I'm less likely to believe a lawyer working for Exxon than a homeless person on the street with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh!" At least the homeless person doesn't know that the things he is saying have no basis in reality.

Lawyers have a responsibility to represent their clients' interests no matter how bats**t they are. Their opinion is nothing more than the opinion of their corporate bill payers. And their bill payers are one of the more sociopathic corporations out there.

Exxon is a company that actively denies climate change even though their internal documents show that their scientists have been aware of the problem for decades. It's basically the cigarette industry all over again. There are literally no companies in the world that I trust less than oil companies when it comes to climate change.

No, they aren't. They are required to provide the numbers that the government demands. They're free to precede it with a wall of text that explains why they don't feel that blaming them for people choosing to burn their gasoline, rather than, for example, using it as a beverage, produces CO2 emissions all they want to. That's their choice. What they don't have the right to do is not provide the data.

Maybe you did, but I thought the poster's name was Thomas Jefferson. :-D

The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.

There are three factors that define productivity:

• Toil (T) - The time spent doing random s**t that nobody wants to do, but you have to do, but that probably doesn't contribute much to productivity. This is a constant reduction in productivity at the bottom of the graph.
• Energy level (e) - A curve that declines over time for each day and does not fully recover in subsequent days without days off.
• Error rate (E) - A curve that is inversely proportional to energy level, and becomes exponential at high levels of fatigue.

Raw output in a given time period is proportional to energy level. Useful output is raw output minus the error rate, because erroneous output has to be redone and cancels out its benefit. And the time spent is then reduced by the time spent on toil.

So the equation looks something like f(t) = (t - T) * (e - E). That's why small reductions in bulls**t make a big difference, and the sweet spot for time spent ends up being hard bounded by when the error rate exceeds the useful output, at which point productivity goes negative.

Hope that helps.

Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.

More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.

So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.

And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.

Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.

See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.

I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.

I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...

Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.

No, not even then. Options in a startup that has a 2% chance of making it to IPO are worthless, as is your equity stake. Working yourself to death for a lottery ticket is stupidity.

Startup or not, hire enough people to do the job. If you're pushing people to work crazy hours, you're a moron, and your company is all but guaranteed to be in that 98%.

Uh, no. Center of gravity isn't related to how high the driver sits.

Ah, I see, you think they should use low-floor buses. Those are a lot more expensive, have higher maintenance costs (especially the kneeling ones), require flatter terrain (buses don't go offroading, but where I live they can't stay on the pavement all the time and also have to contend with deep snow), and give up seating capacity because the wheel wells and rear engine intrude into the seating are. Their only real advantage is accessibility. City bus systems can't predict where disabled people will be, so all buses have to be accessible.

School districts, on the other hand, do know where the disabled kids are so it's much more cost effective to buy and operate less expensive buses for moving the 95% of the kids who can climb stairs and to operate a separate fleet of smaller buses equipped for accessibility to pick up the disabled kids. So, they save the money on buses and spend it instead on teachers and classrooms.

As a taxpayer and a parent and grandparent, I think that's the right choice.

Okay... but what does that have to do with the center of gravity? And those sticks are just as important for rear-engine buses as for front-engine buses, though they probably don't have to be quite as long.

In Utah I don't think I've seen one of those for at least 20 years, and they were rare before that.

No, you don't. I'm sure I follow that a lot closer than you do. Any claims that the federal judiciary is already captured are just silly. SCOTUS is an issue, but look at all of the rulings against Trump. Even the appellate opinions that the news calls as in favor of Trump are basically all just staying the district injunctions until the merits are decided, and if you read the opinions, not just the headlines, you'll see they're almost always extremely skeptical on the merits.

Honestly, even SCOTUS isn't quite as captured as a lot of people on both sides think. They also seem to be giving Trump his way on the procedural issues, but almost always come down against him on the merits.

The ~900 federal judges in the system are almost universally apolitical, thoughtful and fair. There are exceptions, and Trump is working to get more of them in there, but the judiciary is very far from captured.

