These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation?
A better answer is "refuse to do it without resigning". To begin with it gives you a better chance of preventing it, because maybe they back down, whereas if you do it or leave, someone does it. Then if they fire you, well, that's not really that much worse for you than resigning, but it's worse for them because now they're retaliating against someone for having ethical objections. How does that look in the media or in front of a jury? Which is all the more incentive for them to back down.
The problem with "well just do it a little bit" is that you can travel arbitrarily far in the wrong direction by taking one step at a time.
> Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.
This is a common debate, especially given current events in US politics. The theory goes that you can do more to effect change by staying inside the system than by resigning.
For powerful positions, it doesn’t really work if there is significant disagreement about what’s being done. If you do the requested actions that you disagree with, you become part of the problem and lose credibility in the process. You also lose some of your ability to blow the whistle because you have some culpability in what happened.
If you resist or try to interfere, it becomes noticeable very rapidly. Sooner than a lot of people in this position expect, from what I gather. Then you find yourself fired for performance problems or insubordination, which makes any future whistle blowing look like cheap attempts at retaliation for being fired. If you did carry out some of the orders then you’ve also lost some standing to blame others.
So resigning, publicly, is the only surefire way to retain your credibility and send a message without becoming involved with the thing you’re trying to prevent.
Sometimes, though, it's a question of retaining actual power vs. sending a message that won't be listened to by the people who need to hear it. Jan 6-7 2021 could have ended very differently if Mike Pence and the other relatively normal Republicans in Trump's first administration had resigned in protest at some earlier point and been replaced by loyalists.
Thanks to inequality, the rich[1] can already afford surrogacy, aka other people's natural wombs.
Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect.
I had that same epiphany when I discovered AI is great at writing complicated shell command lines for me. I had a bit of an identity crisis right there because I thought I was an aspiring Unixhead neckbeard but in truth I hated the process. Especially the scavenger hunt of finding stuff in man pages.
Ironically I feel like this may force schools to get better at the core mission of teaching, vs. credentialing people for the next rung on the ladder. What replaces that second function remains to be seen.
Makes me wonder if they are getting ripe for disruption. Not by a new business model, but a new operating model where a CEO will be tech/ai-aware and push through all these kinds of things.
A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
I could see teleoperated help catching on. Americans are weird about staff. When I visit my old-world family, it's seen as perfectly normal to have someone living in an attached apartment, handling the cooking the cleaning, etc. There are well-established etiquette rules, understood both by the staff and the family, which help navigate the rather complicated, radically unequal relationship between the two.
Americans by and large don't do that. We software developers have not that different of an income gap between us and minimum wage workers compared to my family overseas and their staff. Yet, it would be considered weird, extravagant even, for a $300-500k/yr developer to have dedicated help. We're far more comfortable with people we don't need to interact with directly, like housecleaners, landscapers, etc.
Teleoperated robots sidestep that discomfort, somewhat, by obscuring the the humanity of the staff. It's probably not a particularly ethical basis for a product, but when has that ever stopped us.
Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.
An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.
Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.
- Services like maids or cleaners are usually scheduled, maybe you have to wait and open the door etc. Maybe they can't make it that day because of snow storm etc.
- Services are normally limited to certain hours. With a remote operator, the robot could do laundry all night ran by someone in a different time zone.
- If needed could be operated in shifts.
- Other new use cases could arise, e.g. wellness check on elderly, help if fallen or locked out etc.
Low duty cycle. If one human can drive 20 robots, because most of them are sitting still most of The time, it starts to make sense. Vs a maid or butler that can obviously only really work one home at a time.
The person in a third world country is not a slave, they're doing the job for a few bucks a day because it's still better than other options available to them.
What is the difference between being a teleoperator in India for a californian family robot, and being a software dev for a company selling SaaS products to the US market?
Yeah but with a teleoperated worker you can have them work remote from a place with poor labor regulations and extremely low pay.
The future with this as a reality is a really dark place, where the uber wealthy live entirely disconnected from the working class except through telepresent machines half a planet away. That way the wealthy don't have to be inconvenienced by the humanity of the poors.
Probably because they got rid of it when the XT came out, so it was only there for (a few months under) 2 years. But it was a good trade; removing the cassette port gave enough area on the PCB for 3 more ISA slots.
I have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol...
Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card.
I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way.
Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text.
I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines.
Way, way back when, you were lucky to get a serial port built in to the motherboard. everything was an add-in card. But you did get a tape drive interface. It was just an audio jack you plugged into any cassette player. You had to start and stop the tape yourself, of course.
Those aren't rare on 16-bit or less, '80s and before, pre-MS-DOS home computers. Looks cool, but apparently it was way too slow and painful to be fondly remembered.
OK to be fair it might not be THE telnet protocol but still.
reply