aazaa

tldw: They realize that job security is an illusion.

Aside from the problem that zero evidence is presented that "employees aren't returning to work in America," the idea that they're freelancing instead is just outlandish. It's the kind of thing you might expect a successful but out-of-touch entrepreneur to spout.

Paycheck-to-paycheck living, which has been amply documented, means you have no agency. You work or you begin your journey down the social ladder. Often you do both. Assuming employees aren't returning to work, there can only be two reasons:

1. there are no jobs, despite what employers might be saying; or

2. government transfers (extended unemployment, etc.) have been keeping them afloat.

Extended unemployment (extra $300/week) ended in all 50 states around Labor Day.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/09/05/unemplo...

That leaves just (1). It's a doozy, because if jobs have really disappeared and government transfers are really done, then we are about to witness what happens when millions of people suddenly don't just lose their jobs, but their ability to pay for basic needs.

> "We'll post jobs," he said, "and it's very seldom that someone under the age of 40 is coming in the door to apply." Among the workers who remain, arthritis is a common struggle.

> "A lot of the people have said multiple times that they definitely don't want their son or daughter doing this [making shoes]," Heselton [of Maine Mountain Moccasin] said. "That's tough to hear."

The sense of loss implied in the title makes sense. But ultimately, were these good jobs to begin with?

The article doesn't even mention the environmental problems associated with curing leather, or making other components. All of those costs have been shipped overseas, along with the jobs.

The problem, of course, is that this practice of having China, Inc. make everything used in this US is increasing reliance on an increasingly problematic country.

Most high school students shouldn't go to college. It's not very contrarian here, but outside of tech circles in the US it's very unpopular. Hated even.

> And finally, I became the exact thing I hated: a toxic asshat throwing his skills around like fists. I don’t do code review for the business, I just like showing the rookies their place. My skills have finally started to pay off.

Or he's just lazy.

It's way harder to build up the people you work with than tear them down. The key ingredients tp the former are patience and empathy. And those qualities are lacking in many managers.

Also, aggressive, opinionated people are often perceived as more intelligent than their more reserved peers. You'd think that the snowmen can't get snowed, but the type of person the author describes seems to be just as vulnerable to the misdirection as others.

This is why, for example, decentralized life insurance policies have been compared to hit contracts.

A theory of everything needs to account for everything. This article doesn't even demonstrate that a housing shortage exists, and it completely ignores the unfavorable demographics of the aging boomers and lack of replacement demand.

https://reventureconsulting.com/the-myth-of-the-us-housing-s...

High prices are not by themselves evidence of a shortage. High prices can, for example, be caused by ultra-loose monetary policies that encourage housing market speculators to soak up supply. This condition can readily unwind, although few prior to 2009 would have considered the possibility.

> While the Department of the Treasury prints actual dollars, “printing money” is also a term that is sometimes used to describe a means of monetary policy, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve. Monetary policy involves controlling the supply of money and the cost of borrowing. The Federal Reserve uses monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates on the behalf of the Congress. The federal government uses fiscal policy, or the control of taxation and government spending, to promote economic activity.

I can't help but think this is confusing as heck to most Americans.

I'm not sure all of the quoted statements are true. Private banks create a good chunk of the new money that goes into circulation by issuing loans. The Federal government (through the Treasury) creates still more by issuing bonds to cover deficit spending.

The Fed can influence the rate of money creation by setting short term rates. But the Fed can't force banks to loan money, so its power is limited. Especially so with short term rates pegged at zero for most of the last 13 years or so.

Although some view the Fed's QE as a form of "money printing," it's not. It's an asset swap in which the Federal reserve buys a Treasury from a bank, issuing a reserve asset as a credit to the bank. Reserve assets thereby become "trapped" inside the banking system. They are not cash and can only be used under very restricted conditions (not unlike a laundry token) at least according to some sources.

Market excesses are always marked by a "hot" sector. Remember the Nifty 50?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nifty_Fifty

The members of that group were the tech giants of their time.

Replace "large-cap" with "tech" in that article. Rinse and repeat.

The problem with these indicators is that, although they may indicate over- or undervaluation, they tell you nothing about when a mean reversion will happen.

As Keynes famously said: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

An indicator that does a pretty good job of signaling the "when" of a recession, and by extension the likely "when" of large market corrections, is yield curve inversion. It predicted the recession of early 2020 quite well, even with the external shock of the pandemic.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leonlabrecque/2020/02/26/anothe...

