NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on Why do domestic prices rise with tariffs? in ~finance
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Comment on Why US President Donald Trump's tariff chaos actually makes sense (big picture) in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentIndustrial manufacturing jobs aren’t inherently better paid than high skilled service jobs. They just had the benefit of inertia from the heavy union organizing that happened during the early days...but it can't be ignored that de-industrialization has largely contributed to the hollowing out of the working class.
Industrial manufacturing jobs aren’t inherently better paid than high skilled service jobs. They just had the benefit of inertia from the heavy union organizing that happened during the early days of industrialization. The hollowing out of the working class has come from a recalibration of negotiating power between workers and owners since the stagflation shock in the 70s and the Reagan revolution that followed, not the types of work the workers are doing.
Manufacturing output in the US hasn’t even declined that much, it’s just that the sorts of very high value added manufacturing we do now is largely automated. And even a lot of small-scale manufacturing is as well. You don’t need as many machinists when you can have one person program a CNC machine. You don’t need a bunch of people to knit scarves when you have automating knitting machines that can either operate industrially or take up about a bookshelf’s worth of space and have someone run an Etsy shop out of their garage all by themselves.
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Comment on Why do domestic prices rise with tariffs? in ~finance
NaraVara Link ParentTrade deficits are awesome actually. Other countries send us finished goods made of rare metals, steel, etc. in exchange for, like, excel spreadsheets with requirements.Trade deficits are awesome actually. Other countries send us finished goods made of rare metals, steel, etc. in exchange for, like, excel spreadsheets with requirements.
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Comment on Why do domestic prices rise with tariffs? in ~finance
NaraVara Link ParentThis hasn’t really been successful anywhere it’s been tried and this exact policy is one of the main reasons India failed to industrialize for a half century after independence while the rest of...Tariffs in the short to medium term increase domestic production if the tariff is sufficient to make domestic products cheaper, and tariffs increase production in the long run if it's sufficient to make the large capital expenditures needed for competitive domestic manufacturing less risky.
This hasn’t really been successful anywhere it’s been tried and this exact policy is one of the main reasons India failed to industrialize for a half century after independence while the rest of the Asian tiger economies did. It’s also why Argentina lagged behind the US in development. It only works if you are extremely targeted about what industry you want to foster and protect. If you just try to do blanket import substitution it results in poor quality control and lowered output because there is no competition. If barriers to entry are a problem, it’s usually a lot more effective to float the capital up front to clear them so the fledgling industry can rapidly develop to be competitive with whatever the state of the art globally is. If you give it a guaranteed domestic market that’s safe from competition they never have to and, like India, you just crank out the same shitty Ambassador car year after year after year after year.
If Korea sheltered Hyundai and Kia that heavily they’d have never had to up their game from being unreliable shitboxes to approach being on par with where the Japanese makers are.
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Comment on What if we made advertising illegal? in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentMy go-to move is to just search for [make, model] parts diagram and try to find the thing. The problem is every website that does this stuff is so loaded down with garbage that they’re basically...My go-to move is to just search for [make, model] parts diagram and try to find the thing. The problem is every website that does this stuff is so loaded down with garbage that they’re basically unusable, and often the PDFs of the diagrams are so low rez they’re illegible.
What ought to be the industry standard convention now is to have a universal wiki of appliance documentation and every appliance produced has a QR code stamped somewhere visible that I can scan and access them for parts diagrams, schematics, etc. (And for electronics, links to firmware as well). Stop making me look for serial numbers and shit.
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Comment on What if we made advertising illegal? in ~tech
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentOne of the functions of advertising is to make you aware of the concept of a product that you may not know existed or a vocabulary for thinking/talking about a problem to be solved with a product...One of the functions of advertising is to make you aware of the concept of a product that you may not know existed or a vocabulary for thinking/talking about a problem to be solved with a product that you wouldn’t have if you’re not aware of the field. If I had never heard of Yaupon, how would I ever think to look for it? Or if what I want is a way to listen to music what am I gonna search for? Record player? Tape deck? Smart speaker? Sonos? “Thing that plays music out loud through one of those boxes?”
