throwaway87378

It sounds like you are making a lot of rationalizations for not investing the time to practice live-coding and whiteboarding. Those are skills that can be learned, like any other.

Men approaching women in real life is now rarer than it was in favor of online meeting through Apps.

Ask your female friends (if you have any) about this. You might be surprised.

Elite men can get dozens of sex partners.

Why so low? I have a few friends who have had more than 100 partners.

Average or subpar men are essentially invisible in the dating market as evidenced by declining rates of sex by most people.

Nothing to do with dating apps. 70% of the adult US population is obese or overweight. Those people have a very hard time finding partners, and obese men have associated coronary issues that can make even maintaining an erection difficult.

Dating Apps are part of the reason that birth rates are generally dropping in first world countries

About time; if only the population crisis could be solved by dating apps! World population in 1969 was 3.6 billion, today it is 7.7 billion. We need any and all measures to bring down population levels.

But I'd actually use Amazon.

Amazon book recommendations and keyword search are garbage. Sometimes even a direct search for title and author name will put the result halfway down the list. The two good things Amazon has going for it are the huge catalog (great for finding the right ISBN), and reviews dating back to the 1990s. Makes it easier to decide whether or not to purchase the book from a more ethical retailer.

Out of all the online bookstores, Thriftbooks has the best recommendations in my experience.

The best ways to find good books are still bibliographies and large public and university libraries - browse the shelves, ask the librarians. Online library catalogues usually beat online retailer catalogs for keyword searches.

a left-leaning Sunday paper (WaPo/NYT)/news magazine.

The fact that either the Washington Post or the New York Times is considered left-leaning is one of the problems in US media. They are both corporate rags pushing the neo-liberal plutocrat agenda. Try Jacobin or the London Review of Books as a somewhat left of center starters.

However, we also know that the difficulties of typing these languages without special keyboard support have led to a variety of more English in ASCII language successors such as J/K/L.

The input language has nothing to do with the keyboard. How do you think people type foreign natural languages? This comes up again and again in programming-related online discussions - why is it so hard for people who program software every day to imagine that keyboard input is also mapped by software?

The real reason Iverson used ASCII for J is that in the early 1980s, you had to get an APL character video ROM (code page 907) for your terminal or PC (exactly the same case as for foreign languages). Obviously not a problem at the time for Macs or other computers that use bit-mapped fonts, and has not been a problem for PCs for the past 30 years.

The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.

Have you ever actually tried learning APL, or are you just trolling?

Tor bridges do not have this problem, do not consume a lot of bandwidth, and are very useful for people who need to circumvent firewalls. I have been running one for years without any issues. The Tor Project is currently looking for more volunteers to run bridges:

https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-inte...

The only thing anyone outside of the US needs to see to understand the insane situation we have with gun ownership can be found in this news story about Waymo driverless cars:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2018/12/...

"“Haselton said that his wife usually keeps the gun locked up in fear that he might shoot somebody,” Jacobs wrote in the report. “Haselton stated that he despises and hates those cars (Waymo) and said how Uber had killed someone.”

Haselton's wife told officers he was diagnosed with dementia, according to a police report."

Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers.

Do you have any better alternatives?

GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it.

Yes, anyone not using Gmail is completely inundated with spam every second of every day, is a troglodyte, and how do they even survive? As the posted article shows, the best thing for everyone is to hand over all of our private information, communication, and GPS coordinates to the big tech oligopolies.

There were Visual Basic boot-camps during the dot-com boom.

Take into considering that while the wages for software engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now.

That is a common misconception when people do not take inflation and housing cost increases into account. $1USD today is worth only 65 cents in 1999 according to the consumer price index:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1USD+in+1999

CPI inflation is only 56%, but house prices in the Bay Area have risen 280%:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=median+house+price+san...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/22/median-price-tag-for-...

Tech worker salaries only seem high relative to salaries for other workers, because the tech worker salaries have not been falling in inflation/housing cost adjusted terms for the past 30 years. IMO computer programmers are, as a whole, grossly underpaid today, just not as underpaid as much as people in other lines of work.

Amazon is a trust, not yet a monopoly. There is an inherent conflict of interest, and lack of recourse (forced arbitration), between Amazon marketplace sellers and Amazon the e-commerce store. Likewise between AWS customers and Amazon the e-commerce store and advertising network. By any reasonable consumer standards, AWS should be split off into a separate company. The pervasive surveillance and continual scandals surrounding Ring's handling of user data, when taken in context of Amazon's collection of user data from the e-commerce store, advertising network, Alexa, other Amazon business units, and purchased third party data, mean that Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire Ring in the first place. If the Department of Justice Antitrust Division had not been completely captured by corporate interests, they would be in the process of litigating to undo this acquisition right now.

