This is also true for computers and tech in general.

I do have a friend, however, who is a software engineer at a large company where the CEO and other executives don’t understand software. They don’t understand what is reasonable to expect software to do, how it is made, how software projects are managed, or how a web-based service is run.

That might have been cute 30 years ago, but if you can’t find your Start menu in 2019, it’s no longer cute and you should be fired for incompetence. Computers aren’t some peripheral technology only used by experts and haven’t been for a very long time. Everyone has one on their desk. Some bare standard of competence should be required. “I’m not good with computers” is no longer a valid excuse in the workplace. It should be a firing offense if training doesn’t work.

I say this not because I am a computer expert, but because a basic standard of any job is that you should have much more than a passing familiarity with your main work tool. Why we make an exception for computers (with for what average users do are remarkably simply) I have no idea at all.

Kevin Drum and this dipshit should give a class in how to lie with data. They are masters at it.

My extra spicy, super hottest take of all time: housing, education, and health care are all cheaper today than the 1970s

Yes, you can show me a graph with lines going up over time faster than wages or CPI, but to see why that's a bad measure read this THREAD https://t.co/NeLOMuUFbj

— Jeremy Horpedahl 🍍 (@jmhorp) May 1, 2019

Ignoring for the moment all the issues with how no one can buy a square foot of housing a la carte, in 1973 the average home price was $33,000 and the average wage was $7,600 (round numbers for ease of comparison).

Looking at it in a more sane way than the Horpedahl putz, that means the average worker required 4.3 years of earnings to buy the average house in 1973,

How about now? I’ll use data from 2017 (2018 would be worse). Using the same census.gov data, the average selling price in 2017 was around $320,000 and and the average income in 2017 was $48,000.

This means that in 2017, the average worker would have to work 6.7 years to buy the average home — an increase of 2.4 years of labor required or 36% more. Remember, no one can buy a square foot of housing. This framing is absurd and only a fucking spreadsheet jockey could produce such specious donkey vomit. Also, his “analysis” ignores agglomeration effects, inequality, the Great Recession, and a dozen other important factors.

By the way, it gets even worse if you use median income instead of average. The median person income in the US in 2016 was only around $32,000, for a “years of income to buy” of 6.9 years.

I know he said later that he meant to say that he was using 1978 data, but 1973 or 1978 makes little difference to the analysis. He’s clearly wrong in every possible way and like a lot of classroom-intelligent people, he’s masterful at lying with data. This is how his type get ahead, with their Slate-esque contrarian hot takes and hoodlumish hoodwinking of the (as they see it) lower orders.

I will not stand for that shit. Health care and education are even more expensive than housing when compared to the 1970s, by the way. What an unpardonably shoddy thinker.

About 12 years ago on an old blog of mine, I asserted that GDP was being measured incorrectly as was much of the rest of the economy, and that productivity growth was a good bit higher than estimated. Everyone (including an actual economist) piled on telling me how crazy and wrong I was.

Well, I was right.

Interesting report by @d_harrison on how US official statisticians are abandoning techniques of the 20th century to keep up with new retail and production structure. Result is to lower price estimates and raise productivity growth. https://t.co/hjrh8vIw7F pic.twitter.com/k9pyatg4W7

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) May 3, 2019

This has been bloody obvious to anyone paying a bit of attention, but economics, to the extent that it is worth anything at all, is always about two decades behind the times.

I do indeed like being right.

Those who Can write rarely realize how difficult it is for those who cannot

It makes me think most people don’t understand their own minds very well https://t.co/s6eC7613Io

— Alexander J.A Cortes (@AJA_Cortes) May 2, 2019

Agreed. It took me a long, long time to comprehend that some people — many people — can’t “just write” as I can, and that it is a prohibitively-difficult task for many. I guess that was my equivalent of, “Anyone can do math, you just haven’t been shown how!” nonsense that math types spout.

Writing, though, is a complex task that not only takes much practice but also a certain kind of mind, a kind that I happen to possess. Others don’t, though often being no less intelligent.

And not everyone has the time or interest it takes to read as voluminously as is required to be a capable writer. I estimate I had to read for about 30,000 hours to become a good writer. Not a typo. That is 30,000 hours of reading. That’s just shy of 3.5 years of having a book in my hand. Just reading, does not include any other time. I’d say that’s conservative as an estimate, as I am fast reader and have a pretty good mind. Most will require more reading time.

“Who do I escalate this to.”
…
“Oh fuck I am the escalation.”

All day.
Every day.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) May 2, 2019

I’ve also worked for companies that refused to pay for support contracts or paid for inadequate support (tweet at us!). It’s terrible.

At one such place, because we had no support and no possibility thereof, I was forced to re-engineer from scratch a Windows service that was necessary for the company’s most important application. It took me nearly two continuous days of work with maybe a few hours of sleep during this 48-hour period.

For those who don’t know what this means, imagine someone told that two days from now you’d need to be able to sew from scratch a fully-historically-accurate Regency-era dress, with no assistance other than a musty book with no pictures from 1946.

That’s the equivalent of what I did. And it’s completely horrible as an experience and as a practice.

There are other times I’ve had to call vendors and tell them how to fix their products — slightly different but also annoying. Companies don’t seem to realize that you don’t need support 99% of the time, but when you need it you really need it a whole damn lot.

Whatever you do, don’t do deadlifts like this. It’ll wreck your back pretty quickly. I feel bad for her because no one probably ever showed her the correct way to do the lift, but in a year or two she’ll start having persistent back problems that’ll last for the rest of her life.

On the other hand, if you deadlift the correct way it’ll actually strengthen your back.