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o_class_staron This Person Does Not Exist (2019)

Taking that classical principle of being the best looking in his friends' group a little far, it seems.

o_class_staron This Person Does Not Exist (2019)

Oddly, I found the people more believable than the cats. The people looked realistic about 70% of the time; the cats, never.

I did pull one body horror: a little girl, with a background of flowers, and a petal-shaped wound in her cheek. Freaky stuff.

o_class_staron You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

Precisely. These businesses exist to minimize risk, which includes personnel risk. Everyone should be replaceable, even upper management. (Which is to avoid the psychological costs of replaceability or of investing oneself into work one knows that plenty of other people could do-- that is not something companies concern themselves with.)

o_class_staron You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

A lot of people at large companies are bored at work because a lot of work is boring, and because corporate life sucks. If you control for age-- notice that startups tend to prey on the young-- then I don't think small company work, at the bottom, is any less boring.

o_class_staron You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

At that level, you don't get the salary your work "is worth", because we all know that's a fictional concept. Dollar value is only well defined for finished products. For labor, it comes down to relative leverage, and as a CEO, you get whatever you can get, and your buddies are on your board and you're probably on their boards, so usually that number is quite high.

CEOs may not be smart in the IQ sense we nerds tend to worship, but they understand leverage and positioning, and they understand how to hack complex human systems for personal benefit, because it's what they did to get their careers in the first place.

o_class_staron You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

Everyone works for someone else, but at a certain level both of organizational standing and (for lack of a better way to put it) moral fluidity, you become invincible.

CEOs only answer to shareholders insofar as they're expected to deliver a profit, which is actually very easy to do because most business "profit" is actually rent-seeking derived from resources (including intangibles) the business already owns. You have to be incredibly hubristic to fail as a corporate CEO. It's an easy job.

That's not true for small companies. Startups are harder, and startup CEOs are basically middle management within the "hive company" of venture capital. The true executives are the VCs who float from project to project, careers and fates diversified, and can peel their names off anything that looks like it's going to fail.

In big companies, though, most CEOs would do better not to show up, except once a quarter to give a speech or something. All they do is fire people, producing churn, and get in the way of the people who do the actual work. They can only fail if their egos get the better of them and they get so hubristic that they break something that used to be working. The same is mostly true of executives in general, although they have a little more vulnerability insofar as (a) if their bosses screw up, they may end up eating blame, and (b) if the CEO screws up so bad he himself gets fired, they'll probably also be replaced during the regime change.

o_class_staron You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.

This is the part I agree with most. In your 30s, you start to see a bifurcation whereby the people who take the corporate grind seriously go into cognitive atrophy, while those who have a fuck-it attitude keep getting smarter but become less employable (due to age and their shitty job histories). You do turn into a moron if you buy into whatever role the corporates are willing to give you. The more you believe in it, the faster you lose intelligence. It's probably optimal to be able to pretend you buy into corporate, while not actually investing yourself in it at all, but most nerds aren't very good at this code-switching.

It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.

I thought it was lobsters the libertarians were all on about.

Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

Corporate is corporate. It's all trash. It shouldn't exist. Capitalism is a dinosaur. That said, it's usually better to work for a large company than a small one. In a big company, you can move around. There's more diversity of work, and there's more organizational experience with outlier talent. (That doesn't mean you'll be recognized as outlier talent. If you work at Google and have a 160 IQ but mediocre paperwork, you'll probably just get a regular assignment.) At a 20-person venture-funded company, there isn't much choice of work to do, and there isn't much room to move or grow except by becoming a manager. Which means it's not really any different from the old corporate grind-- it just has worse benefits and more ways to fall between the cracks (and that's by design).

o_class_staron Y Combinator Failed Startups

YC existed to monetize the reputation Paul Graham earned by writing two very good Lisp books.

YC today: no Paul Graham, and too many right-wingers.

o_class_staron Justice Department sues Yale for illegal practices in admissions

Yale Law doesn't have to use grades because it's the top law school and it can push 100% of its students. It's the same with top graduate departments, which have grades but rarely actually give anything below a B. Lower-ranked law schools have to use grades so the top students can actually distinguish themselves and get decent jobs.

o_class_staron Common Causes of Bad Decisions

It makes sense. If a world leader claims that he won an election with 99% of the vote, we assume it was a fraudulent election.

The thing is, in American capitalism, bosses want their underlings to think they have input and think decisions are made by consensus when, in reality, the "right answer" was preselected, and the politically savvy know what it is. Corporates don't actually want workers to have say. They just want the workers to work as hard, and buy in as much, as they would if they actually had a say.

This is also why venture funded companies give employees token stock option allocations even though the percentages are actually a joke. In exchange for options that might be worth $5,000 per year by fair market value, the workers work 50% harder because enough of them are young and inexperienced enough to think they "own the company" in a meaningful way.

o_class_staron “35-50% of clicks on Reddit Ads are fraudulent”

As bad as these numbers sound, they're pretty typical for online and mobile advertising.

o_class_staron Common Causes of Bad Decisions

Capitalism has replaced the community with the office. You don't know your neighbors, you see your extended family once a year if that, and it's almost impossible to make friends after age 30 because we live in a stratified world built to keep us apart from each other. But the people who share the (mis?)fortune of selling their time to the same employer, they're the ones you spend all your time with, and they become your community or your small town.

This pushes you to invest yourself emotionally into a community that a wealthier, more powerful person can take away in an instant.

o_class_staron The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

One of the scariest things a manager can say about his company, if you're thinking of joining it is, "There's no politics here."

Business guys don't perceive getting what they want as "politics" but as the natural, right thing happening. It's "politics" when it's people who aren't them getting what they want. "There's no politics" means that it's a dictatorship where the boss gets everything he wants-- and that's usually not an ideal place to work.

o_class_staron Common Causes of Bad Decisions

Office culture is pathological, but I think the extreme rejection-aversion people have is, within the modern world, least maladaptive in the office environment.

We're built to overreact (relative to our modern context) to social rejection because we evolved in small groups. In the bad old days, being rejected or embarrassed in front of your tribe meant you were socially, reproductively, and possibly literally dead. In tribes of 100 people, it made sense to respond strongly to rejection of all forms. In today's world, it doesn't. You get rejected (for jobs, for romantic partnerships, etc.) a lot more, but it's usually harmless. It's "a numbers game"; but our wetware hasn't caught up. Which is why people are so averse to taking social risks, breaking rules even when they should be broken, and pointing out bad ideas.

Thing is, in the office world, we're back in those small tribes where each minuscule rejection or aggression is a possible threat. We're back in the world where being disliked by one or two of the wrong people means catastrophe. So, that's an environment in which is really does make sense to play it safe.

Challenging bad ideas benefits the company. It almost never benefits the person raising the issue. If you're wrong, you look like an idiot. If you're right but not convincing, you look like an idiot. If you're right and you are convincing, someone higher in the power structure will take credit for your idea.

o_class_staron Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

How lucrative is substack?

o_class_staron Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

He's brilliant, and he explains complex concepts really well.

I can't fault him for being a bit "over-neutral", for lack of a better way to put it. It's how economists are trained to express themselves and, more importantly, I don't think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose name cannot be spoken here.

o_class_staron What Working At Stripe Has Been Like

The theory is that it's better not to respond at that point, because if they change their mind in 3 months, they'd rather not have rejected you so they can say "sorry we were slow".

o_class_staron Justice Department sues Yale for illegal practices in admissions

The whole purpose of the "extracurricular" nonsense that is included in US college admissions is racial and ethnic screening. The original targets were the Jews but now it's the Asians.