From the perspective that somehow a reset of the business cycle has happened through government transfers (not exactly a sound assumption), watch interest rates, and in particular the relationship between the 2 and 10 year.

Should we start to see a rise in short-term rates, without a similar rise in long rates, watch out. You'll no doubt see a multitude of articles explaining how "this time is different." It won't be. And on top of all of that, we'll head into it with the most overvalued market in history.

> In my case, it was worse than expected, but, in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen.

> ...

> It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I'd drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low.

"Mild" can mean different things to different people. I doubt this description of "mild" fits most people's concept of the word, as it sounds like a severe case of the flu. The fact that these infections are happening against a backdrop of normalization efforts should give anyone who thinks we're out of the woods pause.

As the rate of infection increases, so does the risk to the vaccinated. It's another demonstration, once again, of how our public health system (and the CDC in particular) has failed us:

> ... "quantifying that [chance of symptomatic case in an unvaccinated person] in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy."

Some time ago, the CDC stopped counting/sequencing "mild" breakthrough cases, so we're flying blind mostly. Maybe it's delta the reporter caught. Maybe something else. Who knows?

https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asym...

What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. What's also clear is that it shares the tendency that all RNA viruses have to mutate at an extremely rapid rate. It has shown that it can change much faster than we can adapt.

> Antipsychotic drugs — which for decades have faced criticism as “chemical straitjackets” — are dangerous for older people with dementia, nearly doubling their chance of death from heart problems, infections, falls and other ailments. But understaffed nursing homes have often used the sedatives so they don’t have to hire more staff to handle residents.

This problem will only get worse. A lot of it is driven by demographics:

(1) fewer children being born means fewer blood-relatives to share the home care

(2) although medical treatments can often improve lifetimes, they can't necessarily improve life quality

(3) as people stop dying from ever more diseases (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular disease), they'll start to succumb to psychological and physical ailments resulting from isolation and sedentary lifestyles, and these have no cures - only treatments.

(4) people often don't live where they grew up, which means that married couples can face a double-whammy of declining health of both parents, right about the same time and a geographical conflict that gets worse with time.

Those claiming the solution is multi-generational households haven't done the math. And I doubt they've attempted to care for a geriatric relative with rapidly-compounding medical conditions while trying to stay afloat financially after having raised a kid or two themselves.

And then there's the problem of medical costs that relentlessly rise much faster than inflation, putting ever more pressure on nursing homes, families, and governments.

A big squeeze is coming as the boomers enter extreme old age in droves while needing round-the-clock care, possibly for a decade or more, for geriatric conditions without cures.

From the conclusion:

> This article has discussed how money is created in the modern economy. Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base or broad money. The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though, with Bank Rate constrained by the effective lower bound, the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money.

The discussion seems incomplete without mentioning government deficit spending. This is, after all, the premise of Modern Monetary Theory: that unlike households, currency issuers like the US federal government aren't under the same balanced budget constraints as households. Currency issuers can create money by spending it into being.

Budget deficits can be financed through the issuance of bonds, which look a lot like loans. But they can also be financed by just printing the money. The end result is the same, money into the pockets of people, but the implications are very different.

The MMT perspective is gaining ground, especially as the world's governments find it increasingly difficult to avoid deficit spending. A leading proponent (Kelton) proposes ditching deficit targets altogether in favor of inflation targets.

> To warm up a skeptical public, Bukele has promised every citizen $30 in bitcoin if they sign up for a government digital wallet. Ahead of the launch, El Salvador bought 400 bitcoins, Bukele said, helping drive the currency price above $52,000 for the first time since May.

> In the early hours of Tuesday the wallet had not appeared on Apple Inc., Google and Huawei’s app download platforms, however, prompting a series of tweets from Bukele, including one with a red-faced “angry” emoticon.

The involvement of a government-issued wallet gives this story an even stranger dimension. First, it's not clear how the government will identify those eligible to receive the $30 bitcoin deposit. Second, why would the government be involved at all in developing a wallet? There are plenty to choose from now, so what features exactly were missing in those? Finally, what government in its right mind would hitch its fortunes to the vagaries of a walled-garden App Store based in the US, a country clearly hostile to the Salvadoran experiment?

Kind of interesting to note how celebrities were routinely used to sell many brands of personal computers in the early 1980s, including Commodore (Vic 20). The ads for the 64 don't do that, which was almost unusual.