What you’re proposing would require the government to come up with some sort of data model to categorize the whole galaxy of stuff out there so it’s searchable and indexable. A galaxy of stuff that is constantly growing and changing and recategorizing itself at that.
Then there’s the problem where even if I know exactly what I want to the point where I could draw a picture of it, I might not actually know what it’s called. Like I am constantly at a loss about how to buy replacement parts for random things in my house because “long plastic thing with a t-shaped hook on it that curves forwards and unlatches a hook to eject the water filter from my [make and model number] refrigerator,” surprisingly, still doesn’t turn up much when I put it into Google with a lot of additional sleuthing.
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Comment on US Senator Cory Booker's (NJ) marathon Senate speech has exceeded 24 hours and is on track to beat Strom Thurmond's Civil Rights Act filibuster. (gifted link) in ~society
NaraVara LinkThe parts of it I tuned into here and there were good. He started off by reading transcripts of constituent calls that he had a giant binder of laid in front of him. And he finished strong too....The parts of it I tuned into here and there were good. He started off by reading transcripts of constituent calls that he had a giant binder of laid in front of him. And he finished strong too.
The quote about the line in the declaration of independence about the signatories pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor was moving and is something I had rattling around in my head when Chuck Schumer was caving on the budget fight.
His apology for failing to meet the moment was well received and I hope it signals a greater fight in the opposition. The most frustrating thing about Trump 2 has been the fecklessness of all the powerful people at the pillars of civil society. From the titans of tech to the media to universities to Senate democrats it felt like everyone’s reactions to the Constitution being shredded and every value America has ever claimed to stand for being repudiated was to shrug and acquiesce to try and get back to business as usual. I hope this is the beginning of a realization that there isn’t some adult to come sort it all out. It’s us. We’re the adults. We have to commit ourselves to sorting it.
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Comment on US Senator Cory Booker's (NJ) marathon Senate speech has exceeded 24 hours and is on track to beat Strom Thurmond's Civil Rights Act filibuster. (gifted link) in ~society
NaraVara Link ParentIt’s a deeper cut. Us basic bitches are all about #10.He has a favorite Federalist Paper (No. 51)
It’s a deeper cut. Us basic bitches are all about #10.
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Comment on Hey parents, how many of you read vs. tell stories before bedtime for your kids? in ~life
NaraVara Link ParentAh my kid loves those Construction Site books though I kind of hate them ha. The rhyme scheme is nice to read and the art is good, but something about the total erasure of the fact that people are...Ah my kid loves those Construction Site books though I kind of hate them ha.
The rhyme scheme is nice to read and the art is good, but something about the total erasure of the fact that people are doing all that work, not machines bugs the hell out of me. Doesn’t matter to the boy though. Haha
I’ll have to give the prairie books a try. I grew up in India so we just had different references. It was mostly imported Archie comics and traditional folk tales for us.
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Comment on Hey parents, how many of you read vs. tell stories before bedtime for your kids? in ~life
NaraVara Link ParentThis is basically my approach to let him explore and do what he wants. I intervene to stop messes or safety hazards and I offer help if he seems to be getting frustrated. Sometimes I’ll chime in...The other thing to consider regarding imagination is play time. One of the things that parents tend to do these days is to schedule structured play. Structured play is things like sports or games with rules (whether it's hide and go seek or soccer), or overly scheduled games (think: "I got out the blocks for him to build a castle with" or "they are going to build this lego set" or "it's time for colouring"). Unstructured play is time where you let your child self direct and figure things out; "here's a bunch of stuff, have fun". You can do unstructured play with your kid, but it's important to let them drive the activity sometimes. I've heard people call this sort of thing "intentional neglect" but I think that's a pretty terrible way to look at it. Unstructured play lets your child exercise their imagination muscles to keep themselves entertained. It is super important!
