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Within the last month both Mapbox and Etsy blocked my attempts to signup using a Proton Mail alias. How many services do you sign up for in recent years, on average? The practice is becoming incredibly common and more than likely you're just grandfathered in.

are you sure they're not just blacklisting protonmail vs. whitelisting known providers? ime a lot of sites block "temporary" or "anonymous" email providers

Etsy blocks my entire ISP (I know because my IP rotates almost daily) so I cannot even view their site at all, it just gives me a "you are blocked" page.

Within the space of 2 weeks I had both Etsy and Mapbox block signups with Proton Mail aliases. The practice is rapidly becoming more common.

Blocking signups from proton.me is not the same thing as only allowing signups from the big mail providers.

Great, so all I need to do is to authoritatively check each plausible combination of domains that _might_ work and rule each of them out before I can make my claim, according to you?

What a load of pedantry.


People always seem surprised when someone in CS or SWE doesn't care for anime or cutesy pictorial graphics of girls.

It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman. In a lobsters thread about Anubis, a community member of 12 years got themselves permanently banned because they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer and refused to apologise when given an opportunity by moderators. Telling on themselves, perhaps? It's funny, in a bizarre way, that this is a hill people will die on.

> ...they were frothing at the mouth with accusations of pedophilia against the developer...

I think I remember that thread. IIRC, it went something very, very roughly like this:

  Future banned user: It weirds me out a bit how young the mascot looks. I've never been comfortable with cutesy, underage-looking mascots.
  
  The dogpile: How dare you insinuate that the dev a pedophile? Don't you know how anti-trans that dogwhistle is?
and the conversation degraded from there.

I'll also note that you chipped in with

> It's mostly surprising how many grown adult men go into a blind rage when confronted with a picture of a cartoon woman.

when -AFAICT- noone in this subthread expressed anything more heated than "dislike of kawaii". But perhaps you were speaking more generally, and weren't inspired by any conversation that happened in this subthread.


It also serves as a sort of "chud defense", in a way.

I like it.


If anything, its the opposite, going by the number of users with anime girl pfps on Twitter and other social media posting slurs and bigotry.

It's moreso only a loose indicator the user is between the ages of 14-30, if anything.


For some reason it's always underage girls.

How do you determine whether a drawing is "underage"?

Without these kinds of policies you'll just see the rise of more "new-right" parties like One Nation in Australia and Reform in the United Kingdom (yes, I am aware both are not "new", but they are newly popular).

It turns out there is a sufficient amount of immigration that is disliked by the populace that they will dump support for long-standing parties in favour of those who promise change.


Voters rejected a proposal, and your response is that the result will be more parties that support the type of thing that the majority of voters just rejected?

In a sense, you may be correct, but who cares? The majority of people voted against xenophobia, some people are still super xenophobic and will continue to try to implement xenophobic policies, and the majority of people will keep voting against them.


Disliking mass immigration isn't xenophobia.

The UK far right got what they wanted with Brexit, yet they are still complaining. There's no evidence indicating that capitulating to their extreme policies will somehow lead to them becoming friendlier to the political establishment.

I find it interesting you label the majority of voters in the populace who voted for Brexit as "far right", and not just "right".

Honestly to me it seems that the objectively unprecedented migration levels in the UK of the last decade (caused explicitly by government policy) are better suited to be called "extreme" or "far" than the demands to roll them back

The Swiss people voted in a folks referendum, not per parties’ delegate. Thus, it’s not politics as in other countries but the direct responses of the population. Switzerland is a direct democracy that doesn’t need alt right parties to “revenge” and support chance.

Not sure if there is any in-depth analysis across more countries about this pattern, but also in this votum, densely populated urban areas had a clear stance against this votum, whereas the majority of votes have come from rural areas. So I am not as certain as you are whether the trend extrapolates as outlined - I rather imagine that the polarization will increase even further across these two segments, with lived and experienced realities drifting apart.

Switzerland already has such a party, the SVP (UDC in French), and in fact they put forward the initiative.

