So it's eating a star every two days, with an accretion disk managing the luminosity of 700 trillion suns.
If you take the Sun's current output and hold that constant for 4.6 billion years and then emit that total energy over two days, you get 0.1% of 700 trillion Sol brightnesses.
The mass balance here must be way strange, involving some kind of seriously supersized all-you-can-eat hot stardust buffet.
Apple is a corporation. It's not a person. It's run by board with the only goal being to make money.
90% of corporations behave less unethically than they could get away with, bottom line, total-cost-of-assholeness (TCA).
The psychopathic shock absorber in modern corporate culture is perhaps not terribly large, but neglecting it entirely is ideological, idiotic, inflammatory and smells bad, too.
At the 75% "yammy" position, I can mentally prime myself to hear either one, so long as my mental prime is right at the beginning.
Once I got the hang of it, I alternated hearing Laurel/Yammy without fail several dozen times in a row. Using hysteresis and moving in small increments, I even managed to hear "Laurel" a few times at the 95% Yammy position (but it was weird and growly). Laurel is way dominant for me.
At the 80% position (after sliding up from Laurel-ville),during transition from Laurel to Yammy, I can even manage to hear most of both (equally distorted) at the same time for a couple of iterations, before Yammy prevails. Once Yammy prevails at 80%, I can't get Laurel back without moving the slider down.
Note: I'm still using small but heavy Altec Lansing speakers (with a large sub) purchased along with a Dell Pentium Pro box circa 1996. They've held up surprisingly well.
This is a world class demonstration of how our phonetic perception is self-reinforcing on early subconscious categorization.
It's been long known in the neurolinguistic community that once a phoneme is recognized, accurate musical assessment of pitch and timber basically goes out the window (except perhaps in odd cases like synesthetes, who are fundamentally wired differently).
In a traditional permission system where you tell your OS what you will and won't allow, you could still run the Facebook app and notice when it fails to work normally—or when the OS terminates it outright.
But that's not what we have. Imagine a town where everyone feels socially obligated to leave a house key under the door matt for the town priest, who basically just sleeps wherever he wants.
He is also a priest with a known drinking problem, and anyone slipping him a ten spot in a dark alley will be quickly rewarded with choice gossip. To put it bluntly, sharing gossip is really the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.
So what's he doing with all those house keys left conveniently under the door matt?
Nobody knows, not for sure. I guess you just kind of close your eyes and pray that your children don't have any closer-to-God than God intended loose pyjama experiences.
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Me, I'm heading for the atheist exit. My phone is down to three apps: Firefox, Signal, and a password store (and some legacy cruft that won't survive my next phone purchase). Oh yeah, and a Google thing that plays podcasts (but mostly I still use my old iPod as a dedicated podcast device).
I consider my phone the worst technology I've ever owned, and this list includes several different computers purchased before anyone not in the 1% could afford an actual hard drive.
The "killer app" meme isn't what it once was, but here we have it: geographic and social ubiquity. And it was good. It was so good that two high priests strolled into town, wearing different hats, but both basically saying the same thing: "hey, everybody, start leaving your house keys under your front door matt" and don't worry, be happy if we share your close personal affairs with political operatives.
And now we have an entire generation raising under a regime of not just tolerating, but pocketing quasi-consensual corporo-totalitarian spyware.
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Merely becoming a real atheist isn't good enough anymore. Now the motivated atheist needs to also live on the outskirts of town, and subsist on a routine diet of social media juniper berries.
Fortunately, I've never much liked my illiterate fellow man. And this is a weird thing, because this is golden era like no other era before, where I can surround myself exclusively by the glitterati of every intellectual endeavour of life, whether print or YouTube on demand. I casually consume hours of books/lectures per day from the rock stars of the modern academy at basically no marginal cost (my computer is so weirdly configured, Google rarely delivers a single ad, and when an ad does come up on something that's not fungible in under 5 s, I slide the window to another desktop and mute my audio for 30 s, before returning for a quick rewind to content begin).
I'm basically the Dwight Freeney of commercial bullshit.
For example, in the week leading up to a game that season, âoe[Freeney] ate beef and pinto beans and nothing else, not even for breakfast. ⦠If he goes to a restaurant, he brings his own ingredients and instructs the chef on how he wants it prepared—no oil, no pepper, no garlic, no garnish, no powder and certainly no pan spray.â
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Where are all the other mental athletes out there, with similar dietary rigidity? The body is your temple, but your mind is junk heap? I guess while the abusive jocks were preening, all the sad-sack geeks internalized lazy, don't give a shit. Vi
Narrating the video, Foster acknowledges that the theory may have been discredited when it comes to genetics but says it provides a useful metaphor for user data.
How can I be reading Robert Sapolsky from 2017 (Behave) who is talking like Lamarckian epigenetics is still a thing, while a narrator from 2016 is saying it's not a thing?
Because Lamarckian epigenetics is still a thing in nematodes. It just hasn't been much demonstrated in mammals yet.
Whew! For half a second I was afraid that the hairiest Out of Africa monkey guru on planet earth had just emitted a submission yelp to some indoor-office sebaceous crooner.
[*] Sapolsky and his perfidious ilk actually trick various primate troops into staring at the untrustworthy bushes for an extra long time—"did you just hear Muggsy Bogues stuff Manute Bol? because that's what I though I just heard"; but it's all done with smoke and mirrors and secret tape recorders. Then the befuddled apes huddle and scratch and nibble twice as hard on whatever leaf is likely responsible for the Most Excellent Mass Hallucination, which is all that they can reasonably do, seeing as they don't have religion yet.
Leading experts, in fact, believe that roughly two-thirds of all cancers are the result of mutations to DNA that are caused by natural bodily processes, not exposure to environmental chemicals.
That anyone escapes high school without a solid foundation in economic marginalism is a national catastrophe, but there it is (from economics, also comparative advantage; from psychology a few select cognitive biases; finally, from statistics a fair list of sanity principles—these collectively essential to achieving 100% military power Iron Manchild / Iron Maiden batshit escape velocity).
Obviously (at least to anyone with a passing grade), the background rate is not on the margin (refer to definition of economic margin).
Preventable cancer is on the economic margin.
