domain:betonit.substack.com
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
21hr ago
Not the same person, but:
(1) I'm paying mostly cash, since I have it and I generally dislike the idea of taking out gigantic loans just to have the bank second-guess everything. Of the 220-k$ price tag, I already have 110 k$ of investments, and my brother has agreed to lend 40 k$ to me. While construction is ongoing, I expect to make up the remaining 70 k$ with my salary and (if absolutely necessary) a 35-k$ unsecured loan and my two 10-k$ credit cards.
(2) I drew up a rough design on my own, and then hired an architect to double-check the suitability of a few lots that I found on Zillow. The builder's in-house architect then made some small changes.
(3) I like insulation and heat pumps, and dislike closets and non-flat roofs.
(4) I bought the lot in February. I expect to get a construction schedule in the next week or two.
(5) The permit process has not yet started, but I don't expect much hassle. This lot does not have any environmental entanglements (such as a floodplain), and I certainly don't need any variances.
(6) (not applicable in Pennsylvania)
anti_dan
21hr ago
Given the number of closures of PP in states that banned abortion, they do not.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
21hr ago
Interesting premise let us know how it is.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21hr ago
I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps
If you’re smart enough to get a math PhD then you’re smart enough to code. Might take some time but you can do it if you want.
I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away.
That’s… the majority of what awaits you outside of academia. Especially if you’re restricting yourself to opportunities of the form “trading my STEM skills for financial compensation received at regular, reliable intervals”. Are you sure you want to leave academia? The grass ain’t always greener.
There are always people on LessWrong from bespoke AI research institutes posting about their work and sometimes even advertising open positions, maybe you could explore something like that? (They tend to recruit from within their own social circles but it’s worth looking into…)
Gaashk
21hr ago
I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:
- Installed a metal roof
- Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.
A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.
No, run. Treat those “opportunities” as lava. They’re but rebranded and/or higher class Mechanical Turk.
Know Your Worth is a cliche, but for a PhD in Math, $40 an hour is an insult. For an hourly position with no benefits, it should be deep into three figures an hour before a conversation even begins.
I and many of my acquaintances get regularly hit up with Exciting! AI! Opportunities! From LinkedIn-and-the-like thots—or excuse me—professional women with photos where they feel most confident to best position themselves for marketing purposes.
We used to chuckle at them like “hot girls in your zip code,” but we don’t anymore given the lack of novelty.
NunoSempere
21hr ago
As an example, image sharing and videoconferencing are much faster & better. Slack is actually much better than IRC; it casually embeds a version of Skype just because. It allows for sharing images. Good threads.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand
I think the lack of concern foe whether the methods actually work, and thus you go through fads that are dumped for other fads rather than trying to actually figure out what methods actually get kids to improve in a given subject. This would absolutely never fly anywhere else. If I try a new method at work, and I don’t see any improvement, im not going to be allowed to keep going. If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work. Teachers and administrators can flit from idea to idea, have kids do worse, and nobody cares.
MathWizard
Good things are good
21hr ago
Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.
I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.
So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.
Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.
Gaashk
21hr ago
Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.
Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21hr ago
If pushback against Trump is so widespread, it should be trivial to demonstrate. Where are the high profile Republicans standing in opposition to Trump? Where is this significant pushback?
one of us is simply wrong in our understanding of reality, there's no other way around it. And I don't think it's me.
Look, I don't know you. I can't speak to your personal experience. All I can observe is that on a national level, every prominent Republican who has stood up to Trump has either been whipped into line or is effectively no longer part of the American conservative coalition. On a personal level, I can observe that family members who were literally Republican party officers for decades were chased out of the party for not being sufficiently deferential to Trumpist conspiracy theories.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
21hr ago
How much did you pay and for what make and model?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
22hr ago
Other common things young girls said they feel the need to do during sex include having no pubic hair, making pleasurable noises, doing what the man says, and orgasm or pretend to. Mr Cleary said students admit that these expectations are coming from porn.
This sort of undermines the rest.
You won't believe he shocking things men expect from women as a result of porn!
- Choking
- Pleasurable noises
- Her to orgasm (or pretend to)
When late GenX was coming of age, those last two were not only part of a major motion picture, they were in the trailer.
Gaashk
22hr ago
It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.
I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.
Rov_Scam
22hr ago
It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.
anon_
22hr ago
The CEO of Glenn Valley Foods was shocked to find ICE carting away a dozen of his workers even though he participated fully in E-Verify.
From the point of view of an employer, I dunno what to tell him. If we want employers to be part of an enforcement system, we need to have some assurance that if they do the work, it will actually result in not hiring ineligible workers. This is a guy that provides significant training and value to employees -- the exact kind of person we want to incentivize to hire legals. Instead he's going back and using the same E-Verify system that sucks in the first place.
gattsuru
22hr ago
Apologies, KJA's pretty much my central example of Extruded Book Product; the comparison's not a compliment to either of them.
Corvos
22hr ago
Re: private schools, would I be right in saying that most of them are grandfathered in? Particularly thinking of the Catholic schools.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
22hr ago
Sanderson writes very satisfying stories and he's known for sticking endings, but I think there is a sameness to his plot beats and his prose is definitely lukewarm, and I can never stop seeing the character sheets (and the Mormonism) floating around on the page. I agree that Tchaikovsky sometimes wanders off into self-indulgent tangents, but his ideas are exceptional and his writing is just better, especially in recent works.
I've only read Kevin J. Anderson once or twice and thought he was borderline awful.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
22hr ago
You are not wildly off, but this is an exaggeration. There are many private schools at the secondary level in Japan. They cost more and in general may have a higher academic standard. Their accreditation is only relevant in terms of what they may prepare students to expect in the college entrance exam. In some cases these private high schools have International Baccalaureate programs, etc. As for university, the highest ranked schools are public (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, etc.) But any kid from any high school, public or private, who can pass the entrance exam can get in. This, as you say, is the purpose of cram schools at the high school level.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
22hr ago
Starting on The Sword of Christ by Giles Corey.
gattsuru
22hr ago
Tchaikovsky's not quite a Zahn or Pratchett-level writer, but he's pretty worthwhile; will definitely second if any of his books grasp you. I dunno that I'd say better than Sanderson -- Children of Time had more interesting characters and core ideas, but the plot and especially denouement was a muddled mush in a way that even the more trite Sanderson stuff (or even some 'better' Kevin J Anderson stuff!) never hits. But definitely at least on the same or similar tiers.
TheDemonRazgriz
22hr ago
In my opinion the true blackpill for the anti-immigration hardliners is the bipartisan refusal by the government to actually enforce E-Verify, which quite literally is already on the books (relatedly the floated exception for illegal immigrants employed in agriculture and hospitality). A crackdown on illegal immigration which refuses to penalize employers for hiring illegal immigrants is a completely unserious attempt at a crackdown. The administration seems to be optimizing for flashy headline-grabbing deportation raids while avoiding anything that might actually disrupt the status quo.
There's no question its a cross subsidy. The medicaid stuff pays for the salaries of the same staff and the rent of the same building.
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