100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
21hr ago
Posting this here and specifically not in the culture war thread.
You're gonna get what I mean; It's not bananas and rice. It's more like bananas and rice
Because this is the fun thread, leave aside the somali stuff. The awkward circular dialog is fun to laugh at regardless of context. This had a base of Arrested Development with a playful side dish of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The garnish was the cringing awkwardness of I Think You Should Leave. 5/5 would recommend. Zagat nominee 2026.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
I see what you did there, friendo.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Better phrasing than mine, for sure.
Maybe it's more the tyranny of metrics as product. If the point of measurements, and tolerances is to "make things work" that's fine. It seems to me that, in this case, the point of measurements was to point at the measurements.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Agreed.
I was thinking about Minnesota and this comment a day or two ago. It's part of a kind of memetic that I think of as "Stop making Scott Adams look like Nostradamus."
Scott Adams, Dilbert comic creator turned online politico commentator and, recently, dead, made some not PC comments in 2023.
They're nothing special. A bit of breathless hyper-noticing and juiced up with a Very Online Person kind of flair. Ho-hum, as far as it goes. But the media pounced and Scott took a lot of flak for it. Elon defended him, which is kind of cool, I guess. Everyone moved on.
And then, at the end of 2025, he turned out to be completely right, at least directionally. Roving gangs of private citizens are harassing people - well, white men - for just kinda sorta looking like ICE agents. Which, I guess, consists primarily in ... being a white male.
While I am firmly on the right, I've never liked Trump. He's economically illiterate, a populist Dixiecrat rather than a conservative, and has no actual worldview other than an interesting and admittedly successful (in some sense) set of boomer "vibes."
But he keeps not trying to kill me or brand me as the devil. Which puts him materially ahead of half of the country, and the leadership and majority of the democrat party. And yet, they keep being astounded that I don't want to get my membership card in the "Kill Everyone who is like TollBooth" club.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
"Don't be hypersensitive"
"Most people are normal"
"Except all people on the right. Who are hypersensitive"
And, the parting morality shot - "Don't introduce data and ask me to review it, that would be ... unbecoming"
I'm not going to try to change your mind on anything. I'm only going to try to suggest that you read what you write before posting and ask yourself the question "am I making any arguments here or am I just kind of teasing my opponent?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
I explicitly said that in my original post.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I applaud your deep reading of the article, because it shows how bureaucratic thinking can infiltrate any job.
Notice the language of Bell - "everyone did it this way", "I was just doing what I had been told" - It's the "I followed orders and The Process" defense. I'd be much happier if a technician or supervisory one at that actually had a technician's mindset and pride in his/her work that would lead them to think "You know, if these rails are always a little off, that's probably a bad thing, even if 1/8th of an inch isn't Big Bad on its own." No, instead, there's citing of reports and approvals and procedure.
This is your brain on PMC+Bureaucracy. This is how they want you to think because then capital-C Compliance is the way to a "respectable" job.
Even if that job is making sure everyone is in alphabetical order before going into the culling machine.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
There are different kinds of not making a profit.
I wish my accountant would see it like this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Links to Chinese and Indian government crackdowns? Ok. I mean, there's a reason I don't live there and call both of those regimes authoritarian.
Let that not bother you, the government has enough money to hire a thousand of lawyers and let them outplay you in any rule-lawyering contest - given that they will actually be judging who won anyway.
So the system is already irrevocably rigged against me. But ...
But you will never get a seat at the table itself while being a rat. And that's the goal.
I should want to have a seat at the corruption table?
If they want 99.99% of people using government-controlled identity-linked devices to access the internet - that's what will happen
Why would "they" (I think you mean legislators) want this? If you're going to answer with "because they want total control!" Then you're just feeding into a straw man archetype.
I'm interested in preventing a censored future. And I also think there is a very real chance it could happen - look at England arresting people for tweets. But what you're presenting is an "you're already fucked!" blackpill doomer scenario that relies on a lot of circular argumentation and conspiracy thinking. There's a lot of logical leaps - they're gonna find a way to fuck you, bud! - without a lot of well thought out causal chains for how it would all actually happen. I find so little value in this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
A Live Fire Experiment in UBI
This is a link to the 2026 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Budget.
Note: I'll make number page references to it throughout this post. This means when I say "p. 6" I mean the page that has "6" in its lower left or right hand corner, not the page number in your browser's PDF viewer.
1. WMATA is not self sustaining.
WMATA annually serves 268 million riders and makes approximately $2.03 in revenue per rider. Their revenue is ~$545 million, which is 1/10th of their budget. (p.1) By comparison, New York's MTA makes up about 35% of its operating budget via fares and tolls. 23% is from fares alone. (Note: I'm pretty sure I'm doing a mostly apples-to-apples comparison here. I'd be thankful if anyone finds that I am not and can point out any error.)
Public transit in the US is always a money losing operation. Everywhere, it is existentially dependent on taxes for basic operational support, let alone capital improvements or system expansion. The idea, however, is that providing a low cost transportation system "pays for itself" (indirectly) by providing more economic dynamism and potential for growth in a given area. Therefore, at best, and most charitably, public transportation is a public good in the textbook economic theory sense.
There are, however, economists who would debate the ROI of public transportation and more still who would question the efficiency with which the tax dollars that fund public transportation are spent. This leads us to;
2. WMATA cannot pay its own employees
ALL of WMATA's revenue can only pay for about 31% of personnel costs (p.6). Total personnel costs for FY2026 is forecast at $1.746 bn (compared to a forecast revenue of approx $545 mm). This personnel cost is separate from "services", materials, fuels, utilities, casualties and liability, leases, and miscellaneous. It is, by far, the single largest expense. "Personnel" is 6.6x the size of the second place "services less paratransit." Combining the two different "services" line items, Personnel is still 4.16x the size. Personnel expenses represent almost 70% of operating expenses for WMATA, whereas NY's MTA (link above) pegs theirs at 58% of operating expenses.
Grim, to say the least. To keep this post focused, I'm not going to go into a detailed analysis of WMATA's performance. Suffice it to say, however, that it is notorious for being late, delayed, always running incomplete or rerouted service due to maintenance and repair issues, and highly vulnerable to fair evasion. For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.
3. WMATA's tax based funding is pure redistributionism
Page 10 shows the operating subsidy for the key areas that support WMATA:
- Whole of DC.
- Maryland. Two counties; Montgomery and Prince George's
- Virginia. Six municipalities; City of Alexandria, City of Fairfax, City of Falls Church, Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Loudoun county.
For some context, with the exception of Prince George's county, all of these municipalities have median household incomes well over $100,000. The Virginia counties (not cities) rank in the top 10 of income for the entire country nearly every year.
The net operating contribution of all of these subsidies is about $1.996bn, about 14% more than the $1.746bn necessary to meet the "Personnel" operating budget.
Looking at the contributions by municipality, and without digging into service levels (i.e. number of trains and buses) versus population and/or tax base in each one, it doesn't look like anyone is getting "hosed." The only thing that sticks out to me is that metroBUS subsidy in Prince George's County seems meaningfully higher than elsewhere.
Staying focused on personnel, however, it is remarkable how close the local area subsidy is to that personnel budget figure.
** 4. Analysis and Opinion **
I think WMATA can best be thought of as a jobs program that redistributes tax money from several local jurisdictions to its 13,646 employees (p.19). That's an average "personnel" cost per employee of about $127, 949.58.
Then, using a combination of federal grants, about $800 mn of debt issuance, and its modest $545mn of revenue, it then actually finances, you know, running the trains and buses on time. Except that service, as stated before, is notoriously sub-par.
As an interesting comparative, the DC localized Federal Gov't Pay Scale link here would put $127,000 towards the lower steps of the GS-13 level. For anyone who has had exposure to Federal Contracting in the Northern VA, Southern MD, DC area, a GS-13 is pretty much where a white collar professional with anywhere from 5 - 10+ years of experience ends up depending on technical skill, advanced degrees, security clearance level, etc. It isn't a particularly special pay grade. GS-14 is where the "adults" live and GS-15 is meaningful (it's the equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. army in terms of seniority alone).
Now, to be fair, the $127k cost for WMATA employees is almost certainly salary plus benefits, whereas the GS scale is straight salary. Also, I will note that my $127k calculation is an average instead of a median. A WMATA bus driver isn't going to be anywhere near $127k. Still, I think the rough comparison is still informative.
WMATA is a jobs program for 13,000 people. It sinks tax dollars from some of the most wealthy parts of the country - and Prince George's county - into a workforce that fails to perform the basics. Its operating model - I hesitate to call it a business model - is so poor that it can only generate 1/10th of the revenue needed to keep itself afloat. The positive externalities it generates for the DC area economy are questionable because most of the local economy is inextricably tied into Federal dollars already - mostly through direct federal contracting. For the outer suburbs - Northern Montgomery County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Falls Church, western Alexandria City - Metro stations and bus stops are so spread out and so infrequently serviced that people living there will definitely have a car. Traffic on 495, 66, 270, and 50 are testament to this.
Thinking ahead to discussions about UBI, I think that the WMATA example is a far more accurate preview of what a UBI program would actually look like; horribly inefficient government allocation of capital for do nothing jobs but at a level of "basic income" that is actually quite high.
A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k? The IRS has about 90,000 employees, for reference
Furthermore, the WMATA example is also an example of the PMC-Bureucratic machine carrying out its mission perfectly. That is to say invisibly. Who really cares about a $5bn budget of a regional transit system besides turbo autists on internet forums? Ho-hum. Boring. But then you dig in and see that this is $129k/employee being siphoned away from the tax payers in suburban areas. It's wealth redistribution in exchange for political patronage and non-productive labor activity. It's a serfdom of laziness and fealty at the ballot box. And that' the end state for UBI in the American political-economy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
it seems pretty clear in hindsight that Good was just trying to get away.
Is this exculpatory evidence? I don't think so. If it were, then every criminal who starts running from the police "because they got scared" would then have, at the very least, a get-out-of-evading-arrest-free card to play at all times.
Non-compliance with law enforcement orders has to remain chargeable. Otherwise, we get into a situation in which subjective interpretations in the moment bear the same evidentiary weight as objective facts. Again, I'd recommend everyone watch an hour of police bodycam videos and not just the ones that result in discharge of a weapon - I mean basic traffic stops / drug possession chargers. You see a pattern after a while of the cop going through this process of information elucidation to begin to establish facts and intent and also to suss out obvious self-contradicting lies. They're doing this so that, should they need to testify later, their evidence and procedure is as tight as possible.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I don't think you'd be surprised to hear me call this a slippery slope argument. There's a lot of implied necessary changes and conditionalities baked into your scenario.
finding an unlocked phone on somebody would be universally treated as a sign that person is a criminal.
This stretches credulity. And how does "phone" and "unlocked" get defined in a legal sense. If I assemble an old hobby kit radio, do I possess an unlocked phone in principle?
I think the more likely answer is that a lot of legislation is going to fall apart because of a technical illiteracy. Look at New York State's RAISE act (Recently passed):
- "SAFETY INCIDENT" MEANS AN INCIDENT OF THE FOLLOWING KINDS THAT OCCURS IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT PROVIDES DEMONSTRABLE EVIDENCE OF AN INCREASED RISK OF CRITICAL HARM: (A) A FRONTIER MODEL AUTONOMOUSLY ENGAGING IN BEHAVIOR OTHER THAN AT THE REQUEST OF A USER; (B) THEFT, MISAPPROPRIATION, MALICIOUS USE, INADVERTENT RELEASE, UNAU- THORIZED ACCESS, OR ESCAPE OF THE MODEL WEIGHTS OF A FRONTIER MODEL;
How can model weights "escape"? How is that different than inadvertent release and/or unauthorized access.
The entire "demonstrable evidence of an increased risk" is ambiguity on ambiguity. And this is being linked to model weights; giant matrices of very long numbers. How in the world can you create a direct causal line here?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
That's a choice people make. There's always going to be some sort of radical, free linux distro that the technically capable can load onto third party hardware.
Again, if you're buying fully integrated hardware, firmware, software from a corporation that puts these kind of things in place - that's a choice. There will always be bad faith actors out there. We should do our best not to reward them for that behavior.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
Do it! You don't need the $200 / month out of the gate. Pro is $20 (I think?) and it's hard to burn through a days limit unless you're hammering on it constantly or using sub agents.
Take a half a Saturday / Sunday and read a good prompt engineering guide. "Spec Driven Development" is one of the good keywords to use on Google or X.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
4d ago
(including @MachineElfPaladin as well)
Ah, got it!
Yes, this is absolutely a massive potential problem. We will mandate that a human is put in the loop to slow down AI work in the name of safetyism.
I think, however, that this can only go so far and I know it is self-defeating.
Crypto (specifically Bitcoin) showed that even with something as hyperregulated as literal currency, people will find a way around it. You can't outlaw math, which means you can't outlaw encryption and cryptography in the digital world. It was a matter of time before people figured out the precise mechanisms to turn this into permissionless money. Are there still issues with BitCoin? Of course. Is it going to replace the USD? No. But it's already broken contain - MicroStrategy, a publicly traded "old" tech firm - is now effectively a Crypto Hedge fund that uses real USD from public markets as fuel for fake internet money scheming.
I expect that several companies will willingly hire their armies of "AI compliance people" and then will be defeated - fast or slow, doesn't matter - by new companies (DAOs?) that say "fuck that" to compliance and, instead, rely on new technologies to just get shit done.
Will this result in a wild west and semi-to-totally unregulated economy? Yes. Will there be a lot of chaos in the interim? Yes. But I do believe it's not only the only choice, but inevitable. The only alternative is slow death by bureaucracy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Can you add some more here, I'm having trouble parsing your meaning.
What do you mean by "compliance layer", for instance?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I read business class as business class.
Like an MBA course.
But I not only agree with you, I am elated by this line of thinking (which I also arrived at independently). AI, well deployed, should remove a lot of the drudgery of modern knowledge work - TPS reports, powerpoints, progress reports and the like. Instead, you'll actually get paid to think well and deeply.
Obviously, this means 80+% of people are scared shitless because thinking is their least favorite thing to do.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Vi keyboard shortcuts.
The "best" way is to train literal muscle memory. vi/m "grammar" is kind of a brain breaker if you try to front of mind process it. But if you just let your fingers fly to move line 38 to mark b, it usually works.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
jq
as in the programming language.
whenever I need to work with some JSON files (often messy) I have to take 30 minutes to re-learn it from the ground up. Then I am off and running. But the retention after more than a day not using it is zero.
This is notable because for work in general purpose programming languages, especially the venerable old python, all of the bread and butter things come back to me even if I haven't written anything in months.
Tiny little end note: this is all now no longer relevant because of claude code
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Awesome comment. Thanks for the actual info and the great writing stemming from a single phrase in my original post. THis is why I keep coming back to the motte.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
The Pogroms Will Continue Until We All Get Along
This is some good old fashioned culture warring. Happy New Year, y'all.
This clip has been popping up on twitter recently, most likely because Elon Musk re-tweeted it.
It's a doozy. I'm probably in too deep in AI land, but I thought for a moment it may have been a very well done deepfake. The cliches are just too juicy:
- Calling for a focused investigation to various Republican personalities ex post facto after an (assumed) 2026-2028 Democratic sweep of house, senate, and white house. This is the pogrom vibe.
- Over use of the term "accountability" which is not only grating, but an open code word for punishment / retribution.
- Packing the Supreme Court.
A little Wiki background on the host here turns up the clown world dial even more. This is an atheist progressive white woman who has a podcast with a title that is synonymous with exasperation. She's been wanting to speak to the manager since before it was cool. The Wiki entry concludes with a Hasan Piker endorsement. Hashtag resistance, hashtag StayWoke.
I thought both left and right were starting to slip into a post-post-liberal dichotomy. Gen Z conservatism was figuring out how long is was going to stay in its Nick Fuentes giga-irony phase before figuring out how to TradLife it up but with good vibes. Gen Z liberalism was establishing a pansexual polycule, ordering designer embryos, microdosing, and flirting with anti-semitism. Yas Queen, Globalize the Intifada.
Turning down my own sarcasm, this appears to be like a kind of resistance-within-the-resistance of severly disaffected former Obama style liberals / progressives who have decided to go full Provisional IRA. It isn't the weirdo terminally online language of Gen-Z etc, but a hyper violent rhetorical style of a group that feels they are the besieged templars of the Final Stand against The Big Bad. I didn't think this was, well, real. I thought the "Karen" archetype was mostly a lot of bad looks on very bad days for otherwise milquetoast suburban ladies. Mostly, I felt sympathy.
But these folks seem serious! If this is TollBooth losing some of his childlike wonder of the world, so be it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12d ago
AI 2027 Guys in 2040:
"Although none of our original or updated predictions were right, per se, we believe that we were wrong for the right reasons and that our logical argument and use of evidence provided important development in the overall conversation about what was previously referred to as AGI and/or ASI. While future forecasting is a notoriously difficult field, we can be proud in our own effects to attempt to look over the horizon. Ultimately, the journey to AGI/ASI may never be totally complete, but we can all be assured that the ethical dimensions of our arguments will have been forged in the hopes of guaranteeing the best possible future for humanity."
Give me a fuckin' break. These guys are boomer charlatans out of their depth who are now post-doomering in order to maintain "mindshare".
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Hmmm interesting.
Would a minmax strategy be to get the BigLaw job, then intentionally poop your pants (figuratively not literally) and coast in an "Easy" 40 - 60 hour, but fairly high status and well compensated, corporate job?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.
I think it produces locally maximally good results.
This is Hill Climbing problem and what a lot of people get right and wrong, simultaneously, about things like Private Equity and quarterly results in publicly traded companies.
The search for maximum grindy efficiency / performance for a given game or domain will result, through vicious competition, in maximally good results to the extent that the game / domain is well defined and bounded. "Get more people to click on the red button vs the blue button" is well bounded. "Figure out the best way to live life" is totally unbounded and also subjective - an optimization frontier can't really be defined let alone achieved.
The classic tech/business text on this is The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen's major point is that constantly iterating to optimize an existing product for an existing customer need opens you, the firm, up to disruption by a new product - not one that meets the current needs better, but one that creates a wholly new way of satisfying needs/meta needs. The classic example is Ford "inventing" the model-T when everyone "asked" for a better horse.
Meritocracy, especially in today's over metric'd and quantified world, is good at hitting these bounded local maxima, but not so good at plucking out the next Big Ideas. You need, sadly, a bunch of weirdos for that. The problem is that everyone loves to think of themselves as "that misunderstood genius." Most of the time, you're just fucking weird. One one millionth of the time, you're Jobs/Wozniak/Musk etc. (sorry to over index on tech, you can do this same thing with almost any field, however).
The preferable "third way" is something like N.N. Taleb's concept of anti-fragile systems; systems that acutally get stronger for less than optimal (or, more accurate, stressful) situations. In professional terms, you want the Physics department to have one or two loonies who don't shower and use words like "chinaman" if they actually help the more "professional" researchers deal with edge cases or whatever. You want a guy in the office who is a functioning alcoholic but can close to mega-deals but is also a walking cautionary tale to the rest of the sales team. Over HR-ification (of which the Gino example is probably somewhat an example of. This is why Ackman got himself involved, I think) doesn't let talented-but-awful weirdos do their thing, and we eject some of the useful "stress" from the system.
The good news is that anyone with eyes to see sees pretty early that the grindiest of grinder fields aren't worth it. It's literally a trope that BigLaw / Consulting / Banking partner are all twice divorced alcoholics who never see their kids or get to enjoy their million dollar pay packages. These are lizard people who thrive on preftige alone. For a while, BigTech was sorta-kinda the exception to the rule, but has since been revealed to be both more grindy that initially assumed and far more of a office-politics and social climber firefight.
The way to win is not to play. Let us take heed of this young bard;
I don't wanna be famous / I just wanna be rich
60g of cooked chicken is damn close to a full pound of it depending on the exact fat content / blend.Edit: I am a dumb. A full pound is closer to 90 - 100g of protein. Carry on.
I imagine Chipotle chicken is probably a bulk blend of mostly thigh meat with some breast met. Almost certainty skinless (for better storage and easier prep).
I've seen the advertisements for the extra protein, but haven't tried it myself. Did your eyeball on it say "yep that's probably about 60?" or did it seem light?
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