This is basically my approach to let him explore and do what he wants. I intervene to stop messes or safety hazards and I offer help if he seems to be getting frustrated. Sometimes I’ll chime in and help him make a mental connection if he seems in the neighborhood (e.g. “Hey if stacking the red and blue tiles together make it look purple I wonder what happens if you stack other colors?”). Otherwise he’s largely puttering around on his own.
if you feel like your kid is behind
I’m not actually concerned about this from a cognitive development perspective. It’s more of a vague spiritual sense that I want him to have his own imagination and ideas about how things look rather than being too heavily influenced by commercial art. Kind of like how I have a mental image of Aragorn when I read the Lord of the Rings and he doesn’t look at all like Viggo Mortenson, but basically everyone born after me reads those books and sees Viggo in their mind’s eye. (Gandalf does look like Ian McKellen but, strangely, he always did!) He’s too young to be worried about that I know, but I think that sort of ability to “conjure an image” is a muscle that needs training but I’m not really sure when it gets trained. I also encounter a lot of people who are simply not that good at it as adults. I don’t know to what extent it’s a nature vs. nurture thing, but I feel like my own skills have atrophied over time (basically as I’ve come to spend more time consuming visual media rather than reading) so I know there is some element of conditioning. So I am concerned it might be wiring my kid in a certain way too.
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Comment on Religious switching into and out of Islam in ~humanities
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentIt’s not even that participation makes it real. Let me try an analogy. Suppose we live in a rural Chinese village in the 15th century. There is a belief that drinking tea is healthy. For all...It’s not even that participation makes it real. Let me try an analogy.
Suppose we live in a rural Chinese village in the 15th century. There is a belief that drinking tea is healthy. For all practical purposes, we have very limited technology to actually determine to what extent this is true. We have some very vague anecdotal claims that we can’t systematize because there’s no way to collect large sample sizes or data or do stats on them. And we have subjective experience of feeling good after drinking it. That’s basically it.
Given those facts we can have a positive, negative, or indifferent take on the claim that tea drinking is healthy. The thing is though, whether or not we participate in the tea culture doesn’t have much to do with how we feel about the claim at all. We might just enjoy the taste, regard it as a social expectation, just be habituated into it by cultural pressure, are addicted to caffeine, or whatever. Regardless of why we’re drinking it, we either will or won’t receive the fruit of the practice. There’s really no way of knowing, since we have no way of seeing the counterfactual world where we didn’t drink tea. It’s just a thing we do, maybe hoping for a certain outcome, maybe not. Just being aware that the outcome is among the options on the table and we suspect it might be the case. In this world, drinking the tea is what people pay attention to, your opinions about the health benefits of tea are basically irrelevant.
Christianity is not like that. Christianity is more like you have to believe in the power of tea for the tea to work. With some denominations, you don’t even actually have to drink any tea to obtain the benefit at all. In this world, drinking the tea is less important than whether you think it will be good for you. If you believe it, you will probably drink it of course. But that’s not the important part. What’s funny is that even as an analogy this claim is not as ridiculous as it sounds at first. Medications actually do work better when you believe in them. Telling someone a pill will be really good at helping with their pain will make the same pill more effective than if you tell them it’s efficacy is dubious. So it’s possible the Christians are onto something!
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Hey parents, how many of you read vs. tell stories before bedtime for your kids?
My son loves reading time before bed, but he’s only 3.5 so the books have mostly been picture books until now. Lately though he’s been getting more into stories with plots and an extended...
My son loves reading time before bed, but he’s only 3.5 so the books have mostly been picture books until now. Lately though he’s been getting more into stories with plots and an extended narrative, but entirely in the form of movies. There aren’t a lot of kid’s books to go around with the sorts of dramatic stories he likes, they’re more like “caterpillar eats food” and “train engine climbs a hill with grit and determination” type stuff. And whenever I’ve tried to have him just lay down and listen to me read a story without any pictures to stare at he has absolutely no interest. He really likes having pretty visuals to look at.
I know when I was a small child these sorts of board/picture books weren’t really a thing in India. The pre-sleep ritual was usually “storytime” instead, where my parents would tell us stories. I’m a little bit concerned that my kid has been so accustomed to always having visual cues presented to him that it’s stunting his imagination a bit, like failing to exercise his capacity to visualize ideas and concepts for himself without being anchored by some artist’s depiction.
