I am definitely a layperson when it comes to organized sports, but from my POV it seems like competitive cycling attracts WAY more fraud/cheating/doping/etc. than many other kinds of sports. At least I have heard about it a lot more. I wonder why that is.
Because it's such a tough sport. The Tour de France was originally intended to be so tough that only one person might finish it. In other words it was set up to be extremely hard for most normal athletes to compete without some kind of artificial assistance.
So there was a history of drug taking from the start. But after the scandals of 20 years ago it became one of the most tested sports in the world. So now, in my opinion, drugs are not used much compared to other relatively untested sports (maybe some microdosing). Instead sports science has taken over. Pogacar, the current TdF champion works with a someone who is a contributor in mitochondria research. Something that has made a big difference in the last few years is the amount of carbohydrates the riders take in during a stage etc. etc.
> The Tour de France was originally intended to be so tough that only one person might finish it.
The difficulty has been toned down a lot since the early days though. (You'll never see a 466km long stage like the first of Tour de France 1903[1] ever again).
There are still races with much longer "stages" than 466km, but they are not part of the contemporary pro-cycling world. The classic brevet events, Paris-Brest-Paris and Boston-Montreal-Boston are 1200km ridden as a single stage. PBP is older than the TDF also, starting in 1891. The nature of brevet events means that they can essentially never be a spectator sport, hence the lack of any significant attention to them.
With satellite trackers and social media these kinds of events have developed into a spectator sport. Bikepacking races tend to be in more remote locales than the French countryside so racers are required to carry a satellite tracker which reports to a public website. "Dot watchers" who live along the route come out to watch racers go by or leave water/snacks in coolers along the side of the road. Far more dot watchers are limited to the live tracker and check daily updates from racers or journalists covering the event on social media.
After the event some racers upload videos for spectators and it helps them with sponsorship. This video gives a glimpse into what its like to race the Tour Divide competitively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJS106xeNA
What I mean by a "spectator sport" in this context is primarily that the event can be monetized because huge numbers of people will watch it either in person or via video of some sort.
The number of people watching the trans-europe or other similar solo events as they happen is likely less than the population of a typical US liberal arts school. The monetization that might follow from YT videos that occurs later is completely different from what the TdF manages to encourage. The winner of 2023's Tour Divide has 58k views ... even Lael only gets 300k or so views for her adventuring and racing videos. This is not a spectator sport in any sort of historical sense of that term.
The nature and culture around the event discourage treating them as races. The point is completion, not competition. It shares a lot of the definition of a race while not being one.
The culture centers on completion because that's so damn hard. The fastest riders, however, are absolutely racing each other.
Would you say that Tour Divide or TransEurope are not races, because enough people fail to finish them that the focus is on completion, not competition?
Another reason why the culture is different: drafting is not widely used, and pack formation is rare. This magnifies the effects of very small differences in riding speed so that riders are generally widely spread out. I know from own experience doing brevets in the 90s that it would be rare to be in visual contact with other riders. Same is true for Tour Divide, TransEurope, RAAM etc. This makes "competition" look and feel very different than in pro-cycling and cat racing where "can I hang with the pack?" and "should i attack now?" are the constant questions.
However, all the same things are true of ultramarathon running too. Limited visual contact with other racers, high DNF rates, completion being the goal for the majority of participants. Nobody says, however, that WS100 or UTMB are "not races". And the reason for that is: in this category of racing, there is no other format. Nobody runs 100 miles like the pack on a track and field event, or even the way most major marathons play out. The nature of racing WS100 or UTMB just simply is the nature of ultramarathon running races.
And so it is for cycling. When you increase the distances and terms (e.g. "the clock runs non-stop"), the nature of the event changes. PBP is nothing like any TdF stage, but it is still a race. Granted, more like triathlon where only a small percentage of the entrants are actively racing other people, but people don't say that's not a race, either.
I think a thing fit all the definitions of something while not being that thing. For example, tomatoes are berries according to the definition set by botanists, yet if you ask anyone in genpop they consider tomatoes a vegetable because that is how people view them.
I’m not trying to disagree that PBP isn’t a race, because i acknowledge it fits the definition of a race, but I hope we can agree that calling it a race does a disservice to its history and culture.
For similar reasons I wouldn’t consider the Tour Divide a race either because the organizers don’t call it a race. For the same reasons an ultramarathon or rides like Unbound, Silk Road, TransAm, or Transcontinental is a race; because the organizers call it one. Is this a rational viewpoint? Definitely not, but that’s fine with me.
There is a power in what things are called and I think it is important to stay true to roots.
This is a naive view of doping, sport, and physiology.
Of course, they use doping nowadays, just as they did yesterday. I would go so far as to say that all top professional athletes in individual sports use banned substances. They use methods and substances that allow them to avoid testing positive.
At the highest levels, all athletes are genetically gifted. However, the performance differences created by substance-induced physiological alterations are too great to be compensated for by slight differences in genetics, training, and nutrition.
Almost all records in individual sports have been broken since competitions were basically not subject to doping controls. Athletes from the DDR and the Soviet Union, and more recently from China, have used enormous amounts of hormones. Yet almost all records set in the 1980s have been broken. Is there better talent selection today? Certainly, along with better training, science, and nutrition, as well as better surfaces and shoes/equipment. But physiology reigns supreme.
For the prestigious pro events samples are kept for years afterwards and are subject to re-testing at any time as science advances. If any of those re-tests fails (or if cheating comes to light through any other means) the rider would be dq'd, stripped of the result, and be liable to pay back prize any and sponsorship money.
These are riders in their twenties, that's such a long time to rely on getting away with it I personally do not think it's happening at the highest pro-level.
Of course it happens. At the highest levels and at the amateur levels. People want to win. It's like telling people they shouldn't commit crimes because they might end up in prison or worse. But people continue to commit crimes and end up in prison when they are caught, or worse, when they are killed.
If prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, according to some, cheating is the oldest way to gain an advantage.
I mean, just a few weeks ago, we found out about a guy who was working for I don't know how many companies at the same time, that a start-up had developed some artificial intelligence software to cheat during tech interviews and had secured some good funding. Well, but that can't happen in sport, even though it's been happening since the dawn of time. Sport is business, and business is dirty.
ah, the magic undetectable drug that's just the right kind of effective without the pesky side effects, which you'd need other undetectable drugs for.
this drug would be worth a lot of money, but we'll keep secret except just for the one top performer, because wide distribution would increase the risk of a leak substantially.
and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades. cycling isn't a huge money maker for financial investors like football, rather it's a money pit for sponsors. do sponsors love a podium placement more than being forever associated with dirty cheaters? they'd risk it all for modest gains. a young superstar would trade a life of a good salaried position with some more money but also a high risk of being banned from the sport forever, thus no source of income at all and also the questionable title of being the killer of a whole sport.
I would argue that history suggests this is likely. The dopers have substantially more financial resources than the testers. EPO is a great example. It was widely used in cycling for almost 10 years before tests were developed. It was pretty much a miracle drug from a performance standpoint and undetectable. The very few cyclists that tried to blow the whistle were run out of the sport.
Similarly, blood doping was widely used for a decade after the EPO test was developed and no one ratted out the teams doing it until USADA brought the hammer down on Armstrong.
It’s also worth thinking about the incentives to test and catch cheaters. Do the organizers of the Tour de France really want to bust the biggest names in the sport? That would destroy their livelihood. Do the national anti-doping authorities want the athletes from their country busted (look how many national antidopingborgs have successfully appealed adverse rulings through CAS)? It’s in everyone’s best interest to bust a low level doper here and there to make it look like they are watching but to ignore the big names that fans are coming to see.
All of this is also why motor doping is unlikely. Motor doping leaves incontrovertible evidence of cheating. Positive drug tests can always be challenged as either inaccurate testing or unintentional contamination.
i'm unconvinced. EPO was undetectable, but not anymore. new undetectable substance would run the risk of being detectable in a few years. who would ignore whistleblowers today? and the USADA did bring the hammer down on LA at some point.
sure, they pay off is high, but the risk - at least in cycling - is even higher, exactly because they've been caught once and now all eyes are on them. if pog gets popped, nobody will trust cycling to be clean ever again; it's hard enough today, as this thread proves.
We can agree to disagree. People said cycling would be clean after the '98 Festina affair because all eyes were on them. All that happened was that teams (that could afford it) switched from EPO to blood doping. The next Tour after everyone said the Festina bust had cleaned up cycling was Lance Armstrong's first win (1999).
EPO was always detectable. The trouble was detecting synthetic EPO. In fact, the maker of synthetic EPO (Amgen) was the title sponsor of the Tour of California!
After they developed that test stage speeds dropped dramatically. Now speeds are back up to where they were right before the EPO test was developed. You really think that’s natural?
Cycling has a doping scandal once every decade or two. Why would another one kill the sport this time when it never did before?
It's not necessarily a new performance-enhancing molecule that nobody has heard of, but alternative posology or training regimen to stay under detection threshold, new masking products, etc.
Doping has been a cat-and-mouse game for decades, it's not unrealistic to think this is still happening.
The fact that Pogacar this year managed to reach Bjarne "Mr. 60%" Riis levels of performance in the mountain makes you wonder if this is only standard athletic and performance science or if they're something else.
I think that you have to actually watch the grand tours to understand why this seems plausible:
Both Pogacar and del Toro (UAE’s gc riders in the Tour and Giro, respectively) are able to keep up with (and even drop) the strongest climbers, and then look fresh as a daisy across the line. Like they aren’t even trying.
This was most obvious when del Toro lost to Yates on the last stage of this year’s Giro, but Pogacar does it too. They start the final climb a few minutes behind the leaders, then match the fastest rider up the climb and then magically have zero fatigue for the final sprint across the line to pick up a few spots. Yates only won because del Toro made a huge tactical mistake of focusing on Carapaz
Everyone else is dying and the riders from this one team look like they could do another stage… and we’re supposed to think that’s natural?
Perhaps there's drugs which mask the actual performance enhancers now. The women's marathon record was broken last year by Ruth Chepngetich by a considerable margin. Seemed too good to be true, and many of the groups I'm in called out doping straight away.
She has just been suspended for 2 years for a drug which I believe (may be wrong) masks other performance enhancing drugs.
> and remember: the top performers getting busted would probably mean the end of pro cycling as we know it for decades
You mean, like when Lance Armstrong got caught?
It was less than 20 years ago and yet you still argue like it didn't happen. Undetected doping was indeed possible (he did it for years) and no it didn't destroy pro cycling…
this also supports my point, though: armstrong got caught. he was stripped of all his titles. there were whistleblowers (even though they were ignored back then). everybody knew they were cheating but nobody did anything about it ... well, until they did.
i don't know how hard pro cycling was affected after his bust, i just remember reading that it took a few years to recover (i.e. a few teams got dissolved, some sponsors jumped ship).
even today, if you talk about cycling to an outside person the FIRST thing they ask you about is doping.
so in my opinion, professional cycling is on its doping redemption part - forced, whether they want it or not - because if they (and by "they" i mean Pog) get popped big time again, it's going to be viewed as irredeemable. they'd have had their chance after LA and blew it.
This sounds like the same fud Armstrong conned most people into believing. In his case EPO was so hard to detect he got away with it for how many years?
So imo: it’s possible but more likely than you think.
"cycling isn't a huge money maker for financial investors like football, rather it's a money pit for sponsors. do sponsors love a podium placement more than being forever associated with dirty cheaters? they'd risk it all for modest gains."
To me, this is an interesting comment, because on the surface it may sound true, like come on, this is common sense, but it is far off the reality that it is in front of us everyday.
People want to win. They want to be better than others. You go to any gym and there are plenty of people who assume substantial quantities of hormones--test, hgh--just to look better in pictures.
You go to any martial arts gym, and there are plenty of people of all ages, including 50+ years old, who are on TRT and more to win some rolls at the gym or dream about winning a cheap medal at a local tournament with 5 people in attendance.
People buy local teams because they want to be known, popular. They want to win. They want to humiliate the owner of the other team. Athletes are getting caught? Well, I strongly condemn their actions, they say.
You can do worse than reading "Speed Trap" or the book by Sandro Donati on doping, if you can find it translated from Italian.
That word can mean several different things. In their sentence "just" means "only", as in "only switched, not stopped", it doesn't mean it was simple which is presumably what you are replying assuming it meant.
It's the most tested sport by far. Mostly because a couple of huge scandals - Festina and Armstrong. It's an endurance sport which is a natural target for doping because of the huge gains that can be made and it's also probably the most popular endurance sport too. That said, it's a problem in other sports but they just don't test as much or publicise it as much. It's become a real problem in Rugby, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/50785122 and in Football where they hardly test anyone
https://warrenmenezes.substack.com/p/doping-and-english-foot...
> endurance sport which is a natural target for doping
This makes a lot of sense to me. A very singular goal of "maximum output" without much need for fine motor skills and strategizing. I'd guess sprinting/marathons might have similar issues?
