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TheBobinator

-9 karma · joined September 4, 2016

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TheBobinator··on De-escalating social media conflict
Joe Rogan had an excellent podcast up on this which is well worth your time to listen to IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtNW3I1FZ5o

What you have is a significant portion of people with c-ptsd due to the abuses western cultures' political experimentation has created who believe western culture was a mistake and tearing everything down it stands for is a lofty moral goal.

These people are angry, and IMO, they have a right to be angry; they've been through some terrible, terrible things. They believe, strongly, that engaging in pyschological warfare and using tactics to build cults or go get orgs to "go woke" that eventually culminate in killing people is a reasonable method of running what can be defined at this point as an insurgency.

I think it is manditory reading for people to read books like The body keeps the Score by Van Der Kolk if they want to really understand this movement and how these people have been marinated in bad situations. I think it is important to give them opportunities and show them patience in their recovery and to allow them to decide what their culture should be going forward.

Their tactics and logic do not stand up to scientific riguer but are complex enough to entrap the normal minimally educated individual and get them into an emotional trap; Much like the Seattle CHAZ\CHOP, the correct way to manage this is as an emotional discussion. Eventually the movement will hit a political peak, the emotions will die down, and an unruly minority is left over.

I think it is incredibly important for us to not ignore this minority, but to recognize, especially after reading that book, that these people exist and need to be given opportunities and space to decide for themselves what they want their culture to be.

We need to set strong boundaires of pride in western culture and its accomplishments, but not engage in debates about how western culture needs to be torn down or we need to self-harm as an act of solidarity. We need to not engage in political discource and when they do come, give them acts of virtue signalling which are a fascade. Over time, the emotions will dissipate and the healing can begin.

Western people are learning and we need, I think, to learn to pay for our mistakes a little better instead of ignoring people as detritus from failed systems.

TheBobinator··on Rents are dropping across the US
This articles takes 4 pieces of anecdotal evidence and concludes rents are dropping; there is no study, no calling around, no use of modern technology. Just 4 anecdotal pieces of evidence.

Then everyone on HN is going to start talking about their anecdotal evidence which does exactly nothing for anyone.

This is exactly the kind of drivvel and BS that does not belong on HN or frankly, published in 2020.

TheBobinator··on FBI used Etsy, LinkedIn to make arrest in torching of Philadelphia police cars
Move was a group who's guidelines looked like cult material and who's members had a lot of criminal convictions. A cop got shot up and the mayor asked them to disband.

Keep in mind, this is a country where you are innocent until prooven guily. The cops don't get to legally go form hit squads and go shooting people they don't like. This isn't the 1800's.

I can certainly agree overwhelming force is not in general a good answer because it emphasizes and strengthens the belief the police are not to be trusted. Would you come out of a building someone was actively firing into? Surrounding the compound at Waco and firing into it was just dumb when dealing with a doomsday cult because it's just going to reinforce their beliefs.

The correct way to look at this tragedy is many police officers were previously soldiers, so keep in mind when they see a cult, their mindset is to kill or capture or dispense with extreme force and what you get is a whole lot of stupidity as compromise.

TheBobinator··on Six eBay executives and employees charged over alleged cyberstalking campaign
Public corporations grant their investors and executive management immunity against such charges unless it can be traced directly to their involvement and even then, most of the time someone is made into a scapegoat and hung. Much of this is out of necessity. The problem stems from privatizing the profits and socializing the losses; people want accountability.

I think the correct approach is if a corporation wants to be a c-corp, they need to pay 2\3rds profits through approved accounting mechanisms to non-management staff which can include things like company stock, and should include requirements about openness of the books with staff. The "Public" seldom owns a company, and I am sure the public is very interested in making sure other people are rewarded for their hard work vs investorship.

What you end up with is people have disposable income to invest in things they care about, and thus, the executive management is motivated not to do BS crap like this. It does make it more difficult to get large sources of capital together, but it also forces companies to the whim of people and investorship and employee's which is a much more tenable balance.

