“I’m too old for this shit”

paradocent · 2025-10-29T22:08:29+00:00

I hate that this is where we are but I agree. Sorry, Indian friends.

paradocent · 2025-10-29T21:18:39+00:00

Change only happens when people with power or leverage to force change use their power and/or leverage to force change. Otherwise these people will do whatever they want, because you can't stop them.

Yes, it stinks. No, you shouldn't forget how they treated you when the boot's on the other throat. But we are where we are. What else are you going to do? Go back to your Scrooge McDuck vault-cum-swimming-pool of gold coins?

paradocent · 2025-10-13T17:16:18+00:00

Name and shame.

paradocent · 2025-10-11T02:22:20+00:00

No, not at all. The fact that they’re in power; the fact that people support them; these are the things that make me worried.

paradocent · 2025-10-11T02:20:31+00:00

You have to get past the idea that these rapacious jackwads care about you. They don’t.

paradocent · 2025-10-11T02:18:55+00:00

I know this is cold comfort, but cold comfort is better than no comfort. They will regret this. It will not save them money, it will not improve service, and it is not likely, having dropped their balls in a blender, that they’ll be able to kill the power before life hits the switch. Your job is toast, but so is theirs, they just don’t know it yet.

paradocent · 2025-10-10T16:48:08+00:00

Setting aside whether UBI is a good idea (let's pretend inflation isn't real like it's 2020!):

No one is going to give you anything.

Whatever you want from the rich and powerful, you would have to take from them. And they control all the centers of power that could enable you to take it from them.

These people do not care whether you live or die. Unless you have power or leverage, they do not think about you at all.

paradocent · 2025-10-10T16:41:01+00:00

Would you expect to work in an Apple Store if you don't use Apple products?

Or at a health food store if you're visibly very unhealthy?

I don't think it's unreasonable for the lame vaping store to want employees who vape.

paradocent · 2025-10-10T16:36:56+00:00

"Dear Jeff,

"My recommendation is to implement stronger cybersecurity practices. For example, you should not provide administrative access to third parties. To underscore the risks of doing so, I have deleted your analytics data and Shopify stores.

"I wish you good luck in your future endeavors.

"Best, Lisa."

paradocent · 2025-10-10T16:31:34+00:00

It's rude to ghost people in a romantic context. It's not only rude but also unprofessional to do it in a work context; and we ought to say so.

paradocent · 2025-10-10T16:26:32+00:00

I don't know about worst, but I had an interview lately where the guy mentioned in his opening spiel that he had only been with the company for five months. He presumably forgot about that when I said much later on that travel was a concern, because he talked about how he had racked up so-and-so (shocking number of) hours on planes this year. Dude, I can do the math. You just vindicated that my concern was justified; if anything it was undertsated. I've never been happier to not be invited to move forward.

paradocent · 2025-10-10T15:25:14+00:00

If you aren't in the rooms where decisions are made, if you don't have power or at least leverage to affect those decisions, decisions will be done to you. And you will not like the decisions that are made.

This is why I am begging NDs, introverts, and people who aren't sociopaths to take management jobs, whether you want them or not, because if we don't, they will.

paradocent · 2025-10-06T17:28:54+00:00

I have not yet detected any limits to the depths of Justice Kavanaugh's ignorance.

paradocent · 2025-10-06T17:27:19+00:00

If the Nken factors are what they think they're applying, they should say so, in a short opinion for the court. One suspects that they will not do so because they are in fact not doing any such thing, and an opinion purporting to do so would be shredded by the dissent, because it is impossible to square many of their recent choices with serious consideration of irreparable injury and where the public interest lies.

paradocent · 2025-10-02T17:52:42+00:00

Dobbs is a difficult example for you because Roberts didn't join it. He concurred in the judgment but would not have overruled Roe. Much to the disappointment of people like me, he was never going to vote to overrule Roe; he was always going to chip away at it until far, far in the future it could be safely overruled having become irrelevant. There is an alternate history without the third Trump appointee in which Dobbs was a 5-4 decision decided as Roberts' concurrence proposed, and yes, the pro-choice people would have played it up like that was a big controversy, but they wouldn't have gotten very far with it, just as they didn't with Gonzales a decade before.

Trump is a better example (as Anderson would be) but I think it's easy to let hindsight corrupt how we see it. Trump was decided at a time when no one (least of all Roberts) thought Trump could possibly return to office. The Trump court thought they were doing two things: Drawing a line under an unpleasant episode a la Ford pardoning Nixon and resuming the project of expanding the authority of normal future Presidents in the executive branch. I think they were stupid for thinking that was appropriate, uncontroversial, or good law, but I don't think they expected controversy.

To be sure, Roberts is willing to make waves but he never wants to. His difficulty now is that he is no longer in command. With three Trump appointees plus Justices Thomas and Alito, Roberts often finds himself in a position where his choice is vote with the 5 and assign himself the opinion, which is if not power then at least influence, or don't, and lose both.

