A former friendly co-worker of mine got a CEO position at some small gaming company. He offered me a job. Decent salary and bonuses and they are willing to let me work from the US (the company is based back in Israel).

The co-worker turned hotshot is a religious guy and so is the owner of the company. We're friends on social media and he never posts anything political so we successfully avoided any type of politics discussion over the years.

Sadly, I made the mistake of visiting the company's owner Facebook profile. It has like 5 shares a day of Jordan Peterson translated videos, every Israeli pseudo-intellectual right winger writing articles about how white men are being persecuted by feminists and your ordinary 'but what about XYZ hypocritical leftists' posts.

It's a small company that makes tons of money and I'm sure i'll have to work with him eventually even if not directly. Do I just ignore it and take the job?

idk, I think the guy running the company being a right-wing whackjob has to contribute into your calculation about...
a.) the likelihood of them achieving financial success
b.) the social environment at the company, which you would at least deal with in Slack/whatever communication you have with them even if not in person

Yeah that's a concern for sure. One mitigating factor is I'm not trying to be a front end or back end dev anymore - but more of an AWS back-end DevOps guy - where "greybeards" are a little more valued. I feel like after 2 years of experience at this job I will still be reasonably employable.

I don't need a lot of money in retirement. My plan is to live in a van/camp and drive around the world taking pictures. I'm in a weird spot where if I could just go the next 10 years w/o my nest egg diminishing (and getting a modest return) I'll probably be fine. So I feel like I'm just working to kill off the next 10 years of my life - which is depressing.

Things change. You might start banging a young Hollywood debutante and get married and wind up with a family to support.

Yeah my last work was the most social environment you could imagine. We went to happy hours, went to each other's weddings, goofed around all day. Had a ton of interesting characters from all walks of life and like 20 nationalities.

Most days it didn't even feel like going to work - just hanging out with your friends and building cool stuff. We still have get-togethers and people who haven't worked there for 5 years show up.

At the new office it's nice but infinitely more boring. We literally have beige cubicles, and not the low-walled ones. I'm trying to start more of a collaborative social culture. The devs seem to be warming up to it.

I think what you have to be careful about here it the built in human tendency to assume that bad things might happen but they will happen to other people. If you are a good driver, you probably have not been in many (or any) serious accidents. But that doesn't mean that it will never happen to you, and the consequences of getting in an accident going 60 vs 35 are drastically different. Like, literally life and death.

So I can see the benefit of designing roads to make people go slower, even for people that accurately think "I don't consider myself a speed demon or reckless". 40,000 people die in car accidents every year in the US and most of them were probably not reckless drivers, but just people that made a mistake at a speed where a mistake means a fatality.

Counterpoint:






3177 deaths (population: 81 million) in traffic accidents in 2017. This includes pedestratians and motorcyclists (aka organ donors on wheels).


Driving fast itself is rarely dangerous. It's drunk driving, texting, people not adjusting to weather conditions, young guys proving their masuclinity by driving way over the speed limit.


Speed will make any accident worse but the US traffic laws use an overabundance of caution.

Video editor needs to be shot into the sun, but the speed limit discussion reminded me of this experiment:

Serious questions: are there limits on who has a license? Are there more tests? Are the age limits higher? Do people get their licenses taken away more quickly or when they reach a certain age?

Just positing that maybe the drivers are of a higher quality in Germany, thus fewer accidents and safer roads.

Everything about this is terrible and everyone involved needs to get the guillotine

Don't know if things have changes, but when I was in high school I know a German foreign exchange student who came here (for a year) specifically to take the US drivers test.

There's a whole industry around Chinese people traveling to South Korea to get an international driver's license there. As someone who drives in China it absolutely amazes me that there are people who would fear being denied a license by Chinese authorities because they drive that badly but are somehow able to pass any driving test at all.

I agree that German drivers are definitely better trained (see article quote below).



You need to be 18, mentally healthy and physically able (sorry, blind people). I can't think of any other restrictions.


I was just looking for a random Autobahn picture but coincidentally the one above is for an article titled
Eight reasons that Germany’s Autobahn is so much better than US highways


From the article:



Unfortunately, there are no provisions that allow taking away driver's licenses specifically from older drivers. Older drivers, barely able to see and mentally deteriorating, are certainly a hazard. On the plus side they tend to drive slower and thus are less likely to cause fatal accidents.

Regular scheduled proficiency tests for senior drivers are suggested occasionally but just like in the US no one wants to piss off the most active voting block.

Was he under 18? It used to be possible to legally drive in Germany even if you weren't 18 yet if you have a valid foreign driver's license. Getting a US driver's license was an option for those who were able to afford being an exchance student for a semester or two.

