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@four-last-songs
I would like textbook recommendations on:
Systems programming, how an OS works, etc.
Networking
Please recommend hardcore deep end shit, I don't like simplified explanations. If something is too hard for me I'll just go through it slowly or whatever.
This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed co
notes on a book I'll probably never write
I find his take on the value a college education brings to these kinds of jobs extremely over-generous. In many parts of Europe you would go into an “email job” straight out of high school.
To be more cynical, it seems like the only point of demanding a degree when hiring for this is to keep out the people who can’t afford one.
the government occasionally has trouble recognizing that I am a real person, which contributes to my skepticism when people suggest that the government and solely the government should provide some useful service. I like being able to obtain useful services
Nobody has to recognize you as a person for you to be able to use, say, roads.
legal access to roads, the foot in the door the government has used to normalize and enforce possession of a government legible identity, is maybe not a slam dunk counterexample here
“we don’t quite believe in you, maybe try again later for that driver’s license” is one of the problems I have had ever. sure I could drive without a license or insurance, so it’s not as bad as some other things. but it does make life harder
Right, I guess they can just not build sidewalks… maybe parks or even subways are a better example. Not a lot of free-at-point-of-use services in the US to pick from, but the ticket machine isn’t going to judge you either
I do admit that governments like to design services so that some stupid bureaucrat can lord it over you, but I think this is usually as an implementation of means testing specifically
the government occasionally has trouble recognizing that I am a real person, which contributes to my skepticism when people suggest that the government and solely the government should provide some useful service. I like being able to obtain useful services
Nobody has to recognize you as a person for you to be able to use, say, roads.
legal access to roads, the foot in the door the government has used to normalize and enforce possession of a government legible identity, is maybe not a slam dunk counterexample here
“we don’t quite believe in you, maybe try again later for that driver’s license” is one of the problems I have had ever. sure I could drive without a license or insurance, so it’s not as bad as some other things. but it does make life harder
Right, I guess they can just not build sidewalks… maybe parks or even subways are a better example. Not a lot of free-at-point-of-use services in the US to pick from, but the ticket machine isn’t going to judge you either
the government occasionally has trouble recognizing that I am a real person, which contributes to my skepticism when people suggest that the government and solely the government should provide some useful service. I like being able to obtain useful services
Nobody has to recognize you as a person for you to be able to use, say, roads.
Universal basic income is essential if we want to build a bright future in the age of automation.
Seriously. The 40-hour work week was codified in 1940, before computers did anything. Per-hour productivity has more than quadrupled since then, but we’re working even harder, to live not all that much better. It’s absurd.
No, it’s not absurd, it’s deliberate. The ruling class wants us to work as hard as possible, so they have profits to skim and pile up.
I’ll reblog this every time I see it: Before the 40 hour work week, we had the 80 hour work week, the 100 hour work week. What got us 40 hours? Unions. Want a work week that reflects productivity levels? Unions. Want UBI? Unions.
average hours worked has declined steadily over time as productivity rose.
You can see the US graph flattening out after 1970, and productivity has increased a lot since then.
i feel like my fundamental break with like 90% of like, "orthodox rationalists" (so to speak) is that i think hyperbolic discounting is basically good actually, for uncertainty reasons. i think your uncertainty about distant events should increase so rapidly that even exponential effects quickly die out
IMO “hyperbolic discounting” is actually just Keynes’ liquidity preference. Classical economics tries to explain it away as a cognitive bias, because it isn’t predicted by their model, because their model doesn’t treat time correctly; it assumes perfect knowledge of the future. It’s not even distant events; “now” and “not now” are fundamentally different, and “money now” is more valuable in the face of uncertainty
Honestly I just realized that I find discourse on walkable neighborhoods frustrating because they take for granted that the environment I actually grew up in (Middle to lower middle class, detached single family dwellings, easy access to bike, walking and public transit routes) is simply impossible to construct.
The whole discourse has a weird gaslighting quality. Like, I know it's possible, I lived there for a decade!
Also that the reason more aren’t being built is something other than it being literally illegal to do so. As soon as you suggest that you should be allowed to live as you choose the screeching about mandatory pods starts
I think a big question is why, exactly, we should be privileging racial wealth gaps and other racial gaps in the first place?
People say that this is about "justice," but that just punts the question! Why should we care about justice between racial groups, which are statistical abstractions, rather than about justice between individuals? The groups in question aren't even countries and don't have specific elected governments. Why should we award benefits for being "a member of a historically-harmed group" by skintone when guys with the same skintone just stepped off a 747 two hours ago?
It's ridiculous because poverty is obviously the single most intersectional criteria.