This was widely understood to be a vote on how well the SVP can appeal to the center. Turns out pretty well but it's not entirely surprising given their recent election results.


Yeah.

So what will realistically happen, if we look at the trajectories of other countries, is that immigration will continue to rise, more people will be peaked by the discontent it can sow, and the popularity of this party will rise further.


>more people will be peaked by the discontent it can sow,

I think this is sort of begging the question a bit, in the sense of assuming a specific conclusion is true when asking the question of whether it's true.

In particular, I don't think it's demonstrably true that immigration sows discontent. I do think that it can be shown based on the US example that far-right parties looking to sow discontent often scapegoat immigration as the cause for societal problems that may have nothing to do with immigration (like the classic "your cost of living has gone up coincidentally at the same time that corporate profits are at an all-time high and regulatory capture is widespread; it must be immigrants to blame for things being expensive!")


Imagine taking away from the last century of world history the lesson that we should proactively give in to demagogues.

And it's criticisms like this that isolate people further from each other politically and emboldens support for the parties you dislike.

There are valid and reasonable reasons to dislike large-scale immigration beyond supporting despots for the sake of doing so. The mainstream parties are not offering alternatives, can you blame those who are disaffected by this rapid societal change from reaching out to support the first name that voices critique at policies they dislike?


>The mainstream parties are not offering alternatives,

This part rings a little hollow when it's one of those mainstream parties that's doing the demagoguery.

>can you blame those who are disaffected by this rapid societal change from reaching out to support the first name that voices critique at policies they dislike?

Yes and no.

Can I blame people for recognizing that something in their life isn't working? No. Can I blame them for willfully accepting claims that offer no attempt at proving themselves with evidence, and that consist almost entirely of "people who look different than you are the only reason you have any problems"? Yes, because the average person shouldn't be so easily duped, and if they are, it's generally because they already wanted a reason to blame "those people" and anyone offering the faintest excuse ought not be "good enough".


Can you list some of these reasons?

Immigration has been directly responsible in the last decade for the huge run-up in housing prices in New Zealand.

It is not _the only reason_, but it is a big reason.


Yes. Yes I can and do blame them.

This is written beautifully. It's like a much more inconsequential variant of Chernobyl.


The constituent particles of nature are under no requirement to be apparent or achievable to you.


> A senior engineer says “I want a 40% raise or I’m leaving,” and the company’s ability to respond depends entirely on what their alternatives look like.

Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another 3 months (New Zealand).

Both the employer and employee know this. So the employee is either foolish or risky enough for asking and gets turned down, or they do actually leave and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.

End of story.


> and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do

It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.


> the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.

I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around.

If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.

If someone is claiming to be paid below-market but the company can hire their replacement, then they're not being truthful.


Hiring the replacement ≠ finding the same or better replacement.

Will you be able to find someone in this economy? Sure

Could you fill the shoes? Much harder. Especially in the age of bootcamps, AI to complete exercises, and what have you where people went into IT for the money and not for the love of the craft, tinkering and learning.

So this is not an oxymoron: you can have 200 applicants and not a single good one to replace someone with them.


Only in a market with perfect information. With imperfect information, the market rate is an estimate of the expected or typical rate for a similar good. Because everyone has access to a different subset of the information, everyone's estimate is different, and companies often end up paying above or below the consensus rate.


Yes, this is how markets work. You don't need perfect information to have a market. The price of risk is factored in.


That depends on the country. In the US where everything is tied to stock options and employees will jump ship if they get 50 cents an hour more next door, that may be the case. In Aus/NZ you don't have that kill-yourself-for-your-stock-options-and-then-leave culture, if you're not on a barely-subsistence wage where you don't have any choice then people will look at job satisfaction, ease of travel to/from work, and so on alongside what they get paid. I know several guys who have turned down jobs that paid five-figure amounts (this may be a two-figure amount in the US) more than they were currently earning because they were quite happy with their current work environment. Good work environment, laid-back management, the company looked after you (rec room, pool table, beer fridge, after-work gaming, being able to tell the mgt that something wouldn't work and they'd listen to you, etc), not because they saw it as a leash but because they believed in looking after their employees. Some of those guys, and their coworkers, have been at the same company for 20-30 years.