So I’m curious to hear from other parents or caregivers/educators (@kfwyre?). Did you find there was a natural transition point between going from picture books to telling/reading stories? Was there any sort of work you had to do to enable it? Are there “exercises” I can work on to help my son exercise his imagination? I have been working with him to have him tell me stories about his day, which he does pretty well. But his stories are always quite grounded and he’s usually telling me what he’s actually done and seen. When my nephews and nieces were his age they tended to spin out a lot of random stories that pretty obviously did not happen, and I assume this is because they had more experience being told stories themselves rather than just factual reporting about the happenings around them.
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Comment on Do you have games that you play (almost) exclusively? in ~games
NaraVara LinkI’ve played basically only Helldivers 2 since, like, last summer. I had a brief bout of playing Metaphor: Refantazio but after I stopped to travel for Thanksgiving couldn’t pick it up again....I’ve played basically only Helldivers 2 since, like, last summer. I had a brief bout of playing Metaphor: Refantazio but after I stopped to travel for Thanksgiving couldn’t pick it up again. (Common issue for me with JRPGs where once I lose momentum I have no will to restart).
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Comment on Religious switching into and out of Islam in ~humanities
NaraVara Link ParentI would make that claim. Christianity operates on a model of how the universe works where what you believe matters. It’s a reflexive thing. You don’t just believe in God as an objective fact about...I don’t claim that Christianity is a necessary component of atheism.
I would make that claim. Christianity operates on a model of how the universe works where what you believe matters. It’s a reflexive thing. You don’t just believe in God as an objective fact about how the world works, it is the act of believing (in spite of its apparent absurdity) that saves you from original sin. It’s not like the belief will elicit the right actions that will save you or that they will cultivate the right habits of mind to become spiritually evolved. Faith, in itself, is the thing that saves you.
That’s the only context in which “atheism” as a sort of “belief-system” even makes sense as a thing. In most cases, what you believe about how the world works doesn’t actually change anything about how the world works for you. So it wouldn’t make sense to hang your hat on it. People tend to identify with things that actually impact what they do and how they live. In societies where the dominant religious traditions are polytheistic, they don’t actually care whether you believe in God(s) or not. The Gods exist or don’t regardless of your feelings about them. You can practice appropriate rituals and traditions to enter into a relationship with them but it’s the practice—a thing you do—that matters not what you think about it. Consequently people tended not to talk in terms of belief or disbelief, they tended to talk in terms of whether they observed certain rituals or not.
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Comment on If you had to buy a car today, what would you buy? in ~transport
NaraVara Link ParentDidn’t they conclude it mostly came down to poorly fitted floor mats getting stuck under the pedal?Didn’t they conclude it mostly came down to poorly fitted floor mats getting stuck under the pedal?
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Comment on If you had to buy a car today, what would you buy? in ~transport
NaraVara LinkI think I’d lean towards a Mazda CX-70 or CX-90 plug-in hybrid (basically the same, the 90 has a 3rd row and the 70 has more cargo space). The plug in range is like 50-70 miles, which means it’s...I think I’d lean towards a Mazda CX-70 or CX-90 plug-in hybrid (basically the same, the 90 has a 3rd row and the 70 has more cargo space). The plug in range is like 50-70 miles, which means it’s basically an EV for most day-to-day driving and becomes a hybrid with great mileage for longer road trips. It handles really nicely and the interior feels pretty luxurious, they’re approaching a fancier Toyota or the lower trim BMWs. Plus it’s a Toyota drive-train so parts are cheap and maintenance should hopefully not be too eye-watering.
Other options, the new Toyota Sequoia comes in a hybrid that gets great mileage. I test drove it and it’s extremely practical. It’s boring compared to the CX-70, which itself isn’t the most thrilling ride. But it’ll haul your kids and stuff and it’ll be reliable and cheap to maintain if that’s what you need.
I wish they had a hybrid Sienna or Honda Odyssey now because those minivans have all kinds of great family/dog bells and whistles. The Sienna has a small refrigerator and a built in vacuum cleaner! But it’s also boring to drive. And I live in a dense enough city that parking these big boys is a hassle.
On the more fun side, I’ve been looking at the new Honda Passport and Toyota 4Runner. The 4Runner comes as a hybrid, but the mileage is still like 19 mpg in the city. But they look cooler and are more fun to drive. But it’s definitely an aspiration thing for me to need stuff like 4WD and all this overlanding frippery.