But like Jorgenson said this year, there’s no tactics that can beat Pogi going up a steep hill at 7w/kg. At some point it all comes down to power to weight.
Stage 21 was a great example of how tactics can beat a stronger rider. Pogacar was probably the strongest but Matteo burned up his energy chasing attacks in the final lap and then at the right moment WvA was ready to pounce and take the stage.
Sure it was great to see Wout win again - in Paris no less! And it does kind of validate the TVL strategy of “wear Pogi out with 3 super hard weeks of racing.”
Unfortunately for them it just wasn’t enough to make the difference in the GC.
I wouldn't deny that (and probably should have caveated this in my OP), but compared to a basketball or football team, the benefit of smart play doesn't seem as significant compared to doping up and pressing hard.
>the benefit of smart play doesn't seem as significant compared to doping up and pressing hard.
For the athlete, or for the team?
For professional racing strategy is in the hands of the team members on the sidelines - it's less of a team sport (as in athlete) and more of a group sport (as in information parity.) Whether it's motor races or TdF, there's a significant number of factors to consider. What you are going to have your team do? What are other teams doing? What you should do in response to what they're doing? What will they do in response to your response? What is the average performance of your team? What is the current and maximum performance? What's the condition of the equipment? What tires are being used? What is the forecast for the next few hours? How will changes in weather impact the equipment used? Will you have enough spares to make it through? Do you have good comms between you and the athletes? Etc.
For example, sometimes two athletes on the same team might be one behind the other, only for the coach to tell the lead to let the other teammate to pass. For the audience, it might be unclear why or it might even feel unfair, but there are reasons why they made that call.
Maybe the leader looks gassed and needs to hang back to collect himself.
Maybe they want to encourage the secondary by giving him the reigns for a while, and in turn, push the lead to work harder.
Maybe they want to keep the wear and tear a little lower on the lead by holding him back in case a team close behind ends up overtaking in a sharp turn up ahead.
Maybe they're worried about a pile up that hasn't been cleared yet.
Maybe the sun will be facing the direction of their next turn, so the secondary is providing shade for the lead.
So on and so fourth. An individual athlete can only receive and process so much of that information in a cohesive way.
sure, numerous examples can be shown to say smart play does help. but, would you argue the net benefits of smart play are identical between a sport like basketball and racing?
I thought the same but after watching the Netflix TdF documentary I would not agree to your statement anymore. Team strategy plays a huge role as e.g. driving in the slipstream saves up to 40% of your energy expenditure.
Depends on what is meant by popular. In terms of participation then running, in terms of non-participatory viewers then cycling is probably more popular
One way of thinking about it is how much a sport is skill-based versus fitness-based. Team sports and racquet sports tend to rely more on skill. Cycling and track and field rely more on fitness. A good soccer player isn't going to become a great just by getting a bit fitter, but the advantage given by doping is exactly what it means to be a better cyclist.
This doesn't explain why cycling seems to attract more doping than running. I don't even know if it's true that it does. But there might be something there given the institutional problems cycling has had with doping. Back in the day, it was entire teams doping, with the team staff and doctors in on it, and it's not like they all left when the sport tried to clean up. Either way, the reputation has stuck around.
Yes, and I remember the years around 1990 when teams with tall men with a lot of stamina and not much else were giving headaches to top teams with top players. But soccer is also a team sport and there are dynamics that go beyond fitness. The morale of a team has a lot of impact. There have been many cases when the same players started playing well suddenly after a change of the manager. Looking at normal workplaces: fire the boss that hates everybody and everybody hate back, put somebody not abusive or toxic in charge, the workers will start performing better.
It's very hard to tell because the true rate of doping is not known. We just know about who we catch (or very questionable survey results) which are skewed by the resources available for testing and the resources available for hiding doping. Competitive cycling is more popular than many sports, so it gets a lot of attention and effort on both.
Cycling was also at the center of the explosion of EPO use between the 1990s and 2000s -- there was no known screening process originally and it was extremely effective at improving performance in endurance sports with low amounts. Cycling has spent a lot of time working to restore the reputational damage from that period.
Generally, never. Because any small change in chemistry is something that evolution is very effective at picking up. Which means that if there is a simple intervention that improves performance, there is always a good reason why nature hasn't already given it to you. In the case of EPO, it's significantly increased risk of blood clots and blood pressure related conditions.
Many of these drugs were developed and used as medical products before being adopted by athletes.
EPO is used in medical conditions.
Several anabolic steroids are prescription drugs and can be used in cases of muscle wasting or cancer.
Most people don’t understand the consequences that come with using these drugs. They’re often not a free lunch where you take the drug and become a better human being across the board. There are negative consequences for altering the body’s systems directly in most cases.
In medical conditions doctors can weigh the tradeoffs and use drugs sparingly to achieve an outcome while monitoring the negative effects. When a 20 year old gym bro starts juicing with excessive doses to get swole, they’re not thinking about how it’s going to damage their testes for the rest of their life or disrupt their HPTA axis.
Yes, EPO is a normal drug used to treat certain disorders affecting blood formation, or to trigger increased blood formation before donations or operations.
Medication for human use has been availabe in various forms and brand names since before 1990, as Epogen, NeoRecormon, Eprex and lots of other names.
Road cycling is a sport of extreme hyper specialization. Skill is much less of a factor than dedication, training, nutrition and genetics. Increasing VO2max by 5% isn't going to make you Messi, but it can put you on a tour podium.
it's a safe bet that your big money sports (not cycling) have a lot more doping than cycling. the issue is that you can't report what you don't know.
* cycling is a mix of moderate money and lots of drug testing. there are significant incentives to dope, but it's fairly hard to do these days since there is a lot of testing.
* big money sports (in the us especially - nfl, mlb, nba) are the jokes of the testing world. they rarely test and often inform their athletes when a test is coming. the big money basically assures that the incentive to dope is also big. but you'll never get caught if the testing process is a joke, so there is nothing to report.
People want to see doped athletes in the NFL, NBA, etc. We don't know that we do but we want to see the biggest, strongest people doing the most exciting athletic fetes that they can. The pure punishment that athletes in the NFL take and then keep taking the field is mind blowing. The human body has a hard time dealing with that on its own. I would be surprised if the majority don't have a dosing regime. A 265lb man with low body fat running at the speeds they run is just not realistic for so many, they are the pinnacle of physicality and that doesn't come naturally for many.
Add on that most of them only play for a few years and there is every incentive under the sun to dope and maximize their earnings. I'm not endorsing it but if its essentially a widely accepted secret and you cant compete without it then you get what you incentivize.
The nfl testing regime is purely surprise testing based.
The bigger difference is that endurance sports have more options for doping than others.
Frankly, I think too many things are banned. Blood doping seems no worse than sleep chambers and hgh in correctly applied regimes would take some of the punishment out of football.
Maybe read some of the stories of the cyclists like Pantani doing blood doping. They would have to wake up every few hours through the night and do some cycling on a stationary bike to get their heart rate up or their heart might stop while they're asleep due to their blood being too thick. Sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber to boost the mitochondria is childs play in comparison.
The NFL (and other major sports organizations) have no incentive to catch their athletes beyond a token amount to make the general public think the league cares about it. They don't want to catch too many as that could lead to a PED scandal that damages the reputation of the league; for example the BALCO scandal in the early 2000's MLB. Plus PEDs allow their athletes to stay healthy and perform at higher levels.
There's a reason athletes refer to PED tests as IQ tests. Only the very dumb or careless get caught, but the reality is nearly all of the athletes in these leagues have used PEDs at some point in their career.
Anyone who thinks cycling of all sports is clean is a total fool.
It is a sport literally built around doping. You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs. Beating the test is part of the sport.
In the NFL/NBA, drug testing is just a theatrical performance. I know in the NFL because careers are so short, the players basically have a gentleman's agreement that whatever you have to do to stay on the field is fair game.
Cycling though is just such a sport of watts per kilo there is no way around doping being a huge variable.
The stupidest thing to me is every player basically says they will do everything they can to win , no matter what the sport. Everything but the thing that will help them the most in PEDs. For some reason the public just wants to believe this bullshit.
> You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs.
You absolutely can. However, you will almost certainly be impacted as the days progress, and this doesn't work well for the largest spectator single sport event in the world.
Also, watts per kilo is irrelevant in pack cycling and flat time trials. It only matters on when climbing.
>they rarely test and often inform their athletes when a test is coming. the big money basically assures that the incentive to dope is also big. but you'll never get caught if the testing process is a joke, so there is nothing to report.
This reminds me of compliance training when I worked at a trading firm.
>Canada is perceived to have the least corrupt stock exchange in the world.
Cyclists can be tested all year. This includes mandatory tests immediately post-race for top placings. This is true for gymnastics and track&field/athletics as well.
NFL players can be tested once during the season. It's a joke.
NBA players can be tested four times in-season and two more off-season. Less of a joke than the NFL, but still pretty relaxed compared to cycling.
In team-based group start road racing, like TdF, a lot of people aren't really competing. They are top sportspeople by ability, but their job is to support the team star. They are often called in French "domestiques", servants.
I wonder if this contributes. Imagine you're a sport person, your job depends kn your performance, you are at the mercy of your team, and it's not even like you can win. So why not help yourself to some pills.
But then, as siblings say, I don't even know if cycling is worse than other sports.
I think the format plays a huge factor too but for different reasons. This format of racing is very dependent on aerodynamic advantages - to the point that even on the massive climbs the rider on the wheel still holds the edge to someone doing the work. On the flat stages the peloton is almost always going to catch a breakaway. Any marginal advantage is super useful in that context and the well funded teams push to optimize everything. I think it’s more likely than not there is cheating. Motors seem unlikely but with this kind of money and international attention marginal advantages like microdosing for example will be exploited. People cheat in everything and often get rewarded for it. It’s an infuriating fact of life.
First, what is there to wonder about? Stakes. There are things to be gained from winning (and purposely losing).
Second, no one sport has more cheating than any other with similar stakes.
Third, "cheating" is more of a spectrum than binary. Travelling with the basketball is cheating and sometimes penalized. Having your husband kneecap your Olympic skating rival is cheating as well.
Fourth, "cheating" is relative and always in flux. You could head slap an NFL receiver in the 1970's, but no longer. Forward passes in the NHL were illegal in olden times, but fine today.
It's not unique. Different sports police themselves more & less, punish more & less, coverup wrong doing more & less. As you said, you've just heard about it more.
Yeah, in some sports cheating is so common that the cheating itself has become part of the competition... e.g. finding 'loopholes' or difficult to detect cheats in motorsports, doctoring the ball in baseball, flopping in soccer, etc.
Its not like that. If anything cycling has less doping than most sports. Cycling has been very serious about doping for much longer, than most other sports. Infractions are punished very hard; a guy like Hessmann had his career paused for a year plus, while also losing his contract, even though he hadn't doped. While a tennis star get three months for a clear doping infraction. Cycling also bans more substances than the international doping authorities does. As an example did cycling banned tramadol and other strong painkillers, while other sports don't care.
You have heard much more because from cycling over other sports, because the other sports don't want their dirty secrets aired out, and you heard about the huge scandals in cycling in the 00s.
i think that cycling is cleaner than other sports today. the past doping epidemics led to so much bad press cycling faced a huge sponsorship crisis. if another one of the stars would get caught today they'd take the whole sport down with them.
so, if they don't cheat as much, what's left? todays cyclists are actually a lot better than the stars of yesterday, mostly due to better nutrition. training efficiency also improved as the young stars of today are of the first generation that grew up with power meters.
i'm not very knowledgeable in the sport and my last point is a bit of an assumption, but here we go: pro cycling is mostly based in europe. the UAE team is swiss, astana qazaqstan team (a team representing the state kazakhstan) trains in spain and austria. girona (spain, near the pyrinees) is _the_ classic cycling hotspot. this means testing by officials is comparatively easy.
in other sports the training facilities are, for example, in the chinese mountains, russian provinces or in the iranian back country. getting regular testing there is hard. so imo no: cycling today is probably less dirty than most others sports.
tbh i think pogacar is just one of those rare genetic talents that show up from time to time to dominate a sport, but is doubted more than others due to cyclings tainted history. it may be possible he uses newly developed drugs that are undetectable, but i'd say innocent until proven guilty is still applicable here.
Spain doesn't test during evenings or weekends. They've also historically had a habit of turning a blind eye on positive tests, especially if the athlete was Spanish.
I think there are different factors. One is that doping in cycling had big media coverage, especially in the 90ies to 2010s. Media uncovered that basically everyone in the race org knew that doping was involved. See for example Cofidis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofidis_(cycling_team) This adds to the perception that cycling is very prone to doping.
Whether it is so more than other sports... I don't know. As was mentioned before, in cycling as in other endurance sports, doping can push you very far.
Then there is the way the whole sport is organized. In the tour de france, privately sponsored teams compete against each other. I think this is very different to, say, a world championship. A country or trainer may have the interest of pushing their athletes beyond what is legal. But in a privately sponsored team, the pressure could be much higher.
