At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.

Don’t dead Mormons get their own planets or something like that? This family probably resurrected on a low-quality planet that has a very crowded neighborhood because they didn’t tithe enough, possibly because of the obvious cosmetic surgery decisions.

Also, those are not all separate paths. They are all one, and they lead to the same place.

California.

Fascism. It’s fascism.

Economic and social collapse dislocates a lot of people. It dislocates people who think they shouldn’t be dislocated, because they played by the rules. They go to church, they had a job, they’re patriotic to their best understanding of the word.

Then, in their minds, something must have changed. It might be the immigrants, or the Jews, or the gays, or weirdly drag queens for some reason this time around. Then someone comes along who validates them as victims and promises a return to their historical glory days.

The last paroxysm is the election or ascendency of a far right populist who elevates that narrative. They promise to restore national pride and return to traditional values, and to return the nation to its roots which had made it strong and put them on top.

It’s happened multiple times around the world, and there are a lot of books and articles on how and why it happens.

No worries about the lack of sleep. I’ve been there and then some.

I do think however that you’re misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.

First, it’s a completely noisy signal. It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what I’m interested in, I’m not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and that’s the only data point I have, that’s what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. I’m not arguing that it’s not noisy. I’m just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. I’ve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I can’t say that they had a whole lot in common.

Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I don’t think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, you’d probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.

In terms of social power, that’s absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.

If you’re talking about the “elite” schools - Ivy or otherwise - there’s a little bit more to it.

A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of that’s all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets they’ve already run. It’s like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.

As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you can’t say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.

If you’re talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever they’re calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.

Manager at a FAANG here. It sounds like you’ve been mostly talking to people at small companies who use terms like “code ninja.” I have no idea what they’re looking for, and I honestly doubt they do, either.

What I’m looking for is someone who can help me solve the problems that I have and that will be coming up. A candidate should be able to answer some basic questions about the programming language(s) they claim to know if they’re relevant to what I need (sometimes people will simply list everything they’ve heard of in an attempt to game resume scanners). They should be able to whiteboard an algorithm (like an elevator controller) on the fly and explain their thinking on it. They should be able to walk me through their resume work history and explain the projects they listed, as well as detailing their roles. I want to know who made the decisions on the project - the tech, architecture, implementation, and so on. I want to know what the candidate did, and what they’d do differently knowing what they now know. If they lost publications, I’m going to do the same (and I might skim at least the abstract). Basically I’m looking for someone I can be working with for at least the next five years, and who can continue to learn and grow.

Oh, and don’t list emacs (or in one notable case, “emax”) as a technical skill.

We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn.

So this is what we call a “career limiting move.”

In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”

Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

I voted Green in 2012 because a) Barack Obama was given a 99% chance of winning my state very close to the election and b) I thought I could “send a message” to the Democratic Party that they should move further left.

I did so with full knowledge that not only was Jill Stein in no position to win a single elector and that in addition she was a horrible candidate who would be literally the worst president in the entire history of the United States (this was before Trump, but I’m still going to go with that for the purposes of this discussion). I did so knowing it was a protest vote while claiming it wasn’t a protest vote but a vote of conscience.

Jill Stein and GPUSA are a bunch of corrupt fucks who only run because they take in republicans money because they regularly scrape off a 3-4% of the otherwise democratic vote, which in some districts and state can swing the entire election.

So o cast my GP vote, the total GP vote was completely in line with historical trends, Obama won my state and the presidency (thankfully), and no signal was sent, except that the republicans could rely on that.

I’m sure the Dems do something similar with the libertarian vote. I’ve even been tempted to donate (now that I have some money to donate) to libertarian candidates in elections where scraping off a point or two could tip things towards the D (which I confess is something I favor, being part of Team Rainbow). I haven’t dug into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that racist son of a Bircher Ron Paul didn’t help hand the election to Clinton. If so, fucking yay. I don’t love Bill, but we sure as fuck didn’t need more Ronald Reaganing.

I think everyone should treat people advocating for a GPUSA or other protest vote as a Republican stalking horse, period. Whether they’re intentionally doing it or naively turning themselves into a broadcast node doesn’t matter - I’m not judging. I’m just saying that they’re effectively campaigning for a fascist, and should be treated as one.

Yes. Yes, I do.

Edit: Bought some. Will update if any other plants or ants start glowing unexpectedly.

No, it is a legitimate mental illness.

I will lay a bet that if we were to perform a neuroimaging exam of this man’s brain, we would find a hypertrophic amygdala (which is the physical part of the brain that detects and classifies fear and threat responses) heavily primed to kick off a reaction in the limbic system. It’s a hair trigger over which you don’t have conscious control at that point. I will also guarantee he has a hypotrophied prefrontal cortex, which is the slower to react but more evolutionarily advanced part of the brain that’s supposed to keep all that stuff in check by asking “Is that what’s really happening?” and “What will happen to me if I do this?” There’s also a very solid chance we’d find evidence traumatic brain injury, with is present in 50%+ of persons in jail for violent crime and about 10% in the general population. We could do a blood work up, a DNA test, a psychological history, and so on.

We’re talking about structural, chemical, genetic, and psychological determinants. I don’t know how to classify that other than mental illness requiring treatment. I’m going to use a non-preferred term in its colloquial sense, but if a person is psychotic, you’re not going to punish them back to mental health.

Not everyone with mental illness is violent - almost none are. But people with these conditions are indeed mentally ill - it is a medical, not a moral condition - and until we approach it like that, we’re not going to be able to begin to address it.

I do not believe that we have free will, but I think in extreme cases like this you don’t even need to go that far. You’re no more going to fix a person like this morally than you’re going to cure epilepsy with an exorcism.

Okay that was one of the weirdest news stories I’ve read in months, and it really closes strong.

Investigators found a search made with her phone on the question, “What happens if you get in an accident with an Amish buggy and kill two people,” the complaint says.

I can’t be the only person who read this and went “Jesus fucking Christ, they were doing what?”

It looks like Jesus is targeted by a sniper.

I am a native speaker, and I do take my word choices very seriously - often to the point of pausing during conversations to find the exact phrasing which will convey the shade of meaning I am looking to convey. I wrote fiction for a while, and it was always extremely important to me to get phrasing right.

I agree with you completely. While I would interpret all of those phrases as equivalent (based on context) if they were to come from someone else, I would tend to use them in exactly the ways you suggest.

I kind of want to learn some Middle English stock phrases to grill anyone who complains about the changing nature of English being just political correctness. Like, “You want to be a language conservative? Here’s some Chaucer-era language motherfucker.”

I find this odd. A study came out last year (iirc) that found that, as Americans get older, a greater percentage of each age cohort becomes more conservative. It was particularly interesting because each generation exhibited the trend at the same rate - just offset by the age differences.

However millennials broke the trend, becoming more liberal as they got older, and Gen Z even more so.

I’d have to look at the details of the two studies to come to any conclusions as to what’s driving the different findings.

That (iirc) Harvard professor specialized in fascism wrote that we cannot count on institutions for protection. We’ve seen that institutions, including the judiciary, can be taken over and corrupted. Trump has stated multiple times that one of his first acts as president will be to basically clear the decks of the federal government and fire all of the non-Trumpist personnel. His lawyer even argued that the president can break any law, up to and including murder, and impeachment is the only process to hold them accountable. I’m not even sure how that’s supposed to work, since then they could arrest or kill everyone in Congress who would support their impeachment.

Basically, we’re fucked.