throwaway_75369

Should be labelled (2013).

Would be nice if I didn't have to say that; in so many ways the bloom is off the rose of my (admittedly high paying) corporate job. I even recently reunited with some old friends who chose a more independent career path, and was jealous and nostalgic- they're definitely working far closer to their passions with more freedom than I've felt in a decade. But man, what a decade since 2013.

I would be foolish to dismiss that I had stable employment through Covid, and I still have a paycheck through the current economic turmoil. I also have my corporate health insurance, which covers my stupidly expensive regular medication which I had no idea I would need in those nostalgic days when these friends chose their alternative careers (I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2015, now in remission thanks to the meds)

So I agree with the sentiment that it's dangerous (especially to your soul) to just blindly conform and follow the money, but it's not always unjustified. In my case it was at least a little bit justified, since my parents were more or less broke and I didn't have a safety net.

I do wish I had hedged my bets better and been less of a workaholic, of course. Would be nice to be married now.

I mostly agree with this sentiment, but I think it goes too far.

command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.

Hmm. This seems unfair to the military during wartime? WW1 feels like a huge example.of advancement driven from very command-ey institutions; from the idea of the tank to deal with machine guns and barbed wire to nitrogen-ating fertilizer in Germany to withstand the British blockade. (Never mind DARPA and the internet or the moon missions during the Cold War, or the Manhattan Project)

(Yeesh, not that I'm suggesting it would be preferable to pursue this as a full-time model - it's literally fascism, but it's important to understand why these systems were pursued in the first place - the point is that there do at least appear to be high profile success stories)

For what it's worth, I (mostly) disagree with your detractors in the other comments and agree with your sentiment (I think).

Markets care about "aggregate demand". Rich people can be lucrative individual customers because they have more to spend and often less price sensitivity. But they have limited capacity for consumption in many areas; they only eat three meals a day and only fill so many airline seats at once. The middle class and even lower classes have much higher capacity for consumption and are worth targeting - think McDonald's or even Google (advertisers want all the eyeballs they can get, even if they prefer wealthy ones)

One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack.

This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)

The article mentions that you can track the Temperature of surfaces with an "inexpensive infrared thermometer". Then you could calculate the "operative temperature" as the average of Mean radiant and the air temperature.

But yeah, if you want to fully automate it you'll need to figure out a way to gather those readings from the various surfaces.

Hmm - TIL that Power of Attorney is not automatic for spouses (although I imagine it is set up practically by default for most people who get married, and the laws differ by state). (https://www.google.com/amp/s/estatelawatlanta.com/do-spouses...)

Seems like something folks would care about? It's adjacent to the "When I die, who gets my stuff?" part of the marriage contract which I remain convinced is the real reason governments need to be involved with marriage contracts. I also know a lot of folks who would rather their S.O. make medical decisions for them if they're debilitated than, say a sibling (especially if they're estranged).

But yeah, this doesn't explicitly prevent you from assigning power of attorney to an unmarried partner, of course.

Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).

The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.

You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though

A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.

Edit: bad at math

Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games...

I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US).

In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc.

Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking. Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though.

Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now)

Edit: typos

Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch.

https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August.

Edit: For a little bit more to search on in terms of Japanese stuff - https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-jap...

Huh. I'm a huge fan of instrumental music. I encountered Plini and Nick Johnston and through them discovered my favorite guitarist, Guthrie Govan. Then through him discovered his band The Aristocrats, with Bryan Beller (who's awesome, but I don't know too much about bassists) and the drummer Marco Minneman, who's now my favorite drummer after Neal Peart passed away.

I also really like all the Dream Theater adjacent stuff, like Liquid Tension Experiment...

Ok, guess I'm rambling. I dunno, for some reason I find it easier than ever to find all kinds of fantastic purely instrumental stuff, and now with YouTube you often get to more easily observe the musicians themselves, as opposed to listening to CD's back in the day.

Hmm, I like the thrust of your point, here, and I do think that when people think critically about the news, they aren't "stupid and credulous".

But Gell-Mann amnesia is a real thing that educated, informed readers readily fall victim to, so it's clear that the media seems to have some kind of privilege of credulity.

I wonder if it's really an effect of people reading media primarily for entertainment - isn't there some old saying about "people who read the Times are less I formed than people who read nothing at all?"