Not sure your last statement is necessarily correct, just think of the massive doping in the former soviet union. The prestige gained by countries due to e.g. the Olympics regularly causes people to use illicit means.
Relative to other sports it doesn't require much skill that can't be easily quantified. The person who can produce the most Watts over the required window is a strong favorite. I assume that doping simply makes a difference in a way it doesn't for skiing or soccer, and probably not as much as even swimming or running.
Why not? Its a big difference whether you go ski jumping in leggings or in a wingsuit. Obviously the difference in reality is less, but the principle stands
It doesn't start out that way. And in any case, a lot of people have horribly physically demanding jobs that just barely let them survive, not earn millions of dollars and have fawning fans wherever you go.
there's probably just as much doping in distance running but it's easier to evade (top athletes spend most of the year in countries that have limited interest in testing)
The incentive to use PEDs is almost certainly higher in other professional sports than cycling. For athletes in leagues like the MLB, NFL, NBA etc. the average career is quite short and you essentially need to make all of the money for your entire life in 3-4 yeas. Plus the step function of being in the league and making millions vs just missing a roster spot and making almost nothing is so extreme you'd be foolish not to take PEDs to give yourself the best chance at a payday.
Why is pay off greater in cycling than other sports? Salary of the top riders? Compared to say NBA players, pro cyclist make relatively little. Tadej Pogacar (best and top paid cyclist) makes about $8M (euros) in salary per year. Steph Curry (highest paid) NBA player makes $55M (dollars) in salary per year.
Basketball isn’t as demanding physically as cycling. You need to be fit but not to the extreme degree cycling demands. I would expect doping to be most beneficial in sports where pure physicality is needed. Marathon, triathlon, track running.
You can reasonably assume that some NBA players are using PEDs. However, the effect is different. To be an NBA basketball player you need to have several attributes, such as height and hand-eye coordination, that cannot be affected by PEDs AFAIK. If basketbally are using PEDs, it is probably to recover faster, which means coming back from injury or training more. More training can lead to a higher level of skill, but it's a second order effect. It's not like cycling where, for example, EPO directly affects performance on the bike.
yes, but those epo-esque drugs aren't exactly trivial to use these days. the testing process makes the doping process much more difficult for drugs that have these direct performance benefits.
recovery help is where it's at these days i expect, in most sports.
have you seen the physiques and workloads that nba/nhl/mlb players are dealing with these days? these athletes have more incentive than cyclists to dope ($$$), and the testing in those sports is a joke.
there are obvious performance benefits for traditional endurance sports, but the testing infrastructure is pretty robust and the financial incentives are much less than those big team sports. it's harder to dope (and get away with it) and the financial pressure is less.
I totally believe that a lot of basketball/football/baseball players take something. But the effect won’t be as important as in cycling or marathon or 100 m sprint where you need pure physicality.
The effect doesn't really matter. If it gives you a 2% edge, and you don't take it, then you're 2% off the top. That may be the difference between having a career at all and thinking about what could have been at your desk job.
Sure, there's no drugs that will turn you into prime Messi. But there are drugs that will let Messi play like prime Messi for 90 minutes, 3 times a week, 48 weeks a year, which is incredibly valuable.
The "pay off" the commenter is talking about is the results in the sport, not the monetary gain. Cyclists are like the engines in an F1 car. Not saying there is no skill involved, but any skill differences are irrelevant if the other guy is putting out 100W more than you over 200km. So it really comes down to raw power to weight ratio.
That's not the same in basketball or most other sports. You can't just jump on gear, lift weights and suddenly become Michael Jordan. Plenty of people could beat Pogacar if they could use anything they could, though, just like manufacturers could build an F1 car that would dominate every race if they could circumvent the rules.
Because beside some skill needed in going fast during descends at 70-80-90km/h without dying (which is not easy but not extremely difficult either), a cyclist is basically an engine. Most other sports need physical fitness (speed, stamina, strength, endurance etc) AND coordination skills, and the latter is not easy to improve chemically.
I could agree with this. You do need some physical gifts as far as muscular endurance beyond the capacity of most but after that, its a very limited set of movements performed over and over again for hours. Plus a massive amount of will power and pain endurance. No amount of chemicals will turn even most gifted people into an NFL athlete.
Not money. It's highly specialized in what physically benefits it, so even a small doping on that specific physical attribute leads to significant advantage.
Open source / Free software comes with all the usual benefits:
- you can fork and adapt to your needs
- should the original authors stop developing it or take a direction you don't like but your started depending on it, someone can take over the development of a fork
- you can study how it works
- you can reuse some of the code to build an alternative product
- you can contribute patches if the project accepts them
- if you have to migrate, even if the format is specific, you can at least check how it works
That thing being open source is a big plus, and Obsidian using a standard format is a big plus.
That's like saying "you do not need oracle to use your bytes on disk". I may be mistaken but doesn't obsidian provide a ton of functionality on top of markdown?
No, just a little bit. Your docs remain 98% compatible with other Markdown editors. The functionality is mainly around a.) better UI for editing Markdown, b.) plugin ecosystem (optional), c.) paid sync (optional, and achievable otherwise e.g. SyncThing, your own rsync script, etc), and d.) optional (and very bad) "publish-as-a-website" feature.
The plugins are no small thing though. I replaced Anki with a spaced repetition plugin, now my notes can be flashcards and I don't need to maintain two separate apps.
Also the UI for search and navigation is much better than just a collection of Markdown files. I rolled my own note system using Markdown before this. Obsidian is way better.
If you only use standard Markdown. But the advocacy often focuses on DataView and a thousand other features that are simply not available without Obsidian.
True, but it seems very obvious that if you add a bunch of plugin dependencies (or even one), you are deliberately choosing to forego "standard" Markdown (there's actually no such thing, but roughly speaking).
That's why they're plugins.
I do use the Excalidraw plugin, but nothing much else, and that is why I have an easy time making my Obsidian notes web-accessible (currently, via SilverBullet, but any tool that makes markdown web-editable will work — as long as you don't go nuts with plugins, that is).
Having said that, I think the reason Obsidian "failed" — to the extent that Notion and some others have massively more adoption amongst organizations larger than me and my gray beard – is that they failed to combine their (super awesome) files-and-folders approach with a web editable solution.
They thought - obviously wrongly, in hindsight — that web accessible would be enough.
It's not. It's the 10%, Notion etc cover the 90% (but with fairly bad tradeoffs, they have export and it works, but you can't easily interop with your data where it lives).
But I've had such an easy time making my Obsidian web-editable that I suspect in a few minutes (or months) Obsidian will be like heyyyyy... edit yo vault via web yo — and for free! and then we will all be like woo Obsidian boo Notion!!
The code is indeed entirely AGPL, I looked at license headers in the specific files implementing paid features. I wonder if it’s an oversight. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514304 for details.
It doesn't have to be free everything to qualify for open source. The source and licence are available. You can actually bypass payment if you want to do that as the source ia there.
Yes, if SiYuan stops being developed, you can still get your notes exported as markdown files. Since SiYuan is open-source, you can also use the internal code to parse the JSON format notes.
Yes, your existing installations on your devices, whatever they are, can read your data as long as you use the correct Repo keys that are used to encrypt stuff.
In the worst case, you can deploy the docker instance with older images to keep going on.
Also you need a license for anything work related. Since I code in my work time and my free time I can't separate this clearly. To be compliant I would need a license
Obsidian has built-in support for markdown, images, PDFs, canvas (via JSON Canvas which they developed and open sourced https://obsidian.md/canvas), and others.
For databases, you can add fields/properties both in the markdown frontmatter or in the text and query it via very popular plugins:
The thing that bothers me about this line of argument is...there already are a lot of people! We've had _massive_ population growth over the past few centuries, especially in the last 100 years or so. We have 8 _billion_ people now...and I personally don't see a lot of the benefits that the author talks about. I really don't think going from 8 billion to 10 billion or 16 billion or even 50 billion people would really make a meaningful difference in "the number of geniuses" or the number of people to populate a subreddit for a niche hobby, to draw on two of his examples. We have lots of geniuses now and we have lots of people on subreddits already.
We can already see that many (most?) societies are really quite bad at dividing finite resources/wealth/capital/land/etc. in an efficient (let alone equitable) manner among the billions of people in the world today. Are we really supposed to believe that resource management would magically become better/more efficient/more equitable somehow with even more people to divide them between? My hunch is that the vast majority of new people that got added to the global population would be relatively quite poor, whereas the global number of billionaires and millionaires would stay relatively flat.
Yes things like whale oil and bat guano are resources we've progressed past the need for...but we can't progress past the need for land. Or water. Both of which are in relatively short supply for many people, especially in places that are more desirable to live.
Large population centers have historically tended to form where they are for a reason (proximity to water, natural resources, natural recreation/beauty, desirable weather/climate, etc.), and most of the world's large cities are already pretty tapped out in terms of population. You can't magically fit a billion extra people in New York or Shanghai or Paris without it having disastrous repercussions for the people already there (and the new people). Sure we could build new massive cities in presently rural/unpopulated areas, but I think there's a reason that lots of people don't live in those places now, and if a billion-person city was shoved into South Dakota (to use an example of a very sparsely populated place) out of necessity, I'd imagine many people wouldn't be too happy about having to live there.
To be very clear (and preempt any bad-faith readings of this), I'm not endorsing the view of dramatic population reduction or anything like that. I'm just saying that the idea that massive population growth is always an inherent good strikes me as quite wrongheaded.
These resources are abundantly available on Earth and endlessly recyclable. It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.
At some point, your problem will be heat, not energy, because roughly speaking humans are 100 watts space heater, never mind all the heat generated from making food, transport infrastructure, industrial production and extraction.
If you take a look at cities and how they're constructed, it's really a 2.5D map. The road corridor are frequently ground level, maybe two or threes. Then we build towers and buildings. So what we created are artificial canyons in cities, but we don't build entire floor of cities.
So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.
So in that sense, space isn't probably an issue.
Humans are actually pretty space efficient. What's not space efficient is all the expensive infrastructures such as cars and roads.
What will be the most challenging for us is really political, not engineering or economics or space or energy.
> It's a question of economics, energy production, and negative externality.
And we're doing a pretty poor job at solving those problems today, for many people at the lower end of the wealth & income spectrum. What makes you think adding more people will magically fix those issues?
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible to fix issues like this and have a much larger population, with everyone housed, clothed, fed, and even more than that, happy. But humans -- especially those with wealth and power -- are a selfish bunch, and we are pretty bad at sharing when the goal is to raise other people up.
I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.
The continued comfort and wealth of the haves will always be a priority, at the expense of the have-nots. Eventual post-scarcity increasingly feels like a pipe dream to me.
> So, let say that you have a square kilometer area. If you add a floor of space, congratulation, you just doubled the amount of space in an area.
That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.
I mean, we could ensure that not a single person on Earth went hungry. We could do that today, with our level of food production technology. But we don't, because we don't like the economics of it. We could swallow it and do it anyway, but we refuse to.
It's really not a problem of economics. It's entirely a political problem.
That's just another way to create inequity. Would suck to live on anything but the top level, without sunlight in your home. Sure, maybe it's possible to get sunlight to everyone's home, but let's not pretend that would actually happen, out of the generosity of every builder's heart.
Not everybody care for natural sunlight. I certainly don't. Moreover, I see sunlight hitting the roof of my non-solar paneled house as uselessly bouncing and heating things up unnecessarily. Just another resources to be used and transformed into something more our liking.
If you're talking about open space for a sufficient definition of open space floor plan, then it's a question of engineering.
I can see the appeal of the screen, but would want it pretty strictly limited to the time, calendar events, and maybe something like what Spotify song I'm playing at the moment. Products like Tidbyt (https://tidbyt.com/) do a cool job at this sort of thing as well.
That said, my big concern when seeing products like this is what happens if the company making it goes out of business and shuts off their servers. Presumably the screen in my desk would become useless as I'm nearly certain there must be some kind of underlying cloud-based API for it to interface with to get data.
Definitely a cool idea, especially in terms of smarter management of standing schedules and built-in power management, but the screen seems like a big potential failure point, and it would really suck to buy a beautiful desk like this and not be able to get super long-term (10-15+ years) use of it
This is somewhat misleading as the initial part of their page says `BU meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all admitted, first-year students who are US citizens or permanent residents.` — BU is part of a small number (in the dozens maybe) of private US colleges/universities that are "need blind", which can basically be thought of as "price discrimination" from microeconomics. Wealthier families would pay full price, while less-advantaged students pay a more reasonable amount of money. At these schools the total out of pocket cost ends up being roughly comparable (if not less) than going to a state university would be. I went to a similar school and the out of pocket cost was far less than going to my state university as an in-state student would have been, and I got a much better education.
Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend.
I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid.
This is beholden to BU's definition of need. Barring any transparency on what these definitions actually mean for the school, I'd assume it means the following.
1 - Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school.
