I think that Berliner actually was way off in his timeline. NPR almost fully lost me back when Obama did the DACA executive order. Every story NPR did about it was some version of "listen to this sob story about a kid who isn't going to go to Harvard if DACA is struck down by the courts." Certainly those stories were real and heartbreaking in a way, but you never heard them run a story about the wife beaters and tax evaders who came here illegally with their parents as children (and of course I'm not saying those types of people are representative of the population either...just that they never even tried to be balanced). I thought their coverage was a great disservice to the country by not focusing on the legal merits but rather on the human interest. It was so blatantly biased that I see that as the point in my life where the liberal media bubble was popped for me. It (DACA) is probably one of the major starting points for Trump's political career, so it's ironic that Berliner sees their Trump coverage as the beginning of the end. NPR-level liberal bullshit is why he exists as a political player, IMO.

Seems to be so many instances where these tech guys watch/read sci-fi and identify completely with the bad guys. Fury Road in this case, I guess.

Without getting into the technical details of the work I do, I have a certain amount of expertise in sex hormones, at least as they relate to the brain. One curious aspect of SSRIs that is not paid nearly enough attention to is that one of the ways in which they work is to increase a certain hormone called allopregnaolone, whose primary function in the brain is to make receptors for the neurotransmitter GABA much more sensitive. Curiously, Prozac, e.g., causes this change at about 10x lower of a dose than what the typical starting clinical dose is. However, the typical response to drugs not working is to increase dosage. My opinion is that people are generally already far overdosed and that docs should start way lower than they normally do. I, obviously, have no idea what your history is and I wouldn’t in a million years pretend to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. However, what I will say, and what I say to anyone on your shoes, is that if you ever choose to do SSRIs again, start small and give it time. Your doctor will push back. Don’t let them. Happy to share more if you’re interested and also happy to butt out.

We have a similar non-tradition tradition in the States, which is our obsession with "God" in official government stuff. We added the phrase "In God we trust" to money in 1956 and "under God" to our pledge of allegiance around the same time, but despite the fact that this is well known, if you ask any conservative they'll tell you it's always been that way.

My favorite quote from the internet today: Elon Musk is doing for Mark Zuckerberg what Donald Trump did for George W. Bush.

Finally got around to reading it.

Fibres do not regenerate between dives.

That’s some WSJ level dark, dry humor right there. The lack of attention to materials science 101 just boggles the mind.

This is so amazing. Also, when it first started my kids, aged 3 and 5 and hearing it form the next room, were like, "It must be a new ice cream truck!"

Here is a very good rebuttal that complements kleinbl00's pretty well.

To overstate the obvious, Jim Jordan does not appear to have a very good handle on the law. He's much more the spitting dinosaur.

I'm on the war path today. My wife works for General Motors. If you follow the financial news, you may be aware that GM is trying to reduce their white collar workforce by some unspecified amount, but probably around 10%. My wife's boss is a bone fide misogynist. Fortunately for him of the 200 or so people who work for him only 5 are women. It's a sausage fest. However, he's been pressuring certain people who he thinks are likely to be laid off to take a buyout that GM has offered. Somehow, he has pressured at least 3 and maybe 4 of the 5 women to take it, including my wife. She has until Friday to decide, but I've basically forbidden her from doing so. This is 2023. I tried to tell her that no matter how moronic and anachronistic her boss is, that the leadership of GM is aware that in this day and age a single tweet from a powerful person can tank your stock. How would it look, I asked, if they have to lay off 10%, they're 2% female overall (in design, which is where she works) and women comprise 15-20% of layoffs. Now isn't the time to make your company less diverse, and using attrition to achieve that end is doubly stupid. The whole thing is weird, because GM is led by arguably the most powerful female executive in all of American business. Anyway, I keep trying to reassure her that in a sane world, she's the last person to get axed (female, 20 years experience but not in management, all glowing yearly reviews), but my words have not been soothing to her. Her boss basically back benched her after she returned from maternity leave, so he has a bad track record. Sounds ripe for a lawsuit to me, though I'm admittedly no lawyer. As a last resort I have a powerful friend who can scare them, and probably would if I asked, but I've been asked not to resort to that, not yet anyway.

It’s a shame they did that, because it’s actually a really good piece up to that point. They just can’t help themselves though. Conservative media is trying to make a narrative that says this is a woke problem, so this is clearly part of that concerted effort. It’s so out of place for the rest of the op-Ed that it looks like it was thrown on at the last minute like that trump sharpie hurricane thing.

Dude. For real. This is over the top incredible.

Worst. Christmas. Ever.

Spent it on my couch with a 102 fever sweating through a sweatshirt and a thick blanket, vomiting every couple hours until I wanted to kill myself. Crazy virus that ripped through our house save for my youngest son.