TheBobinator··on Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
The purpose of copyright is to provide a temporary monopoly to creators for their works to encourage them to create more and thus transfer more to the public domain.

Currently, it takes greater than 2 average lifetimes for a work to transfer into the public domain and copyrights have been extended something like 12 times due to Disney's lobbying; there is a strong argument that that current copyright law is forever.

What interest does the public have in copyright that transfers nothing into the public domain? The "mainstream media" is in fact a publishing oligopoly of 4 companies (Ref: Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian). Furthermore, a 20TB HDD can store enough movies you can watch 3 a night for 2 decades; in 20 years time it'll be possible to store every newspaper clipping, TV Broadcast, movie and song on a desktop computer and in 40 on a thumb drive.

Congress and Businesses have neglected the publics interest, and due to that the public is using technology to wipe their arse with the law and rightfully so. The "Legal and Business frameworks" are outdated, orwellian cultural astroturfing exercises supported that are counterproductive to the operation of a disciplined, free society. Go read Vietnam and Korean era Psychological warfare manuals and tell me they are not blueprints for how a modern news org works.

When Mickey Mouse is free, I'll respect what you are doing. Until then, don't come sobbing to me. Nobody cares.

TheBobinator··on To Make Police Accountable, End Qualified Immunity
Holding them "to a higher standard" is verbal masterbation; feels good, conclusion is a climax of moral splooge, you even get to nap after, but it sets no defined goals and says nothing anyone hasn't already heard.

Police have immunity because many cops come from military backgrounds, have operated in chaotic urban and rural environments and know how fragile life is, so they formed a union to protect their interests and skins from the legislative, judicial, executive branches and the public, all of whom from time to time looks for the easiest party to scapegoat; the police.

The public, and you especially, need to understand cops are not gun-wielding process-following soldier robots, they are human beings. If the milwaukee cop saved 100 lives in his career and takes one by accident and there are riots, that's one hell of a double standard to set. The first step to a root cause analysis is taking the officer to a padded room for a thorough psych evaluation.

When you end up with a SWAT Raid of someone's house that goes wrong and their chihwuawua gets shot, that's half the story. A lot of the time the reason you only hear half of the story is to protect someone. A lot of the story is, the population is not as intelligent or well-to-do as the hackernews demographic; to a military strategist, shows of force are an essential mechanism for gaining compliance, and they are probably right about that to an extent.

You have a demographic that is not doing themselves any favors; rioting, assaulting people, looting businesses, burning buildings. This is not a civil way to handle the situation. What I find very interesting this time around is the willingness of the public, especially young kids, to take up arms and defend their neighbors businesses and back up the police. That there is the start of something.

TheBobinator··on Supreme Court says state may enforce some restrictions on religious gatherings [pdf]
Historically, The states power was plenary is because everyone had first hand observational knowledge of the pandemic; they lost friends, family, acquantences, and so forth. Nobody on the street knew how bad it was at the time until statisticians had time to study records from the time, which to be frank, took decades.

We're becoming a technological society; most people recieved life-saving information directly from infectious disease experts giving interviews on CNN, Fox, CNBC, and so forth. If you are successful in stopping a pandemic, most people won't know you stopped it, and furthermore, once you have it contained, you have to deal with keeping it contained because unlike spanish flu, you have no herd immunity.

I think just on first hand knowledge alone, most people don't believe there's been a pandemic and they'd be correct in that viewpoint; something else, something very novel, and probably very good for us all, has gone on.

What I find particularily onerous about this ruling is the Supreme Court is using the term "church" in their writing; given, it's a church that's filing the lawsuit, however, they are not using language such as "places of worship" or "Religious instutitions". Do these rules apply to Synagoges and Mosque's? It gives the feeling that if we were dealing with those institutions, an entirely different discussion would be had and that's dangerous given groups of armed protesters are willing to peacefully walk in and occupy government buildings in a show of force.

