derekam

Yeah, my only use of this post was to see if there was anything I could get my business removed from in the tools listed. I just don’t like people knowing where I live; various past experiences have made me hypervigilant about this. It isn’t hard to track someone down with a state and sufficiently uncommon full name.

“As soon as you run a business or have more than $X you have no right to privacy” is a position a bizarre number of otherwise normal people have, though never stated in those terms.

Exactly. There was some fuss a while back about a similar classifier for sexuality. It turned out to be guessing mostly based on head tilt, personal hygiene and whether the person was wearing glasses. The physiognomy component was ~nonexistent even though it was publicized as though it weren’t. People intentionally if at times subconsciously present themselves in a way that signals information to kindred spirits. You’d need to bring in hundreds of people, wash them and basically take mugshots to control for that.

It’s older than that originally. I remember playing with it over MSN Messenger on a Dell desktop in ~2005.

>People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week.

This hits hard.

Whenever I think I want to do something, I try to seriously think about whether it’s something I want to do, or something I want to have done. Working on side projects and companies is something I enjoy actually doing, while for a lot of the status-seeking types it’s usually something they want to have done and finished successfully. Similarly I sometimes think I want to write a book, but I really just want to have written a book, which is a very different thing.