wdewind

I'm sorry but you're making a massive stretch by implying the either Einstein or Feynman were known as toxic assholes by basically anyone (except maybe Einstein's wives).

And while one can of course say that someone is a genius at a sport, I meant specifically intellectually, and even more specifically I wanted to combat the notion that it is common for software engineers to be geniuses and total assholes. I just haven't seen that frequently, and in fact usually the pattern is that the engineers who are typical assholes are, correctly, the least secure in their own skills and try and mask that with needless complexity (in code, communication etc).

I guess maybe my meta point is that I think intelligence generally fights toxicity, not the opposite. I'm sure you can find counter examples as humans are complex.

Everyone is commenting on the mismanagement angle here, which is very real, but I think it's also important to point out that the author is simply wrong about "Rick" being a genius if the descriptions of his behavior and work product are accurate. I think there's a huge myth about solitary geniuses who are assholes. I've yet to meet someone I consider really genius who is also a toxic asshole. Maybe occasionally you run into geniuses who are a little shy or socially awkward, but by and large the defining factors of the true geniuses I've worked with have always been a desire to share with the team, improve everyone around them and contribute deeply to the product. Their code is maintainable and other engineers totally get it and when they don't the genius is there to walk them through it, taking notes on how they can make it easier to understand next time. They hate the idea of being a dependency/SPOF, and they are extremely accountable for very real and obvious progress.

I've also worked with people genuinely like "Rick" from the article. It usually takes about a week to find out that they don't actually write any code or contribute to the team in any meaningful way besides making noise. People who are that wrapped up in their own ego cannot make meaningful contributions to their teams.

It lends more weight to the idea that there was a ton of mismanagement going on at this company that beyond the bullshit described in the article, the author still considers "Rick" to be a genius.

Wouldn't they have scheduled these trades months in advance like most employees of public companies with insider trading policies?

Because they weren't necessary because the legal system worked just fine in this case?

Controlling for calories and assuming you're not diabetic why does it matter what your source of carbohydrate is?

It's not. The same amount of glycemic load consumed all at once or over time throughout the day will not have a significant effect on insulin resistance. Not being able to eat as much because you are constrained to an 8 hour window will cause your overall glycemic load to go down.

Overall the body is pretty good at nutrient partitioning and maintaining a caloric balance. There may be small statistically different outcomes for practicing stuff like IF, but there aren't clinically different outcomes outside of using IF to maintain compliance to a diet.

If IF helps you maintain your ability to comply to the diet you want, great, but there's absolutely no evidence for it being superior than the same diet spread over the day, and there a few ways in which it's probably suboptimal, like building muscle (although again not hugely so, so compliance probably trumps the small advantage you get).

But you can just choose to stop accepting ErikCoin at any time right?

How is that different from virtual currency in video games?

Saying that bitcoin allows users to act as their own banks is like saying a mattress with your cash under it is your own bank. It's not meaningful in anyway. Debt is the meaningful differentiator.

> They literally allow an individual to be their own bank.

The main function of banks is issuing debt, not holding cash.

> If you're talking about Marxism, you're misunderstanding the division between bourgeoisie and proletarians; stocks, pensions, 401k, whatever, does not count as means of production; the division is between the proletarians, who almost always have nothing to sell but their labour-power and the bourgeoisie, i.e a class of people who own the means of production.

Can you explain what you mean by this? If you own stocks, pensions, 401k, whatever, you pretty definitionally have more to sell than just your labour-power right? I guess I don't understand how it's not gradated ownership over the means of production.

We're getting lost in the weeds. What exactly are you proposing?

> The government creates money all the time.

The vast majority of new money is not created by the government, and that fact seems to be missing from your argument. If we no longer had credit we would be shrinking the available money supply by about 90%. This would be completely catastrophic for not only the US but the entire global economy.

Maybe you could be more specific about what you're proposing because I feel like I am not really understanding it.

I mostly agree with all of this and felt like it was covered by:

> Economic growth, although not by itself, helps alleviate a lot of these issues. There are other factors that also impact this, and I'd argue a lot of the economic issues we face aren't from too much growth but from these other factors (taxation etc.) not being handled properly. So in general more growth is advantageous, but we have to other things going right as well.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. As I've mentioned in other posts, there's obviously a balance, but suggesting that the credit markets could go away entirely and be supplanted by "friends and family" loans is a gross misunderstanding of the credit markets, and certainly would not at all benefit the lower class. The entire premise of TARP was that this is true and economists on both sides of the aisle largely agree with it.

> It's perhaps not a coincidence that the last few decades have seen ever increasing credit availability while the middle class shrinks.

I don't think so. I think it has much more to do with tax law.

I agree with that. Economic growth can help these issues, but it's not the only, or even the biggest, factor. As I mentioned...

> You're assuming the alternative to lending at interest is nothing rather than something.

No, I'm arguing with what you proposed, which is this:

> > People would still lend money to their friends and family. Stores would extend credit to customers because they want to make sales.

which is not in anyway a meaningful alternative to the actual credit market.

> Notice that the first two are the only ones that are actually good for anything.

Except that the first two only exist because of the third.

> But you don't actually need any lenders for that. If all you want is to create new money and give it to people, the government can create money by fiat and just hand it out to all citizens, or pay for government with it in lieu of taxing people. It's the same thing, there is just no interest.

