Rex
3yr ago
This is all great for an employee. I'm suggesting that being married is an advantage for being invited to senior leadership.
Rex
3yr ago
Being taken seriously was poor phrasing. I was referring to a general advantage that married men might have in successful business relationships or other social interactions. I have no doubt that there are domains where marriage is not helpful. Perhaps 99th percentile philosophers or physicists are two examples. There are no doubt more.
Rex
3yr ago
I wonder if they still say this.
Is this kind of thing common knowledge that is just left unsaid? Was I just in some sort of bubble where I dont hear it, but everyone knows it?
Rex
3yr ago
I agree. And i think more men in my age cohort need to hear this. I know a number of single men in their 30s. I cant point to any character defects, but I agree that there must be something there.
Rex
3yr ago
Are unmarried men taken seriously in business and life?
I listened to Charles Haywood’s latest essay on entrepreneurship and he bluntly suggested that single men are not taken seriously in business. This is something I’ve long suspected, but rarely heard articulated. The only other time I can think of hearing this in media is Alec Baldwins character in The Departed saying something to the effect that you need to be married to: “let your bosses know your not a fag and that at least one woman can tolerate you”.
It seems completely obvious to me and was a source of anxiety for many years. I married in my mid 30s. It’s also completely antithetical to the dominant narrative and I reckon you’d find countless news and opinion articles arguing the opposite.
I also wonder how kids factor into this. I recall reading an analysis of honor culture and the three Ps: provide, protect, and procreate. I don’t have enough background to fully explain this theory but the just of it is that in order to be a man that is fully accepted in a honor culture, you must be competent to excel in one or multiple Ps. I suspect that this is linked to my original question and that having a wife and kids demonstrates competence in all of these dimensions.
Rex
3yr ago
I don’t want to spoil the plot for you. Suffice it to say that the creators of the show are the worst culture warriors in media. And the direction the show will likely go in season 2 is controversial to say the least. And not controversial like the gay episode 3. Controverisial insofar as many if not most people think the narrative choices are horrendous storytelling.
Rex
3yr ago
Thanks for the review. I follow video game news more than I play video games these days, but the Last of Us game and sequel are a particularly hot culture war flashpoint in the video game world.
The developers and creators of the game are some of the most subversive, degenerate, and outspoken culture warriors in the entire industry. I don’t think I can support the show based on what I know about the series.
The narrative of the first game (season 1) was well liked and hit on some timeless themes and archetypes. the sequel to the game has one of the most controversial narratives and is extremely heavy handed on culture war issues. Even beyond the CW issues, some of the choices seem to be optimized for shitting on certain types of people, as opposed to telling a good story.
Rex
3yr ago
I think this is the goal, not the state of current practice for lending. And EBIT wouldn’t consider it. It’s pretty much revenue less opex.
Could be some sort of selection bias. Craft your filters in just the right way. Easily within the capabilities of any Accenture associate.
Rex
3yr ago
If the vaccines caused noticeable health risks it would be absurdly easy to see a correlation. Vaccination=higher mortality. That correlation isn't there.
Do you know if there is a dataset where this would be visible? Or would you need to do a controlled study? If it’s the later, do you think anyone has looked? I imagine there would be a lot of hurdles to even ask this question. Sadly the experts have lost all credibility. I personally don’t think anyone would ask that question for fear of the answer. And even if they did, I’m not sure they wouldn’t mislead us to get the proper results.
Rex
3yr ago
Ackowledging I suffer from epistemic learned helplessness, have you considered that western propaganda is just that good? It’s easy to dismiss obvious propaganda in the opening weeks and months of the war. But when you have the entire western media ecosystem singing the same pro Ukraine tune for a whole year, I think most people just shrug and say “I guess Russia is a joke after all”
I’m not even saying Russia is doing well. I’m just suggesting that a year long propaganda campaign can work on even the most skeptical people.
Rex
3yr ago
Thanks for asking. I haven’t googled this in a while but it looks like the iron air battery projects are moving right along.
Here’s some detail that was just announced on Friday. It’s all moving very quickly.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-energy-form-energy-storage-coal-iron-battery/641386/
Rex
3yr ago
Not really. It’s a known issue with some solutions that while not perfect, help quite a bit.
Offshore wind is much less volatile.
Distributed battery systems have started deploying over the last couple of years.
There’s some interesting applications of long duration storage tech. For example, I think there is a rust-iron battery that has very long and cheap storage where you rust and de rust iron.
Companies are actually deploying pilot storage tech right now.
We’re likely moving to a world where the sunny areas have solar plus storage. The east coast has offshore wind. And we have a large fleet of gas turbine plants that can be dispatched quickly when needed. Not exactly peakers, but flexible enough to support the intermittent resources.
SMR isn’t even on the map.
Rex
3yr ago
I’m talking tropical. The south generally still has winter where ag doesn’t work. Mexicos industrialization is a function of the US industry rather than home grown. Plus Mexico has significant European stock. The indigenous Mexicans are a different story.
Rex
3yr ago
Climate seems to have an impact. When you have long winters, you need to plan ahead and develope large ag or industrial capacity.
If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.
It’s pretty hard to find any warm
Climate country that produces cars. Though I imagine there’s local South American brands I don’t know if perhaps.
Rex
3yr ago
I'll grant that are can be quite subjective. I'll also note that I'm not educated in art so I dont know if i have the tools to adequately explain this. But there is no doubt to me that there is a universal aesthetic that reflects beauty. This tends to come back to nature. Landscapes and vistas. The human form or even the animal kingdom in general. Fitness in the evolutionary sense. For a long time we became better at expressing this aesthetic in various mediums. Then we took a u-turn with modern art and focused on the most absurd, ugly, and unnatural things the human mind can create.
I dont think we need to turn this into a whole modern art debate, but there is nothing natural or beautiful about that video. In fact seems to optimize for the most unnatural and deranged movement and sound one could imagine.
To answer you question, I perfer whatever art is at the opposite end of the spectrum than what is in that video (modern art).
Rex
3yr ago
We recently had a main thread post on WEF and how ithe chatter around it is low status right wing conspiracy talk
This video popped up on Twitter, proportedly of a meeting from WEF23. (That could be Shwab and Gates in the bottom right there).
This is some type of art display.
https://twitter.com/clownworld_/status/1619297161589714945?s=42&t=x77Luz_3dCmZf-BkWgQzKw
I don’t know what this tells us. Maybe it’s just the apex of modern art. Maybe it’s a satanic ritual. Either way, it’s very disturbing that this is the type of thing that the leaders of the western world enjoy.
Rex
3yr ago
I work in the energy industry, specifically around deploying new power plants. The latest round of nuclear renaissance talk has been quite annoying to read about. I can say with certainty that the utilities and power generation companies have zero interest in this stuff for a few reasons. One, its way more expensive than wind, solar, and gas. Like north of $5/watt. The other tech is about $1 to $2/watt. Conventional nuclear is also big, so your talking tens of billions of capital on a single project. Second, its incredibly risky. And not just risky for a nuclear disaster, I'm talking risk of failure to even build. Something like 2 of the 6(?) nuclear units the US has tried to build in the last 10 years have failed and left the owners with $30 billion in sunk costs. Noone wants to make that bet.
Maybe SMRs change the equation if the total cost to deploy a few is cheap enough that some companies give it a try, but im skeptical. The industry has zero appetite for this stuff. They've decided to invest their capital in wind and solar. All this nuclear talk is exclusively coming from the media and academia. SMR might work on paper, but noone has commercialized it yet. Plus the fact that 15 years ago we went through this same nuclear renaissance talk, the industry bought in and was subsequently burned badly.
I have a lot more to say but ill stop here. Things like how the U.S. has pretty much lost the industrial capacity to even build nuclear anymore. How wind and solar is actually the right choice for investment dollars rather than nuclear. Etc.
I'll leave you with one thing. On Friday i was watching Bill Maher (who i do actually like) and he had a bit on how the country hasn't really done shit to solve the climate crisis yet. He showed a stat that in 1979 we got around 40% of energy from coal and in 2019 we got around 39% of our energy from coal. Implying that we've made no progress. That seemed wrong to me, so i looked up the 2022 stats from DOE. Coal as a percentage of total generation is down to the low 20% range. A ridiculous number of coal plants have been turned off over the last 4 years. And almost every remaining plant is set to be retired in the next 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if were well under 10% by 2030.
Rex
3yr ago
This is as good a time as any to think about what the following statement means in practice.
By 2025, we aim to achieve parity at the VP+ level for U.S. minorities by increasing our minority representation from 19% to 32% and doubling the underrepresented population of African Americans/Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos
The reality of this is that there are many likely hundreds if not thousand's of staff or managers going up for a limited number of promotion spots who will likely get deferred in favor of the minority groups. I dont really feel bad for Phiser employees, however this exact type of 2025 mission seems to exist at most professional companies. Its likely going to directly affect tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands of people over the next few years.
That does however assume there are tens or hundreds of thousands of black/hispanic/latino candidates who even exist at these companies. I suspect anyone with a pulse is going to be promoted given the numbers here.
Rex
3yr ago
Does anyone know how easy or hard it is for non politically correct actors to get ahold of comparable tech?
Is the actual code to create a LLM simple enough that it could leak? Is the compute necessary to train it limited to commercial scale hardware or can you do it on a PC or small server? Is access to the training data hard to come by? Is the fact that we know it works enough for someone to develop their own models in parallel in a small dev group?
Simply put, can this tech leak to non compromised groups. Or will we only have access to the censored version.
I’m talking in the short to medium term, assuming no major strong ai breakthroughs.
Rex
3yr ago
One follow up question. Do you expect that Ukraine will take back Russian controlled territory in Donbas and Crimea? That seems to be the objective I hear these days, admittedly, from online people, rather than anything official. So I don’t k ow the stated Ukrainian objectives.
If the answer is no, and the war ends with the lines as drawn today. Who has won?
Rex
3yr ago
The only thing I have to add here is that Matt Taibbi mentioned something on his premium podcast that I haven’t heard elsewhere.
He said he believe this is a DNC opp to sideline Biden in ‘24. He implied that he believes this is the case based on certain unreported facts about the source of this brouhaha. He didn’t elaborate. More of a passing comment to his cohost.
Rex
3yr ago
Not only do i agree with @whiningcoil that nothing will happen, bit i also dont expect that the unvaxxed will lauded for their foresight. I imagine there will be even more animosity and perhaps even violence direct at unvaxxed people since they did not take on the risk that the rest of society did. I think that sentiment was always driving the cruel policies for the unvaxxed. We chose not to accept the risks for the good of society and are in their mind, freeriding on everyone else.
Thats why I still keep my vax status to myself to nearly everyone except family.
I’m also not suggesting it’s fair. But I think @walterodim’s opinion is very common.
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