1,061 karma · joined January 11, 2019
It does feel like ineffectual knee-jerk firefighting. Yet I don't think psychadelics having utility to people nessecarily precludes fixing our lives and societies more generally.
With the minimum wage I suspect a similar effect. The effects increasing wages have on employers red ink doesn't wholly comprehend the positive effect more money in people's pockets has on black ink & overall productivity. A well invested grand in the hands of the poor is DRAMATICALLY more impactful than in a well invested grand in the hands of the rich due to diminishing returns. A company making a new product can deliver more value for society making some wonderful new invention the poor and middle class can spend their income on rather than some out of reach luxury good.
This logic by the way underpins the very unpopular around these parts notion of affirmative action.
The real money is less days at work per week... Not shorter workdays.
Low taxes sure bolster economic growth in the short term and bolster investment but they also lead to forms of societal decay like income inequality which leads to crime which leads the more demand for order which leads to cementing the accumulation of power. Left unchecked the powerful will accumulate resources out of line with their actual merit to society through the leverage of their existing capital. We're in a situation now where it's increasingly obvious how the rich are overcompensated relative to their productive output but countries race to the bottom to compete for their capital. If this race to the bottom were not happening every country would be better off taxing the wealthy more fairly but we're in a tragedy of the commons situation.
A guard got blackmailed or something.
Honestly an IT team would MAYBE bother to prioritize these cameras as critical. They only definitely would after something like this happened. It's an easy thing to put on the backburner...
I'm not saying it's a movie where the moment a camera goes down a 250lb Russian goon comes down and investigates. However cameras not working for years? In the fucking suicide watch cell? You honestly think that's realistic? Honestly those would probably get replaced faster than most cameras...
Maybe there's a few cameras people just forgot were broken and get forgotten about for years but it wouldn't be a typical case if the IT and maintenance team was even half-competent.
Why doesn't the hard conspiracy theory hold water for you? The motive is much more reasonable and prison assassinations are hardly some unheard of impossibility especially given the sheer amount of extremely powerful people with a reason to kill him.
When competing theories nessecarily have the prison guards who have been overwhelmingly successful in preventing suicide attempts and somewhat successful in stopping suicides after they get to attempts to hold the idiot ball it stretches credulity. Why haven't more prisoners been suicided if these guard were on such a hair trigger they would murder somebody at the expense of children's safety?
On the other hand compromising a prison guard and blackmailing him into murdering Epstein or else would be trivial for an Epstein associate. I just don't get how enraged prison guard is a remotely more plausible motive than prison guard being given a compelling reason to kill Epstein by an associate. It seems like setting out to prove the conclusion Epstein wasn't killed by the rich.
There's such a thing as an irrational bias that something CAN'T be a conspiracy if other scenerios are possible. Many people take pride in "debunking" conspiracies and that ego can make it hard to see a real one right in front of you.
I would go as far as to call wired IEMs inherently inferior if price is no object and I don't care if you're buying a $1000 pair with an amp. You're buying a less practical product with a sound quality improvement only in SOME situations. The only reasons to go that road now are running time (if you listen to music ALL day) or cost.
Still either lifespan needs to improve or price needs to drop or both these to be a non-stupid purchase for the vast majority of the market. Most people really don't have the disposible income for these including half the people who buy them.
In the end trade is valued higher than democracy by both Trump and his detractors. It just makes me sad and cynical. I wonder if we will ever have a "Nixon goes to China" moment in reverse?
P.S. Don't know what you're on about saying how my position is only true if trade has no or infinite value. My position would be utterly incoherent if I thought it had infinite value. My position would be coherent if I believed Trade had no value but it's also coherent if I believe it's overvalued.
Honestly I don't feel I can trust an entire journalistic outlet as trustworthy after what happened during the Iraq war. I'll just individual journos but not papers.
One thing I notice is that left wingers are essentially universally aghast over what's happening to Hong Kong. They will hold to the idea that a trade war with China is the stupidest thing ever that causes economic damage to yourself and incurs great risk. Which is true. However you can't have it both ways and you have to choose between economic vitality and essentially having no say in a situation like Hong Kong.
