lukifer

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241.
by lukifer 5y ago
It's worse than that: cash is at least nominally provided and supported by governments themselves; whatever stupid or unjust constraints are on paper dollars [0], they are at least currently "legal tender for all debts public and
242.
by lukifer 5y ago
Society reifies and adjudicates the specific rules surrounding "property rights", but they also derive from our cultural norms and biological instincts: everything from "Finders Keepers" to "Your Home Is Your Castle
243.
by lukifer 5y ago
> they’re only reliable if many independent people mine Sort of. It's a matter of establishing trust with buyers, holders, and the ecosystem. If a hypothetical 51% owner behaved as a good citizen (which is to say, their incentives w
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by lukifer 5y ago
Also worth noting that this extension works on other Chrome-derived browsers, like Brave, or the pure-OSS flavor Chromium.
245.
by lukifer 5y ago
I counter-act the unlimited vacation thing during onboarding (if not interviewing) by setting expectations: "I consider a reasonable amount of vacation to be X(=3) weeks, does that sound reasonable to you?". Then I track it myself
246.
by lukifer 5y ago
Location: Denver/Boulder, CO Remote: Yes (Preferred, or Hybrid) Willing to relocate: No Technologies: React, JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML5, CSS/JSS, Node, PHP, *SQL, GraphQL, Docker Résumé/CV: https:/&#x
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by lukifer 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
248.
by lukifer 5y ago
The heartfelt moral questions the series poses ("the spider and the butterfly") are nothing short of profound, all the more because they may not be resolvable. One of my favorite series ever, aesthetically, narratively, and themat
249.
by lukifer 5y ago
> Nobody bloody cares about integrity of journalism. To offer a bit more nuance: consumers care about enough integrity; and powerful institutions (public or private), who stand to win or lose based on press narratives, care about enou
250.
by lukifer 5y ago
"Capitalism" is not merely a short-hand for "trade"; it's also a theory of capital. And its shortcomings are numerous: not only the ones you describe (externalities, exploitation of addictive behavior), but also gam
251.
by lukifer 5y ago
The concept of a Pigovian tax [0] on externalities is to dissuade anti-social behavior by assigning it a price, while giving the proceeds right back to citizens as a universal dividend. It would actually function as a progressive tax, with
252.
by lukifer 6y ago
WWII killed roughly 75 million people, "only" 3% of the world's population at the time. Scale matters.
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by lukifer 6y ago
Yes, context matters, and sometimes even irrational instincts can end up being correct, especially under uncertainty, which was definitely true of the first few months of COVID. I'm less concerned about purely useless interventions, th
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by lukifer 6y ago
Superb analogy!
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by lukifer 6y ago
Learning about Terror Management Theory [0] has definitely been an eye-opener. Anecdotally, it seems to me that most people cope with fears of mortal threats either with self-delusion and denial; or, with extreme over-correction and self-so
256.
by lukifer 6y ago
While you’re completely correct, I’ve also observed an anti-pattern where people become afraid to touch load-bearing code if it “works”, compounding over time into a brittle codebase and piles of hacks to work around shortcomings in infrast
257.
by lukifer 6y ago
No dispute: journalistic institutions are power concentrations that invite pressure from all sorts of private interests, in addition to prevailing internal groupthink. (In the Twitterati era, I'd say the latter problem is both top-down
258.
by lukifer 6y ago
Huh, it's actually top of his blog right now [0]. Alexander is borrowing from the 80's book by Fussell, so it's apparently an idea that's been kicking around a while. O'Church's piece looks interesting, I'
259.
by lukifer 6y ago
I had high hopes for a pro-social silver lining around the pandemic as well, but it's simply too distant and indirect (especially given that the outcomes ranged so widely to those infected: from death, to the worst flu ever, to no symp
260.
by lukifer 6y ago
While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model leaves something out: that journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives
261.
by lukifer 6y ago
Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".
262.
by lukifer 6y ago
I think the dividing line in practice between "working" and "middle" is the four-year college degree, serving largely as a status signifier, and marking one a participant in cosmopolitan cultural aesthetics and norms. Wh
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by lukifer 6y ago
Scott Alexander recently wrote a great piece about class in America: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on... . tl;dr: one of way of looking at class is that it's not one ladder, defined sole
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by lukifer 6y ago
Curiously, one of the things that gives pilots and airline workers such powerful bargaining leverage, is exploiting safety regulations. If an airline is playing hardball with the union, the pilots go out of their way to create flight delays
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by lukifer 6y ago
United went through a period in the 90's where it was majority-owned by its employees, which ended when it restructured under bankruptcy in the mid-2000's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAL_Corporation#History
266.
by lukifer 6y ago
This story is also a good parable of why Veblen goods [0] distort GDP as a measure of value creation. If Apple had decided to lean in to that market, raising the maximum app price to $1M, and those same 8 purchasers who bought the original
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by lukifer 6y ago
Accelerating inequality has led to a conundrum for the rich in addition to the obvious consequences for the poor: what do you actually do with that obscene wealth? [0] You can only consume so much luxury, and sitting on dollars results in
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by lukifer 6y ago
> both are human social concepts and can be re-imagined at any time I think that's what's essentially being advocated (whether now or later): reimagining human social roles outside the wage/employment model (and perhaps di
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by lukifer 6y ago
> People used horses to do jobs. If I order food delivered, I and the restaurant are using a human to do a job. If that job can be done by a drone instead, that human has to find something else to do for income. For better or worse, the
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by lukifer 6y ago
Renewables are cost-competitive, but not by an order of magnitude. If wind and solar net 1/3rd each of CA, it no longer makes economic sense to build them.

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