Are you guys getting bonuses for being on call? I kind of signed up for it (SRE) but I'm curious if this is more common in jobs that aren't primarily concerned with reliability.

Also, shouldn't you be more concerned about oral cancers and cardiovascular disease? I understand most people don't inhale cigar smoke into their lungs like they do cigarette smoke, so you would certainly expect the lung cancer risk increases to be relatively lower.

Small companies probably can't afford to pay taxes for everyone's 83b elections, nor can they afford the 401k match or the other missing perks. After all, if they could afford to compete on cash comp with big tech cos, surely the founders would rather do that and preserve their own equity stake.

But with exits taking longer and longer, such an exercise scheme lets rank and file employees preserve some small upside that they have earned themselves, and not worry about hurting their career by being forced to wait for an exit.

I think I generally agree that employees get a pretty bad deal. I think it used to look better, but these days you can make so much more money so much faster working at Google than you can at a random startup.

But this seems sort of like overengineering? I'm not sure we're at any substantial risk of the world suddenly becoming fair, so it seems odd to spend time worrying about what might happen if we run out problems to solve.

But ultimately, the south fought a civil war in order to preserve the institution of slavery because it was the fundamental organization of society on top of which the economy was built, and many non-elite white men nevertheless allied themselves with this effort.

As for projecting the past, I don't know. It's certainly plausible that White people today are still reaping the benefits that were established by slavery and racism in a broad, systemic sense. As far as I know, my relatives didn't own slaves, but my relatives did do things like get mortgages that Black people couldn't do. That doesn't seem fair does it? It's a little bit like inheriting stolen property. But if you go back far enough, what isn't stolen property?