pwncat

This is correct. The problem is that so many people, including top decision-makers within society, are too short-sighted to care about this notion of deficit. "Someone else" will clean it up. Externalized costs and myriad variations of deficit spending (widespread layoffs despite the long-term costs of an underemployed nation; education cuts; environmental damage; ramping up social inequality on both the national and world scale, setting us up for violent revolution and national dissolution) are being tapped for short-term profit even when it's completely unnecessary. That a sizable portion of people are going to disregard their health, working insane hours and using substances of dubious long-term safety, isn't surprising in the least.

Terrible idea, actually. The productivity gained by the health sacrifices is dubious and might be counterbalanced by the negatives.

Sacrificing most of the fun but not productive activities that fill the hours of less-ambitious young people (video games, TV, social drinking, chasing tail) is reasonable (I haven't had a drop of alcohol, or been on a date, in months). An occasional 5-hour night of sleep can be justified by a freakish, almost hypomanic productive streak. Sacrificing one's health for work is idiotic, and going 7 years without taking a vacation is nothing to be proud of.

[Edit: I developed panic disorder from working through a severe flu, in an overbearing environment. I'm still on meds, over a year later. So I have personal experience to support my claims.]

Networking is always hit-or-miss, and I'm asking about a worst-case, not average case, scenario.

I'm explicitly asking how people would respond to a worst-case scenario.

This isn't something that has ever happened to me (although it theoretically could) and it's not my situation now. I'm just curious how people on here would handle it.

Not remotely, but they're pretty scummy, like the investment banking industry as a whole. What makes them worse than most others is their connection to politics, which allows them to get all kinds of favors.

If you want to develop a boiling hatred of the investment banking industry, look into how these firms handle IPOs. If the banks were behaving ethically, IPOs would be priced at the company's fair value, meaning that having an allocation in the IPO would have zero expectation. In practice, IPOs are known to be 10-15% underpriced, meaning that the IPOing firm raises less money than it should, while the bank has a positive-expectation allocation it can use to pay favors to clients. Moreover, it's a bad idea for an average Joe to participate in IPOs at all; if you're a nobody, banks will let you in on losing IPOs but never allocate you into the good ones.

Another sad truth is that the "nice" (in relative terms) investment banks were Lehman and Bear, both of which died. Lehman especially was known for having less of a BSD (not the OS) culture than the other banks. It was also obvious even in late 2007 that these banks would be the first to fail (if nothing else, because they were less prestigious and would be hit first by panic-driven activities) while Goldman had enough of a lifeline to benefit from the inevitable "stop the bleeding" measures for which other banks would be too late.

I disagree with this argument. I think another one's more salient. For a pack animal such as primal humans probably were, a certain type of moderate depression is a survival mechanism for dealing with low social status. Your appetite and libido decrease, you become inassertive, you accept mistreatment from others. Subjectively, this process and experience sucks, but lacking desire to mate with the alpha female keeps the omega male alive. Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the pack; the depressive response ensures that, in extreme scarcity, the less successful individuals slink away and accept starvation, rather than challenging and potentially causing harm to the more important ones.

In modern society, this reaction is completely useless and utterly maladaptive. It also has a tendency to fire in people at all levels of social status, because modern society (with its dynamic, subtle, and multileveled play of social status) is confusing to the primal mind. So a depressive response can be rightly considered an illness.

Civilization expects everyone to assume the role most closely analogous to high beta/low alpha. People who have omega traits tend to be depressives; people who have too many alpha traits are sociopaths.

Same here.

I think it's a great language. As much as I value purity from an academic standpoint, I also need to eat. I'd rather see a 90%-pure Lisp that I can get a job in than a 100%-pure Lisp that I can't.

Moreover, I think Clojure will get more Lispy, rather than less, over time. In 2015, I think far fewer people will be programming in Java full-time, and the JVM will be optimized as a VM to support higher-level languages rather than to support Java as a primary language.

I generally upvote comments that make an interesting point in an intelligent way. I tend to favor concision, since I don't upmod (or downmod) something if I'm not compelled to read the whole thing.

I generally upvote anything I respond to, even in disagreement, unless it's obnoxious (in which case, I downvote).

(or (with? you lisp) (against? you lisp))

I'm kidding.

When you're writing Clojure code, you generally are supposed to prefer Clojure features and idioms. Functions like proxy and gen-and-save-class exist because sometimes you have to create classes to use other Java APIs.

I wonder what happens if you have an auto-deduction from your account. Not a problem for the monthly bills, but it would suck to find $11k taken out of one's bank account with the deduction done through a process that, although extremely unethical, is technically legal.

If I ever had the intention of using a phone for data, I'd turn off auto-pay immediately.

Two words: stone soup.

The JVM is just a starting point, and a very good one for that.

Note: if you trust any company run by Mark Zuckerberg with anything, you're doing it wrong.

Korean women are naturally very beautiful and don't need to "Europeanize" their features. I find that really unfortunate. They also have an uncanny ability to remain very kind, good people even when very attractive.

However, I foresee a trend toward a strong desire for "race" mixing on all sides, as the world beauty standard converges to a mix. (I'm white and prefer to date non-white women, at least in the US.) Perhaps, in another part of the world, I could use the prospect of having attractive, mixed-race kids as a selling point. :)