It's the same thing, there is just no incentive whatsoever for the behavior to happen, so it reality it's not at all the same thing. This would cause massive devaluation of currency.

That's like arguing that restaurants are extending credit because they charge you at the end of the meal. The "keep it open and then you forget to pay" type tabs are very different than having a long running tab at a bar, which is not super common and is what I thought we were talking about. One is much closer to credit than another. Regardless, neither are significantly meaningful in the larger credit market.

Murabaha is largely a semantic hand wave that really doesn't fundamentally differ from the credit/mortgage model we have. The lender makes profit, frequently there are late fees, the government gets involved if the loan is not repayed (with varying consequences based on the country), the underlying asset gets seized etc. The major difference is that you don't call the profit 'interest.'

It's really basically just a way for Islamic countries to claim that they are adhering to Sharia law while not being completely left in the dust because credit is so completely vital to a modern economy.

I think its confined to places outside of major metropolitan areas, where the vast majority of money moves around.

If you have a credit card you don't need a bar tab.

> And why would "more economic growth" be a good thing?

Because billions of people still live in poverty worldwide.

> I don't want endlessly slaving to make the pie bigger (while ignoring second order effects, from quality of life, to environmental issues, to debt etc).

No one does. Economic growth, although not by itself, helps alleviate a lot of these issues. There are other factors that also impact this, and I'd argue a lot of the economic issues we face aren't from too much growth but from these other factors (taxation etc.) not being handled properly. So in general more growth is advantageous, but we have to other things going right as well.

> How about we learn to enjoy a moderate rate of economic growth, or even a steady economy, and focus on improving other aspects of life besides bank accounts?

Well a lot of people disagree about what things like quality of life and adequate environmental care are. One of the beauties of capitalism is that it allows people with wide disagreements about what's important in life to coexist and even benefit each other.

Edit: sorry I didn't see this before:

> Under the current model though. Whereas e.g. better distribution of wealth might help them more than more lending.

Maybe, but if that better distribution of wealth comes at the cost of shrinking the overall system (which there is a real reason to think would happen: this is why people and corporations bank outside of the US frequently already) then I think it's hard to conclusively argue either way.

Again this is not to say I don't see problems with our current economy, I just think "it's growing too much" is not one of them.

No, because it means much less economic growth. There is obviously a balance: too much lending and the economy collapses the other way. But too little lending is really bad for everyone too, and there are pretty fair reasons to think it might impact the lower class the most. Getting rid of (relatively) easy access to credit would be completely catastrophic for the global economy.

So first off, I want to question the premises that this is a widespread thing, and that it is an effective business practice. The whole point of credit cards is it allows the bar to be out of this business, and most of them gladly accept credit cards so they can do that.

Second of all, especially in smaller communities where this practice is more likely to occur, there is a social capital gained by doing it which is not necessarily directly monetary, but I think it's pretty easy to see the rational self interest argument for "being part of a community" outside of just purely monetary gain.

> It is very rational to lend money with zero risk if that gets you more business.

Well it's definitely not zero risk, and when credit cards exist, which deal with all the risk, it's not rational to lend money without credit cards.

> Stores would extend credit to customers because they want to make sales.

Not GP but: much less credit would be extended because many stores wouldn't be able to do much with bookings. One reason credit cards are so ubiquitous is because they allow even tiny stores to take advantage of extending credit without having to worry about all the stuff that comes with it (not getting paid soon, fraud etc.). So yeah, sure, some people would still lend to close friends and family, but in general the credit market would get orders of magnitude smaller, and I don't think that's good for anyone.

> But regardless, how was that supposed to dispute any part of the post you responded to?

Again, not GP, but he is replying to your comment implying that access to money at interest would make things worse for the lower class in this model and that making that change would make it more realistic. It may make it worse for the lower class in this model because you can't inflate the number of dollars, but in real life there's a lot of good reasons to think credit markets are extremely helpful for everyone, including the lower class.

Which would mean that much much less of it would get done, which is not a clear win.

> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory.

Socrates absolutely did.

> for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gr....

> The main reason systems aren't secure is lack of simplicity.

I don't think it's that simple.

There are two ways you can look at simplicity:

1. The lack of needless complexity, which is just another way of saying something is well built

2. Smaller modular components that do less and have clearer interfaces, ie: the unix way.

If you mean the 1st, then sure, the main reason systems aren't secure is lack of being well built.

But if you mean the second, all you're really doing is taking security concerns and spreading them out over more components. This makes them easier to reason about, but also means more entities need to reason about them. Like all things in engineering there are only trade offs, no pure wins.

> Starting Strength fails in teaches the idea of deloading by dropping weight then taking a run at it without changing any of the training methodology

No, starting strength tells you to take exactly two runs up until your failure weight and then move on to another program, which for many people works very well and allows them to progress far beyond weight they failed at. People who can run an SS linear progression for a year straight are rare, but they exist and they end up in the upper 3s, 4s and 5s for bench, squat and deadlift after their first year.

> Meditation/music can only help when you are not at the edge point.

I don't think music will be particularly helpful, but meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation, will be most effective when you are at the edge. Try practicing for 10 minutes a day, and then when you are on the edge try your best to really feel the stress and experience it. Your goal is to build your tolerance to it, which you can only do by not running from it. It's just like working out: you need to practice and you'll get stronger. The 10 minutes a day of practice when you're not on the edge will help you build up to being able to be truly present when you are on the edge.