not_jd_salinger

> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even.

For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically.

I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization.

Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers.

In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line.

I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.

I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together.

I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc.

But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers.

I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes.

The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.

Comments like this are strange since anyone with eyes can see that the break down of the systems we rely on is not some far off future event, it's happening right now and will likely escalate fairly rapidly in the next few decades.

It's not surprising that people feel stress from this and "walking it off" is not all that effective of a treatment.

While this is true and a very important part of understanding life on Earth, our current situation as a species is the consequence of high energy density, non-renewable fossil fuels.

Solar, geothermal, wave and other forms of energy will surely continue to allow complex systems to thrive on this planet, but our particular system arose out of access to an abundant, but ultimately limited source of high energy density fuels. We could essentially view our civilizations work as assisting in breaking down the energy gradient caused by having very rich stores of energy locked in the bonds of hydro carbons beneath the surface. As this source of energy is exploited and depleted too will our civilization and possibly species begin to break down.

Entropy is tricky when it comes to life and other forms of complexity.

The book "Into the Cool" explores this is away you might find very interesting. It spends a lot of time exploring the question of how the complexity of life emerges given the second law of thermodynamics. It argues pretty strongly that the second law still rules everything but we have to look at larger non-equilibrium energy flows to really understand it.

Energy fuels the complexity of our society, species and world. That wood you see burning is a solar battery in which complex life converted energy into hyrdocarbons over the period of many years.

Energy shapes everything about our society and will determine everything about our future. We life in a technical wonderland as a direct consequence of our species discovering extremely high energy density fossil fuels not all that long ago.

But in the end all of this complexity serves the second law in helping reduce energy gradients. All of that stored up potential energy in fossil fuels is being released into the environment, and we are the tools of nature to help. Thing of all of the energy we have spend freeing resources and energy from the grown. When we grow beyond the means of the energy supporting that system, all of it will break down.

We're starting to see this now not just in climate but the ecosystem, our economy etc etc.

The greatest illusion we've had as a species is that we are anything other than an expression of the second law in action.

> That's not the case if they had invested the same money in a 401K.

The unquestioned assumption that the stock market is a source of infinite growth is both foolish and, for anyone that thinks about it honestly, very likely to be wrong.

Even if we completely disregard the fact that limitless growth is impossible on a finite planet, and that we are daily seeing more and more cases where we are brushing against our limits, the very nature of 401ks is a pretty ridiculous way to build a retirement for a society.

Putting your retirement into a 401k means that your retirement is based on the future success of the economy. Typically what you would want for retirement would be some sort of investment structure where the economy doing worse when you are older will not impact your quality of life.

But instead we have set it up so that if the economy does poorly then, aside from all the normal problems of a bad economy, suddenly an entire generation of people will lose their safety net right away.

Like so many aspects of our society, we've let irrational optimism allow us to be highly leveraged in many ways, such that small bumps along the way have the potential to drive the entire system into utter catastrophe. The fact that we respond to these small bumps today by even further leveraging ourselves means this disastrous end becomes increasingly likely.

> hey arent currencies, they are assets

The irony here of course is that the only way that Crypto currencies would meet any standard definition of an asset would be if they were functioning currencies.

Going with Investopedia's straightforward definition "An asset is a resource with economic value", how is a non-currency crypto coin in any way a resource or possess economic value?