An article I read yesterday mentioned that Japanese train workers will point and speak whenever they are doing something. This technique helps workers communicate and think about what they're doing and reduces mistakes.

Greeting customers as they enter may have similar effects. It makes sure someone notices the customer and acknowledges they are new. It lets the customer know they've been recognized as a new arrival. Acting like you're in a good mood may also help you feel that way too.

I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).

Letting the economy balance itself seems a lot smarter than trying to control it and I think history provides many examples supporting this claim.

I think it's a better approach to say "The problems are X. We know this because of Y. My proposed solutions are Z. If you agree, let's get together and figure out how to do Z. If you don't agree, let's get together and figure out where our analyses diverge and how we can come together."

I agree that instant gratification is a problem, but it doesn't strike me as bad that kids might think YouTube or social media or whatever is an easy way to make money, and then try their hand at it. I think they'll quickly find that success still takes effort and perseverance.

People are in that situation where prostitution is illegal and they do it anyway. What's your alternative? To force the woman to do it in secret? To punish her and the John if they get caught? Should she be kicked out? The landlord made to accept no rent? The woman forced to spend another 20 hours at work away from her kids where she might've spent one or two?

It's a shame generally that people have to work for a living. I think that's one of the things "we" are racing to solve by improving technology and automation. I hope there'll be post-scarcity society with a basic income and nobody will be required to make any bad choices. We aren't there yet, so we should try to get there.

Take a young woman who doesn't like school, doesn't like being a cashier or waitress, wants more money than she can get with the jobs available, etc, and she doesn't really connect promiscuity with indignity in the way that you're implying. Why should this woman be barred from what might be a lucrative and pleasant career just because you and others think it's undignified.

I might suffer from dignity issues if I had to work as a birthday clown, but some people enjoy it and that's great because some people want to hire birthday clowns. I think the same logic applies here.

1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains.

2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment.

3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money.

4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets).

I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions.

After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.

Regarding your point about Rome - I'm not an expert, but I'd bet the aqueducts provide a valuable service. What are your estimates for how many passengers would need to ride the rail in order to make it worthwhile, and your estimates for how long it would take to serve that many passengers?

Think about the huge amounts of money and the value of the rail (delayed by when you could get that value) and then compare that to other ways you could use that money - for example by leaving it in the hands of the taxpayers.

The key difference between your car and a bus is that with the bus the safety of thirty people is involved, plus the willingness of many more people to use buses which the city has an interest in. Your car is you and your family's safety which is a fraction of the importance.

I told her to just walk out the exit confidently and directly. If people get the sense that they need to move or be bumped, they will move.

I forget what my cousin said to me, exactly, but it made me realize that she was a slight woman whereas I am a not slight man. People really will move out of my way if it appears I will plow through them. If they don't, I will push through them. For her, that strategy doesn't work as well.

My point is - there are some situations, for some people, where fighting is an option. Just like there are some people and situations where fighting isn't an option. Beating someone isn't always an option.

Some products are a great fit for releasing something quick and fixing it later, like a free website. Other products, especially physical goods (car parts, medical equipment, etc) this is obviously a terrible strategy.

The question isn't, or shouldn't be, "Do we have representation of women/conservatives/whatever in proportion to demographics?" Instead, the question should be "Are we treating people unfairly?"

For example, I'd feel quite comfortable wearing a Burnie Sanders shirt or hat to work. I'd expect that wearing a MAGA hat would cause problems.

I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.