TheBobinator··on Trump signs executive order targeting protections for social media companies
The heart of this discussion is not the freedom of speech, it's the the ability to say whatever you want without consequence.

What Twitter wants, though selective undocumented "curating" of its platform, is the ability to slander, intimidate, harass, terrorize and verbally abuse whomever they don't like, without actually being drug infront of a jury and tried for crimes.

Telco's wanted the same government exemption that USPS had; someone mailed a letter with a bomb, they can't be held responsable. This was something the courts were likely to give them anyway.

Intentionally promoting a user's post containing a manifesto about assassinating a standing president is no different than USPS mailing millions of manifesto letters to people. One mechanism is simply more automated.

TheBobinator··on Work-from-home boom leads to more surveillance
Your software records a phone call an employee made while not on the clock? Congratulations, That's a felony.

Your software reports on their browser history when an employee is not on the clock, Congratulations, that's another felony.

Your terminate someone because the software is saying they aren't at their computers the whole day, that's a class action lawsuit and possibly another felony.

And all of it is EASY AS HELL TO PROOVE BECAUSE YOU MADE THE LOG FILES AND INSTRUCTED YOUR IT STAFF TO DO IT YOU DIPSHIT.

Think that your employment contract which stipulates you get to watch everything and anything they signed to keep or get their job will save you? Think binding arbitration will save you? Not only will it not save you, but it will make your sentance longer.

We have entered a brave new worlds of uncharted territory.

One of the key driving factors of bad behaivour of company staff is the consequences of a fertility rate so bad a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating. Many people in "trap" jobs have chosen to live well and die young; if that means fucking your company over for the maximum dollars than so be it, they will do it, and you are going to be forced into putting up with it. The disconnect of plantation management is unbelievable; they think it's honorable capitalism to cannibalize society and lament they have no choice but to do so. They have a choice, they just prefer not having responsability. And that's when they are not intentionally sabotaging you. Piss off your employee and they might let an APT group in on their personal computer who will then attack your infrastructure.

And if I were IT Staff, I'd asking the question and Nop'ing that and quoting the law.

TheBobinator··on Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts
Forcing work during a pandemic that might kill people without providing them PPE or making changes to operations is the literal height of insanity.

Amazon has been a subsidized american corporation servicing chinese interests for 2 decades; the US goverment recieves hundreds of billion in chinese bond purchases a year and for the privelage of having this subsidy the Federal government the federal government in turn provides a subsidty to amazon in the form of forging anti-trust prosecution against amazon for running a retail division that ran a loss for 2 decades while prosecuting wal-mart.

End of the day, best way to handle this is to make an app for it. People run it on their phones which everyone has, and they co-ordinate and vote that way as a single block and as seperate groups.

TheBobinator··on Medium-hard SQL interview questions
First of all, in your example, the DB server is doing the other 97 lines of work that java had to do; one approach uses data structures the other uses a SDE designed for data management and access. I think most employers would prefer a developer that can do both.

Second, the most important skill to DBA or Data Scientist role and to an employer is finding someone that understands the data domain well enough to point out obvious mistakes, bad approaches and thinking to managers and provide leadership, not just access, to information.

Third, "any competent person" is just belittling a skillset that, like programming, can take years or decades to truly understand.

TheBobinator··on YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice
Few things to be said here.

First, people are, in general, really bad at navigating traumatic events and situations. Now if you've been through some real Sh!tty situations in your past, you're better able to navigate new ones, but don't make the assumption if you are able to navigate them, they can as well. Giving them 10 different sources of information including things like 5G being to blame and other disinformation can create more problems than its worth including riots.

Second, The WHO has been flogged thoroughly by the US government in the States and rightfully so given the misleading statements that were made at the onset about the ability of china to keep the virus contained. You look at the WHO ARCGIS webpage for Covid and it's got outbreaks with 30 people in a circle the same size as the US outbreak; there's some degree of obvious derision by the WHO for the west in general and the US in particular which in my estimation, factored into what they communicated. At this point it's hitting every country, so every country is going to request a reform and furthermore every country is going to be look for other trade partners aside from china.