Injured or disabled? Can't work well; poverty.
Discriminated against? Can't get work; poverty.
Live somewhere with no jobs and can't afford to leave? Can't get work; poverty.
Mentally ill or had a psychotic break? Can't work well; poverty.
Never did well in school or testing and can't manage to demonstrate your talents to others? Can't get work/can't work well; poverty.
Homeless? Can't work well; poverty.
Hurting someone's ability to gain money or maintain wealth is probably the best single-metric measure of how much something hurts them, since money is used to buy almost everything except social relationships, and even buys the tools to help with that, too.
The only reason to take the race-first approach is if you can show substantial gains, but if that's the case, then where are those gains?
A lot of social justice discourse cares more about racism or other oppressions per se than about poverty, but poverty is just about the worst aspect of racism and many other oppressions. Any serious intersectional social justice person should put poverty front and center. A lot of the stuff that gets called class reductionism is very bad, but the erasure of class is overall probably worse and more widespread.
The incredibly obvious answer to that very annoying question (With regards to my country, the USA) is that the economic and geographical landscape of America was built by racism. Wealth moves from generation to generation and there are a number of concrete, discrete, historically identifiable moral atrocities which have played into the current dynamics of racial wealth.
For fuck's sake, my dad is old enough to remember de Jure segregation!
Which means that, if you're black and have parents about my age, the first few years of their life may well have been spent in a segregated town.
The assertion is that this will have had some kind of effect on their earning potential and ability to lay down solid foundations for their children to build on.
Imagine that, as a child, you murder my father, steal his money, and burn down my house. I don't go to college because my mom can't afford it and I end up making minimum wage.
I think it's absurd to sit their and ask, "Gosh I don't get it how is your poverty different from anybody else's?"
Racial wealth gaps were deliberately constructed as a matter of explicit policy for the first three quarters of US history, that's why "we" focus on them.
For christ's sake, you said it yourself!
"Hurting someone's ability to gain money or maintain wealth is probably the best single-metric measure of how much something hurts them, since money is used to buy almost everything except social relationships, and even buys the tools to help with that, too."
So if, for example, it was the overt policy of a country to specifically hurt the ability of certain races to gain or maintain wealth well into living memory, then the psychological focus of that country's people would be on...
"Why should we care about justice between racial groups, which are statistical abstractions, rather than about justice between individuals?" Ta-Nehisi Coates' argument for reparations was, if I recall, exactly this argument: That we identify specific, living, individual black people who were demonstrably the subject of, for example, redlining, and attempt to determine the economic damage caused by those policies to those individuals and attempt to fix it.
Instead, we seem to intend to simply punt and pretend that there are no such individuals for as long as it takes for all of them to die, at which time our pretense will become reality.
That this is our policy might provide additional insight into why racial wealth gaps might be of particular interest to people in the US.
I'm very, very, very, INCREDIBLY annoyed that this treats,
"Why should people in the US care about racial wealth gaps"
and
"Should the US have affirmative action"
As essentially identical questions and I think pretending that those are the same question atrophies your ability to think about the future or understand the US.
Well then "ADoS" (American Descendant of Slavery) is a useful category whereas "black" isn't. At some point in the past, the two categories were overlapping enough to be treated as congruent, but as time goes by they're diverging and any preferential treatment distributed by race will be captured primarily by rich successful first- or second-generation American Igbos.
Your second post seems to agree with that, so I feel like I'm talking past you here, but I'm not sure how exactly.
The fact that you aren't sure is kind of why I sound so incredibly irritated above.
"Any preferential treatment distributed by race will be captured by rich successful first or second generation American Igbos."
Why?
And as a follow-up, wouldn't one expect race-blind policies to be "captured" in the same fashion? If not why not?
EDIT: Also, if we're going for politically correct euphemisms, I really intensely dislike "Descendant of Slavery" because it really plays into the notion that nothing of particular economic impact on black Americans happened in the century between the emancipation proclamation and the civil rights act.
This was a big rhetorical dodge that conservatives liked to use in the 90s and 00s; "Why, nobody alive today kept slaves or was a slave, why should we be punished for something that happened in the 19th century."
It was necessary to insist that slavery was the primary issue because if you talked about segregation you would have to admit that, well, actually there were a bunch of living people that had been subjected to racist policy with concrete, measurable effects on their economic position and overall wellbeing.
Like, that's why you have to specify "first or second generation" Igbo immigrants because the third generation would likely have grandparents who came to the US when Jim Crow was still in force.
Like, leaving aside the merits of it as policy, I'm unclear how bussing as a school desegregation technique could be "captured" by already successful immigrants.
