What experience are you expecting in a phone-free breakfast joint if you are there by yourself? Interupting other patrons meals to randomly talk to them? That sounds kind of like hell.
Of course not, but its also not an exclusive experience you can only get at resturants.
And quite frankly noisey busy resturants are a subpar place to have that sort of experience. Most people who want to do that sort of thing go to a park or somewhere quiet with nature.
Do you commonly carry those around with you? I'm not mistaking a resturant for a library, i just want to kill time until my food comes out.
Is there a reason why someone sitting by themselves reading a book on the e-reader app on their phone is more offensive than someone sitting by themselves reading a dead tree book?
>someone sitting by themselves reading a book on the e-reader app
I was this person. Eventually I gave it up because I didn't want to be mistaken for just another screen-addled zombie with no impulse control miserably scrolling Whatsapp and Instagram.
Perhaps I have too much self-awareness but I'd argue most people have too little.
> Eventually I gave it up because I didn't want to be mistaken for just another screen-addled zombie with no impulse control miserably scrolling Whatsapp and Instagram.
So you gave it up not because you are worried about being a "phone addicted zombie" but because you are worried about being precieved and judged as such?
Some would say changing your behaviour due to social insecurity is just another form of being a zombie.
Not sure it would make me a "zombie" exactly but I agree it's an oddly incoherent position to judge the behavior of others while also being concerned about their gaze. Much introspection has not yet pierced this mystery.
Who cares? They're strangers. If they want to make faulty assumptions and feel an unjustified smug sense of self superiority that's none of my business.
At this point I read ~all books on my phone as a simple matter of practicality. I'd prefer my phone had an epaper screen and grayscale page centric apps (instead of scrolling) but that's just not how things are.
You dodged the question. You don't know what he's using his phone for. Fair enough. Is there a reason that privately looking at the screen is offensive while privately looking at a book is not?
It's a more social activity in a world that is increasingly isolated. A book is a nice conversation starter. I'm not going to come up to you and ask about what's on your little screen. Even if you're just reading an e-book the phone contributes to the perceived loneliness of those around you.
If you really want to read a book in peace, try a library.
I don't think you're going to have many good conversations if you go around interrupting people trying to read in peace, regardless of where you do it. What a bizarre sentiment.
> Even if you're just reading an e-book the phone contributes to the perceived loneliness of those around you.
This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
> If you really want to read a book in peace, try a library.
I've quite enjoyed the times I've taken a book to a restaurant and read over a meal. I do not appreciate you, or people like you, dictating how I ought to act in public in a way that doesn't affect anyone else in the slightest.
I don't want to start conversations when I'm alone at a table with my book. The fact that you find it somehow less social for me to be on my phone instead of reading a book when I am minding my own business at my own table seems like a tremendous failure in your own boundaries and expectations of other people.
>This is a wild projection of your own experience onto someone else's actions.
I asked a friend who doesn't use a smartphone about how it feels walking into a room full of people with phones and he told me the same thing. I have a smartphone but I don't take it out reflexively. I don't even consider myself a very social person or an extrovert, yet it always has to be ME to start a conversation in a room full of people because they would rather stare at a screen that say a hello.
I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting? Imagine entering a coffee shop and finding it dead silent. I would just go home and make some food. If you have a problem with me talking to you, go ahead tell me how much you don't appreciate it or whatever, I don't care.
> I'm going to talk to you whether you like it not. If you don't want to talk to people, then maybe don't put yourself in a social setting?
You seem to have a strange definition of what's a social situation. Maybe I want to be around people without talking to them; if I wanted to strike up conversation with strangers, I'd sit at a bar.
You're obviously conscious of the fact that you may be doing something that people don't want, which makes it all the more confusing to me that you're upset about people possibly preferring their phones to books: if you're going to interrupt them either way and potentially invade their space, why do you care how they're signalling? (For the record, I don't think people inherently are signalling, but you seem to--it's the inconsistency in your own stated approach that's confusing me.)