We talk about the margin (where change is possible) rather than the base rate (where change is still a twinkle of a some sketchy garret innovator that no-one is yet willing to believe) because that's where today's action resides (Willie Sutton: "I rob banks because that's where the money is"—which is surprisingly uncommon wisdom, once the zen origami is fully unfolded).
People struggling to assimilate this reality (how important something is at base rate / what gets the most air time) need to review their earliest childhood encounter concerning how a large nickel is worth less than a small dime. Oh, cruel world, very difficult! My heart goes out to you. Truly, I feel your pain.
But then these same people dial into the margin real quick when it's introduced to the talk-radio leprosy mosh pit as a "death panel" (modern leprosy is an incurable attitude, on a short, repeating, call-in loop).
The reference to Santa Monica though was a pretty good clue.
In order to decipher a clue, you need to have already made a decision to invest mental energy.
If you don't give a shit about Venice, California, your sunk cost should have ended abruptly exactly there, and not one word-clue further along, or an iota more difficult to process than the word "California".
I make 10,000 mental energy assessments every day (only possible because the quick answer, most of the time, is "no"). Epsilon assessments should not involve clue busting.
What you are implicitly advocating is running every ethernet card in promiscuous mode all the time, whereby every packet gets reported to the OS on a separate interrupt every time. As you assert, once the packet arrives at the OS, the destination address serves as "a big clue" about whether this is something the OS needs to fully ingest (more than just siphoning it off to the packet log), so what's the big whup?
Back to reality, on the sixth day, the ethernet vendors invented hardware offloading, and it was good.
Well, it was good when the packet header contained "Venice, California" and not so good at all when the packet header only contained "Venice".
The most ridiculous missing feature on YouTube is the inability to time-shift the audio track when some idiot uploads video with the audio badly out of sync.
Alternatively, Google's machine learning could correct this automatically, in most cases.
I once got a B+ in my advanced-stream, enriched introduction to calculus course, so I guess my standard 11–15 character passwords (seeded from the OpenBSD apg utility) count toward the B Ark's less-than-entirely-lame password rating.
But I guess I was pretty stupid after all, because just about any other course would have been less difficult to complete with a big fat A.
But then again, only because I effed myself to take the hard road did I gain a full and proper understanding of Simpson's paradox (apparently this is a high achievement in life, because on a straw poll I seem to be a member of a select few).
Simpson's Paradox has fooled many. In the fall of 1973, for instance, the University of California, Berkeley's graduate division admitted about 44% of male applicants and 35% of female applicants. That raised eyebrows among school officials, who feared bias and asked Peter Bickel, now a professor emeritus of statistics at Berkeley, to analyze the data.
Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook's AI tools didn't catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days.
This assumes that account creation rate is independent of the account deletion rate, with no justification and for no particular reason, other than to cap the submission summary text with a de rigueur derf derf.
Joyent is able to do what it does (double-hulled Docker) because Linux is fundamentally the Linux kernel API (and not even the core OS). So there's your external API to the hardware environment. Internally, the programmatic interface is mainly POSIX. Third on my list are the kernel interfaces and coding conventions surrounding Linux device drivers.
I suppose that GNU can lay some residual claim over the Linux ABI, but Clang generates Linux executables just fine (alongside actual Unix), and Clang is Certainly Not Not Unix.
However, like Knuth, I do respect my computer history, so I'll end off on +1 GNU/Debian, because Debian officially onboards politics, GNU's primary calling card.
The word "Debian" was formed as a portmanteau of the first name of his then-girlfriend Debra Lynn and his own first name.
That's the only mention of Debra in Wikipedia's Debian article. Therefore it seems we can legitimately simplify this to GNUbian, even if just aurally.
You think his offspring will have the same work ethic as their dad? Heck, their dad might have grown up in the poor part of the tracks with barely enough food to eat and clawed his way to money one deal at a time. His kids will never have that experience, growing up in a relatively large house with plenty of food. And having to go without seems hard to do when you have enough money to buy what you want.
To find someone who doesn't already know this story, in many glorious hues, you'd pretty much have to travel to some remote place where television hasn't been invented yet (and maybe books, too).
Most people on the internet have television, and 99% of us can read with fair proficiency, yet somehow you feel the need to recap that story in its essential outlines here. Obviously, your narrative purpose is not to inform, but rather to scold or remind, or some interesting hybrid thereof; or perhaps to anchor one narrative frame in the discussion, at the expense of another.
There's an extensive and thriving literature on nature vs nurture, and the complex weave of heredity and environment—which your post reduces to a single, commonplace "just so" story.
Another possible name for "just so" stories is base-rate baldies: you can tell a "just so" story by the inability of a superforecaster to do anything with it at all. The universal hallmark of a superforecaster is to first establish the base rate, and then refine the model to increasingly narrow specifics progressing inward by degrees from that firm foundation.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about a knockout success.
Michael Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, to a Jewish family, shortly after the family's immigration to the United States. The son of Lorraine Charlotte, a stockbroker, and Alexander Dell, an orthodontist, Michael Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston.
In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.
Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered an early teletype terminal in junior high. At age 15, after playing with computers at Radio Shack, he got his first computer, an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked.
He got a job as a dishwasher at age 12 and was quickly promoted to maitre d'.
Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer. While making cold calls, he noted that the people most likely to purchase subscriptions were those in the process of establishing permanent geographic and social presence. He then hired some friends who scoured local court records so he could target this demographic group by collecting names from marriage and mortgage applications. He then segmented those leads by the size of the mortgage, calling on those with the highest mortgages first. Dell earned $18,000 that year, exceeding the annual income of his history and economics teacher.
He used the company's first financial statement to convince his parents of his decision to drop out of college. The statement, dated July 31, 1984, shows a gross profit of nearly $200,000. Dell dropped out of the University of Texas in his first year aged 19.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about another knockout success.
Elinor Claire Awan was born in Los Angeles, California as the only child of Leah Hopkins, a musician, and Adrian Awan, a set designer. Her parents separated early in her life, and Elinor lived with her mother most of the time. She attended a Protestant church with her mother and often spent weekends with her father's Jewish family.
Growing up in the post-Depression era to divorced artisans, Ostrom described herself as a "poor kid." Her major recreational activity was swimming, where
When that happens, I'll stop worrying. Until then, a lot of constituents of electrolyte have to be disposed of.
Worry is one of those strange abstract things with a non-linear opportunity cost. Extremely cheap, until it inhibits other productive activities.
