182400+ entries in 0.041s
mircea_popescu: this. they thing "oh, patria si buitres no", "soberania" blablabla. then talk football and peronismo. and don't matter. and it's ok, because THEIR FRIENDS see them as people.
mircea_popescu: "Let's take all this at face value. Is he entitled? Delusional? I don't doubt for a moment he sincerely believes he is a lawyer, because lawyer for him isn't a profession or even a job, it's a label, a code word for a kind of intellectualism he wants for himself. As long as "all of my friends see me as..." it was well worth the cost. He didn't study to become an attorney, he bought a back-up identity." << exactly
mircea_popescu: funyn thing being that they seem blisfully unaware of this.
mircea_popescu: i ocasionally encounter derps living the delusions of the foregoing, who i threaten and they go away.
mircea_popescu: i have yet to have met any argentine in any sort of position of power or relevancy of any kind whatsoever.
mircea_popescu: someone should go into fucking middle east to be blown to bits by really angry men, to protect this pasty ass' dumbass notions of reality. this is worth doing.
mircea_popescu: He gives a slight shrug and a smile as he heads back to work. "It could be worse," he says. "It's not like they can put me jail."
mircea_popescu: "Bank bailouts, company bailouts -- I don't know, we're the generation of bailouts," he says in a hallway during a break from his Peak Discovery job. "And like, this debt of mine is just sort of, it's a little illusory. I feel like at some point, I'll negotiate it away, or they won't collect it."
mircea_popescu: Unless, somehow, the debt just goes away. Another of Mr. Wallerstein's techniques for remaining cool in a serious financial pickle: believe that the pickle might somehow disappear.
mircea_popescu: everyone in argentina is a lawyer btw. im telling you, this country is the logical conclusion of that country.
mircea_popescu: "They understand I'm in a lot of debt, but I've done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important." [my edit: he isn't actually practicing law.]"
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski this is where i go "had he spent the 350k on bitcoin in 2011, he'd have a little over 500k-1.5mn a year now"
mircea_popescu: "It's a prestige thing," he says. "I'm an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to."
mircea_popescu: MR. WALLERSTEIN, for his part, is not complaining. Once you throw in the intangibles of having a J.D., he says, he is one of law schools' satisfied customers.
mircea_popescu: sure, my hos regularly get two bedroom, two bathroom apts, provided a) they're good at what they do and b) live in pairs or triples.
mircea_popescu: He lives with his fiancee who is "unperturbed by his dizzying collection of i.o.u.'s." She doesn't want him to get a corporate law job because (take a sip first): "we like hanging out together." Carly, another unemployed law graduate explains, "I guess I kind of assumed that someone would hook me up with something." I'm sure she felt she deserved it."
mircea_popescu: all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.
mircea_popescu: "WHEN Mr. Wallerstein started at Thomas Jefferson, he was in no mood for austerity. He borrowed so much that before the start of his first semester he nearly put a down payment on a $350,000 two-bedroom, two-bath condo, figuring that the investment would earn a profit by the time he graduated. ...Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague --
mircea_popescu: allow me to refer to the source material in my response.
mircea_popescu: given three kids ahead of you and three kids behind you you could ALWAYS pick at least two of each kind.
mircea_popescu: fucking hell. when i was that age i knew exactly where i could go. EVERYWHERE. and so did they.
mircea_popescu: et hired?" They think to themselves, "amn't I bright? Hard working? Fluent in legal theory?" And the employers respond, "how the hell would we know that?""
mircea_popescu: "And once they're in law school, there is more grade inflation and even retroactive adding of .333 to everybody's GPA. And now law school graduates are surprised to find they're unemployed. Law students had no real measure of their status as an applicant; no reliable descriptor of what kind of a school they went to (short of branding); and no reliable measure of their performance there. "What do you mean I can't g
mircea_popescu: that hole. relationships, business arrangements, political arrangements, scientific models, all of it the same exact hole left behind. "this is where nothing used to be".
