• 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The thing that gets me is that these people are all really smart. If someone is willing to lie and do math, why not work at an unscrupulous pharma/finance company? They’d make way more money and do way less work. I’d even argue that fraud in the private sector is less unethical - if investors give money to a fraud they deserve to lose it, and regulators take an adversarial stance and have whole orgs (in theory) policing fraud like the SEC and FDA.

    It takes a really particular kind of scumbag to seek a position of public trust, make a bunch of trainees financially and professionally dependent on them, accept taxpayer money intended to help cancer patients, then commit fraud.


  • In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.

    The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.

    So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).
















  • New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.

    The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.

    Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.

    Largely agree with all your other points though.




  • Not a huge fan of the Israel situation but it does seem like they often stay out at the US’s request:

    During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Iraq carried out a missile campaign against Israel, in which it launched 42 modified Scud missiles (designated Al-Hussein) at Israeli cities with the strategic objective of provoking Israel into launching retaliatory attacks and potentially jeopardizing the multinational coalition formed by the United States against Iraq, which had full backing and extensive contributions from other Muslim-majority states; Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks due to American pressure, and Iraq failed to gather support for its occupation of Kuwait.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq–Israel_relations