Day: February 10, 2025, 11:57 PM
Be New
My field is a weird one. Weird bad, that is.
I’ve seen accountants get hired after not being in the active workforce for 10+ years. And yet I wouldn’t hire an IT person who’d been out of the workforce for 3 years. And in some areas, merely 2. That’s how fast it all changes.
If you’re out of the game for 3 years or more, you’re basically a newbie again.
No other field is like that.
Understim
What I thought (and continue to think) about Obama:
— He made a huge mistake in understimulating the economy leading to an excessively slow recovery
— He was right about almost all the rest
— Dems post-Obama efforts to be further left on everything haven’t worked pic.twitter.com/x1RubAnW2l
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 9, 2025
And this is why I thought then and continue to think that Matt Yglesias is a fucking idiot.
Obama made the choice that millions of Americans would lose their homes. And yes, that was a choice — it all could’ve been prevented. That was done to save the banks and specifically the banksters who wrote all that fraudulent paper. This decision ruined many Americans economically for the rest of their lives as well as making the Great Recession worse and last much longer than it otherwise would have.
Obama also oversaw the largest loss of black wealth in history. He was and is just an evil, venal person.
As president, he had one of the greatest opportunities for real reform since the 1930s. And instead he forked over the country and its wealth the rich all so he could be a billionaire later himself. No Obama, no Trump it’s also important to remember.
Spirited
When my brother was very young, he referred to himself in the third person. One time he needed to see if he’d broken bone, the nurse asked “Would you like Mommy or Daddy to go with you?”; he replied “Matthew will go alone. X is for X-Ray!”, opened the door, and walked into the door frame.
— Mike Wiser (@drmikewiser.bsky.social) April 10, 2024 at 8:57 PM
My story is also door-related.
A friend of mine that I’ve wrote about on another iteration of this blog had a horrible early life, but she still ended up being a free-spirited person who tried to enjoy the time she had. At least when I knew her, anyway.
One time we went to Gainesville, Florida, and had to enter a building with a revolving door. This was back in ’93. She didn’t travel much and I’m guessing that’s the first time she’d ever used one of those. It did not go well, to say the least. She got trapped inside for at least two cycles around and on one rotation she screamed, laughing, “It’s over for me! Just go on without me! Save yourself!”
Of course everyone was looking at us, some confused, some amused. Neither she nor I cared.
She eventually made it out and we found the indie record store we were looking for. As we left, though, we used the side door.
PDQ
when i was a teenager i read lesswrong and it was great but then i believed the part when everyone said markets were efficient and it ruined like four years of my life
— near (@nearcyan) February 10, 2025
It’s funny and telling how many people (the vast majority) who believe the “market efficiency” hypothesis have never held a corporate job.
Get one and you’ll become disabused of that notion right quick.
Retail or Helldesk
I wonder which career leads to hating the general public the most quickly?
If I had to guess I’d say retail, followed either by helpdesk or food service. I know that working helpdesk and helpdesk-related roles early in my career caused me to become much more of a misanthrope. How could it not? In that role, you encounter the stupidest people who are proud of being clueless dumbasses all day every day. And they are also often aggressively rude about it.
Were I to go back in time, I would do more to avoid the helldesk as that really is just a sociality killer. I think I’d probably have more friends if I had never did that sort of work as I was quite social comparatively when I came out of the army. After working helldesk for a few years, though, I wanted nearly nothing to do with anyone.
Rage Quit
I’ve got some more necessary pushback against the No one should know anything at all about how to do their jobs if it happens to involve a computer in some way mindset.
I’m not arguing that computers aren’t complex. Here I’m just standing against the idea that it should be permissible for someone not to know the name of the application they’ve used for 10+ years and that sort of nonsense.
In reality, someone not being able to recall or have any clue how to use their most commonly-touched tool is more akin to a grounds maintenance crewmember not knowing what a mower is or how to start it up. Look, clowns, we’re not asking people to program an OS from scratch or change BIOS settings. We’re just asking them as a driver to know what a goddamn steering wheel is (to switch to another metaphor).
Though I grew up using computers, I learned the essential control interfaces in a couple of days. They are not hard. I learned what the common applications were I use in a few seconds. And I did that when I was four years old. So if a four-year-old can do it so can you.
None of this is actually difficult. That we pretend like it is to coddle doofuses is just wrong IMO.
Unknown Error – The Cruel Earth
This is the coolest little-known thing I’ve found lately in my scouring the earth for good music.
Blueprint
The best blueprint for the future is to do nearly everything the degrowthers say we should not do.
We need:
- Massive increase in electricity production — we really need to attempt to make it too cheap to meter
- Building all kindsa shit in space
- Massively increasing our industrial capacity even if it is not “profitable”
- Geongineering, despite the risks
Etc. We simply must become the gods now we only pretend to be.
We have no choice. It’s that or oblivion.
Unhoused
Modern Conservatism is basically blowing up your house with your family in it to make sure your smug liberal brother dies too
— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) February 9, 2025
Conservatives are indeed the worst about this, but it’s a very American thing to willingly hurt yourself as long as it harms someone else just as badly. I will never understand this way of thinking, but it is in fact an integral part of the American ethos.
Mapping Antarctica’s hidden ice-free lands: a blueprint for conservation.
Frupidity: The Silent Killer of Productivity and Innovation. Frupidity is loved by MBAs and accountants, so it’s never going away.
How Noether’s Theorem Revolutionized Physics. Understanding Noether’s Theorem is the key to comprehending why so much happens in QM. QM emerges from symmetry and symmetry breaking.
It seems few people know what an “indirect cost” is or why it has to be 40-60%. There are better ways to do this (as the existing one is pretty terrible), but what Musk is doing is clueless clownery.
Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Boost U.S. Transformer Production. Probably should not make Megatron.