NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
2d ago
I wonder if this move is actually about Trump, designed to rope him into a Logan Act violation in which he contacts Putin to make some diplomatic assurances ahead of being sworn in.
NewCharlesInCharge
8d ago
I would not be surprised if someone on the federal circuit asserted that punitive damages aren't punishments.
NewCharlesInCharge
9d ago
In the private sphere Musk also has the advatnage that he can attract top talent on prestige. Government workers enjoy the opposite of that. The most common response to someone pontificating on government work is "the job security must be nice." In other words, you're only going to be fired for terrible malfeasance, not for run-of-the-mill incompetence. And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.
To make the government leaner and more effective, I'd couple cuts with an increase to prestige. Make government jobs highly sought after. Make the pay something like 95th percentile for comparable industry jobs. Make expectations high, with a target on attrition at well above zero. Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce. They could have immediate access to Tier I support at other federal agencies. Access to exclusive spaces at national parks. Franking privileges. The rights of an FFL without the paperwork. There are many possible privileges that would cost very little.
The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
I wonder if the dudes that used to upload pictures of their semen submitted them with an accompanying license.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
It appeared to be both. He'd just had some violent confrontation and was likely in a state of mind where he just wanted to break things (and children and grannies), but also he drove through parade barriers with people waving for him to stop, and on video both swerved into people and sped up into them.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
The judge did plenty, though granted him a whole lot of leeway. Eventually he ended up having to attend the trial from a separate room via videoconference so that he could be muted when he wouldn't behave.
This was a fun watch. The guy was a Soverign Citizen, and a small corner of Reddit went nuts with it. "Estoppel" became a catchphrase. I just checked and it's actually still quite active: https://old.reddit.com/r/DarrellBrooksJr/
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
From that NPR link on 4b:
It calls for the refusal of dating men (biyeonae), sexual relationships with men (bisekseu), heterosexual marriage (bihon) and childbirth (bichulsan).
Koreans didn't have a word for sex until the West brought them one?!
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them
Is Covid not dispositive here?
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
Me as well. One riot with one death, and on the rioting side. And then the winning side ultimately gets to govern without bureacratic hamstringing.
Compared to years of rhetoric and investigation into "Russian collusion" that turn out to have been sourced to a document paid for by the opponent's political campaign. And then a whole summer of riots all around the country with billions in property damage and many more than one death.
NewCharlesInCharge
11d ago
“Humunculus not installed: please refer to manual.”
NewCharlesInCharge
12d ago
I suppose it comes down to whether or not there is a ghost in the machine.
If human intelligence is all neurons that can be modeled as a graph with weighted edges then we should be able to simulate it.
Maybe we do that and still can’t get human intelligence to pop out of the simulated brain and find that something is missing.
NewCharlesInCharge
12d ago
Chinese engineers and scientists elect to live in the USA because you can make crazy amounts of money here. Style of government is rarely part of the decision function.
I know a lot of Chinese engineers and none of them are against the government, even though plenty have specific complaints here and there. Only one has taken up a hobby, hunting, that would be unavailable to him if he moved back.
Culturally they go along to get along but still most of their entertainment, food, and holidays are Chinese.
NewCharlesInCharge
12d ago
We’re exhausting almost all the data, video included. We’ve recently taken to generating synthetic data. For images, this would mean generating novel images and then feeding them back into training. Imagine taking an image of a car and then rotating it behind some thick leaves or a chain link fence.
NewCharlesInCharge
15d ago
But he’d be ninth in line for the presidency.
NewCharlesInCharge
15d ago
I just watched Kamala’s speech and was surprised that she told the crowd everything is going to be okay.
I guess she doesn’t believe Trump is a fascist or that we just had our final American election.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Amazon is not the same tier as Meta and Google. Engineer comp at Amazon is about half of what it is at Meta or Google. We reject a whole lot of applicants coming from Amazon.
C players drag down A players in lots of ways. The most obvious is making messes for the A players to clean up. Less obvious is trying to justify their existence through things like diversity initiatives and such that cause everyone to have to deal with linguistic purges and trainings and such. They also just take far longer to explain things to, and they’ll bog you down with questions they ought to be able to answer for themselves if they were smarter or more conscientious.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Two C players means you’re just dragging down your A players even more than if you’d hired the one. We don’t want them, it would be better to just not hire.
There are apparently employers like Accenture that play games with H1-B to bring in bottom tier talent to work here and grind out garbage tier code. Big Tech is not doing this.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
The media had also successfully painted Trump's handling of COVID as inept, enough so that when Trump said the vaccine was likely to be out before the end of the year that was treated as just another lie.
In reality Operation Warp Speed did succeed, and it was only via shenanigans that vaccine approvals were delayed until after the election.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
I think you are imbibing media narratives. The downward pressure on tech salaries and employment came in the summer of 2022 when banks collapsed, startups imploded, and VC money became tight.
Big tech hires from abroad because there aren’t enough top quality engineers here. We do have programs to grow talent in our own pipelines for non traditional candidates, and internally we say it’s because we’ve literally exhausted the market for engineers that can meet our standards. Google, Meta et al are largely engaged in zero sum struggles for the same relatively small pool of talent.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Even the Biden administration gave strategic credit to Trump in trying to defend their tactical blunder. “This was the timeline Trump negotiated” was their refrain.
Yet it seems plainly obvious that if you’re going to exit the county, you retreat to your strongest position and exit from there. And you don’t leave unspoiled equipment for the enemy to use.
Why in the world would the last point of exit be the civilian airport and not the military airbase?
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
That’s not so surprising. When I was eighteen I’d have told you that the Internet is going to be very important for political campaigns. Of the presidential campaigns at that point only Dean was really taking it seriously.
Had traditional media not buried him over nothing he might’ve won out.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Even the news agencies are quite conservative. Earlier in the night when Pennsylvania was about 90% counted I did the math and found that remaining votes would need to break about 2:1 Kamala for her to make up the difference. All remaining votes would need to have come from Dem strongholds, but the remaining votes were distributed all across the state.
News wouldn’t call it for a few hours more.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Inflation in part drove me to go back to big tech from startup land. I’m now making my old salary, barely budged from pre inflation numbers. It’s double the pay for 10X the effort and stress.
I considered relocating to a cheaper home, but rising interest rates make that a nonstarter.
I don’t assign 100% of the blame to Biden, but I definitely think that the Biden stimulus exacerbated the impact of the Fed’s loose money policy, and when they passed it everyone knew it wasn’t necessary.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
With the current counts Trump is guaranteed at least 269. The worst outcome given that is a tie, in which case the Republican controlled House would choose him as President.
Not eligible, but at least in my state of Washington they still get notices to appear. They're required to refuse due to their citizenship status, but that requires them to both read and fully understand the summons they've been sent.
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