Some restaurants provide a handful of parking spots, some provide an entire parking lot. This may or may not reflect on the quality of the food served, but I sure wouldn't conceal this column from my food-quality machine-learning project; neither would I conceal the plurality of a person's worry spots from my cognitive-quality machine-learning project.
I'm not a big fan of worry myself. I maintain a few short-term parking spots for things I haven't figure out yet, and almost none for things where I have figured out the basic contours, and I'm just sitting around waiting to see how the cookie actually crumbles.
For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.
At that point in time, one's view of the solar system would have been that it was still a hot mess, and that certain distinguished bodies were well on the their way toward becoming planets in due time, after the gravitational wet wipe had done it's thing.
There's nothing wrong, in principle, in using dynamical evolution as a definitional concept, even if, at certain points in time, it's somewhat forward looking.
YouTube links break, without leaving behind even a title archive (bastards), so "just for the record":
1) Island of Dr Moreau movie trailer, keyed to the line "on the eighth day" shortly followed by "something impossible... unmistakably human... undeniably animal..."
2) Ludovico Einaudi Greats Hits 2018 (first impression: Keith Jarrett jams with Enya; almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Beethoven by just the right amount to give Alex an additional fit)
3) The Simpsons — A Clockwork Orange Parody (Santa's Little Helper)
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#2 is a nested joke on "conflating".
#3—in which many doggies come to dodgy ends, Simpsons' style—plays on All Your Usenet are Belong to Wesley Crusher (alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die), which loops back to my opening TV Tropes Star Trek moment.
But all you geek bloodhounds out there got those obvious propeller-head cultural references, buried like a stinky bone in minor misdirection—despite the minor down draft—right?
(Well, I guess there's the reason why working geek bloodhounds don't actually wear powered propeller beanies. As ever, one tends not to think these things all the way through, off the disgruntled bat.)
During the infamous transporter room scene of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Chief Rand mutters a horrified "Oh, no, they're forming!" and turns away when the two doomed crew members start to materialize on Enterprise's transporter pad. Everyone else in the room is frozen in stunned horror at what they just witnessed.
Starfleet Transporter Tech: Enterprise, what we got back didn't live long... Fortunately.
(Just for the record, Don LaFontainealways left me writhing in my seat.)
If I were into this kind of thing, I might upload a certain iconic scene from Clockwork Orange with Beethoven's symphony replaced by a gravely Don LaFontaine voice-over narration: in a world ruled by mediocrity, one man dares...
I'd actually pay good money to have everything in an e-mail easily predicted by this tool re-displayed in a very small font of a very dull grey.
The stuff remaining in black would at least have a hope of a glimmer of reflecting an IQ point bent to task by the document's author.
Conveniently for the counter-pendulum yet to come, the automatic is also the irrelevant.
Bonus: the amount of correctly predicted text can be instrumented behind the scenes by corporate head office to rationalize AI-driven workforce slimdowns.
For notetaking my preferred spacing after a sentence is CR LF LF.
I can skim familiar material where every non-trivial sentence has its own paragraph to reorient and refresh at about twice the speed of block text.
I tend to write this way, too, with short paragraphs. But then during preview, there's no shape to the text, so I stitch a few sentences together here and there to make some block paragraphs as visual landmarks.
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First, a short digression... I can't stand the Unicode ellipsis character. Space dot space dot space dot space is the worst of all. Space dot dot dot space is tolerable. Then yesterday I came across the perfect solution (visually): space dot thinspace dot thinspace dot thinspace dot space. Perfect! I can die happy now. (But not on Slashdot,... any...time . . . soon.)
I read the TeX manuals when they first came out, and the rules have nothing to do with integers. Thin space exists for a good reason. If two spaces help the rendering software identify the end of a sentence, that's great. Regardless of how you get there, the space at the end of the sentence should be visually larger than the interword space, though almost certainly not double.
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The other factor with Courier 14 is that the line lengths were almost certainly short and reasonable for efficient reading. So many websites make the line lengths too long. The usual quick unit is 2.5 times the width of the lower case alphabet (at most). Many design-centric websites push this up to 3.5 lower case alphabets, which makes tracking from the end of one line to the beginning of the next far more difficult than it needs to be.
Then, just to show off, they figure out some way to write the CSS so that when I use my browser's text zoom feature to enlarge the font relative to the line width, the margins automatically rescale relative to the font size to the same ridiculous text length. It's as if the site designer regards text as a form of ruler putty whose only function is to establish geometric layout ratios. (Rumours that designers are slow on the uptake are greatly exaggerated; that said, all their best times at track and field events are posted in the total absence of nearby reflective surfaces—and a rain delay is any rain that leaves behind a shiny puddle.)
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TeX has letters and glue (stretchy white space, of various cardinalities).
TeX revised by a design professional would just have glue: large white glue, and small black glue. In Jordan Peterson's schema, the white glue would be the yang of order, and the black glue would be the yin of chaos (damn those proportional fonts, irregular word lengths, and fussy hyphenation points!).
As line length goes to infinity, interline glue variance goes to zero. This is the only theorem most web designers know. The problem is even worse if you can't trust an automatic hyphenator to handle all the ridiculous content Joe Random Blogger might compose. Why, in extremis, you might even be forced to adopt the dishevelled, libertine ethos of ragged right.
Better to simply set all text to a line length 3.5 times the width of the lower case alphabet and be done with it (surely if we do this enough it will ultimately impel VESA and the Koreans to set the 16k video standard to an aspect ratio of 9:4, as never-married, closet-God conspicuously prefers).
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In my notes, I also break apart long sentences with list structure into bullet format, and I almost always break sentences joined by semicolons into separate sentences, too.
"Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)" becomes "MIT", etc.
"Boston, Massachusetts, USA" becomes "Boston".
The "Cindy Elizabeth Erin Olivia Mary-Ellen and James Benjamin Jason Zebulon John-Boy Walton Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Behaviour FRS FRAS OBE with a joint appointment to the Peter, Paul, and Mary School of Ma
When the product category is more trouble than it's worth, time to dump it.
What tends to happen in outlaw industries like this one is that the sensible parties form a trade association to enforce some kind of standard of conduct internally, and then they're allowed to play with the nice kids again.
