bamfly

You're taking the very much not-universally-shared position that concealing something you know would make a big difference counts as "honest".

[EDIT] I retract the "circular" claim—you're right that it's not that, it's the definitions of "lying" and "honest" that are making the difference.

Ours were cheerful happy babies until they turned into moody, constantly-bonkers late-toddlers/preschoolers/lower-grade-elementary-kids on whom zero disciplinary or behavior-correction approaches worked, whatsoever. None. Even a bit.

Both were eventually diagnosed with ADHD. Both got on meds. Now we're not constantly stressed every waking second with a chaotic house full of screaming and shit flying everywhere.

We'd have thought we were just the world's worst parents, if we hadn't had a third on whom every approach worked, exactly the way the experts say they should. That's when we were like, "oh, maybe it's not entirely our fault, maybe we should take these kids to a shrink".

We'd read these books on various parenting approaches, try each very earnestly and consistently for months at a time, and not once would any of it look like it did in the book. Nothing worked. Third kid, no ADHD? It all went exactly the way the made-up examples in the books said it should. It was a revelation. "Oh, this is what this stuff's like for most people! Holy shit, this is so easy!"

When I read your comment above, I wondered if you'd gotten here by defining "fair" circularly.

And... yep.

> It seems to me who is president does affect a lot of my life, from abortion, to Supreme Court rules that have majorly affected my life, to war, trade and the economy.

It does—the problem is the value of a single vote.

Odds are very poor—like, single-powerball-ticket-poor—that if you cast a vote for every single presidential election you can in your lifetime, anything about your life or anyone else's will be even slightly different. It's the least effective vote you can cast—yet seems like the only one people go out of their way to shame people over, if they don't vote.

The smaller the vote (and, in the special case of presidential elections in the US, the less stupid and disenfranchising the rules) the greater the effect. Even narrowing a close vote by one, if you don't quite put it over the top, can make a difference at the very-local level.

> news

Following news, especially outside the very-local, has very nearly zero value for most people. It's a hobby with about the same value as watching a daily soap opera, that we fool ourselves into thinking is important.

"But, informed voters!" the voter who spends a few minutes a day reading relevant non-fiction books—history, poli-sci, statistics, marketing/PR, political philosophy, economics, and so on—rather than the news, and just pokes their head up to look at the news & candidates' messages for a few minutes right before each election, is going to be a way better voter than one who puts the same amount of time into mass news media, and skips the books. Wildly better. Incomparably better. Hell, someone who does neither might well be better than the one immersed in mass news media daily or weekly. It. Is. Not. Important. Or. Valuable.

(separately, having a strong news media is important... so, IDK, pay for a paper that does good investigative journalism, but rarely read it? This part's tricky, and arguably one of the great problems of democracy)

FYI everyone also votes backwards from how they should. If you're going to ignore elections, ignore the big ones, and attend the ones for local candidates and issues and school boards and such—the more local, the more your vote matters, and the effect is large. If you want to make a difference in a Presidential election, it's far more effective to participate in the primary or caucus and stay home on election day, than to do the opposite. Yet voter behavior is reversed on all this.

You are ignoring a lot about the situation of the workers, to reach these conclusions, and implying that they have so much leverage they're able to capture all the value of their labor:

> The employees in this scenario have all the leverage. But, they can only negotiate their wage up to a point where the farmer's livelihood is sacrificed

—save a tiny sliver that the farm owner is lucky to manage to get.

And this:

> Its not like farmers are making orders of magnitude more than the people they employ to help harvest

Consider the immense capital value required to have a farm of large enough scale to even halfway succeed in 2023. Some extremely poor decisions have been made if they're really not making a lot more than a migrant worker on their farm.

This is... fantasy-land topsy-turvy-world stuff.

You might have a point if the laborers were bargaining as a bloc, had captured ~all the available labor into that bloc, and had a substantial cash reserve for strike-pay. Short of that, this is all totally backwards.

This farmer claims it's about 50% of his costs. There are more steps before it hits store shelves. And price-charged is necessarily over costs for any non-failing business, so 50% (let's say) of costs won't equal 50% of the wholesale price even before shipping, storage, and all the profit and overhead of those are factored in.