Anyone remember William Shatner selling Vic 20's?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/593419688400760080/

- Bill Bixby sold Radio Shack computers.

- Bill Cosby sold TI computers.

- "Charlie Chaplin" sold IBM computers.

- Alan Alda sold Ataris.

Here's more:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/11-celebs-who-tried-to-sell-you-p...

And what I'm saying is that the change of appearance in this particular case is less surprising than the fact that double or triple name candidates on a ballot "regularly" occur.

Maybe the most surprising thing about this is how commonplace it is for multiple candidates to share the same name. From the article:

> “Double” candidates regularly pop up during Russia’s election cycles, which can be surprisingly cut-throat despite the expectation that the ruling United Russia party will maintain a majority in the Duma. The rising tide of opposition to United Russia and growing support for the Communist KPRF have apparently spooked the government and nominating doppelgängers can siphon off precious votes in close contests.

The Forbes article does a better job of explaining the case:

> Shortly afterward, a person going by the name “Lucifallen21” got in touch to inquire about the ad, according to the search warrant. The IRS, without saying how, determined that Lucifallen21 was actually Evansville, Indiana, resident Chase Hite. By July, he’d agreed to buy from Mr. Coins, wrapping up $15,040 in cash in clothes, putting the money in a box and posting it to the agent in exchange for approximately 1.59 bitcoin, according to the government’s account.

> ...

> Further messages over Wickr indicated Hite was involved in dark web drug sales, claiming to sell “pills and opioids,” as well as cocaine and marijuana, the IRS claimed. ...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/09/01/irs-u...

Trading Bitcoin for cash is no crime. It appears the IRS claims it had evidence linking Hite to offers to sell drugs. So the Bitcoin sting was incidental to the case.

> What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively. My success so far has nothing to do with the fact I know React instead of Vue, or have experience with AWS and not Azure. What has contributed to my success is the willingness to learn new tools as the need arises.

What's not fine is having poured resources into a framework over the course of a few years, only for that framework to first cease to be necessary, and eventually become a barely-supported ball-and-chain.

This applies to almost everything released prior to HTML5. The problem is that re-writing isn't always an option, but the old stuff permeates almost every source file and is extremely expensive to decouple.

I suspect this will sooner or later apply to everything released immediately after HTML5. Eventually, everything used today will face the same fate.

There's something to be said for rejecting frameworks that aggressively inject themselves into code bases and which can't easily be extracted.

> So, take it from me, a historian of opioids: if you want to learn how one family and their company caused arguably the biggest ongoing public health crisis in the US, but you only have the time to read one book on the subject, it should be Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

To say that Perdue Pharma caused the crisis seems too strong. The crisis was caused by people making bad decisions against a background of economic and social disintegration.

> ... On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.”

But this was no "error":

> Branson also told spectators about the bike ride during a post-flight celebration at the spaceport, Reuters said. "It's so awesome to arrive on a bicycle, across this beautiful New Mexico countryside," Branson was quoted as telling the crowd from a stage.

https://www.space.com/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-bike-r...

Even without the red light, this incident speaks volumes about what's going in inside this "company."

As long as Branson is at the helm, VG's prospects as a going concern seem dim. You can't merch your way into space with the usual marketing game plan. Mother Nature always calls bullshit.

It was surprisingly easy to see the connection to the movie after the fact. But I could guess none of the titles just from the poster.

It's worth pointing out that never in all of world history has such a large percentage of sovereign debt yielded a nominally negative rate.

Where this ends is anybody's guess. But when the situation finally does resolve itself, it seems reasonable to expect economic and social dislocation both qualitatively and quantitatively beyond anything ever seen before.

The incremental manner in which the GFC continues to play out has numbed most people to the danger they are in.

> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.

What happens if you don't go far enough up, abstraction wise?

You end up repeating yourself - everywhere. You end up with globals everywhere. You end up with God Classes. You end up with epic-length functions nested 15 levels deep. You end up with primitives trying to do the job that well-crafted data structures, named using the terminology of the problem domain, should be doing.

It's odd that the author rails against "astronauts" without addressing the very real motivations that lead to good architectures. Like all design, there are tensions in software development, and navigating the forces pulling you in opposite directions regarding architecture is one of the most important contribution you can make.

