I was talking with a friend who works at a company HQ'd in NYC and he said that the average cost per person/desk was over 60k/yr. It was a lot higher than I was expecting.
No way...a nice sized cubicle is 100 sqft, and Class A rents in Manhattan are under $100/sqft/y. So the actual office space is something like $10,000 or less per year.
Of course there is other overhead, but space itself is in that range. So the max savings, in the most expensive market in the US, is under $10k per year.
But you don't rent by cubicle, you rent by floor or building. So adding a new employee when you have hit your max means you have to figure something out or sink a whole lot of money into a new building for one person.
Office in NYC was remodeled to open office, and the limits were determined by fire code, bathrooms, etc. In the end, a whole bunch of valuable floor space is sitting empty as relaxation rooms, a puzzle table, and funky couch areas that nobody wants to sit at because it’s next to a big boss’s office.
Practically speaking, most people are treating the shift as an implicit agreement that employees can work from home 90+% of the time.
That size seems high. 100 sqft would be a nice sized office. Cubicles are more like 30 square feet. Douglas Coupland gave cubicles the name "veal fattening pens" in Generation X but they're actually smaller now - calf enclosures are 30-35 sqft. The latest fad with standing desks is even smaller.
Yes, that's my point--the cost of raw office space for a single large cubicle/small office in Manhattan is under $10k/year. Other overhead is basically the same for a shared bench vs. large cubicle.
But the portion that is ascribed to the raw footage would be under $10k/y...the other costs are not really correlated with shared bench vs cubicle vs private office.
Options in major cities are much more limiting. The nice places like that are absurdly expensive. Rover helps make it more affordable to board your pup for longer trips.
My building in Miami has a 24 hour dog walker that you can call or text, and if you've got an apple device, you can even facetime with your dog, and it's part of my Condo Fees. Because of that, I really have no need for Wag or Rover.
Agreed. It's hard to read this post without feeling some sort of judge-y "back in my day" kind of vibe from it. Even if this person is young, it still gives that impression.
Different strokes for different folks. If you enjoy traveling sans smart device, go for it. That will never be something I do and I don't feel bad for it one bit.
I think if you read it with more charitable glasses on, it's nicer.
There are many people who will respond to this, and think, "wow, yeah, I do spend a lot of time on my phone when I travel, instead of enjoying a new place", and might (at least) resolve to waste less time on their phone. There are others who will think, "that sounds like a cool idea; I'm going to try leaving my phone at the hotel on my next trip and see what happens", and then maybe have a cool experience.
If you don't want to do this, or already have a good handle on your phone use (so that you aren't using it to distract yourself from life), then maybe this post just isn't for you. There's no need to dump on it, or the author, for presenting a different way of doing things.
That's awesome. Probably has helped your overall uptime numbers too. We couldn't get SLT approval to implement this, we had to settle for war games in dev/stage
Does the BT detection work the same way that WiFi access point scanning works? I know that app developers use this WiFi tech from a client (device) side to determine location, but I am a bit disturbed about the aspect of this being so accurate with BT devices.
Due to the architecture of DNS, DNS is not end-to-end encrypted. There is a potential solution (djb's DNSCurve), but it will not be deployed. As a result, let's do an assessment.
Using Google DNS, self-hosted resolver, or your ISP's DNS: NSA, your ISP, everyone and every dog at the middle of your link to the Internet can track and see your requests.
Using CloudFlare's DNS w/ DNS-over-HTTPS: only NSA (via a NSL or subpoena), Cloudflare and CloudFlare's upstream can track and see your requests. And I guess 10%-20% of the domain names already use CloudFlare, so for some domain, it's end-to-end encrypted, nobody but NSA and CloudFlare can track you. Even better, Cloudflare is experimenting with peering to upstreams (e.g. Facebook) using private encrypted connections, so the point-to-point encryption ratio would be even higher in the future.
Therefore, using CloudFlare is a net positive.
But one also needs to consider its second-order effect: is giving CloudFlare more leverage over the Internet infrastructure in the long run an acceptable choice over unencrypted DNS? I guess everyone has a different opinion.
Wait a minute... First Google DNS provide both DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS, second Pihole (or should I say dnsmasq, or FTL the name of their dnsmasq fork) does not support forwarding DNS query request to upstream using neither DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS.
> Using ... your ISP's DNS: NSA, your ISP, everyone and every dog at the middle of your link to the Internet can track and see your requests.
Technically speaking the NSA wouldn’t be seeing your DNS requests, they would be seeing your ISP’s, for all its users anonymised.
If you use Cloudflare or Google DNS directly from home (or your own resolver), then yes, the NSA and anyone else can track your individual DNS requests directly.
In that regard using your own ISP’s DNS is clearly superior.
What threat model does concealing DNS but not indirecting traffic via Tor address, given that Tor can also tunnel DNS? Cloudflare's not wrong that the DNS requests are hidden, but many classes of observer who could read your DNS request could also see you connect to the resting host?