mircea_popescu: g. "I think I belong in a top tier school..." How do you know? The analogy is you have no idea what kind of a man you are and thus what kind of a woman would be right for you, so you just harass the girls that other people think are the best. Then if you don't get her you're angry at the girl ("these bitches just want jocks and legacy applicants"); and if you get her you're surprised to find that three years with
mircea_popescu: "See? Grade inflation. We already know about the problem of grade inflation in colleges; the LSAT was supposed to help offset this by offering a standardization. Now the ABA wants to do away with the LSAT requirement. Fine. But the result of all this is you can't really be sure how you compare to other applicants, so instead you demand objectivity in the schools' rankings as a proxy to guess where you might belon
mircea_popescu: specifically. "precision that you can't act upon". could be the "web analytics" business as well.
mircea_popescu: "A ranking, like the "percent employed", is an example of information bias. You think you know something, but you don't. If Fordham is #21, is that different than saying it is #29? Or saying it is in the second decile? It's a deliberately obfuscated precision that you can't act on. That level of "certainty" does not inform your decisions."
mircea_popescu: all of this is ACTUALLY going on. and has been. for years, decades.
mircea_popescu: donations" factor by calling alumni and asking them to donate $5, and whoever doesn't donate label as deceased."
mircea_popescu: A quick word on the US News rankings. 25% of the ranking comes from a "peer quality assessment" in which schools rate each other. So, say you are Clemson Law School. What should you do? "Rate all other programs below average." And, of course, do what University of Wisconsin did: give the highest score only to itself and one other school that you're not really competing against. You can also bring up that "alumni
mircea_popescu: "They fake it because that pointless data gets handed over to the illusionists at US News along with other pointless data (expenditure per student, library facilities, max bench press) to generate a single overall ranking, which is just the kind of simplistic, pseudoscience objectivity that students, parents, and schools demand.
mircea_popescu: The schools do this because the schools are extremely profitable businesses: high cost, low margin.
mircea_popescu: A law grad, for instance, counts as "employed after nine months" even if he or she has a job that doesn't require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee's? You're employed.
mircea_popescu: How do they do this? "Enron-type accounting standards..."says a law professor. "Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty."
mircea_popescu: Which brings us to the first point, the main point: law schools are lying. Despite the fact that "JDs face the grimmest job market in decades" the schools are somehow reporting to prosepctive applicants that, e.g., "93% of grads are working" and "the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000."
mircea_popescu: anything up to what it'd cost me to butcher them and drain the blood and guts.
mircea_popescu: the rest - not only they can keep, i'd even pay them to keep.
mircea_popescu: the stable solution here is that the socialists get the crowd and wash their head with it, all i want is the well put together teenage sluts and the fewq and far between whose heads work.
mircea_popescu: i am not intending to "save" the mass from it's "opressive" government/landlords/what have you anymore than i intend to run around farms in rural england "freeing" the cows.
mircea_popescu: to quote myself, "Bitcoin suddenly opened the gate. It is a poisonous offering. You are grossly unequipped to interact straight with the refuse of Western society. Accepting investors with fortunes under a million dollars or whatever the limit was placed for US citizens may make sense. Accepting investors with fortunes under any arbitrary value and simultaneously wits under any arbitrary threshold is not a sound busine
mircea_popescu: you're turning into a modern version of the immaculate conceiver over there, you know ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i think you've well seen what the results of public access to phuctor were.
mircea_popescu: it both perpetuates the jwz "i only want to" class and it creates the "i know nothing and have some oppinions" class of stolfi/swanson/etc.
mircea_popescu: apparently teh dept of depting feels it needs more voices.
mircea_popescu: a compass is a compass. if you shove it up your ass it will be "internal"
mircea_popescu: well wtf sense does this make ? you don't have one so aim to fix it by having 100 ?
mircea_popescu: you say : thus therefore, the fact that there aren't 100 people to follow, so each of these 100 could follow one of those 100 (ie, the same one) is then the problem.