I think your idea of a social situation is too limiting and contributes to the loneliness epidemic. I moved to a completely different state where I didn't know a single person so I can't leverage an existing social circle to make friends. So I'm not going to refrain from talking to you just because you might want to be left alone. If you don't want a conversation, just say so. It's not hard.
Sure, I might be doing something you don't want, but that's also true of asking a girl out (and I mean in real life, not on snapchat). She might say yes, she might say no. Either way, you I never get anywhere unless I ask.
Here are some places I think its perfectly acceptable to talk to strangers:
- A class (barring when the professor is speaking).
- On a bus or at the bus stop.
- A coffee shop
- Airplane ride
- DMV
- Waiting for a table at a restaurant
Maybe you disagree. I can't read minds.
As for what makes phones particularly bad, its because they discourage social interaction. Why talk to people when you have endless stream of dopamine in your pocket? In economic speak, phones dramatically raise the opportunity cost of actual social interactions. So everyone just stares at their phones, and this negatively affects even those who choose to opt-out of technology because we are deprived of human engagement because we are unable to compete with those little dopamine machines.
Maybe this is a cultural difference, but i would generally consider it incredibly rude for a random person to interupt someone trying to enjoy their meal. A resturant isn't a singles mixer.
Depends on the layout. If its a large, sit-down restaurant with wide gaps between the tables, then yes it would be weird for me to go up to you and say "Hi, Stranger!". But at a coffee shop you might be sitting right next to me. We might even be sitting at the same table waiting for our food. Am I not allowed to talk to the person sitting right next to me? I ordered some food the other day and realized there were no free tables, so I asked a stranger if I could sit at his table and had a conversation with him and his buddy.
All of this is contextual and it doesn't take a screen or a book for someone to give off clear vibes of not wanting to chat. "Mind if I sit here" in a crowded shop is the expectation. Anything beyond that such as having a conversation with a total stranger depends on the subtle behavioral cues given off by the other party.
It's not my intention to be rude but based on your responses on this topic I'm guessing you're fairly oblivious to the relevant social cues. There's nothing wrong with that per se but adopting an attitude of "not my problem" is probably just going to aggravate the people around you.
I understand social cues. I am just more than willing to push the envelope. And I have nothing to lose by possibly causing some mild discomfort to a stranger by "gasp" talking to them like a fellow human being.
Yes, possibly. But they also don't talk to each other. It's pretty unlikely that nobody in that room likes anyone else. It's more likely that they just don't know how to socialize. And when I start talking, people tend to open up and laugh at my jokes. So I wouldn't say anybody dislikes me.
Do you make a habit of interrupting people who are reading? If so I can just about guarantee that you're "that guy" to the people you're doing that to.
I don't think most people view a table for one at a cafe as a social setting with regard to total strangers. It will depend of course and there will be associated social cues; reading anything be it a screen, a book, or something else is a strong cue against unsolicited social interaction in almost any context.
It depends, it depends. You need to look at other signals. Are they extremely absorbed? Is it somewhere extremely quiet (like a library), or somewhere louder (like a coffee shop)?
If you are doing it yourself shoot for the moon. If you want other people to work on your idea, then yeah you better be able to explain to those other people why the result would be worth it and why the approach is viable (or pay them not to care)
The examples he used included: the plan depends on a different team providing labour and that team is not on board, the business plan for the idea does not make sense.
I suppose they are low effort in the sense that they are very basic 101 criticisms, but i wouldn't call them cheap shots.
Literally no plan is ever going to work if it involves the labour of others without their (or their supperiors) consent. It seems to me a very valid criticism to make. That doesn't mean its the end of the idea, it means you need to have a plan to either get the other stakeholders on board, or a plan to do it without them.
It's not a plan, it's an idea. You're shooting down an idea for not being a plan. The best person for coming up with the idea will probably also come up with some of the pieces of the plan, but they're unlikely to be the best person to figure out all of it. That's why you have a company not a sole proprietorship.