If somehow Google = speech, then the conversation we need to be having is splitting Google into parts (along with Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft just for old times sake).
No corporation should be so large as to become a de facto speech utility. And I really don't think Google is that large, in the first place.
Just about every protein unique (or largely confined) to the human species is presently at its highest level in the last 800,000 years; and probably another 10 million industrial compounds, of which maybe 100,000 were intentional, and the other 99% being random and undesired by products around the margins of the defined process (even the smallest amounts discarded instead of destroyed would lead to record-setting environmental levels over a billion-year historical time scale).
What makes CO2 special is that we worked a little harder to crack this nut.
Current cumulative industrial emissions of CO2 is presently on the order of 33,000 million metric tonnes (Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1850–2030). That's 33 petagrams in base metric units, once you collect all the distributed zeros together.
How many chemicals exist on planet earth in excess of 30 Pg?
The entire earth's biosphere clocks in at 1–4 Eg. We can start by eliminating any biological chemical that accounts for less than 1% of the entire biosphere.
Goodbye, glucose, at 3–8 g per human body. ATP? Nope. Glycogen? Closer, but still no cigar. Cellulose stands a chance, if we're generous about counting molecular D-glucose units, rather than actual molecules. Perhaps one lipid, the most common chain length of all fats?
And what if earth had blessed us with ten (or one hundred) Middle East oil fields, where gasoline practically gushes out in finished form? The newly acidic oceans would be halfway sterile of yummy megafauna, but fertilizer for use in terrestrial agriculture would have been practically free.
Not better, not worse; just different.
But cross your fingers God keeps his promise about not sending a second flood, because Noah 2.0's ocean pantry would be exceedingly slim pickings. Yes, a merciful God wipes the slate clean before you waltz off the boat, procreate vigorously, and then discover mass geological reserves of buried hydrocarbons to rival the entirety of God's respiring endowment.
How much is too much? 3 Pg? 30 Pg? 300 Pg? 3 Eg? 30 Eg? Do stop me when your anthropogenic spidey sense reaches its in-built marble ark threat-detection threshold.
Governments are terribly inefficient and work through coercion and fear.
90% of everything is crap, including the private sector.
Why is the web slathered with helpful little articles on how to put up with your asshole boss—especially in the private sector? People don't simply leave these asshole jobs, especially in America, because of systemic mobility friction, like a health plan tied to an employer who wields it as a club to get away with hiring cheap (and bad, and often abusive) bottom-tier management staff.
When you form the Cantor map of government suckitude to private sector suckitude to determine which has the larger cardinality, a single Enron cancels out 10,000 small anecdotes. But we wrap up colossal stinkers like Enron in a tidy garbage bag with a red bow tie: the foolish shareholders deserved to lose their money, and then we neglect to gape over the majestic size of the Enron crater.
Who were the biggest losers? Hard-working California linemen, whose pensions funds were taken for a ride at the Arthur Andersen cleaners. Oh, they screwed up, too, bigly? Quick, hand me another garbage bag, and let's not gape at that majestic hole, either.
Bottom line: there ain't no monopoly on inefficiency in any walk of life. The Cantor map between private sector and public sector fuckitude takes a lot of brain power, because the sectors have very different shapes and ultimate loss functions.
So what people do instead is a stupid pet trick: declaring that every fuck-up of the private sector can be construed as "some foolish stakeholder deserved the shit outcome; they'll wise up next time, and the world will turn better soon." The whole point of Authur Anderson (and their ilk) was that society had come to a joint realization that having everyone in the entire country devoting 25% of their day to caveat emptoring basic business criminality was a colossal waste of human potential.
Caveat emptor—done right—is a substantially specialized skillset in the complex modern economy. This is why grandma missed Spectre and Meltdown and bought herself a fucked up Intel box, nevertheless; one that an active, private-sector vigilance (on the back of a caveat emptor PhD obtained in her well-spent youth) would have adequately warned her against. And now some Russian mobster has spent your inheritance. You go, private sector, FTW.
While I agree in principle, given the myriad of ways in which a government can already circumvent this (e.g. not sending an email, private server, private email address) I find it hard to get worked up about ${SPECIFIC_CASE}
Your sentiment is so ridiculous on its face, I don't know whether to slam you down with a poem or a proof technique.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I'll let the proof technique speak for itself: Mathematical induction, which does indeed get "worked up" over a specific case.
Corollary to proof by mathematical induction (scaled down for Business 101 students):
#1) Don't sweat the small stuff
#2) It's all small stuff
The vast majority of modern mathematics unfolds from a grain of sand, and that aphorism is the closest most business students will ever come to understanding this profound truth about reality.
Well, It's not a total loss. At least you earned yourself a "C. P. Snow" Boy Scout badge, for your Two Cultures equal beatdown.
There's a huge government apparatus to (generously) define the boundaries of intellectual property, so that Peter can litigate in public courts (well below the net cost of the institution) to Peter's great advantage.
Without the fiat power of government, there would be no patent and copyright systems. There would just be trade secrets. Reverse engineering would be the new Right to Bare ARMs. Defamation? Open season, subject only to your powers of economic retaliation. (Just a heads up on that one: the cost of defending turf in the drug trade is very high, and few in the business find themselves on the black side of the ledger for very long—long enough to bling trance some lusty chicks as a young adult male, before they send you off for a couple of years of daily practice in keeping a wet bar of soap on the up and up; this institution is also a great public expense, benefiting the most those who already have the most).
Peter doesn't really like to talk about how 70% of the defense of property is socialism. Not his favourite talking point, by far.
So a lot of what Peter sees as excess taxation to Paul's benefit is the chunk the government takes from Peter to fund the giant public industry of keeping Paul from aggressively spilling out of the Paul bucket.
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Here's another thing. Behind every Peter, there's usually a couple of grand pappy Pauls, who managed to scrounge their way out of the Paul bucket, and not by means that the prevailing Peter ruling class wasn't trying to extirpate by stuffing their fat fingers into every feasible escape option.
Of course, Paul can invent a better mouse trap. There are at least 200 million Pauls (and Paulettes) in American right now.
It would only take circa forty million SUCCESSFUL mouse trap innovations per year, to reliably expand the Peter class to universal suffrage.