Plus, the same farmer said stuff like:

"After all, he says, he cannot raise his price on a box of asparagus by 50% just because it was cut on a Sunday."

Which makes me inclined to take anything he says about his business or this law with a grain of salt(ed & peppered grilled asparagus... mmm, delicious). Because that's both a blatant math fail, and a business-sense fail.

Easy to do, even when people aren't doing it on purpose for propaganda reasons (which, you clearly weren't, from the tone of your post, but... it happens).

> many of these ag positions are exempt from minimum wage

Child labor laws, too.

> A judgment of fair payment is up to the employee and the employer not the nation as a whole.

Only true when it's two people of similar wealth and circumstances bargaining over how much one will pay for the other's labor.

If you just cringed over how much less leverage the employer would have in that scenario—yeah, exactly.

There's a reason NPR's expanded as "Nice Polite Republicans" in certain circles.

> So yeah, raise the price of asparagus by 21%, to reflect the actual cost of picking, or better yet have the owners take a 21% pay cut.

Wouldn't be anything like 21%. Tons of costs other than the labor to pick. I'd bet it'd closer to 2% than 20%.

... or juicing the economy with a little redistribution, without simply giving handouts. Or a little of both.

The CCC in the US was a similar thing: paying people to build nice things in parks and such while people were going hungry. We absolutely didn't need that stuff. Coulda just given the money away to those who needed it. Though, this way, at least, we got some wonderful benefits that endure to this day—indeed, the kind of well-built, long-lasting, and nice-to-have but unnecessary infrastructure and flourishes, for the enjoyment and appreciation of all, that make one feel like one actually does live in a very-rich country—even if the resource-allocation wasn't ideal from a greatest-good-for-the-suffering perspective.

A sincere attempt at economic stimulus, or keeping the able-bodied masses busy & fed so they don't get any ideas? Probably both.

As for the true motivations of the pharaohs—who knows.

I'm 80/20 on Musk's Mars thing being a way to get great PR in certain circles at near-zero cost. His periodically erratic behavior is the only reason I allocate the 20. Who else is seriously talking about space colonization and even kinda putting their money where their mouth is? Which money, conveniently, would have had to have been spent for much-lesser goals anyway... I'll be convinced he means what he says, on that front, when he starts spending serious cash on projects that have little purpose other than reaching and/or colonizing Mars. For now, I believe he wanted to own a rocket company, and wanted to have a stated mission that might make recruiting easier and buy him some goodwill points.

This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.

Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now.

Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.

> [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.

Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.

Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.

The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.

Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.

It's physics-enthusiast for "time goes one way".

Pibb used to be cherry-forward, smoother-drinking Dr Pepper (nb I preferred Dr Pepper).

Pibb Xtra is mostly just SUGAR punching you in the taste buds.

> Dr Pepper tastes like raisin/prunes (caramelized plum if you prefer) + cherry + vanilla + a hint of black pepper way way way off the back end, in that order.

For the young'uns: Mr Pibb used to be this, with more-forward cherry, no hint of pepper, and maybe a little lower acidity. Smoother, cherry-heavy Dr Pepper. I always preferred Dr Pepper, but sometimes Pibb was what I wanted.

Then they turned it into nasty, thick-feeling sugar-syrup so overwhelmingly sweet you can hardly taste anything else (like... two decades ago. "Pibb Xtra").

So if that's all you've ever known and you're like "OMG how is this gross soda a thing?", know that it used to be a lot better.

> I'm not a native speaker and am finding it hard with how many qualifiers one needs to put into English sentences as to avoid looking like one is making sweeping absolute statements.

Web-forum-English isn't like normal English. Well-written books or articles in real publications usually aren't written with the goal of heading off unreasonably-hostile readings or very-careless readings—in normal writing, that just means a few readers misunderstand something due entirely to their own mistakes or prejudices and that's the end of it, while on Web forums it can spawn entire useless threads and flamewars.

Clarity and some amount of contextually-appropriate precision are still important in normal English writing—it's not the case that every misreading is necessarily the reader's fault—but this kind of trying-to-craft-a-wish-for-a-malicious-genie crap isn't the norm.