Youtube at this point is an international utility so they are siding with an international firm; in the short term this is wise. Long-term, you can expect a US institution to take over as the authority as the vast majority of medical research worldwide is done in the US.

TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
We're talking about people in the ~155-180 IQ band; In a city the size of Chicago you have 20 or so people in that band.

The reason it's called "Gifted" is because you get born with it, just like your skin color. I didn't choose to have a high IQ. Frankly, with the way people have treated me in life and all the pain I've gone through due to it, I'm not so sure I'd want to be this way. I'm sure you know that feeling.

You want to explain performance differences in racial groups, look at complex trauma and cultural phenomina. Conduct an similar ACE study in the south-side and see what you get.

I think what you're going to find is 50% of the population has generational complex trauma they are trying to escape, and their outcomes would be improved draumatically by specialist intervention and I think one that is done, you are going to find out IQ isn't altogether different between racial groups in a country like the US.

TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
There was a long interview on youtube from John Taylor Gatto I listened to once where he said essentially creativity must be constrained for society to be stable. Your anecdote reminds me of this. Teachers focusing on test scroes is a great way for this to happen. I'd mod this comment up it I could.
TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
EQ is a load of poppycock; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi48uZjpJDk

What you are referring to are people with high IQ who are not well socialized and thus develop neuroticism and have emotional instability, which can happen for a variety of reasons but I think it is common among high IQ people and blood lines of high IQ people because of societies inability to understand them.

I was going to post a long tirade (which would've probably traumatized everyone here who read it) as EQ is a particularily onerous topic for me but I think a few short paragraphs will suffice.

In my case, I have high IQ and a near-eidetic memory which means I have what I call a "refactoring imagination"; I could imagine the perfect assembly of a car engine down to each measurement (or a few measurements that would allow me to make accurate guesses of the remainder) then iterate that complex system in my head over and over. That drawing can get put away in the brain and brought back 20 years later if relevant.

Now take a 6 year old child who always has his hand up in the classroom because he's bored, knows the answer from the book after reading it once or what the teacher showed them, and can anticipate what the teacher wants with a high degree of certainty. That child figures everyone else is just like they are is just as bored as they are (because that's the kids think); this goes on for weeks, the teacher becomes bewildered by the other kids (that profoundly gifted child is very good at selling the idea kids are smarter than they actually are to a relatively new teacher who hasn't developed out of that thinking yet) goads them a bit and through no fault of their own, the other kids begin teasing and assaulting him to take out their jealousy.

This snowballs due to an inference pattern of bad situation and that child then becomes what I call "the scapegoat student" for the remainder of their academic schooling.

It takes two parties to make a kid well socialized; the child and society. If society doesn't want to socialize a kid properly, they won't be. The kinds of people who latch on to EQ are the kinds who cannot accept they are "not special" and are also the kinds from whom I derived much abuse.

In the case of primary schools, getting your kid out of that situation requires moving to another district or state because the teachers are there to bring the bottom of society up to a functional level, not to allow the talented and gifted to soar. This produces the incentive, ultimately, to use some students as scapegoats.

The rest of what you mentioned is interesting to me, I'll take the tiem to look into it. Thank you.

TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
Can you name a few examples of schools or school districts that are magnet schools? Never heard that term before.
TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
You are not your numbers is a rural sensibility and assumption.

During the Iraq War veterans were coming back with PTSD and seeing psychologists and psychiatrists. Some of them had multiple comobidities; depression, anxiety, Bipolar, with the PTSD and were send to get MRI Scans.

What they discovered is there was no brain damage, but certain areas of the brain weren't as developed as they ought to be; they administered ACE tests and found out everyone had high ACE scores. Other studies were done and are being done and are finding evidence of somatization; when you aren't raised right your brain physically doesn't develop properly.

