Tacherus
2mo ago
Right, exactly. I watched a talk from Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor about this years ago. She encouraged people to splurge on things like restaurants and vacations rather than cars and houses because if things go south you can easily just not go out to eat versus having to unwind an expensive car or house payment.
Similar logic applies here I think.
Also it seems like in most cases the lifetime spend for renting dwarfs the cost of ownership.
Tacherus
2mo ago
It’s related but not quite the same. If my savings are in the market for instance and I’m let go because of a recession, suddenly my obligatory expenses could mean I have to sell at the worst possible time.
I’m not saying renting is never a good idea but racking up fixed expenses poses risks.
Tacherus
2mo ago
I mean a network of people who know you and your work. Preferably from having worked with you. I checked in with school acquaintances for instance, many of whom were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.
The more you can be a “known quantity” the better I think during job searches. Someone who knows you and can say good things about you can be a major leg up.
As for how, I know there are often local tech meetups where you can meet people. My personal approach has been to make sure when someone works with me they like my work and they like working with me. It’s opened a lot of doors.
Tacherus
2mo ago
For me it all comes back to what kind of cash flow you need. Depreciation notwithstanding, if I lose my job I’d much rather have a car that’s losing value on paper than have a monthly payment I need to make.
Tacherus
2mo ago
Imho it’s a numbers game until you build out a network. My first job was the result of months of cold applying to things. Every job since has been joining someone I’ve already worked with which is so much easier.
Does your school have alumni job placement help? That can help bootstrap a network, along with talking to former classmates.
Are you getting interviews but not offers? Or just not hearing back after applying?
Tacherus
2mo ago
You can pretty easily query the price history of stock symbols to get sample time series data.
What type of plots do you want to test?
Tacherus
2mo ago
I listened to an interview with I think a psychologist a few years back who argued what we diagnose as PTSD in soldiers is often really the loss of the close relationships and the intense bonds that develop. The feeling of having someone’s life in your hands and willingly putting yours in theirs.
Returning to the world involves a grieving process, he argued.
Tacherus
2mo ago
Interestingly I’ve heard the same thing from the other direction, that honest portrayals, the best portrayals, are inherently anti-war.
Tacherus
2mo ago
When in doubt, listen to the view of the Japanese person, who will be getting all the subtleties. That said, I am of the belief that one person can't give the one right answer any more than any random American can tell you how to interpret a given social situation at the shopping mall in Columbus, Indiana.
Agreed.
Tacherus
2mo ago
Oh, sure. Sorry wasn't trying to be opaque.
The Ministry of Love is of course the organization that tortures and re-educates wayward citizens. It seemed to me the first time I read it like a deliberately absurd exaggeration to name something the literal opposite of what it is, but "reasoning from names" seems like a common strategy.
See, e.g., "antifa just means anti fascism -- why would you oppose that?" or "why would you oppose 'inclusion' initiatives, you worthless bigot?" or "a disinformation governance board makes you nervous? what, you want incorrect information to spread unchecked?"
It's a common trope that to name something is to wield power over it, for instance Adam names creatures in Genesis, demons keep their true names secret in much of fantasy, and there are plenty of folklore beliefs about the power of a true name.
The inverse also seems true to me. If you can't properly name a thing then you can't control it. Giving something reprehensible a benign-sounding name seems to really short-circuit something in our brains. It becomes difficult to even reason about it properly I think.
Orwell had a deep understanding of how language can manipulate people and I shouldn't have doubted him.
Tacherus
2mo ago
This is the death spiral though isn’t it? Responding to norm violation by violating more norms just leaves us with weaker norms overall. It’s one-step-ahead thinking.
Tacherus
2mo ago
I thought “Ministry of Love” was over the top long ago as well. I too owe him an apology.
Tacherus
2mo ago
For what it’s worth, I have heard of Ft Bragg before and this thread is the first I’ve ever heard of a Ft Liberty, let alone that it’s a renaming of a prior base.
I can’t speak to the writer’s intentions but it’s worth considering that using an older, more widely known term could be just about avoiding confusion.
Tacherus
2mo ago
This was interesting to read. I’m learning Japanese right now and recently have been practicing kenjougo and sonkeigo (forms for extra politeness).
One of the exercises was an extended dialogue of an employee and his boss talking and I had to convert the normal forms to the honorific ones.
It really surprised me when I was done how much of an asshole the boss seemed to me. My tutor had to repeatedly reassure me that he’s not being an asshole; its ok because he’s the boss.
I accepted it more or less but now what you’ve said has made me reconsider a bit if maybe there’s something to it.
Tacherus
2mo ago
Thanks for the contribution. I think you hit on something important, which is the rationalization aspect of it.
It does seem like it comes back to using concepts of evil vs evil influence to justify what I already want to think.
What’s striking to me is even in your Harry Potter example it seems like we could make it go any direction we want. Maybe we want to redeem Voldemort because of absolutely-not-sex-related reasons.
Wouldn’t I be on equally firm ground (which is to say, not that firm) saying “yeah the little scamp got carried away but it was the bad influences! And now he’s terrified of these Death Eaters who know where his horcruxes are and are Evil!”
As I type this I think it’s basically scapegoating. That’s all it is. There’s something bad I need to account for so I pin it on someone I don’t like in order to absolve someone I do.
Tacherus
2mo ago
I can confirm both being asked by women (at work!) and being shocked because I thought it was low status.
My theory is that it’s not so much a “god-shaped hole” as an “identity-shaped hole.”
The other day, I forget where, I saw an ad to find out my “work personality type.” Astrology, Myers-Briggs, various personality quizzes do a couple things I think
- they let you out yourself and others in a box
- they seemingly outsource introspection—why “know thyself” when you can read it in a book?
- they give you a narrative for yourself
It’s not completely unrelated to god I think, but more about missing meaning, purpose, and something to tell you who you are.
Tacherus
2mo ago
To me what was striking was not the counter examples or the rightful heir trope, it was the explicit invoking of varying degrees of mind control to account for the baseline behavior.
Maybe I’m just reading overly into it but it felt conspicuous not that there was a random mindflayer, but that the reason he was good seemed to be he’d broken free of mind control, implying others might be too.
While I agree that there’s some justification in each case, if you couple that with the recent push to for instance remove alignment associations in DnD, it seems to me a pattern starts to emerge.
Tacherus
3mo ago
For sure. I get paid mostly in shares of stock and it blows my mind that my colleagues will keep theirs instead of selling and diversifying.
Tacherus
3mo ago
That’s a bit of a bummer to hear. My wife and I were thinking about buying guns like 2 months before Covid hit. My main concern now is the time commitment to stay fresh on maintenance, training and skill.
When you say your friends “cannot” do the tactical courses, what do you mean?
Tacherus
3mo ago
Sure but where does the difference in politics come from? Why would Trump appeal less to a union boss than a union worker and vice versa with Harris?
Tacherus
3mo ago
That’s what I thought at first but it seems like they’ve got the same background as the members. How do you account for the split between leadership and members?
I enjoyed it immensely as well. Glad to see others defending it.
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