People like Erik Loomis and the other fusty fucklets at Lawyers, Guns and Money really severely understimate cultural change and how quickly it can occur, and how much it is already occurring.
They are centrists masquerading as revolutionaries, milquetoast Obamanations, farceurs who don’t know they’re in a farce.
Good representatives of a past that will propel us to Berlin 1939, though, and are directly responsible for Trumpism.
I’ve come to realize that when I make puns across three or four different languages, literally no one gets them, and thus they are pointless.
Still, they are fun, so I will continue to make them in my head.
The first ten on today’s playlist:
People always seem to refer to younger versions of themselves as “young and dumb” or something like that.
While I was young (once), I was not dumb. I dealt amazingly well with the stresses I was under and handled my life better than all of the adults around me and nearly all of my peers.
Also, why was going to Italy “dumb?” It was probably an amazing experience. Would she trade that for something else?
Sounds like just attempting to fulfill a standard narrative.
I was a smart and collected kid, and I did the right thing by myself by leaving as soon as I could, and keeping it together under very bad conditions before I could skedaddle.
People were quick to insist that The Hunger Games was so unrealistic.
Meanwhile, we have periodic horrific slaughters in our schools and nothing is done to change that.
If written in fiction, it’d be seen as so egregiously unlikely that reviewers would pillory it.
Yet here we are.
The whole point of a lot of what Mozilla is doing with Firefox is to optimize it as a contained and controlled ad delivery platform.
They can’t tell you this, of course, because everyone would immediately abandon the browser. Revealing it would be suicidal, so they are forced to call anyone who realizes and understands this a paranoiac or crazy.
Removing the ability — bit by bit — of the user to alter the interface? Integrating services like Pocket and the like? The “tiles” that appear when you click on the browser? Disappearing the bookmarks and making them hard to find? Even blocking tracking is just so they can nuke the competition and insert their own garbage, not out of some altruistic commitment to the user’s best interest.
This all obviously leads somewhere, and it isn’t to the desires and wants of the user. It is, however, to a tightly-constrained ad delivery platform that masquerades as “ads done right” or whatever marketing material they eventually come up with.
I feel sad for Mozilla and for all the clueless people who look but do not see. It’s blindingly clear what is happening and why, but most people have the insight of a turnip so even a “told you so” after it’s all done will fail to make them realize what has happened.
The thing about a sucker is they never realize they are one, or have been one. It just never occurs to them.
Unsurprisingly, Firefox market share continues to go down the toilet after the insane decision they made to destroy their add-on ecosystem (click to make larger):
Fuck you, you fucking wankers. I’ll dance on your product’s grave when it’s dead.
This is for those who believe Mozilla and Microsoft aren’t tracking you and spying on you.
This is shit I blocked recently (using PiHole, great project):
So yes, they are tracking you.
Vera Farmiga is like the female Bruce Willis. She always looks about 40. She looked about 40 when she was 20. She looks about 40 when she’s 44 (her current age). I imagine she looked about 40 when she was born, and she’ll probably look about 40 when she’s 70.
Some people are just like that.
Vera Farmiga 1997 (though likely filmed in 1996):
Vera Farmiga 2018:
Yep, about 40.
This article is about junior developers, but could equally well apply to my IT field, too.
In infrastructure and related, the job market for junior people basically does not exist any longer. It’s been cleaned out. Obliterated. Outsourcing to (mainly) India and automation has made it disappear. Every day, there are fewer and fewer paths up from the swamp of help desk and consulting to senior architect and designer type roles.
If I were starting out in IT today, unless I had a flashy degree from a well-known college, I probably would not make it.
This is actually good for me now. I am senior, competing with far fewer people than I otherwise would be in the market as it was 15 years ago, and my salary increases have by far surpassed inflation for the last 10 years. I have my choice of jobs, generally. But it also means that there is no one younger than 35 on my team, and there probably never will be. There’s simply no one to hire — very few junior people or even mid-level people are available who know even 1/10 as much as anyone on my team, and there is little demand for them.
I have no grand moral conclusions about this. Just reporting what is.