The metaphor of the invisible hand is remarkable in having no metabolism. With no metabolism, it never suffers from overwork or fatigue. It never goes "don't fucking bring me one more member of your huddled masses—and I mean it!—I'm totally fucking bagged." So we pretend that a narrow path that works for the special few (driven individuals with broad skills who can maintain a 125+ IQ on an average of five of six hours sleep, long term), that this narrow path can accommodate the entire population, side by side, arm in arm, if only they'd rise up off their lazy asses.
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While I have few socialist sympathies, I certainly think the wealthy and advantaged complain too damn much about an already good thing. Peter/Paul rhetoric makes me want to puke, because every institution in society has differential Peter/Paul dynamics, and not just the tax system.
So what really anchors this Peter/Paul meme in the public discourse, despite its superficial stupidity?
Because there's a severe scarcity of noddables. The tax system is one of the few transfer payments where you get an actual receipt. All of our greedy, self-interested anger over all the ways that our value is transferred to others is focused on that tangible document of distress on tax day. We are, of course, really poor at adding up all the ways that values invisibly comes home to roost in exchange for the taxation exacted. We're neurological wired to always believe that the net transaction is hopelessly rigged.
So the tax thing is one of the few memes where every agrees to nod together: taxation sucks.
That's why the slippery Peter/Paul narrative is anchored, first and foremost, to the mechanism
Slashdot Mirror
So it's eating a star every two days, with an accretion disk managing the luminosity of 700 trillion suns.
If you take the Sun's current output and hold that constant for 4.6 billion years and then emit that total energy over two days, you get 0.1% of 700 trillion Sol brightnesses.
The mass balance here must be way strange, involving some kind of seriously supersized all-you-can-eat hot stardust buffet.
That's nothing compared to the Itanium compiler that Intel once envisioned.
I'm guessing the software used to synthesize Itanium (and the 10 billion transistor chips of the near future) is fairly sophisticated, too.
90% of corporations behave less unethically than they could get away with, bottom line, total-cost-of-assholeness (TCA).
The psychopathic shock absorber in modern corporate culture is perhaps not terribly large, but neglecting it entirely is ideological, idiotic, inflammatory and smells bad, too.
At the 75% "yammy" position, I can mentally prime myself to hear either one, so long as my mental prime is right at the beginning.
Once I got the hang of it, I alternated hearing Laurel/Yammy without fail several dozen times in a row. Using hysteresis and moving in small increments, I even managed to hear "Laurel" a few times at the 95% Yammy position (but it was weird and growly). Laurel is way dominant for me.
At the 80% position (after sliding up from Laurel-ville) ,during transition from Laurel to Yammy, I can even manage to hear most of both (equally distorted) at the same time for a couple of iterations, before Yammy prevails. Once Yammy prevails at 80%, I can't get Laurel back without moving the slider down.
Note: I'm still using small but heavy Altec Lansing speakers (with a large sub) purchased along with a Dell Pentium Pro box circa 1996. They've held up surprisingly well.
This is a world class demonstration of how our phonetic perception is self-reinforcing on early subconscious categorization.
It's been long known in the neurolinguistic community that once a phoneme is recognized, accurate musical assessment of pitch and timber basically goes out the window (except perhaps in odd cases like synesthetes, who are fundamentally wired differently).
In a traditional permission system where you tell your OS what you will and won't allow, you could still run the Facebook app and notice when it fails to work normally—or when the OS terminates it outright.
But that's not what we have. Imagine a town where everyone feels socially obligated to leave a house key under the door matt for the town priest, who basically just sleeps wherever he wants.
Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook — 6 April 2018
Concert dates: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2018.
This is a priest with a known history.
He is also a priest with a known drinking problem, and anyone slipping him a ten spot in a dark alley will be quickly rewarded with choice gossip. To put it bluntly, sharing gossip is really the only thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.
So what's he doing with all those house keys left conveniently under the door matt?
Nobody knows, not for sure. I guess you just kind of close your eyes and pray that your children don't have any closer-to-God than God intended loose pyjama experiences.
———
Me, I'm heading for the atheist exit. My phone is down to three apps: Firefox, Signal, and a password store (and some legacy cruft that won't survive my next phone purchase). Oh yeah, and a Google thing that plays podcasts (but mostly I still use my old iPod as a dedicated podcast device).
I consider my phone the worst technology I've ever owned, and this list includes several different computers purchased before anyone not in the 1% could afford an actual hard drive.
The "killer app" meme isn't what it once was, but here we have it: geographic and social ubiquity. And it was good. It was so good that two high priests strolled into town, wearing different hats, but both basically saying the same thing: "hey, everybody, start leaving your house keys under your front door matt" and don't worry, be happy if we share your close personal affairs with political operatives.
And now we have an entire generation raising under a regime of not just tolerating, but pocketing quasi-consensual corporo-totalitarian spyware.
———
Merely becoming a real atheist isn't good enough anymore. Now the motivated atheist needs to also live on the outskirts of town, and subsist on a routine diet of social media juniper berries.
Fortunately, I've never much liked my illiterate fellow man. And this is a weird thing, because this is golden era like no other era before, where I can surround myself exclusively by the glitterati of every intellectual endeavour of life, whether print or YouTube on demand. I casually consume hours of books/lectures per day from the rock stars of the modern academy at basically no marginal cost (my computer is so weirdly configured, Google rarely delivers a single ad, and when an ad does come up on something that's not fungible in under 5 s, I slide the window to another desktop and mute my audio for 30 s, before returning for a quick rewind to content begin).
I'm basically the Dwight Freeney of commercial bullshit.
Athletes with Weird Eating Quirks
———
Where are all the other mental athletes out there, with similar dietary rigidity? The body is your temple, but your mind is junk heap? I guess while the abusive jocks were preening, all the sad-sack geeks internalized lazy, don't give a shit. Vi
How can I be reading Robert Sapolsky from 2017 (Behave) who is talking like Lamarckian epigenetics is still a thing, while a narrator from 2016 is saying it's not a thing?
Because Lamarckian epigenetics is still a thing in nematodes. It just hasn't been much demonstrated in mammals yet.
Whew! For half a second I was afraid that the hairiest Out of Africa monkey guru on planet earth had just emitted a submission yelp to some indoor-office sebaceous crooner.