Pick up a copy of the body keeps the score by Van der Kolk, and Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. Your wife undoubtedly has gastrointestinal issues from her situation and you have your issues (likely over-resorting to fight, flight freeze or fawn responses), those books will help to cure you. I also reccomend seeing a complex trauma specialist even if you don't think you need to.

What you will end up finding out is that there is such a thing as a complex trauma family and trauma tends to be passed down from one generation to the next and become more severe until the blood line just fails. The CDC study on ACE's shows a score of 4 or higher reduces your average life expectancy by 20 years. There have been a few studies correlating high ace scores, specificially sexual abuse victims, and a specific type of rare cancer.

You will also need to go through a few iterations. I've changed tremendously from the person I was to the person I am now, and in that process, ended up completely forgetting my childhood and some of my early adult hood. Couldn't remember grade school teachers names which is not like me. My brain had repressed those memories because they were incompatible with who I am now and as I remember and re-remember them they get integrated and I gain more emotional and mental self-control and become more capible of handling future trauma.

Good Luck.

TheBobinator··on Exceptionally gifted children: long-term outcomes of acceleration (2006) [pdf]
Question for you. If you were profoundly gifted and had kids who were also profoundly gifted, what kinds of things would you do with them and resources would you provide to them to ensure they were adaquetly challenged?

My situation: I'm in my 30's, I take IQ tests every 3-4 years and always score somewhere around 155-165. I come from a multi-generational complex trauma family, my mother has an ACE store of 9, I have an 8, my father is with what I know about him around a 9 and going back generations on either side of the family it seems to be the case on both sides. High ACE scores reduce your IQ and academic performance quite a bit. My Sister scored 167 on a MENSA exam once unadusted for dyslexia and dyscalculia which they mentioned would put her in the 180's.

I can't even begin to describe the kind of perceptual maze I've had to navigate overcoming my own issues; cognitive restructuring is a powerful tool I used well before I learned about complex trauma and in the last few years that has been a real renissance for me. I feel in a lot of ways I was raised more by the internet and BBS than my own parents.

Decided a long time ago to be celibate because I just assumed my kids are going to go through the same lot in life I did and I wouldn't want to do that to anyone even by accident. Any kind of technique or program to help those kids avoid that outcome would be useful to me. If I have kids I want them to be who they are supposed to be in life.

BTW, thank you for posting this.

TheBobinator··on Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus
Please name one Amazon Warehouse stock picker or forklift operator who is making 6 figures please. Also, where are all these tech workers making 6 figures at? BLS OES Job wage data shows about 80% of tech workers don't make 6 figures. The ones that do are in cities where $90k is the poverty line ffs.

Management can choose to share profit fairly in a keep what you catch manner so everyone's interests are aligned, and report accounting fairly, to the whole company.

Or Management can choose to do what Bezos did and ruin the retail market by selling at a loss for 2 decades while playing guile and psyop games with the public; he owns washington post BTW. Amazon is terrified of unions because that means they can't be profitable. Agriculture, Warehousing and logistics are major employers of illegal alien labor; the way Bezos makes money is by undercutting brick and morter retailers' supply chain costs because he doesn't have to hire anyone to run a store.

The reason unions form is management gets abusive; this pandemic is one such instance.

TheBobinator··on It's not what programming languages do, it's what they shepherd you to
Game development is a rapid prototyping adventure that is fuelled by the fact what you are producing is ultimatly a form of art. Architectures are based on abstraction, and abstraction is ultimately mindful ignorance; in this case of specific requirements or specific goals which are going to change because you are creating art. You are going to find out as you continue to develop that technical debt builds because the changing requirements create conflicting workflows which is why you get spam in the header. It's a lot faster to prototype something through duplication, cobbling, or refactoring then later on use automation to remove the chunks of code that are not used and reduce line count by creating utility functions because at that point, part of the project is set in stone and the project is going in one direction. Things will gyrate back and forth between messy and clean, and hopefully you have the budget to refactor to clean before you ship as modders don't like dirty game code.