Not to mention that “helping people is bad because a few “””undeserving””” might benefit” is an actually a really stupid line of reasoning
So which is your No Good Very Bad Slightly Wrong Post going around?
The one about labor activists in poor countries being the natural allies of people in rich countries whose jobs have been moved abroad, because higher labor costs elsewhere make it less beneficial for companies to offshore jobs/outsource them to foreign firms.
Now, all of that is true, but what I said at the top of the post was "the main reason why labor is cheaper in poor countries is because of weaker labor laws (or weaker enforcement of labor laws)", which is false. The main reason is evidently different levels of productivity in the overall economy of poorer countries, due to lack of productive capacity in various senses (industry, education, so on).
What I should have said was "a strong labor movement raises the cost of labor in general, and historically speaking one of the main explanatory factors for the improvement in labor conditions (and with them, labor cost) in rich countries has been the efforts of labor activists. Lower labor costs abroad are the primary reason for the outsourcing of labor from the US since the end of the post-war boom. Thus, support for labor movements abroad, especially in poor countries to which labor is commonly outsourced, is in the direct personal interest of people in the US who have lost their jobs to offshoring."
Which I stand by wholeheartedly.
Owned in the trivialities but not in the broad analysis, as they say.
i mean. um. how do you square this with your position that global wealth inequality is a huge problem and it is a moral obligation to transfer wealth from rich to poor countries.
Do you think labour activists in poorer countries are actively hindering this, since their efforts are making it so less money from rich countries is being spent hiring people from poorer ones?
The thing is that poor countries running trade surpluses because workers are underpaid doesn’t really transfer wealth to those workers, at most it transfers it to local elites who already have plenty.
But as you say, if one low-wage country raises wages, it’ll lose jobs to countries that don’t.
But raising wages in all low-wage (=/= poor!) countries doesn’t mean those jobs get moved back to high-wage countries, it means those workers buy more imports, making everyone better off
there are obvious questions about how to square this with academia as a job ppl rely on for money to live but someday somehow academic articles should all be anonymous to readers as well as reviewers. everything that can be said for the virtues of double blind review (and more!) still goes for the ultimate form of curation: what articles scholars actually choose to read
My impression was that in many fields peer review basically doesn’t work to sort articles into should read/shouldn’t read (iirc the vaccines cause autism paper passed peer review), so academics fall back on author names as a substitute. Maybe it would work better if everything submitted was published (lowering expectations), but with comments from the reviewers on the methodology. This would free up reviewers from having to reject submissions for “uninterestingness” and reduce some publication biases. But since readers have limited time, reviewers should probably be able to “recommend” a few articles to take a look at, independent of their soundness. Hang on, I think I’m describing Reddit…
I enjoyed watching The Big Short with CJ so much that I said “let’s watch another finance drama movie!” and started up The Wolf of Wall Street, and had to stop 40m in. It leans so hard into the misogynistic sexual excess and drugs and money thing, and it feels like it invites you to leer at it in enjoyment while also condemning it in a superior way.
And, well, heck yes I wanted to leer in enjoyment! I want to look at a new workplace’s glass elevator being christened by two people fucking in it. I like the parade of hookers. I like watching the insane parties. There’s a reason I made it 40m in. I’m extremely in touch with my affinity for this kind of crude excess and, know it’s not uncommon.
Before watching, I skimmed the Wikipedia page for it, and this won a bunch of awards and is ‘considered a good film’. I think this is a shame. The movie seems like a dirty little trick: the equivalent of the story of the artist who paints a naked woman because he’d like to see one, puts a mirror in her hand, and titles it ‘Vanity’ to feign a moral.
Funny, Netflix’s Bonding has the exact mirror image of that hypocrisy, where the characters go on about sex-positivity and feminism while the subtext and presentation says “haha look at these gross perverts”
fucking bizarre that computers heat up while operating. like dude it’s just math
i too heat up doing math. They're not special
it’s worse than that. the laws of physics require doing math to produce waste heat.
it's bonkers that the answer to "can i make a more efficient steam engine" is "no, and btw all good is temporary", but it's objectively even funnier that the answer to "can my fucking cpu stop throttling" is "no, bc otherwise you could make more efficient steam engines"
It’s a little weirder actually, doing math doesn’t have to produce waste heat, but erasing the result when you’re done does.
