rev_bird

Genetics has something to do with my interest in genealogy, but honestly the direct familial connection is what is so interesting to me. Sure, I never met my great-great-great grandfather, and his genes probably have a negligible effect on my life now, but it's fun to think about his connection to me: My dad was really close with his grandfather Henry, who died when my dad was 12. Henry, in turn, had been very close with HIS grandfather, John, who died when Henry was 12. John fought in the Confederate Army for four years, got shot twice and stabbed once, including at Gettysburg.

My thoughts and beliefs have been greatly shaped by my dad, and I'm positive my dad is who is is at least partially because of his relationship with his grandfather. Carry that backward, and I'm only three degrees removed from a soldier in the Civil War -- it's not impossible to think, completely independent of genetic inheritance, that some of my personality quirks or principles worked their way straight to me from someone who was born in the 1840s.

>"go/be abroad at least once each month"

This is such a dramatic departure from my experience as an American. I'm almost 30 and have left the country once.

It's not the fault of liberals that you believe quantifiably incorrect things, but it's a convenient idealogical scapegoat to get out of learning anything helpful.

>the gateway drug marijuana

This is a myth, and not even a good one. Alcohol has a far stronger correlation with negative outcomes than marijuana does, and having "personally seen friends" doesn't change that.

As for the childish "less drugs, not more" solution you've come up with, weed has been illegal for almost a century. It hasn't helped yet -- what do you propose? We start killing weed dealers?

That's a good point, I hadn't thought of it that way.

I honestly didn't know about "PING," thank you. I have no idea how I missed such a fundamental feature, even if it is relatively new.

I've considered doing this, but I can't figure out if the networking upside would be outweighed by the "annoying people making lots of noise" downside. Not to mention I really like my setup at home, which I value more than I realized. Now that I'm working from home, I'm finding it hard to pry myself out.

I can't imagine how much work it would be to sift through all the other "ideas people" who need an app next week and then they'll pay you once the cash starts rolling in.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, this is really interesting. It seems like you had a pretty unpleasant experience as a traditional employee, which I can appreciate. I'm curious about this part:

>I was one of the best people someone could hire for things that are necessary, but not glamorous -- database performance tuning, data warehousing, ETL process development, and cleaning up disasters. Yet getting market rate for salary as a senior dev was like pulling teeth. At the time I was gritting my teeth to collect a paycheck.

The skills that you polished -- to the point of being "one of the best people someone could hire" -- seem heavily reliant on experiential learning. For example, I can't see how someone could get to be really good at "cleaning up disasters" without cleaning up a lot of disasters first. Would you say your experience as a (chronically underpaid) senior dev is what prepared you to be able to go out and perform the work that companies value so highly? Is the trick for us less-senior folks just to... keep working?

I recognize your username from various threads, but I'm unfamiliar with your work. What is it that you consult on? And, if you don't mind me asking, how did you get "demonstrably technically competent" in it? Were you an employee in whatever field it was, and then struck out on your own? I'm fascinated by consulting but have a hard time envisioning what these consultants do that employees don't, at least in the more technical fields.

So excited for this, really excited to dig in and start kicking the tires. One question, since it looks like steeleduncan is answering questions in here: How does the realtime typesetting deal with large documents? I can't tell if it can keep up because it's only re-calculating a segment of the total document, but I've been working with LaTeX mostly for book-length documents; my chronic annoyance is the minute-plus compile times unless I break it up and only compile a chapter or two at a time. A realtime option would be a huge benefit for the final typesetting runs where I'm trying to fix image placement and orphans and whatnot, but I don't know if that's asking too much of the engine.

That's true, but it would still need to reload, rather than just sending the little request in the background as you keep scrolling along.

This is cool, thank you for explaining. It never occurred to me that it would be so different for commercial offerings. The main question I have with ideas like this is where the shitty pricing scams are going to be happening—if it's the residential companies, then yeah, this is perfect. But if it's Level3 that's shaking down Netflix for more money, for example, then the "fork" isn't happening high enough up the chain. Do you have any insight into this part of the equation?

>We just had an election in Alabama that proved this view incorrect. Even in seemingly "safe" districts your vote can matter. That's how safe districts become safe.

