jboog

I was clearly talking about in the US.

Literally the previous sentence I was talking about the danger in the US of fossil fuels, then I wrote about the danger of nuclear and then move on to worldwide.

Nothing I wrote was false at all. It's almost like you're intentionally trying to misread my argument to paint me as disingenuous.

I'm not a nuclear engineer, although I have a couple friends that are and have assured me the risk is incredibly low. The scientific literature backs this up.

What annoys me is climate change activists that paint nuclear power as some terrible boogeyman we must never use lest we irradiate the entire United States.

They will never ever "show their work" and do the cost/benefit analysis of the ongoing thousands who die from coal and other carbon energy sources or the potential millions who will die from climate change.

No, no it's all just alarmist BS about nuclear being "dangerous" so let's just not use literally the only power generating technology that can replace almost every single fossil fuel plant in the US. Not even solar and wind can claim that!

So I think it's accurate to describe this view as "anti-science" at least for those who want to abolish the use of nuclear altogether (Green new deal types)

Coal kills thousands of people a year in the US (13,000 if you believe the extreme estimates)

Less than 20 people have died in Nuclear related accidents in the history of this technologies use. And almost every single one of those were unrelated to the nuclear technology itself (electrocution, other workplace accidents that could happen in any power plant)

If you want to lump in Chernobyl and Fukushima we are still only talking 3-4000 deaths in history. And there's zero reason to believe these accidents are likely to ever occur in the US.

So yes, there are "undeniable risks", but they are vastly vastly overstated.

Especially when the "undeniable risk" of climate change is many millions of deaths whilst climate change activists insist we can't use the only technology that can almost entirely eliminate cooking the planet via coal, oil and natural gas.

What would you propose the federal solution would be?

"luxury" is one of the most meaningless and oft misused terms in housing/real estate.

It's not legally defined as anything so any developer can build a shoebox with a bathroom and a murphy bed throw in a nice countertop and call it "luxury".

It's also become a pejorative for ANY market-rate housing in cities by NIMBY anti-development types.

SF also has some of the most ridiculously onerous zoning laws in the country.

A HUGE portion of the city is just giant single family homes or 2-3 story buildings and you are absolutely forbidden from redeveloping them into dense, affordable housing.

Change the zoning laws and developers will gladly build affordable market-rate housing.

This is interesting and we can definitely learn something from the Vienna model but it isn't a super dense city so what works there might not translate as well to other cities.

Manhattan for example is about 7x as dense as Vienna. There just isn't the space for the government to be churning out cheap flats for the amount of people that want to live there.

SF is not nearly as dense and there is absolutely a lot of space to build there but unfortunately the zoning there is an absolute nightmare that doesn't seem to be getting better any time soon.

The people who believe GME is worth $1000 a share are 100% absolutely wrong.

That's FIFTY TIMES what it was valued at ~2 months ago.

They sell video games in malls for fuck's sake.

Based on what? "I like the stock"?

Likely the same people who believe BLACKBERRY is going to make a comeback! lol

Are we still punishing short-sellers now?

Because most of the major HFs and shorts closed their positions or hedged several weeks ago now and GME is still being pumped all over WSB

And that's not even getting into the fact that 99% of WSB posters had no idea what a "short squeeze" was about 60 days ago. There were some sophisticated people who understood what was going on there and hundreds of thousands of easily manipulated people who thought it sounded like a way to make a quick buck.

And I'm not begrudging the people who made money on this. Good for them! I'm just annoyed by the ex post rationalization that there were all somehow masters of complex financial instruments because they bought a meme stock.

The very idea that someone would argue that GME at $1000 a share which is almost FIFTY TIMES what it was valued a few months ago is a reasonable price for this stock is just absolutely bonkers.

I'm talking about what the company is ACTUALLY worth, not how many suckers are willing to roll the dice on a dubious pump and dump scheme.

Imagine if someone told you Blockbuster was worth FIFTY TIMES what it was trading for on the market in 2007. Gamestop's long term prospects are about as optimistic as BB was at that time.

Their revenue comes almost exclusively from retail sales of video games, IN MALLS.