Basically everything new is gonna end up being about $10-15k over your $30k price range though unfortunately.
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Comment on Beware tech career advice from old heads in ~comp
NaraVara Link Parent1.) The field used to recruit primarily for smart generalists who had a solid foundation of technical skills and were good at figuring stuff out. The field now recruits primarily for people who...1.) The field used to recruit primarily for smart generalists who had a solid foundation of technical skills and were good at figuring stuff out. The field now recruits primarily for people who check the boxes on having experience with specific, highly abstracted frameworks, tools, platforms, and technologies which makes it harder to get your foot in the door or dabble in multiple things.
2.) There is a LOT of competition because of a glut in hiring and poorly designed training programs/bootcamps. There’s a lot of people now who have nearly 10 years of experience as “engineers” but whose actual engineering skills are lacking because they’ve been able to job hop or coast largely by drafting on other people on their teams. Because of the credentialism in item #1, it’s hard for a candidate to stand out or show that they’ve done good work unless they have a big name on the resume.
3.) Most technical problems now are actually strategy and business problems, but company IT departments are too engineer-brained to admit it. Everyone wants to pretend they’re AWS or Google and solving cutting edge engineering challenges, but for most companies’ use cases the engineering issues have mostly been solved and are matters of implementation. What’s actually holding them back is that the company’s silos don’t collaborate effectively and their data architectures are too chaotic and out of date to do any cool modern stuff with them. They’re hiring for the wrong mix of people/skill sets basically.
4.) There’s just a lot more scamming and spamming in the jobs space. Recruiters are getting scammed with AI applicants and scam placement agencies. Applications are getting scammed with fake job postings, umpteen million “knowledge checks” before you can talk to anyone, and very dumb resume filtration systems that make no sense and drop good candidates in favor of manipulative SEO people.
There’s other issues, but those have been the major ones. The other one is just a pipelining thing. The incoming generations of technical talent simply lack a lot of technical foundations AND basic office/professionalism skills that used to be taken for granted and teams and management styles have had trouble adapting.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe problem there is that one end of the chain is the hardware, so anything being displayed by that hardware is a potential point of compromise. Like I said, I think the way to do it is with a...Communication between the phone and watch could easily use some other method
The problem there is that one end of the chain is the hardware, so anything being displayed by that hardware is a potential point of compromise.
Like I said, I think the way to do it is with a very restrictive “licensing” program that can get all support pulled if you violate it. But companies like Facebook and Amazon are too big for Apple to really enforce such rules on, which ends up fucking the whole ecosystem.
I really don’t like the EU approach to regulating these because they mostly just seem to be focused on punishing Apple (and other large American tech companies) instead of setting up better rules for the market. It’s often rules that are like “Apple unfairly privileges Safari so let’s further entrench a world where everything is Chrome/Blink.” Or “Apple’s App Store restrictions are anti-competitive so we need to create a world where Epic is reaping the profits of abusive casino games for kids instead.” It doesn’t feel like they’re addressing the root cause of the suckage so much as trying to make sure different players benefit from the suckage.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThere’s also Podcasts, which is so open that most people don’t realize the iTunes Store is primary directory that everyone references.There’s also Podcasts, which is so open that most people don’t realize the iTunes Store is primary directory that everyone references.
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Comment on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentOn some dimensions but not all. E2EE is one of those things where there can’t really be an expectation of privacy unless the devices on both ends are trusted. They could do something like a...A company with the resources of Apple could absolutely find a way to allow more 3rd party support without significantly compromising on security
On some dimensions but not all. E2EE is one of those things where there can’t really be an expectation of privacy unless the devices on both ends are trusted. They could do something like a licensing program for third party hardware AND the messaging software they run to comply with however iMessages is working, but that would be so burdensome and onerous that vendors would still complain and most probably would not bother.
In most cases, people just accept the risk that the recipient they’re talking to is not using compromised hardware or a compromised client on their end. It’s probably not a big deal for the vast majority of people, but becomes a big deal for a handful of people like celebrities and business owners.
The thing is though, they actually focused on selling those cars in larger foreign markets where they had to compete with everything the global market had to offer. That’s the key element that forces them to compete hard to improve productivity and processes. Without that, you end up like India.