Aug 06

Covering

I’ve seen people say when a death occurs, “Why do they need an autopsy for that? It’s so obvious how he/she died!”

Great, you think you know how someone died. Aren’t you special.

But the best way to cover up a murder or other malfeasance is to make it look like some sort of other accident. And that’s the kind of thing you want to be sure about when it does happen.

Aug 06

Out

"Outlander" Is The Feminist Answer To "Game Of Thrones."

I don’t actually think Game of Thrones is unfeminist for the most part, but this show looks interesting. Yeah, unfeminist things happen to the women in GOT, and perhaps we didn’t need another sword and sandals vehicle, but the women in that world are real characters with depth and verisimilitude.

Just because a world is unfeminist – shocker, like the world we live in! – doesn’t mean the work is unfeminist. Subtlety is a mode that many people do not possess, though. (If a world makes a work unfeminist, then by definition every work by anyone in this world – the actual one – would be unfeminist.)

Aug 06

Charleston

The best food I’ve ever eaten in my life has been in Charleston, SC.

This article explains a bit about why.

Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China comes in a close second, but the food I got in Charleston was more consistent in its quality.

There are more great restaurants in downtown Charleston than there are in many entire states, including in all of Florida (which has absolutely no food culture to speak of).

Aug 06

Why humanity won’t last

The idea that humans won’t go extinct is pure hubris. Something like 99.2 percent of every species to ever exist has become extinct.

In 1962, the Soviet Union had about thirty-three hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and the United States had more than twenty-seven thousand.

Twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons. Merely 100 nuclear weapons detonated in the right places would be enough to set back human civilization a thousand years, or to end it altogether. We had enough nuclear weapons at one point to end the world 270 times over.

And just wait till cheap bio labs that can manufacture airborne rabies or similar become easily obtainable.

Aug 05

City de-slicking

This is not surprising.

Rising rents and the difficulty of securing a mortgage on the coasts have proved a boon to inland cities that offer the middle class a firmer footing and an easier life. In the eternal competition among urban centers, the shift has produced some new winners.

We’ve lived in Seattle. Housing there is ridiculous. And in general it was a terrible city for us for many reasons. Finding a place to rent there was nigh impossible unless you responded to the ad in the first few minutes of its posting.

Also, we paid more for less there compared to any other city we’ve ever lived. (That said, the place we had there was pretty nice.)

And buying? Even though we were both fairly-high income earners, we couldn’t have afforded anything there comfortably, not even a shack.

If you live in a major city – and if you can find a job – you will never be able to afford a good life. Or at least this is true for the majority of Americans.

Where we’re considering living next we could work at a convenience store and afford rent. Try that in Seattle or some other similar shithole that we don’t even like. Hint: It will not be possible and you will starve.04MIGRATE-hp-master675

All that said, the first photo in that NYT article and the house in the background? That is an ugly fucking thing. It has about 37 different architectural styles going and is about as attractive as a burning carburetor. Why move all the way to Oklahoma and then buy something like that?

Sure, everyone has a dream, but sometimes that dream is stupid.

Environmentally of course cities are far better. But cities are a miserable fucking place to live for many people, including me. I can understand why not everyone wants that, because I don’t want that. It’s nice having a space of one’s own and not having to interact unnecessarily with dolts and noisemakers.

Aug 04

PC Tab

The PC is dead! Oh wait, the tablet is dead!

No, no, wait, the post-PC PC is too PC!

No, I’ve got it, the post-tablet is post-dead!

No, no, the revenant tablets are rising up and going all Cthulhu on our collective asses!

Ridiculous pronouncements and sloganeering aside, neither the PC nor the tablet is dead; this is merely what maturing markets looks like.

It took the PC market ~30 years to mature. It took the tablet market around five.

We’ll see continued reduced market share for the PC to the tune of probably 20% fewer sold in 2024 as compared to now, and tablet sales will stabilize a bit higher than they are now (in the Western world).

If you basically ignore what nearly all tech pundits claim and predict, wisdom can be found.

Aug 03

Self

Selfies and Instagram presage a near-inevitable future of machine-based memory augmentation and enhancement.

These people – as daft and narcissistic as many of them are – are like the BBS users of the early 80s compared to the internet users of the now, except in this case they are the oracles and stentors for the eventual subsuming of humanity into its machines, or at the least hybridization therewith.