You can say that "they're going digital!" and ok, fine that might stave off bankruptcy for a few more years maybe even allow them to remain in business for a while, but selling games online is...pretty competitive lol.

And why would someone prefer to buy a digital game from GME when there is PSN, XBL, Steam, Battle.net etc. etc. ?

Or if we believe physical copies of games are going to be around past a few more years, how are they going to compete against Amazon, WM, Target, Newegg etc which have somewhere between a 5-10 year head start?

Generally writing should be judged based on what the author was trying to accomplish, as in this case, does it make a compelling case to its intended audience?

And the intended audience is clearly people who care quite a lot about the "inside baseball" of NYT/Journalism and the media more broadly.

So how the general reader perceives this is irrelevant. It wasn't written for the general reader!

I don't read articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and claim the writing is poor because...it's not written for me and I wouldn't even know where to start in critiquing it.

I totally disagree!

I thought it was a well-written account of his experience.

This guy has been writing for the NYT for decades. Has tons of prestigious accolades for his writing, was up for a Pulitzer this year and you claim his writing is "poor quality" based on....what exactly?

I hear what you're saying but go on any social media today and you'll find hundreds, likely thousands of people claiming people are sexist, racist, ageist etc. because of the most innocuous comments.

These are full-grown adults doing this. Many of them have prestigious jobs in media, universities etc.

Really not hard to imagine a scenario where teenagers are looking for scalps to show how "woke" they are. The author fully admits that he comes off as an asshole sometimes. Maybe he was a bit of a jerk to the kids and pissed them off so they decided tattling on the guy for "being racist" would be payback.

I saw shit like this happen in high school all the time and it was well over a decade ago.

My partner is a teacher and I don't know how many times her students do shit like complain to the principal or guidance counselors that she's being unfair to them. Marking them absent from class for no reason when they attended via zoom and when it's investigated it turns out the kid had the camera off and didn't respond after being called on repeatedly.

Is this actually what happened? I don't know, we only have this guy's side of the story. Literally no one in the NYT or elsewhere has any evidence first hand or otherwise that he said anything worse than what IMO worst case scenario might be described as ill-advised and potentially insensitive.

As someone relatively well educated in finance and capital markets the whole GME fiasco has further convinced me of just how foolish and easily manipulated the average person is.

It was pretty incredible what happened with the whole pump and dump a few weeks ago I won't lie, but when GME was at 325 a share and literally many thousands of people on WSB were insisting it would go to $1000.

Why? "I like the stock" or "The new CEO has an amazing plan to go digital!"

They sell video games. In malls. Is this 2003?

Imagine 15 years ago pumping up Blockbuster stock to 20x what it was worth. Just utter insanity.

Not to shit on "average joe" it's also caused me to reflect on what biases might be causing me to have really dumb beliefs on things I don't have any domain knowledge of.

I wasn't claiming the technical interviews require some genius, but they are way tougher than IB interviews.

Yeah but you need to be a top engineering/CS kid to get those high-paying tech jobs.

All you need to get a job in IBD is go to a top school, have a high gpa, and be able to memorize some basic accounting and finance and not blow your interviews.

Getting a technical degree like CS and then passing the interviews at a place like Google or whatever the hottest unicorn grads wanna work at is way tougher IMO

I don't work in Investment Banking but I've heard a ton of anecdotal reports that in IB at places like GS the "Work from home" has made their already long hours even worse.

Even before Covid they worked 80-100+ hour weeks 7 days a week. Now that everyone is home all the time the expectations are that you're never "off" as before you'd at least get to go home for 4-6 hours and get some sleep.

I don't know how much of that is self driven vs top down but IB is one of the few jobs where it seems like a lot of people are looking forward to going back to the office from what I've seen.

I'm talking about the conventional fight.

Once you get into nukes it's another ballgame.

How does the F35 or its cool successor prevent MAD?

Iraq and Afgh were counterinsurgency fights. Any China or Russian fight will not be the same.

And the US absolutely crushed the Iraqi military within a matter of days in both Desert Storm and OIF. The problem was the "nation building" COIN fight.

I'm not saying China can't sink a carrier or two.

What I am saying is that if they do we have a backup of about 40-50 more. And that's not even counting Nato.