On the plus side, I got a giant promotion today, because life isn't fair and there's no logic to it; there's just a self-congratulatory boys club that I'm really good at being a part of.

Michigan is a mostly blue state that only once has voted GOP in a presidential race in the last 34 years (I think we all know which one), and that was an anomaly (Trump got fewer votes that year than Romney did in 2012). So all of the statewide offices remaining Dem was no surprise (especially considering , uh, "candidate quality" in the wise words of Mitch McConnell...e.g., the guy the GOP put up for AG is under investigation for election tampering from 2020...can't make this shit up). Whitmer won big for the same reason DeSantis did in FL, which is that things are good and getting better for almost everyone. She spends all her political capital on infrastructure improvements, and while people don't like sitting in traffic, they do like broken shit getting noticeably fixed.

The real surprise here was that both houses of the legislature went democrat. That is a direct result of a citizen-led effort in 2020 to get a constitutional amendment that guarantees non-partisan redistricting for both Congress and the state houses. It worked, and surprise, surprise, for once the party with more votes got a majority. All in all it was really a best case scenario given the natural headwinds the incumbent president's party face.

Seems like a lot of these Silicon Valley self-professed lovers of sci-fi pretty much always identify with the villains.

I thought the comments on the article were illuminating. Several people pointed out the the stock rout has brought the P/E to 8 from over 50, and that maybe the transition to Meta was just a market signal that the party is over, and Meta no longer deserves its highly inflated stock price. Silicon Valley has long needed a major stock price correction based on things like fundamentals. Meta was first, but will they be last? In the era of no-longer-free money, I would think not, but I’ve been wrong on the tech industry in almost every prediction I’ve ever made.

I liked working as a teenager, and I worked as much as I could. In a restaurant. That was subject to osha. And the health department. It was fun and hard, but it wasn’t sewing until my fingers bleed after my 10th hour of work at 8 years old. To pretend mowing your neighbors’ lawns is the same as living in a Dickensian hellscape is disingenuous at best. And it’s still beside the point.

So the thesis is basically that you have to be an influencer to get material wealth in the new economy? I think I'll kill myself if I live to see that.

Fortunately, I think the thesis is half-baked. The analogy of serfdom is not that great, because it's not as if money didn't exist during the middle ages. It's that the average person was locked out of attaining it. The Black Plague helped usher in some forms of technological advance (via labor shortages) that freed people to do other things (like think about stuff, for example), which led to a positive feedback loop of innovation.

In the best case scenario, our current trend of automation will do the same. It's scary, because we don't know what happens when a doctor no longer needs to think about what the diagnosis/therapy/prognosis of the patient is, since Watson or whatever can do it with less error in a fraction of the time. But that doesn't mean we haven't seen this movie before.

I actually think the opposite of this article is more likely to come to pass. I think we're in the digital equivalent of Oliver Twist. Eventually the skies of London cleared so air was breathable and children didn't have to work 60 hr weeks in the factory. Laws catch up. They will catch up with Facebook and Google, too, because no one wants to live in a world where corporations make you suffer. Again, we've seen that movie and it sucked the first time around. I won't make any predictions about how fast the laws will catch up...the industrial revolution wasn't quick, after all. But they will. Eventually.

I complain to my wife about it a lot, because she is a car designer. She does exteriors, not interiors, though. She just shrugs her shoulders and says, "If you hate it now, give it 5 more years." Supposedly the insider trend is that the entire dash will be a curved screen at some point in the self-driving future. Probably a good way for them to serve you ads while you're trying to get from point a to b.

In response to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, Trump himself signed a law in 2018 that made it a felony to remove and retain classified documents.

Not enough laugh face emojis in the world for that parenthetical.

I just defaulted to what I usually default to, which is the truth delivered in a way that has as little sting as I can. I led with all the good things I could think of, which to be fair, this woman has a lot of assets. Very bright, very competent decision maker, very knowledgeable about disparate topics. But then I just spoke my mind, while also offering specific examples of why I had the perspective I did. I did not, however, say that she once told me she doesn't have any empathy. I thought that was a bridge too far and would only look like I had an axe to grind. My sense talking to the coach was that the point of the exercise is truly to engage with one's strengths and weaknesses, so I wanted to live up to that. What I didn't do was say, "She's a heatless bitch who would shove her own daughter in front of a bus if there was a reward to be reaped." But what I did say was, "Sometimes she appears to lose sight of the fact people need to feel heard and respected before having their ideas dismissed. And her failure to sometimes do that has probably cost us at least two and maybe three good employees." Too early to tell if there will be any fallout, but the coach was highly insistent that nothing identifiable will get back to her. We'll see.