Games are a simulacrum of reality and reality doesn't say properties of two different objects can never, ever, interact with each other; that's why you have the abuse of global variables to store state and also why there's a rich speedrunning community using all sorts of hacks in games to speed up their playtime due to unforseen edge cases. If you build a model of reality, you're going to be doing R&D learning how it interacts with itself, just like we do today!

Nobody wants to play a game with a static workflow.

TheBobinator··on Federal Reserve pledges asset purchases with no limit to support markets
If the government wanted to so decree, they could decree banks could not forclose on bankrupt customers and must restructure loans. They've already done that for rent and mortgage agreements in many areas where people are hard hit by this. That would stop the loss of money right there.

The market is demanding liquidity to be able to manuver an uncertain future; this has caused an effective collapse of the credit market due to demand. Much like there's no TP on the shelf, there's no credit on the shelf; the fed however can print a lot of money if it wants to which ironically enough, can then be invested to print TP. If everyone has cash in the bank account, they feel secure, and that in of itself will stop the stock market from collapsing further.

The way they avoid inflation is by providing loans at a rate under the rate of inflation; free money, but it has to be paid back and over a reasonable term. This will expand the amount of money in the economy for a time.

History will remember this as is a perfect storm; the medical industry has been a tremendous burden on government and employers backs in the form of an unscrupulous blackbox of spend. A couple million deaths especially of elderly patients is going to upend the medical industries cash cow and at the same time force a hard look at what the industry is doing to be prepared for pandemics like this one. If you have cash going into this downturn, now's the time to start plotting where you are going to invest it for maximal gains.

TheBobinator··on Things you can do with a browser in 2020
What seperates psychological warfare from marketing?

If you pay attention to advertising for a week, you will be marginally educated on what the advertiser wants you to know about their products and services; this has some economic utility as you cannot buy what you don't know exists.

If you pay attention to psychological warfare for a week, first off you at bare minimum will not be happy or content as you are not buying if you are content or happy; they must torture you through mechanisms of persuation and manipulation in order to manufacture a desire. Once that is done, then they try to train you to have desirable habits to them; as a famous example McDonalds happy meals for kids creating obese adult customers 30 years later. If the food didn't have a serious downside (didn't literally injure you and make you depressed) you wouldn't come back to the restaraunt later for your momentary allevation of that depression\for a fix.

Now, Go try to find reliable information on Coronavirus. Which one of those is going on 99% of the time? The sales funnel is really training you to be the product for them.

The web is funded by marketers who engage in pyschological warfare for profit, no feature they will ever impliment is designed to make you happy, and technologists have tremendous profit motive to make up all sorts of excuses as to why this behaivour is acceptable when clearly it is destructive to both themselves and the web.

Browsers today are trying to become an operarting system so they have absolute conrtrol over the user experience and as they do that they are on a slow march towards building an unbelievably bloated application who's philosophy is to confuse, distract, and screw you at every turn all while managing your perception.

Case in point, it would take hours for me to research how to turn off all of those features as I don't need them and there's no mechanism in Firefox or Chrome to backup settings which those browsers reset randomly and intentionally.

So call these things what they are; at best, bloat, at worst, a stock pump and dump scheme combined with a tremendous waste of time.

TheBobinator··on ‘Locate X’ allows federal law enforcement to track phones without warrants
That works right up until the point someone turns off their cellphone and goes hunting.

The problem with leaving all this data around is eventually the proletariat will begin prefering to share it all with each other. When they start doing that, they will begin to co-ordinate instead of compete. For awhile the information advantage will be with people who have money, but that can change.

Then they begin realizing things like Uber is owned by the Saudi Oil Fund and all the soulless corporations are really vampires owned by foreigners who only care to garden in their backyard but sh!t in yours...

I have a very optimistic viewpoint of this discovery; right now law enforcement uses it for an information advantage, but, that won't last forever.

