jtbigwoo

7 ms·

1.
by jtbigwoo 4mo ago
I worked for a company that ran a pretty big, high-security data center--75,000 square feet serving thousands of customers. There was a team of 6-8 technicians and a couple dozen security guards. None of them were particularly great or hi
2.
by jtbigwoo 4mo ago
We, as a society, set up rules to allow the people to have a voice in decisions via various means including public meetings and various review procedures. There is a cost to these rules, but the alternative you're describing is a syst
3.
by jtbigwoo 7mo ago
I think the problem is that Microsoft's hardware quality is super inconsistent. We had a ton of employees using Surface laptops and tablets at my previous company, particularly sales and support. The company stopped buying them after
4.
by jtbigwoo 9y ago
As someone who about programming and electronics, but knows very little about parallel computing, is this a good place to start? Does anybody have other resources or projects to recommend?
5.
by jtbigwoo 9y ago
I help to run a once-a-week STEAM program for kids. Here's what we've found about cheap tools. + When they are new to a program, kids and parents care about how tools look. We have a nicely organized wall of tools and six identi
6.
by jtbigwoo 9y ago
>> I bet their accounting practices are just as screwed up. The difference is that proper accounting has laws behind it. If your accounting practices are crooked enough, executives can go to jail and/or be personally liable for
7.
by jtbigwoo 9y ago
I did a fair amount of volunteering in my kids' school. There is a huuuuge difference between the effective teachers and the teachers that parents like. The school is a public school that uses a lottery to determine admission because
8.
by jtbigwoo 9y ago
I volunteer with two organizations--one group serves mostly privileged high achievers (kids on track to be lawyers, architects, etc.) while the other is made up of kids who are probably only 50/50 to graduate high school. In both grou
9.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
I think the point of most pump and dump schemes is getting someone else to buy so that you can sell and leave others holding the bag. Other scams are probably more like MtGox where the coins don't exist or are routinely stolen.
10.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
>> I'll defend the parent comment by observing that we can reproduce this effect with non-judicial metrics, like "murder rate in majority foo-race communities". Assuming the reporting rate for murders is very high acros
11.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Auto and life insurance are usually more expensive for men, but health insurance is usually more expensive for women. It would be interesting to see who comes out ahead overall.
12.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Since the 80's, the state of Montana has banned insurance underwriting based on gender. There have been attempts to reverse that law, but none have passed. My male Montana cousins always had slightly cheaper insurance than I did, but
13.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Fun fact: The rules on coworker dating in the post-WWII era were originally intended to get the woman to quit. Here's how it worked: A company would hire a bunch of high school or college grads. Young women would get hired as secretar
14.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
My mother-in-law has a cabin in northern Minnesota. It's three miles outside a town of 150 people. Her utility lines are buried. Meanwhile, I live four miles from the center of a metro area of three million and everything in my neig
15.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
So let's put together some assumptions: 1. Company X is smart enough to never record this illegal policy in documents/email/etc. 2. The policy is verbally communicated to all recruiters and many upper managers. 3. Company X i
16.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
It's not clear from the articles I've read. Here's one that references some of the research: http://educationnext.org/all-together-now/
17.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
A minor quibble: The state subsidizes all public colleges, most likely including your community college. Where I live (Minnesota) that subsidy accounts somewhere around half of the total cost. So community college probably costs about th
18.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
It turns out to be more complicated than you're thinking. Lower- and average-performing kids get a greater benefit from mixed classes than higher performers. However, high performers with some interaction with average performers do
19.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
>> The best insurance policy for your career is to be really good at your job, which means working on your job instead of networking. This isn't true, in my experience. I have a few pretty good jobs on my resume (System Architec
20.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
>> There is an argument to be made for not having corporate tax. Corporations are just collections of people, owners and employees. Forming a corporation allows me to gain benefits that would be difficult or impossible to obtain as an
21.
Commute Map: Where Workers in Each U.S. County Commute To(bigbytes.mobyus.com)
2 points by jtbigwoo 10y ago|0 comments
22.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
So many fascinating possibilities to this data. It would be interesting to see the next hundred schools. Places like Michigan State or Minnesota have so many students that it'd be interesting to see how many congress members they&#x27
23.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
They absolutely did. Look up the origins of the Chicago Teachers' Union or the fire fighter's union in Pittsburgh. Even today, government employee unions face serious challenges to their existence. If Scott Walker doesn't c
24.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
You want to hear an insane story about why we need teachers' unions? This neighbor of mine was a teacher for 45 years, starting back in the 1940's. She found her first job in a little town and found a nice apartment for $45/
25.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
I took a couple labor management courses in college. One of the things the professor said has always stuck with me: "Management gets the union it asks for." Almost every union in the US and the UK was formed in the face of wither
26.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
> The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. I feel like you set up a straw ma
27.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Agreed. I know anecdotes aren’t data, but here are some of the workplace injuries I witnessed before I got a white collar job: Hardees - frier accident=third degree burn. Management told her to finish the dinner rush. Two days later when
28.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Just speculating, but it could be a couple things: Providing more choices can often result in consumers simply giving up. At a former job we did an A/B test where we showed some visitors two options to buy our product and added a thir
29.
by jtbigwoo 10y ago
>> Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard. That's why
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by jtbigwoo 10y ago
Cities in North and South Dakota are so small , though. I don't see how you could include Sioux Falls or Fargo in a map like this. You'd have to include about twenty cities in Texas. (Des Moines's inclusion is suprising t

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