One more nail in the public education system. This will amplify the inequality through middle class folks hiring tutors and such or just opting for private schools where the curriculum is “modified”.

It’s hard to properly assess someone’s intellect, overall skills and, ability to adapt & learn in a few hours of interviews. Much easier to pass candidates through a sieve and pick from the remaining few.

Good luck in your search.

Seriously? You can't suss that out over the course of several hours of conversation?

Unfortunately, no. People can be really good at covering up for massive inadequacies, and it can take weeks or months to really start figuring them out.

It’s a long tail problem.

Two things you can do that will help is to make your hiring process much more data driven, and to put your people who would be working with them on the team of people that will be doing the interviews, and give them extensive training on how to properly perform those interview panels.

You could also follow that up with take-home example work, for some cases.

But the real trial is those first few weeks and months, where they have to know that they are being carefully evaluated, and where if things don’t work out then you can make sure that you can easily let them go.

I recently joined a new employer in October, so I am acutely aware of this situation.

Business are legally required to accept cash. I pay cash all the time at gas stations or for small amounts (< $20).

Covid adds a bit of friction to this but I have yet to be refused a transaction because of a cash payment.

> Business are legally required to accept cash.

If you're in the US, this isn't true. Businesses are only required to accept cash for debts, i.e. where you pay after services are rendered. That's why dollar bills specifically say "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."

The gas station can refuse your cash payment for a candy bar because there's no "debt" yet. A restaurant can't refuse to take cash unless they make you pay before they bring you food.

It's not common to do, especially since cash is so easy and cheap to handle, but it is legal.

> Covid adds a bit of friction to this but I have yet to be refused a transaction because of a cash payment.

Earlier in the pandemic, most places near me had signs up that they weren't taking cash because of COVID.

That depends on where you are. In the UK, while any debt can be paid in cash by law, there is no requirement for a business to refuse to accept cash for a purchase. There are some places that don't accept cash, some coffee shops, most cinemas: I guess that's more because they expect their staff to pilfer. Personally, I just don't use those places.

For anyone interested, that's the definition of legal tender: something which must be accepted as a payment method if offered for repayment of a debt.

But that’s also a failure of internal IT and processes. These types of architectural decisions really need to go through some sort of ARC before proceeding.

When you have a situation where the winning candidate has fewer votes than the other candidate, that clearly leads to some saying it wasn't a fair representation of the feeling of the country.

I don't think many contested Bush in 2004, when he got a majority (not even just a plurarity) of votes. They might not have liked it, but it was a given.

Clearly in 2000 there were complaints, Gore got more votes, on top of that was the whole hanging chad fiasco.

In both 92 and 96, Clinton got the plurarity of votes, but didn't reach 50%. Most who voted, voted against him. Not as bad as not getting a majority of votes, but will lead to some resentment.

Now on top of that there's the whole "Hacking" the election, which is far more woolly, and isn't just because of Russia and Cambridge Analytica, it's also about how informed a population is, the ease of getting onto the voting register, the ease of casting a vote, etc.

Democracy is hard

All good points. I would add that democracy in the workplace, which affects most people's day to day lives far more than that of the government, has been decreasing for decades, with the decline of unions and skyrocketing of wealth inequality.

agreed though I think the appearance of workplace democracy affecting day to day more than governmental democracy is only historically (rather than inherently) true of post-war america. that standard could radically shift in the future and I'd also say that it's government policy or stagnancy that enables the context in which workplace democracy has declined.

Would the election being contested by the losing candidate be more of the same to you? Because there's a massive difference between voters being upset their candidate lost, and the candidate not accepting the results.

Especially if that candidate is the acting president and refuses to go through the peaceful transfer of power.

And the fact it's even being discussed as a serious possibility that the current acting president would do that should raise so many alarm bells about how democratic the US really is ... it's not even funny.

Trump has refused to say that he would accept the results of the election, constantly saying he "will see".

This is absolutely not something Obama has done and claiming the situations are similar is blind and absurd.

Removing the president by force does not help the stated case by the way.

It's not removing the president by force. If Trump fails to win the electoral college vote by 12:01p on Jan 20th, the president will be Biden or Pelosi. If Trump then refuses to leave the white house he'll be treated as an intruder and arrested and/or shot. He has no individual power, and no loyalty to him, the loyalty is to the office of president, which is currently occupied by Trump, but unless he is declared

The peaceful transfer of power is about the operation of the government transferring - the head of the army, the secret service, the finance, etc.

You might get civil unrest if some Trump supporters refuse to accept it, but unlike other countries where ballots are counted, the US does not elect a president by popular vote, instead a joint session of congress counts registered votes from 538 electors across the country. The sitting president isn't even the room. There is no question.

In all your replies you are defending against a claim nobody is making.

Nobody said the president will just remain a president if he just says so. What I originally said is that the fact this (the acting president refusing to go through peaceful transfer of power) is a serious discussion is symptomatic of a serious issue, and I maintain that, and nothing you said contradicts it. You then replied with a weird tangent about Obama.

> He has no individual power, and no loyalty to him, the loyalty is to the office of president, which is currently occupied by Trump, but unless he is declared

You should note, the man has shown many times to be able to gather a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people with a few tweets, and phone calls.

Not at his inauguration, and not at his Oklahoma rally.

