lamasery

4 ms·

1.
by lamasery 5mo ago
It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.
2.
by lamasery 5mo ago
It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money&
3.
by lamasery 5mo ago
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign. To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you m
4.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that's, like, the point of life or something, or something one ought to expect. It kinda snuck up on us, actually, until one day we were like "whoa, are we... on the verge of 'maki
5.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Tying anti-abortion positions so tightly to Christianity (especially, popularizing it among protestant sects) and elevating that to a concern above most or all others (American conservative catholicism) was a deliberate move by propagandist
6.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I can say that post-Covid inflation took us from feeling like we were on the edge of escaping the middle class, to feeling like we aren't even close and realistically won't ever be again. Even as our incomes went up quite a bit
7.
by lamasery 5mo ago
People want their bills and chores eliminated. Show them tech that does that and you'll be every working person's favorite human being. They'll be naming their kids after you. They wouldn't mind their jobs being eliminat
8.
by lamasery 5mo ago
A lot of things delenda est. The ever-growing length of the delenda-est list and the nonexistent rate at which we're est'ing all those delendas is quite worrisome at this point.
9.
by lamasery 5mo ago
We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income. Our money, aside from basics on which we don't spend so differently from when we made a lot less money, mostly goes to: 1) Optional but advantage-conferring or life-impr
10.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Hitting an estate sale and lucking into someone whose tastes run similar to one's own can get a person whole libraries for cents per book. It's the kind of thing a certain kind of reader can dabble at for a few months one lazy y
11.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typic
12.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Unlike "the Silk Road" or "the Middle Ages", "third world" was a term in contemporary use at the time it applies to, including among non-aligned states and NGOs that worked on third world cooperation. It was pr
13.
by lamasery 5mo ago
The LLM meeting-summary bot in Teams seems accurate… unless you were in the meeting, and also closely read the summary afterward. It misrepresents what people actually said all the time.
14.
by lamasery 5mo ago
> It's way cheaper (usually ~6x cheaper) I have hundreds of books. All but... I dunno, fewer than a hundred, were purchased used. Tens of the ones purchased new, were cheap Dover Thrift editions (they're so cheap that if you&#x
15.
by lamasery 5mo ago
One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked M&A activity, so I'm not surprised he commented on
16.
by lamasery 5mo ago
The novella is the only version I've read. I came away both not understanding why a longer, novel-length version would exist, and with no interest in reading anything even slightly worse than that from the same author (which I'm
17.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters. Those are all gone, e
18.
by lamasery 5mo ago
In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vac
19.
by lamasery 5mo ago
It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result). Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no pow
20.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistant
21.
by lamasery 5mo ago
> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessar
22.
by lamasery 5mo ago
As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following. If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it&#x
23.
by lamasery 5mo ago
That policy has long been a kinda funny "gee, why don't they allow it if more 'good guys with guns' make us safer?" example. I guess at least this removes that bit of rhetorical inconsistency... at, guaranteed, a
24.
by lamasery 5mo ago
This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good. It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.
25.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen. The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information about what you’re doing that wasn’t necessary and expected
26.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I accounted for this in my post. Obviously if you’re making requests just so you can spy, that’s spying.
27.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I deeply hate that this attitude took over even among “hackers”. Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware. Tracking what I do on my
28.
by lamasery 5mo ago
Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying. Aggregating request statistics server-side unless you're only generating those requests to spy on what I'm doing on my computer is more like the not-spying you're
29.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I'd probably be happier about self-checkout if I had previously been expected to tip checkers.
30.
by lamasery 5mo ago
I’m not sure whether this is a bit of a joke about the broader thrust of my post, but I actually do think tons of the “automation” computers have given us is fake, for many of the reasons you suggest. I think it’s part of why the benefits o

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