> You're shooting down an idea for not being a plan.
If you are pitching an idea out of nowhere, than i think it better have a semblence of a plan, otherwise you are just wasting everyone's time.
Like maybe its a bit different if you are brainstorming for an acknowledged problem, but that is not what the article made it sound like.
The article made it sound like the idea was being pitched unsolicited, with no clear problem it was trying to solve and no clear plan on how to do it. After all 2 of the so-called cheap criticisms were people asking why we want to do this ("the customers aren't asking for it") and how are we going to do it when it has dependencies on stakeholders who have not bought in ("devops doesnt like it").
Why would anyone care about such an idea? Like if you want to work on something by yourself, you dont have to convince anyone, but if you want other people on board, you are going to have to answer basic questions. Questions like: what benefit would implementing this idea bring me, and will my effort on this idea be a waste because neccesary stakeholders aren't on board.
There are a lot of details that can be sorted out on the way. Things like, why would we even want to do this in the first place, is not one of them.
And shooting down shit is also valuable. It is fine to have ideas without thinking them through, and it is also fine to criticize those ideas without thinking through the criticism. That is how we figure out how the ideas could work.
The problem with this is, that the article literally says:
> The person proposing has been thinking about this for weeks or months. They've tested pieces of it in their head or even built proofs of concept. They understand things about the idea that aren't obvious yet. And they're trying to explain all of this to a room full of people encountering it for the first time.
If they did that much upfront work, it's more than an idea. And if it's that easily shot down, they should have done even more upfront work and probably slowly gotten others involved.
Honestly, it sounds like someone so desperate for credit, so worried that someone will steal the idea, that they feel compelled to unveil it in a large gathering that was convened for some other purpose. And that never goes well.
Ideas truly are a dime a dozen. If one gets shot down, then you can reflect whether that was warranted, and try again with the same idea if not.
If you're really emotionally invested in it, as the guy writing the article seems to be, then you damn well better have more than just an idea, and you should understand enough about human nature to slowly try to bring individuals onboard to help before you put it out in front of a big crowd.
No one should care about devops’s consent when they’re given a work item that comes from someone higher up on the org chart. Their consent is willful employment. Similarly, no one should care about an engineer’s consent when given a work item in a similar context.
If the engineer proposes an implementation the devops team doesn’t like, the devops team should come up with a counter proposal that still fulfills their requirements. And if their counter proposal fulfills the requirements but the engineer objects, then whoever’s at the top of both their branches in the org chart should be making the decision.
Open source bug trackers tend to not appreciate people who just want them to implement someone else's idea without the other person putting effort in. That is true for both good and bad ideas.
Its like going up to a tech person at a party and saying "i have a wonderful idea for an app"
Meh, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
You shouldn't listen to every nay-sayer. Sometimes criticism is not convincing and it can be a skill separating out useful criticism from unconvincing criticism. However if someone did X in the past and ran into problem Y, you should probably have an answer to why Y is not a problem for your use case or what you plan to do differently to avoid Y.
If your good idea is so lame it can't even take the tiniest bit of criticism, its probably not a good idea.
Like in the article, the criticism seems pretty valid but they aren't really about the idea. If the criticism is that DevOps doesn't want to do it [do you just mean ops? Isnt this the opposite of the concept of devops?], that is not a criticism of your idea, that is a criticism of you failing to get stakeholders on board who you plan to rely on. If the criticism is "i haven't heard customers request this" that is code for you failed to make a compelling business case for your idea. Those are criticisms of you not your idea.
> those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it
This is a classic meta shutdown - the exact thoughtless criticism the article rails against.
Make the future, deal with the relevant mistakes one discovers on one's path.
There is an infinite number of mistakes to make. It doesn't help to waste oodles of time learning about mistakes made by others under different contexts and constraints.