I don't understand why people are not pointing out the obvious: there is a correlation with rising obesity rates.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

40% of the adult US population is now obese, 70% is obese or overweight. Overweight people have a hard time dating, for those obese it is even tougher, and many give up hope. Men have a further problem: obesity is very strongly linked to diseases that have an impact on their ability to have an erection.

I don't know anything about John Zerzan but

Stop right there. You know nothing about the "modern left" if you have never heard of John Zerzan. And if you think that he is some kind of Marxist because you skimmed a Wikipedia page, you are clearly a know-it-all idiot Dunning-Krugering himself.

That's pretty much what my copy does. I'm grateful the profession has TAOCP as a resource, but the reality for the majority of workaday engineers is that most of the sort of art described in that series is abstracted out into libraries.

The books are a collection of algorithms and commentary on them. That is not that different from a collection of algorithms in a library.

The keybindings it does have are terrible and give RSI, and crucially because there's a whole ecosystem of addons that try not to collide, they can never be changed, which is why CUA mode isn't default.

Everything you are claiming is wrong. I came to Emacs from the Apple HIG shortcut world (which btw, Apple copied from PARC), and I think the keyboard shortcuts Emacs comes with are better thought out and more ergonomic to use. That is why they are the default (Emacs users prefer them), instead of cua-mode, which comes with Emacs and is easily activated.

Emacs key bindings are also far easier to change that in any other application, because Emacs keymaps are first-class objects with inheritance and are separate from commands. That is why Emacs can easily support not just completely different keyboard shortcuts, but completely different input methods such as modal editing.

I mean, if you're too conservative to use modern technology, this doesn't seem like the right field to work in.

That kind of attitude ("why aren't you using <insert personal preference bloated point-clicky IDE released 6 months ago>?") is just as obnoxious as what is in the article.

There obviously is a modern left and feminism is a central tenet of it.

Since you seem to be so well-informed on the subject, maybe you can help me with a question about the "modern left" that I have had for several years now: what does John Zerzan have in common with Hillary Clinton?

you can't really "improve" your looks after possibly weight loss and personal care without a doctor.

An appropriate hair cut (which might be going totally bald for some people) is a big deal. This also involves facial hair. Clothes are another easy and very effective thing to change. Eyeglasses. And all these things have to work together.

This is a bit myopic with respect to how normal people view university education. For a typical person, the point of education is not to learn things, but to obtain a degree. The point of degree is to get a good job. If they manage to get a good job, that’s a success, and nothing more is expected from the university education

The point of a university, however, is for people to learn things. The fact that most people today treat universities as trade schools is unfortunate, and IMO is having a negative effect on universities and people (like myself) that went/are going there to actually learn something.

There is no such thing as the "modern left," except as a straw-man used by various people in US corporate television and radio.

Mary Daly was a Catholic professor of theology and prominent second-wave feminist in the late 1960s/1970s, and according to her "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males." Valerie Solanas argued for total androcide in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto (IMO a very underrated book).

These ideas are not new, are not liberal, and should not be particularly surprising if you stop emotionally investing in consumer society, corporate indoctrination, and "traditional" (authoritarian and misogynist) cultural values, and instead look at where the life-carrying capacity of the Earth has been, where we currently have reduced it to, and where it is heading towards if present trends continue.

Move forward to today: a large percentage of men are totally removed from the dating market (not by choice), they do not have sex, they have no hope of getting into a relationship. The reverse is not true for women, who have countless options and can at any time open their phone and have their pick of men.

You are totally ignoring the demographic of women over 40. Older women have a very hard time dating.

So, when it says young people are having less sex, it’s primarily men who are having less sex. The world changed, women do not need your money or your protection. The fancy jobs do not matter like they did before, nor does having a ton of money. What matters more than anything now are your looks.

