Donetsk Oblast, Ukrainian forces hit a Russian Bm-21 Grad with a M30A1 GMLRS AW. pic.twitter.com/c1nqAcNTLi

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 10, 2023

Damn. Look at that shockwave.

I knew the republic was lost when being fat, weak and dumb came to be valorized.

This is clown shit. It contains a lot of unevidenced assertions and highly dubious ideas it takes as obvious.

I do high-level cognitive work. I design complex networks and cloud architectures. I am not at all able to be productive when gladhanding MBAs drop by my desk every 15 minutes to talk about sports teams I don’t care one little fucking bit about.

Back when I was forced to work in an office, I’d sit there all day and do basically nothing because there were way too many distractions to think. Then I’d go home and do my real work for 4-5 hours every night. Alas, I did this for many years. I refuse to do this ever, ever again. I will never take an office job again. Not fucking ever.

I am 2-3x as productive in work time spent at home. Sometimes more. I’d warrant most people are too, unless they are those gladhanding MBAs. It’s no surprise really that the very least productive people are forcing RTO because most of their status and advancement is based on office politics and throwing others under the bus rather than actually achieving anything.

The US is building factories at a wildly fast rate.

Just a few years ago nearly everyone was saying that this was “impossible.” Remember that? It was ubiquitous.

Policy matters. Incentives matters. Everything else is just doofuses with status quo bias.

Census Bureau is switching to a chained price index for its household income measures, a good idea which will probably spawn some conspiratorial takes.https://t.co/9Fchkmi8Ur pic.twitter.com/NJe0hJkFbt

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 8, 2023

Ya fuckin’ nitwit, this will conceal actual inflation. Clown ass motherfucker.

Chained CPI does represent what consumers actually buy. But just because prices increase so much that someone can only afford ramen and unbuttered toast is a bad representation of anything at all useful. It thus misrepresents inflation enormously and is a terrible measure for understanding what’s actually happening in the economy.

If there were a World Dipshit Competition, it’d be a tight race between Yglesias and Welsh. I really am not sure who would win. Nor do I care, really.

A teenage girl who pretended to be a boy in order to engage in sexual activity with a severely shortsighted girl also duped a second teenager, a court has heard.

Dang some people really hate when others try to get and stay fit. Really hate it.

That’s ok, I revel in your tears!

Simple proof that corporations do not care about efficiency or productivity: the widespread RTO demands lately, mostly from large companies. For most people working from home is demonstrably more efficient partially (but not only) because they work more hours.* If companies actually cared about productivity and making the most profit possible, they’d allow work from home as much as is practical.** That they do not encourage this is obvious proof that what they claim to value is not what they really care about.

For most companies — especially very large ones — profit and productivity is maybe fourth or fifth on the list of organizational and executive priorities. Actual priorities are:

1) Wielding power
2) Being a live player
3) Advancing the interests of the upper class
4) Profit
5) Productivity

That said, I have worked for companies where “profit” and “productivity” were de facto as low as 10th and 11th on the list of org priorities. It’s not uncommon at all. Thus, RTO is mainly about wielding power and being a live player. That it’ll harm productivity and profit is not even a consideration for most of the MBA types who are forcing this.

But I already knew all this because I usually know what’s going to happen before it does. I wrote this on April 23, 2020, over three years ago now:

Did I nail it or what? Of course I knew I would. You know a swish is a swish right when the ball leaves your hands. As an aside, it used to bother me that people didn’t listen to me even though I am consistently right. Then I realized they didn’t listen because I was right while going against the herd. Then I loved it. Now I really enjoy people not listening to me and failing and flailing because of it. Wallow in your dumbassness, motherfuckers!

* This has been shown by study after study. Do your own damn research.

** Anyone who believes capitalism is particularly efficient is fucking insane.

I know it bothers more than a few people, but I just don’t care about Covid. If I’m sick I won’t go out and infect others. I’m not an asshole. And if someone wants me to mask, I will. But the harms have been overblown (like most new things) and the effects are similar to other viruses like it.

That doesn’t mean they are nothing, mind. Covid really harms some people both physically and psychologically. But I’m just not going to upend civilization to deal with a relatively mild virus. The world has bigger problems and we aren’t even upending civilization for those. Why should we for Covid?

If the Covid true believers had not said crazy shit like Long Covid would be world-ending, perhaps more people would be on their side. But it’s clear they are just butt-hurt that Covid didn’t end capitalism or something. Word to the wise: that was never gonna happen.

as a Seattle resident I genuinely sympathize, I do, but it's hard to not notice how wildfire smoke is suddenly very important now that new york city residents are experiencing it

— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) June 7, 2023

New York City residents firmly believe that their city is the most important on the planet, and only things that happen there matter. It’s a disease.

The real most important city in the world at the moment is either Taipei or Mumbai, though. NYC used to be in the top three even as of a few years ago, but now I wouldn’t rank it even in the top 10 except for financial services.

And that's fine. But Europeans should also realize that in the event the U.S. goes to war with China, or even a proxy war, Europe will suddenly be on its own against Russia. So Europeans need to be able to resist Russia without major U.S. aid.

— Noah "Rabbit = Good Friend" Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) June 7, 2023

Agreed. There is no way the US can fight a two-front war against China and Russia. Europe has to stand up here because it might have to fight Russia alone.

OH MY GOD I'd heard about Windows 11 calling a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English because of really lazy translating but it's ACTUALLY HERE ON MY PC like not even in beta this is actually happening right now in publicly available Windows pic.twitter.com/SeWPUxQIDu

— Jym (@JymFox) June 5, 2023

Since most software companies have eliminated QA departments now, developers and users end up doing all the testing. And that works about as well as you’d expect. This is yet another (hilarious) example of that.

I cannot stress to you how INSANE it is to be a new parent in NYC in 2023.

Waiting lists for daycare of 6+ months or more (you do the math from conception to birth)

When you get in, it's $30K per year (after tax income of course).

Need care after 6pm? You're on your own! https://t.co/egudGS0Jep

— Brian P. Mangan (@brianpmangan) June 1, 2023

For $30K you could hire a nanny if you provided housing. How is day care a good value at that point? Those prices are indeed insane.

The Dunning-Kruger effect has views on labor statistics. https://t.co/KifIs8ytBr

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) June 3, 2023

LOL. Both can most definitely be and often are true. That guy has major issues. Like having no brain, for starters.

A QJE paper finds the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high social interaction grew by ~12 percentage points as a share of US labor. Math-intensive less social jobs—fell by 3.3 percentage points: https://t.co/ltwC6U3zr5

— Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, Ph.D (@KwekuOA) June 5, 2023

True. I am in a highly technical role and not in sales support or sales engineering, yet I have meetings with non-technical client teams 2-3 times a week.

Many people who are in my field cannot be put in front of clients due to their poor social skills and lack of ability to explain technical ideas and concepts to those in less-technical roles. One of the reasons companies have to hire 2-3 (or more) people to replace me when I depart is that I can be schmoozing with clients one day, putting them at ease, and setting up BGP failover the next.

In my field that is very fucking rare. I know it, those above me know it, and clients know it. That’s why I get p-p-paid.