Follow up question, do you trust CloudFlare not to manipulate the results of DNS more or less than Google?
Cloudflare has also rolled out ESNI (https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/) which would mean someone reading your traffic would only be able to tell that you're connecting to a cloudflare IP address.
However be unable to determine which specific site you were accessing.
Why do you want to present a false sense of improved privacy by only obfuscating your DNS queries in these networks?
It seems to me like these DNS tricks are parlor tricks in a security sideshow. Any attacker that could see your packets can also see who you are connecting to. It's pretty rare that SNI does anything relevant to a real threat model.
I think a false sense of privacy is at least as dangerous as the alternative.
Cloudflare scaled up massively so quickly when they started offering cdns a decade ago.
I judged the company in a negative light when their ceo or cfo wrote an open letter rationalizing their ban silencing some obnoxious website over political belief virtue signaling.
A company that crushes free speech cannot be trusted.
I don’t even remember what the obnoxious or offensive website was but I know that offensive speech is protected speech.
Autocratic technocracy centralized into a few digital monopolies wrap our wrists into digital slave chains labeled “free”.
The first amendment applies to government censorship only.
Cloudflare is not the government. A business can choose not to service someone based on almost any criteria, that's not "crushing free speech". You can then choose not to patronize the business based on that policy. This is an important part of a free market.
This is how many of the countries around the world treat it. You can thank the folks that lobby the government on behalf of tax prep companies for this convoluted mess we have. The more confused we are, the more money they make.
There are very influential anti-tax and small government think tanks that vehemently argue against it, from the perspective that it reduces oversight.
Their position is that people just won't pay much attention to how much taxes they're paying if they don't have to fill in tax paperwork themselves each year. Their position is that if you make it invisible to end users, governments will just keep creeping up that tax percentage on end users and people will just accept it.
They're not wrong as regards to visibility, in the UK where tax is PAYE (Pay As You Earn), I don't think I ever paid more than a moments glance at the P60 (but I'd often check month to month that things were in the ballpark I'd expect. I'm a little more unusual in that regard probably). In the US I've had to pay close attention.
Anyone who uses TurboTax etc. doesn't actually "do their taxes". They're basically just doing a data entry job, mechanically typing values into boxes from forms as TurboTax prompts them. In many cases people don't even do that, instead opting to direct TurboTax to automatically fetch their data from a payroll provider, bank, brokerage, etc. and do it for them. So for many people it's just 1) enter in financial institution usernames and passwords; 2) click "file my return".
And given that the IRS wouldn't just "send you a bill", but instead send a pre-filled return, people would have every opportunity to read through it and decide if they agree with what the IRS filled in.
There is materially nothing different. The tax prep lobby has just done a fantastic job of convincing people that it "feels better" to fill out your own taxes rather than getting a pre-filled return from the IRS. Which is bonkers, especially since that supposed "feel good" crap wastes billions of dollars every year.
(The US is also pay-as-you-earn, btw. If your employer doesn't withhold enough taxes from your paycheck and you don't make up for it by paying quarterly estimated taxes, you have to pay extra penalties come tax day.)
Their actual goal is to make people resent taxes by forcing them to calculate themselves just how much money they are giving the government. It's less painful if you get something akin to a credit card statement from the IRS.
Ok, but why does making the process more painful make people lobby for lower taxes? The connection isn’t obvious to me.
To make this more explicit, presumably the chain of reasoning is as follows:
1. Make tax filing more painful.
2. As a general rule, people will set out to do that which reduces their pain.
3. Therefore, people will set out to do that which makes tax filing less painful.
4. People determine that lobbying for lower taxes will make tax filing less painful.
5. Therefore, people will set out to lobby for lower taxes.
Step 4 doesn't make sense to me because reducing total tax rate and reducing tax code complexity are orthogonal issues, and advocating for lower taxes will not in and of itself lead to a simpler tax code.
I disagree with the premise, but I don't think the idea is that making the process more painful will make people want lower taxes.
It's just an in-your-face reminder of how much you're paying in taxes, supposedly sending a stronger message to you than if the IRS were to send you a pre-filled return.
So the idea is, if you're more obviously reminded of how/why your tax money is leaving your wallet, you'll hate taxes more and lobby for lower taxes. You understand that doing so won't make filing taxes any less complicated (and in fact it might be more complicated if taxes are lowered through new deductions and credits that you need to prove eligibility for), but you'll expect to be paying less.
It's still stupid, but at least the chain of logic could potentially hold if you squint close enough and agree with the premises.
> It's just an in-your-face reminder of how much you're paying in taxes
But that’s just going back to my comment 4 levels up this thread. If it’s an issue of tax amount visibility and not tax filing pain, the latter is not needed for the former.
While it is still working for me, I have also seen some issues with some Office 365 services. According to Azure's Twitter account, there is also an outage going on there (although they have yet to update their status page for some reason).
