Block_thought

What if the job market was a true market, where jobs could be bought by the highest bidder? An intriguing thought experiment. Applicants would seek financing and apply to purchase an entry-level job, say, from someone ready to trade upwards in their career — similar to how the housing market works now. Recruiters become brokers. A great system for job-holding incumbents, terrible for everybody else 

The big idea: A job you can buy and sell

Exiled on Saint Helena, Napoleon had only the occasional English newspaper for information. Not knowing English, he set about learning it, taught by his biographer, Emmanuel de Las Cases. He wrote letters for Las Cases to correct: “Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged”

Napoleon’s “Englich” Lessons

Debates about Large AI Models revolve around their intelligence or its lack. It would be more useful to see them as a new cultural and social technology that allows us to harness unmanageably complex human-made information — à la markets and democracies. A product’s price or an election result are incomplete, selective but useful measures of large amounts of individual knowledge and actions

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Essay about the arrival of infinite scroll on the web, presented in a clever circular design that the reader can scroll through forever. "The scrollbar solved the web’s first scaling problem: how to situate yourself within content that stretched beyond the visible screen. Somewhere along the way, the usage changed and became a fuel for motion. A motion I can’t really control and a motion I can’t really resist"

Navigation queues | Navigation cues

Everything we understand about the cosmos can be traced back to angels. Medieval debates about bodiless celestial beings that were nonetheless located in time and space forced an update to Aristotelian notions of physics. In the thinking of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and others, an invisible force such as God's will could act on such a body. This laid the framework for modern physics

Legacy of the Angels

Unlike traditional elites who can pass down land, family businesses, or social networks, this class’s only transferable asset is earning potential, which their children must re-earn through education and training. Education has become more expensive; professional training is lasting longer — “a wage cut by other means”. “The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is unsustainable”

Managerial Class Has No Future

Many writers have pursued the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, to no end. This one doesn't find the answer either, but at least does it in a way that explains why a definitive result is now vanishingly unlikely. The trail went cold long ago, and crypto has become enmeshed in the investment landscape. "There is no paternity test for Bitcoin"

In Pursuit Of The Bitcoin God

A group of friends build a scale model of time on a dry lakebed in the Mojave to visualise the entire span of human civilisation against 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. The effect is appropriately humbling.

To Scale: Time | Video | 10m 20s

AskSN

What's the best financial advice you ever got?

Aardvark

Dont take financial advice from anyone. Do your own research. Asses your risk to reward ratio and never get too greedy

Suppose a pedestrian gets hit by a bus, but cannot recall the colour of the bus responsible. The pedestrian sues the Blue Bus Company, as they own 75% of the buses in town, and the odds are high it was one of their buses. Should the pedestrian win? “If we were to let baseline probabilities dictate verdicts, we’d risk punishing the likely without evidence — instead of proving who was guilty”

The Blue Bus paradox

The “melancholy image” of the commuter, as quoted in Benjamin’s Arcades

Memes

Meme Monday - Best Bitcoin Meme Gets 5,000 CCs

There is no gold at Fort Knox

![](https://m.stacker.news/82599)

Despite the title, a defence of the humanities. They furnish a cultured class within society. “Writing a commentary on Virgil is just as useless now as it was in the 450. The humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices which marks one as a member of a particular class. What humanists want most of all is to initiate their students into that class”

There Is No Case for the Humanities - American Affairs Journal (2017)

culture

Persuasive argument that we should publish more biographies about failures, rather than allowing successes to dominate the record. For example, a Belgian lawyer called Paul Otlet spent decades compiling what he termed a “Universal Bibliography” that would allow everyone to “become his own editor” and answer any question. He failed, but his efforts deserve to be better known

Let there be more biographies of failures (2021)

Stacker Saloon

saloon

[I\'m Explaining a Few Things](https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-22618_I-8217-M-EXPLAINING-A-FEW-THINGS) - Pablo Neruda


Thinking about this poem. 

People With Parents With Money

Satire of the bag. “Bags can live for years high in a tree, much like other creatures of the plastic animal kingdom. Bags form colonies that absorb other colonies of marine mammals and reptiles, who — in confusion — eat them, believing them to be jellyfish or Medusas. Bags eat away at the beliefs held by human beings regarding usefulness. Through this tactic, they determine their multiplication and survival”

Bags -

Such is the stigma attached to being dependent on family money that it was tricky to find interview subjects on this topic. The 14 people here are different in many ways — demographically as well as in the nature of their parents' richness — but they are all giving something up, like their privacy, in exchange for the cash. A mixed picture emerges from their accounts, sometimes frivolous, but often sad

Field guide to bad arguments. Being able to spot them is the first step to defeating them. There are seven types: the appeal to ignorance, ad hominem attacks, the slippery slope analogy, the straw man, the appeal to authority, the false dichotomy, and whataboutism. Their use does not necessarily mean the point is wrong; merely that its maker is resorting to underhand tactics to try and win

Logical fallacies: Seven ways to spot a bad argument

[Words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jmq3mon8TSC99ittm/common-probability-distributions) are power-law distributed: the more frequent a word is, the more salient it is in most people's minds, and hence the more it gets used in the future.

[Haste](https://amzn.eu/bppQJcv) is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

[I told](https://amzn.eu/e8SlwbJ) students never to start a story with someone waking up in bed, but here I go and I'm not even a cockroach.

[There is](https://www.berfrois.com/2021/12/the-christmas-numbers/) no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article.

[It is](https://amzn.eu/2GJKBZ4) perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating.

[In order](https://amzn.eu/9bMbfuk) that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all, they must think it startling.

[If a](https://amzn.eu/4V9ZgAm) man must needs be conceited, it is certainly better that he should be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really possess. For then his vanity remains more or less superficial; it remains a mere mistake of fact, like that of a man who thinks he inherits the royal blood or thinks he has an infallible system for Monte Carlo.

Something more is necessary

Fun Fact Friday - Best Fun Fact Gets 5,000 CCs

The [waffle house index](https://www.fema.gov/blog/its-little-piece-normal) is an informal metric used by FEMA to determine the severity of a disaster - if the local Waffle House is closed, things are very bad (they rarely close).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​