veqq
22hr ago
if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed
You could of course sell your assets, move to Asia or South America and live well...
veqq
4d ago
has made Down's a bit of a CW item
Lately, I've noticed many disabled babies and children on Twitter. While I want them to be happy, I'm not sure to what extent they can have enriching and productive lives. I wish I could push a button and make them all better (and make the billions of abled people better too, and myself. We sinful creatures all fall short of our abilities and obligations.) It took me a while to realize this was anti-abortion advocacy.
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee(, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations). - Jeremiah 1:5
Theology tells us we existed before birth. As a wretched modern, I wrestle with the temptation to overcome disabilities with technology. Ultimately, it seems the key's when the soul's coupled to a body - past that point its murder. But if we could get rid of bad bodies before hand, more souls would have a chance. Is that akin to Talmudic legalism trying to one up God and ignoring the spirit, that for whatever reason these souls/people are born with different potential and context than us? I know nothing. But I feel very uncomfortable.
veqq
4d ago
I have met him and his wife a few times. I have bought a few properties in the rust belt area he lives in and we're both from the same area elsewhere. Very good guy.
veqq
7d ago
So Dad, how much did it cost back in 1959 to have DoorDash deliver a poke bowl to my apartment?
$2 in Santa Monica according to the movie I just saw. Restaurants all knew drivers and many had their own.
veqq
9d ago
But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women
RAND just published: The Limited Presence of Male Mentors in the Lives of Boys and Young Men
veqq
9d ago
My current favorite is Keturah Hickman
I had no idea she had a blog; I met her and her husband some months ago.
veqq
13d ago
Christianity is alien
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-believe-by-ross-douthat
if He didn’t rise from the dead, then wasn’t it actually the worst advice ever? The example Jesus provides is an example of how to get killed: first you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense. If the real story ended with the Crucifixion, then surely it’s a story about what not to do.
...
just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story ...
And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?
No. At other times He makes the law more restrictive, sometimes to an almost unbelievable degree. There were already rules against adultery, but this new hero, or prophet, or whatever He is demands perfection. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” (Matthew 5:28-29). I’m sorry what? Just who does this guy think He is? And yet His morality gets even weirder than that. Many of the worlds religions, philosophers, and sages have roughly converged upon a recognizable set of ethical principles for being a just and righteous man. You know what it doesn’t include? “…do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well… love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5: 39-44). This is an impossible standard and seemingly insane advice. In most places, following it is the equivalent of slow suicide.
He seems oddly unconcerned about fairness. Often, as He wanders the countryside healing and upsetting people, He explains His view of the world in simple stories. The stories are about everyday things familiar to the agrarian population of first century Palestine, sheep and vineyards and olive trees and rapacious officials, stuff like that. But think a little too hard about any of these stories, and they make no conventional sense at all. “You know how sometimes you have a hundred sheep?” I imagine everybody nodding along at this point. “Well, if one of your sheep went missing, wouldn’t you ignore the other ninety nine, and spend all of your time looking for the lost one?” Yeah, totally… hey, wait a minute! No, I would not do that. That is not what any sensible shepherd would ever do! Ninety nine is a bigger number than one! But He’s already moved on: “So you know how when you have a group of vineyard workers who work all day, and another group who only show up at the last minute, and then you pay both groups the exact same amount, and…” NO! I do not know that, because that does not make any economic sense at all, ARGH. But He has no time for your arithmetic born of scarcity, because He lives amidst infinity, and keeps telling you, maddeningly, that you do too, and that by giving yourself away you’ll have more left than you started with.
Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society
Context: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b/
I was guy C. But it was just the random last straw, other removals happened and they were already preparing to migrate.
veqq
20d ago
When practicing accountants cook the books, they're embezzling or misrepresenting the company's operations. The professionalized field emerged to protect investors from false data. Presuming this works and public data is real, we may wonder if this data is also useful. A few basic valuation practices which violate regulations:
- Capitalize internally developed intangibles like a "name brand" using marketing spend (while the law requires them to be expensed) (otherwise they're only capitalized when acquired by another company, but goodwill is often a red flag) (a building lease, trademark, customer list or patent are types of intangibles, which may gain value over time, perhaps in relation to money spent building them... Under normal practice, a patent's R&D costs are e.g. expensed as incurred...)
- John Myers' Critical Event Theory recognizes profits at the critical decision (instead of the sale specifically) with cool impacts on how profits from a loan are worked out
- Where dividing normal metrics by revenue gives you a percentage, I advocate doing this far more aggressively. Mining uses AISC, but factoring money out gives you something more like EROI (over LCOE), recycle ratio etc. for businesses to really compare operational efficiency (e.g. COGS misses the point; you'd want, say, to look at CAC but by hours spent, facilities and ads used and depreciate by your repeat customer rate). (Going further, many operations derisk by bartering mineral streams for oil streams. Typical accounting practice treats the royalty buyer as making a deposit, an upfront payment - with convoluted structure adjustment for tax planing. My company happily receives payment in mineral streams for software.)
- Industries closer to commodities do this, e.g. time charter equivalent, scrap value,
Some of this might seem tame, but accepted metrics like COGS leave a lot of alpha on the table because of various violations, which e.g. make illegal some methods to compare companies at different parts of the same industry (e.g. midstream and upstream companies) which help you gauge the cycle.
Similarly, in my system of national accounts, "government spending" is not included in the net material product, a term inspired by the Soviet style which excludes most services and nets out capital depreciation. I use this to forecast growth and market expansion. It's also really import to even out imputed values. From 3% in 1985, now 10% of US GDP is arbitrary imputed rent while e.g. China takes construction cost and depreciates it at 2% per year. This means China's imputed rents on are 1/10 of Germany's for comparable housing, after purchasing power adjustments, when habitable area/person is only 42m^2 vs. 48m^2. In Japan, imputed rent went to 14%.
Now, I don't count "government spending", because monetized transfers like social security directly increase GDP, which is bad. But many governments pay for healthcare and tertiary education - those should be imputed for their real value. This is why I don't count services. After all, greater US healthcare output does not give Americans healthier lives than Italians or Singaporeans, higher European education attainment does not result in greater incomes than Americans; there are obvious confounders for all of this.
veqq
21d ago
Such incentives made accounting stagnate and be all about compliance with precious little insightful metrology. If you really think about operations and valuations, you can easily beat the market (but "non-GAAP" is mostly bs). To practice accounting at work, you must be licensed; if you are the end user, you can do plenty of "illegal" and useful things.
veqq
29d ago
when he speaks ex cathedra where his words have binding power
And both were "just" about Marian doctrine.
veqq
29d ago
John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring?
Thomas Massie
I have multiple friends who visited recently. I can PM some travelogues, instagrams etc. if you're really curious. (You can e.g. enter by land from Tajikistan and just enter with a US passport, no issues.)
Tl;dr: Ok, for men outside capital. "Ok" means better than the impoverished half of humanity in Africa and India, but way worse than Colombia, El Salvador or such (and far more expensive for luxuries). They're trying but we shouldn't expect economic growth or anything since the huge subsidies disappeared.
The capital's facing a water shortage, which will probably lead to mass deaths. International agencies were transporting supplies and subsidizing life in the capital, whose metro population doubled or tripled (depending on source) since 2000 while the aquifers sunk 100ft. The Taliban aren't particularly competent, but worse: They don't receive massive subsidies.
Pakistan's bombing the capital because the Afghani Taliban are harboring some group.
Otherwise, life in the North is "ok". Some Ismailis are being forced to convert. Beauty salons, women on TV etc. have been banned (but only after a few years). There's a "Fachkräftemangel" since women can no longer work in many fields (but are still common in medicine, education...), while the previous government exerted great effort to train them in particular. (I know some Afghan women in e.g. Indonesia or Turkey, now.)
Much criminality, drug use, pedophilia etc. have been eradicated. Thefts may or may not be up.
Orthodox in the Soviet Union
Ukraine had over half the surviving churches, and 2/3 of convents by the the fall of the USSR. Sergius pledged total loyalty to the state and is goals, feeding believers to hungry quotas until only a few hundred priests remained (100k were executed). When Stalin (responsible for many of those deaths, and a former seminarian) rehabilitated the church during WWII, the NKVD staffed most of it. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church serves the state, not Christ; he current patriarch worked for the KGB from the 70s on. This is no more survival than if the literal anti-Christ headed it. I pray the church cease to exist, like the blessed martyrs of the Assyrian Church of the East in China and the wider East, than actively damn its followers like today.
veqq
1mo ago
fighting in Russia during Winter
Napoleon and Hitler failed, but the Mongols, Swedes, Poles and Imperial Germans all won.
veqq
1mo ago
There hasn't been a single piece of media anywhere that I'm aware of that made the fighting in Vietnam look 'honorable' or 'cool.'
Randy Weaver
That's precisely the point. You can only radiate heat which isn't particularly effective compared conduction and convection. This telescope has to be in space for other reasons - it's not in space in order to be cold. Sending compute into space in order to cool it is ludicrous. The guy above seems ignorant of basic concepts and falls for marketing buzzwards which the company's own prospectus disagrees with (they are trying to enable computing in space, not going to space in order to compute. In other words, space is not a welcoming environment for this.)
Edit: Circling back, I believe my interpretation was correct and this other guy doesn't understand basic physics nor that things carry costs. Indeed, resorting to space because you don't trust the grid is hilarious considering how much private grid you could build on Earth instead.
The numbers are heavily manipulated. Very few people, especially in industry, actually look at them. I occasionally talk about accounting and metrics, e.g. imputed rent where the rental value of assets are included in economic growth without actually being measured - accounting for all of these, yearly growth numbers can be greatly reduced. Quality adjustments and awkward exclusions make CPI almost irrelevant - not counting housing/rent at all (while it's imputed to 10% of GDP). Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):
In different periods, the proportions of spending vary greatly, e.g. 40% of income on food, 10% on housing, 20% on clothing etc. to 50% housing, 15% food, 20% mandatory car... Inflation calculations do not account for this, but measure the overall basket's change. My company buys people's personal budget histories to see what actual costs and spending habits look like. From my Christian perspective, consumption patterns have grown to 30% sin. From my growth-is-good perspective, people are using less molecules. When it costs millions of dollars to change an electrical pole because of increased bureaucracy, there's no increase in utility but everyone in the community is saddled with more debt.
At the core, utility is about ranking choices, preferences. Unfortunately, our society has shown preference for sin and our system enables wealth-destroying consumption and work-breaking with seductive choices, gambling, easy debt, taxation increases etc.
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