Also the tests themselves are far more difficult. Even in countries notorious for bad driving, the tests they need to pass are more rigorous than in America. To get my license in America, I drove around a circle, parallel parked and that was that. The written test was 15 questions. It is an actual challenge to get a license in Europe.

This is balanced by the fact that one can live reasonably well in Europe without owning a car at all so long as they live in a city. At times, it can even be a burden to have one given the lack of available street parking. In America, a car is an essential tool for survival which makes it somewhat understandable that pretty much everybody with a pulse passes.

When I was a kid there was a rumor floating around the country that Satan was in all Proctor & Gamble products because of that moon/stars symbol they put on the packaging. As it turns out, it was Johnson & Johnson who had Satan aka asbestos in their products. At least the baby powder.

The thing about Conservatives who talk about the value of work is that, one, they themselves seem to do little of the work they want everyone to value (because it sucks), and two, they don't watch the things they complain about

Umm I know you're a Manhattan Institute fellow which means your some weird libertarian nerd, but actually try watching Atlanta. It's all about the black lower class and work and little to do with rapping

Also

That's because it is! I worked in the transportation. Driving will melt your brain with the monotony. When you ask truck drivers about what they like about driving, it's never "I like to look in mirrors, crossing lanes, etc. It's about more abstract things like independence, being in new places. That's because the actual driving sucks!

Aww there it is

Keep puttin' it in my veins!

https://medium.com/@orencass/the-cul...k-d1c6cae9db08

Today in asymmetrical partisanship, liberals lament the loss of The Weekly Standard for presumably Discourse related reasons:



Gonna be lit when these guys start a Patreon to give Bill Kristol a publication again.

Again, just try to imagine a single right-winger ever sitting around fretting about the loss of The Nation or Mother Jones or some ****. That's neither here nor there but it just goes to show how elite discourse works, the right wingers are uniformly hardcore ideologues and the supposedly liberal left people with platforms sit around pining for vibrant political debates (with people you might even revile!?) for completely obscure reasons.

Remember if you swapped out The Weekly Standard with Stormfront pamphlets they'd get it, that actually no, no one should root for platforms for people with politics you revile, which should prove this isn't so much the mental disease it appears on first blush but is almost certainly entirely ideological, that these guys don't revile The Weekly Standard in the least and want them as counter-parties for Discourse. Josh Marshall types will ultimately pivot to saying this is bad because without The Weekly Standard, more extreme voices are going to fill the right wing mindspace (lol a little late there buddy, this is the result of that, not the precursor) but then also ignores how The Weekly Standard was simply an intermediary stopping point, a contributing factor to the rise of the fascist right. 10 years from now these people are going to getting the fainting couch when Breitbart goes under because Richard Spencer's YouTube page is getting all the traffic and ad revenue. Even if you revile Breitbart's Black Crime section this is not at all good news, not remotely says 2030 Josh Marshall. Even if you revile Tucker Carlson it is not at all good news his show has been cancelled because it cannot compete with the Gavin McInnes 8pm NewsHour on ProudBoys.tv.

Been rocking to 'Heart' all morning since I heard Nancy Wilson died. Whoops.

Bayer still by far the worst, as they tested their products in concentration camps. Can't believe they actually exist.

Yeah well how many lives were saved by flame-******ant baby powder. I don’t see many babies catching fire thanks to J&J.

In other words, in the debate between the libs and the fascists on the value of the Discourse, you tend to agree with the fascists?

It's kind of hard to see how your predictions about the future actually differ from Marshall's, or even how your feelings about those predictions differ. I mean, I think Marshall is deeply concerned that in 10 years, the right is going to consist solely of cryptofascists and open facists. I imagine he views this as a deadly serious problem because the government of the country is going to be in the hands of the right at least half the time, and having a government run by fascists who are smarter than Trump is a mortal problem. If you're on board with all of those things... why wouldn't you think it's scary that the more centrist parts of the right are disappearing. Even if you despise Bill Kristol, I have no doubt you would prefer to be governed by him than Gavin McInnes, right?

The fundamental logic of democracy is a competitive-cooperative model. The literal whole point is that you want your side to win as much as possible, but you acknowledge that the other side's victory is an acceptable outcome. If you're living in a society where one of the two governing alternatives is no longer acceptable, then you are an opponent of democracy. What Marshall is alluding to is that the survival of an acceptable right is a necessary condition for the survival of democracy. Perhaps what you are saying is that there is no acceptable right and the libs need to get on board with the revolution?

All bosses are scum. Take the job and get that money

Are we sure Marshall doesn't just think it's bad because it involves political pundits being out of a job :P

Maybe The Weekly Standard could apply for a NEH grant or something.