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.
10d ago
I think this is, sadly, more probable than not.
Arlington County, Virginia, 2036:
The "White Girl Buses", manned by former Blackwater security, roll in sequence up Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon for the nightly 7:30pm run to Whole Foods. The armed men spill off the bus and cordon off the parking lot. A sergeant dispatches a squad to hastily speed-cuff a few military age somali males who have strayed too far from Seven Corners.
15 minutes 38 minutes later, as Rebecca, Becky, Becca, and Ashlaighyeh re-embark on the security bus with their paper boxes (recycled of course) full of pad thai, one of them flips a crinkled old $100 bill to the Guatemalan street cleaner who bags the liquid shit of their golden-doodle-pug breed. "Gross-eyy-ahhhsss!" she wails, waving at him like he's deaf.
Cain, the security chief for the convoy, radios as the busses pull off; "Got some skinnys by the 66 on-ramp near Ballston that look sporty. Can we get a QRF to do a sweep?"
"Palantir recon already has them marked for a UAV sortie. It's logged." Comes the distorted reply. Cain doesn't even bother to respond. The bus hits a pothole and one of the newer guys loses his balance for a moment, his left hip knocking Becca's dinner box off her lap on, harmlessly, onto the seat next to her.
"Sorry, ma'am" he offers.
"It's like ...... whatever." She says.
Cain thinks about his home in Morgantown. 17 more days until I'm off rotation.
Thank God for redistricting.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I had ChatGPT find some information
Well, no, you didn't.
You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.
The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college.
Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.
If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time. It's just a matter of when it is your turn in the barrel, not if.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10d ago
I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.
My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this
I would have to think twice about investing in a weapon .... this is defense, you know ... more defensive.
Bruh.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11d 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.
11d 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.
11d 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.
23d 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.
29d 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.
The Gender-Swapped and all Minority Remake of MeToo is Really Good
A J.P. Morgan executive is being sued by a former junior employee for allegedly saying hilarious shit like this. If there were merits to the case, it would be comic book levels of sexual harassment. Literal "cringey HR video" remarks.
Unfortunately, most of finance twitter has already come to the conclusion that the allegations are highly or totally fabricated at worse and, at best, that there was a mutually consensual affair that the junior employee, since fired, is trying to use to legally extort settlement money.
Here's the fun twist; the executive is female, of white-and-something else origin, and the alleged victim is a male of likely southeast asian or, maybe, arab origin.
This is mostly a flavor-of-the-week alleged sex scandal that will be forgotten quickly. But the culture war implications are fun if you list them out;
Of course I am being tongue-in-cheek here because this is goofy tabloid nonsense. But goofy tabloid nonsense can have second and third order impact. If the ghost-of-the-ghost of MeToo now has junior male employees fabricating or embellishing facts to try to rend some money out of corporations, at what point do those corporations, and their legal departments, and courts, start to get fatigued of these annoyances? Do we see something coming-full-circle where off-color sexual jokes are de facto re-permitted in work environments because "everyone does them, and if you can't deal with them, you probably shouldn't be working here?"
On this one, I'm in the Nothing Ever Changes camp. MeToo both nailed a few actual monsters (Weinstein, Bacon, Matt Lauer) and caused thousands of anonymous, awkward men permanent career damage. Something something trolley problems. MeToo did not cause a fundamental shift in workplace "gender relations."
AI will never replace this level of art.
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