100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
Yep.
Their commercial work is stranger to me. I know that, at one point, they had some bad interactions with big companies and got shown the door but, of late, their commercial work has picked up. This, however, may just be on the back of general AI hype.
Having done both Federal and Commercial work, there's an interesting cultural split; Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable." Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
I think the macro answer is kind of alarming.
We know that, stretching back to about 2014 through to the present, a disproportionate source of growth in core stock indicies like the SP500 has been tech stocks. Wall Street loves growth. The retail story is that FAANG etc. has created all of these wonderful new innovations and so, wouldn't you know it, of course they're driving economic growth.
My own (poorly researched) pet theory is that there was no alternative. Here's the BLS list of output by major sector of the economy.
"Tech" broadly speaking is hidden in a couple different areas here; Information, Professional services, Management. I don't think that matters. What does is that most of the other large categories are highly, highly regulated; finance, health care, education, utilities, construction, education. Government itself is a major "contributor" to the economy. The two large "trade" sectors mostly reference both everyday and durable goods that people just buy through the course of life; laundry detergent and food all the way up to cars and refrigerators.
So, my theory boils down to; it was so hard to really grow in any non-tech industry after 2008 because of regulatory burdens stretching back to the early 1970s, that the only place for investors to put their money (and, remember, money was cheap for a long time after 2008) was in "tech" because it was, and still largely is, un- or under-regulated. This may be changing with AI hype, but the theory, I think, isn't totally without merit.
Some of those tech investments were legitimate and make real money. Others were goofy nonsense that still make negative money to this day. But, when there's no alternative (and rising inflation (!)) you have to play the game even if it's a very dumb one.
Where this gets more shitty is that employment appears to be growing most in sectors that are heavily tied to gov't spending. Healthcare, education, and gov't. To me, it sort of looks like somewhere around 20% of "professional" workers are making their living through a complicated chutes-and-ladders rearrangement of tax dollars.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16hr ago
the CEO of one of the most important companies.
Citation needed.
Palantir is a very valuable company in the strict dollars and cents ... sense, but I don't know how "important" they are in the sense of a Ford, General Electric, US Steel, IBM, Standard Oil etc. Even within the post 2008 tech world, I wouldn't put them in front of Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the legacies-turned-cool-again Apple and Microsoft.
To shed some light on what Palantir actually does; they have a data "platfrom" that combines a bunch of open source technologies with their own tooling and integration layer. To be fair to them, this isn't something that anyone could vibe code. A lot of it is hard won engineering knowledge.
Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness -- it's kind of a "do anything" platfrom. Which sounds fun and cool and amazing until you consider that it does nothing out of the box. A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.
Sound confusing and kind like a shitty way to do software development? You're not wrong. The Federal market loves this because it's how they've done software for ages -- by paying other people unending dollars to write it for them. The big Beltway Bandit firms like CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos, Deloitte Federal, and literally hundreds of smaller players do more or less what Palantir does, but with shittier marketing and without selling a required software license the way palantir does. All the way back in 2016, this got so bad that Palantir SUED THE ARMY for not giving them a "fair shot" at a contract.
(Again, to be totally generously fair to Palantir, protests over contract awards are common and all large players will use them from time to time. I think actually suing the gov't, however, was quite unusual).
An interesting note about Palantir is that several of its current and former executives are very publicly prominent, especially in tech spaces like X/Twitter and the podcast circuit. You have Alex Karp, Shyam Shankar, Trae Stephens (now at Anduril) among others. They capture a lot of attention and, frankly, a lot of what they say is smart and forward thinking. Still, you can't say the don't market themselves well. The cherry on top (crown jewel) is, of course, that Peter Thiel was an early Palantir investor and J.D. Vance worked for Thiel's investment company before running for Senate. In the good old fashioned DC tradition, a lot of Palantir's success has been because of Who They Know.