Or the fact that hundreds of other ships and subs led by Navy folks that are far better trained and with better equipment than anything China or Russia could ever hope to compete with in the next 15-20 years at best.

My point isn't that China can't give us a bloody nose or two, it's just that they are so far behind the NATO force's militaries that we don't need to waste another few trillion on the latest greatest tech.

China can't even field a blue water Navy and their Air Force is about 20-30 years behind the US and its allies.

We don't need an F-35 or another 2 Trillion dollar procurement process to sink literally anything China wants to put in the water.

~1.7 Trillion dollars so we can have a bleeding-edge Ferrari while our "enemies" in the PRC and Russia are still driving around in Yugo 45s

So many people seem to still buy into the Cold War mindset that we just need the latest bleeding edge platforms or the Soviets are going to invade and we'll all be reading Trotsky.

The US and NATO militaries are so far ahead of the Russians and China it's comical to claim another 1.7 trillion dollars for a "ferrari" is a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.

China can't even field a blue-water navy yet. I guess they're only about a century behind the US there lol

The US and NATO is so far ahead of China and Russia in the conventional fight it's comical.

No one outside of the US or its allies even has a blue-water Navy. China has ONE carrier and it's a pile of shit compared to what we have. We have 11 super carriers, add in the smaller ones and we have another 40 or so. That's not even counting the rest of NATO.

Let's not even get into to the backwater that is the PRC's air force.

Yeah they have 1.3 billion people. Big deal. How exactly do they get them over here?

Nuclear war, now that's a different story but having another cool bleeding-edge fighter jet isn't going to stop a full scale nuclear conflict. China and Russia have enough nukes they all might not make it to the continental US but it's enough to destroy us. We can certainly do the same. The basic game theory of MAD hasn't changed much in the past few decades.

Big if true but I'm super skeptical.

First of all how many years have we been hearing about how we'll have fully autonomous vehicles just around the corner? At least a decade.

How many years have we been hearing that human-like AI is just around the corner? At least since the 60's.

I'm skeptical (although optimistic) about massive tech breakthroughs in general. Even more so when it comes to military tech since so many in the mil. industrial complex stand to benefit from the trillions that the DoD sloughs off every few years for the next big thing.

Not an aviator but spent almost a decade in the military. You used to hear all the time about the latest and greatest tech that was going to change the way we fight.

At least in my nearly 10 years nothing really changed in any substantial way. incremental improvements, sure but no massive breakthroughs like are continually trumpeted in popular press.

I hope you're right though!

Wow. even worse.

This is one of the things that really annoys me about the anti cancel-culture warriors.

I get it, there has been some excess, some poor decisions made, but the hyperbolic, bad faith, and often dishonest framing they often use makes me really suspect of basically anything they say.

In MOST states in the US your boss can fire you for NO REASON at all. Or ANY reason save a few federally protected reasons like race/gender etc. That's "at-will" employment.

Anyone who tells you this is the same as the protections tenured profs have is a liar or complete moron.

So you have one example of someone being fired at...Evergreen college or whatever

And some guy who was temporarily suspended and then immediately reinstated.

And this proves profs with tenure have the same or worse protections than employees of private industry?

Have you ever heard of "at-will employment"?

In what world do shareholders believe that firing the principal talent, creative director, and founder of a new acquisition--within a YEAR of acquiring the company!--is "good for business"?

Only if you believe businesses are run by mustachio-twirling villains who sit around trying to ruin games for fun.

I know EA is the evil empire and whatever else but it doesn't seem obvious to me that Garriott threatening to resign means he would just get replaced. I'd say more likely they would give them more time.

The Ultima fanbase has always had a cultish love of RG for many good reasons, sure. Firing the guy would not be a smart business decision.

We're also only hearing his side of it. I tend to think EA was in the wrong, but also know that it's almost always the case one side of a story is biased, even if unintentionally.

You genuinely believe that there is no large group of people curious about trying a drug that supposedly offers the most euphoric feeling imaginable "better than sex" as many have claimed?

What if people tell them it's not addictive? And now it's not illegal?

I'm not sure we can take the results of a single experiment in an incredibly homogenous tiny country in Europe to mean an outcome is replicable across the world.