A lot of “ancient” traditions are 40-140 years old. Some that are claimed to be as old as time I can remember when they began. The world is strange.

One of the things I like about the stock market is that it’s one of the very few areas where you get paid guaranteed if you are right.

In most of life, you just get castigated and exiled if you’re correct against conventional “wisdom.”

I surprised someone else again today with my age. A woman I work with asked me how old I was. I told her, she looked incredulous for a moment and then said, “What!?! You look amazing!”

So that was an ego boost. (She’s an immigrant, so she’s not been captured by the primarily-American PMC lib feminist HR drone mentality. Thus, she acts like an actual human being at work. Had a few in-person meetings this week.)

there should be a minimum computer literacy test when hiring new people.

I agree. I would probably not be so vehement about this if training and blame did not get foisted onto the IT department. New hire does not know how to use Outlook, Microsoft Word, that specialty accounting software or do anything on a computer == the IT department isn’t doing their job!

The last time I looked “Training Specialist” was not in my title nor in the title of anyone on my team. We are not qualified trainers. We have no idea how your department’s practices and procedures work. It is and should be the manager’s role to make sure a new hire is 1) Qualified for the job, including having seen a computer before and 2) Receives the necessary training for the role.

Many times I have pissed off people by refusing to have my team train incompetent new hires on software that we have no expertise in or on. And I will do it again, I absolutely promise.

Boomers should be called Busters instead, because that is the generation that broke so many fundamental aspects of society.

Indeed. NIMBYism — primarily a Boomer thing — has reduced collective wealth by about 1/3. I don’t mean that they have taken it. I mean every single one of us would be that much richer without Boomer NIMBYism.

What’s the punishment for disappearing a few trillion dollars and making 340 million people’s lives worse?

I really hate smartphones, that so much is done by text and the whole shitty surveillance ecosystem around all of that. And that so many people just accept it. I remember when things were different and people were much more averse to ubiquitous monitoring and surveillance.

Sasha.

I usually don’t watch stuff like this, but what a sweetheart. It refutes the self-harming feminist contention that no one should talk to anyone in public ever, especially if you’re a man.

Things could be better.

Mass Ukrainian ATACMS Tactical ballistic missile launch against Russian-occupied Crimea, reportedly this evening. Four M270 MLRSs fired 8 ATACMS in a quick salvo. June 23, 2024.

There goes $20 million.

One of the reasons I like reading the Hacker News comments is that most often, people there are clownishly wrong. Usually 180 degrees incorrect. It’s a good way to think little and achieve much. Just do the opposite of the consensus there, and you’ll almost always be right.

That’s quite handy, in fact.

Ukrainian FPC drone pilot fly’s his drone underneath the camo netting and nearly into the breech of an artillery piece.

Just amazing flying. I hope we’re not fighting the Russians in Poland in 2032, but I suspect we will be.

Unpopular opinions about relationships and sex:

1) Women and men and everyone above the age of majority should have more age gap relationships.

2) Licking pierced nipples tastes like licking sweaty keys.

3) Women hold men to standards they don’t hold themselves to, and that seems to be getting worse.

4) A great milkshake is far better than sex with most people.

5) And most people are not motivated by morality or propriety, but fear. This is true of both relationships and sex.

I’ve watched quite a lot of combat footage from Ukraine. I’ve seen many people die horribly. War is neither noble nor just, though it is sometimes justified; it is, though, a great bloodsoaked machine that consumes all in its path indiscriminately.

Every day now that something minor goes wrong in my life or I come up against some trifling inconvenience, I think to myself, At least I am not being hunted by drones on some Ukrainian battlefield. And my day seems vastly better after that. I have a great life in comparison and in absolute terms. I will not die pointlessly and brutally, forgotten, in some farmer’s field south of Kharkiv.

That is something to be grateful for.

Also, this:

I had a friend who did exactly this — he lived alone and worked full-time at  Blockbuster. In 1995 he was able to afford a small apartment, a cheap car, food and entertainment all on his own. That would be 100% absolutely fucking impossible now in any US city.

This is clownish bullshit:

This distortion is caused by the top 10% having much, much larger houses, skewing the average (and households have gotten smaller).

The reality is this:

Noah Smith and related econs (emphasis on “con”) cannot admit the above is the common case as that leads to exile from the profession — because the whole point of modern economics is to exalt power and wealth. As a result, nearly all of the economic stats you see are just pure lies.

(And no, this is not sour grapes. I make well above 4x the median individual income, and that does not include any of my quite numerous and profitable stock market shenanigans. I am doing great. Others, not so much.)