AND/OR
2 - BU gives preferential admissions to students who are able to pay the maximum, while telling everyone else that they don't. This can be done through multiple methods including A) offer admission but don't offer significant aid, B) offer admission preferentially based on signs of high income including expensive club participation, high cost achievements, or Geographic considerations.
Schools have become adept at pretending to do something about the student loan crises, I don't see why we should take any non-quantified statement at face value. My Alma mater UMass Amherst, used to lead every tuition and fee increase with a statement on increased financial aid - Unfortunately a simple multiplication would always show that the magnitude of cost increase vastly outstripped the magnitude of the aid increase.
> Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school.
This rings true for me at least when I was in college (early to mid 2010s). My parents happened to buy a house in the late 80s in a community where real estate values ended up rising enormously by the time I was applying for financial aid, and my dad happened to work for a private company where only employees were allowed to hold stock for the vast majority of his career (he coincidentally started there around when they bought the house), so his stock was basically part of his savings for retirement. I ended up not getting a huge amount of financial aid in terms of either grants or student loans, so the options were for my parents to refinance their mortgage they weren't done paying off, spend a huge portion of their retirement money on my education, or have me take out private loans with them as cosigners with the idea that I would hopefully be able to pay them back on my own. We opted for choice 3, so I ended up graduating with around $100k in debt with fairly high interest rates due do having had no credit or income at the time we applied for the loans. Overall, it's worked out due to some luck in terms of the job I was able to get out of college, but it still feels like that shouldn't have been required in the first place. On the other hand, I completely agree with the assessment that I was not anywhere close to a priority to receive financial aid. One of my best friends in college had one parent who only was able to get part time work and another parent who was disabled and couldn't work; between the grants and low interest loans he was given as financial aid, he essentially was able to attend for free, which I wish was available to everyone like him who needed it much more than I did.
They don’t do number two, that is not need blind (blind means admissions doesn’t look at financial need, and this makes sense because the applications are due before financial aid is filled out). But here’s what they do do:
B.U. may be need-blind in admissions, but like many colleges, it is not talent-blind in financial aid. When the admissions office accepts a student, the file gets a rating before going to the financial aid office. That rating, Dr. Pohl says, is based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.
The article is pay-walled, but barring a publicly disclosed admissions criteria - I am dubious of this claim. Consider how adding the following leadership/club activities as "desirable" in the admissions process would affect how much need the student body would need.
- "Polo"
- "Cross-Country skiing"
- "Ski team"
- "International volunteer work"
It's pretty easy to skew admissions criteria in favor of affluence without overtly checking financials. The university could just as easily de-select items such as.
> based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores
This is another problem. Instead of primarily looking at things you can quantitatively measure, the arbitrary measures now have more weight, meaning they can now more easily discriminate against “boring” student applicants.
> of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.
Yes? So they have a catch all justification for discrimination against and for whoever they like. Remember, holistic admissions was invented to keep out the Jews. Now it’s used to keep out Asians.
I’m not disputing that. They claim to be need-blind, and explicitly acknowledge they have a bunch of other fuzzy criteria.
While they could discriminate against poor people who put crappy jobs in their applications, it goes against their diversity goals. Whether or not you agree with said goals, (liberal arts) colleges and universities want a diverse population (and yes, to the detriment of Asians).
Visible diversity is far more important to them than social class diversity. There are large boosts to admissions for non-Asian minorities, much smaller boosts for poor visible minorities and penalties for being both white and poor.
> Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of “class based preferences” and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites. Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes. Espenshade and Radford cite this study and summarize it as follows: “These researchers find that, for non-minority [i.e., white] applicants with the same SAT scores, there is no perceptible difference in admission chances between applicants from families in the bottom income quartile, applicants who would be the first in their families to attend college, and all other (non-minority) applicants from families at higher levels of socioeconomic status. When controls are added for other student and institutional characteristics, these authors find that “on an other-things-equal basis, [white] applicants from low-SES backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, get essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other [white] applicants.”
> Distressing as many might consider this to be–since the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to “diversity” and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes–Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
BU has a couple of cost calculators online here [1] that let you enter data on you and your parent's income and assets and on how many other siblings you have and their ages and tells you how you would likely be expected to meet the costs.
Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themselves into debt. What are the huge cost increases they're bearing that force them to raise tuition?
The one institute I'm familiar with appears to have hired an absolute shitload of useless administrators, but that is an expense of choice that could be trimmed at any time.
This submission is likely an outlier amongst outliers. It's a crazy expensive private university. So I have no answer for you.
For public universities, the claim is that historically, tuition never covered expenses, and the difference was taken care of by the state and federal government. State support has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, and hence the significant increase in tuition.
About a decade ago I know one nearby public university would be open with their expenses and showed that their expenses per capita/student hadn't changed in decades (adjusted for inflation), and that it wasn't bloat that was causing tuition to go up.
Any large organization with no competition ceases to understand what makes the money eventually. University administrators have been selling life experiences, liberal arts, sports, and research experiences to students for the last 2-3 decades. If you asked them which staff are necessary to keep students joining the school, they would likely have a vastly different answer than the one most people have.
> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid.
The term here to look for is "tuition discount rate" which is how many students actually pay the full price. You are correct in suggesting that high discount rates mean that only the extremely well-resourced schools will be able to compete for students who aren't able to afford the full price of college. Here's IHE's summary of a study about 2020's numbers:
> “Tuition discounting strategies come at a heavy cost for many colleges and universities, especially those that forgo a significant amount of tuition revenue to expand educational affordability for students and/or to meet enrollment goals,” the study said.
> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires
Lets assume person is a milionaire.
Having to pay 8% of your networth (including retirement and the value of your home [is that correct?]) so that one of your kids can go to uni (what if you have 2?) is silly.
Income is more important than retirement accounts and your home. For example using the quick cost calculator [1] for a family with 1 child, $36k of income, a $1 million home that is fully paid for, and $1 million in retirement accounts the results are a parent/student contribution of $3200 and $2000 of student work-study.
And what is the definition of net worth? If you own an ordinary single family home in an ordinary city, it may be worth $1 million which makes you a millionaire.
Will you sell your home to pay tuition for 2 kids?
Your kid is perfectly capable of taking out their own loans. One of the big problems with US schooling is that schools just expect parents to pay for their kids' schooling. They're adults. They can fund their own educations.
Why do you think BU costs 80K a year? It's not because the school costs that much to run. It's because private schools are a way for the rich to segregate their kids from the rank and file. The cost of attendance is a FEATURE.
Also, people keep on tossing "millionaire" around as if that term has meaning anymore. Nowadays it means you're a homeowner with some retirement saved up. And while some mere millionaires are desperate for their kids to reach some sort of faux prestige by sending them to a second tier private school, most aren't going to do that. Again, that's the point of BU's tuition being so high in the first place. They don't want the mere upper middle class unless they are exceptional students. They want the rich kids for that sweet endowment money.
> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges ... will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid
The issue with this is that prospective students need to know this is how it works. When I was in school (in a similar caliber school), most lower income students applied on a whim not knowing the school would handle aid.
(Also I'm told the school did a bad job at handling aid, essentially giving people golden handcuffs to control additional factors of their life like housing).
I'm a counter-example to that. My parents paid full-price tuition for me 4 years of university (CMU class of 2010) and 4 years of private high school (which has the same "need blind" admission policy). But, they were not millionaires, rather they had just enough saved.
My mother is a "family doctor" in a small town, and my father was a stay-at-home dad, total pre-tax income around $120k-$150k at the time. House was around $250k, still paying the mortgage while I was in school. We actually knew of families that made more, and paid less, at the same schools. I have one younger sister, in her last couple of years at university she did finally get financial aid - the system/calculations did result in my parents paying off their mortgage but having zero savings left at the end. A couple years later I had some software engineer money, and helped my father buy a car when his old one broke down.
We're all doing fine, we understood the system, we made good lives for ourselves, my parents do have retirement savings, I'm not complaining about that. But this narrative you push here, about only millionaires and billionaires paying the absurd sticker price for university so it's fine, it's wrong. The statistics don't make it right. Even though "the average american" lives paycheck to paycheck regardless of income level (even at our middle to upper-middle level of income), that doesn't make this system fair to the hard-working and fiscally responsible people out there. There were some big family fights each year when it was time to fill out the FAFSA like all the other middle-class families, my dad hated it, it was such a charade and a waste of time.
Is it safe to characterize those who would pay full price as only the children of millionaires and billionaires? I filled out the FAFSA just to see and my EFC (when I first started college) was 91,000. I doubt my parents were millionaires; even an overestimate of assets (some of which weren’t really liquid as they were preparing to buy a house) would’ve been just barely over 1 million. It’s hard to see paying that as affordable.
Well, I couched it saying it was an overestimate. Besides, having $1,000,001 technically makes you a millionaire but I don’t think that’s what people are referring to when they’re talking about “millionaires and billionaires”. 4 years of $80,000 tuition is $320,000 - are we trying to say that 32% of a “millionaire’s” total assets is a cost of college we’re ok with as it only affects millionaires and billionaires?
In addition, given an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) of $91k a year for assets == 1 million (plus other variables of course), there seems to be a decent amount of room to reduce the total assets <1 million and still pay the full price of $80k a year. Then even by strict definition, not only millionaires and billionaires are going to be paying full price.
Yeah, its especially awkward now that people are having kids later in life. Being a millionaire at, say, 45 is way different than being a millionaire at 55 or 60. Heck, I have a friend who had a kid in her 50s - they won't be in college until she's in her 70s!
> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend.
There is a huge gap in between, that isn't addressed in your comment. 80k/year is still expensive to someone whose parents make 100k.
US college tuition pricing is extremely weird because very few people actually pay full price. They put a big number on it so they can justify charging high amounts to wealthy parents (hence the millionaires and billionaires comment above) but then give everyone else "discounts" to bring it back toward lower numbers.
Note that their $30K/year is still a whopping 50% higher than the national average.
Seems off. I used a higher income with sibling and it estimated $13k family contribution via IM formula. That was close to BU’s own calculator, which suggested a $17k combination of loans and family contributions, forgiving roughly $60k via needs.
FM estimated twice IM which I take to mean BU uses IM.
Your link asks if you want Federal or Institutional Method when calculating expected family contribution (FM vs IM) or to run both methods. I don’t know why a school would choose one or the other, just noting the similar result from IM.
Depends on BUs decision, they might be one of those universities who believe parents should've been saving up for their childs education for 18 years and would still happily charge you the full amount.
That's not how and of the "100% financial need meet" institutions work. It's all based on what they calculate your family can pay based off of current income and assets.
The "and assets" part of the equation is the bad part. If you have $100k annual income and a $1 million house plus $100k in a college savings plan, they're giving you the full sticker price. Never mind that you're several hundred thousand short, you have assets.
Going back and changing it to not have a house changes the need-based scholarship to $54600 and drops the parent/student contribution to $19500, leaving the rest unchanged.
Restoring the million dollar house but taking away the $100k savings makes the scholarship $49600 and the parent/student contribution $24500.
Finally, getting rid of both house and savings, leaving just the $100k income makes the scholarship $59500 and the parent/student contribution $14600.
So...it looks like having $100k in savings adds about $5000 to your expected contribution, and having a $1 million mortgage free house adds about $10k to your expected contribution.
I also tried it with $100k in a retirement account, and that changed nothing. $100k in non-retirement account investments was the same as $100k in savings.
It looks like you are going to have to have a lot more in income and/or non-retirement assets to actually get anywhere near full sticker price.
I have around 200k in investments and 50k in cheque account, resulting in 70k per year fee.
Even though that would completely wipe out my savings without paying the full amount...
* If you have a net worth of $250k and they calculate you can pay $70k for the first year, estimating full payment as $70k * 4 ($280k) isn't right. Your net worth will be lower next year, and they'll consider that.
* Their goal is to charge you the most you are able to pay, and someone with $250k in savings is able to pay $70k.
I think this is all a bad system, for the same reason that a 100% marginal tax rate is a bad idea, but it's not quite as nuts as you're suggesting.
>Your net worth will be lower next year, and they'll consider that
I was just giving an example to demonstrate how bad their calculator pricing was (280k fees < 250k savings without selling house) if you wanted to make it more realistic I would also take into account that my investments grow too.
>Their goal is to charge you the most you are able to pay, and someone with $250k in savings is able to pay $70k.
Seems pretty bad to me. Wouldn't pay 7k/year for BU, much less 70k.
Sorry, are you saying the net worth you put into the calculator was more than $250k? Then $70k is even less surprising!
(If colleges ignored home values you could put your $250k into repaying your mortgage faster and report having no savings. They'd charge you $0. And if you needed money later you could borrow against the value of the house.)
It's completely reasonable for you to decide that "everything I have" is not a reasonable price to pay for college. What I'm getting at, is that these colleges are very careful not to charge you more than it is possible for you to pay. They are extremely good at price discrimination.
Agreed. I also think that once you grow beyond one employee (yourself) as a founder, you acquire a deep moral and ethical (although not legal) responsibility to the wellbeing of your employees. The very notion/term "exit" has always made my skin crawl, at least in the context of "serial entrepreneurs".