It's kind of counter-intuitive, but the election of a Democrat in Alabama actually provided a lot of discouraging data about gerrymandering. While a Democrat won the state-wide popular vote, if those votes had been cast in the House districts, Republicans would have won six of the state's seven seats. Gerrymandering doesn't really help as much in a Senate race, but in House races, it's everything.

This is a really straightforward explanation of a situation I was having trouble getting across, thank you.

>As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else's product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume.

I don't think this is always true, is it? The price of a phone call isn't contingent on the contents of the call. Regarding the internet, though, I'd feel better if there was any guarantee at all that these "negotiations" would be on a level playing field. If you're a startup that wants to complete with some Comcast streaming service, the Comcast ISP side of things can kill you day one. There's no negotiation possible when one party has all the power. Maybe that's the system working as intended, but if that's the case, then the system creeps me out.

I agree there are lots of reasons to be discussed, but it's my understanding that access to postpartum healthcare is certainly one of the factors, one that varies widely by insurance company. Medicaid, for example, only covers two months of care for mothers after they give birth,[1] and even then care compares poorly to other countries with more equitable healthcare systems.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-du...

Thanks for linking to this, looking forward to checking it out.

That's not at all how representative democracy works, and I suspect you know that. It's possible for a president to disagree with the regulatory decisions of a federal agency, because the agencies work for us, not the president.

I appreciate the clarification, that makes a lot of sense.

>If you try to do this using conventional budget math, you're not going to get the right answer.

I'm very curious about this part, particularly in light of your comment elsewhere that "It's possible to implement basic income without any direct government support." I feel like there are very interesting answers being alluded to in your posts but none actually presented.

>It seems that for this to work we'd have to maintain some intestinal fortitude to say "no" - and that to me sounds like a serious culture change in this country.

I'd argue that the culture is currently overwhelmingly biased toward saying "no," usually under the guise of "freedom" -- if we couldn't say "no" to the chronically homeless, we probably wouldn't have a half-million of them on the streets. If we couldn't say "no" to low-income mothers, we wouldn't have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world.

>wealth and power are their own defense against redistribution

Right now, yes, that's definitely the case. But does it have to be? Our campaign finance system provides a direct and unlimited conduit between wealth and political power, but we can change that.

>If we are talking about handing out cold hard cash as basic income, as the statement implies, then that is a recipe for disaster.

I've tried and failed to figure out a less confrontational-sounding way to ask this, but do you have any data to back this claim up, or do you just not trust the poor?

Oh wow, I hadn't heard about KDP Paperback. They're literally telling people to start moving stuff over. Thanks for responding.

>unless you think that large website payloads exist because developers are literally too lazy or don't know how asset optimization works.

For what it's worth, I do think this. It's easy to just drag another JS library into your code without thinking of how long it's going to take to load.

>published via Amazon CreateSpace (which Amazon seems to be phasing out).

I just published my second book through CreateSpace, any phasing-out would be news to me, but I'm very curious what you mean. My experience the second time around seemed basically identical to the first—what's getting phased out?

I think "existential panic" in this case maybe isn't referring to existentialism, but... existence? Like if you aren't going to have food tomorrow, and there's no solid prospect of figuring out how to get food the next day, that's a panic fueled by the desire to continue to exist. It's kind of an imprecise term in this case, but that's what I took it to mean.

>You're telling people you have a right to seize their earnings for their labor.

You don't think this is happening now?

A hypothetical, though not a very abstract one: A wealthy investor uses some of their money to buy a corporation. Thousands of people drive to work every day and sit at a desk for more than half of their conscious hours, making money for that company. The investor stays at home, doing whatever he wants. At the end of the day, the investor is many thousands of dollars richer, while the employees have all make $70 in wages.

Capitalism is explicitly about seizing earnings generated from labor. You're not defining "taxation," you're defining "corporation."

Workers have been generating increasing productivity for decades—Americans have never created more wealth. Yet wages have stagnated, companies have trillions of dollars squirreled away, and the richest families in the country have more money than many millions of the rest of us. Who's getting robbed?