6,528 karma · joined October 23, 2013
Send an email to chat: cryosin@gmail.com.
sure, i believe that. but it doesn't help those of us who can't look away from the real world.
i get that my critique of the book sounds like a strawman, but i genuinely can't escape the interpretation of the argument that i proposed here on the basis of what the book says alone.
it's not just about reading books, of course. it's about reading any long-form content.
there's factual information in there, but a lot of it is a bit exaggerated and from a very... shall we say, not-rigorous perspective, even if you largely believe in the thrust of what's being said and the facts aren't really up for dispute.
however, they can fund projects to help people with less money to reduce their emissions by an equal amount, generating a large value in beneficial externalities as a result.
if i purchase an offset and the proceeds go to a hydropower project in india, there's a lot more going on there than the compensation for one ton of emissions alone.
you are probably someone who cares about this stuff roughly a million times more than the average member of the public, but for most people, the actions you specified aren't on the radar.
nobody i've spoken to has even known about offsets, nevermind what they do or how to access the markets as an individual. people do vaguely know about the idea of "cap and trade", but that's not exactly something they think of as being relevant to their lives or their efforts to mitigate climate change, even if it is.
there's a huge gap between the public's willingness to participate in these type of carbon reduction plans and their knowledge about how to actually do so and how much they should actually be contributing to make up for their personal carbon footprint.
i'm not proposing to do anything revolutionary. creating a new source of offsets is a non-starter. my idea is merely to close the gap.
to inform people that they aren't powerless, and to reduce the friction of navigating the carbon markets at the scale they would prefer.
we can't wait for the political leadership to get their game together any longer, and we can't wait for the part of the population that doesn't belive there is a crisis to come around either.
we need to start financing the prevention or removal of carbon from the atmosphere today, using the voluntary carbon markets that we have. there aren't another five or ten years of indecision that we can afford to waste. and we don't have any better system for emissions reductions, yet.
those of us who understand the gravity of our present climate situation have the burden of carrying everyone else on our backs to the extent that we are able. addressing our planet's health is not something that will be fair in terms of the responsibilities that we need to take. an idealistic few must come forth and create the means for our mutual salvation, and they can expect only to thanklessly toil in the short-term.
it's a bitter pill to swallow, but we need to accept it and start moving forward rather than getting mired in spite towards those who won't help, or fatalism that we can't change our situation. taking action will be our protection against depression, and chipping away at our planet's climate crisis will inspire others to join our efforts.
send me an email (it's in my profile) if you want to help/join me. i need anyone and everyone who wants to contribute.
but be warned: if you want to join my effort, at present i can promise you nothing but my appreciation and the assurance that you're trying to be one of the good guys.
the camps serve no productive purpose, yet here we are with a bunch of them in the country anyway.
imagine if someone told you that it won't make a difference to give you a painkiller for your broken leg because it won't cure the broken leg.
the root cause is not easily accessible. but that doesn't mean all other approaches to lightening the burden are useless. it means that a plurality of approaches will be necessary to solve the problem.
while working on a project intended for a government institution, a team at mckinsey hired a digital illustrator to create a handful of beautiful scenes from a high middle ages fantasy world.
i have to say, the illustrations weren't relevant to the project, but they really made the powerpoint deck look utterly gorgeous. the content of the powerpoint, intended to be highly insightful and fuel for decisionmakers, had about three paragraphs of written content across ~50 slides.
the rationale for this very light amount of information was that the intended audience of the presentation would have their eyes glaze over if they saw anything with more than one sentence's worth of exposition. the audience -- government decisionmakers -- needed to be drip-fed the content they'd paid for, or else they wouldn't understand it.
at the time, i thought it was incredibly limiting for the client, even if the mckinseyites were correct about the client's poor ability to digest material -- which was no sure bet. of course, in retrospect this entire rationale was just a cover for the utter lack of insightfulness/knowledge/competency brough to the table by the mckinsey team. the project was light on information and heavy on illustration because the team hadn't ever had a clue about the substance of what they were trying to do.
