Something I learned managing people over the years is that only about one out of fifty people don’t need pretty explicit directions to complete nearly any given task. The other forty-nine will need it step by step or they simply can’t do it. This isn’t ideal for a lot of the business world (particularly IT) because of how often you are doing things that have not been done exactly that way before.

If you’re the 1/50 who can just get things done without detailed and constant instruction, you’re immensely valuable. Working with people like that is so much easier and the organization is so much better off. The intern I worked with a while ago was like that, which was probably one of the reasons we got along so well.

Perhaps this is trainable. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all, though. Quite the opposite. I’d love to be proved wrong, however.

Middle ground on fracking: water still poisoned.
Middle ground on health care: people still dying.
Middle ground on climate: planet still becomes uninhabitable.
Dems, for all these things (and more) there’s #NoMiddleGround. Thankfully though, there’s #Bernie. #FeelTheBern pic.twitter.com/j5SKSyvdm7

— Josh Fox (@joshfoxfilm) June 3, 2019

Exactly. There are some issues where no compromise position is possible because it’s like arguing if someone should chop you up into halves or quarters; either way, still dead!

Not sure why people (particularly Boomers) have such trouble understanding this….

I suspect one of the divisions in this world is between people who would live in co-housing with strangers and people who would rather live literally anywhere else.

I am the latter btw.

Also f everyone and their inaccessible 'solutions.' https://t.co/OI51TQuM69

— ♿️G Peters (@mssinenomine) June 1, 2019

I am also one of those who would rather live anywhere else. That sort of communal living sounds like an utter undiluted nightmare. I’d rather live in a mud hole in the forest than there.

Those sorts of communal environments always bring about the worst of humanity, and I want nothing to do with any of that and would do nearly anything not to live somewhere like that.

By developers convincing themselves that infrastructure is code, they then believe that infrastructure is an unlimited resource with no physical restrictions (such as capacity, latency, availability, etc).

I have no problem with code representing infrastructure and deploying this way. I do it myself sometimes. But the current developer belief common all across companies and the internet that infrastructure maps to no extant physical resource is a fanciful, absurd misapprehension. Your code is always deployed to and running on a server somewhere (yes, even if you are “serverless.”)

Far less has changed than many developers imagine — it’s just that they never understood infrastucture and still do not, but now have even more excuses not to as they’ve been allowed to believe it’s “just code.”

but what i find most fascinating about this:

capitalist ideology is STILL working! people still believe in capitalism! an extremely large number of people! we are seeing capitalism embrace the complete breakdown of the conditions for human life, and people still believe in it!

— jess (@l1quidcryst4l) May 25, 2019

This is not surprising; people are more likely to die for an ideology than nearly anything else — and die they will.

I vacillate on this from moment to moment, but I think there is high chance of human extinction as a result of climate change. Capitalism might the last -ism there is.

Ours is a country led by hollow men like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, "leaders" who think of nothing but their own egos, who will do nothing as we're drowned by floods, starved by drought, choked by poisoned air. That is the way the world ends.

— Sen. Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) May 31, 2019

If you vote Biden or clowntellectual Mayor Pete, you are voting for death for your children and their children (who will never exist).

When I think about the fact of Mozilla killing their add-on ecosystem — their one and only competitive advantage — it makes me wonder how so many smart people can malfunction so spectacularly.

It also makes me wonder why we haven’t had a major nuclear war yet — perhaps it is due to that at least the political power players, while not being as intelligent on paper, have some experience in the real world. This helps mitigate against such brazen and resolute stupidity of the Mozilla variety.

When scientists say (accurately) that “race doesn’t exist,” they are speaking in genetic and narrow pedantic terms. They are correct in (nearly) all ways that matter in their constrained and socially-blinkered lane.

However, when scientists castigate people for believing in race, the average person is not thinking in genetic or any cogent scientific terms at all, so this is a useless and counterproductive method of pushing back against the idea of race.

To the average non-scientist, race is very, very real and showing them a spreadsheet or a karyotype won’t convince them otherwise — quite the opposite! Assaulting people with data has already been shown to be a terrible, worthless strategy so I am puzzled that is being attempted so often and so persistently. And people are correct to believe in race. Social constructions, after all, are quite real as I argued here recently.

If you don’t think the idea of race is real, if I had dark skin and were waving a gun around on Main Street, how likely is it that some cop would shoot me? Nearly 100%. If I were white (which I am), how likely do you think it is? Much less so, of course.

Don’t try to condescendingly convince people race isn’t real just because it’s “only” a social construct. They know better than the scientists that in all the ways that matter, race is real.

Kevin Drum loves lying with data.

Here’s what he claims:

Even at the height of the Great Recession, only 1 percent of employed men and 2 percent of employed women worked for the minimum wage. Today the figures are 0.23 percent and 0.37 percent.

Notice that his graph and data actually refers to the federal minimum wage. Twenty-one states have raised their minimum wage out of necessity as the fed one is so low — thus they are automatically excluded from his data while people in those states are doing better but essentially still earning poverty-level wages.

He also excludes salaried workers which by definition do not and cannot earn a minimum wage.

Here’s some data used properly from the 2018 BLS report:

In 2018, 81.9 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.5 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 434,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.3 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.7 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.1 percent of all hourly paid workers.

So it appears he also excluded anyone earning below the federal minimum wage. Farm workers, students, waitresses, and some other classes are exempt from the federal minimum.

Drum — like many Boomer centrists — excels at sounding recondite and reasonable while spouting casuistry and prevarication. He’s very good at it as if you just take a surface-level look at his “data,” it seems reasonable. But examine any part of it closer and it’s basically just Republican talking points.

The only feature I care about on a phone is that it has Google Maps or a similar program. It’s the only app I use and the only one I will likely ever use on a phone. The rest are worthless garbage that work far better on anything with a larger screen.

If someone would make a flip phone that has Google Maps and a headphone jack, I’d pay up to a grand for that.

When liberals hear “socially constructed” I think they hear “changeable on a whim” and “reasonlessly capricious” whereas I understand how the entire weight of history and inculcation obstructs their easily-imagined alterations and rearrangements of a cultural imperative.

Relatedly, when liberals hear “genetic” I think they imagine that anyone who says that means “eugenics, exterminate all the undesirables immediately” and they also have some sort of idea that anything genetic is ever-ineluctable and cannot be altered by any means at all.

In reality, it’s probably easier to mitigate, alter, or re-direct most genetic human tendencies (though not all) while it’s much harder to change culture.

As usual, they have everything exactly backwards.