Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.

That’s a fair point. Yes, nice skin care products can be a bit pricey. I only mentioned the Tatcha because it’s on my bathroom counter and I gave it a sniff to make sure I was remembering correctly. I don’t sell skin care products. I do math for a living.

My point was that splashing on Old Spice isn’t the best for your skin, even if you were to locate an unscented version. Someone in the business - whether at the counter in some fancy shop or a beauty advice vlogger - would be where I’d go if I wanted to get away from scented and possibly less than helpful products.

But just between us, the Tatcha product line is awesome. My partner got me hooked and I am a fresh faced math nerd as a result.

I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.

I completely agree. I don’t want them to buy out the NYT, and I would rather move back to the laws that prevented over-consolidation of the media. I think that Sinclair and the consolidated talk radio networks represent a very real source of danger to democracy. I think we should legally restrict the number of markets a particular broadcast company can be in, and I also believe that we can and should come up with an argument that’s the equivalent of the Fairness Doctrine that doesn’t rest on something as physical and mundane as the public airwaves.

This is an actual OMG moment.

The next Y2K style problem will happen on this date, January 19, at pi o’clock in 2038. I was really hoping he’d get to see that.

He was ironically taken too soon.

The NYT has a market cap of about $8B. MSFT has a market cap of about $3T. MSFT could take a controlling interest in the Times for the change it finds in the couch cushions. I’m betting a good chunk of the c-suites of the interested parties have higher personal net worths than the NYT has in market cap.

I have mixed feelings about how generative models are built and used. I have mixed feelings about IP laws. I think there needs to be a distinction between academic research and for-profit applications. I don’t know how to bring the laws into alignment on all of those things.

But I do know that the interested parties who are developing generative models for commercial use, in addition to making their models available for academics and non-commercial applications, could well afford to properly compensate companies for their training data.

If I’m misunderstanding, I apologize, but aftershaves are one of the socially acceptable ways for traditionally presenting men to apply perfume. Colognes are often perceived as being a bit affected and in any case get used for special occasions or “going out.” In short, aftershaves are often designed to be used in place of colognes in addition to anything they’re trying to do for your skin (which if they contain alcohol is probably not overly positive in any case).

Is there a reason you would be looking to use aftershave in particular, as opposed to another skin care product? Tatcha, for example, has almost no scent in their water cream, and would probably be better for your skin.

I know that facial shaving can have a particularly strong reaction with some people, but to my knowledge nothing marketed as an aftershave would have a particular benefit over a facial skin care product.

1. It looks way too fucking cold to protest.
2. Those riot police would be completely fucked if the protesters actually engaged with them. They had a shit formation and shit equipment.
3. If either side had employed water hoses, it would have been over in ten minutes.

For the most part, I’m genuinely sad to say, the answer is going to be “no,” for a couple of reasons. For the most part, consumer grade items are pretty much crap. They’re functionally focused, as opposed to aesthetically focused. Yes, an old Apple computer signed by Woz will always be worth a lot of money, but they’re mass produced commercial items. No one is going to care for a first edition Apple Watch ten years from now.

Compare that to an Italian designer chair that sold for $700 in 1969 and now goes for $45000 in mint condition. Things like furniture (and to some extent cars) can increase in value because they’re aesthetically as well as functionally designed. No one, 50 years from now, is going to be impressed with an iPhone 8.

The US retreated from global health leadership in 2016, along with most other global leadership. It is no small part of the reason why Covid developed as it did.

Mariachi Q would also have been accepted for full marks.

Yeah, it disproportionately affects W2 workers making over 140k per year or so. Thats fine. That’s the way things are supposed to be.

It’s not hitting “W2 folks” to extend withholding beyond $140k. It’s doing the appropriate thing and not giving them a free ride. If you want to additionally hit up the people who are living off of the various ways you can monetize wealth, that’s fine too. I’m in favor of a wealth tax. I think that’s also fair. I think Warren proposed a 2% tax on holdings over $4M. I support that. That’s still different than SS withholding.

Let’s say you’re making a whopping $150k. That means that you’ll pay (and I am probably overestimating) a few hundred dollars a year into the SS fund. It’s not a noticeable amount, whether you live in a HCOL area or not. It’s a nice dinner, stretched out over 365 days worth of payments.

It’s a trivial amount of money for an individual, which when spread over the population of the country, can make the difference to the majority of the population. I’m very much down with that.

Yes. That is what I said. I think it’s not a valid justification.

By way of analogy, let’s say we move to a point of tuition-free public college, which I also support. My taxes which go to support those colleges would be far higher than those of most people, but my kids, were I to have any, would receive the exact same benefit from a financial standpoint as people whose taxes contributed far less to none.

My property taxes are somewhere around $25k per year. They go largely to support a public school system which, as a person without children, I receive zero direct benefit from. Should I get a lower property tax because I am a person without kids despite having a higher income and higher valued property? Or should I be taxed relative to my ability to support the community? Should a family that makes a quarter of what I do but have four kids pay more than me?

Just for those unaware - the social security pay-in is a percentage of your income, but the maximum amount of your income subject to social security withholding is capped at a fixed level that increases annually. The last time I looked, the cutoff was somewhere around $138k. So if your cumulative income for the year hits $138k in, say, June, you are no longer subject to SS withholding and your weekly paycheck goes up by a couple of hundred dollars or so as a result. Most people don’t hit this amount, but enough do that were the cap eliminated, it would increase solvency and possibly allow for an increase in payouts.

On the flip side, your payout from social security is proportional to what your pay in was. It’s still capped, and it’s not really enough to live on. Those who hit the cap typically have multiple other sources of savings for retirement and could easily contribute more to the national program.

By Grabthar’s tiny ball peen hammer!

It’s an interesting argument. Does Israel not get to claim moral outrage if Palestinians bomb school buses because that’s just what happens in war? If there is no morality in war, Hamas did nothing wrong, correct? Rapes happen in war. Deaths of children happen in war. Could Iran use nerve gas against Tel Aviv and have it simply written off as “that’s what happens?”

Asking as someone who has fired and been fired upon at the request of my government.

First, fantastic job tracking down the actually relevant stats rather than the person above you who was trying to debunk.

Second - and this would only make your argument stronger and I’m not saying you needed to go this far - we would need to see if there has been an overall drop in crime rates. The tough on crime types love to tout numbers that reflect general trends as if they’re a justification or proof of the effectiveness of their policies. You need to demonstrate using proper statistical analysis to show that the falloff can accurately be attributed to a given policy.

They shouldn’t, and yet they do.

People aren’t rational actors. Look at Trump’s method of argumentation, look at the success it has throughout the US and around the world, and use that to help infer what people are actually convinced by.

That’s also what general happens in the US if you die without a will. It’s called intestate succession. If your spouse survives you, they will generally get everything held as community property. If you had property prior to the marriage, it might be divided among your children, if any. Of there are no immediate family (spouse and/or children), it can then be divided among any relatives you do happen to have.

If you have any valuable assets that you want to bequeath to someone in particular, then it’s important to have a will. If you want a bigger chunk of money to go to a relative you know is struggling financially or could otherwise use it (kids heading to college, buying a house, whatever), then that’s another reason to have a will. Of instead of a family member, you want the money to go to a charity, then that’s yet another reason.

Babylon Bee : The Onion :: Joe Rogan : Jon Stewart