Interesting. What stick are you talking about? I'm talking about the thin plastic tube that hinges out from the front passenger corner and blocks kids from being able to walk in front of the bus. It clearly can't have anything to do with center of gravity or stability; you can bend it with one finger (it springs back).

Also, all the buses where I live (in the US) are rear engine and have flat fronts.

You didn't actually read the method, I think. In order for corruption to "build up around it", the entire (or at least most of) the federal judiciary would have to be corrupted. While that's not impossible, if it happens we'd have much bigger problems than pardons. And the fact that the judiciary isn't already irredeemably corrupt is strong counter-evidence, because the benefits of corrupting the courts are far bigger than the benefits of corrupting the pardon system.

I think the reasons the pardon power was given to the president still make sense, so abolishing it is a step too far. Instead, it should just be weakened a little, probably by adding a review by a non-partisan review board plus a limit on the number of pardons a president may issue. The review board shouldn't try to decide if the pardons are "correct", but only whether there is a presidential conflict of interest.

The question of what something like this should look like was interesting to me, so I had a long conversation with Claude to collaboratively design a solution. The high level of the proposal is:

1. If someone files an objection within 30 days, the pardon is reviewed by a 9-member panel of judges selected algorithmically from all sitting federal judges. Unobjected pardons sail through.
2. Reviews must be completed within 60 days or the pardon is automatically upheld.
3. The panel examines the pardon for evidence of presidential impropriety, mainly conflicts of interest. The president can file counterarguments to objections.
4. If 6 of the 9 judges vote to overturn the pardon, it's voided.
5. If the president has three or more pardons voided during a term, the burden shifts and pardons are void unless a majority of the panel approves them.
6. To prevent the president from flooding the judiciary to exploit the time limit to get his pardons through, a given judge's queue of reviews is limited to n = 16. Any assigned pardon above this limit automatically receives a vote to void the pardon.

The selection algorithm Claude proposed (after some refinement) struck me as brilliant: use HMAC-SHA-256(pardon_id || date_of_first_filed_objection) to generate a sequence of judge IDs to fill the panel. It's publicly verifiable and hard to game, providing an essentially randomly-selected pool. The president can try to game it by ordering the pardons to use the pardon_id value to pick a "friendly" panel, but opposing parties can also game it by picking the day they file... and both sides have very limited options, so gaming it effectively will be possible, but hard, and rarely successful.

Some other important bits: Objections may be filed by anyone but are filed under oath and bad faith objections are also subject to sanctions and contempt orders by the panel. Successful bad faith objections may also expose the objector to civil suits by the failed pardonee. Pardons take effect automatically on day 31 if no objections are filed and on day 61 if the panel doesn't collect enough votes for a disposition. Pardonees who are in custody may demand a hearing to request conditional release. The judge will evalaute their request based on the nature of their alleged offense, their risk of flight and the apparent likelihood that the pardon has the appearance of impropriety, and will decide whether the pardonee should be held or released, and on what conditions.

I think this would work quite well.

Seems like they've been doing it since 2008. Is there a ten year statute of limitations or something?

Indeed. The chorus of utterly ridiculous claims in support of Trump, many from otherwise reasonably-serious people, are baffling until you understand that performative self-humiliation is their goal. Standing up and saying true or even remotely defensible things to defend him, even using standard politician tricks like deflecting or dancing around the question, is something that anyone tasked with defending him might do, which means it's useless if your goal is to prove your loyalty to Trump.

In order to prove your utter loyalty it's necessary to inflict damage on your own reputation, to abase your self and humiliate yourself in front of the world. This is why Trump demands that his cabinet members pay him ludicrously over-the-top compliments, on camera, at the beginning of each cabinet meeting. It's not just that they know they're lying, they know that everyone knows they know they're lying and everyone knows they're doing it merely to toady. That reputational self-harm of publicly licking his boots is how they show Trump they're irrevocably tied to him no matter what.