This rebuttal is... poor, I guess? Not disingenuous or anything, but lots of wishful thinking and (for lack of a better term) "inside baseball"-objections.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.
YoY sales are down while other automakers are up, Q3 might be an artifact of EV incentives expiring. Iirc other manufactures also saw an increase in EV sales in Q3.
The Stack Exchange TOS ( https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public ) doesn't assign ownership - posters retain copyright, SO gets a non-exclusive license to it, and everybody else gets it under various CC wiki terms.
> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
Note that all of this is deeply problematic, EVEN IF the truth is that the virus was a normally evolved bat coronavirus that got to Wuhan through some method that did not involve a lab in any way. The dichotomy between what they were saying in public, and what they were saying to each other in private, severely undercuts the idea that they are who the public should be trusting for advice on this topic.
I don't know that I've ever heard such a violent "woosh" as the goalposts were moved. Going from "obviously happened, consistent with evidence" to "the problem is the way it was discussed in private" is just... wow.
I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.
I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.
...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.
Discovery, immediate mitigation, deeper mitigation, general notice, notifying effected users - all these can happen pretty quickly once the ball is rolling. Once you're dealing with "the law" in any capacity you are constrained in what you details you can share broadly, and when.
I'm happy we were finally able to share this level of detail.
There's a pretty strong connection between the numbers the tool has and market rates - it's not like the numbers are pushed top down, they come from actually participating in the hiring market.
The calculator normally gets a few revisions a year, one of the things that prompts that is market rates changing (others are things like hiring for new skills, or new roles being created).
What's nice about the calculator is, if the market rates change, everyone gets a raise (and knows they should). It's not just the new hire (who's mostly recently on the market), it's everybody in the same skill track.
The calculator also keeps us honesty about what matters for compensation. When the yearly salary review comes around, you can point at things you've done in the last year _and_ at where it says they should matter. It means fewer surprises, less frustration, and less fear that you're being too aggressive or too passive in salary discussions.
All of what you're saying is reasonable, but I think the premise is wrong -- what you can do doesn't determine how much you are paid, at the very least it's not the most important factor.
You could be the greatest COBOL programmer with the best people skills, but if there are no COBOL jobs, the rubric is 100% wrong (assuming your salary is 0 because you're unemployed). In the same vein, you could be a completely average developer (even a bad one, however you measure that), but if the market is absolutely starved for developers, you should (and likely will) be paid a lot. I think SO's appraoch obscures that fact.
There's no way they can update it enough to keep up with market (and it's arguably in the company's best interest in the short term to do this), and I'm worried that how this is being presented is lulling developers into a false sense of safety when they need to be on their guard.
But it's also likely that I'm being overly pessimistic/exaggerating the danger here. SO seems like a company that has enough breathing room to truly care about it's employees, and as such I think they will do their best to revise the calculator to benefit their employees. However, I really do think that the logic you're using equally applies to all the usual grade/level yearly review based systems... That's exactly how it works in larger companies (not that it's a bad thing) now, I don't think the rubric is a differentiator.
My point is that if you're one of the people that isn't a new hire, but aren't thinking critically about your salary where it is in relation to the market for people with your skills (whatever they are), please do. Don't leave it up to any company, however well-intentioned, to pay you what you should be making.
Like sure H3 might be a byproduct of other mining on the Moon, but the hard part is the mining at all yes? It's wishful thinking to handwave away another hard problem and then say "this rebuts the other hard problem". Or "we'll get the metal for a Venus cloud city by moving asteroids into orbit" - yeah... if we can move and mine asteroids, building on Venus would be a lot easier but we can't do those things? Or an assumption of high enough immigration rates to offset genetic diversity concerns - space travel is hard, expensive, and all of this is at (or beyond) the limits of current engineering why assume a certain scale?
There's a fair amount of "only Musk and/or Bezos say X, but there are others in the community you say not-X" - which I'm sure is true but seems irrelevant? Like it or not, a handful of rich folks (and Hollywood and other popular media collectively) set the bounds of discussion here. Most telling in the rebuttal around Moon and Mars settlement, where the argument seems to be "A City on Mars is right, but we should also be talking about Venus and Titan (etc.)" - if I grab a random non-expert off the street, they're gonna list Mars, Moon, and maybe "space stations". Heck, didn't the current NASA admin announce plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon? Presumably that's to power something (not that I expect it to ever be built) base-or-settlement-y?
A City on Mars is a pop-sci book so I'm sure there are plenty of issues, but (at least as a non-expert) the critiques I've seen (and this one in particular) are really poor.