the lesson here -- and there are other anecdotes in this vein too -- is that the mckinseyites are adept at gaslighting both themselves and their clients such that the innumerable shortcomings of their output are slickly presented as features.
it's a real pain, especially when you don't have enough information on an issue to form an opinion yet. you'll get all kinds of probing questions trying to sneakily suss out exactly what you're expecting to see or which way you want them to affirm your opinion on the subject at hand. it seems like their target customer is always someone who wants to add legitimacy to their bad ideas, and they will treat you as such even if you don't want to fit that bill.
they're incapable of being objective regarding facts of reality because their mental model for truth is that something that is "right" or "true" only per the opinion of whichever authority figure is the most salient at the moment. it explains a lot about why they're so amoral. it also explains a lot about why they fit in so well to the world of the elites: they're not ever going to have the moral gumption to speak truth to power... or even to the disempowered.
my favorite part about people from mckinsey has been that they're stunningly incapable. need some quick research done? after a lot of hand-holding, you'll be given an uninsightful and dubiously comprehensive summary of the mainstream view on the topic of your choice and a pivot table you didn't want or need, roughly 10 days after you needed it. you won't need to proofread the report, of course. but that isn't what you cared about anyway.
need something obscure and complex deeply analyzed and fully understood in an insightful way? again, you'll get some flashy combination of excel and powerpoint shit you don't need or ask for, maybe even ahead of schedule, but you'll also get an irrelevant speech about whatever tangentially topical prestigious person/institution the mckinsey person recently bumped elbows with. you'll also realize that the person working on the thing you wanted doesn't really have any understanding of the thing you wanted them to understand at all -- they're just regurgitating whatever they could find without analysis.
however, they've all been imminently presentable people who can articulate themselves clearly and appear to be very serious. this has been my experience with no fewer than 4 former employees -- all of whom were hired to perform tasks exactly like one would expect a business management consultant to be capable of -- but take it with a grain of salt anyway.
try this thought experiment:
your neighbor has $10 and you have $1. the cost to keep a person sheltered, fed, and clothed is $3. your neighbor pays you $1 to do some task each month while making $10 from your labor. you can't afford the basics with the salary being offered. your neighbor, on the other hand, can afford the basics for themselves and also for you using the revenues generated from your labor -- and more! yet, they still only pay you $1, because if they paid you $3, they'd only be able to pay for their own consumption two times instead of three times. is this situation acceptable on the basis of the factors outlined in the experiment alone?
because that level of exploitation is a mere shadow of the scale of exploitation that the current crop of billionaires perform. and we haven't even started to talk abou tax dodging yet.
a predictable response, but it's the wrong one which will surely lose your company plenty of money and valuable employees extremely rapidly while generating a tremendous amount of ill-will from the people in your network. really, it's the attitude that's creating the problematic and unprofitable approach here. aside from being disgustingly invasive and utterly reprehensible from a social perspective, you've also put yourself in a position where you're spending your company's time on something that will never generate it any financial returns, only more costs when the employee discovers your snooping and inevitably ditches you and you need you find a replacement on short notice.
the correct response here is to re-evaluate how much you're paying the employees that are moonlighting because it clearly isn't enough to keep them appeased, which means that by definition it isn't enough to keep them operating at 100% during the hours you expect to be getting 100% of their energy and potential for productive output. in other words, moonlighting employees need a raise because at the salary you're paying them, they know they can't afford to stop looking for more opportunities to work for pay. when you do find a reason to give that employee a raise proactively, you'll increase their output to the level you thought you were purchasing with the initial salary negotiations. you'll also increase their loyalty to the company, and avoid intruding on their private life, which is explicitly, irrevocably, and unimpeachably beyond your purview, consideration, or examination under any conditions whatsoever.
in a nutshell: focus on things you can change, then stay in your lane.
once an agent achieves "oligarch" status in their model, the flow of wealth towards them accelerates rather than decelerates such that the remaining agents have no ability to exchange wealth with anyone other than the oligarch. so intermediates between the lowest level with nothing and the oligarch are temporary at best.
