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underlipton commented on You Have to Feel It   mitchellh.com/writing/fee... · Posted by u/tosh
ghaff · 15 hours ago
The problem with probationary periods is that, especially if relocation is involved, it's really expensive/disruptive to the employee. I'm reasonably confident that I'd have cleared the bar but I probably wouldn't have taken a job when there was a clear short-term probationary period that required me moving across the country. Just too much risk unless it's an incredible opportunity.
underlipton · 11 hours ago
I'm of two minds on this.

1) If such a short probationary period is involved, there's no reason to permanently move during it. A short-term rental will do. If the position works out, then move. (I have done this, it is doable.)

2) Then maybe the job isn't right for you.

The point is to strip the desperation to find The One True Candidate/Job On The First Try, from both sides. Companies are already hiring based on vibes, so this just formalizes it. Employees are already subject to swift termination, based on their employers' whims; this just makes that expectation transparent. From both sides: if it isn't going to work out, we get there quickly and move on. Little is worse than being on a job for half a year, only to get sacked because it took that long for the company to decide that it doesn't like you.

underlipton commented on You Have to Feel It   mitchellh.com/writing/fee... · Posted by u/tosh
Aurornis · a day ago
> You can have a perfectly argued decision that fails some vibe check and is hence discarded

One of the worst hires I ever worked with was excellent on paper, came with good credentials, had an impressive resume, and did objectively well on the interview questions.

However, everyone who interviewed him felt uneasy about him. He failed the vibe check, even though he checked all of the boxes and knew all the right things to say. At the time there was a big push for eliminating bias and being and as objective as possible in hiring, so we were lightly admonished for raising questions based on vibes.

When he was hired, it turned out our vibes were justified. He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.

Since then I’ve observed a number of situations where decisions that seemed objectively good but came with weird vibes were later revealed to be bad. Some of the most skilled grifters I’ve encountered were brilliant at appearing objectively good but couldn’t pass vibe checks of experienced business people. Some of the most objectively good deals on paper that came with weird vibes later turned out to be hugely problematic.

I think the trap is thinking that vibes and feelings are wrong and should be ignored in favor of pre-selected objective measures. This is good practice when doing a scientific study, but it’s not a good practice when you’re entering a real world situation where an adversarial party can root out those criteria, fake them, and use your objectivity against you.

underlipton · 20 hours ago
This is why recruitment as it exists now is a farce. If everything is ultimately vibes-based, there's no point in portraying the process as objective. I'd say that it's even a sort of fraud to do so.

Set base credentials, lottery of everyone who passes the post, full hire or fire after a short (1 month, at most) probationary period where vibes are considered. There's no reason to go through rounds and rounds of interviews over months. It's a waste of everyone's time. Unless your criteria are completely compromised, you'll find someone within a few tries.

underlipton commented on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything   wsj.com/business/retail/t... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
habinero · a day ago
"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own interest" is "the workers will suffer" with more words tacked on the end.
underlipton · a day ago
"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own short-term self-interest in order to secure their workforce, their industry, and, ultimately, the economy, over the long term," is the more correct characterization, and accurately portrays the behavior as misanthropic and illogical for anyone expecting to live beyond the next handful of quarters.

Iwata took a paycut. The least our guys could do is take responsibility.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...

underlipton commented on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything   wsj.com/business/retail/t... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
habinero · 2 days ago
"Companies" aren't going to suffer. Their workers and vendors will, and the whole thing cascades.
underlipton · a day ago
Their workers and vendors only suffer if their owners and executives decide to pass the buck of 1) poor management (not being able to set prices adequately), and 2) being in the socioeconomic class with the most influence on the most recent election. That class has expanded their wealth ludicrously during the last 3 presidential administrations, while most Americans have suffered. Any hits they take now are completely deserved, and nobly so if accepted willingly, in order to spare those lower on the ladder even more pain. (I am, of course, not holding my breath.)
underlipton commented on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything   wsj.com/business/retail/t... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
analog31 · 2 days ago
Look on the bright side, it would have been much more harsh, had they worked in binary.
underlipton · 2 days ago
Would you say it's half as bad as the worst-case scenario?
underlipton commented on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything   wsj.com/business/retail/t... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
underlipton · 2 days ago
I kind of welcome this. Corporations panicking and being afraid to raise prices too much, and perhaps having to take a loss because they're essentially giving away product, is the LEAST that could happen to them after their naked and abusive COVID-era gouging.

EDIT: You had years of corporate stimulus and ZIRP expanding M2, but the inflation floodgates only opened after a paltry return of a small fraction of the real wage losses the middle class and lower sustained over that period? Live by the macro grift, die by the macro grift. And I wrote-in Bernie both times.

underlipton commented on Income Equality in Nordic Countries: Myths, Facts, and Lessons   aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers
underlipton · 3 days ago
Thoughts:

1) It makes me wonder where the surplus goes. Invested back into the corporations, so that the people who run them have a large amount of power? That would be dystopian. Unless I'm making an incorrect assumption, like...

2) Is it only downward compression, or does it perhaps act both upwardly AND downward? So there's little profit unspoken for, and anyone participating in the labor market is receiving a roughly equal piece of the economic output (or, at least, within a relatively narrow band).

3) That would suggest something rather radical to the (neo)liberal mindset of there being no ceiling on what spoils of productivity one can claw to oneself: instead, an acknowledgment that we're all roughly equal humans giving up a roughly equal portion of life, time, energy, and freedom to labor, regardless of the prerequisites to be competent at that labor (or of the opportunities to exploit one's position).

4) As for implications for other countries, I wonder if there are any for those in which social, racial, and class hierarchies are deeply embedded. Can the kind of robust wage bargaining described emerge even without all of that rectified? Maybe it's what catalyzes that rectification?

underlipton commented on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts   petapixel.com/2025/08/20/... · Posted by u/mikece
llm_nerd · 11 days ago
>You can't, resources are limited.

Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

>Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...

underlipton · 3 days ago
>Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.

Wildly naive and incorrect. Wage theft enforcement is limited by access to government labor rights protection resources and legal counsel, and usually just the first. Even simply filing a claim against shoplifting losses, let alone pursuing criminal prosecution, requires getting law enforcement involved. In all cases, you're waiting on authorities to involve themselves and sign off on outcomes. Time and resources put towards one incident are being kept from being applied to another.

>but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.

That's not the actual data.

https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...

The NRF are a notoriously poor and biased source to rely on for this subject.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/07/us-retail-lobbyists-retract-...

underlipton commented on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward   ghacks.net/2025/08/27/you... · Posted by u/speckx
graemep · 5 days ago
One comment says LibreOffice may have fixed the issue.

it looks like the cause is a shutdown without flushing buffers so a file is not properly saved. Backups of any file type should be OK.

underlipton · 3 days ago
It does, but I also found forum posts discussing similar issues with LO back when I had the original issue. I won't risk it; I would rather use applications without a hint of these problems. I've also dropped Evernote after it ate a few of my notes. It's almost impossible to get that user trust back without excising every bit of the concern, and then some, and unfortunately, the LO development community (like many FOSS communities, as well as many proprietary developers) is too self-involved to do that sort of thing.
underlipton commented on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward   ghacks.net/2025/08/27/you... · Posted by u/speckx
Ghoelian · 5 days ago
Do you have any kind of source for that? A bug report or a PR or something?

Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.

underlipton · 5 days ago
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=8...

Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.

I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.

u/underlipton

KarmaCake day618April 21, 2023View Original