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2022

bullshit jobs

If a man calls a girl 3-5 times who doesn’t want to hear from him an tells him to fuck off everytime, its harassment and he can be charged... if a man calls 100 people a day who all tell him to fuck off and continues that everyday for 20 years... we call that a [sales] career.

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the fact that expertise in a particular field of compliance and expertise in the government bureaucracy mandating the compliance is the exact same skillset and a common career path is jumping back and forth between the two “Sure i can help you comply with these rules! I was the one enforcing them!” “Sure i can help you write and enforce the rules! I’ve spent the past 4 years complying with them!” Does very little in my confidence for this field. - /u/KulakRevolt

a reply:

I proposed once on this forum that some value is "derivative" of other value, so that none of the people doing sales at an oil company could exist without someone manning the well. I remember being mostly told that economics isn't measured that way. (I consider that economics' problem.)

teenagers lost rights

I think it’s important to recognize that, whether his argument is sound or not, teenagers do occupy a rather historically unique position in the present. People between the ages of 12 and 18, or even 12 and 21, are probably the only group who have steadily lost rights over the last century and a half (maybe dating from 1880 in the US?) as a result of their membership in an immutable group, rather than gaining equal rights with others, as has been the trend for other such groups. Obviously age is more mutable than e.g. race in the absolute sense, but certainly it’s immutable in the sense that it’s not alterable by any human power, only by time itself.

This does seem a bit strange, considered from the perspective of an alien observer: 250 years ago, Alexander Hamilton was selling cargo at 15, publishing influential political writings while attending Columbia University in New York City at the age of 17 and serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp at 19. Now, at those ages respectively, he couldn’t work, instead being forced to be in school, he wouldn’t even be able to drive in NYC, and he couldn’t knock back eggnog with old Georgey either. And why is this? I don’t really know. - some user on /r/TheMotte

latch

the right has latched onto a boogeyman of election fraud, while the left has latched onto the idea of internal coups. Both are dangerous in the sense that they create an atmosphere of paranoia about the acts and intentions of the other side. That’s where the violence will come from. When people see the other side as untrustworthy enemies, there’s no good will. Whoever is president after Biden will be president of his own voters, not the country. And the rest, for reasons of their side’s choosing will not accept him as president. And with each claiming the republic is at stake, the risk of nut jobs getting a gun or planting a bomb or whatever else starts making sense. - /u/maiqthetrue

Looks like it was deleted. Can't find link.

microsoft acquires activision blizzard

It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. - curiousllama (HackerNews)

smoke-filled dark pools

An Atonomy of Bitcoin Price Manipulation

Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools. Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now. But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more. Crypto will have it’s 2001-style GC cycle, the useful stuff will stick around until Goldman owns it and the SEC makes a show of regulating it, the tulip garbage will wash out leaving behind a bunch of rich guys who are really annoying because they never built anything, and we’ll go back to arguing about programming languages. - benreesman

I truly appreciate your experience and cynicism here. People who haven't worked in financial markets have a hard time appreciating how deep the muck can get. Which makes them especially valuable suckers for the unregulated markets. - wpietri in reply

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eldritch sun

{% include centerImage.html url="/assets/eldritch_sun.jpg" desc="Hillarious" title="Eldritch Abomination: the Sun" alt="LMAO" %}

discussion on HackerNews about census 2020

I'm in favor of removing the race question from the census. It proliferates collectivist thinking (my people/kin vs others, based on bloodlines or appearance) over individualism. It is also used as a justification for implementing discriminatory policies, ironically in the name of fighting discrimination. - cherrycherry98

and other replies:

The census exists to inform policy. If there is discrimination based on race, then we're better off measuring it so we can address it than burying our heads in the sand. Of course, this may lead to targeted policies, just as insulin is applied to people with a diabetes diagnosis, and not to the general population. - karpierz

The comparison to diabetes has one major flaw. You either have or don't have diabetes and the fact that you are tested for it does not change your diabetes status. You can only measure it, but your measurement won't alter the situation. But by constantly reminding people of their racial category, a feedback loop is created. The more are people defined by their race, the more important will they consider their racial category. They will also start viewing more interactions through the race angle, especially the negative ones. Not "the policeman was rude because he is an asshole", but "the policeman was rude because I am of a different race from him".

I cannot imagine a scenario where constant race consciousness leads to people being less concerned about anything that can be construed as racially charged. - inglor_cz

As pointed out elsewhere in the comments on this thread, the census may have accidentally ended up enforcing white hegemony in America. See the anecdotes of people suppressing the reporting of partial indigenous or African heritage in order to pass as white. The data made America look far more white than it ever was. And despite the recent trend I doubt the effect has vanished. Are we so sure we want to be using that data for policy? - retrac

Anyway, colorblindness is inherently a pro status quo approach

If the data is bad then improve data collection - Trung Tran