Johanna

If you criticize X to Y, Y wonders whether you criticize him to others as well. This problem can increase to the extent your criticism is biting and on the mark.

Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”. They could be required to be available for meetings and firefighting outside of their 4 hours, and still have way more free time. With a good developer and a well managed project, you wouldn’t even notice a... See more

The weight of all of this evidence is that low doses of radiation do not cause detectable harm. Little to no cancer, or at least far less than predicted by LNT, is found in the subjects receiving low doses, such as workers operating under modern safety standards, or populations in high-background areas.

Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up... See more

Knowledge is a non-rival good. You don't loose anything if more people have it. In fact, I would even argue the opposite. Knowledge compounds. The more people have it, the more progress we'll make. If you are publishing a paper and only a handful people understand it, the impact of your findings will be limited to what these, highly specialized... See more

A good pair programming task could be solved in a way that’s too long for the session or in a shorter approach. Picking a “good enough for now” solution is part of the evaluation.

But there are other reasons for the persistence of work. Many people actually like their jobs. Automation has made humans more productive, which has in turn raised wages and kept people in the workforce. Human desires have kept evolving. It'd be relatively cheap to give everyone in the world a smartphone if that smartphone were a used Handspring... See more