In AUS/NZ you're not going to earn even close to the same amount as you would in the US. Every time I've changed jobs, it was for an extra 100k+ per year. The rec room/pool table can't compete with that.

My current manager has been with the company for almost 20 years. He doesn't feel the need to leave because his stock options have made him a multimillionaire. The company doesn't care about him or me, but we're both happy to stay because we don't need them to. We just need them to pay us.


No, we are not talking about a commodity market with a clear exchange. If an employee is bad at a negotiation or doesn't look around then they may accept a lower salary than another market participant would have offered and if neither side looks around, and is willing to pay some costs of a change then they are making a salary that is different than the current market rate.


I'm not an economist but that implies the market maintains some kind of optimal equilibrium price. The reality probably is very noisy like with everything else. Plus there's asymmetric information on both sides meaning people don't get what they think they do.


Poeple are not fungible, who’s to say that the individual replacing them is of equal value.


People are not fungible but the role frequently is.

You could be an AI infra genius, but if you're in a cookie-cutter consultancy role, that's the salary you're getting.


The role is only ostensively fungible because the org acts like it is, to its detriment. Staff turnover is crazy expensive.

It’s a lemon market with a power play dynamic, one of the main reasons I’m self employed.


> If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.

Or they lobby the government for slaves


This is pretty much what's occurring in New Zealand right now, yes. 2020–2023 had pretty much zero international movement due to closed borders with COVID-19, with a low official cash rate which caused business to be in desperate need of development resource; so salaries were high.

Market rate for developers has either stagnated generally or depending on the role dropped as hundreds of applicants are willing to undercut each other on what constitutes an acceptable pay check.

But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons.


> But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons.

The main reason being that it's illegal in NZ. The employee would have to agree.


The main reason is that employees will quit. It's not illegal in the US, but it still almost never happens. Companies would rather lay off than risk alienating employees like that.


> the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.

Money doesn't cleanly convert into time.

Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior because of the lower expectations and risk.

Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.


> Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.

Hiring is the most important function in any company, full stop.

If they aren't good at hiring, well then they shouldn't be running a company. There are no excuses. If HR aren't up to the task, then they should be replaced, and so on up to the level of the CEO, until whatever incompetence has been flushed out. Shareholders have to demand this.

A company not being able to hire is just as ridiculous as a restaurant not being able to serve food.

If they are receiving a flood of applications which is hard to sift through, they are already doing everything wrong. Shareholders have to nuke these kind of people.


> If they are receiving a flood of applications which is hard to sift through, they are already doing everything wrong. Shareholders have to nuke these kind of people.

That's why some companies will contract with temp agencies for relief.


> Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior.

Yeah but the point of this post is that it makes an assumption that your company doesn't have mid-levels or juniors.


Aye, its assuming the org tossed them away when LLMs turned up or stopped recruiting at that level.


as knowledge is commoditized the bar for junior raises, what was advanced math research a century ago is now undergrads' homework. I don't see why code is so special in that regard that cannot progress beyond artisanship.


Seems like you’re only imagining interchangeable people who dont have bargaining power?


That's probably the bulk of senior developers. We're not all inverting custom proprietary binary trees.


By the same logic, most CEOs are interchangeable. After all, not all of them are creating new markets, shepherding new and exciting business ventures or changing the way we do X.


Knowledge and tacit knowledge of the system and company around it makes a huge difference.


Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.


The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.


There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.


The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing


Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.


Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.


To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.

The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.


Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.


We didn’t have any. The project manager set it at 3 story points.


Agreed. I'm very pro-solar but there should be incentives for residential solar and solar on commercial buildings first. Covering up farmland and natural environments should be a last resort.


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