[*] Sapolsky and his perfidious ilk actually trick various primate troops into staring at the untrustworthy bushes for an extra long time—"did you just hear Muggsy Bogues stuff Manute Bol? because that's what I though I just heard"; but it's all done with smoke and mirrors and secret tape recorders. Then the befuddled apes huddle and scratch and nibble twice as hard on whatever leaf is likely responsible for the Most Excellent Mass Hallucination, which is all that they can reasonably do, seeing as they don't have religion yet.
That anyone escapes high school without a solid foundation in economic marginalism is a national catastrophe, but there it is (from economics, also comparative advantage; from psychology a few select cognitive biases; finally, from statistics a fair list of sanity principles—these collectively essential to achieving 100% military power Iron Manchild / Iron Maiden batshit escape velocity).
Obviously (at least to anyone with a passing grade), the background rate is not on the margin (refer to definition of economic margin).
Preventable cancer is on the economic margin.
We talk about the margin (where change is possible) rather than the base rate (where change is still a twinkle of a some sketchy garret innovator that no-one is yet willing to believe) because that's where today's action resides (Willie Sutton: "I rob banks because that's where the money is"—which is surprisingly uncommon wisdom, once the zen origami is fully unfolded).
People struggling to assimilate this reality (how important something is at base rate / what gets the most air time) need to review their earliest childhood encounter concerning how a large nickel is worth less than a small dime. Oh, cruel world, very difficult! My heart goes out to you. Truly, I feel your pain.
But then these same people dial into the margin real quick when it's introduced to the talk-radio leprosy mosh pit as a "death panel" (modern leprosy is an incurable attitude, on a short, repeating, call-in loop).
Quality-adjusted life year
With an entire wonky literature, all to itself:
Is the value of a life or life-year saved context specific? Further evidence from a discrete choice experiment
"Death panel" batshit escape velocity: impulse power hip wader.
In order to decipher a clue, you need to have already made a decision to invest mental energy.
If you don't give a shit about Venice, California, your sunk cost should have ended abruptly exactly there, and not one word-clue further along, or an iota more difficult to process than the word "California".
I make 10,000 mental energy assessments every day (only possible because the quick answer, most of the time, is "no"). Epsilon assessments should not involve clue busting.
What you are implicitly advocating is running every ethernet card in promiscuous mode all the time, whereby every packet gets reported to the OS on a separate interrupt every time. As you assert, once the packet arrives at the OS, the destination address serves as "a big clue" about whether this is something the OS needs to fully ingest (more than just siphoning it off to the packet log), so what's the big whup?
Back to reality, on the sixth day, the ethernet vendors invented hardware offloading, and it was good.
Well, it was good when the packet header contained "Venice, California" and not so good at all when the packet header only contained "Venice".
The most ridiculous missing feature on YouTube is the inability to time-shift the audio track when some idiot uploads video with the audio badly out of sync.
Alternatively, Google's machine learning could correct this automatically, in most cases.
This is completely stupid.
I once got a B+ in my advanced-stream, enriched introduction to calculus course, so I guess my standard 11–15 character passwords (seeded from the OpenBSD apg utility) count toward the B Ark's less-than-entirely-lame password rating.
But I guess I was pretty stupid after all, because just about any other course would have been less difficult to complete with a big fat A.
But then again, only because I effed myself to take the hard road did I gain a full and proper understanding of Simpson's paradox (apparently this is a high achievement in life, because on a straw poll I seem to be a member of a select few).
Simpson's Paradox and Statistical Urban Legends: Gender Bias at Berkeley — 8 May 2016
This assumes that account creation rate is independent of the account deletion rate, with no justification and for no particular reason, other than to cap the submission summary text with a de rigueur derf derf.
Joyent is able to do what it does (double-hulled Docker) because Linux is fundamentally the Linux kernel API (and not even the core OS). So there's your external API to the hardware environment. Internally, the programmatic interface is mainly POSIX. Third on my list are the kernel interfaces and coding conventions surrounding Linux device drivers.
I suppose that GNU can lay some residual claim over the Linux ABI, but Clang generates Linux executables just fine (alongside actual Unix), and Clang is Certainly Not Not Unix.
However, like Knuth, I do respect my computer history, so I'll end off on +1 GNU/Debian, because Debian officially onboards politics, GNU's primary calling card.
That's the only mention of Debra in Wikipedia's Debian article. Therefore it seems we can legitimately simplify this to GNUbian, even if just aurally.
To find someone who doesn't already know this story, in many glorious hues, you'd pretty much have to travel to some remote place where television hasn't been invented yet (and maybe books, too).
Most people on the internet have television, and 99% of us can read with fair proficiency, yet somehow you feel the need to recap that story in its essential outlines here. Obviously, your narrative purpose is not to inform, but rather to scold or remind, or some interesting hybrid thereof; or perhaps to anchor one narrative frame in the discussion, at the expense of another.
There's an extensive and thriving literature on nature vs nurture, and the complex weave of heredity and environment—which your post reduces to a single, commonplace "just so" story.
Another possible name for "just so" stories is base-rate baldies: you can tell a "just so" story by the inability of a superforecaster to do anything with it at all. The universal hallmark of a superforecaster is to first establish the base rate, and then refine the model to increasingly narrow specifics progressing inward by degrees from that firm foundation.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about a knockout success.
Magic Eight Ball, Magic Eight Ball, tell me a story about another knockout success.
Worry is one of those strange abstract things with a non-linear opportunity cost. Extremely cheap, until it inhibits other productive activities.
Some restaurants provide a handful of parking spots, some provide an entire parking lot. This may or may not reflect on the quality of the food served, but I sure wouldn't conceal this column from my food-quality machine-learning project; neither would I conceal the plurality of a person's worry spots from my cognitive-quality machine-learning project.
I'm not a big fan of worry myself. I maintain a few short-term parking spots for things I haven't figure out yet, and almost none for things where I have figured out the basic contours, and I'm just sitting around waiting to see how the cookie actually crumbles.
Too stupid for words.
At that point in time, one's view of the solar system would have been that it was still a hot mess, and that certain distinguished bodies were well on the their way toward becoming planets in due time, after the gravitational wet wipe had done it's thing.
There's nothing wrong, in principle, in using dynamical evolution as a definitional concept, even if, at certain points in time, it's somewhat forward looking.
Maybe it's wrong here, maybe it isn't.
