I very deliberately avoid politics. If I fail let me know.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: May 22nd, 2025

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  • Not sure what you mean by Michael Burry levels of ethical investment, but he has a fund and apparently its most recent disclosed holdings are here. You could just buy (or rather sell, in most cases) those. As you can see 6 out of 7 positions are short - meaning he’s betting the stock price will decline - and if you would rather bet against every corporation shorting is an option. But be aware, it’s very hard to make money shorting because you’re fighting inflation and losses are unlimited. Great way to go bankrupt, especially if you’re new to investing.

    Beyond that, if you want minimal exposure to some asshole CEO, you can invest in commodities like Gold (e.g. GLD, which is a gold ETF that just holds gold bars, and generally goes up over time) and a billion other things. Bond etfs are another option (but pose some risk of losing money at the moment due to inflation/interest rate fears), and if you wanna be a sort of landlord you can do a REIT. Many of these pay dividends which probably lowers your risk of loss to some degree. The markets are a little nutty right now and I can’t think of a single thing that’s easy to predict at the moment.

    Finally, there’s simpler options like high interest savings and CDs, which aren’t as terrible of an option as usual because interest rates are higher than inflation in the US for the time being.




  • Once I worked at a place that had its own in-house project management software. It actually worked rather well. Part of the problem is that every company has its own process and Jira and the like try to accommodate all of them and it ends up being a jumbled mess that doesn’t fit anyone’s actual process. It’s like trying to fit a tesseract-shaped peg into a round hole. But companies don’t like to spend money on developing their own software so that’s what we end up with.


  • Obviously, solar energy is going to continue to grow. Less obviously, this will have a pretty significant effect on global economics. Countries that previously lacked domestic energy production now will suddenly have it. Countries highly reliant on fossil fuel exports will suddenly be less important. I think this will probably be the most significant change and it’ll be for the better. Obviously global warming problems are on the horizon but over 5-10 years from now it’ll still be comparatively small.

    I personally don’t see AI getting much better than it is now because it’s starting to run out of how much it can do with existing data. It’ll continue to be a useful tool for autocomplete and generating low-effort content, but otherwise won’t rearrange society or build us dyson spheres or anything like some seem to expect. I don’t see software technology doing anything especially great for a while and its role in the economy may shrink for the first time really since it started.

    More speculatively, I’d guess we’ll see more advancements in DNA and RNA technology that will make medicine more resemble programming rather than throwing stuff at the body and hoping it works. This will progress slowly, but in 5-10 years I think we’ll be looking at some vaguely significant impact on common health problems. Other medical tech will be significant too - knowing someone who takes GLP-1s I think we’ve kind of missed celebrating how big a deal that is for some people.

    Society as a whole - who knows, that’s especially hard to predict. I tend to be optimistic that the current reactionary period will fade, having already used up its credibility. I worry though that we’re getting better at exploiting human emotions and that can be used by the powerful to control masses. But when has that ever not been a factor? We’ve only relatively recently emerged from the era of divinely ordained kings, and mass literacy is still quite new in the grand scheme of things. Our society will continue to evolve, a bit inconsistently.




  • I mean the other lyrics really do back it:

    So here’s a story from A to Z You wanna get with me, you gotta listen carefully
    We got Em in the place who likes it in your face
    We got G like MC who likes it on an—
    Easy V doesn’t come for free, she’s a real lady
    And as for me, ha-ha, you’ll see
    Slam your body down and wind it all around
    Slam your body down and wind it all around

    Basically they’re walking you through what you gotta do to please each one of them. Baby wants the lingus, Ginger and Sporty by contrast want it on an “e” - i.e. ecstasy, Posh of course only gets off if you buy her expensive stuff first, and only then do you prove yourself worthy of Scary, who will beat the living shit out of you.









  • I swiped almost everything right

    Don’t do this, if this is an input into your app’s algorithm at all it’ll assume you’re ugly and desperate and not show you to anyone. Only swipe on people you’d be at least potentially excited to meet and that could actually work out (e.g. don’t swipe right on someone who’s profile says “I want a man of god” if you’re a hardcore atheist). I shifted to this strategy on hinge and it made a noticeable difference in the number and quality of matches.

    Think about it - if you only swipe right on good matches (for both of you), they’ll see you and be more likely to swipe right on you, improving your match rate. And don’t worry about how their level of attractiveness plays into this, because it’ll be weighted for that.


  • As a massive introvert it’s pretty much the only way I meet anybody. I could write a multi-volume treatise on why people hate online dating and how it points to them doing it wrong in some way. But I’ll spare you other than to say remember that you’re asking a computer to match you with someone. It has no feelings for you and will just do what makes sense for the system as a whole, not for you in particular.

    Just have low expectations - a lot of people treat those they meet on the app as relatively disposable compared to someone they met in real life. So if someone ghosts you or just disappears from the app without a word, it’s definitely impolite but not uncommon. Don’t take it personally (even though my friends tend to take it personally when it happens to them).



  • The paradox of tolerance relies on a lot of assumptions that don’t really work in reality. We don’t tend to see more open societies have more intolerance, quite the opposite. Part of the problem is that “the intolerant” is not a single group, but many groups that hate each other. And those who are intolerant towards the intolerant are themselves part of the intolerant.

    For a less-political example, let’s imagine hypothetically that Lemmy is very pro-linux. However, some people who absolutely hate linux show up and start posting anti-linux memes. These people get insulted, downvoted, and eventually banned by others on Lemmy, because they’re showing intolerance towards linux.

    But then what happens to those anti-linux people? They go off and created their own forums, and talk about how intolerant lemmy is to people who don’t use linux. So whenever a linux user shows up on those forums, they’re inevitably banned. The result of intolerance of the intolerant is that they remain intolerant, and now the tolerant have become hard to distinguish from them, and there’s no way for pro-linux forces to be part of the conversation anti-linux people are having - allowing them to create their own culty filter bubble.

    Now imagine an alternative - instead of banning the anti-linux people, pro-linux lemmy users decide to engage with them and correct misconceptions about linux. After all, linux, like many other topics, can get kind of complicated, and linux users need to remember that not everyone has the same background knowledge that they do about the topic. Sure, some linux haters would be persistent, but maybe others would be like “hey, these linux folks are actually kind of cool and helpful, I want to be more like them.” That may sound idealistic, but I think that’s a lot closer to what we see in reality - intolerance thrives in closed off spaces, and dies in open ones.



  • Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it “everything becoming facebook”.

    Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself “I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet” JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it’s the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

    A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that’s not how email would work at all - you’d need a google account to both send and receive emails. That’s why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

    Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it’s like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it’s just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that’s how it should be.