> It isn't so hard to imagine hundreds of them marching into the white house to "protect" the president after he loses the election.

If the secret service can't cope with a few protesters what is the point of them?

> That was discussed with the same seriousness by the other side with Obama stepping down.

I'm just going to call that out as a straight-up distortion and falsehood. In it's effect, equivalent to a lie.

Show me reliable quotes of saying Obama he would "have to see" about the election results, as Trump has, and I'll be more charitable.

Otherwise I (mostly) agree with you. Bear in mind though that when Trump wanted to deploy paratroopers to cities during the first wave of protests and the riots associated with (but not really a part of) them after the murder of George Floyd, the only check and balance in our system left was our military leadership itself, which, to their credit, saw that such an order would be immoral, probably illegal, and un-American.

But literally all the other checks and balances meant to prevent a President from turning the military / law enforcement into their own personal squad of doofuses have been removed at this point.

Look at Barr and the FBI. Or the current behavior of DHS in Portland.

So I mostly agree with your prediction but certainly have my unsettled moments.

I mean the guy got the Army to have a Blackhawk helicopter go hover over and intimidate peaceful protestors like it was part of an occupying force.

Plus, let's not forget that the election could be a shitshow this year in terms of how long it takes to count the votes, voter access to polling places (because of neglect or deliberate disenfranchisement), etc.

So there could be a lot of gray areas and areas of concern unrelated to a "military coup."

What if votes are still being counted? What if so many votes are lost because of screwups that it's hard to know who won in certain counties? What if Trump lies, as he does, and says he won in places where he didn't?

Also I'd like to point out that the orders to create concentration camps for immigrants which Trump issued to ICE may very well have been illegal. Federal agencies receive orders all the time from various folks and sometimes those orders are later acknowledged as illegal.

It's tricky for an officer to know if an order is legal or not, hence the issues. What an chief of staff is sure of is that a legal order can only come from the president, and at 12:01p on Jan 20th the president will be whoever the joint session of congress says it is.

I think you're missing me point. Most likely you'll be correct.

But if all the votes aren't counted yet - like what happened with the Bush/Gore election - then the Supreme Court or whomever makes these decisions could legally extend the timeline (however it happened before). Trump remains President then until it's sorted out.

And it probably would get sorted out. But my point is that there is historical precedent for a gray area of when an election is over - I mean come on, the Supreme Court had to decide when the Bush / Gore election was over, and Gore could have contested that, if he had chosen to.

So it's obviously a possibility considering how messed-up our electoral process could be this year from a combination of covid-19, neglect, and deliberate neglect. And possibly foreign sabotage though I'd put that at the bottom of the list.

The 20th amendment literally says

> The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January

It could not be plainer.

Supreme court can rule about the process of counting, when the joint session to verify the votes happens, when a given state has to appoint its electors etc, but can't possibly interpret this as anything other than the plain text it says.

Thanks for the info on that. :).

What if on January 20 there is disagreement about who the President is?

I actually don't know how that works.

May I suggest finding a cause you truly believe in and volunteering your tech skills. Most non-profits and advocacy groups have such a huge tech deficit that they could use someone like you.

Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.

What? What do you mean by worse...

Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.

Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with.

The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative.

It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.

I’ve been pushing for a similar model for years as well but called but used rings to model it. Might have to try your solar system model and see if I have better luck.

I'm not interested in getting into a political flame war over some windmills, but I think it's a bit of a gross oversimplification to say that the people gained nothing from them.

There were extensive public consultations. You can view the outcome from that here:

https://whitepineswindfarm.webs.com/20120901%20WPWF%20(1-41-...

Some of the "sidelined" concerns were pseudo-scientific complaints about health effects but those were still addressed with sincerity.

Nothing was "rammed" through, and suggesting such a project was is pretty dishonest.

This was done to finally shut of the coal plants (a good thing in my mind) but the GTA consumes a lot of electricity and it had to come from somewhere. So in a classic case of externalizing their problem they voted to make it someone else's problem. The sitting government took away local planning and oversight, created setback guidelines based strictly on what the industry wanted and practically all of the "consultations" were held in the gta far away from the people actually affected by them.

Host communities didn't gain anything other than many folks having dried-up or polluted wells from the footings driven into the ground, seeing roads destroyed by heavy truck traffic with no compensations to the municipality, and none of the promised green jobs materialized. They lost scenic views (some like windmills, some don't), property values, a general sense of knowing that they, and their opinions matter. Losing that last one is the most dangerous to a functioning society.

I'm still puzzled that you assume I have chosen a side in this. There' no war here since you are clearly unable to see both sides of the issue and further discussion is pointless.

Your chosen language was pretty inflammatory.

I linked the document providing the large numbers of public consultations and their results. You made a lot of pretty inflammatory assertions as well, but I've never heard of these things from anywhere else.

Keeping in mind my home county is full of windmills on all sides. Not once have I heard of wells drying up or being polluted even from their harsher critics. And in this county nobody was "forced" to house a windmill. Farmers who opted to house one are well compensated to boot.

There are environmental studies done and accountability with regular updates to a number of institutions including Environment Canada expressly to prevent such problems. You can see how I am hesitant to believe hearsay in opposition to the results of studies by these kinds of organizations.