Viewing profile — lamasery

It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.

It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the groce…

> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign. To the extent there's "science" on this, …

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that's, like, the point of life or something, or something one ought to expect. It kinda snuck up on us, actually, until one day we were like …

Tying anti-abortion positions so tightly to Christianity (especially, popularizing it among protestant sects) and elevating that to a concern above most or all others (American con…

I can say that post-Covid inflation took us from feeling like we were on the edge of escaping the middle class, to feeling like we aren't even close and realistically won't ever be…

People want their bills and chores eliminated. Show them tech that does that and you'll be every working person's favorite human being. They'll be naming their kids after you. They…

A lot of things delenda est. The ever-growing length of the delenda-est list and the nonexistent rate at which we're est'ing all those delendas is quite worrisome at this point.

We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income. Our money, aside from basics on which we don't spend so differently from when we made a lot less money, mostly goes to:…

Hitting an estate sale and lucking into someone whose tastes run similar to one's own can get a person whole libraries for cents per book. It's the kind of thing a certain kind of …

Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the …

Unlike "the Silk Road" or "the Middle Ages", "third world" was a term in contemporary use at the time it applies to, including among non-aligned states and NGOs that worked on thir…

The LLM meeting-summary bot in Teams seems accurate… unless you were in the meeting, and also closely read the summary afterward. It misrepresents what people actually said all the…

> It's way cheaper (usually ~6x cheaper) I have hundreds of books. All but... I dunno, fewer than a hundred, were purchased used. Tens of the ones purchased new, were cheap Dover T…

One of the seasons of The Wire is largely about a major newsroom (the Baltimore Sun, unsurprisingly) taking its first hard punch from the collapse of the news market and unchecked …

The novella is the only version I've read. I came away both not understanding why a longer, novel-length version would exist, and with no interest in reading anything even slightly…

I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stati…

In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as …

It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result). Unions are similar. People cry about…

I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickba…

> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes d…

As far as I can tell it's nearly impossible to get picked up by a major publisher now unless you're bringing a very large social media following. If you've got the social media fol…

That policy has long been a kinda funny "gee, why don't they allow it if more 'good guys with guns' make us safer?" example. I guess at least this removes that bit of rhetorical in…

This shit's why the industry should have unionized when times were good. It's not just for pay, it's for pushing back on inhumane horse crap.

Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen. The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information…