Assembly 2023 had a fantastic presentation[1] from @BackTheBunny (from X) about precisely this. When the US really wants to do something, the constitution is a parchment guarantee and the media runs cover for them. Many US gov agencies are basically supranational and extrajudicial.
I don't agree with everything he said but the information was well presented and enjoyable.
ha, your comment reminds of that quote from the mentor:
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals"
I agree with the point you're making but I think this is a less than ideal example:
>Did an early investor in Facebook do more work than an early investor in Pets.com?
It's quite possible that an investor who does more research, spends more time networking with smart young people, etc, would have to do more work in order to invest in better things.
And even if not, meritocracy means rewarding the quality of work, not just the quantity. Making smart investments should pay better than making dumb ones, even if it's not more work.
I feel this so hard. Whenever I read HN people are like "obviously we SWE's are economic elites who will never struggle financially, unlike everyone else"
Bro I have over ten years of dev experience, dozens of significant bug bounties including well-known projects like Chromium and Github, am a great competitive coder (love leetcode and codewars type challenges), and my brother makes much more money fixing air conditioners than I do as a dev.
Appsec is my specialty but my background is in React frontend (Node and Flask backend).
If it's hard for me, it must be brutal for new grads and people just coming out of bootcamps. I'm lucky that I focused on open source instead of going to college, because when I started looking for work I already had a portfolio and real experience, plus FOSS friends.
If anyone is looking for an appsec person who can find vulnerabilities, report them in a way that clearly explains the issue to other devs, and then write patches, please do reach out. Glad to work for WAY less than $60 an hour lol.
Currently I'm a freelancer, can show projects I've worked on. I don't mind hoops at all, send me a coding challenge or CTF or whatever you want :)
The job market is not great right now, but sounds like you could have moved up last year.
> Glad to work for WAY less
That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.
> instead of going to college
It's fine if you just want to have work. But won't cut it if you'd like a coveted job, as your resume is filed to /dev/null within minutes. Ask me how I know.
Oh yeah, I understand, last year I was indeed making boatloads of money.
Right now I'm focused on something other than making tons of money tbh. There's a job I covet, so I've been just focusing on maxxing relevant skills so I can join this elite club of extremely cool people working on this very cool thing.
But after that I'm gonna go back to money, for sure.
Btw I love your blog. That same essay "How to be a hacker" is the one I consulted as a teenager, which led me to switch from QBASIC (my first lang, on the recommendation of an IRC channel that was probably trolling me) to Python.
I mean, this cuts both ways. One of the most consistent predictors of success in public school is parental involvement.
The only school I ever went to that was good for socialization was community college. Tbh, for learning too. I basically learned all of math, from arithmetic up, as an adult at community college, to compensate for learning nothing and getting pushed through all of the grade levels at public school.
I wish they had community colleges where I live now lol.
Exactly. There are involved parents whose kids are going to thrive in the public school. There are uninvolved parents whose kids are going to do poorly no matter where they are.
So the question becomes "should more taxes be spent to disproportionately favours kids whose parents are uninvolved, in the hopes that they reach the same outcome as kids of the involved parents?"
If a school system is organized around providing each child with the same investment of education and expecting some to make use of that investment more than others, then answer would be no. If it is organized around trying to get the same outcome from each child regardless of how much it costs, the answer is yes.
>it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids.
I agree. Public school is not a great place for socialization, and it's not hard to create something better. Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other motionless in silence for several hours lol
The advantage of public school isn't that the socialization is super high quality, but that it's going to be broader spectrum than pretty much any alternative.
It's not about getting your kids to form the best relationships possible, it's about teaching them to be comfortable with and learn to handle a huge swathe of people that are different from themselves.
And, possibly more importantly than that, it's about teaching kids to do this without the immediate presence of their parents.
Are public schools a perfectly diverse cross section of the population? Of course not. Are they a whole lot closer than very nearly any private school or home school? Absolutely.
In my experience, socialization at school is "broader" in that you meet kids from a wider range of the population, but that breadth is destroyed by the fact that they are all exactly the same age as you are.
Homeschooling brings you into contact with a self-selected subset of the population, but across much wider range of ages.
I split the difference with a Montessori School. Broad range of ages in each class. The whole school interacts during the 2 hour collective lunch and recess time. It's been a good experience for my kid and the school continues in a somewhat similar way after elementary. It's more of home school cooperative than public school in style and I'm okay with that for now. I'd like my daughter to move at her own speed and get more help or more advanced work if she needs it. I just can't be the one to do it. I have no patience
Oh, so because not everyone can do it, nobody should be allowed to? We should all strive for the lowest common denominator? That makes strong communities?
The best part about socialization in public schools it you will meet someone who isn't like you. I know plenty of home schooled kids who got plenty of socialization - but it was all people of the same group as their parents. Same religion, same politics...
Do you really think kids in school sit silently and motionless in class for several hours? I’d invite you to sample any classroom to test that hypothesis. There are many reasons to suppose schools aren’t the best for socialization, but that’s not it.
I'm not sure it's about socializing with other kids. There's also something about being able to function in a hierarchical organization (e.g. the workplace) that may not be developed in a home school environment.
I got really into fencing as a kid, which for whatever reason attracted a lot of private school and homeschooled kids, so I got to interact with the whole spectrum. I'm in an affluent, highly secular area, so this was basically the best case scenario for those homeschooled, and they were still definitely weird.
No amount of artificially constructed socialization immersion is going to beat the organic development of spending several hours, every day, surrounded by a ton of other kids.
What you end up with is a kid who has marginal experience with conflict resolution, communication skills, and any degree of independence. Which in turn, makes them perceived as weird, meaning that when they do have social interactions with others, they get marginalized, and further deprived of social development.
Public schools definitely have a misalignment of interests problem, but private schools solve that problem without stunting your child's charisma.
> I got really into fencing as a kid, which for whatever reason attracted a lot of private school and homeschooled kids
Selecting relatively obscure sports that nonetheless have a decent representation on college sports rosters is a college admissions and scholarship “hacking” thing. Fencing used to be a great choice for that, dunno if it still is.
Her point is that this effect is way bigger in 3rd world countries, where these kinds of beliefs signal alignment with "The West" and the status that comes with that.
>Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism)[a] is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews.
I'm a fellow fan of looking into words' etymologies, but it would seem that antisemitic has not had much to do with 'semitic' for quite some time.