trebbble

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

- Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 25

Pretty sure the whole exchange speaks for itself to anyone else reading it, and doesn't convey what you hope/believe it does. HAND.

Since they're already unable to keep up with their current workload, and it will take time for them to staff up, no, I don't think this will give them enough staff to do substantially more auditing of 2021 taxes unless, for some reason, they decide to keep neglecting more recent years in order to do that. Some? Sure. A lot more, enough to make the audit-rate graph in the article look noticeably different? Nah, doesn't make sense, even if their motivations and purposes are what you imply.

So no, that's not what the "smart money" says. If the staff increase were 2x what's proposed, sure, maybe. As it is I expect them to mostly use those resources to make the chart in the article go up for FY 2022 and on, though I'll be surprised if they manage to reach 1990s levels of audit rates.

I think what's happened here is you got caught either misreading or deliberately ignoring parts of my post in order to bring up something that's bugging you and you wanted an excuse to post about, and instead of going "oops, my bad" you're digging in. So now you're trying to relate your thing back to 2021 so you can pretend it was ever relevant to the discussion. That's not making it look any better, incidentally.

> Gee I wonder what the results will be.

On the FY 2021 audit rate? Little or no effect, I expect.

From the article:

> A large increase in federal income tax audits targeting the poorest wage earners allowed the Internal Revenue Service to keep overall audit numbers from further declines for Americans as a whole during FY 2021.

I'm guessing low-income people are, for a bunch of reasons including having simpler finances and ~no ability to hire legal counsel or other outside help, way cheaper to audit than those with more money are.

This passage suggests they shifted focus there to keep their total-audits number from dropping even further. The IRS is experiencing a many-years-long deliberately-inflicted severe staffing shortage. IOW this was probably done to keep a metric someone cared about from dropping without requiring more funding, not because it's efficient or just or anything like that.

I didn't mean to imply that Windows is uncommon, but that you have to get pretty damn obscure to find another modern desktop or server OS that doesn't do the dot-equals-hidden thing. Windows is the most common on the desktop, obviously, but if you step outside it you're almost certainly in dot-is-hidden territory.

Practically the only remotely common desktop or server OS where it's not still a normal way to hide files, is Windows.

Anyone who was near a tree during the eclipse saw that, too. The effect was very clear in spots of light passing through leaves. Definitely weird to see.

> But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.

Most younger people are also really bad at using computers.

No, not because they're ruined by smartphones—because most people seem to find most current operating systems and computer systems in general unintuitive and hard to understand. They always have and seemingly always will, unless/until UIs and core metaphors in computer interfaces change significantly.

The typical experience of most non-nerds using a computer, no matter their age, is repeating some steps they memorized and hoping the right thing happens. They don't make connections between functionality (say, thinking to try copy-pasting a file, not just selected text), they don't experiment because it usually gets them in some state they don't know how to get out of without help, and any change to UI layout or any kind of pop-up notification confuses the hell out of them. Desktop computers are mysterious, frustrating things. Observe some workers in a non-tech office using their work computers for a while and you'll see what I mean.

> I think the natural end point for heavily worn clothes would be as a rag?

This used to be a super-common middle class (and under, I suppose) habit, at least in the US.

But synthetics make shitty rags, so that rules out a high percentage of modern cheap clothes of the sort that don't tend to get repaired or sold used, and material costs are so low that more people can easily afford to just buy cotton rags that'll perform better than strips of denim or old cotton t-shirts. Plus I don't think people do things that call for nigh-disposable cloth rags as much anymore (in our house they were mostly used for cleaning up engine grease or motor oil, but folks worked on their own cars and lawnmowers and such a lot more back then, and they were all ICE, not electric)

Not sure. I know they push tons of deals through the apps. I know this second-hand, including from someone who routinely gets entire meals from Taco Bell, specifically, for a couple dollars—just as you used to be able to do off the normal menu. Sometimes he can get absurd amounts of food for less than a dollar—just as you used to be able to do couponing or deal-hunting. In short, what it looks like to me is the normal prices became "sale" prices, the former sale prices became super-duper-sale prices, and the new menu prices are a totally new massive-profit-margin category that didn't exist before.

This is actually pretty similar to what pizza chains have been doing far longer and to a greater degree than other fast-food joints used to—it's long been the case that you can get 30-50% off your chain pizza order with coupons, and that there are always a bunch of coupons available to suit many common orders, such that there's rarely a reason to order anything at full menu price from a major pizza chain unless you just can't be bothered to track down any of the deals (hence, it's price discrimination, with a side of psychological manipulation to make you think the "deals" are actually bargains when they are, rather, simply not rip-offs).