Probability in a given encounter, is how the post is written, which is fine. That is, in an encounter between police and non-police, it's much less likely that a police officer is killed or injured than that someone else is.

Now, police officers are obviously going to be involved in a lot more of these encounters than the average person, and there are fewer of them, which I think is what you're getting at, but this is valid from an "in a given encounter, which party is more-justified in fearing for their physical safety?" sort of way.

> A lot of them are ex-military which is why every incident is treated like a mini-fallujah.

The impression I get of the impression other ex-military folks have of veteran-cops, from the veterans I know, is that other veterans tend to regard cop veterans as very-likely to be a two-years-and-out sort (or similar) who jockeyed a desk state-side—and probably poorly at that—or maybe did go to a warzone but never fired a shot in anger, but act like they were In The Shit and can't wait to tell everyone they meet they're a veteran. I.e. not especially good soldiers, the kind who are in for the wrong reasons and had the wrong temperament & attitude for military service.

I'll never forget when Trump called in the military (reservists, I wanna say?) to guard DC during the protests. I stayed up that evening watching various live feeds. They looked so very chill. Relaxed stance with the rifles, not seeming at all tense even when totally surrounded by protesters. Didn't start no shit, and there wasn't no shit. Didn't "kettle" people, didn't act threatening, didn't posture and project an attitude like they thought were the Spartans from 300, and everything was fine. Armed like SWAT (rather, SWAT arms like them, but you get what I mean), humvees and shit, but it was such a different vibe. They projected an aura of authority without acting threatening. That's what confident power & professionalism look like. Go figure.

This is why I comment a "why" for any line of code that's not incredibly obvious. And 100% of the time when it's due to interaction with something outside the codebase, whether that's an OS, filesystem, database, HTTP endpoint, hardware, whatever, if it's not some straightforward call to some API or library.

Sleep due to rate limiting from another service? COMMENT. Who's requiring it, the limits if I know exactly what they are at the time (and noting that I do not and this is just an educated guess that seems to work, if not), what the system behavior might look like if it's exceeded (if I know). Using a database for something trivial the filesystem could plausibly do, but in-fact cannot for very good reasons (say, your only ergonomic way to access the FS the way that you need to, in that environment, results in resource exhaustion via runaway syscalls under load)? Comment. Workaround for a bug in some widely-used library that Ubuntu inexplicably refuses to fix in their LTS release? Comment. That kind of thing.

I have written so very many "yes, I know this sucks, but here's why..." comments.

I also do it when I write code that I know won't do well at larger scale, but can't be bothered to make it more scalable just then, and it doesn't need to be under current expectations (which, 99% of the time, ends up being fine indefinitely). But that may be more about protecting my ego. :-) "Yes, I know this is reading the whole file into memory, but since this is just a batch-job program with an infrequent and predictable invocation and this file is expected to be smallish... whatever. If you're running out of memory, maybe start debugging here. If you're turning this into something invoked on-demand, maybe rewrite this." At least they know I knew it'd break, LOL.

I hate this in documentation. Snippets of code or config that don't work on their own, and it may not even be clear where they're supposed to go or what they're nested in. May use imports the name of which cannot be found on the page. That kind of crap.

Please, at the very least, put a full-fat example or a link to it at the bottom of the page. Something.

> I'm not sure how someone wearing body armor and carrying multiple weapons that can incapacitate or kill someone can be intimidated by a smile.

They're wannabe military tough-guys with laughably worse training and culture, much of which tells them they should be pee-pants scared all the time (seriously—folks very-successfully sell some wacko training courses to cops; or, just look at the disconnected-from-reality-and-common-sense mythology they've built up, within their ranks, around fentanyl). That's the best-case explanation for that behavior. Sometimes they're literal machismo-fueled gangsters (yes, literally, as in, "involved in organized crime") and will punch down all day long to make sure they're feared.

[EDIT] Actually, school districts suffer from some similar problems, as far as being sold all kinds of ineffective and wrong-headed wacko programs and training, and too-frequently ending up corrupt little petty empires (OMG, the amount of money superintendents siphon off to pals...)—I think in both cases we may have opted for a level of devolution that's tipped at least a bit too far toward local autonomy, and could perhaps benefit from something like a professional management/officer corp that gets re-assigned every few years, like officers in the military, to prevent empire-building and make corruption and deviation into wacko-land much less likely. Though, I think that kind of thing's on exactly nobody's radar, so don't expect it to ever happen.

