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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Because they make more money than they’re paying in fines. They also may be making more money violating laws than they’re paying in fines, but that’s how they’ll have to determine how they conduct business.

    Basically - and this is mostly for tech but I suspect it applies to other markets - the US is the single largest market. “Europe” is second, depending on how you want to define it, but even just the EU is a very big market. China is big and growing, and most companies are trying their best to keep growth there. Asia collectively could be huge, but the attempts to collectivize Asia have not worked out well, historically speaking.

    But the takeaway is that a company will exit s market if it’s losing money, generally speaking. No one is sacrificing earnings to make sure Belgians have access to the latest phones out of the goodness of their hearts.


  • I think they also have an EMP effect that can damage ship/sat electronics.

    But, like the internet, a sub is a series of tubes. You have a big horizontal tube that the people and the engine lives in, and you have vertical ones where the things that blow up cities live.

    I mean, there are optional smaller horizontal tubes, but I feel like if you’re going to launch a sub into space it really ought to be one of the big ones. Maybe it’s just a Freudian thing.


  • Fascism. It’s fascism.

    Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

    Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

    The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

    It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.



  • Please keep in mind that these books should be acceptable by the school and approachable by students who would be unlikely to accept or read very progressive material, so themes that strongly (just strongly) contradict Western narratives should be avoided.

    This made me hesitate, but then I decided that you’re more than capable of reading a summary or skimming a book and deciding whether or not it makes a fit.

    Let me start with some obvious ones:

    • Orientalism by Edward Said

    • A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

    • 90% of Chomsky’s work

    • 21 Things They Don’t Teach You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang is an economist who I believe studied under the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. They both research the economies of developing countries, with Chang having a specialization in South Korea. He accused developed countries of “kicking away the ladder” when they force the Washington Consensus on developing economies while having violated those norms as their own economies developed.

    Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - There’s a lot wrong with the book but it does make for an effective deconstruction of the myth of western cultural superiority by proposing a physical/geographical explanation.

    Better than GGS would be any book by David Graeber, who for my money was the greatest anthropologist of our time and who brings a radical preconception of some of the most treasured but false narratives in the development of western history and capitalism. Debt is his most famous work, I think, but I’d especially recommend The Dawn of Everything.

    Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson - the best bio of Che that I’ve read, but it’s really, really long. Maybe just watch Motorcycle Diaries and Even The Rain (which is about modern and even liberal colonialism but not Che).

    Anything about James Baldwin

    The Social Conquest of the Earth by EO Wilson. Wilson was the biologist who founded the field of sociobiology and who towards the end of his career came to the conclusion that its because humans exhibit the highest levels of cooperation (eusociality) that we’ve come to dominate the planet, for better and for worse.

    I realize that a lot of these are US centric, and I’ve left out virtually everything on LGBT history and culture, but I think this might be a good start.


  • I have a few honest questions for anyone who supports this kind of legislation.

    First, what problem specifically is this trying to address? Have teen pregnancies gone up since the advent of kids being able to access porn on the internet? Kids with STDs? Sexual assaults on children? What specific metric has changed that makes this kind of legislation a priority right now? Is there a model that shows a correlation between the behaviors this legislation intends to address and the social ills you believe are associated with it?

    Second is the related question of what metrics you think will improve with the introduction of this legislation? How long do you think it will take for that change to come about? If it does not, would you support removing this legislation?

    Third, if a social ill were to be associated as per the above with online content, would you support similar legislation to regulate access (eg, if hate speech or LGBT-phobia posted online were to show a positive correlation with intolerance or violence), would you require online services to monitor access to sites hosting that kind of content, such as requiring a government issued ID to be kept on record and associated with specific user accounts?



  • Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

    The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

    This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

    Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.





  • I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.

    Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.

    We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.


  • While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

    I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

    Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

    So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

    But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.



  • This the order in which you should try to access papers:

    1. Normal Internet search including quotes to force the title and components like “pdf”
    2. Organizational/lab pages of the authors. Very many people will put either full papers or preprints on their personal professional pages.
    3. Preprint services like arXiv. The ones you look at will be determined by subject area. Preprints will usually only differ from the published work in formatting.
    4. Just email the authors. Most of us are so happy that virtually anyone wants to read the paper we spent months on that we will happily send a copy. Because people are busy you might need to hit them up a couple of times, but most will be more than happy to send you a copy, and most publications specifically carve out to allow authors to do that.

  • You’re talking like a Sovereign Citizen.

    I’m talking about the very specific laws that prevent people from being evicted if they’ve been residing on a property for N months without following a very deliberate and drawn out legal procedure so that landlords cannot evict a family from their home of many years because of some missed rent payments or because they want to upgrade the place so they can charge more to a new tenant. Those are the laws that keep the sheriffs from just kicking down doors, at least in some states.

    I’m not taking a moral position on squatting. My friends and I squatted in an abandoned house while I was in high school, although most of us didn’t live there full time. If I noticed someone squatting tomorrow, especially in a corporate owned home, I would not have seen it. But the laws that I’m talking about were designed to protect tenants from having their lives unfairly disrupted, and I’m arguing that even if people are against squatters, we still need to protect tenants’ rights.

    I would have thought that was abundantly clear.