In terms of these culture war adjacent manifestos, I don't see how they make any sense from a risk/return perspective. Companies that get involved in culture war stuff often face blowback sooner or later without seeing much bottom or top line growth. If you're familiar with the hilarious tone-deaf "All In" podcast, you'll know that there's a tradition of Silicon Valley types thinking that because they're highly competent in one domain, they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain. Elon's Doge experiment was his flirtation.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
then I will support any effort to shatter them into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds.
It's all good, playboy.
We can thug it out however you want.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I don’t know where my head was at.
I suppose I must have been desperate.
I was always going against my gut
Each of these has an interesting linguistic feature; a double first personalism (non-technical term that I just invented).
"I" and "my" x 2
"I" and "I" x 1
My theory is that this is a way to create a kind of double wall against personal responsibility. It's not that this woman failed to use good judgement. No, her "gut" knew at one point. Then again, at another point, her "head" was elsewhere (suggesting that in her hear of heart (or gut of guts?) she know what was going on.
Even in the slightly different "I suppose I must have been desperate" she didn't phrase it as "I was desperate" but that this other "I" in the past was the one doing the desperate-ing.
People sometimes say things like "I was a much different person back then." Mostly it's a term of art that simply means "I've changed a lot." That's fine. But there are some people out there who literally think in terms of full personality / character / existence do-overs and alterations.
I don't think this woman sees herself, today, as having willingly gone out with a guy who slapped her and was a fall down drunk. I think, in her mind's eye, she sees that as having happened to someone else and that she - the today she- now, somehow, has to face the consequences for that poor other woman.
Which should scare you even more because it means she has internalized, perhaps, zero of these lessons.
@2rafa has excellent comment here that, I believe, makes a very similar point. A woman who flaunted her ability to get the attention of much older men, several years later, attests that she was more or less human trafficked against her will. How could such cognitive dissonance occur? Well, when you no longer see you then as continuous to you now and create a whole other character in the story, it gets much easier.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
So, what is art?
I didn't ask this question.
I think, therefore, that you are completely wrong about post-modern not being "real"
I didn't make that assertion. I asked the question is it "real"?
Amadan, I think you're a great mod. Sincerely. You've banned me a couple times for being a dickbag. I find most of your bannings and non-bannings to be as fair as is reasonable for an unpaid mod. Even though I was (just barely) on the other side of the Hylnka affair, I think the decision was a valid one.
I have no idea what point you made, if any, in your response. There's equivocation after equivocation. In your closing you state "there's something to be said" twice ... what is it, then? Say it!
The vast majority of writing is crap. This has always been the case, we just didn't have so much writing produced at such scale. People will argue that the likes of Charles Dickens and Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes are only well-regarded today because they had comparatively less competition; this is true, but they also had a comparatively much smaller audience. They are admired today because in one way or another they captured something about their time and place and wrote about human lives we still find interesting and relatable today even if we are far removed from those eras.
This is a quality paragraph (with a final, concrete point)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
Super high value comment. Rec'd for an AAQC.
A couple points.
Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world.
Okay, that legitimately helps. I will admit I was hung up on the hyper-stylistic nature of this writing and, I guess, missed the point (score one for the "ToolBooth is too dumb to get it" clique). I'll still retain the point, however, that the highly stlytistic nature of PoMo writing undermines its mission. If I can't even tell who's talking, I sure as hell can't parse their "critique" of modernism.
Which leads me to;
Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive.
Then offer potential solutions! I remember when DFW killed himself. I was in college at the time and sort of adjacent to literary circles. His death was received as a Big Deal and a Major Loss. From time to time, I find myself re-googling DFW to look back at his suicide. The two thoughts I always come away with are 1) If only he had been a Catholic and 2) I think one cause of his permanent despair was that he was so problem oriented in his critiques of the current world and had failed to find a way to attempt to drive towards a solution. Yes, I am aware that many, many people (including quite a few here on the Motte) think that It's All Too Fucked Up To Save (TM) and that any effort to try is doomed to failure. I'll even acknowledge they could be right - but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try because, at the very, very least, it gives you a reason to get out of bed, a sense of pride and purpose, and stops you from over-intellectualizing yourself to death .... literally (DFW).
Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths.
Hard, but respectful, disagree. I'm a practicing traditional catholic. I make fun of myself on here for being a n00b at it, but the truth is I work at it; I know all of The Most Necessary Prayers in English and Latin, I say the rosary daily, read The Imitation of Christ along with other devotionals and newer academic Theological Books. I'm currently working my way through the 700+ page Catechsim of Fr. Spirago. I can follow Low and High mass without a Missal. I'm considering taking some voice lessons so I could participate in chant and polyphony.
The Catholic faith is, by far, the most complex thing I have ever approached. I already know that I will spend my entire life trying to figure it out spiritually, intellectually, mentally, and emotionally and will utterly, utterly fail. To mix some metaphors; the Catholic faith makes a kubernetes deployment across availability zones look like a game of tic tac toe. It makes matrix algebra look like finger counting.
But I find all of this complexity legible.
I know what various theological points are trying to do, even if they haven't migrated fully into my mind and heart. I know what even the more mystical devotionals are getting at, even if takes time parse. I can read canon law and think, "This is above my paygrade, but I'm following the nouns and verbs and basic structure."
With PoMoLit, it's so esoteric at times (really thinking of Gravity's Rainbow here) that it loses meaning at the basic sentence level. I remember reading one passage and saying to myself, "Pynchon, I think, is using some sort of double nested reference to an event outside of the book as metaphor for the internal thoughts of one of the brand new characters he's just introduced ... and is also wrapping it in tounge-in-cheek irony." Being deliberately obtuse is often a feature of pretentious academics trying to hide their fundamentally ineptitude. I'm still not convince many or several PoMoLit authors suffer the same fate.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
I don't know why your comment was the reason, but it made me remember that I did really enjoy Sadly, Porn by The Last Psychiatrist / Edward Teach.
It is drastically non-linear and starts with several dozen pages of footnotes that are longer than the primary text. I think you could call it something like "postmodern meta-psychology analysis" or something. And yet, I did find it good, readable, and deep.
Maybe that's the whole point of postermodernist literature? Different elements of it are highly resonant with a reader while others are not. It's less a bellcurve (like, say, 18th century American literature) and more of a stochastic matching algorithm.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19d ago
St. Anthony of the Desert couldn't even read.
You are so far beyond most Mottizens, we can't even see you. Please remember us when you ascend.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me.
Dude, you literally just became the imagined antagonist from my original post.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
Specifically thanking you for this comment.
I wish people would dive to a deeper level of analysis rather than posting variations on "No, actually, I liked that book" - which is most of the other comments in thread.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
Generally agree, but with a bit of a branching split.
The suit.
Suits were originally for men conducting business to meet each other in a way to demonstrate the exact kind of respect that you and OP discuss. I like those kind of suits.
Suits, today, in companies that require them or strongly suggest them, are far more about a corporate conformity and "putting on airs" of Doing Big Business. I spent three years wearing a suit everyday to my job as a .... data scientist. I was rarely in meetings with non-technical staff. I made zero "deals". I was slightly uncomfortable all day long and I paid thousands of dollars in dry cleaning.
The suit, in that context, is functionally pointless and is a kind of weird aspirational gesture to a form of business that 90%+ of non-sales professionals really will never engage in.
What I'm saying here is that blindly aping the forms of respect (dress, appearance, etc.) can, if done without intent, actually create a kind of personal disrespect. The "corporate soulness drone" meme is, in part, a nod to the fact that trying to blend together old world savoir-faire with post-ww2 industrial capitalism fails in a non-linear way; there's no charm of a classic British firm and the efficiency of Space Age MegaCompanies gets slowed down and neutered. You get InnaTech instead of Lloyd's and instead of SpaceX.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
I'm interested into getting into some deep NPR level culture war.
