Jan 10

Emma 2

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I wish the show The Gifted were better, because it’s so mediocre that even Emma Dumont, as excellent as she is, cannot save it.

I hope she is in a lot more. Her IMDB page says she’ll be in a movie in 2019, so let’s hope it’s worth a watch. I mean, I will watch it just because she’s in it but if it’s good, too, all the better.

Now I need to go back to watch everything she’s ever been in. Talent like hers is rare so it’s worth it. And it has nothing to do with her acting skill, but because it’s cute, here’s a video of Emma D. playing the autoharp and singing. Alas, talent is not evenly distributed.

And here’s a scene of her being very different.

The ending is particularly good. And that’s some good stuntwork, too, by whoever did that. Looks completely real both on Dumont’s part and the actor/stuntperson taking the fall.

Jan 09

Dejection

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The hesitation is because decent men are scared of being labelled a harasser, worried that they’ll get the “I have a boyfriend” line when they’re just trying to do something nice, or otherwise be rejected/cold shouldered in some bizarre way. Just as women are harassed constantly, this sort of thing happens to men constantly.

If a woman speaks to me in public is about the only time I will engage with a woman I don’t know, and even then I keep it as cursory, neutral, and clipped as possible no matter what she says/does. Most men who aren’t bastards will be doing the same these days.

Yes, it’s a bad equilibrium for everyone, but what’s the alternative?

Jan 09

Mation

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So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job.

I have done this. It sucks but is also not really capable of being stopped. Sometimes, people have been doing tasks for 20+ years that really can be done by a small shell script these days. One place that a company worked for took over, we easily got rid of six IT staff (including an Oracle DBA who made well over 250K a year) by automating backups and other tasks, converting to MS SQL, removing some ancient Citrix environments, reducing support for old platforms, improving VPN, and putting in self-service password resets and a real ticketing system. It’s not that these six people were doing nothing, but what they were doing was a complete waste of time in several different ways that actually hurt the company more than it helped.

This churn would not be a bad thing if we had a real safety net in this country. It helps no one to have people scurrying around doing useless tasks that a machine can do in 0.001 seconds. And frankly, if you are doing these sort of tasks, sooner or later (probably sooner) someone is going to notice, and then say, “This girl/guy appears to be here to hit a button every 10 minutes. They’ve been doing it for the past 20 years.”

Boss: “Well, can you automate it?”

Me: “Yes, I automated it already. Here’s the two-line script that I just wrote while I was talking to you.”

If you have that kind of job, well, you probably won’t for much longer given the way things are moving.

Jan 09

Wall Wall Wall, What Have We Here

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I don’t give a crap, really, about Trump’s wall either way. It’s stupid, but it’s minor stupid. It won’t help much, won’t hurt much, and the main negative impact will be ecological.

For the left and so-called liberals, I think their de facto open borders stance is a huge loser and a bad idea generally. I suspect that if they mostly backed away from open borders fetishism and virtue signaling, they could probably pick up another 5ish percent of Republican-leaning voters and win far more elections.

I will never understand how it can be that many leftists and progressives tend to value people who aren’t citizens and don’t live here over legal residents and American citizens, but they truly do and it’s pretty disgusting.

Jan 08

Names

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There was a teacher in high school who would call us by any nickname that we requested at the beginning of class. But only the first one you chose, no changes allowed. So I told him off the top of my head that I wanted to be called “Sky Bandit.” And sure enough for the rest of that year, he called me “Sky Bandit” in his class and anywhere else.

There was a man of his word.

(My friend’s nickname in that class was “Sharp Sauce.” Don’t ask me.)

Jan 08

Ganda

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Aye. It’s pretty refreshing. The narrative is that she’s unintelligent because she occasionally gets a fact wrong (that’ve usually been widely misreported in the press for many years). This is by the same people, of course, who’ve been getting all the facts wrong for the past 30 years. About the major things, though, she’s dead right and much more knowledgeable than her interlocutors.

People, even those operating in good faith, are more reacting to her tone and approach than anything. She doesn’t act or speak like a politician, and it turns out that many people are only comfortable with politicians who are trying to hoodwink them, no matter what they say they want. She’s moving, nearly all by herself, the Dems away from corporate centrist warmongering. She’s truly only an FDR liberal, not some kind of mega-communist, but since the Overton window has been shifted so much to many people her ideas seem outlandish when in 1960 they’d have just seemed normal.

The establishment narrative is turning hard against her because she and her ilk are going to make rich people less rich. That’s all of what you’re seeing now.

Jan 08

Phoning It

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By the same token, I’m an infrastructure designer and CTO. I don’t know a thing about your smartphone or how to do anything on it, especially if it’s an Android. I don’t know how to recover photos, don’t know what the name of that app was that you used two years ago, and I don’t know which app has malware in it. I know nothing about phones.