the "low" unemployment is a result of nearly-unemployed people working small jobs which aren't enough to cover their basic needs rather than a genuinely improving economic situation. remember: 5% unemployment is normal and ideal because it representes structural unemployment plus the churn of people moving from job to job. we're lower than that now, which means that either our metric is not reflecting the scenario (as i believe) or that the fundamental amount of churn and structural unemployment has decreased, which i think nobody will try to argue.
the people knocked out of the labor force in 2009 have had an extremely difficult time getting back in, and the jobs they occupied have been destroyed permanently by the looks of it. in other words, while unemployment is very low, compared to then, the economy either has 2-3% fewer open jobs compared to the number of jobseekers (who may be employed), or employers are substantially more reluctant to take on new employees when those employees are not already participants in the labor force. or both.
there's two additional problems here. the first is that employers are unwilling to give unemployed and marginally employed workers a shot because they're tainted. this is especially true in "professional" and "high quality" jobs. the second additional problem is that middle-class people tend to hold out for a "good job" rather than taking any job which they could reasonably do, like waiting tables etc. knowing this, employers often refuse to take these people for those roles...
here's my advice: unless you have friends who can set you up with the right VCs and ensure that they will be willing to overlook your lack of experience and IP, don't bother.
you're not going to get up to speed working in the lab on your own in any short amount of time. learning the theoretical stuff that you need to know won't take long, but you probably won't understand how to use the theory to make something novel until you've spent time in the lab. and you won't know how to vet the ideas of people with phds, either.
then there's the elephant in the room: risk. biotech is extremely risky because drug development is difficult even under ideal conditions. making "niche drugs" is even more difficult than making drugs for the mainstream because niche diseases won't have as much of the scientific background already researched when you sit down to try to come up with a useful therapy concept.
if you want to talk in more depth about the skills which are actually needed to get into the field in a scientific or a business capacity, i've advised someone who reached out to me here on HN about that exact topic in the past, and i'm more than happy to discuss it with you via email. check out my profile if you're interested.
yep, that's why i left the industry. the companies know that the science staff are willing to work for less, so long as they have the opportunity to do what they're interested in. so they end up working for much less.
he strikes me as the kind of person who is both mysterious and familiar at the same time -- someone who is wise and accessible, yet avuncular and rare to interact with. and, of course, he's deeply italian.
psychedelics as medicine are finally starting to gain the traction and serious research which they will need to be utilized therapeutically. while imperfect, they're potentially curative therapies which are likely a quantum leap ahead of much of what psychopharmacology has had in its roster so far.
the gut/microbiome stuff is also starting to come to a head after about 9 years of intense research activity. clinical applications are right around the corner, and there's an entire universe to explore which we've only scratched the surface of so far.
i'd also like to add cannabinoid (CBD) therapeutics as an addendum to psychedelic medicines. while there's a tremendous amount of hype and folk science surrounding CBD, it appears as though the chemical does in fact have a massive impact in domains ranging from immunology to psychiatry to geriatrics. we're just at the very start of the research process, and there are already a cornucopia of compelling and empirically valid leads which need to be followed.
sure, they can get you a job, but it will be a horizontal move for you if you are currently employed, and certainly no step up from your prior employment if you're suddenly unemployed.
consider that for many young people outside of the software and finance worlds, this is precisely the situation. all the good reputation in the world doesn't much matter if it doesn't get you any further than where you are.
i know this is sounds like a snarky and low-effort response, but it is not intentional. it's just the way things are, and there isn't really a diplomatic way of saying it.
this is what the constant specter of economic instability causes people to do. stash money under the bed, defer big purchases, and refuse to buy things that are not necessary for life. then, when the economy worsens, people feel like they are at least a little bit more prepared. the trick, of course, is that the actions taken to respond to their feelings of instability are more likely to cause a recession.
overall, the liberal-capitalist response to the outcry of the young public has been "shut up, get a job, consume more, be more competitive" -- and it will be just as tone deaf and infuriating in the coming recession as it has been since before the last recession.