YouTube links break, without leaving behind even a title archive (bastards), so "just for the record":
———
#2 is a nested joke on "conflating".
#3—in which many doggies come to dodgy ends, Simpsons' style—plays on All Your Usenet are Belong to Wesley Crusher (alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die), which loops back to my opening TV Tropes Star Trek moment.
But all you geek bloodhounds out there got those obvious propeller-head cultural references, buried like a stinky bone in minor misdirection—despite the minor down draft—right?
(Well, I guess there's the reason why working geek bloodhounds don't actually wear powered propeller beanies. As ever, one tends not to think these things all the way through, off the disgruntled bat.)
"I Can't Look!" Gesture
Voice of God internal monologue
(Just for the record, Don LaFontaine always left me writhing in my seat.)
If I were into this kind of thing, I might upload a certain iconic scene from Clockwork Orange with Beethoven's symphony replaced by a gravely Don LaFontaine voice-over narration: in a world ruled by mediocrity, one man dares ...
No, wait, I'm conflating Amadeus with Dr Ludovico Faustus.
alt.fido.die.die.die
I'd actually pay good money to have everything in an e-mail easily predicted by this tool re-displayed in a very small font of a very dull grey.
The stuff remaining in black would at least have a hope of a glimmer of reflecting an IQ point bent to task by the document's author.
Conveniently for the counter-pendulum yet to come, the automatic is also the irrelevant.
Bonus: the amount of correctly predicted text can be instrumented behind the scenes by corporate head office to rationalize AI-driven workforce slimdowns.
For notetaking my preferred spacing after a sentence is CR LF LF.
I can skim familiar material where every non-trivial sentence has its own paragraph to reorient and refresh at about twice the speed of block text.
I tend to write this way, too, with short paragraphs. But then during preview, there's no shape to the text, so I stitch a few sentences together here and there to make some block paragraphs as visual landmarks.
———
First, a short digression ... I can't stand the Unicode ellipsis character. Space dot space dot space dot space is the worst of all. Space dot dot dot space is tolerable. Then yesterday I came across the perfect solution (visually): space dot thinspace dot thinspace dot thinspace dot space. Perfect! I can die happy now. (But not on Slashdot, ... any...time . . . soon.)
I read the TeX manuals when they first came out, and the rules have nothing to do with integers. Thin space exists for a good reason. If two spaces help the rendering software identify the end of a sentence, that's great. Regardless of how you get there, the space at the end of the sentence should be visually larger than the interword space, though almost certainly not double.
———
The other factor with Courier 14 is that the line lengths were almost certainly short and reasonable for efficient reading. So many websites make the line lengths too long. The usual quick unit is 2.5 times the width of the lower case alphabet (at most). Many design-centric websites push this up to 3.5 lower case alphabets, which makes tracking from the end of one line to the beginning of the next far more difficult than it needs to be.
Then, just to show off, they figure out some way to write the CSS so that when I use my browser's text zoom feature to enlarge the font relative to the line width, the margins automatically rescale relative to the font size to the same ridiculous text length. It's as if the site designer regards text as a form of ruler putty whose only function is to establish geometric layout ratios. (Rumours that designers are slow on the uptake are greatly exaggerated; that said, all their best times at track and field events are posted in the total absence of nearby reflective surfaces—and a rain delay is any rain that leaves behind a shiny puddle.)
———
TeX has letters and glue (stretchy white space, of various cardinalities).
TeX revised by a design professional would just have glue: large white glue, and small black glue. In Jordan Peterson's schema, the white glue would be the yang of order, and the black glue would be the yin of chaos (damn those proportional fonts, irregular word lengths, and fussy hyphenation points!).
As line length goes to infinity, interline glue variance goes to zero. This is the only theorem most web designers know. The problem is even worse if you can't trust an automatic hyphenator to handle all the ridiculous content Joe Random Blogger might compose. Why, in extremis, you might even be forced to adopt the dishevelled, libertine ethos of ragged right.
Better to simply set all text to a line length 3.5 times the width of the lower case alphabet and be done with it (surely if we do this enough it will ultimately impel VESA and the Koreans to set the 16k video standard to an aspect ratio of 9:4, as never-married, closet-God conspicuously prefers).
———
In my notes, I also break apart long sentences with list structure into bullet format, and I almost always break sentences joined by semicolons into separate sentences, too.
"Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)" becomes "MIT", etc.
"Boston, Massachusetts, USA" becomes "Boston".
The "Cindy Elizabeth Erin Olivia Mary-Ellen and James Benjamin Jason Zebulon John-Boy Walton Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Behaviour FRS FRAS OBE with a joint appointment to the Peter, Paul, and Mary School of Ma
Bail: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) — June 2015
When the product category is more trouble than it's worth, time to dump it.
What tends to happen in outlaw industries like this one is that the sensible parties form a trade association to enforce some kind of standard of conduct internally, and then they're allowed to play with the nice kids again.
If somehow Google = speech, then the conversation we need to be having is splitting Google into parts (along with Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft just for old times sake).
No corporation should be so large as to become a de facto speech utility. And I really don't think Google is that large, in the first place.
Just about every protein unique (or largely confined) to the human species is presently at its highest level in the last 800,000 years; and probably another 10 million industrial compounds, of which maybe 100,000 were intentional, and the other 99% being random and undesired by products around the margins of the defined process (even the smallest amounts discarded instead of destroyed would lead to record-setting environmental levels over a billion-year historical time scale).
What makes CO2 special is that we worked a little harder to crack this nut.
Current cumulative industrial emissions of CO2 is presently on the order of 33,000 million metric tonnes (Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1850–2030). That's 33 petagrams in base metric units, once you collect all the distributed zeros together.
How many chemicals exist on planet earth in excess of 30 Pg?
The entire earth's biosphere clocks in at 1–4 Eg. We can start by eliminating any biological chemical that accounts for less than 1% of the entire biosphere.
Goodbye, glucose, at 3–8 g per human body. ATP? Nope. Glycogen? Closer, but still no cigar. Cellulose stands a chance, if we're generous about counting molecular D-glucose units, rather than actual molecules. Perhaps one lipid, the most common chain length of all fats?
And what if earth had blessed us with ten (or one hundred) Middle East oil fields, where gasoline practically gushes out in finished form? The newly acidic oceans would be halfway sterile of yummy megafauna, but fertilizer for use in terrestrial agriculture would have been practically free.
