stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Curious, why doctors rather than hospital administrators?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Moreover, it seems the technology for carrying out assassinations without being caught has improved by leaps and bounds since, say, the heyday of Weather Underground in the 1960s and ‘70s; 3D printed ghost guns and improvements in robotics and computer vision, not to mention the Internet, mean that it’s possible to set up an untraceable, remote-controlled, perhaps even autonomous killbot to assassinate someone without even being physically present at the time. Yes, CCTV and vastly higher amounts of SIGINT from ubiquitous smartphones do make catching criminals easier. But I still think the balance favors the would-be assassin; if the killbot can be assembled days or weeks in advance, in, say, an abandoned warehouse overlooking a parade where the victim will be marching, good luck finding the assassin.
Uh, this is all theoretical of course.
Anyhow, I chalk it up to us being an older, fatter, richer, and more docile society than we were during the Days of Rage.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I initially thought this might not actually be a lie in the strict sense, because Kaling’s family may have lived in East Africa prior to immigrating (like the family of Rishi Sunak, for instance). This would make Kaling and her brother “African-American” in the same sense as Elon Musk.
But nope, turns out the Chokalingams came straight to America from India, no politically-expedient stopover in Africa involved. Which makes Mindy’s brother an out-and-out liar.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Non-Extremely Online person here; is “SickTok” at all related to Spoonerspoonie-ism? (It’s all a lack of pies, I tell you)
What I can't steelman is high CEO pay for people like Mary Barra or Marissa Mayer who do an awful job as CEO, do real damage to their companies, and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aren’t most CEOs compensated in equity/options, precisely to align their incentives with those of their shareholders? A CEO who is paid in shares, or in at-the-money call options struck at the beginning of her tenure will, by definition, stand to make no money by tanking her company’s share price.
I don’t know the details of the two cases you mentioned, but potentially the steelman is that from the perspective of shareholders/the board of directors/whoever decides executive comp, hiring these folks was a positive EV bet ex ante, which turned out to be a dud ex post. That a given instance of a positive EV bet pays out negative is not evidence that taking the bet was a bad decision.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.
If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Can the President annul a previously-issued pardon? If so, this suggests another interesting possibility: Trump could proactively pardon all of his cabinet members/executive branch employees for any crimes committed during his presidency, then order them to commit some crime, then (assuming they comply rather than resign) threaten to revoke the pardon unless they do exactly what he says. Boom, instant leverage over his cabinet!
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Surely Japan is, by global standards, and even compared to Western Europe, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (that last one is debatable). It’s hard to argue that they’re on the whole more Westernized than Western Europe, the literal birthplace of Western-ness, but certainly in some respects Japan is very Westernized.
I think you are arguing that Japan is not as woke/culturally Blue as Western Europe, which seems broadly true to me. But this is, strictly speaking, distinct from WEIRD-ness, and more importantly there are senses in which Japanese culture displays the same lack of memetic antibodies against wokeness as Western European cultures (namely, relatively low emphasis on extended family/clan relationships, and “pathological altruism”).
I’m really struggling to see how Japan is culturally much closer to deep Red Tribe. Respect for ancient traditions perhaps? But Red Tribe (like all of America) doesn’t really have much in the way of ancient traditions. And if Japan is so culturally, whence their much-lower-than-US-Red-Tribe TFR? Do you think that’s entirely explained by their greater emphasis on education?
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
he has always towed the line
Ah, my favorite pet peeve rears its ugly head again: it’s toe the line
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.
However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.
Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.
stuckinbathroom
8mo ago
Fiery but mostly peaceful elephants
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.
By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)
One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy.
Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!
Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!
WK: Don’t try it!
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
None of them have been dishonorably discharged for their shenanigans.
Though if you look under the dog masks, there’s a good chance you’ll find some dishonorable discharge
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drums. Curtains.
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Her parents are dentists, that’s all I remember about them
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
weasels and malfoys were the two types of old money with no money
Uh, since when did the Malfoys have no money? They were famously generationally wealthy, as evidenced by Lucius Malfoy purchasing a new Nimbus 2001 for each member of the Slytherin Quidditch team in Chamber of Secrets
I’m utterly baffled; what could “sigma” possibly mean in this context? Usually “epsilon” is the mathematician’s Greek letter of choice to denote very small quantities.
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.
The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).
By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
Frankly even the pay might be a tough sell: if we’re looking to slash wasteful spending, why would we pay bureaucrats even more?
(Yes, yes, I’m aware that the goal is to hire talented bureaucrats who will use their prodigious skills to bring government closer to private-sector levels of efficiency and productivity and thus more than make up for their higher salaries. But it’s hard to get buy-in from the public, especially the Red Tribe, on such second-order concerns)
stuckinbathroom
9mo ago
median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer.
I’m not following… absent some additional assumptions (e.g., that the median income in your town is initially >= top 10% income for the US), how does inviting people who make less than the top 10% make your town poorer? The part about the top 10% of taxpayers providing 70% of tax receipts seems irrelevant.
Is the Fed not required to disclose its asset holdings on a regular basis? If so, wouldn’t we find out soon if they were hodling BTC
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