinas-racism-is-wrecki...).
Perhaps you should educate yourself on the real and pervasive socioeconomic, class, and racial divides present in any country, just like in the United States, before proceeding to make reductionist analogies.
I think concerns about how Apple will handle the transition can generally be addressed by the relatively smooth transition from PPC to Intel. Apple has literally done this before.
> As evidence, he pointed to data from real estate companies that showed less interest in California, New York and New Jersey as well as slowing searches for homes in larger cities
This isn’t good evidence for the argument. People who live in cities primarily rent.
As an aside, I do think that a move to smaller cities will help strengthen the American economy overall, similar to the distributed small-cities economy that you see in Germany, where no one city has the primacy and pull of NYC.
> It's only when you go out to the suburbs, probably one of society's least efficient constructions, that you see the lowest prices -- a perfect balance of efficiency, I guess. It is weird and I wonder if there's some lesson in here.
I suspect the inefficiencies are just externalized! Rent is low because land is cheap(er) in suburbia, but society pays in increased average travel times* as well as the high costs of road infrastructure needed to support suburban living in general, which is paid for in our taxes and thus doesn't show up on the price tag at the store but rather as a line item on our paychecks.
* I can walk less than five minutes to the grocery store in the urban core. Admittedly I have no data on this but based on my own experience, I'd bet it takes the average suburban household at least 10 minutes to drive to a grocery store - and 20-30 minutes to drive to a Costco-like store, placed where rent is even lower - and then 2-3 minutes on average spent looking for parking and then walking across the parking lot! Time is money, and given society's obsession with optimizing time, I find it strange how little attention we truly pay to travel times.
But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.
> TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.
For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.
> A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking
And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.
You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.
Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.
FWIW I don’t see anything extraneous, neither in the source code nor on the page. Browser extensions can inject content, of course; that might be what’s happening here.
Sure, comparisons to Gitmo might be unwarranted, but this article is not about cafes merely playing music nonstop (which is indeed ubiquitous), but about Starbucks playing the same few songs over the speakers repeatedly while denying employees the ability to control the playlist (and therefore the environment around them). FTA:
> Earlier this year, irritated Starbucks employees took to Reddit to rage about how they had to listen to the same songs from the Broadway hit musical Hamilton on repeat while on the job. One user wrote that if they heard a Hamilton song one more time, "I'm getting a ladder and ripping out all of our speakers from the ceiling."
At a smaller cafe, I'd imagine employees would get much more control over what music to play (often I've noticed it's just some employee's phone plugged into the speakers).
Apparently you aren’t aware of any sort of common courtesy. Or how HR works.
Edit: D&I is a deliberate, well-documented effort by many HR departments across many, many large organizations now. Any attempt to reduce this to a cutesy analogy about fractions is highly suspect at best.