domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
47m ago
Especially the average white male county judge in counties where they are elected. Oh boy.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
48m ago
Bottom tier: Sotomayor and KBJ. There are random white male judges (who went to unremarkable state law schools) I could pick from my state's court of appeals (not even supreme court) who would leave both in the dust.
Next tier: Kavanaugh and Barrett. Subpar by federal appellate judge standards. Probably still higher than most of the recent retirees from the Supreme Court, though.
Next tier: Thomas (probably higher when younger--some of his opinions interpreting and harmonizing conflicting federal statutes are not for lightweights) and Roberts. Maybe Gorsuch, but maybe he's highest tier. Gorsuch's writing style is excessively casual and sometimes sloppy, which I don't think is a good feature for a justice.
Highest tier: Alito and Kagan.
Provided advice to a guy in almost exactly your situation. He's doing a lot better now after investing ~3 years in his crappy job.
- $50k is low. If you're competent and patient, you can improve this.
- You can determine your relative skill by:
- Exercising via leetcode or codewars to see where you stack up
- Interviewing elsewhere
- If you are too lazy to determine your skill or exercise your skills outside of work, do not under any circumstances go get a masters.
- If you move out of your parents and towards your job, make sure the place you're moving to provides other benefits (economic, social, health [getting outside])
- Believing "a career" is antiethical to human life does concern me. Expecting growth from yourself in exchange for huge swaths of your time is not asking too much. Nor does a career have to be an endless treadmill of progress. Moving out of your parent's house and having a reasonable 401(k) is an OK place to stop striving. I'm sympathetic to there being limits to how much you should try, especially given progressive tax rates
You're correct that the industry will shrink for people who can't beat AI. I am still hiring, but have lost patience with people who cannot operate independently. The clock is ticking far more slowly than the world would have you believe, but you'll definitely want to muster up some energy to evolve.
You mentioned not having a plan, not thinking about money. You'd be surprised how easy it is. If you're starting at ground zero, can I suggest I will teach you to be rich? It's 80% correct and a short read.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Would it be fair to say that the whole disagreement here is that @fmac is interpreting "Tell them not to have premarital sex" as, literally, programs telling kids not to have premarital sex, where you're interpreting it as reversing three generations of cultural change?
Yes, I'd say that's entirely fair.
But, although I'm not criticizing you for sticking with Chesterton's wording, doesn't it feel like "difficult" is grossly understating the problem here?
Also entirely fair.
I would say that "sex education" is a failure all around and that we've so thoroughly given up on designing a culture and education program to achieve goals that we don't have any clue how to do so. Healthy cultures are evolved phenomena, and most cultures currently alive are no longer suited to their environments.
This is not a high-effort response, and yours certainly is, so I apologize for the inadequacies.
Hadad
1hr ago
How do you imagine us suffering? What harm are you imagining China inflicting on us if we use too many bunker busters in Iran? China will never harm the US mainland, because mainland threats against nuclear powers don't happen. Perhaps, if we ran out of resources for awhile, we wouldn't be able to protect Taiwan. But, really, Taiwan belongs to China as it is -- same as Cuba is ours. We shouldn't really be protecting them anyway, we should be building our own domestic chip manufactories.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
It would be better for the first 10-50 years, after that, open question.
Iran is pretty paternalistic and I don't want to live there.
a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.
Something that Americans also adopted the instant the birth-control pill hit the shelves (hippies were famous for this- they said free love was natural for a reason, but every "all-natural" person exhibits profound ignorance of what technological advancement lets you see as natural, like how everything you eat has been specifically bred for gigantism). Being able to not get pregnant on a whim is a massively transformative technology; so is having so much food the poor only starve if they're explicitly trying to, for that matter (and the Germans invented the chemical process that makes that possible, too).
traditional religious morality
The foundation of traditional religious morality is not meaningfully distinguishable from "sex bad reeeeee" (no other intelligent examination other than "Bible says it's bad"), so it makes sense traditions holding that viewpoint get absolutely bodied by the new reality that a good chunk of why it was destructive is now obviated by new realities. Some traditionalists have tacitly accepted this, but they won't actually say it for Overton window reasons.