Not better, not worse; just different.
But cross your fingers God keeps his promise about not sending a second flood, because Noah 2.0's ocean pantry would be exceedingly slim pickings. Yes, a merciful God wipes the slate clean before you waltz off the boat, procreate vigorously, and then discover mass geological reserves of buried hydrocarbons to rival the entirety of God's respiring endowment.
How much is too much? 3 Pg? 30 Pg? 300 Pg? 3 Eg? 30 Eg? Do stop me when your anthropogenic spidey sense reaches its in-built marble ark threat-detection threshold.
Facebook's user base is already self-selected for prioritizing short-term convenience over long-term autonomy.
Libertarians, despair: none of these people are awake to the ideological lure of personal autonomy juice.
90% of everything is crap, including the private sector.
Why is the web slathered with helpful little articles on how to put up with your asshole boss—especially in the private sector? People don't simply leave these asshole jobs, especially in America, because of systemic mobility friction, like a health plan tied to an employer who wields it as a club to get away with hiring cheap (and bad, and often abusive) bottom-tier management staff.
When you form the Cantor map of government suckitude to private sector suckitude to determine which has the larger cardinality, a single Enron cancels out 10,000 small anecdotes. But we wrap up colossal stinkers like Enron in a tidy garbage bag with a red bow tie: the foolish shareholders deserved to lose their money, and then we neglect to gape over the majestic size of the Enron crater.
Who were the biggest losers? Hard-working California linemen, whose pensions funds were taken for a ride at the Arthur Andersen cleaners. Oh, they screwed up, too, bigly? Quick, hand me another garbage bag, and let's not gape at that majestic hole, either.
Bottom line: there ain't no monopoly on inefficiency in any walk of life. The Cantor map between private sector and public sector fuckitude takes a lot of brain power, because the sectors have very different shapes and ultimate loss functions.
So what people do instead is a stupid pet trick: declaring that every fuck-up of the private sector can be construed as "some foolish stakeholder deserved the shit outcome; they'll wise up next time, and the world will turn better soon." The whole point of Authur Anderson (and their ilk) was that society had come to a joint realization that having everyone in the entire country devoting 25% of their day to caveat emptoring basic business criminality was a colossal waste of human potential.
Caveat emptor—done right—is a substantially specialized skillset in the complex modern economy. This is why grandma missed Spectre and Meltdown and bought herself a fucked up Intel box, nevertheless; one that an active, private-sector vigilance (on the back of a caveat emptor PhD obtained in her well-spent youth) would have adequately warned her against. And now some Russian mobster has spent your inheritance. You go, private sector, FTW.
Your sentiment is so ridiculous on its face, I don't know whether to slam you down with a poem or a proof technique.
Let's start with the poem:
First they came ...
I'll let the proof technique speak for itself: Mathematical induction, which does indeed get "worked up" over a specific case.
Corollary to proof by mathematical induction (scaled down for Business 101 students):
#1) Don't sweat the small stuff
#2) It's all small stuff
The vast majority of modern mathematics unfolds from a grain of sand, and that aphorism is the closest most business students will ever come to understanding this profound truth about reality.
Well, It's not a total loss. At least you earned yourself a "C. P. Snow" Boy Scout badge, for your Two Cultures equal beatdown.
Yes, but robbing Peter to pay Peter comes a lot closer, both to the truth, and to sustainability.
I'm going to read that / as a jaunty cigar.
Have you ever hard that possession is nine-tenths of the law?
There's a huge government apparatus to (generously) define the boundaries of intellectual property, so that Peter can litigate in public courts (well below the net cost of the institution) to Peter's great advantage.
Without the fiat power of government, there would be no patent and copyright systems. There would just be trade secrets. Reverse engineering would be the new Right to Bare ARMs. Defamation? Open season, subject only to your powers of economic retaliation. (Just a heads up on that one: the cost of defending turf in the drug trade is very high, and few in the business find themselves on the black side of the ledger for very long—long enough to bling trance some lusty chicks as a young adult male, before they send you off for a couple of years of daily practice in keeping a wet bar of soap on the up and up; this institution is also a great public expense, benefiting the most those who already have the most).
Peter doesn't really like to talk about how 70% of the defense of property is socialism. Not his favourite talking point, by far.
So a lot of what Peter sees as excess taxation to Paul's benefit is the chunk the government takes from Peter to fund the giant public industry of keeping Paul from aggressively spilling out of the Paul bucket.
———
Here's another thing. Behind every Peter, there's usually a couple of grand pappy Pauls, who managed to scrounge their way out of the Paul bucket, and not by means that the prevailing Peter ruling class wasn't trying to extirpate by stuffing their fat fingers into every feasible escape option.
Of course, Paul can invent a better mouse trap. There are at least 200 million Pauls (and Paulettes) in American right now.
It would only take circa forty million SUCCESSFUL mouse trap innovations per year, to reliably expand the Peter class to universal suffrage.
The metaphor of the invisible hand is remarkable in having no metabolism. With no metabolism, it never suffers from overwork or fatigue. It never goes "don't fucking bring me one more member of your huddled masses—and I mean it!—I'm totally fucking bagged." So we pretend that a narrow path that works for the special few (driven individuals with broad skills who can maintain a 125+ IQ on an average of five of six hours sleep, long term), that this narrow path can accommodate the entire population, side by side, arm in arm, if only they'd rise up off their lazy asses.
———
While I have few socialist sympathies, I certainly think the wealthy and advantaged complain too damn much about an already good thing. Peter/Paul rhetoric makes me want to puke, because every institution in society has differential Peter/Paul dynamics, and not just the tax system.
So what really anchors this Peter/Paul meme in the public discourse, despite its superficial stupidity?
Because there's a severe scarcity of noddables. The tax system is one of the few transfer payments where you get an actual receipt. All of our greedy, self-interested anger over all the ways that our value is transferred to others is focused on that tangible document of distress on tax day. We are, of course, really poor at adding up all the ways that values invisibly comes home to roost in exchange for the taxation exacted. We're neurological wired to always believe that the net transaction is hopelessly rigged.
So the tax thing is one of the few memes where every agrees to nod together: taxation sucks.
That's why the slippery Peter/Paul narrative is anchored, first and foremost, to the mechanism