I have a meeting with an “executive training coach” tomorrow, whatever the fuck that is. It’s not for me. It’s for my company’s COO, who’s apparently trying to better her leadership skills. She asked for candid interviews with a few of her underlings so that this coach can give her feedback, apparently under the auspices of confidentiality and immunity.

The thing is she’s a complete and total sociopath. Long before I started working for her she told me, and I am quoting verbatim, "I have no empathy." This is a woman who will do shit like send you negative Slack messages while you're in the middle of a presentation. Or wave her hand in your face and say (yell, really), "MY TURN. I'M TALKING. STOP." A former colleague, who she considers a good friend though the feeling is far from mutual, says that "She will never do or say anything that doesn't directly benefit her."

All this is to say that I'm torn between lying and telling the truth. Lying is the easy thing to do. It's also the cowardly and non-productive thing to do. Telling the truth is the brave and potentially productive thing to do. But. Lying brings me no potential pain, and telling the truth puts me in a really sensitive position should this "coach" relay to her what I had to say (there are like 4 to 6 of us doing this...it won't take 2 minutes of figuring to guess who said what, all other things equal).

My gut from the start has been saying "LIE, LIE and LIE SOME MORE." But I've shifted into a mode of the extreme opposite. Just tell the unvarnished truth and let the chips fall where they may. Honesty is what she asked for. Not sure I can be held responsible for any fallout. I already talked to my direct boss (the company's CSO), and he's planning to lie like his job depends on it. I think I'll gamble and hope it doesn't come up snake eyes.

This shit is bananas. Hopefully this will serve as a call to action for congress, which has been painfully sleepy on all sorts of issues that are “settled precedent”. They need to recognize there are no rights that are guaranteed by the ultra-conservative reading of the constitution. They need to pass law protecting gay marriage, interracial marriage, contraception, gay sex, privacy generally. Nothing is safe. Not from these people.

Thanks!

I’m doing something really stupid and starting a drug company from whole cloth.

Earning a hubwheel seems like a moot point if users are admitted based on writing something to begin with.

Wow. The leak may be unprecedented, but what’s also unprecedented is that the court, at least in modern times, has never voted to take away a right that it has previously granted. That’s, I think, a parallel takeaway that needs a lot of attention.

Or forgot how to drive. I was trying to cross a not-very-busy 25 MPH street with my 2 year old yesterday to get to a playground and by the 4th car that didn't stop at the incredibly clearly marked crosswalk, I went on an obscenity laden outburst that probably wasn't wise insofar as, like I said, I was hold the hand of a 2 year old. When we we returning home, he starting swearing while we were crossing the same crosswalk, because I'm not that good at parenting. People are reckless. I'm pretty sure they were reckless before covid, too, but I'm not ready to blame the pedestrians.

The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.

Actually we don't have to imagine. Left-wing heresy hunting just happens to be more visible, because left wing people have the media and other levers of cultural power. But make no mistake, there's a big time cancel culture within the right, as well. For example, Trump any Romney were both pro-choice until the moment they decided to run for president. Not a coincidence. And these days a preacher in a white evangelical church can lose his job for merely pointing out one of Trump's many manifest moral failures.

While the right wing cancel culture may not be as evident as someone losing their job because they used the N word 20 years ago, it's no less harmful, because it has stifled completely any possibility of having an honest political conversation among republicans. We need our politics to be open in order to have the debates that shape legislation. Right now we don't have those debates, because neither side is willing to say what's on their mind, and it leads to bad laws written by scared people for the purpose of resume padding and not public improvement.

I don't know how this problem becomes more tractable in the Age of Twitter.

I had omicron in January. Bad cold symptoms for about a week, maybe less, but I was congested, especially at night, for several weeks. Annoying, but there are worse things.

Interestingly, if you look at NYT's covid map, Washtenaw is the only county in Michigan experiencing a spike in cases right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/michigan-covid-cases.html

I'm 80-90% certain it's because it's the only place where regular testing is still occuring. Basically everywhere else has dropped their covid protocols. As trump once said, "No testing, no covid."

I like to tinker with guitars, but I finally made an attempt at building one from scratch. The neck was purchased fully finished, but everything else is my handiwork. It's not good enough to sell, but it's better than I thought I would do for a first attempt. Overall pretty happy. Good excuse to buy some new tools, too, so that's always a plus.

I really like my job, but I've always known, even before signing on the dotted line, that I work for shitty people. Just how shitty is coming into focus after 15 months on the job. Thinking about actively searching for something else. Actually, to be more honest, it's at a point that if I didn't have kids and a mortgage I would have resigned in protest already. My area isn't a hotbed of biotech research and development, so hoping I can find at least a part-time remote situation. I won't do anything I don't find interesting no matter what the pay and convenience, so that's always problematic for me.