Fivecast

That is a really great insight. I do not rely on checklists. This only works in normal times, not crises or emergencies. In those instances reliance only on checklists usually fails catastrophically.

These models in my head are exactly why people often call me “crazy” and then I often turn out (far higher than the noise rate) to be right.

Her polls are also a great insight into how poorly — very fucking poorly — even the “educated” think.

I might not get the exact outcome correct every time, but I guarantee I will best nearly all PhD forecasters in most fields every single time (politics excepted). If you think that’s arrogant, you’re wrong and I’m right — again.

Deplo

I said nearly this exact sentence to my partner a few weeks ago.

In the last election, it was such political genius for Trump to say: โ€œI love the poorly educated.โ€ Had Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders been capable of saying that, theyโ€™d be on their way now to a second term.

That was the phrase that won Trump the 2016 election just as Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” is what lost it for her. Words do matter sometimes!

Also this is an excellent point.

Yes, thereโ€™s race, and immigration, and globalization, but thereโ€™s something even scarier, and hard to address directly: this Knowledge Economy, which belongs to us in the postgraduate elite, who cannot imagine the working class ever being part of it. In that sense, the vote for Trump in 2016 was the Luddite equivalent of taking a hammer to all that human capital belonging to us.

And the sad thing is the “educated” have gotten yet more haughty and convinced of their vast superiority since 2016 while their obvious cluelessness has only accelerated.

Power Spell

Agreed. I think a great deal of this occurs because liberals are acculturated in a habitat where words are the animus of the world — at least from their perspective. They are wrong, of course, but the typical education certainly gives you this impression.

Words and language are not unimportant, of course, but in the hierarchy of actual power as realized and exercised in the world they are quite far down the ladder. Glad I joined the army and had some of the other experiences I did because that jarred me out of my belief in the infinite power of words.

But I think the woke types will keep worshipping this golden calf until they die of lack of health care.

Putsch It

This guy understands the scope and scale of the current crisis. He’s one of the few. Unfortunately he seems to want to use it to achieve some sort of technocrat putsch.

But much credit for grasping what’s happening and what’s likely to occur. That’s about 1 out of 10,000 people or fewer right now.

Insular

So? This is how insurance works. Anyway, if they’ve paid that much, it’s not unlikely that in the previously-good times the insurance company made nearly that much in the 17 years on the money paid in, with good investments and leverage.

It’s weird when people have these oddball criticisms for how things work and have for hundreds of years. I mean that’s literally what insurance is for.

Culpa

Most people only care about their stupid fucking team, not getting shit done. It’s why I won’t vote for Biden — I know he won’t get anything worthwhile done, and probably quite the opposite.

Micro Answer

The microservices-honeymoon period is over. Uber are refactoring thousands of microservices into a more manageable solution, according to Kelsey Hightower monoliths are the future, and even Sam Newman says that microservices should never be the default choice, but rather a last resort.

If your answer is always “microservices,” you’re probably asking the wrong question. Just as in clothes, in the IT world technologies come in and out of fashion. This is the story, largely, of microservices.

Tech Yes

This is what I mean by “technology as nature.” It’s taken many years for other people to get to where I was decades ago. And where Natalie Merchant was in 1982, as she coined the phrase.