sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3d ago
there's not really an event in the Olympics that has a pure test of static strength.
The clean and press is hella cool but if there's a clean in there it's not a test of static strength. And to be honest given the techniques they were using for the press it's not static strength either. Maybe someone could come up with some autistic ruleset for the press but who wants to see that? Just add a deadlift event and be done with it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4d ago
There's some places where people whose output is zero or near zero are quickly rooted out and fired (assembly lines?) but in many fields ZMP workers learn to camouflage themselves and fly under the radar from management's perspective.
Or, if you like, NMP and ZMP workers can have de facto "acceptable production".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4d ago
Nature abhors a discontinuity. You already agreed that an employee can accomplish nothing. How can it be that producing zero is possible, producing X is possible, but it's impossible to produce x/1000?
Effort, productivity, hours worked, talent - all these things are continuous variables. It's trivially obvious that someone who has little talent, low productivity, and slacks off on the clock can produce arbitrarily less than someone with talent, drive, and focus.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4d ago
It seems strange to believe that someone can have zero or negative marginal product, but not arbitrarily small positive marginal product.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4d ago
Personally, I don't believe it's possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another.
It is actually much worse than even @TitaniumButterfly is suggesting. There are Zero Marginal Product workers, but there are also Negative Marginal Product workers, those who actually reduce a team's aggregate output after joining (one example would be Ignatius J. Reilly).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
It's not missing the point, it's bringing up another separate point that bears on the argument.
It doesn't bear on the argument because it's got nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that CEOs are parasitizing comp that should be going to the barista, and the barista union will undo this injustice.
Trying to shoehorn in concerns about CEO performance is missing the point at best and quokkadom at worst ("wow, the union and I both think the CEO is overpaid, we must have a common cause! Comrades, what do you mean you don't care about the stock going up?")
Costco, for example, doesn't have this problem. Costco is well run, pays its people well, treats them well, and has had an excellent run of fairly compensated CEOs. Costco pays a total of $20mm including stock. Is Starbucks doing better than Costco? (No) Is Starbucks more complex than Costco? (No)
Okay, but Google, for example is (reasonably) well run, has vastly outperformed the S&P over the past five years, pays its employees pretty well, and people still bitch about the CEO comp. "Well, he screwed up when he laid off all th-" "but google employees don't get paid at top of ma-" no, this is a competitive business, nobody does everything right, the point is that the company is doing well and employees are paid fantastic amounts.
Why are Starbucks baristas and Google engineers alike complaining about this? It's because of leftism. Nothing to do with CEO performance.
CEO overpayment is an obvious and manifest injustice, so of course people are going to latch onto that. Saying well it's a big company with a lot of money sloshing around so stealing a few bucks is no big deal is the morality of the shoplifter and the lazy employee, not the profit maximizing shareholder or the diligent corporate steward.
Yeah, agreed, bad CEOs should get the boot. The mistake is to think this has anything to do with the amount of comp that the rank and file get.
Bad CEOs are bad for the rank and file because if your employer goes out of business it's bad news. That's about it. The other points you mention are much more relevant for investors than employees who stand to gain about tree-fiddy a week if the CEO takes a 50% paycut.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
This is missing the point. Do you think anyone complaining about starbucks unionizing would be satisfied if starbucks stock instead grew at 10x the rate of the s&p500?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
This "squeeze" has been happening since checks were invented during the Song dynasty. It turns out that people find it useful and convenient to make transactions without carrying cash or bullion.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5d ago
Thirteen years in Californian K-12 and I've never heard of this woman in my life.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
6d ago
What do you need a $200 bill for?
We're in an interesting situation where inflation has made these chicken shit denominations worthless but large denominations are not useful since big transactions are handled by check, card, wire, etc.
I don't even know when is the last time I've held a $100 bill despite selling my last car for cash money. I got an envelope of twenties for it.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
6d ago
Put, like, Bessie Coleman on one of them but keep Andrew Jackson. None of these ‘literally who?’ Activist women like they’ve got on quarters now, though.
Coleman is definitely a "literally who." How about, like, Louisa May Alcott or something?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
6d ago
The whole point is to "hate the world"
This sounds more like Gnosticism than Christianity.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7d ago
The dog has been bred to be docile. It hasn't been bred to find arbitrarily bad living conditions enjoyable. Artificial selection cares little for your quality of life.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7d ago
I can imagine a 24 hour fitness type situation is not great for this but all of the smaller gyms I went to that focused on some sport (i.e. wl or pl) obviously had a decent amount of community in them.
All this applies equally to the dog.
It doesn't, because the dog has been bred for hundreds of thousands of years for subservience. Not attacking its owner is in its bones. Is that how you view yourself?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7d ago
I’m obligated to sit at my computer and code for 8 hours per day when working.
You, in fact, are not obligated. You can quit and live off welfare. You can live on the streets. You can find another job. You can, as the kids say, keep yourself safe, if no other options are open to you. You, not somebody else, have the ultimate control over your life. Don't make the foolish argument that, since you aren't free to do literally whatever you want, you are forced to do what you currently do.
Is my life net negative?
Since you have the benefit of making yourself understood, i don't need to speculate and you can just tell me. For animals whose lives are placed in our care, we must speculate.
I see no evidence this dog experiences its life as a net negative.
I do. Sitting in Piker's basement for hours in a corner with no autonomy, stimulus, or even, as far as I can tell, daylight is a profoundly unnatural lifestyle for the dog. The dog is not able to engage in any ordinary dog behaviors (such as, uh, walking two feet) without being shocked. I view that as an obvious case of a net negative existence.
View the dog as a working animal, its job is essentially to perform as an actor contributing to his streams. In exchange it receives food, shelter and so forth. It seems like a fair deal for the dog, I see nothing wrong with this.
I'd probably rather be dead than alive as a prop dog like that. Given that the dog was almost certainly artificially bred rather than a stray, I find it repugnant to create and perpetuate a net negative life like that.
I don't see why the fact that he keeps the animal alive means that it's a fair deal.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7d ago
I wonder to what extent just decriminalizing minor physical violence would help. Like you look back to the 30s/40s and it seems like a low level of pervasive physical violence was normal. Guys get mad at eachother, fight it out, all is well (unless someone suffers a horrible permanent injury, which did happen).
Mutual combat is legal in Washington. Despite this, it's not exactly a shining city on a hill.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
7d ago
Lifting is good but lacks the social component.
Lifting absolutely has a social component. You hit the gym on a schedule, get to know the other guys, how their lifts are doing, etc. Even an antisocial guy like me found it easy to develop a "group" of guys I expect to see at the gym.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8d ago
People come here to work. If they're not going to work, there's not much point in being here.
I should be clear that the persecution fantasy here is specifically that young men are at risk of having their IP addresses traced by a visual basic GUI written by The Liberals unless they use a VPN (which they are all doing), hence why I quoted "young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long."
I don't argue that doing stuff you don't want people to find out about under your real name is inadvisable. It's just that VPNs are neither necessary or sufficient to avoid this situation.
This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.
Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.
If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9d ago
Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long
Basically nobody does this outside of persecution fantasies.
Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org? The site gets hacked an every IP that ever visited is released?
The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.
Even posters have more to fear from revealing too many details about themselves voluntarily than from attackers. And no VPN is going to save you there.
I'm starting to think you're Coleman's descendant.
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