TheBobinator··on Hard negotiations: why a softer approach yields better outcomes
I've seen sales guys intentionally leak information to the competititon in order to try to push a company they were working for out of business so they could get out of their non-compete contract and go after more lucrative employment at a competitor. I've also seen them sabotage a company just out of spite.

Your biggest stick is actually flipping the table and doing something that seriously damages the company or puts it out of business. Comitting actual crimes like embezzlement, theft, or damaging company equipment for which you are not caught are also great sticks.

Of course, nobody likes to talk about that, they find it too high minded, but all to often that is what goes on behind closed doors. The root cause of it is a mal-formed, unfair compensation policy.

Classic example is Small business Sole Proprietorships where the ownership passes their purchases through the company and plays accounting games to hide profitability from their staff. The staff are always told "work harder to make the profits go up we'll reward you", nobody gets to see the balance sheet so the profit number they are given is fundementally hidden and there's no end of excuses as to why the business can't pay those market wages or big bonuses. Then one day the ownership sells, new ownership cleans house, and we repeat.

They'll negotiate just fine, make verbal promises, but at the end of the day there's a scam going on.

And when people feel scammed, then they do the aboved illegal\immoral crap and make the place a totally messed up place to work.

TheBobinator··on Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
I know people who work there out in Chicago. They distribute pamphlets and have it cooked into their health insurance policy. It's mostly a city and urban problem for the company, and done on a community-by-community basis; the stores they do not drug test at are the stores they impliment the program in. All you have to do for yourself is walk into a wal-mart in a bad neighborhood and ask.

Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.

If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.

Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.

TheBobinator··on Spectrum Kills Home Security Business, Refuses Refunds
I think you are unbelievably naieve to think refund costs are all that are at stake here.

First they sell security systems to people for a big fat chunk of change.

Then they turn those security systems off, and then tell those same people to buy from their affiliates who are going to give them a great deal (and them a great commission).

Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knows this is illegal bait and switch and all sorts of legal trouble for spectrum; especially when you are selling things like fire alarms and burglar alarms, there's a whole bunch of regulations.

But, those same people seem to be dumb enough to not view the words "binding arbitration" as "my management wants to act like criminals and get away with it".

Then they cry about broken promises and being burned.

The way you fix the crying is with handcuffs. For executives. Drag em' infront of a jury and let them sort it out.

That way the bad people get label "Felon" and are not around in managemnt positions to do this BS anymore. Very simple.

TheBobinator··on Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-population-rati...

Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard.

The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, and it takes years of working, of gaining experience, even doing something like janitorial work, to be considered competent.

Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.

The entire concept and point of minimum wage was to ensure people wouldn't fall into this kind of disarray and businesses that complain about minimum wage hikes are parasites that have to literally eat people alive to survive, except today they hire PR Firms to cover it up. This is not the way to run a society. A lot of the reason our government allows this to go on has to do with controversial tech firms like Uber being funded by foreign entiteis with questionable morals such as the Saudi Oil fund, the US Government allowing china to buy 100bn+ in bonds every year, and other such "arrangements". We had 2 presidential candidates last election the Russians government admitted to compromising.

Congress has sold certain segments of people up the river and genuinely doesn't know how to get them out.

If you look at the growth rate in US Census data and private studies of men over 45 never married, no chilren, and look at the trend and how that has been correlated with a declining fertility rate that's starting to rival the USSR's collapse.

We haven't even begun to recover from 2000, and there's one heck of a powder keg forming.

And none of those people who make up that powder keg care about whether or not our health system is superior or inferior to canada's.

TheBobinator··on Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force
Few things to be said here as I think this comment is unbelievably misguided.

Much like how first wave feminism was a response to advanced in pressure vessels producing distilled alchohols, and second wave was a response to the obsolescance of muscle in manufacturing, so too is 3rd wave feminism the response to the key technologies of social media and contraceptives.

