Neoliberal Lies

quoderat

What a dumbass take by a typical liberal dumbass.

Read a damn book. Or anything. Shit. The information is right there. Right there. I get so infuriated with these types because they never get any smarter.

The “confusion” (really deliberate obfuscation) really comes from the fact that immigrants raise GDP (that’s the net benefit he’s citing in poor faith) but lower wages particularly for low-income workers.

At the most basic level, immigration increases the supply of labor in the economy. More labor means more goods and services being produced, so that national output (GDP) rises.

Immigration also affects the prices of the inputs that are used to produce these goods and services. Those inputs for which immigrant labor substitutes will suffer as the prices of their services fall. Simply put, “substitutes” means two things that are very similar to one another. As a homely example, red apples and green apples are almost perfect substitutes, so that an increase in the number of red apples would not only reduce the price of red apples, but also simultaneously lower the price of green apples by about the same amount. In the context of immigration, whereas we shall see many immigrants are unskilled laborers, the strong presumption is that immigrants are substitutes for domestic unskilled labor. Therefore, an increase in the number of immigrants will generally decrease the wages of domestic unskilled workers.

In other words, immigration will raise the wages of useless whiners like Matt Blaze while lowering the wage of people like most of the people I grew up with, and anyone who does low-wage labor.

There is no hope for Democrat types at all. They are just utterly clueless.

Hilair

quoderat

This movie with its terrible subtitles is also unintentionally hilarious. Its subtitler translated “fixed” as in “She fixed a meal” as “repaired.” And then it translated “loaded” as in “loaded with drugs” as “packed.”

The Swedish word is indeed “packad” but that’s not what it means! No one who speaks English says “packed.”

I have a feeling whoever watched this movie didn’t speak Swedish or English. And may not have actually been human.

Dedication

quoderat

You know you must be dedicated to watching a movie when the English subtitles are so inaccurate that you understand what Swedish you can, transliterate the rest and read that, and if you can’t read that, then Google translate the remainder.

Luckily, Swedish and English are fairly close phonemically, structurally, and share many cognates, but I didn’t realize I was basically going to have to learn damn Swedish to watch this film….

Gone

quoderat

I truly miss the days when I didn’t have to fight my computer and my browser to get them to do what I want.

Perhaps we’ve made the world easier for the droolers. Perhaps. But we’ve lost so much freedom in exchange that it definitely was not worth it.

Struct

Quote quoderat

“We use these and other abstractions because they work, because we have found they describe nature. From a purely mathematical standpoint they are certainly not inevitable; if they were, we could derive them by logic alone. But we can never prove any math to be a true description of nature, for the only provable truths are about mathematical structures themselves, not about the relation of these structures to reality.”

–Sabine Hossenfelder

V-8, no tomato

quoderat

It bothers me more than it should when in shows and movies car and trucks that I know were never offered in a V-8 pull away with a V-8 sound.

Yeah, sure, maybe an engine swap…but realistically how many people do that in a stock-looking vehicle? Almost none.

The latest one: the Toyota Tacoma has never been offered in a V-8, so why the V-8 noises? I know a V-8 sounds a lot better than other engines, but my car nerd brain squirms a bit when I hear that bit of dissonance with reality.

The Block

quoderat

This is true, but it’s more than that. I know most everyone on Tumblr is really, really young, and at this point I’ve been around the block so many times they’ve named the damn thing after me, so here’s some advice.

Most jobs put an absurd list of requirements so if for some reason they don’t like you, they can say, “Ah, Mary didn’t know how to trampoline slam dunk a volleyball into a basketball hoop, as is listed in the requirements, so even though this is an administrative assistant job, she’s right out.”

When the real reason they didn’t hire you is because it just wasn’t a cultural fit, or you spoke in a Bronx accent, or any other number of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily have to be discriminatory, though it often is — listing absurd requirements is just an easy out for the company even if it’s just a budgetary reason that the hiring doesn’t go through.

However, sometimes ridiculous requirements are listed because the job is being tailored to a specific person who already works there. Many companies have rules that any job must be first advertised outside the company before an internal candidate can be hired. I’ve been involved in this myself several times as the internal candidate. Everyone has unique skills, so the job description was literally just a listing of all the things I already knew how to do. The chances of anyone else having exactly my skill set, especially since I’ve been in IT for nearly 20 years now? Nada. These jobs you will never get because they aren’t for you, but they are hard to detect so apply away.

The desperation mentioned is also often at play, too. My last job (pre-CTO) I got somewhat for that reason, as I was not by the standards of the advertisement qualified for it, and I wasn’t really who the company was looking for. I’d never worked for a large-scale hosting provider previously, and had never worked with multiple large customers at once. I was missing other qualifications, too, but I happened to get interviewed as they just couldn’t find anyone else. As I (frankly) tend to do, I nailed the interview so hard they still can’t get it off the wall, and a few weeks later I was sitting in a spot a less ambitious person had unknowingly abdicated.

Mediocre or not, I excelled in that (very difficult) job and I only got it because I had the gumption to apply.

The Litany

quoderat

With the extensions I use — and not even including any ad blocking ones — my Waterfox is roughly twice as fast as the Quantum bullshit.

None of these extensions work or will ever work in the Firefox Quantum shitstain.

You know the drill: fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers!

The Chain

quoderat

Well, we got the shittiest dystopia. We didn’t even get a potentially fun one — just a dismal, pedestrian, boring one. I mean, concentration camps. Always with the fucking concentration camps.

BTW, it’s not a conservative lie that this family detention policy was started by Obama (but not generally family separation). However, the concentration camps? All “cool-ass” Obama.

Mercado

quoderat

Here Is Why You Shouldn’t Expect A Bargain On A Pre-Owned Sedan.

There’s been a lot of confusion about why auto makers do not want to make sedans any longer. Sure, the demand has softened a little but the real reason is that SUVs and trucks have a much, much higher profit margin for automakers. Profit margin on a sedan is in the single-digit percentage range.

On the other hand, the profit margin on even a mid-tier SUV is around 20%. It’s even higher for the luxury SUVs people seem to want to buy now.

So, no, it’s not really lack of demand that is causing sedans to disappear — it’s lack of profit margin from the manufacturers’ point of view.