AnarchistSpaceDad @freakazoid@retro.social

Just went through and removed any followers who haven't posted in at least a year, then sorted follows by most recent and removed all the oldest who weren't following me back (possibly because I'd removed them as followers), except those with recent activity whom I still wanted to follow. It's possible I inadvertently removed someone who's still active, so if you feel like you should be following me and aren't, feel free to send a new request.

I'm not very strict about who I allow to follow me, but please have some posts and/or a reasonably detailed profile before requesting to follow.

A Trump-appointed judge is ordering employees to turn over communications that would expose other #union sympathizers within the company that #Starbucks could then terminate.

Use non-discoverable communications mechanisms like #Signal disappearing messages or real-time voice and video communications.

https://www.levernews.com/to-crush-unions-starbucks-targets-employee-communications-2/

And before someone suggests MMT as the answer, I'd like to point out that MMT is just a less complicated version of the same endgame, where the government has ultimate responsibility for price stability. Every single attempt at entrusting price stability to politicians has eventually resulted either in hyperinflation or a return to a precious metals standard.

Even under precious metals standards the politicians couldn't resist devaluing the currency to achieve political aims. With fiat currencies they don't have to revalue; they just print more. In the Roman Empire they eventually wouldn't even accept their own currency for taxes because it was so worthless. They established in-kind taxes, where you had to pay your taxes in wheat or sheep or whatever.

Bretton Woods 2 only dates back to 1970. One could call quantitative easing the start of Bretton Woods 3, but I suspect future historians will consider it the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods system. (The IMF's talk of a "Bretton Woods 2.0" is utter nonsense as far as I can tell.)

While researching central bank losses I saw a bunch of articles that say it's nothing to worry about. I don't think there's anyone on the planet qualified to say it's nothing to worry about. This is, as far as I know, unprecedented.

One of the fundamental principles of central banks is that their assets and liabilities must always balanced. They are not allowed to simply create money out of thin air. While on some level this is just an accounting gimmick, it's the only thing that differentiates what central banks do from simply printing money and giving it away.

The way the Fed handles losses is by treating them as a "deferred asset". The asset represents future profits they won't turn over to the Fed. But they don't get to keep the money; it's used to pay down the deferred asset, vanishing into thin air in the process. Which means that the Fed's losses are real losses that come out of the government's revenue.

The other possibility is that central banks eventually just give up on trying to make up their losses, and their losses become just another number all the "experts" claim doesn't matter. And people will most likely pretend it doesn't for as long as they can. But the problem with this scenario is that those unbalanced losses represent money that the central bank cannot pull back out of circulation without asking for it from the government, because even though they call it an asset they cannot sell it. Add that to the toxic assets they already hold, and the inevitable outcome is that the Fed loses its ability to control inflation.

Inflation will eventually fix the problem, but it can be very hard to stop once it gets going, especially if the government accelerates its borrowing in an effort to keep providing the same services. There is no alternative to living below your means after living beyond your means for so long. Aside from conquest/theft, I guess.

You only need to make $200k to be an accredited investor, but if you live in Silicon Valley that's not enough to own a home.

I had assumed the rate hike meant the Fed was tightening overall, but after March 8 they started increasing their balance sheet again. Their assets bottomed out at 8.34T on the 8th after having peaked at 8.965T last April, and they're now back up to 8.73T, closer to the peak than to where they were just a few weeks ago. Which bolsters my theory that the rate hike is purely about optics.

Meanwhile, the Fed is losing about $4B a week on its portfolio of billionaire turds, so it won't start paying remittances to the Treasury again anytime soon.

We had a class that had a couple of class properties (using a third party classproperty decorator) that would raise TypeError if it was fetched on the base class, because it tried to index into an attribute that is None by default. You weren't supposed to do that anyway, so we didn't have a check for it. But MagicMock now fetches all attributes on any class you are trying to mock in order to check if they're async closures. It uses getattr with a default of None, but getattr only expects AttributeError from properties, so it passed up the TypeError instead of returning the default value, which made the class un-mockable.

Just think, in another couple of decades we'll be fondly remembering the days when climate activists were just blocking bridges and supergluing themselves to things instead of blowing up buildings and setting thousands of cars ablaze every night.

As we blow up buildings and set thousands of cars ablaze every night.

Is one wireless access point per level of my house, in the ceiling of the hallway in the middle of the level, OK, or should I have one in each room where we use WiFi? The latter setup is probably only 1-2 additional APs.

Slack has turned everybody rude. "Waste your time reading this entire thread because I can't be bothered to summarize it for you despite the fact that I'm asking you a question."

I think part of this might be correlation rather than causation: if you think you need 2 week sprints, it's probably because you're not very good at keeping meetings on track, breaking down work, etc.

A majority of the issues people have trying to make #Scrum work seem to originate from trying to use 2 week sprints instead of 1 week. I've never seen 2 week sprints work well.

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that Slack is utterly toxic to corporate culture and productivity.

The main use of the term "NoSQL" is to inform others that you have no idea what you're talking about.

"Scheduling this meeting during the no-meeting block because it was the only time all the invitees were available."

s/toxic assets/billionaire turds/g

The impact of #AI on artists seems likely to be similar to the impact of sound recording on traveling musicians: the work of the best will become far more valuable, while most will end up out of work. Meanwhile, entirely new kinds of jobs with different skillsets will become available.

And like with sound recording, AI is likely to be monopolized to maximize the wealth transfer to people whose only contribution is already being rich (i.e. owning capital). That's the real problem.

In a system that pays people simply for owning capital, advancements that increase the productivity of capital will tend to increase wealth disparity. The solution to this problem is not redistributing breadcrumbs as the tech elites propose, but to change the underlying system so it doesn't work that way.