For the record, I never objected to public employees or anyone else getting a decent pension. I objected to stuff like sheriff's lieutenants making $350k their last year of service w/a bunch of questionable overtime or many years of accrued vacation paid out at once, then retiring on that for life at age 50. Especially when that case was from San Bernardino county, which also coincidentally declared bankruptcy.

Sounds like they reformed that in 2013 although it didn't take effect until June 1, 2016 (for new employees). Everyone else can still goose the system apparently.

But yes, I do get the irony.

I'm getting wistful for the prior derail where he shared life hacks for wiping his ass.

Watched Derren Brown: Sacrifice last night, which painted an interesting picture for how we can reform Trump voters. The main subject of the story was this guy from Florida who hates immigrants and seemed super racist, particularly toward Hispanics. Brown did two things with him:

1. Gave him the results of a DNA test, which in particular showed about 1% each from the Middle East (Israel/Syria) and Central America (Mexico down to Peru) and seemed to make him rethink those places a little

2. Had him do an exercise where he sat in a chair across from another guy (just a few feet from each other), and had them silently look into each others' eyes for 4 minutes. Other guy was British, maybe of South Asian ethnicity? Anyway, our Trump voter made it a couple minutes of staring at this guy before breaking down into tears.

What? Why? So many questions. Is there a YouTube of this somewhere?

Something about that makes no sense. What other treatment was provided to make this happen? Was this only one person or did they do this with other people?

I'd be curious about the results with a larger sample and follow-up studies to see how their political/racial views changed since then.

idk, lots of repressed feelings and anger bubbling up and being challenged?



Just one person.

Careful with questions like this. You'll get relegated to tldr

Trying to square that video against the Jimmy Kimmel one with the military DACA family and wondering what the difference is. Is it just a sample size problem or is there actually something to that method?

Sounds like people are getting tired of the suzzer retirement derail, but briefly:

Suzzer, I'm not entirely comfortable giving you advice (partly because I don't want to spend the time understanding all the details of your options and partly because I don't know you and your situation), but I'll share my experience.

I had worked in a position at UW for just over 5 years (the threshold for vesting) where I was part of a defined benefit pension plan, when I got another job at the university that only offered a 401(k) type plan. I had the option of rolling my money over into the new plan or leaving it behind and being able to collect a fractional pension when I retired. I opted to leave the money in the pension plan for exactly the reason you touched on in your OP of diversifying my retirement plan: a little pension, (hopefully) SS, and my stock/bond mutual fund-based savings hopefully put together give me a better chance at having a decent retirement. Just my experience/thought process, hope it helps.

Was just about to post this.

According to Kimmel in an interview with PSA, the video was actually worse than what was aired. He said that he nearly got into a fight with one of the guys there.

My suspicion is that the people in the group during the Kimmel interview wanted to show everybody else in the group how virtuous they were by bashing the family. The ancestry test Brown gave also influenced the thinking of the crying guy. He was one of the people he was condemning and it led to a showing of empathy once he had his skin in the game.



Starts at 3:58

I would guess (strong emphasis on "guess") the staring-into-eyes thing, and being 1 on 1, is a much more intimate experience than just sitting across from someone and talking to them, especially when surrounded by 10 of your most racist friends.

Thanks - sounds like I'd be dumb to turn down the pension.

Random thought: News curated by an algorithm tends to promote humanity at its worst, because it takes a human curator to understand how to curb our worst impulses.

The algorithm was trained to maximize your engagement. It wants you to keep clicking. The data says showing you the worst gets the best results. The human either is optimizing for news worthiness or just isn't as good at enragement. It's a lack of skill by the human, not restraint.

I heard it described somewhere as Facebook notices you slow down to look at a car wreck, so it creates more car wrecks for you.

It sounds like amplifying what you measure instead of what you want. Like when they used to rate programmers on lines of code, you got lots and lots of lines of code. If you want people to behave better on line figure out a way to measure/reward people for it.

Narrator: Social Media doesn't want people to behave better on line.

Counterpoint: Local news broadcasts.

Not really when they are essentially using the same algorithm...

Five years away from 60, and I can tell you one thing - I certainly don't want to be a developer a day longer than I have to. I'm hoping to retire in the next year or two because it's getting tougher all the time to keep focussed and not look as bored with the same repetitive problems and management BS I've heard for 30 years.

The rest is fine - when I sleep well I feel like I'm in my 30s until after about 7 hours of work when I can feel my productivity falling off a cliff.

Yeah for sure - I can't pull 12-hour days like I used to.

I still really like my job though. And I'm learning a ton of new stuff (AWS/DevOps,C#) right now. However the commute sucks and my boss is a challenge.

If I imagine retiring tomorrow I think I'd be really bored - even with travel. I could however travel and try to pick up remote contract gigs. I'm just not sure how hard those would be to find, and I know I wouldn't be learning as much as I am now. So I'm definitely here for a couple years until it gets repetitive.

So many variables to consider.

Los Angeles raises speed limits in order to punish speeders

Counterpoint: no, you're wrong, that law is awesome.

I read a really interesting article awhile back about the influence of speed limits on drivers - I don't think this is that same article, but it makes the same point: Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

This makes me think of driving from the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco in the last several years after they built a new road there. When they first opened it, the speed limit was 35 mph, but it's basically a nice, open freeway:



I don't consider myself a speed demon or reckless or anything but it feels legitimately stupid to drive under 60 on that road, regardless of what the posted limit is. They've since upped it to 45 which is still absurdly low, possibly to the level of being unsafe.

The value of interactions with other people at work is often underestimated. I took an 18 month career break and enjoyed it immensely doing online research at home and reading a ton of novels I'd never got around to reading, but eventually I missed the regular company of different people.

Even if they're often annoying and you don't want to socialise with them they do at least take you out of yourself, which is crucial for mental well-being.

Tronc (Chicago Tribune) settled a wrongful termination suit with a fired exec for millions to bury a recording the exec had made of Tronc's chairman & largest shareholder talking about a "Jewish cabal" that runs Los Angeles

So that's a thing

https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/stat...43583672455168

What if the economy goes straight down the ****ter in the next two years and you find out employers don't want to hire a dude in his 50s? Pension ainec imo.