Treating a company - a thing that often dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people depend on for their livelihoods - as nothing more than an assert that can be bought and sold at the whims of a founder is fundamentally gross to me. Sure, not every acquisition leads to layoffs, but many (most?) do and I think that's abhorrent.
I know it's how the world works, but I don't think the culture of starting a company to get acquired for a nice "exit" should be celebrated and I think policy measures that can stop or diminish this culture are fundamentally good.
> as a founder, you acquire a deep moral and ethical ... responsibility to the wellbeing of your employees
No, everyone knows what they are getting into this is a horrible concept and should be pushed back against at every turn. If you want someone to be responsible for another adult petition the government to do it.
Another note on this, I've had a few very thorny Amazon customer service issues in the past, and at a certain point I found the only solution was to email the CEO's office. I emailed `ajassy@amazon.com` and CC'd `Jeff@amazon.com` (Bezos) and `Dave@amazon.com` (Dave Clark, head of consumer). Got a response nearly instantly from an extremely helpful executive assistant who was empowered to do basically whatever and was a single point of contact moving forward. Even offered to hop on a call and explain what went wrong on their end and how they were fixing it moving forward (an offer I politely declined). I got my issue resolved and a fairly generous gift card for my trouble.
Ah, the source of Jeff's famous "?"-mails. Believe me, you jump on those immediately. Good thing, at least back in my day, you could basically drop whatever else you were doing until the "?" was successfully answered.
LinkedIn Inmail has been my go-to. Find a suitably high ranking staff member who is usually insulated from customers, and they're often shocked to hear real customer experiences.
Got Cc'd on an E-mail chain from the assistant to some senior VP at DHL once, where the threat that said SVP wanted updates magically caused a package that support had claimed was already on a freight ship across the Atlantic in the wrong direction back to the sender to turn up in a depot five minutes from my office.
Anyone know if an analogous exception path exists on ebay?
I'm currently getting screwed on a >$20k purchase and the ebay dispute resolution response has been idiotic -- basically demanding documentation from UPS that AFAICT isn't something UPS provides, when it wouldn't matter in any case (seller admits that the merchandise is currently in his possession).
It's taking an issue that reasonable people could resolve in ten minutes minutes and going to make it end up in litigation for no good reason.
Read through the Reddit. Wild situation. The part of the seller including their number instead of yours seems pretty lame and should be enough to have you win the resolution. Good luck
I've had similar experiences with a building maintenance company. Some guy came into my apartment and completely misused my private property during his work. There was a note left at the building with a phone number left to reach the employee in question - but they didn't actually pick up the phone. I presume that it was because they had already finished work for that day. I just decided to look up the company information and called the CEO, who promised to make it up for me, and did.
This sort of thing happens all the time at the apartment complex I live in (in the South Bay Area, California). We have an outdoor "mail room" with an automated package locker. I'm not sure if the package locker is usually full or simply hard for drivers to use, but often the delivery drivers will just leave a pile of like 30-50 packages next to it.
Honestly, I don't blame the drivers in the slightest. If I were treated the way they were treated and paid what they were paid, I wouldn't care about doing my job the right way either. Hell, they're so monitored by algorithms and surveillance devices that they probably don't have time to do it the right way even if they wanted to.
Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job.
This implies that "things like this" are somehow bad, though.
What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
I know Amazon already don't bother to process their own returns, instead selling those off in bulk lots for potentially far below the market value of the items (sort of like creditors selling off bad debts rather than trying to collect on them themselves.)
Both situations suggest a paradigm where human labor is by far the most expensive part of any logistics process, such that margin can always be increased simply by replacing workflows that involve even a little bit of human labor with fully-mechanized/externalized workflows, even when that brings service quality down.
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon
Maybe it does, but isn't this because of a _negative externality_, i.e. the "indirect cost to individuals" (1) who deal one way or another with the pile of abandoned packages?
So Amazon is like an river polluter in that regard, dumping the problem because it's cheaper _for them_. It should be clear that this is not a net good thing.
I suppose in most cases, for most people, this would be a positive externality. You get free stuff. Amazon should just do a better job communicating this.
I've more than once got complete garbage through somebody getting hold of my shipping address (not credit card, just shipping address!) and exploiting Amazon using it.
I get 'free stuff' except it's absolute garbage. Somebody else gets to abuse Amazon reviews, hyping that stuff under my name for the purpose of jacking up its review scores. Once I looked and the thing was rated #1 in its category.
Don't assume you've figured out the true costs of externalities: anything that is clearly a broken system is also going to be harming people in its brokenness.
The only time that I got someone else's amazon package, likely due to a labelling or packing error, it was utterly useless to me, I mean like "book 4 of an anime series that I had never heard of, not in a language that I understand" level of junk-ness (to me).
It's typically not "free stuff" to the recipient, it's junk, a hassle, and in the way.
The "spam parcels" from review-brushing scams have negative externalities, yes; but, unlike regular spam, these spam parcels don't make up the majority (or even a non-negligible minority) of Amazon deliveries. So, on net, a random abandoned parcel pallet is going to have net-positive ROI to whoever claims it. Probably highly net-positive ROI.
(Compare: the liquidation stores that run entirely off of a business model of buying Amazon returns lots, tossing out the broken crap, and selling the rest. Those stores make a profit, and they're receiving pallets where half the stuff is unusuable. If they were receiving pallets where everything is new from the warehouse [valuable or not], they'd likely cry for joy.)
Remember, whoever gets this stuff doesn't have to personally have a use for it. They could just call up their local charitable thrift store to drive over and pick up the whole lot, if they wanted. But that's still net-positive ROI — they get a warm feeling of having donated a bunch of stuff; and the charitable thrift store gets a lot of free stock that they know how to resell, to turn into money for their charity; and a bunch of people who each wanted one particular thing, can now find it at that thrift store for much less than they would have paid for it on Amazon. It's exactly the same as if Amazon donated a bunch of random crap directly to the charitable thrift store, save for the necessity of making one phone call, and the possibility of the caller skimming whatever nice items they like off the top before they make that call.
All of these comments are from the perspective of a consumer rather than the perspective of the amazon employee (driver) who is likely poorly treated and paid. I doubt the driver is happy about their situation, is that positive?
Minimally paid, so again probably not happy. You think people in low wage delivery jobs are doing it because they love delivering things? No, they likely don't have many other options, if any at all
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
This is the sort of situation which happens so infrequently that literally the solution is you ask whoever calls about it to "read me off the TBA number off the tracking label", look up which DSP was responsible, and tell them to divert someone to go pick those up. Any DSP worth its salt always has some number of drivers on rescue or, failing that, one of their dispatchers will go pick it up. In short: DSPs are incentivized to maintain personnel to handle problems on route, and this is exactly the sort of thing they can and should handle. Either way those packages are going to be marked missing/undelivered and the DSP will get dinged for that driver's fuckup, so they might as well send someone out to pick them up and get them properly delivered.
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
Excuse me? There's like a pile of boxes in the way. Amazon should clean this up, quickly. So you say it's better that random people living there should be made responsible for getting rid of a pile of boxes instead of Amazon who put them there?
What if I "abandon" a sh*tload of poo in your front garden because that's cheaper for me?
You might be overreacting. This is free stuff for whoever picks it up - yes Amazon shouldn't be littering, yes it might inconvenience something but it isn't that bad.
This is someones property not "free stuff". Its theft if you take it. These packages will actually have names and addresses of the actual owners written on them so you can't even say you didn't know who the owners are.
No, in this workflow, Amazon generates a replacement package and sends that out for the recipient. The recipient is entitled to one item that they paid for—and that would be the replacement item. The original item is still owned by Amazon, who is free to declare it abandoned, and so property of whoever finds it.
Remember, these parcels aren't being sent through the postal system (where you legally release ownership of mail to the Postmaster General by sticking something in a mail slot, which is how it can be a federal offense to tamper with their mail—undelivered mail is the government's legal property!)
Instead, these are parcels going through Amazon's own logistics carriers. Amazon never released ownership of these items—they don't do that until the item hits the recipient's door. These items are legally Amazon warehouse stock, that happen to have shipping labels printed on them.
I’m actually curious about the legality of this. Potentially those shipments contain personal information (from the invoice to the package contents). Is Amazon actually allowed to release them like that? Lost packages are one thing, but intentionally forgetting about them, idk.
Technically. Nobody is going to prosecute them for it if they just take it though. It is abandoned.
But Amazon isn't going to just abandon the people who bought stuff. They're going to get a different item. This is just Amazon signalling that it is cheaper to deliver a new item than to collect a lost item.
What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon
What if killing the natives just has plain-old higher ROI for an oil company than trying to work with them? What if operating an illegal taxi business just has plain-old higher ROI than following the laws in place? What if kneecapping the competition just has plain-old higher ROI for an ice skater?
Those things are negative externalities. In this case, apartment buildings are receiving e.g. a carton of free new laptops that they could sell or donate. Yes, in some sense it's "littering", but it's not littering of valueless trash that costs more than it's worth to dispose of. It costs Amazon more than it's worth, but to pretty much any regular human being, it's like Amazon "littered" a stack of $20 bills in their apartment lobby.
And, because this stuff has value, it will very likely all get reused (i.e. resold or donated into the secondary market), not thrown away. Which will satisfy some of the demand for the products Amazon is selling, replacing an order someone would have made for a new product. Which means this act doesn't even have any externalities for the environment—nothing is going to landfill that otherwise wouldn't.
What if killing senators and representatives offers higher ROI than complying with laws (or bribing the senators more than other companies are bribing them)?
Amazon's not the first one I'd look at for this, but still. At some point you have to look at how things actually function. Not unlike critical theory. You ask, 'this is the rule, what's it like in practice though?'
> What if abandoning entire cartons of merchandise, and then shipping replacements, just has plain-old higher ROI for Amazon, than does peeling a driver off their route to get those parcels fed back into the system for re-routing?
It's not. Delivery works with a hub and spoke model. Simply get it back to the nearest local distribution point and it will be dealt with.
However, the loss just isn't tracked by Amazon. "Unable to recover packages due to atrocious processes" will be indistinguishable in their reporting to "van flooded/burnt, packages lost". So they don't see the problem and can't see any reason to fix it.
How I can tell - the customer service couldn't even figure out how much the packages were worth. No cost benefit calculation was performed.
Cost isn’t necessarily linear with complexity. And customer service wouldn’t be the ones tasked with those calculations. Amazon knows how many packages they lose in delivery once the intended recipient notifies them as such.
Letting people leave their scooters obstructing the sidewalk apparently has a higher ROI for Lime/Uber/Whoever than promptly collecting them, setting up docks, etc. The scooter riders seem to find it convenient, too. But it annoys this pedestrian.
You sure this is only Amazon, and not also USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc?
I'd sooner blame your apartment complex than delivery companies.
Anecdotally, I've had so few problems with delivery drivers, that I can't recall specific examples.
On the other hand, the amount of lousy experiences with apartment complex management companies and their policies would fill a long twitter thread.
For example, ordered computer equipment from Newegg. It was delivered to my apartment complex mail room, which closed at 5pm. I left work early to pick it up, only to find out that the staff had closed down and went home early (4:45p).
At my building I’m pretty sure, given that every USPS package gets delivered to my mailbox, every FedEx and UPS package gets delivered to my apartment door, and like 25% of Amazon-delivered packages never show up or show up mysteriously a few days after they are marked as delivered.
> until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job
Everyone knows this already - though the lowest rung is occupied by the undocumented, and no one wants to help them.
until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap"…
Ahem, the society is not only middle and upper middle class, even (I believe) in US. These drivers themselves use Amazon and other “cheap” services, I mean do you realize they sometimes need to buy things too? That’s obviously not a counter argument to your conclusions, but something to account for before raising the prices.
So what am I supposed to do as the consumer? Where can I buy things where this won't be the case? For a few product categories, I sometimes have alternatives. Farmers market which is seasonal. I'm lucky to live in Portland which had a great local book store. Many other things I need regularly are much harder.
What makes you think that store treats its employees better than Amazon treats its drivers? Maybe you can talk to the employees, but that's just the first layer. What about their suppliers?
As dehrmann said in a parallel comment, sure I can pick up almost everything at local stores, but I don't believe that most of them treat their employees any better than Amazon does. That's why I listed farmers markets and our fabulous Powell's as alternatives where I'm pretty confident that employees get treated well or there aren't any.
Sorry, I should have been cleared that I was referring to the part about the middle class waking up to the abuse of service workers. I'm pretty sure that many local stores treat their employees as bad if not worse than Amazon.
Delivery dates shift. Amazon's are doubly fluid. You might have to stay at home for a whole week have a reasonable chance of being there when the package deigns to be delivered.
I'm in the UK, I can have stuff delivered to my office, my home, a remote access anytime locker, a local store or a friend's house. I really don't have an excuse for someone not being there.