Avoiding mistakes is hard. Listening, nous and intuition can help. The biggest trick is to learn how to deal with mistakes as they occur (no matter how obvious they might be to someone with sufficient art).
The biggest mistake is to have too much fear of mistakes to even begin a venture.
If you are making the future yourself, why do you care what anyone else thinks? Just do what you want. Its your time and effort, nobody else has a claim on it.
In the context of the article, the author wanted other people to be involved with implementing his idea. If you want someone else to help, you are going to have to convince them. Nobody wants to put labour into an idea that is half baked, with no clear answer as to why we would want to do it or how we intend to do it.
> This is a classic meta shutdown - the exact thoughtless criticism the article rails against.
No, it's not. Read the rest of his comment. I agree with it wholeheartedly. The article describes a terrible way of surfacing a new idea, and if you keep trying to get buy-in that way, you will keep failing.
> It doesn't help to waste oodles of time learning about mistakes made by others under different contexts and constraints.
Intelligence is practically defined by the ability to learn from others' mistakes.
> Avoiding mistakes is hard.
But useful. I once read about a machinist who started at a new job. His boss caught him trying to rework a piece he had screwed up, took the piece away from him and threw it on the discard pile. "We want you to focus on doing things right the first time, not fixing your mistakes."
I imagine the same reason they have a data center in places like Sao Paulo. More locally centred businesses want the low ping, and AWS wants to be your cloud compute provider of choice no matter where your target audience is.
I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
It's supposed to show to regional US allies that the American military cannot really protect them, pushing them to apply pressure to end the war in the short term, and to cool their relationship with the US and Israel in the long term.
It has had some effect; the emirates are desperate to find a way out of this conflict, and various figures have publicly said "the system of alliances [with the US] has worked but needs to be modernized" - i.e. we can't allow Americans to do what they want anymore.
It (normally) has an effect on the military calculus - e.g. if the US weren't allowed to have military bases in these countries, the possibility to take such action seems less plausible.
Correct, but that's not my point. My point is whether the Gulf States can realistically dictate what the US does. Perhaps they can affect US actions, but I doubt it's that cut and dried.
Nobody can realistically maintain bases in a country without some sort of agreement with the local government (and a certain level of tolerance from the population at large) or an expensive full-on occupation. As far as I know, there is a single US base on a territory where the local government does not want it (Guantanamo, Cuba), literally on the doorstep - anywhere else would be prohibitive to maintain long-term hostile occupation.
Everything else is maintained and operated in agreement with local authorities - which is why the US, at the moment, cannot use Spanish bases and Diego Garcia to wage war on Iran. Even Saudi bases have been blocked in the past (notably to invade Iraq).
Without long-term bases, it becomes extremely difficult to project power with continuity. Can you still do the occasional special op, like killing Osama? Sure, but you can't do things like ensuring free navigation (and hence the flow of resources and goods) and signal intelligence gets so much harder.
the mask can be taken off at least, that the bases are there so that americans can kill the gulf state leaders in a moment's notice, rather than for any defenses.
You need to think that all the way through. The answer is obviously yes. Yemen is a perfect example. Iran is obviously as well. Afghanistan another great case. It is certainly possible to resist US pressure. Iran is asking the gulf countries to do that. Imagine how much better they would all be able to resist the US together as well, better than each alone.
Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power. Power that's gained more or less independently such as Iran's. Gulf states should be in a position of power to able to resist US presence. The power they have right now is mostly gained through the help of USA and its allies. It's not the same as Iran. Not even close.
> Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power.
I gave examples of it actually happening. If sandal-wearing Houthis can resist, then well-funded oil states can as well. The Taliban beat the US. In fact, very few people have failed at ejecting the US from the country when they tried if you think back. The US tends to lose a lot.
Ironically Yemen (Houthis) are fighting not only with US but against other gulf sates like Saudi Arabia as well. It's not really an example that demonstrates unity in gulf.
> The Taliban beat the US.