The ur-source of well-positioned academics’ notorious levels of “toxicity” is the high degree of security afforded by tenure. However much you select for “non-toxic” professors earlier in the process, there is no resisting the logic that when ppl are contractually guaranteed more leeway to be unpleasant and egotistical they will, in fact, be accordingly more unpleasant and egotistical. Pruning out “toxicity” therefore requires a reduction in tenure protections (that is, labour rights), either in the form of a larger share of nontenured faculty or scaling back the protections themselves for even tenured faculty
Such efforts are, therefore, fundamentally anti-labour, and should be opposed as such
Have you seen the way Americans talk about French service workers
So, I don't know that it's actually true that French service workers have comparable levels of job security to tenured professors, that seems suspect, but even if it was, there's another difference: professors (tenured or otherwise) are in a position of power over significant numbers of students. The "toxicity" of professors would presumably be less of an issue if they couldn't, you know, give someone a bad grade just because they got on their nerves, potentially affecting that person's funding or other opportunities.
This is why, in a better world, we'd simply do away with grade altogether (or keep them around purely as a metric useful to teachers, without the capacity to influence anything outside the class). We'd have to find some other metric by which to select who gets to attend academic institutions, ideally one as permissive as possible within resource constraints.
We have a lady at one of our European offices who has apparently done like 3 weeks of work ever, and instead has flipfloped between being on vacation and being on maternity or sick leave for several years. I'm sure it's very nice to live in a world where you get two months vacation and like a year off as soon as you get a positive pregnancy test, etc, but it is pretty obviously suspectable to the whole "unfirable employee who has literally never done any work in years" problem that strong labor protections reliably create in union shops and government employees.
Sometimes I wonder about the whole “the current horrific system must not be improved in any way, lest someone benefit who doesn’t deserve to in a way which doesn’t harm anyone detectably” impulse
where the alternatives are “Elon Musk’s dad was rich, so Elon gets to routinely kill people at Tesla plants ‘cause he thinks safety measures don’t look cool” and “you can get fired, become homeless, and then starve to death ‘cause the boss didn’t think you were sufficiently obsequious, or because you were momentarily unpopular on Twitter, or the boss thought you might have a similar name to someone who was.”
I'm not worried about someone undeserving exploiting the system in a way that doesn't harm anyone detectably.
I'm worried about the concrete and specific harm that has already been done by a specific EU employee only working 3 weeks over a couple years while drawing a paycheck and making it impossible to hire someone to actually process the purchase orders for stuff my department needs.
And I am considering what kind of redundancy and class split between permanent and temps/contractors would be necessary to replicate these types of benefits in the US while still keeping our vast numbers of lower quality workers employed AND allowing not just the most high profit margin buisnesses to survive, because poor people gotta eat, etc too.
An organization’s failure to have enough people to get essential work done when somebody’s out on maternity leave is really not the fault of the person who’s taking care of their kids.
The rest is ... sorry, the idea that letting normal people lead decent lives not being possible without rich people having to pay some level of taxes, like they do in other countries where life is vastly better
is really not a comparable risk to the detectable real-life harms of having, for instance, Tesla employees literally dying in real life because Musk thinks safety measures are uncool, or people literally in real life getting fired over Twitter drama, or literally dying in real life because their insurance company screwed them over, or...
Do you see the problem? “Rich people wouldn’t get richer at the speed they’re currently used to, and might have to spend money on something other than further corrupting the system” isn’t as scary as it seems like you’re aiming for, compared to literal atrocities happening in actual real life right now.
Do you know what a profit margin is? Do you understand that buisnesses that don't make money go out of business or get bought and either substantial layoffs ensure. Companies that are losing money have layoffs. If a communist hire multiple people to get 1 purchase order processor, that's drag on profitability.
Like, do you understand how many buisnesses fail? The labor market isn't just jobs at wildly profitable companies that are enriching some asshole; a huge number of jobs are at companies that are slowly declining or clinging to survival by their teeth. A lot of lower quality workers are employed by such companies. When a company goes out of business, the employees are unemployed.
Sure I hate Musk and his disregard for worker safety, but that's absolutely off-topic bullshit chaff to this discussion about the employees who contribute no or almost no productivity while drawing a paycheck or otherwise behave in ways that would get them fired with less worker protections.
Hey, interesting thought; the EU countries can afford to have miniscule military budgets because the American military budget is so big. By which I mean our taxes and lack of social services spending is subsidizing the lengthy European sabbaticals. The American mother with 12 weeks unpaid leave is paying for that EU months of paid maternity leave.
Honestly, this is just another form of "under communism, people won't have to contribute to the upkeep of society".
It's one thing to have a lot of vacation time and maternity leave. It's another thing for labor laws to turn things into sinecures.
The idea that US labor conditions subsidize European ones strikes me as not well proved by the fact that someone in your office is lazier than the American workers.
If the US worked more and transferred that income to Europeans who worked less, the US would have a trade surplus to Europe, which it doesn’t.
