Month: March 2020

Test And

Chill Uncategorized

A lot of the drama you’re seeing on Twitter between the right and the left regarding the economy will never be resolved because most liberals have deontological views and most of the non-liberals do not.

I am more of a consequentialist myself, obviously. To be clear, I think that test and trace is the way to go regarding Covid-19 and that we shouldn’t restart the economy just yet. My point is that if we wait three months, that there will be no economy left to restart and ~20 million or so deaths from that alone are likely (no, I do not care what economists say; as usual, they are wrong).

However, the liberals, with their deontological outlook and their hatred of any thought experiments, cannot recognize the real world has absolute limitations in almost all cases and that wishing that it weren’t so does nothing. It’s like risk: it can’t be eliminated, but it can be shifted.

Rank and file Republicans only care about the stock market, though. The liberals are absolutely correct to claim that they don’t care if your gramma dies, because they don’t, as long as the stock market goes up. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. The issue is that after a certain point — and I think it’s about three months — economic relations break in a way that cannot be mended. There will be no repair, only destruction. The economy isn’t a Windows 95 machine that can be rebooted when it crashes. It doesn’t work like that at all.

The Kantian categorical imperative was always a nice idea that doesn’t comport with brute reality. And we’ll get to see just how badly it works soon enough. Most of you won’t like it much.

Lines

Chill Regular-ass Post

In academia, though, generally you are punished for strongly cross-discipline research. It’s a career negative and sometimes a career killer. And outside of academia if you pursue any line of inquiry without the right pieces of paper, you’re just ignored.

Break this impasse, and a better world might result.

Say My Name

Chill Uncategorized

That looks like my IT projects, which are often like:

Name of project manager: Mike

Name of solutions architect: Mike

Name of infrastructure designer: Mike

New of network designer: Mike

Name of network implementer: Mike

Level 1 support: Mike

Level 2 support: Mike

Level 3 support: Mike

Name of DBA: Mike

Name of application designer: Mike

Configuration manager: Mike

Name of infrastructure implementer: Mike

Hope to get away from that kind of thing soon, but that’s been my whole IT career so not sure if that’ll actually happen.

Uses of Pandemics

Chill Uncategorized

Some “progressives” are already using this pandemic to get to their ideal world of no travel, no leaving the house except to apologize to a tree, and banishment of most the things that make life worth living. Soon they’ll be mandating insect consumption and IV drips of fake meat. Ok, I’m being flip and mean to be funny. But they are indeed using this opportunity to push their preferred diminished ascetic future of licking algae out of glass bottles while performing recompensatory cunnilingus on Gaia on demand.

Why did our choices have to be reduced to predatory neoliberal capitalism and algae-slurping Benedictine monks?

Fragile

Chill Regular-ass Post

Right the fuck on. Obesity makes you fragile. That’s not beautiful — it’s just tragic. It should not be celebrated or shamed, but it should be prevented.

Seeing It

Chill Regular-ass Post

The supermarkets in literally every country I’ve been to — save Egypt — have been better than the US. The very best grocery store in the US (think Wegman’s) is roughly the “average” to “OK” supermarket in most of Europe and China.

Cono

Chill Uncategorized

I’m very frustrated by how poor an understanding liberals have of the economy, what makes it run and their vast misperception of how easily it can be restarted after a protracted complete shutdown.

This utter failure of comprehension almost makes me want to write more about how complex dynamic systems function and fail, but that would take 100 pages of dense writing before I could even start making my main point. It’s just not worth it and I don’t care enough. Most liberals wouldn’t understand even 10% of it and the rest would complain that it’s not intersectional enough or that I wrote a prohibited word.

What I’ve only discovered as an adult, other than that propaganda is devastatingly effective, is that most people aren’t curious and don’t want to learn anything at all.

Perspective

Chill Regular-ass Post

When you say that we shouldn’t let the economy crater and consign millions to suffering and death, people with comfortable six-figure salaries come out of the woodwork screeching, “Why do you want gramma to DIEEEEEE?”

Easy to say when you still have nice six-figure job and savings and won’t be evicted soon.

In the real world, about 50% of Americans have no savings and make $10-$11 an hour. But most of those people are not on Twitter.

Look, no one wants your fucking gramma to die. What we’re trying to do is to avoid your gramma dying, you dying, and your kids dying after the economy can no longer be restarted.

How’s that?

Soliety

Chill Regular-ass Post

Also a lie is that this labor is unskilled, unimportant and that “anybody could do it.” I never understood why so many accepted those falsehoods in the first place, but many did.

Eight Two

Chill Regular-ass Post

That’s an 82nd Airborne Division combat patch on his right shoulder. That’s my old unit, and that patch being there means he was in combat with that unit. 82nd competence represent!