red_tux

[red_tux @red_tux]

@DominionEnergy what's the point of having an app to report outages if it does not work?

[red_tux @red_tux]

@VSPPIO @AugustaCountyVA FYI, your VSP web page for active alerts appears to be down.

[Leading Report @LeadingReport]

BREAKING: RFK’s VP pick Nicole Shanahan releases a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” ad.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I shipped an essay yesterday about how relatively smart people are oblivious about what life on the low end of the IQ distribution is like. It mentioned UBI because what stimulated me to write it was somebody else's thread about a recent study of UBI.

I should have expected what happened next. Lots of clever people tried to come up with clever ways to fix UBI's failure modes by time-structuring the payouts, or erecting restrictions on what the money can be used for.

I was gobsmacked that only one person in the entire thread pointed out the obvious: if you try to trickle payments so that UBI recipients can't overspend, all you will do is create a market niche for shady characters peddling predatory payday loans. At which point your clients will revert to their careless high-velocity spending, after the shady characters have taken a rake off the top.

I waited in vain for somebody to point out that we already know what happens when you try to put use restrictions on transfer payments. There's plenty of experience about this around EBT cards - people spin up informal markets in which they can sell the planner-approved goods they don't want for money to buy the disapproved goods they do want. They don't mind that they're usually taking a huge nominal loss on these transactions, because they want what they want and not what planners think they should want.

All such proposals are doomed. They're technocratic wankery, perfect examples of what Nassim Taleb calls "fragilista thinking". They illustrate another chronic failure mode of smart people. This post may look like it's about UBI, but it's really about that failure mode.

All you would-be social engineers continually trip over your own blindness about second-order consequences. Especially the second order consequences that come from the fact that the people you are trying to help, or nudge, don't want what you want. They want what *they* want, and they don't care about your clever planning except to the extent they can exploit it to pursue their own desires.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I got a stark reminder today that people with college degrees, in general, haven't got the faintest clue what the conceptual world of a person with an IQ below 90 is like.

This was in reaction to a large, carefully designed study of the outcomes of universal basic income. Basically, what it found is that UBI doesn't work. Recipients simply increase their discretionary consumption, and end up deeper in debt than they were before with none of their problems solved.

I won't identify the person who insisted that the problem is a lack of financial education - those people simply need to be taught better money-management practices! Because I don't want to embarrass the poor goof.

Education would probably work fine if everybody in the UBI program had an IQ of 100 or up. The problem is that not too far below that level people start having cognitive deficits in their ability to handle hypotheticals and long-term planning. They can't handle "financial education"; they can barely even process the concept.

I think there used to be more cultural wisdom about this than there is now, back when there was less social mobility and people with above average IQs didn't almost automatically segregate themselves away from the below-average. We used to understand that the not-very-bright can only stay out of poverty by having habitual thrift hammered into them so hard in childhood that the conditioning partly overrides their high time preference.

Nowadays, it's too easy for the relatively bright to project their own low time preference on everybody else, and to assume that more education is an all-purpose fix for everything.

Cluebat time: some people - quite a lot of people in fact - are just plain stupid. You can't fix their problems with interventions like UBI that might work if everybody had an IQ that is above average for a first-world country.

We've put our society through a lot of unnecessary grief by pretending this isn't so.

[S2 Underground @s2_underground]

Step 1: Ban "hate speech".
Step 2: Redefine the term "hate speech" to be anything you want.
Step 3: In doing so, gain the approval of the "law and order" crowd, who are okay with crimes against humanity, as long as they are made legal first.
Step 4: Use the laws created in Step 1 to target adversaries openly.
Step 5: Gaslight the population into forgetting that Step 2 actually happened, using the useful idiots from Step 3 to make the gaslighting even more effective.
Step 6: Profit.

[red_tux @red_tux]

@ric_rac @carlvellotti That's easy. Type "nasi goreng" into maps and proceed to the Indonesian/Malaysian restaurant that comes up. Then I'll QA their nasi goreng (Indonesian/Malaysian fried rice that's very spicy) over time or A/B test another place, along with Q/A.

[red_tux @red_tux]

As an early bata tester, it's a pretty cool project. Heaven will destroy the CCP.

[Andy Leitermann @andyleitermann]

We at @LibSpecInfoSec are proud to have worked with @ChinaUncensored in developing the 'Virtual Hong Kong Lennon Wall'

About the project: https://t.co/zXDO5eDOxO

Please leave a message in support of the brave freedom fighters of Hong Kong here:
https://t.co/CLK8vHes07

plz❤️&RT

[Andy Leitermann @andyleitermann]

James will not kill himself. Especially not when he's so close to realizing his dream, it would be career suicide!

[Wise Squirrel @WiseSquirrel_]

Happy January 6th. Watch this video to learn the truth.

We cannot allow another election to be stolen. Major reform is needed.

Together we can spread the word and Make America Great Again. 🇺🇸

[red_tux @red_tux]

@WillScuderi What about Linux support?

[James O'Keefe @JamesOKeefeIII]

BREAKING LEAKED VIDEO: CEO of IBM @ArvindKrishna admits to using coercion to fire people and take away their bonuses unless they discriminate in the hiring process.

“You got to move both forward by a percentage that leads to a plus on your bonus," Krishna said about hiring Hispanics, "and by the way if you lose, you lose part of your bonus.”

After pulling ads from X for 'racism,' IBM chief Arvind Krishna says he will fire, demote or strip bonuses from execs who don't hire enough blacks, Hispanics — or hire too many Asians

"Asians are not an underrepresented minority in tech in America...I’m not going to finess this, for blacks we should try to get towards 13 percent," says Krishna.

Paul Cormier, the chairman of Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, says in the leaked recording that Red Hat has terminated people because they weren't willing to engage in racial discrimination through hiring and promotion.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race in the workplace. #IBMLeaks

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Child Grooming Content On X Reduced By 83% After Disney Pulls Ads https://t.co/I5LPB3eVfq

[red_tux @red_tux]

@elonmusk yep!

[Not Elon Musk @ElonMuskAOC]

@ReginaDann50698 I am a walking meme man

[red_tux @red_tux]

A great victory for free speech!

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

Well, that was fast!

Less than 24 hours after FIRE threatened legal action, the NY attorney general has backed down—rescinding her unconstitutional demand on @rumblevideo to censor protected speech, in violation of multiple federal court orders.

[Thomas Sowell Wisdom @TheThomasSowell]

The latest

[Chris Pavlovski 🏴‍☠️ @chrispavlovski]

Rumble has built a highway unoutchable from big tech.

Today marks a new era on the internet, Parler won't happen again. #RumbleCloud

[red_tux @red_tux]

There's a new #Cloud in town

[Rick Racela @ric_rac]

https://t.co/LfT3xn7PRS

[red_tux @red_tux]

@ric_rac #winamp it really whips the llama's ass.