>"until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force"
They're not demented. They know it. They do not give a flying fuck.
There's no point in stopping consumption as an individual, but if there was a workers unionization movement to support or an organized consumer action such as a boycott...
That's yet another consumer choice rather than an exertion of political will. The point of political ideas is to change reality, to exert will and make it manifest. Individual consumer choices absent a movement don't do diddly squat.
Then again, in the US it's very hard to focus your vote like this due to the two-party system. So... work on getting a better political system in place?
There are unions that behave badly, therefore unions as a concept is broken and should be abolished.
Funny enough that logic never applies to corporations. If some corporations behave badly, murdering people, overthrowing democratically elected governments, kidnapping children, well, that's just how it is, we can't abolish corporations, even regulating them is criticized.
Unions help the small guy though, so those are okay to trash.
IMHO the need for unions is a symptom of a poor political system (yes, this goes for my own country too, not US-bashing here). So yes they are broken and shouldn't _need_ to exist. That's a different argument though and I agree with your point.
Legislative and executive action to disincentivize the manufacturing of cheap (and less cheap) goods produced overseas and incentivize the revival of US manufacturing.
And who is going to pay for the goods most people would not be able to buy? You will relegate majority of the population to become destitute and may end up with a nice cozy revolt as the result.
Some industries may be able to get away with it and still be competitive - ones that can replace people with robots. This would cause mass layoffs though.
Decent guaranteed basic income could be a solution but something makes me think that North America would rather commit suicide than let people have something "for free" on large scale.
>"China is the reason Amazon is so big."
It was the decision of many US / other western manufacturers to outsource production to China. China was smart and used it to catapult itself from relative nobody to superpower it is today. The true reason is not China but a simple greed.
"Move somewhere better" is the response of the (relatively) rich. It says "I'm OK with this problem, as long as I don't have to be near it." That's an OK position to take sometimes—we have to pick our battles, and can't right all the ills of the world—but it's not really taking a moral stand.
It probably depends on the location because here, we have an indoor locker room that requires a pass to enter. It always seemed like either the lockers are full either because there were a lot that day and/or people would leave the packages in the locker for days. Also, I noticed people would just give the address of the mailroom and probably did not sign up for the locker service.
Well, in the case of your apartment complex and its package locker, it could be either/or. If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location. If it's a Luxor or some other offbrand locker then they either may not have codes needed to access it or they were trying to shave a few minutes off their time by just dropping everything in the lobby. That might sound horrible but when everyone is incentivized to piss in a bottle and not take their breaks in order to make their deliveries and nobody at corporate ever bothers to investigate then these sort of things are going to happen.
> If it's an Amazon brand locker and they're just dropping the packages then chances are the locker was full and the app told them to just drop them there because that was a safe location.
These were not dropped outside a locker at the intended delivery address; they were at the wrong address entirely.
OK, then next question: Is the intended delivery address say one street over? Reason: Packages can only be dropped off if your device reports that you're within a certain radius of the delivery point. When navigating, crossing into the radius defined by that point (termed the 'geofence') is what pops up the button that says you've arrived at your destination. So imagine... you're a driver using the turn-by-turn directions on your device and it suddenly says you've arrived at your destination. So you grab the packages and head over to the building number listed on the packages... except someone put the point for the geofence at the wrong spot so the radius of the geofence extends to the next street over, causing drivers to stop on the wrong street and deliver to an address with the same building number.
Mind you, I'm not saying that's what happened here, but that's one possibility.
> OK, then next question: Is the intended delivery address say one street over?
You don't need to ask me; it's in the article, starting with the first sentence:
> Amazon – the logistics expert the world has come to rely on for everything from groceries to furniture – abandoned an entire cart of packages meant for delivery to Forest Street in a Fernald Drive lobby on Wednesday. …
> Fernald, in Neighborhood 9, and Forest, in the Baldwin neighborhood, are a five-minute drive apart.
> Things like this are going to keep happening and keep getting worse until the middle class/upper middle class realizes that our current lifestyle and access to "cheap" services is being held up by a systematically abused and underpaid labor force that isn't given the time, compensation, respect, or basic decency to support doing a good job.
Disagree.
This is entirely the fault of yes-men/pie in the sky management at Amazon. Any manager with the slightest bit of autonomy at Amazon is making six figures and is willing to throw their employees under the bus for money. They will do literally anything to avoid admitting that a problem that exists that can be solved but will cause a KPI to go down. Absolutely no one is willing to go to bat for ideas that cause temporary productivity decrease but a quality and productivity increase over the long run as the company gets better at solving the problem.
Btw. fun cultural difference: In some other countries it's not considered Ok to keep packages on front porches or next to mail boxes. Drivers in the Czech Republic would never leave package like that and hence it would be their mistake not Amazons/Bazoses.
Yeah this seems insane to mee too, also from central Europe. If it doesn't fit in your mailbox and you can't pick it up in person, you get a note to pick it up at the post office or you can choose to deliver it to a nearby gas station. Both of those will check delivery details and your photo ID before giving you the package (the latter charging you some change for the service).
Nobody here would even consider leaving it outside, despite our crime rate being waay lower than somewhere like the US, where people seem to be 100% fine with that idea.
I've recently had one or two packages left in my recycling bin for paper/cardboard with a note from the driver saying they put it there. That was kind of a shock, because that's simply not done here in the Netherlands unless you have a personal understanding with the delivery driver.
It was also really uncomfortable because I definitely don't want delivery drivers walking anywhere around my house except for the path from garden gate to front door.
In Sweden where I live, if it doesn't fit in your mailbox you'll have to pick it up somewhere.
In Germany a friend of mine told me that if they're not home at time of delivery Amazon's shipping partner will intentionally deliver to her neighbors, smaller city though but I guess culture is indeed different.
>In Germany a friend of mine told me that if they're not home at time of delivery Amazon's shipping partner will intentionally deliver to her neighbors
It's quite common in Germany to accept parcels for neighbors - but that's also because in Germany, a lot of people live in flats in small-ish housing blocks where you know your neighbors. So, like 6-12 flats per house, not high-rises.
But we have the same problems in Germany as described in the article: especially Amazon's own drivers frequently just don't try to ring but instead just leave the boxes outside or just throw them into the hall.
The German postal system has pretty good public lockers, years before we got Amazon Lockers here. Used them a lot, but lately due to fragmentation of the delivery market and those DHL lockers being reserved for the postal system, I more frequently have to drive to some bar or kiosk to fetch my boxes when the sender chooses a different logistics partner.
This is the normal procedure in the Netherlands as well, for I think all-but-one of the package delivery services. If you're not home, delivery goes to one of the neighbours (could be 5-6 houses away if the driver already knows that that one is at home). Might not be common in the inner cities, but definitely in towns and suburbs. Good for social cohesion, as otherwise we wouldn't see most of these people for months at a time.
It's common to such a degree that many of the shipping forms on webshops have a dedicated field to indicate that you don't want this, though I've never felt the need to use this; definitely more convenient to walk over to the neighbours than to a pickup point.
In Poland delivery drivers just call you and ask what do you want to be done with package. If you don't respond, package waits in delivery center. Phone number is typically required field.
I'm reluctant to bring COVID19 into this conversation, but the reason Sweden managed "OK" (In relation to how nonexistent our regulations were) is because we're "the most" (don't have source) isolated people in the world.
We don't talk to strangers, we don't have the kiss on the cheek thing, we stand in well formed distanced lines, we avoid interaction at "any cost".
I would love it if this delivery thing was the normal procedure in Sweden, it builds trust and relationships in your surroundings. These days unless you live in a teeny village you don't really know your neighbors, other than what car they're driving, so that you can buy a more expensive one with borrowed money next time.
Our national anthem says something like "I wanna live and i wanna die in the Nordics", yeah nah!
I think I didn't get my point through, it wasn't about covid but rather that we don't interact socially with people we don't already know / know through someone.
I don't want my post delivered to my neighbour. I much prefer the system we have which sends me a text saying that the package has arrived at the nearest pickup point which is a supermarket within five minutes drive or a locker that is less than ten minutes walk away.
Also, my neighbours are no more likely to be at home than I am.
I think it depends on the delivery company. Amazon, Hermes, and DPD have been fairly good with that in my experience, Royal Mail have always made me go through the faff of a trip to the sorting office no matter what.
Oh yeah, Royal Mail are annoying for that, especially since the sorting office around here is in the middle of nowhere. Every other courier will try a neighbour though.
My wife and I used to live in a street where we were usually the only people at home during the day. All the delivery companies quickly realised we would take in anyone's parcels, so our living room was often like a mini sorting office!
The main reason for this is not just a cultural difference, but a legal difference. Only the USPS can legally deliver to mailboxes. Otherwise, other services would definitely use them. There are, in some cases, other delivery services that ask their customer to have separate delivery boxes installed for their packages.
It's not this. Mailboxes in the American sense are uncommon in my country (most properties have a letter box, which is literally just big enough to fit a letter or small padded envelope through). Delivery companies still don't/(can't?) just leave it on a front step and call it delivered. If you're not there they'll maybe try deliver to your neighbours and failing that, send it back to their depot and either try another day or ask you to pick it up.
I didn’t say there wasn’t a cultural difference, I said it wasn’t just a cultural difference. Signing for packages also used to be common in the US too, that culturally started changing around the dot com bubble when e-commerce companies fought for customers’ approval. Because even big American mailboxes can’t legally receive even a small envelope from a courier, it has become culturally normal to have them left out. It is normal because it is universally done.
He's actually implying that non-native Frenchmen cannot be trusted to deliver packages correctly because they don't care about doing a good job but that's not much better.
BS. I didn't ask for the lockers, or even want them - because I knew what would happen. I've never signed up for Prime service for the same reason. Tell me again, how is anything my fault?
The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employees and don't tolerate anyone who doesn't" are just...basic things you need to do in 2021. They aren't a distraction, I would say not saying them is a distraction.
In all of the discussion around the blog post from Armstrong last year and the similar discussion around Basecamp, I never once saw an example cited of these so-called distractions from being mission-focused that wasn't just affirming the basic dignity of a group of people. I don't understand why doing so should be controversial. Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support the right of Black people to not be killed randomly and of LGBTQ+ people to exist simply doesn't belong in polite, modern society. How is this controversial?
I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
Basecamp's angry worker faction was demanding the company apologize for contributing to a white supremacist, genocidal culture... because some customer service folks had a funny customer name list that included names from all backgrounds.
That had absolutely nothing to do with basic dignity for marginalized groups. It was simply a grab for power and status. One of many. We who have been watching are very familiar with the game.
The framing of it as merely about basic dignity is deeply disingenuous, but is itself familiar and another part of the game. What about the dignity of customer service workers? Is it upholding their dignity to frivolously condemn them for a mildly immature in-joke that showed no racial bias and harmed no one?
Some of us, you will find, are not so easily played for fools.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position
> At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”.
You leave out that basecamp gave 6 months of salary to each person quitting. I'd assume that most of those would have quit under those conditions even if there wasn't an incident at all. As we can see here at the Coinbase incident where they didn't give a ton of money basically nobody quit, basecamps case would probably look similar.
Half the country voted for Trump. A small percentage of those, but still millions of people, voted for him in part because they believed he was going to save them from a satanic ruling class of pedophiles.
"A lot of people did something" is not a solid reason to respect what they did or why they did it.
The big problem with diversity in corporate settings is that it is often fake. It is not used to help marginalized people. It is used for internal power grabs and for “woke-washing” evil organizations. Like the “I’m a Latina with two moms” CIA ad.
This is a fantastically creative misrepresentation. No one demanded anyone apologize for contributing to a genocidal culture for anything. And yes I know you're referring to the pyramid. It also misses out on plenty of other content too, but that bit was fantastically creative, really.
I was slightly off in my memory, but I went back to some of the original blogs [1] and news reports [2] and there was indeed a specific employee demand that leadership acknowledge the customer list as something to be included in the pyramid of hate, as contributing to a colonial, genocidal culture. That this would require an apology was not explicitly stated, but it goes without saying, since there had already been apologies all around for the lesser offense, the general inappropriateness of the list.
In his blog post, DHH pointed out exactly where the dispute was: "It's still inappropriate for us to be laughing at individually named customers in our company Campfires, but not because there are any racist or colonial overtones to it." [emphasis mine] DHH simply didn't want the list spuriously connected to the serious moral offenses of bigotry and racism, with all the consequences that would open up.
This isn't to deny that a completely different sort of list, in a completely different context, could be validly cited as within the pyramid of hate. And it's fine to bring that up, so long as you note that what happened obviously wasn't that. But the angry employees didn't note that, because it wasn't part of their game. In fact, demanding that leadership frame the list as the sort of thing that contributes to colonialism and genocide, rather than merely being immature and inappropriate in the workplace, was a first step in setting off a moral panic where the instigators would call all the shots. Again, those of us who have been paying attention have seen many examples of this.
Other points of controversy, like the implicit demand that leadership take sides on the existence of white supremacy within the company precisely because an employee denied it was present [3], present even clearer examples of the Kafka-trapping and moral panic-mongering that was unfolding within the company.