So, given the title and how stressful the last couple of weeks have been, I was sadly disappointed when this wasn't about drawing cute black and white bears.

I mean, data analysis is useful and all, but not what the heart wanted at the moment.

Stadia devs released a bit of a going-away gift. It's surprisingly fully featured for an advanced version of "Snake," and free to play (for at least the last week Stadia is up as a service).

Hmm - I'm not sure if it supports or opposes your point, but Walker was also supported and interviewed by Andrew Huberman.

https://hubermanlab.com/dr-matthew-walker-the-science-and-pr...

Huberman has always been kind of interesting to me; his list of topics immediately makes him look like a bro-science peddler, but the guy kicks off all of his podcasts by talking about how he's a Stanford Neuroscience professor, and he reads all the journals himself - not exactly daring someone to oppose him, but you have to admit he's willing to risk some really high credentials by putting himself out there like that.

Of course, like nearly everyone else, I don't go read the studies myself and go hunting for math mistakes and misrepresentation, so it's still all a big appeal to authority.

The more desserts they get more likely they are to use a thermonuclear weapon in Ukraine.

I'm still confused when people assert there's any chance Putin will use a nuke in Ukraine.

I'm far from an expert on Russian politics, so I imagine I'm missing something in terms of reputation or intimidation or face saving, but I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)

Why would they choose to destroy this thing they want to control? Using a thermonuclear weapon specifically seems really counter-productive. If I stretch I could imagine a future where they deploy some tiny tactical nuke for intimidation/escalation, but same logic applies, I don't think they want to destroy the thing they're trying to conquer, so they'd want to limit collateral damage.

This was nice - I woke up in the middle of the night with some anxiety and insomnia and this was just what I needed; a dark background theme would have helped with the bright rectangle in my hand :)

Ugh. I'm actually nervous about the fact that real wages rose along with this bump.

There also was some good news for workers in the August report, as real average hourly earnings rose a seasonally adjusted 0.2% for the month. However, they remained down 2.8% from a year ago.

The Federal Reserve is hoping to slow a labor market that has posted solid job gains through the year. Specifically, policymakers are concerned about a huge gap between job openings and available workers as labor force participation is stuck below its pre-pandemic levels. That has resulted in rising wages that have in turn put pressure on prices.

Doesn't that mean we could be looking at a wage-price spiral?

If that's true, then maybe the Fed really wants to see a big weakening of the labor market in order to create downward pressure on wages. Doesn't that mean they want to see layoffs? Really hope that's not the case...

To be fair, it could still be argued that this is "worse for labor", because there would be more competition among laborers for those job openings. They'd have less negotiating power since more of them would be available to apply for the same position.

I do agree the headline is unecessarily inflammatory, though.

I can think of two major things which make me feel good about the future -

1) Medicine continues to do amazing things. I'm kinda amazed at how quickly everyone forgot about how awesome the mRNA vaccines are. Even if they didn't completely stop Covid, the tech is brimming with potential; now we just need to iterate on the social systems to strike the balance between speed and safety, and the incentives are pointing in the right direction. Even before the mRNA stuff, think of monoclonal antibodies, which are effectively treating all kinds of horrible diseases like autoimmunity. And for even one more example, the relatively recent discovery that stomach ulcers could be treat with antibiotics. We keep making huge strides in eliminating pretty useless suffering.

2) I see signs of self-correction in some of the social pathologies caused by the internet and social media, even if it's sometimes unintentional and even crass. For example, I think doomscrolling is a horrifying mental pathology, but now there's the pithy internet phrase "go outside and touch grass". While this is insulting in the usual blunt internet-ey way, it actually seems like good and appropriate advice :p

As a kind of corollary to this, I can't put my finger on it precisely, but I feel like there's a younger generation coming up which is strangely really wholesome and less crass and cynical than the last several cohorts. It makes me wonder if perhaps they're somehow inoculated against the worst of the generally negative internet attitude, having completely grown up with it. I could just be imagining it, of course.

Veterinarian?

I mean, yes, a lot of "low status" jobs are dominated by women, and this is an unfortunate pattern, but I don't think the gender is driving the status, or the attrition problems?