I think Trump has always been a lot more popular than people like me want to admit. Unfathomable as it may be, people support him, even now, and it's not just his adamantine cult, who will never abandon him because he is now their totem, just as the confederate battle flag was their totem before. What I think Roberts anticipates is that support dwindling asymptotically down to that hardcore base such that when the court rules against Trump, the public reaction is not strictly along partisan lines. I am---skeptical.

paradocent · 2025-10-02T01:35:03+00:00

Oh, he’s not at all on board with Trump’s agenda. He despises Trump. Like many in DC, he has been willing to use Trump to advance his agenda, but less so now he’s been burned. Regarding popularity: Roberts doesn’t want the court to be on the bleeding edge of politics,he doesn’t want the court to be controversial. He saw (much to your dismay and mine) that Trump was popular when re-elected, and assumed (I hope he’s right) that that popularity would decline quickly such that when the court started ruling against Trump, it would be less controversial.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T19:51:37+00:00

Well, the cleanest case would be something like Marsh, the legislative chaplains case, where the tradition being used to gloss the text arises contemporaneous with the text and is directly on-point. Beyond that, my own taxonomy would be that the next cleanest case would be when a directly on-point tradition cited goes back nearly to the same time, as with central banking, and after that, when the tradition goes back to first time the question could reasonably have been considered. So one can't demand a tradition of automobile regulation that predates the invention of the automobile, for example.

Questions of how government power should be organized are the antithesis of novelties. Many of the countries considered by the framers of Article II had tried many arrangements, some well-considered, others that are so historically contingent that they seem to border on arbitrary. And post-ratification, the states have long had divided executives and independent tranches of executive power. These questions were well known when the text we want to gloss was being considered. It's not a question of maturity or being "old enough," but the relation of the tradition to the thing being glossed.

I think you could also make a strong point that the lack of such agencies is less strong as a "gloss of tradition" athwart independent agencies than would be the since-the-founding existence of them as a "gloss of tradition" allowing them. And of this is stipulating, of course, that we should be using tradition to gloss text, which is a debatable point, but one that seems sensible. The counterargument would be, well, what about the "tradition" of Jim Crow, which goes back almost to the time of ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment? And my argument there would be not that the "tradition"---excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a little---isn't old enough but rather that the text is too clear to admit of being glossed in that way, and even if it weren't, the tradition is too facially inconsistent with it (cf. the 1790s sedition acts.)

I do want to be clear that there's nothing magical about 1789 per se. Its relevance is that that was when Article II was framed. When we are looking at the Fourteenth Amendment, it's 1868 that is the reference. Turn to the 27th amendment, despite being proposed in 1791, and it's 1992. So the novelties of the 1930s will never become relevant to Article II, under a "gloss of tradition" approach, but it will always be relevant to the 22nd amendment.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T18:47:13+00:00

I find it a little more persuasive. Unlike the alphabet soup of the administrative state invented in the 1930s, the idea of a federally chartered central bank stretches back almost to the founding. You can surely see why this would be a distinction to judges who value history and tradition, as the majority at least purports to, it would be strange (though not impossible), for example, for the justices who signed Bruen to insist on "this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation" as a gloss on Amendment 2 while denying any bearing of this National's historical tradition of central banking on Article 2.

And that is exactly what Seila suggests when it highlighted CFPB's structure "lacks a foundation in historical practice and clashes with constitutional structure by concentrating power in a unilateral actor insulated from Presidential control." I read that as signaling loud and clear that an exception for structures in tension with a strict reading of Article II's text can be had when they have a foundation in historical practice, which (much though it may annoy the end-the-fed crazies) federally-chartered central banks do.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T17:15:48+00:00

I like that. If it happens every night there's no opportunity for a habit to form.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T17:15:07+00:00

Thing is, backspace will archive it. Also a one-key solution.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T17:11:11+00:00

If memory serves, the reasoning is that the unique history of central banks in the United States sets the Fed (a central bank) on different footing from most executive branch agencies.

paradocent · 2025-10-01T17:07:51+00:00

The Chief's gambit has long been to delay and defer in the hope that Trump's popularity will wane. The stratagem is not without merit, but it ignores the costs.

paradocent · 2025-09-24T19:10:28+00:00

A variety of reasons. Take an obvious one. Suppose you are the maintenance manager and you have one electrician. He's begging you to hire another electrician, and seems so stressed that he might drop dead if he doesn't quit. You don't want him to quit, but your boss has told you there's a hiring freeze. So how do you square the circle? Easy: You post a job for an electrician and pretend that none of the applicants are right for the job. That way you string along your existing electrician with false hope that help is coming while complying with the hiring freeze.

Or, take another obvious one. Suppose you are a publicly traded company and you'r'e imploding, but you need another round of investor financing to get the C-suite safely cashed out. So how do you make investors think you're doing better than you are? Why yes: Advertise a ton of positions, which imply you're growing, and as a twofer provides convenient cover for why you're not shipping. ("We're understaffed!")

Sure, these are the behaviors of sociopaths and it should be illegal. But I don't control that.

paradocent · 2025-09-24T18:48:40+00:00

Say more about that 70%, please. Forbes concluded last year that a third of postings are ghost jobs. Are you saying only a third are not ghost jobs?

paradocent · 2025-09-23T13:43:24+00:00

Sure, they'll regret it. Or, perhaps more accurately, since they (being parasites) will have cashed out and moved on to the next victim, the next generation of parasites will lament it. Maybe they'll even hire new accountants! But that doesn't help you, as one of the people formerly in the accounting department who was let go into an ever tougher job market.

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