Jul 28

Confla-not-so-great

Greece burning down. California burning down. The UK burning down. Sweden, Siberia…ok, are we allowed to say it’s climate change yet?

The world a hundred years from now is going to look nothing like today. Glad I am not young. Sorry, Millennials and those of more recent vintage, but you are pretty much screwed.

Jul 28

The High Cost of Being Skint

Yep! Here’s all the things I don’t pay for that I did when I was poorer:

1) My bank accounts.
2) Money orders.
3) ATM fees. I can use any ATM anywhere in the world and guess what, it’s free!
4) Foreign currency fees.
5) Cashier’s checks.
6) Checks in general.
7) I get super-low interest rates. Like at or sometimes below prime.
8) Mortgage fees are either lower or non-existent.

Also, I earn higher interest rates, I can do free stock trades if I wanted to at my bank account, and many other things I am forgetting are free or waived. (And I know I am forgetting a ton.)

Being (relatively) well-off has saved me so much money I can’t even tell you. Being poorer would cost me at least $3,000 a year, conservatively. More likely in the $5,000 range.

Being poor costs in other ways, too. If you’re poor you have to take whatever job is on offer. You can’t afford to wait. If you have enough to wait, you can pick and choose (which I do). So this increases your potential and actual income greatly, too. I know it has mine, that luxury of being picky.

Jul 28

Chater Box

The below is one of the stupidest, least-informed articles I’ve ever read.

There Is No Such Thing as Unconscious Thought.

The problem with “experts” is that at least 20% of them are attempting to con you. Alas, this is not the case here. Would be better if it were. Another 10% of experts aren’t really an expert at anything — they just got lucky enough to get a PhD or similar from somewhere or other. That’s the case with Mr. Chater here.

Even a single second of thought (conscious or unconscious) shows that his contention is utter horseshit, yet this was published somewhere.

Jul 27

Wishes

I wish the internet had semi-fizzled. I wish, like the commentariat confidently declared in the mid-90s, that it had just been a fad. Now, 40 or 50 million people in the US would be using it, scientists and researchers would still be there, but we would not have to endure Facebook and the like.

If the normals had not dropped in, much would be better than now. Once the normals invade, all is lost.

Jul 27

Fred Up

Obviously there are degrees, but if we had to disavow the works of anyone who’d ever done anything heinous or horrible, we’d have nothing left to watch except perhaps Mr. Rogers.

And while I like that show just fine, I don’t think that should be the only entertainment available.

Jul 27

Fun Times

I make fun of moronic liberals often enough, might as well direct some ire at my real enemies: the conservatives and libertarians.

Well, that pretty much says it all.

Jul 27

Borsewr

It’s sad that my browser now is much less capable and usable than my browser nearly 15 years ago.

Fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers!

Jul 27

A Book

True for most people, I assume.

Remember writing papers in school? Remember trying to eke out 1,000 words or three pages or whatever seemingly arbitrary number a teacher set?

That’s the first 15 minutes. Then what? Yep, I was and am that annoying person who can toss out a 1,000 word paper in 15 or 20 minutes, get an A on it, and not ever think about it. That’s where I can just play.

I know I could write a book, or many of them, and that I don’t do because it’d be a lot of work comparatively and there is no money at all in it.

Jul 27

Versions

I am glad I have lived in many places, had many careers and been to many countries. It’s like living different lives. I suspect it has made my life feel longer (in a good way) as diversity of experiences negates the grinding predictability of doing the same thing for 20 or 30 or 40 years. Life passes in a blink when it’s all routine monotony and tedium.