I shouldn’t complain so much about the harm and uselessness of smartphones. In the meta sense, they are to my advantage.

They make people both more anxious and stupider, more prone to be less attentive in public, less able to exercise self-control, and also less able to use a real working tool — a full computer.

So, in other words, it makes the smartphone-addicted far less competitive in the job market and their disadvantages accrue to me as advantages as I am not and never will be wedded to my smartphone, nor beset by FOMO or anxiety from its various beeps, exhortations and cries for attention.

I don’t even know where my phone is right now, and that is not uncommon. If I didn’t need it for work, I’d throw it away.

I was thinking of this reference Mozilla, but it’s generally true. For me, avoiding doing the stupidest thing possible is usually fairly easy, but it seems really very difficult at crucial times for most organizations and people. I wonder why?

Often, I don’t do the smartest thing, or the cleverest, but at least I avoid doing the absolute most harebrained action possible. But it seems a huge attractor to many. It was for Mozilla and so many others. This is also something else I am thinking about a lot lately.

This is pretty close to a discussion a friend and I had over 20 years ago, when the DMCA was being debated.

We both posted on some popular (at the time) boards and newsgroups with our concerns, but we were told essentially that what we were worried about “could never happen.”

Every bit of it has happened, and worse. It’s no fun seeing a future that sucks.

I advocate this exact opposite of this advice for men and women.

One of the best things I ever did was dating women significantly older than me. It helped me learn and grow more than just about anything else I did at that time.

What’s with this narrative of female fragility that’s taking over? Women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions now? And I don’t understand why anyone who dates a younger person is automatically labeled as predatory? That’s just not the way relationships work. Is everyone really a weak fragile flower when they are 21? I somehow doubt that. I certainly was not.

I think this is more about policing assortative mating, etc., than anything else. (In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with protection from harm, but rather eliminating more interesting, more resourced competition from the dating pool.)

Let people date who they want to date, as long as they are not minors. Must we really find yet another way to shame and control people?

Thank you, authoritarian left.

This isn’t about #metoo or anything specific, but I am really not down with the left’s idea that one bad choice or saying the wrong word makes a person irredeemable forevermore.

That’s another sign of creeping authoritarianism, just as is the left’s increased and unrestrained cheering for the use of the carceral system, said system which probably should not exist at all.

Nearly every ideology is the same these days, and that’s not just to do with neoliberalism. I need to think about this a lot more.