Taliban, brought to you by US of A to combat Soviet Union's influence! Well, it seems they are done beating US and are now busy beating Afghan women.
> The US tends to lose a lot.
Do they really? After the war is over and US is beat, how does the life of an average American compare to someone's from your list. It is the people of Middle East who pay the biggest price. That's the real loss.
Korea was wiped off the map… until the Chinese arrived with nukes and millions of soldiers. That wasn’t a Korean victory.
Vietnam was wiped off the map… until the Chinese arrived with millions of soldiers. The Vietcong had something like a 99% yearly casualty rate. They were completely obliterated every year of fighting, but more villagers were simply conscripted and sent forward into the napalm.
To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
Occupation is doable, but very costly. The US did it recently in Afghanistan (which is barely a functioning country itself).
So yeah, it keeping military bases abroad via occupation is doable for some time, but not very feasible. It is more realistic to have a system of allied countries.
It's sort of a meme how people in the US imagine all middle eastern countries to be a bunch of mud huts in the world's largest gravel quarry.
> To keep a military base in a country you either need to be allowed to do so, or you have to do so by force, by occupying the country.
There are all sorts of levers US, China, Russia can pull to in order to put pressure on a country for such things. There's occupation, mutual benefits, long standing agreements post wars, soft power, sanctions, etc. Geopolitics is complicated.
And this is all is part of what "allowing" means. If a country is unwilling to allow for it, the only thing is left is either accepting is as a reality or trying to do so by force.
The gulf countries hate Iran and have for a very very long time, longer than even the concept of the west has existed. Iran throwing around ballistic missiles is far more like a temper tantrum than a viable military strategy. And its a strategic gift to Trump. Whether he/we can take advantage of that, IDK.
I'm not so sure it's a strategic gift for Trump. Before the war (oh, sorry, I meant the "special military operation") everything was largely fine for the Gulf states. Now, it's not.
"Videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, indicate that at least some of the launches came from Bahrain, the tiny kingdom just 125 miles across the Gulf from Iran."
The air bases are still being used as launch pads for drone strikes and chopper missions.
This, plus a history of conflicts between various Persian dynasties and their Arabian neighbors that predate the existence of the US by over 1,000 years.
These other "randoms" are US allies which host bases and equipment used to attack them.
In more practical terms, wrecking shit up in places like Dubai that made their name off air travel and attracting "expat" douchebags, is a very effective way to get them to pressure the US to stop the war. So is blowing up oil infra and stopping transit in Hormuz for allied nations.
NY Times doesn't even know what NATO is, while writing a full-page article about it, so yeah this kind of ignorance about where USA has it hands and guns is not surprising, from some random on the internet. ;)
I think Israel is the dessert. First they need the Americans to back off.
In the end game, they are going to need some leverage over Israel, that is stuck there with them. If they destroy everything now, they will not have anything to threaten them with.
The data centers in Israel are protected by their AA systems that have more interceptors available than the Emirates. For weeks there are rumors about low stocks of interceptors in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, while Israel manufactures their own while also getting more from US, so their stocks were probably way higher and replenishment better.
Also the Emirates are in range of short range cheapo drones and Iran build lot of these, while Israel is farther away.
it's a good strategy. There's no point in trying to stop Israel by harming them economically because they know perfectly well that like for them, this war is existential. The Gulf states are financial hubs and tourist destinations disguised as countries and so their wealth is a neuralgic point, the Gulf states and also by extension the US actually respond to having their economies wrecked.
> I do think there is some irony that the Iran war took down all the AWS datacenters in the middle east except the one (or 3 i guess) in Israel, which is still chugging along.
... For now.
> Like as a strategy its kind of weird. Iran plans to force Israel to stop by wrecking the economies of a bunch of countries that are basically frenemies of Israel? I suppose its meant to pressure USA, it just seems like a terrible strategy.
The gulf countries are enemies of Iran. In fact, they are a lot cozier to Israel.
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