Month: November 2024

Sanding

Chill Evil, Lying Liars

Covidians: Lockdowns weren’t real! No one was even mildly inconvenienced by Covid restrictions anywhere in the world! It’s all lies!

Reality disagrees. Those who became mentally ill because of Covid (not the infection itself) are just angry that the political changes they wished would occur were not brought about by the pandemic. It’s sad to see.

Nano

Chill Regular-ass Post

If in this hypothetical scenario I were also allowed the ability to hire multiple full-time nannies and someone to manage and monitor the nannies, then I’d do it for nine figures — say $100 million.

If not, no amount of money would cause me to do this. To me, taking care of kids (even my own) would be absolute hell. It’s just one of the worst thing I can imagine for myself.

Chill Links

Footprints show two species of ancient human relatives shared the same ground at the same time.

China’s Wacky And Puzzling New Aircraft Carrier Has Set Sail.

Monitor-eating office cat.

Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.

In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse.

Baby-boomer homeowners got rich from skyrocketing house prices. Now they can’t find retirement housing. Wah.

The Second Gilded Age: the Revenge of the New Robber Barons.

Why Kamala Harris lost: Around the world, incumbents are in trouble.

The Local Sheriffs Gearing Up to Help Trump Carry Out Mass Deportations.

This Is What the World’s First All-EV Car Market Looks Like.

Oracular

Chill Tech

What was the most challenging issue you solved?

Figuring out how to get a critical (couldn’t go live without it1) call reporting Oracle database to work on Solaris after the vendor’s top-level tech support and half a dozen other people could not get it to function. I did this mere hours before the deadline.

No Google. All brain (and some man pages).

I later phoned the vendor and told them how to fix their own misconfigured garbage.

I miss working in Solaris and using CDE. Don’t want anything to do with Oracle ever again, though.

  1. Due to regulatory requirements.

Out Cop

Chill Lying Liars

Why do people often say ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’ instead of explaining things in the moment?

Because it’s a cop-out for adults who are committing or want to commit bad behavior or unethical acts and not be called out for it.

Every bit of the “you won’t understand until you’re older” stuff told me to when I was a kid was bullshit. None of it was true. All lies. All was designed to manipulate me and others. And I think that’s almost always the case with this from everyone everywhere.

Officiousness

Chill Clowns, Political Economy

This trend of employers inventing reasons to disqualify your experience is really obnoxious.

Try getting out of the army and then seeing how employers treat you. I had more than one tell me I had “no office experience” despite working in an office for five years straight, eight hours a day. And working in an army office is a hell of a lot harder than working in any corporate office I’ve ever seen.

Employers make every effort to discount your experience because then they can pay you less (in general and in specific).

Chill Links

In First Postelection Interview, Kamala Harris’s Advisers Admit That Democrats Are “Losing the Culture War.”

Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red. As the glaciers of South America retreat, the supply of freshwater is dwindling and its quality is getting worse.

Inflation Re-Accelerates Despite Plunging Gasoline Prices as “Core Services” PCE Price Index Hits 7-Month High.

Americans Buy Ever Bigger, More Powerful, More Fuel-Efficient Trucks, SUVs & Cars. EVs Escalate the Horsepower War.

US grocery workers hit by rising prices: ‘We’re at the bottom of the food chain.’

Trump’s Tariffs In His First Term Did Little To Alter Economy — But This Time May Be Different.

How the 1980s Engineered the Collapse of the Working Class.

NIMBY MBA

Chill Political Economy, Rant

The problem is being ruled by Excel spreadsheets and the MBAs who wield them. Who, strangely, seem to be in some sort of oddball alliance with the build-nothing do-nothing degrowth left. Excel knows nothing about will and changing the shape of the possible. Much of what we do now was said to be impossible not long ago; our goal now should be to make our current selves look just as clownish in the future.

Anything else is a failure.

Chill Links

Dr. Oz and the Stealth Destruction of Medicare.

The Texas Ob-Gyn Exodus. Amid increasingly stringent abortion laws, doctors who provide maternal care have been fleeing the state. Any reason is the right reason to flee Texas.

Cars Are About to Get Even More Expensive Thanks to Trump’s Tariffs.

A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

Bluesky boom worries Chinese media.

The mind-bending new science of measuring time.

LinkedIn Posts Are Now Mostly AI-Written, Study Shows.

What fossilized dino feces can tell us about their rise to dominance.