I also feel like this misses the obvious explanation of European work benefits: European cash wages are lower and prices are higher. Companies can pass on the costs of their benefits without going out of business because the law requires every company to give those benefits.
One week on from the shock announcement of the UK’s mini-budget, the pound sterling has recovered to the levels it was at before the panic.
“If there was no intervention today, gilt yields could have gone up to 7-8 per cent from 4.5 per cent this morning and in that situation around 90 per cent of UK pension funds would have run out of collateral,” said Kerrin Rosenberg, Cardano Investment chief executive. “They would have been wiped out.”
so the central bank stepped in to save the day, as it has over the past decades, but as Tooze points out:
Who exactly is being bailed out when the Bank of England steps in? The answer is not clear cut. Is it pension policy holders? The economy at large that is spared a catastrophic financial crisis? Or is it BlackRock Inc., Legal & General Group Plc and Schroders Plc who manage LDI funds on behalf of pension clients? The very fact that we cannot give a confident answer to these questions, suggests that we are dealing with a system riven with conflicts of interest. And this poses the question of reform. Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous financial risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages? Yes the central bank can act as the fire brigade, but why do we such a dangerous situation as normality. Why do the smoke detectors fail again and again? And why is the house not more fire proof? It is time to ask who benefits and who pays the cost for continuing with this dangerously inflammable system.
when basic long-lived assets like pensions and mortgages can suddenly go bankrupt in a matter of hours due to a quirk in the way the markets for them are structured that doesn't demand a bailout it demands a fundamental restructuring of the market.
But to answer his question, no one was bailed out because no one was actually insolvent. If gilt prices are falling because people expect them to fall further, stopping that isn’t bailing anyone out.
so if they didn't do it the pension funds would have been insolvent, by their own admission, but doing it doesn't count as a bailout? in that case nothing does, even TARP wasn't strictly speaking a bailout by that standard.
I think if the central bank is forced to change its policy to the extent of buying more bonds when it wants to be selling them purely to save commercial financial institutions from the consequences of their bad decisions then it raises real questions about those decisions, the incentive structures that led to them, and the profit that is extracted by the industry before they blow everything up.
I think you can distinguish between a loan or a grant to save some institution, supporting the inflated price of an asset, and buying an asset that’s having a run. If the run doesn’t stop, the price falls far below the actual value and agents that are actually solvent are forced to sell and take a huge loss. If you buy it at some discount, agents that made risky bets that it would only go up aren’t validated.
It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s like deposit insurance; when people put their money in a bank that fails we don’t just say “too bad you made a bad decision,” and I think most people don’t consider deposit insurance to be very morally hazardous.
One week on from the shock announcement of the UK’s mini-budget, the pound sterling has recovered to the levels it was at before the panic.
“If there was no intervention today, gilt yields could have gone up to 7-8 per cent from 4.5 per cent this morning and in that situation around 90 per cent of UK pension funds would have run out of collateral,” said Kerrin Rosenberg, Cardano Investment chief executive. “They would have been wiped out.”
so the central bank stepped in to save the day, as it has over the past decades, but as Tooze points out:
Who exactly is being bailed out when the Bank of England steps in? The answer is not clear cut. Is it pension policy holders? The economy at large that is spared a catastrophic financial crisis? Or is it BlackRock Inc., Legal & General Group Plc and Schroders Plc who manage LDI funds on behalf of pension clients? The very fact that we cannot give a confident answer to these questions, suggests that we are dealing with a system riven with conflicts of interest. And this poses the question of reform. Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous financial risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages? Yes the central bank can act as the fire brigade, but why do we such a dangerous situation as normality. Why do the smoke detectors fail again and again? And why is the house not more fire proof? It is time to ask who benefits and who pays the cost for continuing with this dangerously inflammable system.
when basic long-lived assets like pensions and mortgages can suddenly go bankrupt in a matter of hours due to a quirk in the way the markets for them are structured that doesn't demand a bailout it demands a fundamental restructuring of the market.
But to answer his question, no one was bailed out because no one was actually insolvent. If gilt prices are falling because people expect them to fall further, stopping that isn’t bailing anyone out.
On the one hand, I feel like economists have a blind spot when they contrast the concentrated misery of unemployment with the distributed misery of inflation, because they ignore the fact that employed people also suffer from bosses having the leverage to be petty tyrants in a slack labor environment.
On the other hand, opinion polling also suggests that voters don't weigh this much either, which is bizarre to me.
I found this weird as well. My guesses are that either frequently unemployed people feel that politics won’t help them and tend not to vote, or that people’s “just world” bias kicks in and they imagine that unemployment is something that happens to other people, who deserve it.