The more intelligent traditionalists focus on "but a woman who has a body count is spiritually degraded" for that reason- if they had any better arguments, I think they'd be making them, but they aren't. So "vibes" (and "men want virgins", when they're being more honest- and I can accept that doing things that help men would make society better, but in a general sense rather than this specifically) is obviously the best they have.
I'm sympathetic to those for whom biology meshes better with first-century sexual norms, but they're too busy thinking with their other head in this matter. So putting them in charge in a context where technology has obviated most of the previous reality they cling to is (rightly) viewed by everyone else as destructive. (The same is true when you put women doing that in charge, but rejecting that is an even more cutting-edge idea.)
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I guess what I'm trying to understand about your view is why knowing the scale doesn't matter.
Bigger country = need more bombs = less bombs to deter China. Why isn't that important to understand?
I guess you can respond by saying "well we should simply make more bombs", which is correct, but the political party who is more willing to make bombs is currently in power and they're not exactly going hard on increasing defense production (happy to be proven wrong here, I would like USA to be stronger vs China than it is).
If Ted Cruz overplays America's hand due to ignorance, we all suffer
Hadad
1hr ago
I agree. But I look around at modern society -- hateful, demoralized, mentally ill, pumped full of medications, fat, not having kids, eschewing relationships -- and I struggle to think paternalism would be worse.
Modern liberalism is great at facilitating hedonism. That seems to be it. This, of course, makes it wildly popular, but I don't think that's a good thing.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
We need less redditor justices!
Fewer. We need fewer redditor justices.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I am actually somewhat in favor of more paternalism, but it's hard to have that not go absolutely fucking sideways
oats_son
1hr ago
Haha, this was actually what I was thinking of, I think. Quoting that study exposes you as a redditor. We need less redditor justices!
Hadad
1hr ago
All fair concerns for you to have, just not ones I share. I genuinely don't think it matters at all if Ted Cruz knows the population of Iran, because its population isn't one of the relevant metrics for our decisions.
Hadad
1hr ago
I'm sympathetic to fatties, I'd say there's plenty of reasons. But it also goes for smokers, drinkers, for people who get into toxic relationships, etc.
Comfort is seductive. Pleasure is seductive. No matter the costs, people gravitate toward them. This is why society should try to restrict them, not facilitate them -- nobody needs help pursuing vices.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
These are logistics, and it is not the place of US Senators to do the logistics work of the US military.
Doing another Ceteris Paribus, I would much rather my elected officials understood the scope/scale of the military conflict they are pre-commiting the military people to executing on.
For a more tangible point, every missile fired at Iran, and every defensive interceptor used to protect American assets against Iran, cannot be used for a war against China. The bigger Iran is, the more of those you will need. T
here is a serious opportunity cost to committing to a war, especially when you are in a cold war with a country that is expanding its military faster than you.
Maybe you think it's more important to smash Iran than be maximally prepared against China, in which case fair enough.
But to confidently say "I don't care if the people in charge of deciding to start a war don't understand basic facts about the scope and scale of the war they're committing us to" I think you should have much higher standards for your elected officials.
Jiro
1hr ago
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
I think "not being a slave" is pretty positive.
hanikrummihundursvin
1hr ago
That might be true but I'm not sure what that changes.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I did not say the population would drop 80%. I said food production would drop by 80% (though that's a rough estimate). There's give in a few places (the USA exports food and that would be redirected; grain-fed animals would be replaced by eating the grain; also, while Westerners do need more food than Third-Worlders to not die - because the body stunts from undernutrition, but that's not retroactive - we don't need quite as much food as we get) - just not 5x worth of give.
I think you also have a different opinion of what constitutes "a going concern" than FCfromSSC.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
I got nothing for that, fair enough
Honestly I ask myself that every time I see a fat person. I have my own shitty habits but that level of self-destruction blows my mind.
Hadad
1hr ago
Healthy lifestyles are harder work than unhealthy ones, and people are accustomed to self-destructive hedonism. Why don't fat people just eat less?
Why not both? Is that really so much to ask?
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