Month: August 2024

Chill Links

After Chinese Incursions, Japan Plans a $2 Billion Defensive Satellite Network.

The Grammar of Food.

Boar’s Head plant linked to deadly outbreak broke food safety rules dozens of times, records show.

The Times Strikes Again.

Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious. He’s just a louche douche clown felon.

Trump Calls Out Arlington National Cemetery For Hazard-Filled Fairways.

The future of the world may depend on what a few thousand Pennsylvania voters think about their grocery bills. That’s it. Nuke Pennsylvania!

Kroger Executive Admits Company Gouged Prices Above Inflation.

Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP.

RTOZ

Chill Rant

RTO for the “culture” – employee dead in office for 4 days.

I had that same thought yesterday. Can almost guarantee she was pushed to RTO because “it’s important to be seen in the office.” Well, no one saw her dead for four goddamn days.

Almost all the people who have been forced to RTO go in and sit on Zoom calls with people in other offices. It’s all a sham. Her death gruesomely and sadly demonstrates that fact.

Paragren

Chill Video, Video (other), War

Not to take away anything from her thinking this up herself, but paratroopers have been doing that for ages with the Mk 19. Indirect fire with that weapon to engage troops which are in defilade is just part of the game. Advance, shoot and scoot with the 19 is a pretty standard thing. But she’s right — it’s incredibly dangerous but also effective.

That tells me the Ukrainians don’t have as many advisors from NATO/US as they should if they have to cook these tactics up themselves.

Doing It Down

Chill Rant

It’s annoying when people Do The Stupid and I tell them how to Fix The Stupid and not Do The Stupid and they coincidentally and with no comprehension Do Some Other Stupid that fixes or, in most cases, hides the original Stupid and then are like, “I didn’t do what you said and it works!” With the implication there that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

In those cases I just say nothing, because what’s the point? I have infinitely more knowledge and capability than they do and I revel in that silently. Most of the time their Stupid returns with a vengeance. Then I laugh and no longer help at all.

Lake Ontario Is

Chill Amusing, Music Video, Video

Not sure why the bottom is cut off, but that’s the way I found it.

And this would be a better set of first date questions than most I’ve been on, for sure. The most fuckable Great Lake is definitely Lake Ontario, though. It’s half-Canadian, so it has a slight hint of exoticism, but it’s still safe (won’t steal your car, will say “sorry” a lot).

Here’s a good song and video about the vapidity of first date conversations (en Français):

Booting

Chill Tech

Well, that was the smoothest Ubuntu LTS release upgrade I’ve ever done. Went from 22.04.3 to 24.04.1. Only one package broke and that one was easily fixable. In the past, I’ve had the system not boot at all after doing an LTS to LTS jump1. Thank the gods for VM snapshots.

So pretty smooth, especially since I’m using Xubuntu and not the shitty Gnome default distro which I am sure receives more testing love.

  1. Which, theoretically, should never happen. But Linux….

Gap

Chill Regular-ass Post

Agreed. And I’d argue the same for age gap romantic relationships. Yes, even for women. As long as everyone is legal I think it’s a net benefit.

Also, a 20yo vs. a 30yo is not a generational divide. However, this seems abso-fucking-lutely insane to me:

I was mentoring an intern at work when I was 42 and she was 21. We had tons in common. We liked the same music, books, had the same philosophy of life, were able in fact to discuss philosophy together. We had so so much more in common than the other people I worked with who were closer to my own age. Where does that insane belief just above come from? Admittedly, she was an unusual high-IQ high-curiosity individual, but I will never understand how it’s so easy to conclude that two people only separated by 10 years can have nothing in common. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test.

Cereb

Chill Politics

It’s striking how dense more-cerebral people like Kelsey can be sometimes. Most people are not statisticians and have no coherent way of thinking about polls or how the numbers are determined post-polling. Also, correctly, the hoi polloi recognize that no claim like this is made without a political dimension. Therefore depsite being statistically nearly-indistinguishable, Trump at 51% vs. Harris at 51% is also a potentially political claim about the future.

Regular people recognize this. People like Kelsey struggle with it as they tell us that philosophy is irrelevant while bombarding us with spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides.