haroldbkny
11mo ago
Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. In this case it's caused by the fact that a number of major governments decided to spend several years printing money like there was no tomorrow, and then tomorrow came.
I agree that's a likely culprit, and I hated the crazy COVID spending, but is it the only culprit? Prices went up around the Russia war, and everyone said that much of the price rise was due to supply chain problems. Like, because gas was so much pricier, it impacted every good that requires gas to transport. Couldn't that cause massive price increases irrespective of how much money supply there is?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Hence why employees, especially start-up employees—if they can—should diversify their stock-compensation as soon as possible. Diversification is the only free lunch. You do not want to get diluted out much less end up holding the bag.
Oh, believe me, I do. At every vest, I immediate sell all of it, and then use it to buy index funds. The problem is that my company never gives in-year stock grants, so I'm vesting what I earned last year, which is now worth peanuts.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
I find a lot of people I work with from Asia still mask a lot. And no, these were not Asian people who masked a lot before Covid, at the max it was only when they were sick.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Is there a way to see all the posts I've liked? I often want to revisit these to see if there are replies.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Thanks! never noticed save before
haroldbkny
11mo ago
But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd. Covid was empirical proof of that. The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do". Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore.
Like others, I also identify with this sentiment and I feel like I could have written this exact thing. However, maybe that shouldn't be surprising. After all, we're both on the Motte. As a rule, I try to never believe in my own exceptionalism, or the exceptionalism of any group I'm a part of. It's just too easy to think that you're special, or that you're right. Surely there must be tons of other groups that would point at us and claim we're hypocrites due to some rubric that we're not even aware of.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Surely you know about how Canada's CDC actually recommended gloryholes for pandemic-safe sex, which is the most ridiculous and short-sighted wannabe bandwagon jumping thing I've ever seen:
If you're bantering back and forth, you're already in a good spot. There's two ways you can go.
You can ask something where there's obvious subtext, like "we should get coffee/dinner sometime", or make it even more strong by actually setting up a specific time to get coffee or dinner. This was how I asked out my now wife, and at least a couple previous girlfriends. Of course, I also failed with this many times, too. You can do this if you feel you already have a good enough rapport such that she probably already likes you, or if she thinks highly enough of you such that she would be flattered by you asking her out, not weirded out.
Alternatively, you can try to start setting up social engagements with groups and include her in them. This is safer, and you can use it to keep building rapport, but eventually you'll probably have to try to "ladder leap" by doing the first thing anyway.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
I can smell weed on people easily. Maybe avoid smoking a jay before approaching a church girl, unless you know she's into that, too. She might not take you seriously, or might think you're not her style.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
A common issue is not pressing the "GPT-4" button in the ChatGPT interface, and getting GPT-3.5 when you think you're running 4; and not being familiar enough with the interface to recognize that the blue-green icon means it's a lot dumber. E.g. Bryan Caplan fell for that.
Which blue-green icon are you referring to?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
working out 6 times a week doing high-volume bodybuilding style training in order to preserve every shred of muscle I've built over the past 10 years of intermittently working out
I don't know anything about this stuff, but I thought I remember hearing people (maybe even Motte people) say that it's much easier to have weight loss cycles separate from bulking cycles. I'd be curious to know, because I'm also losing weight and working out, though I'm more focused on losing weight, and I'm working out much less intensely than you. I'm just working out a few times per week, and if my smart scale is to be trusted (I don't actually trust it, it's too inconsistent day to day), I'm losing muscle, despite the working out. But still, my body fat percentage is still going down, meaning in losing more fat than muscle.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
What you say about the overhead of work definitely makes sense, and I agree, but my question would be, why have we decided as a society that a 40 hour workweek is the general standard? How did we come to that particular number? Why is it that most employers don't require a 60 or 80 hour workweek instead, even if only implicit? Why are almost all work places willing to tolerate 40 hours as the optimal balance between overhead and productivity?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
I did, then moved back. I mostly didn't like having to deal with performance management. I felt like a soulless PoS, and I especially didn't like the concept of having unregretted attrition quotas.
Also, it felt more like I was being judged on my ability to act like a business person, which I know very little about how to do. There seemed to be no real rules, just a notion that you had to keep your reports happy, and then make decisions according to some unspecified ever-changing rubric, that no one really knew. It was all about having to make decisions and then justify them somehow. Basically, work felt more than ever like a game of Calvinball. Now that I'm back to being a high-level software engineer, there is some aspect of Calvinball in my work, but certainly less than as a manager.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
I'm so glad I get to spend my 8 hours of recreation commuting, paying bills, dealing with house issues, cleaning, shopping, etc.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Well, I guess if they factored the fact that everyone has to manage their own life into the equation, and devoted some time to that, too. Or at least commuting time. 7 hours of work, 7 hours of recreation, 1 hour commuting, 1 hour dealing with other shit, and 8 hours sleep. Or something.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Why's that?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
That's an interesting perspective. I've never been a project manager, but I've enjoyed the project management I've done in other roles, and I've considered switching to be one. Yes, project managers are somewhat impotent. I view them as little extension arms of the higher level leaders, to be their eyes and ears on the ground and report back. But I guess if you have a good mind for organization and setting up mechanisms, you don't want to do anything too technical, and you want less power and less responsibility, I feel like it could be alright.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Dunno. I'm not claiming to have a perfect system or anything. I just think that if the "8 hours for ___" system is really why things are the way they are (and I have heard that referenced before as a reason), then it seems pretty shitty that so much of people's time is prespent on stuff that doesn't make them happy or better off in any way. It can certainly be difficult to manage one's life on so little time per day, and still feel happy and like life is worth living, that you're not just frittering away your life doing chores, with no recreation to speak of.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Well truly, I never really understood why anyone wants power at work. Who cares if you have power? It's a paycheck. As long as I'm doing my job and getting paid for it, that's all that matters to me. If I don't get to command anyone, that's just fine with me.
The only way I'd feel differently is if I had a true passion for something that I needed to see done, which I've rarely ever felt about work. And I get the feeling most others feel the same way. We pretend otherwise, since there's an unspoken rule that you need to pretend that you're really passionate about work, but to be honest, it's hard to always be truly passionate about whatever work throws your way, and it's hard to maintain passion for so long when work grinds you down so much.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Probably cheap, legible, and also the corporations benefit from seeming cutesy and harmless.
haroldbkny
11mo ago
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution.
Somewhat tangential to your question later in the post, but I was so saddened by seeing people I know post this meme the other day:
https://preview.redd.it/ukazfxdcn2ua1.png?auto=webp&s=5f4ebcbab0593b4432eb4bb1afaab9138caef5a5
It really made me feel honestly sad and worried for where we are, that people are honestly putting their pet gender theories, which don't seem to be based on anything more than definitional assertions and mob power, on par with physical science, and mathematics. They're claiming that their gender theories are "biology", but on what basis?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
Well, if you're defining power so generally, why do you feel that as a project manager you get less power but just as much responsibility? Can you indicate the context for what you mean by that? What sort of responsibility are you referring to?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
https://twitter.com/JakeHerrington/status/1443286841533374469
This link seems broken
I'm just asking for specifics. Keep it specific to what power and responsibility a project manager would have or want. Or not want, and have forced upon them.
Does anyone think that the current massively inflated prices will ever fall? I'm still so pissed off about it, a year later. Due to the fact that much of my income is based on the company's stock, which massively fell the same time inflation went nuts, I make less money now than I did a few years ago, despite having been promoted and working harder than ever. Couple that with inflation making my money worth less, and it's a wonder I can afford any non-essential spending at all. Every single good that I buy has increased in price by very noticable amounts. Generally, many people may not have the same problem as me, where their income is based on stock, but still, most people's cost of living has greatly increased and their income has stayed the same. Prices have been so out of control lately.
Is it just the Russia-Ukraine war that's keeping prices so high, or is it more than that, like aftershock from the pandemic, lockdowns, and COVID relief spending upending the economy? What's the best to hope for? If the war ends, is all we have to look forward to a reduction in inflation, meaning that prices will stop going up? Or is deflation a possibility, to bring prices back down to previous levels? I know close to nothing about econ, but I always hear deflation talked about as if it's this terrible thing. I don't really know why, I guess just because it destabilizes the market, and makes outstanding debts larger. To me right now, my dollar being worth more sounds great. Is deflation immediately following inflation a bad thing if it just brings prices back to previous levels?
More options
Context Copy link