This was already foreseen by many feminist and population control advocates in the middle of the 20th century, such as Mary Daly. Here is Terence McKenna's take on it in a 1994 talk:

"There are not only too many people, there are too many men. I would be very interested in seeing a set of social policies, tax incentives, medical policies, insurance policies, put in place to limit male birth. It is very rare in mammal populations that you have a 50/50 ratio of male to female. In fact, it is well known that male infants are less robust than female infants, and the reason we have a 50/50 sexual ratio is because we artificially support males and withdraw resources from females. I suspect that in the high paleolithic the ratio was closer to two to one. My supposition, in thinking about this, is probably that the best ratio is three to one. This is the way to feminize the human race, if you are serious. This is the way to advance women, if you are serious… I have never heard anyone say that male birth should be limited, but it obviously should… we can steer ourselves towards a population with a predominance of females, and those females should have only one child, and 75% of those children should also be female. I don't consider myself a gung-ho feminist… As a humanist, I advocate a reduction in male births. It just seems obvious that it is the way to go. If it does not seem obvious to you, then let's have a public debate about it, and at least make it part of the rhetoric of the culture, that this is an option to think about."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IO7pHD3X9M

The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous

The "terrorism" rationalization provided for this surveillance has nothing to do with reality. The United States government is not in any way involved in fighting the source of jihadist terrorism, and the state responsible for 9/11, Saudi Arabia. They are allies, and Trump's cabinet is now attempting to arm Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons. The actual intent of this law is to surveil whistle-blowers and journalists. WhatsApp messages have already been used in the case against IRS whistle-blower John Fry, who exposed the Donald Trump-Michael Cohen hush payments.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/report-trump-rushing-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo-0EAu5Oc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-SjxsGHOI

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveilla...

Vancouver's specific problem seems to be that the Soviet leadership in British Columbia has been unable to curb the very capitalist problem of money laundering profits from the People's Republic of China into Canadian real estate.

It's not just money laundering, but an entire "industry" of investment and tax fraud schemes:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of...

I'd rip you to shreds on that one.

What a wonderful way to phrase talking about interviewing your potential future co-workers. You must be a very pleasant person to work for.

The economic exploitation underlying the need for women (and to a lesser extent, young men) to prostitute themselves is central to the subject, and highlighted well by this essay. Chris Hedges did a very moving interview with Rachel Moran about her experiences as a prostitute that describes these issues. Trigger warning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S2pE-Uoh6I

Cultural changes and evolves, of course, but it's really hard to uproot a norm or more once it's settled in, even if it's one that causes you personal pain.

Terence McKenna lectured on this at length. Here are some apropos quotations:

"As a global civilization, we can no longer afford the luxury of an unconscious mind. When you can pull down the fusion processes that light the stars on the cities of your enemies, when you can sequence DNA, when you can map the heart of the atom, then it is entirely inappropriate to have an unconscious mind, because the power that is given onto you is a kind of god-like Promethean power. So how can we switch on the lights on our animal nature…? I think it is very simple: we have to de-condition ourselves from culture. We are sick, we require medical intervention… into what is a galloping, cancerous state of neurosis - the growth and spread of ego. Ego is like a calcareous growth in the psyche of human beings, and if it is not treated, it creates the kind of society that we have. A society based on hierarchy, male dominance, accumulation of physical goods,suppression of the weak by the strong… This is why the psychedelics are so socially sensitive, because they dissolve de-conditioning. Every culture is a scam. Every culture is a lie. A shell game, run by weasels, for the amusement of rubes. If you do not want to be a weasel or a rube, then you need to inform yourself of how the shell game works, and what lies beyond the carnival midway of civilized values. And the way to do that is to go back to the plants, to the original gnosis."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IO7pHD3X9M

"Culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. That is why cultural trips are so bizarre; why they don't make sense to anybody but the Witoto, or the Guaraní, or the Americans, or the Japanese. If you are not inside a culture, it seems crazy. Cultures do not make sense because they are not trying to make sense. What they are trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being, who is living in the light of closure, a more manipulable, a more malleable, a lesser thing… The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. That is the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature, on a planet, in an animal body,in a time and space. In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various means of closure that are around,psychedelics do that. That is why they are so politically controversial and potent, because more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake, they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oydTqnrXCGY

It is not surprising that these kinds of conditions exist on fishing vessels - you start to treat your fellow human animals the same way you treat other animals. "Fishing," which is really planetary-scale sea foraging, as Jeremy Jackson points out, is incredibly cruel to everyone involved. If you do not already shun seafood because of the massive amounts of mercury and other toxin pollution, maybe consider the ethical problems, and start advocating for a total ban on commercial fishing.

Watch this talk by Jeremy Jackson if you still think that seafood is somehow "ok": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMN3dTvrwY

Here are two organizations you can join that advocate for Social Security:

https://socialsecurityworks.org/

https://www.epi.org/ (see https://www.epi.org/research/social-security/)