As for my own experience: we usually do Arby's when we want garbage food. We can easily drop $40 there at menu prices without going nuts—or we can get all of the exact same stuff for $15 or less, with coupons (the key: lots of their coupons list, in small print, a count of times you can apply it in the same visit, so you may be able to use a single coupon for, say, "$3 sandwich + fries" to buy five of those meals at once at the coupon price). Again, these places have long had coupons, but they didn't used to constantly have lots of coupons or other deals active at once, and the difference between coupon and menu prices didn't used to be so extreme. Actually, noticing that Arby's prices had damn near doubled over just a couple years (pre-pandemic) was what prompted me to take notice of this situation, which does appear to be playing out industry-wide.

True if the level you shift it up to has some further explanatory value and/or can be demonstrated or proven in some fashion. If it's just "well, it might be this thing that we can't prove" then, until you've turned that notion into something you can test or at least support with observations, it's just "god did it".

I think "there's something rather than nothing because the set of all possible waves exists... like, somewhere" is roughly identical to "god did it", as opposed to, say, a hypothesis that things fall and planets orbit due to a universal force that causes matter to attract other matter, even if both just prompt another "why?" You can go do stuff with the latter—not so much with the former, which is more of a dodge than even a partial explanation.

A good test might be whether you can apply the answer to any "why?" that lacks an existing answer, with exactly the same utility and validity in every case. Take the example of the question suggested by the explanation of universal gravitation:

"OK, why does gravity exist, then?"

"God did it / that's just what our little corner of the set of all possible waves happens to look like"

There's simply no specificity to them, and they amount to "just because".

Looks like an appeal to the divine, in that it doesn't explain anything but does push the question up a level.

"Why does something exist?" "God did it." "Uh, ok, why does God exist?" "Dunno, just does." <- sure seems like you could have simply applied that last answer to the first question and it'd be exactly as useful and valid.

"Why does something exist?" "The set of all possible wave states exists and behaves such-and-such way" "OK, but why does that exist and why does it do that?" "Dunno, just does". <- Ditto.

Right. Consider how different the profit of a company hiring $300,000/yr software engineers to mow lawns 8 hours per day might be, compared with another company hiring them to... write extremely valuable software 4 hours per day.

The company with (let's say) identically-skilled employees putting in twice as many hours probably won't be the more profitable of the two.

Replace "mow lawns" with "write pointless, doomed-from-the-start messaging apps" and the actual problem starts to become clear.

Garner's Modern English Usage covers "perquisite" in order to call out confusion between that word and "prerequisite", but notes in passing that perquisite is "often shortened to perk". No mention of "perq" which, as with other posters, I've personally never seen.

In general, if you chose a usage that generates discussion about your language choices, and there was another option that would convey the exact same thing and not generate discussion, it's best to regard that as a mistake.

There's a lot of friction to finding and landing side jobs.

Ones that let you hop in just whenever you feel like it and do one hour of work, with no commitment to minimum hours per week? And that you can put in a single productive hour every so often, without ramp-up time eating that entire hour with nothing to show for it? And that pays enough to make it worth it (i.e. not Mechanical Turk or whatever)?

I don't even know what such an ultra-flexible, low-context (= near-zero ramp-up time even if you only do it an hour or two a week, and some weeks not at all) but still high-paid gig would look like, or how to go about finding it.

Meanwhile, you can value-shop if you feel like it, or not if you don't. Entirely optional and no commitment or outside expectations. You can do it very seriously one week, then not do it at all the next.

c. 2005, a $100 shopping cart was overflowing.

2022, a $100 shopping cart may still have space left before you have to start stacking things. More like $300-$350 if you fill it up.

> I took my kids there last weekend ... it was over $30.00 and I didn't eat. Fast food -- across the board -- has gone up.

This trend predates the current inflation.

Several major fast food chains appear to have worked out more effective price discrimination schemes that involve raising their menu prices to much higher than they used to be, then offering crazy discounts in their apps or via coupons.

It's always been possible to get significant discounts on fast food with coupons, but before they seemed to think they needed to keep their menu prices at least non-crazy or it'd hurt business. Something changed and a whole bunch of them decided they no longer needed to keep menu prices in the realm of sanity—10-to-1 this happened so fast and uniformly because one or more of the big-3 management consulting firms pushed new "best practices" across the whole industry in short order.

Now the menu prices are WTF high, but you can get 50-90%(!) discounts using the apps and coupons and eat fast food daily without ever paying anywhere near menu price.

Everything I care about definitely seems to have gone up a lot more than the nominal inflation rate would suggest. Maybe not 50%, but... certainly more than 20% over the last two years.

Then again that's been true since I started paying attention to this stuff almost 20 years ago. The reported inflation rate's never felt all that close to how much stuff I buy's actually going up in price (the reported rate's consistently a lot lower than that).

HOWEVER, in the specific case of McDonalds, you have to factor in that they've spent the last few years aggressively optimizing for price discrimination. If you're poor, you use the app and physical coupons and never pay menu prices, but something closer to what the prices used to be. If you're not poor you pay menu prices and wonder when fast food stopped being cheap (it didn't, they just make you trade some time and effort to get "normal" prices now)

No end?

Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

I'd agree that at some point being "creative" feels like just another kind of killing time with minesweeper or crossword puzzles or whatever.

I've definitely gotten better at consciously adding things the list of shit I try not to to think about. Which is pretty long at this point.

I finally tried weed well into my 30s and discovered it's great at making sure I don't think about those things when I'm trying to go to sleep, which is really nice.

In general I'm pretty sure I've got a fair amount of derealization going on all the time now, which... helps?

I suppose that all adds up to some kind of mellowing out.

Since we can switch any time enough folks feel like moving over some of the major group threads to something else, how are we locked in? I can't really think of any time I didn't do nearly all of my communication over one or maybe two channels. In the 1990s, 95+% by landline phone. Then ICQ + Phone. Then SMS. Then WhatsApp.

I also do 95+% of my driving in a single car, and 95+% of my text editing in a single program. 95ish% of my browsing in a single browser. Not locked in to those, either—in all three cases I've switched before without difficulty, and likely will again. I have no idea where the lock-in notion's coming from.

We're not, so it isn't.

Over 15 years in the industry, shitloads of code shipped in a dozen plus languages, repeatedly taken an idea all the way to being a functioning product, usually get great feedback from peers and managers, often taken point on architectural matters, et c., et c.

Yeah, I'd probably google that in any language I've written, including ones I've worked in in the last couple weeks. Even if I thought I knew what to do, and even if I tried it and it seemed to do the right thing, I'd google it (or use in-IDE docs, or similar) because I wouldn't trust that I was entirely correct.

... however, narrow the question and give me some resources ("the input will be a positive, unsigned 32-bit integer; the string should be ascii and use digits, not words, to represent the number; do insert commas every third digit [and we're working exclusively in English, so commas are all we need and you can ignore system locale preferences—one of many subtle ways one might screw this up]; here's a printout of an ascii table for reference") and I can probably do something like what's requested, without the aid of Google. As long as you don't expect the syntax to be completely perfect.

Consider that FAANG-style interviews are pretty expensive to conduct.

Consider that the big tech companies could agree on some kind of standardized test to replace much of the worst of the interviews—but haven't.

Consider that they often make you leetcode even if you've already passed their interviews before, even if you've passed a couple other leetcode-style companies' interviews before, and so on.

Recall that several of the top-paying tech companies got busted illegally colluding to keep salaries down once already.

Conclusion: making developers more reluctant to switch jobs is one of the main purposes of FAANG-type interview processes, and is likely a core part of their current salary-suppression scheme.

> Aren't we more than that?

I'm "getting" to watch a couple close relatives go through severe cognitive decline.

From what I've seen: no, we're not.

They frequently drop the last few minutes of memories on the floor and you can watch them reset, ask the same questions, react the same way, all in precisely the same tone as the first time. Over, and over, and over. We're little more than spinning tops—they've a condition that makes that plain, but I don't see why the rest of us would be any different. We just retain and re-apply more of our input, than they do, so it's less obvious that "the lights are on, but nobody's home".

Yeah, the "repetition is what makes time go faster" thing never made much sense to me. Few parts of my life have involved more day-to-day sameness and as rigid a schedule as high school. Should have felt fast, right? Nope, felt slow as hell. The less-repetitive summers? Felt about the same speed (so, seemed nice and long—now I blink and it's like "oh shit, the leaves are falling? I meant to plant some tomatoes...").

Meanwhile, the very-novel first few years with kids seemed to go by in a flash. A month feels about a week long to me, now, and has for years.

For me the effect seems disconnected from circumstances, but connected to age—years had been feeling subjectively shorter for quite a while before I had kids, even, and they seemed to just be "getting shorter" as I got older, period, no relation to what's going on.

> It's not just that they have no obligation they are legally required to comply with subpoena requests and provide any and all data that an independent judge has deemed necessary.

I have, for north of a decade, not understood why this sort of thing hasn't triggered the exact same alarms that outright government-run mass data collection and spying would—if the government can pay for the data, can strong-arm to get the data, and can subpoena the data, it's barely better that a private company is collecting it, than the government, if your concern is government mis-use of data. No one should be allowed to collect and hoard information about people the way big tech companies (and some others, like CC companies and banks) do, for exactly the same reasons that we don't want the government doing that itself.

... so they can blackmail some folks to make them turn over corporate secrets, facilitate money laundering, or otherwise act as spies.

Maybe still safer than a US company having the data, but not great.

My point is that your posts read like you have a chip on your shoulder and are working that out in your writing, and that comes through so strongly that it overwhelms any other message you may be trying to communicate. The original post, for instance, isn't off-putting because it's contrarian, but because it reads like the contrarianism is mainly in service of presenting yourself as cleverer than three well-regarded historical figures, plus the author of the article—which, even if that's true, who cares? That's what I meant by the post seeming like it was more for you than for anyone else.

You seemed surprised enough at the reaction to your original post that I thought you might like to know what about it probably "touched quite a few nerves", is all.