dc-programmer

Nothing would surprise me in this age of post-irony. Fittingly, there is also apparently a grift component to it because the subreddit’s creator is hawking some service/product he’s selling.

r/overemployed

However I think a substantial number of posts are creative writing exercises

I guessed and was basically directionally correct. That guy seems like he fits the Bush mold - Cheney and Rumsfield privatizing huge parts of the military comes to mind. Don’t get me wrong what you are saying makes sense. I’d be more surprised if it were a coherent system.

But I do believe many government regulations and laws that may seem like sphaghetti against the wall at first are actually very intentional and lucrative to someone.

Who do you think cane up with and wrote his domestic policies? That’s literally what lobbyist are for. They have these things drafted up ready to go years in advance (just like the Heritage foundation and SC picks). The only thing that might be last minute is the decision to go with it.

They know exactly what the downstream effects of these programs will be. Regulatory capture is a well attested phenomenon, so I’m skeptical of any claims that all the Byzantine policies that just so happen to favor big business came about haphazardly

This is true. But fatal flaws such as the fact that Medicare cannot negotiate prices with drug companies are not accidents but rather artifacts of corporate lobbying. There are many examples of rent seeking like this across the system

I first read about the more disturbing (i.e. waved over in school) details of reconstruction a few years ago in Grant’s biography (really good btw as was Chernow’s Hamilton). One of the most shocking events was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1... and also the New Orleans massacre. The klan would violently put down attempts by black peoples to assert themselves politically and would kill the Republicans who helped them in the process.

Thank you for pointing this out. Also while re-align is probably an incorrect word, there definitely has been an essential transformation of both parties. The new deal coalition and Clinton’s third way have little in common.

To be clear I am not talking about buying pencils, and I don’t disagree bureaucratic reform is badly needed in many institutions (which is the opposite of privatization). Unfortunately kicking the bad apples out is becoming increasingly more difficult in our hyper-individualistic culture where every parent views their kid as an extension of themself, and administrators care more about chasing statistics than real outcomes. But I digress.

The solution that follows from your story is not that poverty breeds innovation/grit or whatever. It’s easy to come up with counter examples to this (affect of war and depressions on educational outcomes). The thing that your wife’s classmates had was hope. Hope that if they worked hard enough they would be successful.

For many reasons, kids growing up in certain areas have very little reason for hope. And this is not irrational thinking: there parents likely are one of the millions of people left behind by the neoliberal era or they are part of a permanent underclass of society. This is what we need to address.

And yes every kid should have a pencil. And not have to worry about breathing in Asbestos. If the answer was just cut funding to bad schools, no child left behind would’ve been a success (narrator: it was not a success).

The argument is the general problem is the negative synergistic feedback loop of poverty, over-policing, drugs, and local culture. These are the problems to solve.

I don’t say never so I suppose a school could fail for endogenous reasons in which case action is needed. But there are less drastic actions than shutting it down, such as firing all the admins.

Yes I’d co-sign the core of what your saying here. It’s pretty alarming actually. And social issues are being used as a wedge/relief valve/distraction to avoid bringing too much attention to where things are materially going. I do believe that many economic issues are deeply related to some social issues and that’s where we might disagree.

I’m not too optimistic for team yellow though. We need good-faith experts to lead us through these times (and social trust) but the last few years have been as disastrous if not not more for wonks as the financial crisis. Between Fauci and J Powell it’s not looking too good

The wording seemed a little generated to me at first that’s all. I’d largely agree that moving to the left economically is the only real choice. It’s the only way democrats can become competitive again in rural areas

The argument would be that serious science educators would not stay long in a position where the curriculum is censured to that degree. Sure there are probably counter examples. But why risk hamstringing the development of future generations like this? Especially as the world gets more competitive. Other countries who take education seriously will have an advantage

Can’t tell if I’m missing a reference if I’ve been arguing with AI this entire time.

But if this is real, this thinking falls into the trap of thinking in final binary outcomes rather than viewing politics as a discourse. Are unions perfect? No. But the center of power has shifted so far in the opposite direction that there needs to be elements far on the other side to bring things back to a sane level

Edit: iPhone autocorrect was bad on this one

It’s not. I don’t care about the blue team. If a yellow team popped up tomorrow that actually cared about the well-being of the public and not corporate interests I would vote for them instead.

