FWIW, I know several developers at Epic who are happy with the job, the work/life balance, and have been there for years. OTOH, I know several people, too, who were project managers, and that’s 110% true. Epic is big on academic performance. It wants people who can put their heads down and grind, without asking questions or sticking up for themselves.

Until they burn out…

Article 5 and Catch 22, which in this case would be formulated as, “They can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.” One could make that argument, but who’d be listening?

By what percent? And, why would even want to take a car into lower Manhattan?

What does it say on his birth certificate?

The $9 congestion toll is nothing compared to the cost of parking in Manhattan. Gothamist, and other media outlets, did the legwork on this: The congestion toll applies to approximately zero poor people; they’re not driving into the city. But tens of thousands of lower-income people benefit from improved bus service, subway upgrades, and less danger.

I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

Taxing the wealthy in their expensive, personal conveyances to fund the MTA that the poor people ride is regressive? Is this one of those situations like with the word literally, where “regressive” now means the opposite?

I think it’s a spoof on the Western movie action sequence in which the hero leaps from the coach onto the backs of the horses, in order to rein them in.

You’re surprised that something that’s not good enough is… not good enough?

Are we still pretending he’s not experiencing severe cognitive decline, likely dementia? We are? Got it. Just checking.

I’m having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it’s fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of “vote blue no matter who” is utterly stupid, because it only works if “blue” wins every election forevermore. That’s highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.

Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it’s fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don’t think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I’m just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.

All of those are center-right policies, tinkering with the mechanics of a fundamentally neo-liberal system, when that system is slowly crushing us (57% of Americans living hand-to-mouth). Imagine why voters aren’t fired up to come out and support a boost to, say, semiconductor research spending to strengthen U.S. supply chain resilience.

That’s not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word “die.”

Biden did very, very few “left” things. His policies were center-right. (For example, when the railroad workers threatened the economy with a strike, the left-wing response would be to temporarily nationalize the rails; the right-wing response would be to protect the railroad companies and remove the workers’ ability to strike.) Progressives showed up to vote for Harris, anyway, as the numbers show. The mythical “centrists” did not.

If “harm” and “less harm” are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There’s the argument that we have to do “harm reduction” in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we’ve been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between “harm reduction” and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.

The Harris campaign tried to appeal to the centrists, and look how that turned out.

I appreciate the gamer aesthetic when scientists need to buy gear with the power to run scientific calculations for relatively cheap. The RGB lights under the case windows bring a bit of pizzazz to the laboratory.

What happened to his nose in the last panels?

TIL

That sounds right in line with the techbro mantra, “move fast and break things.” The results are a little different when applied to physical systems, rather than software, though.