We've replaced the concept of a couple investing in eachother from a young age to build a nuclear family with college, debt and a status symbol competition; Social media and dating apps have cast relationships and sex as something that you purchase like a product, and they advertise to women that they too are a product, and that they are more valuable than 90% of men. When you remove the risk of STD's and pregnancy, advertise to women that the ability to act like a masterbation toy improves their "social worth" with no consequences. It's a disgusting trade but it has prooven unbelievably effective. The business model of OKCupid is to dissaude their audience from viewing relationships as investments so they instead invest time in OKCupid. Many women have shut themselves off from men approaching them entirely until they can fully vet them online first. The flip side of this is the "top dogs" become unbelievably pessimistic about, and often abusive of, women.

Today a newborn male child has a 1 in 2 shot at procreating (US Census data for Males never married, no children; look at the growth rate); that's 60 to 100 million men, TODAY, who are in search of a purpose in their lives that won't be fulfilled by a family. Ever. Replacement fertility is 2.1 births per women; we're at 1.7. When the USSR Collapsed they were down to 1.3. The dislocation this has produced is absolutely massive and is what is behind birth rate declines in western countries.

What nobody wants to talk about is how much of a powderkeg that will become when those men reach the end of their economic and reproductive utility and determine, rightfully so, they have been been screwed over. The reason you get the CEO of cloudflare blanning white supremacist material isn't because he REALLY hates those kinds of people; it's because the population is becoming a powderkeg and group identity politics is a VERY bad way for that to go. Every revolution has been predicated upon the concept of society losing it's concept of self-respect and dignity, and so devoid of those concepts, unable to engineer them into the solutions they impliment. After the french killed the aristocracy, they engaged in the reign of terror.

No amount of engaging in psychological warfare exercises selling information pollution such as the concept of a "CISGender" or taking down websites is going to change billions of years of evolution or the consequences of bad policy. I'm all for studies on sexuality but they have to be realistic; it is, like psychology, a complex topic.

If you like malthusianism, the approach of allowing the next wave of feminism take it's toll is about as tactful of a way of going about doing it as using a AAMRAM to kill a baby. The kind of generational complex trauma and resulting child maldevelopment this is going to create is not what suites any kind of functioning society well; all you have to do is look at the chicago ghetto's and the never-ending cycle of violence to understand that. The Chinese with their 1 child policy is far wiser for contrast. Think about it; you allow nuclear families and hey they really invest a heck of a lot into that one kid with the government stepping in to ensure it works out.

As far as the roles go in relationships, the correct way to look at it is, the two people in the relationship make the decisions, and if you have something to say about it, go to hell.

TheBobinator··on US atomic waste dump in Marshall Islands to be investigated
Assuming it's true the US Did nuke fallout experiments on people 7 years after the end of a war, you need to keep in mind, that's what happens after a war. People who are put into combat situtuations look at human life as a numbers game; the experiment on them would have been justified along those lines. Kill some marginal population in horrific ways in a worthwile experiment to save more lives in the future; to a soldier this makes perfect sense.

The problem with war is not the war itself, it's the weapons, including people, you leave laying around after. Once you get the bad lines of thinking started they perpetuate.

You'd do very well for yourself to remember that while you're re-writing the history of WW2. It's one heck of a spin to call the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "an experiment"; there was a war going on. The Americans knew exactly what was going to happen from the nuke; kill lots of Japs and hope they surrender and given the belligerance of both sides, I'd say they were probably right.

TheBobinator··on Paid Cerberus 'lifetime' licenses are expiring
It's fraud.

The legal way to do this is to go bankrupt, launch app 2.0, and market it under a similar name.

They have a ponzi scheme business model, it failed. There's nothing legal about this; you make promises, you sign contracts, you have to live up to them.

We, the little insignificant people, have to afterall. The rules for us and them are the same.

You do this to a few people you lose your shirt, you do this to thousands or tens of thousands, that accousts the public trust. Management should be in handcuffs and in jail for this.

This news site is questionable for calling the business practice "questionable".

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