Your history conveniently stops at around 1970 and leaves our figures like Jerry Falwell and Nixon’s southern strategy. The partisanship is not being driven by rhetoric - it’s being driven by tens of millions of people being left behind by neoliberalism with zero attempt at mitigating the harm done. If people felt like the current system worked for them then they wouldn’t adopt extreme views.

But sure let’s keep on liberalizing and consolidating economic and political power. It’s worked out great the last 4 decades.

Edit because you edited: wanted to drive home point I can barely stand the democrats. In a sane country they would be the center right party

Don’t think I said I am a democrat. I might vote that way sometimes as a harm reduction strategy though. I’ve seen what happens when Republicans get power (millions dead in Middle East, world historical wealth inequality, destruction of public institutions - don’t want to hear how moderate Dems aided in these, I know)

What you might call social engineering, others might call rejecting social Darwinism. Now the elderly and disabled can live till old age instead of dying on the streets like they did pre-social security. Thanks FDR? The TVA was pretty sweet too.

The core of the Democratic Party (the oldest in the world) has been distrust of big business and advocating for the common man (literally white men for most of it but that can change). It’s essential they go back to these roots and start attacking things like Citizens United with the same verve Republicans go after their goals

I said conservatives. I am adequately informed about the mid-20 century party re-alignment of the Dixiecrats. It’s not the semantic gotcha you think it is because politics is not a team sport to me.

These folks can’t stand that they lost the civil rights battle, the Roe decision (till now), and less remembered the affirmation of the rights of the detained. Maybe there would be less partisanship if they just stuck to trying to lower taxes rather than wage an full assault of personal liberties.

Moderates just want oppressed groups to lay down and take it so their prized stability is not jeopardized

If the school is truly rotten sure maybe let’s close it. But the problem isn’t the schools.

Probably the best thing we could do to produce better educational results is to correct the damage done to city centers by rapid deindustrialization and the war on drugs, and invest in rural communities left behind with infrastructure like broadband. Obviously I don’t think either will happen. But just shifting kids around isn’t going to do anything (but there is money to made in sectors like edtech)

Unironically yes. The war on public schools started when the Feds wouldn’t let southerners run their segregation academies. Conservatives have been trying to sabotage the system ever since

The answer is not sending them to a unaccredited strip center mall charter school like some people want. Or a bible thumping parochial that doesn’t teach evolution.

The purpose of no child left behind is to literally close schools in low performing areas. Leaving families no choice but to go with other options.

This is the classic Republican playbook of tearing down institutions not in the name of small government but rather to replace core functions with private offerings. Doesn’t hurt in this case they can also stick it to a union at the same time

This reality was intentionally engineered so that ghouls like Devos can make their millions and billions in the inevitable privatization

This was a formative read for me many years ago but only recently realized there is also a novel version. Has anyone here read both?

Many of the judges on the bench were literally pushed through undemocratically through the deep state cabal known as the Federalist society. The idea that the US can fix things by just voting better is laughable.

Also why is everyone playing “devils advocate” on this thread? It’s clear what the majority sentiment is here, why bother pretending to take a middle of the road “nuanced” position?

I must run in different circles because I had to Google it. Probably the only thing that made me laugh audibly today.

My experience lines up with your position that these things can’t be learned passively. An alarming number of new grads I’ve interviewed have a tenuous grasp of the fundamentals (the less likely the material is to show up in an interview the shakier the understanding - looking at you computer org).

And a lot of these are graduates of their state’s flagship public university. I can only assume the schools are more than willing to just let students go through the motions. Every new grad filling their electives with AI/ML classes probably doesn’t help either

There were some articles over the last few years about successful founders skewing older. Looks like the average age for billion dollar companies is 34 but I remember seeing over 40 for some thresholds.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-ag...

Is the problem the difficulty of running complex systems or the complete resistance to the idea from politicians and voters that reality is massively complicated. People just want “common sense” solutions and politicians who speak plainly but maybe that’s not what we need.

My bad. My introduction to the topic was through the lens of different use cases

Excellent. I appreciate the information. I’m just getting into the JVM dev ecosystem so I have a lot to learn

Ok thanks, that helped clear some things up. I didn’t realize generational GC reuses the same contiguous memory blocks for the young regions. Makes sense from a fragmentation and resident page locality perspective.

Do you know if the early generation region settings can be tweaked (alignment, size, number of threads/regions)? I’m wondering what happens if you “overflow” these areas by generating too many objects