[EDIT EDIT] I mean obviously the problem's more severe and grave with cops, it just occurred to me that a lot of the problems in both spheres might be for organizationally-similar reasons.

You may enjoy the first episode of James Burke's Connections ("The Trigger Effect"), if you've not seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc

> That an overworked public school teacher is going to write a better letter of recommendation than a private school teacher?

LOL. My understanding is the really good prep school college counsellors golf with one or more high-up folks in elite university admissions offices, and get the inside scoop on exactly what they and their peers in other universities are looking for in any given year, such that they can even tune an essay or letter of reference for a given school based on that non-public information and advise students which schools to focus their application efforts on, based on their background & activities.

Might not be crazy to prefer someone with that ruling-class cred/connections (even if not, themselves, of that background) in certain very-lucrative sales positions. Or investing. Or law (especially the varieties that tend to pay very well). Or lobbying. Or just about any halfway-important position in a non-profit. Or the C-suite of a corporation, and more-so the bigger it is.

And so on.

Lots of cases where "oh, I sailed with her nephew one Summer when we were both at Harvard" or just being able to credibly wear any of several "in-group" school colors ties and talk the talk is worth more than 10 extra IQ points or whatever.

Just look at who runs the government at the highest levels—elected, and appointees, both. Heavy representation of Ivies and other elite schools... sure, OK, not surprising, but you look farther back and more often than not, yep, expensive prep school, rich-parish catholic private schools, or (less commonly) a well-into-the-top-1% public high school (usually with selective admission—basically by definition, since you can't realistically do that well, as a school, without it). Notably, the latter option is simply absent if you don't live in the right places, which tend to be rich, expensive ones, near or in a handful of major cities.

If you're in a normal-ass public school—even a good, but not exceptionally good selective-admission one—when you're 16 because your parents couldn't afford the straight-up costs, or relocation & other maneuvers (e.g. résumé padding), to get you into a top secondary school, let alone university—many doors of possibility in your life have already begun to swing shut, whether you realize it or not. It's not impossible you'll get into those kinds of positions despite that, but... your odds are even worse than one might suppose, had one not noticed this tendency.

(of course, it's worse still for certain other pursuits—for some sports and musical instruments, if you're not already damn serious about it and receiving excellent [$$$] coaching/instruction by age 8 or so, then that's already effectively cut off for you as a possible future career. Decide at 14 that's your passion and give it your all? Too bad, you're already too far behind, learn to enjoy participating as a hobby on weekends.)

> The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books.

Massive problem everywhere. Sometimes I'll read some well-reviewed book-club sort of book, and it's usually somewhere between middling, and really bad. I once encountered one of those from a major publisher and aside from not being very good to begin with, it didn't even seem to have had a test-read done before it went to print—there were multiple parts, and one egregious chapter, where it looked like the author had done a major re-organizing edit then never gone back to iron out the wrinkles, such that the text would contradict itself line-to-line, like two or three versions of a scene describing different action, sequence of events, and circumstances re: things like which characters were present, had been hastily mashed up then never fully reconciled. This was plainly not a some intentionally-ambiguous literary device, but an oversight that left the reader unable to know what was supposed to have occurred. You'd never know what a mediocre story and technical mess it was from reading online reviews, though, unless you dug deep into the one- and two-star stuff (and found a reviewer of that sort who hadn't DNF'd it after the first couple chapters), plus other people I know who read it didn't even notice—one did, and we both got to stop feeling like we were taking crazy pills when we compared notes. WTF.

All I can figure is a lot of people just skim everything, so are used to filling in lots of narrative gaps in their head or accepting the gist or outcomes of bits that don't make much sense to them and moving on, which would also explain why the quality of the story, characters, and writing aren't something they really notice, if it's all coming through to them rather impressionistically anyway and they're painting the rest of the picture any way they like. I dunno.

TL;DR I find book recommendations nearly useless unless I've got a good sense of how a reviewer's quality-o-meter is calibrated. Star ratings from a broad, general audience are entirely useless.