trentnix

I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.

I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"

I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"

Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.

He was thinking he wasn't going to get caught.

The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.

What exactly do you think their response to attempted forcible disarmament would be?

You'll find virtually every dimension of your life will improve if you're on top of these four things. It will make you more ambitious in pursuing social engagement. And that will make socialization much easier.

Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal.

Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.

  The Law of Salutary Contradiction states that when an event or policy is initially dismissed as impossible or a conspiracy theory, it is later acknowledged as occurring—but framed as beneficial and morally justified.

The Mule is still great, though.

As Milton Friedman said:

  What is important is not the particular person who is elected President or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.

They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. When you do so, corruption is inevitable. It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions.

I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income, like most Americans, they might consider some of their legislative choices differently.

After those experiences, my wife then went on a journey to learn everything she could about childbirth and healthcare. The more she learned, the more she became convinced that the entire system is flawed. The pressure to get an epidural, induce (conveniently between 8-5 on a weekday), or to use a C-section is immense. While each intervension is tremendously important in high-risk and edge cases, they are utterly unnecessary in the vast majority of births. But they are used for the majority of births, anyway. Some argue they may even have some damaging effects to the mother and child, but I concede that's not the medical mainstream opinion.

When my wife became pregnant with our third child, the delivery was during the Covid lockdown. Hospitals refused visitors, demanded masks, and were even more impersonal than normal. Although I was initially skeptical, she convinced me that we should use a birth center and a midwife. The birth center was practically next door to a hospital and we talked through how to mitigate risks if something went wrong.

It was a fantastic experience in nearly every way. Our son was born at 7:45 AM and we were home by 11:00 AM. It was substantially more affordable than a hospital birth.

My wife just had our fourth child earlier this year. Once again we used a midwife but this time we had a home birth. You couldn't have paid me to accept a home birth when we were new parents. I wish I knew then what I know now.

I know it's not for everybody (and especially those dealing with high-risk scenarios), but a midwife and home birth is an option if you want to avoid the hospital racket. It's significantly less expensive, more convenient, and every bit as safe for the vast majority of births.

LLMs are very useful. They are just not reliable. And they can't be held accountable. Being unreliable and unaccountable makes them a poor substitute for people.

Edit - for those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

My heart breaks for new grads. You’ve been dealt a raw deal by an industry that looked at you as an opportunity for financial and ideological exploitation and not a mind to guide and develop. They lowered expectations and made grander and grander promises. But the reality you face is an awful job market without the skills and maturity (which isn’t the same as knowledge) of previous generations.

Even still, that shouldn’t matter. With AI tools, new grads are better equipped to be productive and provide value early in their career ever before. LLMs have enabled productivity in areas where learning curves and complexity would have traditionally been insurmountable.

You should see companies putting the accelerator down on building and trying new things and entering new markets. But no, it’s layoffs and reductions and reorganizations. Everyone is reading from the same script.

Few in the C-suite wax philosophically anymore about how their people are the lifeblood of their companies. Instead, it’s en vogue to plot how to get rid of people. They think making aoftware is just an assembly line. They treat software professionals like bodies to throw at generic problems.

Every business plan is some sort of hand-waiving of “AI” or a strategy that treats customers like blood bags, harvesting value via dark patterns and addiction.

The result is that most software is anti-user garbage. Product teams emphasis strategies to ensure “lock-in”, not delivery of value. So many things feel broken and I struggle to make sense of how we got here.

I want to build software for people. I want to use software built for people. That used to be the recipe for success and employment opportunity. Now, employment as a software professional feels more like a game of musical chairs than an evaluation of one’s value and capability.

There exists no path where a publicly traded company doesn't eventually view its customers as subjects. Every business school on the planet is teaching their students strategies and tactics that squeeze their customers in pursuit of maximizing revenue. And those strategies and tactics are often at the expense of creativity, ethics, and community. Just last week people's bed didn't work because the company that makes them architected things such that they have absolute control.

Only a reasonably altruistic private company might buck the trend. But the publicly traded companies are allowed, by the government(s), to use their largesse in a predatory fashion to prevent competition. They bundle and bleed and leverage every step of the way. They not only contribute to the politicians that do their bidding, they are frequently asked to write the laws and regulations they're expected to follow. Magically, it has the effect of increasing the costs of their competition to enter the markets they dominate. And so, the odds of an altruistic private company emerging from that muck is low.

Worse still, many of the elected officials (and bureaucrats) actively own stock in the very companies they are responsible for regulating. Widespread corruption and perversion of the market is the inevitable result.

I'm trying to do a better job and redirect my money to the places that better reflect my values. It's not even a drop in the bucket, but it's a lever where I feel like I have a measure of control.

The map shows numerous parcels in metropolitan Houston classified as "Ag" property. The devil is in the details, but the map justifies (and encourages) closer inspection.

It’s possible this land is subject to delinquent taxes that, in Texas, incur significant interest.

Also, I’d want to know about zoning to see if the city has restricted the use of the land. Zoning is a double-edged sword as well.

But land that is classified by each appraisal district as “Ag” is only taxed on the value it derives from agricultural activity. Consequently, you’ll see large plots of land in the middle of the suburbs and the city that are bailed for hay or that contain a corn field. So then the owner is only subject to pay taxes on the amount the hay or corn produced.

This is meant to protect and encourage agricultural operations, incentivize the maintenance of rural land, and shield residents that are subject to being overtaken by sprawl. But it’s also used to protect land investment, including large ranches owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals.

If the land is sold and developed, some back taxes are owed when the land is no longer city considered Agricultural. But that gets passed on the purchaser and is rarely assessed against the seller.