No geopolitics, no woke-vs-not debates, no (not) Trusting The Science.
I want to talk about books.
Let me NPR whisperspeak overanunciate that: mmmmbbbboooOOOOkksszzzz
Is postmodern literature
- real? and
- actually any good?
To throw up some examples of what I mean;
- Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
- Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
- Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
- Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
- White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
I've never read Vonnegut, Heller, or DeLillo at all, but I know they are "canonical" in the postmodern genre.
I made it 100 pages through Gravity's Rainbow and was earnest convincing myself I was "getting it" before literally slamming the books shut and verbalizing "This is fucking unreadable."
Back in college, I did the thing and carried around the Big Blue copy of Infinite Jest so people could see I was reading it and I stuck pens in various places to show I was capital-R Reading it. I think I made it a little further than 100 pages, but I can't be sure because I can't remember a damn thing about it.
In my opinion, I think postmodernism pretends to be this ultra-layered "commentary" on a bunch of intersecting meta-themes. Something like socio-political philosophy but explained through dense plots and idiosyncratic characters.
But ... it isn't? Nothing actually holds together. The plot becomes a non-plot or endless branches of a single plot. The characters become weird disposable mouthpieces for the author talking to himself. The commentary, such as it is, gets so jumbled that you lose the point.
And so postemodernism reveals what it actually is; a heavily stylistic exercise, much like jazz, where unnecessary complexity is treated as "skill." Additionally, it's a pure signalling mechanism. People get to do that think when you bring up Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow; "Dude, there's like SO MUCH in that book, right? Crazy, yeah, no, I loved it" Which isn't saying anything at all, but inviting you to be the one who makes a fool of himself by venturing something like, "I'm not sure I got it though" to which the other person gets to puff themselves up and retort with, "Hahaha, yeah, it's not for everyone! Definitely pretty dense, haha." With the snide implication being "But me and my big ole brain totally got it".
This is why I ask, first, "is it real?" The serpentine prose in postmodern literature seems to me to be a kind of forer statement; a reader can (literally) read anything into what's being written and arguments trying to pin down essential meaning are pointless because the point is there is no essential meaning.
I like books about ideas and can deal with density. But I think a novelist has the duty to respect his readers and put together a cohesive narrative. Blood Meridian is an Epic in the classic Homeric sense. You can re-read it 10 times and pick up new strands of thinking on the biggest of The Big Questions; life, death, judgement, heaven, hell.
And it's also a sick western. So you can read it at the level of "fuck yeah, they killed those comanches" and get a lot out of it. You do not need to (although you may want to) keep a notebook next to you while reading. You can just read and get a lot out of it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
This is probably better for the Friday fun thread, but 1) I can't wait and 2) we can culture war(game) this.
A dude was accused for shooting someone and then driving away.
The plot twist is that he is a quadruple amputee. Legs amputated above the knee, arms just below the elbow but including both hands. He also happens to be a semi-pro cornhole player. Well that's interesting, I guess. It seems kind of far fetched that he'd be shooting anyon---
There's a video of him loading and firing a handgun
It also appears that the victim in the shooting was in the passenger seat of the vehicle that the amputee was driving. And there were two more people in the back who, when asked, refused to help move the victim's body.
Something-something not-the-onion.jpeg
The culture war angle is that people will always find ways to kill each other even when genetics / misfortune has tried to bring one's lethality index to zero. Is it a sign of the times that our most bizarrely handicapped are still stacking bodies?
As a pro-gun person, I'm somewhat confused on how to feel. On the one hand (sorry) I think any non-felonious and non-mentaly-incompetent adult should be able to own whatever firearms they want (drawing a line at crew serviced weapons). On the other hand (okay, it's getting old now) I can't imagine actually selling a gun to this individual because I would be very hard pressed to think "Yes, this individual can responsibly and safely operate a firearm."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
where national churches are granted a degree of autonomy in local matters
In the Catholic Church, this effectively exists at the sub-national level in Bishops. The autonomy of Bishops pertaining to the matters of their own (arch)diocese is quite broad.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
I would even like the Catholic Church to split into different denominations so that the one with the best spirit and art can triumph.