It's also odd that the author never calls out specific architectures that are the work of astronauts, just "the stupendous amount of millennial hype that surrounds them." He seems to hint in the introduction that CORBA is (was) one of them, but even that reference is pretty vague.

> Gaming companies will be barred from providing services to minors in any form outside the stipulated hours and must ensure they have put real-name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market.

Those critical of the Chinese government should take a look in the mirror. Governments around the world, including those in the US, routinely impose restrictions on minors' ability to access online content. These laws are even structured in a similar way: hold the service providers accountable for monitoring use.

> "Teenagers are the future of our motherland," Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. "Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people's vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation."

It's a favorite tactic of authoritarians everywhere: "Just think of the children!" First get a foothold by selling the thing as protecting children. In the US, we have two other options: terrorism and drugs. With the precedent set, expand the policy and watch opponents scramble to find a foothold.

Maybe a shift of perspective is in order. What if the homeless "problem" is merely the most visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years?

You expect a homeless problem in a depression. You expect drug use to cripple large segments of society in a depression. You don't expect the problems that come with a depression to be fixable. And you expect those with means to jealously guard them from expropriation during a depression.

The thing that separates a modern depression from those that came before is that central banks have pulled out the stops to try to prevent the slide into depression. Their toolbox is limited, so many problems (such as housing) become worse as prices spiral higher out of range of working people, and as jobs continue to flood overseas on cargo ships. Wealth inequality blossoms as the haves keep it (thanks to QE and stock market machinations) and the have-nots lose it. Certain sectors (technology) continue to thrive while everything else (manufacturing, services) spiral downwards. It's easy to blame yourself if the depression is so unevenly distributed.

In following this path, central banks have obliterated cues (massive unemployment, bread lines, collective action) that would otherwise make it obvious that a depression was underway. Kind of like what might happen if you could not smell rot or feces, but could still smell food. Things might seem just fine, but only if you willfully ignored certain non-olfactory clues.

> Today, the Van Tuinens said, they're healthy, sober and doing much better. They live together in their family's Waterbury home, where they have a Sunday ritual of hiking in the woods, meditating and discussing their emotions. Last year they founded a nonprofit, Cultivating Connections, to help other Vermonters struggling with addiction, mental illness and past trauma.

Hiking in the woods should not be underestimated. Every positive outcome described in the article can flow from peeling oneself away from a screen, leaving an artificial environment, getting lost every once in a while, and moving one's body toward a goal.

> The total cost of this tool is: 60$ (yearly, domain) + 60$(yearly, hosting) + more than 150 hours of programming (which would be about 4000$ from where I live). Revenue is non-existent. I've decided to leave the site ad-free because ads suck but now it's only eating money so please donate. My current plan on getting a payout is getting Elon Musk to use it and hoping he will buy me a Tesla.

That is a seriously good result for 150 hours give or take. I wonder if Elon peruses HN...

> That’s when Lebanon’s cryptocurrency market took off, along with the OTC system run by traders like Awad. The OTC ecosystem here largely operates using Tether, a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar and therefore subject to fewer price fluctuations. The process works like this: A client who wants to buy cryptocurrency will usually open a wallet on an exchange (the most popular in Lebanon being Binance) and then meet with an OTC dealer to hand over cash dollars. The dealer will send the same amount of Tether — minus a commission ranging from 0.5%–5% — to their account via a peer-to-peer transaction. The client can then pursue whatever crypto-investment strategy they see fit with the USDT in their digital wallets.

From the frying pan (domestic currency in shambles), into the fire (crypto waiting to implode).

Tether's many problems have been documented elsewhere. What this implies is that the funds being spent by the Lebanese in this story are very likely going into financial speculation, not day-to-day requirements like buying food. And they're using the absolute worst vehicle for doing that.

A ticking time bomb.

> The security group [in Reuters] approved the embed plan. “We were talking about the Afghan Special Forces, the elite,” said Rogers [Reuters global pictures editor]. “They had all the hospitals at their disposal, all the equipment needed to evacuate, including air support.” Siddiqui would join their headquarters near Kandahar.

On display here are the deep miscalculation and disbelief over it. It's a pattern that has unfortunately played out innumerable times in the last 20 years as organizations outside of Afghanistan tried to figure the place out and failed miserably.

Still another application: blog comments, as is done with Utterances.

> A lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues. Use GitHub issues for blog comments, wiki pages and more!

https://github.com/utterance/utterances