sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
You don't have to go into Marxism to protect your True Self. You can also go into crackpot science.
I know a certain person. Reasonably smart, has a PhD. He's always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but the years have not been kind. He sees people much smarter meet with professional success and status while not seeing a path to it himself. But he knows that while he may not be "quantitatively" as smart as the people at the top, he's much better at "making connections" (aka schizo daydreaming). He knows that all of academia is fake, a charade where people blindly parrot whatever the boss believes which is why a free thinker such as himself could never get ahead. But he knows that he deserves to get ahead, that he deserves to be on top and to have everyone (including, of course, Father) admit that they were wrong and he was right.
His current project is a new model for fundamental physics. You see, the reason he can't conceptualize quantum mechanics or whatever isn't because he doesn't have the chops but because it's bullshit and the lemmings in academia just eat it up. He's getting close. He's got a small following, mostly senile boomers and lumpenproles, but it's growing. His true self is coming into being. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the academy.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2hr ago
I also get more out of many investments than I put in, I'm still entitled to it.
You're entitled to those because you own the investment vehicle.
government should not renege on promises if it can be helped.
It can't be helped without cannibalizing the ~entire economy for Medicare and SS.
sarker
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3hr ago
We already have a PvP zone. It's called Washington.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
3hr ago
Bodily integrity? Maybe if you think that photographs steal your soul.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
I simply mean that 80% of Americans work in the service sector. They aren't manufacturing physical goods. They're not drilling for oil. They're not raising crops. They're not framing houses. They're making marketing campaigns for clients. They're writing B2B SaaS platforms. They're providing healthcare. Etc.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Sure. Unfortunately, cutting off the spigot that keeps grandma alive isn't popular with grandma or her kids, for the most part. Personally, I'm 100% in favor of Medicare death panels. I suspect it's a minority position though.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Most Americans are already employed in servicing other people directly! I don't think that most Americans would be working a menial job if they had to walk around rather than sit at a desk to do what it is they do.
The vast majority of actual job growth has been menial healthcare jobs.
Debatable. There's 400k more RNs than there were ten years ago. I'd say being an RN is no more menial than being an onsite product marketer.
I do work in the service sector in a way I suppose, but I mostly do onsite product marketing. Depends on how you define "service."
I think it's pretty unambiguous. Do you grow crops? Do you extract resources from the earth? Do you produce any physical goods?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
The question is not whether X% are menial or not. The question is whether marginal new healthcare jobs are more menial than the marginal new non healthcare job. My contention is that it isn't.
sarker
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1d ago
Did I imply that healthcare employment is solely due to orthopedic surgeons?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
For comparison, the rest of FAANG make more than $500k of profits per employee and have been for a long time.
It's going to take you a long time to become a centimillionaire at 500k a year.
Amazon has to many people in comparison
Amazon has a large staff of directly employed warehouse personnel. Other FAANG companies do not; in fact, the literal janitors are not actually on the payroll, they are contractors.
even here, $50k extra per year makes a significant difference for the janitor.
My contention isn't that income wouldn't increase for the lowest paid employees under this scheme, it's obvious that it would. My contention is that it's impossible for the CEO to be a billionaire if he's only earning 3x what the janitor makes unless the janitor is a centimillionaire, which is impossible.
Maybe makes it more obvious that Bezos only got there by exploiting a large number of workers.
It's difficult to explain how paying people market wages is exploitation, but ymmv depending on the amount of ressentiment in the target audience.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
they're also extremely menial
The healthcare sector includes everything from asswipers to orthopedic surgeons to pharma r&d. Not all of these are menial.
service focused
Sure, but you already work in the service sector, along with 80% of Americans.
there's also the fact that young people are already being taxed a huge proportion of their income going to elders.
This is indeed bad, but one must hope the present levels of spending will prove unsustainable with a bigger dependency ratio.
So you're being taxed so you can get the money recycled back to you serving as a servant basically to old people you don't know.
Anybody on the receiving end of the $7T of government spending (including, for example, highly paid Amazon engineers) is also in this situation. I'd rather the government did and spent less, but it's hardly an apocalyptic scenario.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Healthcare jobs are, uh, real jobs and as a society gets richer the demand for healthcare increases.
If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society?
One of these things is not like the others. Do you propose simply killing the boomers? If not, somebody's got to take care of them, and we haven't hit peak boomer retirement yet.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
I'm not going to bother doing the math on this over the course of Amazon's existence, but last year their net income was $78B which is $50k per employee. Companies usually reinvest much of the income into themselves rather than take it as profit.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Chopping and screwing is an American tradition.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
This is a perfect example. Amazon's market cap is 2.7T. It employs 1.6M people (the true number is even larger due to employee turnover, contractors, etc). That would make Bezos' and the janitor's share worth $1.6M. Even Amazon can't make the janitor a centimillionaire.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Software bypasses that.
A little bit, but not much. Sergey Brin's net worth is 300B. The average FAANG engineer is probably somewhere on the order of millions, maybe ten or twenty if they really got in early and grinded. There's a vocal portion of FAANG SWEs who are not satisfied with a measly few million NW when the boss is at 300B.
Then you've got situations like the Windsurf acquihire where the boss and his college buddies top guys get a huge payout and the rest of the company gets a middle finger.
Wrapped up The Glass Bead Game. I think it's better than I initially thought and there's some cleverness around how Hesse writes the authors writing the biography. Still, I feel that despite the salvation of Castalia being the main thrust of the book, and clearly being successful based on the device of the frame story, it never became clear to me what good Castalia actually is. The Benedictines exist in the book as a kind of religious foil that have persisted for over a thousand years and preserved useful learning and culture. What good is a bunch of eggheads playing the glass bead game without coming up with anything new or useful? Several characters bring this up in the book but the objection is simply never answered head on.
The other thing is that I really don't like Hesse's, shall we call it, anti-didactic worldview. We see this in Siddhartha where he basically says that there's no way for one generation to stand on the shoulders of a previous one in terms of figuring out the good life. Here Hesse seems to go a step further and say that even ordinary lessons are futile. The hero Knecht never learns anything from anyone (sure, whatever, hagiography) and his first and last lesson to Tito consists in death by drowning (but still has the intended effect). It seems like a pretty corrosive outlook for any kind of developed society. I guess it's a step up from the Talmudic view that each generation is strictly less enlightened than the last.
Tried reading Mo Yan's Red Sorghum but couldn't get into it. Mostly torture porn of Chinese peasants at the hands of the Japanese. Prose is decent but one wonders how this guy got a Nobel. The word "sorghum" appears 500 times in the book, and it shows.
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh. Huge amounts of filler but an interesting core of interviews and anecdotes remains. Tough to imagine the psychological state of Weil during the year between the flaw being found in his proof and the fixing of the flaw given his obsession with the problem since childhood.
Currently on Chadwick's The Decipherement of Linear B.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
I mean, yes, the agents he talked to early on told him he’d lose money, and instead he turned a profit. But only after the sale did he talk to another agent for an expert opinion, and that expert expected a higher sale price than Stuart got, meaning he almost certainly listed too low. Stuart thinks that after the agent fee he still basically broke even, but I’m guessing he put in more work and stress this way, and took on more downside risk. I know that if I am ever selling or buying, I will be using AI extensively as part of the effort, but I am going to stick with Danielle Wiedemann. I am confident that her help, connections and advice were worth far more than the fee, and would be again.
Quite bogus. The second agent was told that the house was sold at the price it did with the help of AI. He gets zero points for scoffing and saying he would have totally gotten a better price for it.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
We're basically talking about the same thing. A company in which the CEO earns 3x more than the janitor means that the CEO isn't a billionaire or the janitor is at least a centimillionaire (simplifying a little bit) which is plainly impossible.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.
Sure, but how much more? To simplify, it's enough more that the billionaire is no longer a billionaire. Alternatively, the argument might be that the billionaire should have been taxed until he's no longer a billionaire (I've seen this put as "every billionaire is a policy failure").
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor
You misunderstand. The fact that they are billionaires and their employees are not is proof, in these peoples' views, that the employees are not paid fairly. It's a tautology, or close to it.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
I didn't ask you how ballots get harvested. I asked you how they get harvested after election day. You vaguely implied that California has no chain of custody for ballots (false) and refused to clarify what this meant. This is exactly the pattern of interactions I'm talking about. In your next response, you will presumably say that you never said California has no chain of custody for ballots.
Do you need a loicense to sharpen metal in Ireland or is this "production" in the sense of "brandishing"?
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