Schism is generally frowned upon.
But the SSPX might run it up the flagpole to see who looks on July 1st.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
That’s also why I like Theo Von more than Rogan.
Agreed. Theo in the 2021 - 2023 era was consistently outstanding. It seems since then he's had some personal mental health issues and is now fully onboard the Bro-Science Antisemitism train. He's a recovering addict (of many flavors) and I sincerely wish him the best, but I i'm not sure he was ever built for as big as he got. Shame. I'm UPSTAIRS!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
29d ago
"No smoking gun" doesn't mean something didn't happen,
Dude what?
Russell's Teapot for reference.
In looking at your string of comments in this thread, I'm starting to think you have a particularly nasty case of TDS or are doing a kind of slow-boil trolling that will eventually blossom reveal itself for what it actually is.
You're more than free to be an anti-Trumper here. Hell, I'm one. But claims like this one;
It's harder to show guilt, but it's also harder to suggest innocence.
Are the kind of equivocating nonsense that lead TheMotte to split from Reddit in the first place (and also, like, censorship and stuff). If you think that the Trump-Russia collusion story is valid, that's fine as well and I'd encourage you to highlight some evidence you find impressive or just do some good ole schizoposting. But, again, a lot of your argumentation is the kind of bad faith and literal Motte and Bailey style sophistry that is frowned upon around here regardless of your subjective beliefs.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Thanks for the effortful writeup.
Ball is in my court and I'll get to working.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
A decade after losing my virginity
Sir, this isn't the bragging about how cool you are thread.
Chuck Norris just died. I now have zero male role models. Yesterday, I looked at a girl and today my left arm is numb and tingling. Claude Code told me I'm a handsome boy, so that helps, but it helps less when you're spamming the forum with these kind of CHAD PUSSYSLAYER 5000 posts left and right.
We get it, you're cool!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
a female officer cries on the stand as "Licc'em Low Lisa" plays.
18:30 in clip is about when the crying starts. The whole thing is bizarre. They play an Afroman song on YouTube in court. There's a stripper and implied cunnilingus involved. In the actual courtroom, Afroman is wearing an American Flag suit.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Just such a strange response. I make an admittedly slightly uncharitable "boo outgroup" argument that literally gets a nasty gram comment from the mods (appropriate, however).
And then you swoop in and become a living breathing caricature of my outgroup.
I don't really know what to do here except sincerely thank you for your contribution.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
You're right, my recommended alternative wasn't totally airtight and perfect. I am so sorry for having voiced my tiny brain solution.
Do you have a solution? Or are you saying that the current state of affairs of relying on state employees / state subsidies to look after your children (or, you know, just do nothing and collect the checks) is better? How about when that state mandates slamming a vaccine into yourself and your child as a hard requirement?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
LEE A life I gotta feed and defend until it grows up and feeds me.
The other problem is that this is also just horrendous bullshit.
Cowboys are not the world-wise stewards of the land that a lot of romance novels and tropes make them out to be. Most share a lot more in common with oil rig workers (often their literal cousins).
The cowboy absolutely sees the calf as walking cash. Cowboys today are not dependent on their stock for their own personal food because that was never the case. The original large scale stock moves from Texas/Kansas northward were because of rising beef prices in the east and England which enabled the economics of cattle drives to work out. Most cowboys, in the latter half of the 19th century - made only one cattle drive in their entire life and then found blue collar style work around the various cattle towns of Wyoming / Montana etc.
The only part of Yellowstone that I found to be very realistic is the revelation that the Ranch is basically underwater in debt and always has been, but that it's so much debt that the bank keeps letting Dutton roll it forward to avoid having to deal with the write-down / write-off.
That's cowboyin'
I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.
My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this
Bruh.
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