Hansson and Fried were smart to nip it in the bud, and nip it in the bud publicly. They set a great example of how to show these people the door.
As an atheist that grew up in a religious environment, the techniques and patterns of religions are recognizable. You may not realize it, but you are introducing religion into the workplace.
A Christian posts on HN: merely saying "we as a company believe thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" or "we as a company believe you shall not steal" are just...basic things you need to do in 1952.
>you're mixing two entirely unrelated things up in bad faith.
The Leftist's Exit Fallacy: claim the response is in bad faith because you cannot reasonably respond to the core claims, and do not have any retorts to the analogies, metaphors, etc. used.
>Saying people deserve to be able to live isn't the same as introducing extremely "othering" religions.
The fact that I can't tell if you're talking about leftism or Christianity is hilarious, and telling.
>The tactics are the same, the goals are different.
That's literally what he was highlighting here...
>Comparing these is bad faith.
"I have no response to your well thought out arguments, so I'm just going to disregard them entirely because the narrative must be preserved!"
What if a bunch of white male employees ask the company to make s statement that their lives matter too? After all they are overrepresented in suicide statistics, drug addiction and homelessness.
You now this shit will make a lot of leftists lose their mind and show up at ur company offices trying to cancel you out of existence.
In a society going mad like ours, opting out of the madness like Coinbase did is the best option.
"Black lives matter" is a slogan that largely refers to a desire to solve issues related to police brutality and black people. "White lives matter", as it's commonly said and understood, is merely a contrarian pushback against that desire to fix those issues.
Obviously white lives do matter like others, but making a statement of something communicates something other than the literal meaning: it asserts that there's part of the meaning that the receiver isn't demonstrating knowledge of, and it evokes connections to things people have encountered before. If you say "white lives matter", intending it to mean something about suicide statistics, and other people interpret it as racist pushback against solving police brutality, the other people aren't doing something surprising or wrong. You would just be fruitlessly rebelling against how language actually works.
If you want to raise awareness about suicide, go ahead, but don't use a slogan that already has a meaning that will be misinterpreted in your context, and certainly don't do it competitively against people raising awareness for a different issue.
One could argue that the BLM slogan, being intentionally divisive and exclusive, is designed to provoke from day one rather than bring up constructive change. It's a heavily politicized movement. Since Biden was elected for example, the issue of BLM and police brutality is not mediatized nearly as much as before. It's not that the problem was fixed overnight, it's just that there is no use for it right now by the progressive left agenda.
It's not a honest movement. I refuse to support it even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
And given that the two of us, as reasonable people, can have a rational disagreement on this issue, why should our employer take a side? Why bring this discussion in the office? It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution. And employers don't take stand opposite of it because... it's unconstitutional.
The slogan is only divisive if you make it so. It certainly isn't "intentionally" divisive.
> Since Biden was elected for example
Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". You're reaching to creating a narrative that doesn't fit the facts.
> even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
> It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution.
The stuff you mentioned doesn't start out in the constitution (and arguably actually still aren't). It only got there due to activism by people and organizations, some of which happened in the workplace. Were they wrong to do so? Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms. That misses the point, unless your point is that the norms shouldn't change.
> Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
It's not the issue here. I am not even trying to say you are wrong about BLM. My point is it's one of those issues where 2 reasonable people can disagree. And employers shouldn't take sides.
> Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms.
Strawman fallacy. My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized. Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment. If you were my co-worker I would refuse to discuss this issue unless we have a very close bond/friendship outside of work and we are comfortable discussing this kind of stuff.
We can effect change through debates, voting, protests, ...
The chart shows a large spike in June 2020. Then a sharp decline between June and the election. Like the protests. Then a slow decline after the election with small spikes in 2021.
Erm, no. If there were some sort of correlation, looking at that graph you should be able to tell me where on the graph Biden either won the election or took office (Nov 4th or Jan 21st). You can't. What you do see is a wonderful bit of exponential decay from an event that wasn't related to Biden: the death of George Floyd on May 26. That's the vertical line. And then an expected exponential decay.
If you look at https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202..., for example, Election, Joe Biden, and Trump are all strongly correlated. Heck, Trump and Black Lives Matter are briefly correlated, but Election and Black Lives Matter aren't.
> Strawman fallacy.
No, you literally made an, if we want to get technical, argumentum ad antiquitatem. Pointing that out isn't a fallacy. It's what you did.
> Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment.
People who disagree with you would claim that often they do not feel the environment is safe and non-toxic. They aren't comfortable with the status quo, hence their attempts to change it. That you are unaware of the toxicity and lack of safety doesn't invalidate their experiences. In fact, its an example of the challenges they have to overcome to achieve the safety and non-toxicity you enjoy and presume.
> My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized.
No, you said, and I quote:
" It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side." Your opinion is that employers can clearly take a side sometimes, but only in cases where some norm (the constitution as it is today) dictates. If that's not what you intended, please clarify, but that's precisely the argument you made, and again, it wasn't a strawman for me to point that out.
All of these statements are like when people comment their condolences or congratulations on social media. Yeah, it’s just a gesture, but the gesture is appreciated. And like a condolence, I don’t think it’s weird if a company doesn’t say anything, but I would find it weird if a person was really proud of how they didn’t give condolences or congratulations.
> I would find it weird if a person was really proud of how they didn’t give condolences or congratulations
I am proud I have never written RIP Celebrity on twitter when a celebrity died or sent my congratulations to a Kardashian on the occasion of the brith of their child. When I have offered condolences or congratulations it has been exclusively in person or in a non public broadcast message.
I guess that makes me weird, but personally I find posting that sort of shit on social media decidedly odd.
> I now try to avoid using the English idiom "I just don't understand how..." to express indignation. If I genuinely don't understand how, then my model is being surprised by the facts, and I should discard it and find a better model.
I just don't understand what kind of person expects their idioms and mental models to have a literal 1:1 match. If I wanted to say exactly what I'm thinking, I wouldn't be reaching for idioms.
>I never once saw an example cited of these so-called distractions from being mission-focused that wasn't just affirming the basic dignity of a group of people.
You are free to affirm whatever you want, and have all sort of discussions about society at large when your aren't being paid for your time by someone else to do a job that has nothing to do with affirming groups of people.
>I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
Its baffling to me that so many people feel entitled to espouse their social and cultural beliefs in the workplace instead of doing the job they are being paid to do. The way a workplace recognizes the humanity of their workers is by offering good wages, good hours and a generous benefits package.
You are free to work at companies where you can impose your political views on those arounds you. However people who don't want to work with you are free to go work for companies that doesn't let people like you do that, like Coinbase.
but that's thing...what is "social activism" here? I don't think having a single tweet or post from your company's account saying "happy Pride month, we love our LGBTQ+ Coinbasers" is activism really....it's just like, a nice thing to do. No one is saying Coinbase or any company should pay their employees to go make phone calls for Bernie Sanders' campaign on the clock. It seems like people are inventing some kind of strawman of "paid activism" that no one is asking for.
I don't know, more people celebrate Christmas compared to Pride month, but saying "Merry Christmas" can be seen as controversial. It's hard to imagine that "happy Pride month" is completly neutral.
> If you say “Merry Christmas” to someone who celebrates Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing at all, you could make them feel marginalized: like their own beliefs aren’t valued or respected by society. And that’s not a good way to feel around the holidays.
I'm not sure if that fits "examples of people complaining about it" however, as it's more "people trying to protect the feeling of marginalized groups", which isn't the same.
> On the other hand, people don't greet me with "happy pride" during June, but they do greet me with "merry Christmas" during December, so perhaps there's a false equivalency there too.
That's fair. Pride month is not a thing where I live, so it's hard to know exactly how people experience it. I was under the impression that it was really important and lots of people talked about it, but maybe it depends on where you live, or maybe it was a warped vision of reality.
Though to go back to the original subject, if people don't greet you with "happy Pride" during June, then wishing it would be definitely not neutral.
How about we stick to "a company can do everything it wants as long as it is legal and people are free to go work at whichever company they want"? Why is that controversial? If you want to effect social change become a politician, do not try to turn your work place into a political party that has to react to every social fashion.
The problem with the argument that this is making a workplace a political party is what the fuck are you supposed to do if you’re transitioning at work? Now you’re fucking political, and all you want is for your boss to call you she/her and your health insurance to cover your hormones.
Lets say that coinbase said "We are fully political at work, we expect all of you to have conservative views!". Would that make you happier than their current apolitical stance?
> What do you do in an apolitical workplace and you’re going to engage in controversial medical intervention to align your body with your believed gender?
You just do it? In an apolitical workspace that isn't a political act, what you do in your free time is up to you. And if you change your legal name people should update how they call you. Nothing of that is political. If people make a fuzz they are dragging politics in the workspace and should be reprimanded.
> I think this is a straw man that doesn’t actually address my question.
It isn't a strawman, I am just explaining how politics at work wouldn't solve your problem. However an apolitical workspace actually would solve your problem since it bars conservative politics as well.
The way you picture politics as a wholly separate thing unrelated to the amount of consideration/kindness toward LGBT people or minorities is alien to me.
Twenty+ years ago, being visibly gay in a workplace was much less popular, to the point that many people made the choice between hiding that about themselves or facing a more hostile workplace. Things are very different today in many places. Did society just get overall kinder, or did it go through a political change?
In the past, asserting a visibly gay person warranted more consideration and kindness was definitely "political". Was there some point it wholly stopped being so?
That’s what I don’t understand, because my understanding is that being conservative or progressive when it comes to trans people is no middle ground. Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice. There are laws passed explicitly around their bathrooms for example.
> Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice
No, it is just a kind gesture. It is like people not telling an overweight person they are fat, it is the normal thing to do. And if you go around calling people fat then in any healthy workplace they will call you in for a talk and tell you to stop being so rude.
The problem here is that you make this about politics and not about just common decency. If it is about politics then it makes sense for conservatives to reject your wish, you wont change them from being conservatives. But if you make it about common decency instead then they almost surely comply since most people are nice. Maybe not the first time you ask but after a few times almost everyone will, because they will see themselves as assholes if they don't.
> Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice.
It's not, at least not for me. I think what people do with their bodies is not my business. I think that if people want to be called a certain way, I'm fine with it. All I'm asking is a bit of forgiveness in case I make a mistake, as I'm bad with names. But most of the time it will be not remembering someone's name, not using the one they would prefer me not to use. I don't consider any of this political. My grandmother doesn't like her name, so everyone calls her by her nickname. I was a bit surprised when I saw her full name when I was young, but that's about it. I don't see any difference with trans people. Sure, the stuff behind is very different, the "why" is not the same. But that's not really my business. I think accomodating people, up to a certain degree, shouldn't come with conditions about the "why".
I think people tend to forget that it's normal to accommodate to some degree people that you work with. I have two vegetarian colleagues, so if I bring some food to work, I make something that they can eat. I would try the same if someone was vegan or allergic to nuts. I don't know why they are vegetarian, and I don't need to know why to respect them and try to accommodate them. On the other hand, they've never lectured me about what I eat.
The sibling comment about being overweight is also very true. I am overweight. I've never had any comments about it in the workplace. At my last job, all of my colleagues were very physically active. Sure, sometimes I felt a bit left out, but that's on me. They never made me feel uncomfortable about my weight. I was allowed to exist as a person, and not a fat person. That personally means a lot to me.
I don't have any good answers for the bathrooms. Individual unisex bathrooms would solve that, but not all offices are equipped with that, and adding them may not be possible. You're right that here, it may be a bit harder to accommodate them, depending on who you are. On the other hand, I'm fine with unisex bathrooms, as I'm not comfortable with urinals.
I realize that it's not everyone's cup of tea, and that some people will prefer a workplace where everyone is strongly aligned with them on almost everything. That's fine too.
All of that may be just an expression of privilege/luck/something, as I realize that not all workplaces are like mine. But these places do exists. I'm trying to raise awareness about them, in hope that some people will go look for them, instead of being abused by employers and colleagues that don't deserve them.
I don't think we should optimise workplaces for the smallest possible edge cases.
If you joined a bigoted company as a queer person and transitioned then you have to change your job, the same way if you join NPR and suddenly realise after spending too much time online that you are in fact right wing.
Work is a place where people go to earn money to do stuff they want after. It's not a place to get validation.
That doesn’t answer my question of what happens if someone transitions in a workplace. How do you do that non-politically? Dismissing the edge cases of marginalized people is kind of like… of course they’re edge cases. Marginalized people are edge cases by definition.
> That doesn’t answer my question of what happens if someone transitions in a workplace. How do you do that non-politically?
It is simple, you transition, you tell people you want to go by the other name now. If people say it wrong you remind them but don't get angry. If they harass it for it there are laws against harassment, bringing up harassment isn't political. You can discuss the medical benefits with your manager or HR, but don't have to try to make a political campaign about it.