I've seen countries hunger for trade being used as a lever for international legal reform. A condition of signing trade deals with the united states where countries essentially have to agree to give multinational corporations more government enforced rights or not have free trade. Specifically "intellectual property harmonization". If you want to have trade with the united states you appearantly need to agree that for every idea a corporation comes up with, they have an exclusive right to using that idea for more and more years, and consequently governments need to agree to punish people for not giving corporations money for those ideas for longer and longer periods of time. This is effectively a system that redistributes wealth towards corporate interests in an era of striking wealth inequality, on the reasonable sounding grounds they need that money to "develop new medications", but then it's ignoring the reality on the ground of poor health spreading like a contagion due to economic inequality. As the average person is unable to afford things like medications more and more... the economic vitality of all society... including the very companies who lobbied for these laws will suffer. Yet there's no effective way to push back against these laws without giving up free trade and shooting yourself in the foot economically.
I think at some point we're going to start realizing how many costs free trade have that haven't really been accounted for. It's very easy to portray it as a positive if you don't account for all the externalities.
The article portrays tipping as sexist but the institution acts as a mechanism to redistribute wealth from men to women. It's true that white women, young women, and attractive women get tipped more and they will put up with mistreatment to get tipped more but it ultimately smacks of attacking a system for being imperfect more than because it's bad. The alternative model you see at fast food restaurants is hardly less demeaning for women and definitely less profitable. If one ever succeeded in stripping away tipping it would only serve to keep more money in men's pockets in an attempt to end the sexism of tipping.
I also strongly, STRONGLY dispute the idea that leaving 30-50 percent tips is the best way to redistribute wealth if charitably inclined. It seems more like a notion to make newspaper columnists seem woke and generous than something that actually is an efficient way to do good. The advantage to tipping is the social stigma essentially forces people to compensate service staff better than they normally would but you're never realistically going to pressure people into paying 50% or even 30% regularly.
On the more positive side I do agree with the authors notion that the racial bias in tipping is rather extreme and unjustified. A third smaller tips for black drivers is pretty hard to justify and simply being aware that it happens is good knowledge.
I notice how much of your post washes the managers hands clean of making these decisions. Not getting hired is the fault of disabled people who are behaving rudely by being incapable of certain things like eye contact. It's the fault of other employees who will quit. You know... that's almost the same rationale used to keep gay people out of the military. It's the COMPANY who wasn't convinced the employee was worth working with.
Have you ever had your job threatened because you didn't want to leave early, arrive late, take extra breaks, socialize instead of working, and wanted to work hard because you believed in the companies vision? Or because you didn't want to steal time? Because you wanted to learn your job? Oh man, it really made the other employees not like me. I was pulled aside and told what a bad culture-fit I was being. I was told my co-workers were going to tell my bosses I should be let go because they didn't like me. In the end I bent to the pressure and went half-way, messed up, and got singled out for punishment. At which point the culture I didn't fit changed for the better because everybody felt so damned guilty.
In my entire time in the workforce I have never seen "culture-fit" being anything other than vague opaque bullshit used to discriminate against the disadvantaged and hard-working.
I never really understood the point of affirmative action until I was told point blank repeatedly that my co-workers thought I was good at the work, but didn't like me because of what I couldn't do, and that getting hired & staying hired is about having co-workers like you.
I've tolerated hostile workplace environments, abuse, discrimination, disclosure of medical information, and such just to cling onto a job because I couldn't prove most of it. I didn't think I could just leave the situation and get another job so I didn't want to make any enemies. Honestly one of the main things I have going for me career-wise is that this has happened so much people feel bad for me and pull strings for me.
Discrimination is so easy. Just say somebody was a bad culture-fit. If anybody is different: disabled, poor, old, wrong ethnicity, wrong gender, ESL, then they obviously don't "fit in".
Cheap food causes obesity insofar that if you have money you can buy nutrient dense food that tastes good and spend zero time preparing it. With cheap food you're constantly expending willpower to eat food that tastes like crap, expending more time making it, or are sacrificing health value. Eating pots of unappetizing starches (which really aren't as healthy as you make them out to be relative to smart fast food picks) takes time and willpower. Those are actually limited resources. Attempting to do difficult unpleasant things one after another does actually wear you down and cause negative mental health effects which unravel your plans. A starch heavy diet means you're going to get rocked by insulin spikes regularly for your troubles. Whereas if you can afford to eat leafy greens and a big hunk of fish your mental stamina will increase.
In my mind the key to a healthy diet isn't buying potatoes and rice in bulk. It's $$$. FWIW my favorite poverty meal was chili... Good mix of time effiency/cost efficiency/taste.
I ate very unhealthy and was teased quite a bit for it yet never kicked the habit. Once I started receiving more disposible income than I knew what to do with, it became a lot easier to exercise, I could buy whatever food I wanted, and it sort of spun people's heads how quickly my diet changed. People keep making fun of me for having an unhealthy diet just because of inertia even though I'm eating healthier than them.
I really see body positivism as being more caused by the obesity epidemic than the inverse. As well as the rise of social media sort of spiking body-shaming and anti-body-shaming sentiments. Not just in regards to weight but also things like height.
Whinging of the poorly informed that free speech protections can only apply to the government aside.
I suppose it's great though because the app store is so convenient and relatively free of malware. You just have to use authoritarian state approved spyware such as WeChat that funnels your data into government servers.
You can really interpret the prevalence of trans women in programming as being related to nurture or nature. The data point in a vacuum doesn't obviously point to either conclusion.
I hear this claim a lot but I've never actually understood what "resembles" actually means. The brain structures that transgender people have don't match typical male or female brains but how do you determine which brain transgender brains resemble the most? What is the criteria? To me to determine which brain trans brains were more similar to you would have to study a LOT of dimorphic brain structures.
Some structures in transgender brains do resemble their sex or are sort of androgynous and inbetween. So I don't know how accurate trans woman = "resembles" a woman's brain actually is as a sweeping statement. In my experience trans women have rarely acted completely like either gender. I've seen trans women disperportionately engaging in masculine hobbies like computers compared to the average cis woman.
Personally a DevOps/SRE type role appeals to me more because
1: I really liked ops but found coding and doing NOTHING but it kind of meh. A combo is fine.
2: I REALLY like approaching ops as a software problem
3: The work itself has more variety than straight ops or dev which I think is more suited to my adhd issues.
I think there is much political inertia and a lack of code savvy workforce keeping ops going but honestly the way I see it the writing is on the wall for traditional ops. I never see any ops positions in FAANG.
It may be true most coder s don't think about infrastructure but that gives more value to this niche not less. There is still value to DIY when it comes to things like infrastructure.
Years later after an investigation a decent chunk of generics actually went off the market because they were crap. This is a field that has faced unreasonably low levels of scrutiny historically. So it's no shock to see stories like this.
I think if this trend continued it would be effective against the weak arguments pushed by far-right boosters.
I can make the inverse argument that being told an argument is so offensive it's not worth examining creates this bias in kind. In fact I would argue the point of opposing "hate speech" is not to rationally confront it but to denormalize it so it doesn't affect people's beliefs. Same goes for anti-heresy beliefs, "conservative-only" posting requirements, and many other forms of censorship. I don't think far right communities are unique in the amount of social conformity demanded from members.
This is certainly part of it. I've literally watched Russian propaganda around the Syrian war featuring a "Canadian independant journalist". Yet overall this explanation strikes me as unsatisfying. From what I've heard from the researchers propaganda techniques have been less about promoting the right wing specifically and more about spreading social discord generally. The Russians had efforts to promote Jill Stein that were promoting left wing rather than right wing propaganda. I've never really bought that propaganda efforts weren't getting overwhelmed by the influence of regular users generally. It's possible but I haven't seen serious attempts to prove it.
>I don't imagine the people doing these jobs have much career mobility.
This is actually a more interesting criticism to me. Perhaps internet moderators are more drawn to far-right thought than others because of their life circumstances? This is a population that's lower income and tech savvy.
There's something wrong with mainstream reporting if mere exposure to social media turns people far right. It really strikes me that people are trapped in some pretty strong filter bubbles to the point mere exposure is enough to change political belief.
Spend a week on a far right community and you'll be shown more stats that point to a far-right conclusion than you can critically evaluate. In any internet discussion of police racism for instance FBI crime stats will be mentioned in a heartbeat but I don't think I've seen a mainstream journo bring them up once. Social media and mainstream media fundamentally follows different schemas of information simply because even bringing up certain data can cause a mainstream journo reputational damage.
This is also causing an inverse filter bubble where hateful ideas which actually have refutations don't get refuted because people refuse to discuss the ideas on principle. Much of the data cited is crap and much of the interpretations are crap but they're not meaningfully contested.