If people makes a fuzz over those things then they are political and you can report them to whoever is in charge that they are bringing politics to work and causing problems. If they truly are against politics at work they will take your side and tell those people to stop.
What do you do if your peer reports you as political because asking people to go by your new name is a political demand? I’m genuinely asking, because I’m under the impression that even asking people to respect your pronouns can be too political, or trying to use a bathroom you think matches your gender.
If you legally changed your name then it isn't an political act.
> I’m genuinely asking, because I’m under the impression that even asking people to respect your pronouns can be too political
That is just your assumption here. Why are you assuming that? It is almost as if you assume "apolitical" means "conservative". That isn't true, even if the left tries to tell you that all "apolitical" people are really closet conservatives that isn't really the case.
I’m assuming that because there are laws in several places in the country about whether or not trans people can use certain bathrooms, so I’m assuming it’s a political thing.
I think my assumptions are different than you. I’ve met people, co workers, who have told me that a trans person asking to be described as a new name is political, and forcing the co worker to call them by a new name is forcing politics in the workplace. This is my understanding of what an apolitical workplace means. Am I wrong? I’ve generally avoided workplaces that claim to be apolitical explicitly because the people I know who claim to be apolitical actually claim that they’d never respect a trans persons new name, because that’s bringing politics into the workplace.
Then your problem isn't with apolitical workplaces, but with conservative workplaces.
Also, a few people saying that trans stuff is political doesn't mean that those views are the general consensus or that apolitical workplaces works with that. I haven't seen that and almost everywhere I've been doesn't really do politics at work. Trans people are just people etc, nobody cares.
I don't know. How do you tell an apolitical workspace from a progressive workspace if the progressive workspace claims it's apolitical?
But until we see that coinbase harasses trans people who work there I'll assume they are apolitical as they say and not conservative. If you have evidence that they did harass trans people as you fear then you can bring them up and we can see that coinbase isn't really apolitical, but until then you are just creating a problem out of nothing.
Plenty of companies have policies against politics at work, but I've never heard of a real expample where that caused issues with trans people. Instead people just bring up thought examples. I don't doubt it might have ever happened, but I don't think it is nearly as common or problematic as people try to make it out to be.
I can assure you that most people would not bat an eye they were asked to use a different pronoun. The problem starts when they are 1) forced to do so b) suddenly have to "disclose" their own pronouns, and you end up on a zoom call with he/hims she/hers and one they/them.
The problem is not that some people want to stop being marginalised, the problem is that the aim is to marginalise a normal person.
If they are rude then you can bring it up with your manager about them being rude. Companies usually doesn't accept rude behaviour or bullying. If they are fine with rude behaviour and bullying then you will have problems regardless of the political stance of the company.
There is no law that makes people call other people by their given names too. Or law that makes people call priests "father". I don't understand how that can be so hard to fathom.
> There is no law that makes people call other people by their given names too.
Actually this would likely fall under some form of workplace harassment issue, and the company would have a duty to stop the harassment. ("Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs", and it's kind of hard to imagine how calling someone a name that isn't theirs isn't a form of mockery or name calling.)
> or trying to use a bathroom you think matches your gender
If you get in trouble for being in the wrong bathroom at work, you need to go find a company that isn’t full of children. Nobody has time to care where you pee
>It's baffling to me that people believe I should turn off my brain when I'm at work.
You should choose a place of employment that lets you behave as you feel you need to behave, not expect that you as the employee are the one who decides on the standards of behavior.
Then don't work for someone who you don't consider sufficiently woke! Nobody is being forced to work at Coinbase. If you don't like the idea that you are hired to do a job instead of running a social justice campaign, then don't take that job, work somewhere else! The sense of entitlement is absolutely astounding.
> The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employees and don't tolerate anyone who doesn't" are just...basic things you need to do in 2021. They aren't a distraction, I would say not saying them is a distraction.
The context is people asking the Coinbase CEO to make a statement about BLM. You can read about it here:
This is the start of the first paragraph of that article:
> IN EARLY JUNE, a week after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, employees at Coinbase gathered, virtually, for an emotional meeting. In the previous few days, mirroring workplaces elsewhere, the company’s Slack channels had been filled with comments about the nationwide protests and demands for more support for Black employees. In the background hovered a specific question: Would Coinbase and its CEO, Brian Armstrong, make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement, as so many Silicon Valley companies had?
I think it's fair to say here that the root comment changed the goalposts from "make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement" to "merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter"". Which, in that case, would fit my characterisation of that comment as a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I appreciate your intent in keeping the discussion on topic, however in that case I think I was on topic.
There is a difference between people/companies that believe that lives of black people matter and those that claim that BLACKLIVESMATTER. There is a difference between people/companies that believe that women need to have the same rights as men and those that claim to be feminists. There is a difference between people/companies that believe that gays/lesbians are normal people and those who put rainbows everywhere.
> There is a difference between people/companies that believe that lives of black people matter and those that claim that BLACKLIVESMATTER.
FWIW, in this case, that "difference" might be that Coinbase was simultaneously treating their black employees poorly--dare I say, as "second class citizens"--while actively refusing to take a few seconds to agree with something as banal/obvious as "black lives matter". The BLM statement struggle was merely a catalyst for what were already existing and somewhat long-standing racial tensions brewing inside the company that had led people to feel that, with its actions, the company did not in fact care about its black employees... context you can't just pretend didn't exist going into Brian's "let's not talk about this and everyone go back to work" post.
> The tensions at Coinbase came to a head in June, after the police killing of George Floyd. As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter. They organized a meeting where several of them told executives, often through tears, about their difficult experiences at the company, eight people who attended said.
Take careful note: this wasn't "merely" "our difficult experiences in the world", this was "our difficult experiences at the company". Seriously: too much of this comment thread seems to be hyperfocused on BLM statements--as I guess y'all really think taking a few minutes and a couple sentences to acknowledge that in solidarity somewhere is somehow a horrible distraction--while ignoring that this had started in the background of "Coinbase is mistreating its black employees so much that it had already lost 3/4s of them" (and that's before Brian's post, so a lack of strong improvement since then is telling). This is way more concrete than these abstractions.
> But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees.
> “It was the first time I realized what racism felt like in the modern world,” said Layllen Sawyerr, a compliance analyst who is Black. “I felt like I was being bullied every day at work.” She said she filed a discrimination complaint with Coinbase’s legal department before quitting in 2018.
If you tell people they're victims, they'll act like victims. Not acknowledging George Floyd "hurts" black employees? This is the kind of nonsense born of priviledge.
Anybody from the 3rd world reading this garbage feels sick. 20 year olds making 6 figures to build craigslist for crypto crying because their boss won't acknowledge an event.
>Nah, that's what the far right propaganda machine has tried to tell you.
Nah, that's what facts and being a data driven adult have told us. Apparently they line up with the far-right. Looks like reality had a right bias.
>You're told to believe that Group X is bad, and when you find that you actually believe in the core tenet of Group X, you have trouble reconciling that.
Except Group X is bad, and sharing common beliefs is immaterial. Hitler/Nazis believed smoking was bad for you and excessive drinking was a blight on society. I agree with them on that, but there's obviously no issues reconciling the fact that they were bad.
>You want black lives matter supporters who don't actually fight for change.
If they wanted that, they'd be OK with all the neurotic performative virtue signaling at work LOL!
>In short, you love the status quo, and you're scared that giving marginalised groups a better shake might take away some of what you have.
In short, you believe "you're either with us, or against us." Facts, nuance, and logically considering problems are systemic White supremacy culture in your eyes.
>you're scared that giving marginalised groups a better shake might take away some of what you have.
He supports egalitarianism which definitely helps marginalized groups along with everyone else. You're supporting institutional racism.
'Acknowledging discrimination in our industry is distracting, so to stop being distracted I'm going to focus on writing on how un-distracted we are because we're _mission focused._ I'm going to do this several times.'
I can't be the only person feeling a sense of irony, here. A big argument you see a lot is that people who raise concerns around equitable treatment only do it for clout, the ever popular 'virtue signaling' phrase. Is this not, to some extent or another, similar behavior but for a different audience?
Virtual signal* for thee but not for me? Is this something we've discussed yet?
* I've never been a fan of this term, anyway. Even if someone were 100%, consciously and purposefully 'virtue signaling', it has little baring on the validity of their argument.
What you've said makes no sense. Coinbase offered a bunch of employees the change to quit gracefully with an exit package rather than fire them. That's not virtue signaling, that's material reality.
> merely saying "we as a company [...] don't tolerate anyone who doesn't [share our political stance]" are just... basic things you need to do in 2021
> Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support [our political stance] simply does not belong in polite, modern society
That's extremely divisive and intolerant. Also, it's a cheap rhetorical trick to replace [political stance] with "doesn't want black people to be indiscriminately murdered". Literally no-one is arguing that black people should be indiscriminately murdered. Some people just want to do work at their workplace instead of engaging zealots in political debates that might lead to being cancelled at book burnings. That doesn't mean they want to genocide black people. You should learn to tolerate people who have political opinions different from yours.
This is such obnoxious virtue signalling. Do you issue statements decrying the 30 people murdered in a car explosion in Djibouti on a daily basis? Who decide which new social issue you're supposed to care about?
It's distracting, propagandist and politically charged bullshit. Just because I don't support BLM doesn't mean I don't have a problem with black people randomly being killed.
It's the exact same bullshit as shoving "support our troops or else you hate freedom" down people's throats.
It's disingenuous to pretend like "black lives matter" is merely a phrase that any decent person should agree to without question. BLM is a political group with a radical left-leaning agenda that encompasses much more than just "don't kill black people randomly" as you suggest. Discussing these things in the workplace inevitably leads to the accusation that if you don't support BLM, you must not think black lives matter. It's a very cheap tactic, akin to saying that you're not a patriot if you don't support the PATRIOT act.
This is a caricature of the “mission-focused” mindset. I’ll preface this message by saying that I am brown, raised in relative poverty in the third world, and left of center on most issues. I’ll also say that I have materially contributed a substantial portion of my income helping educate poor brown kids, which most of my preachy white colleagues haven’t and won’t.
The discourse at work in SV tech is not about, “hey, let’s not hang homosexuals”, which I am sure 99.99% of employees and employers fully agree with. It’s typically more in the vein of, “hey, why did we hire person Z, who the media has proven to be a bigot”.
As an explicit example:
Antonio Garcia Martinez’s firing was, IMO, bizarre and unwarranted and a manifestation of this attitude (coming from a company that is okay with using Uyghur labor).
I actually do not want my colleagues to have a very narrow view of what’s right and wrong — or a very black and white view of the world. And surely, I don’t want to expend cycles at work having such conversations.
This sounds like "other people have it much worse in the world, suck it up or help them instead of trying to do things you think will improve things in your own life".
Out of curiosity, is there no way to wear a helmet over a turban? I've had Sikh friends who wear warm winter hats over their head coverings, for instance. No disrespect to Sikhs reading this, I'm genuinely curious.
I'm guessing it has more to do with comfort and appearances (they do look badass). I never really understood laws that force adults to wear helmets, if someone want's to take the risk then thats their decision.
I'm not really sure what you are getting at, but I think that anyone who gets into an accident deserves attention from emergency services. To suggest otherwise would be rather vengeful.
I’m not the parent commenter, but I believe they’re making the case that there are negative externalities that come from not wearing protective equipment which are borne by others in some form or another. In Canada, for example, there is a very direct cost to others because of their universal healthcare.
Thanks, I had a feeling that is what they were talking about but wasn't positive. That seems like a selfish stance to have, and also ironic considering the ideologies behind universal healthcare.
How much money even gets spent on medical bills for bikers who choose not to wear helmets? If everyones personal lifestyle choices now have a monetary impact on each other, then how much intervention does this justify? Should people be forced to eat healthy and exercise? Obesity cost the healthcare system significantly more than motorcycle injuries. Alcohol, candy, cigarettes, even OTC drugs have a huge cost on the healthcare system, should those be illegal? What about mental health? Should people be prevented from doing anything considered "health threatening" out of the fear they may cost tax payers money?
Also should people be allowed to opt-out of a universal healthcare system and be exempt from lifestyle regulations?
What is selfish about regulating some things that otherwise put a burden on society and have almost no upside for the individual if not regulated? Even if they and their families pay the highest cost for their stupidity, this doesn't mean there is no case for regulation.
You don't even know if they have families/dependents, and people should be allowed to make their own choices regardless. If you are concerned about the burden of taking care of others then you should criticize universal healthcare rather than try to dictate peoples lives. Don't bring those liabilities into your life if you are unwilling to deal with them.
It's a complicated and interesting debate. In places where we have universal healthcare we want to simultaneously provide coverage for everyone and allow the maximum freedom possible, but these goals are somewhat conflicting. We still think universal healthcare is of paramount importance for the well being of the group, so it takes the priority. This means reckless behavior can be frowned upon, smoking discouraged and seat belts enforced.
From my european pov I've always felt universal healthcare would never work in the US due to this focus on individual freedom over almost anything else.
