It’s crazy what executive assistants are asked to do these days, and the degrees they are expected to hold.

Also known as secretaries and/or administrative assistants.

The words don’t matter to me. The fact that I’ve seen job ads for secretarial positions that require a master’s degree is just blasting wonky.

From my own corporate experience and from reading this, it appears that companies are attempting to hire “assistants” to do the tasks that actual well-paid executives formerly would undertake, all for an “assistant” salary. Have seen this myself in the workaday world.

I had a full-time assistant (male, actually) at a job I worked for a year. It was great. I was so vastly more productive as anything that wasn’t my actual job I didn’t have to think about. It was just taken care of.

I got literally ten times as much done that actually helped the company in ways directly related to my role.

Productivity-wise, companies are shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating secretaries and executive assistants.

But it’s more difficult to measure than “firing someone on paper appears to save us $50,000 a year, so we’ll do that.”

Just watched the Supergirl trailer again. Melissa Benoist really fucking kills it. Even though I feel like I’ve seen all of the first episode, I don’t care. I’ll still watch it.

That transition from goofy awkwardness to increasing assuredness is really hard, and she manages it in a trailer. That’s impressive.

The show kind of reminds me of Tina Fey’s new show, if Kimmy Schmidt had superpowers. Hooray for the return of sincerity, and for women on TV.

I probably identify with stories like that more than most because that is in fact the story of my life. I was a really really awkward, gawky, weird misfit and I turned out pretty okay.

Still can’t fly, though. I’m working on that.

I’m surprised by the feminist hatred of the new Supergirl trailer.

I can’t quite explain it, though I’ve read a few analyses of it. They all seem to be utterly clueless about the mythos and devoid of any real critical understanding. Yes, the trailer deals in archetypes but the whole point and focus of the Superman and Supergirl mythos is archetypes.

I think part of it is also that nearly everything is expected to be dark and brooding these days. People react poorly when they don’t get that. The trailer was in a mode that hasn’t really been seen since the 1960s, which I believe throws people off.

Supergirl is supposed to be just finding her feet. She is not supposed to be sure of herself, or immediately ready to take on the world. That’s partially what the story is about; finding her confidence and own reasons for being exceptional. I find this “I’m a badass and always have been” utterly boring in male characters, so not sure why feminists are expecting it here in a woman right away where it’d also be utterly boring?

I actually watched the trailer twice because I quite enjoyed it. It was refreshing and complete alteration of the tenebrous bullshit that passes for depth these days.

Supergirl in the comics was dorky and goofy, especially at first. And Melissa Benoist pulled that off very, very well. I was impressed. I will probably watch it just for her. Here’s a good analysis about why there is so much dumbassery about the Supergirl trailer.

A lot of people it seems just search for reasons to be offended, on every side of the aisle.

Did I think it was perfect? No. But did I think it deserved to be trashed as some anti-feminist woman-hating work? No.

I’ll tell you what: real woman-hating is easy to find. It’s where they don’t put any women in anything at all.

This is why we can’t have nice things, people.

(BTW, if you liked the Supergirl trailer, you’ll almost certainly like the show iZombie. It has the same tone, is far better than I expected and Rose McIver is great in it.)

No, alas.

Also not a troll and not satire.

What a world we live in.

Journalists write these articles and provide no context.

What Lily Hay Newman should’ve explained is that public IPv4 addresses are handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They generally issue blocks of IP addresses to large corporations and ISPs.

This is what has been exhausted. There are no more of these large blocks remaining to assign to Level 3 or Cogent or IBM.

These large companies further subdivide IP address blocks for various purposes. For instance usually when I’ll set up a company that uses for example Cogent as an ISP, I’ll request a /28 block. This means I’ll get a contiguous block of 16 public IP addresses, 14 of which are usable*. It’ll look something like this: 173.65.128.16/28.

These IPv4 addresses have not run out. Believe me if you request a block of IP addresses from Cogent, you’re gonna get ’em as long as you pay the money.

Eventually however ISPs and other large companies will run out of these IP addresses to issue. But contrary to what you’ve heard that is not likely to happen soon and even if it does, there are ways around it.

Also there are a lot of companies that hoard ridiculously-sized /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses. That’s 16,777,216 addresses. These were issued before it was known the internet would explode in popularity and now these corporations refuse to return these blocks to be re-issued. They should be forced to, in my opinion.

If these /8 blocks were to be returned, it’d ease the IPv4 address scarcity problems for a good while.

Anyway, IPv6 hasn’t been widely adopted mainly because it is a huge piece of crap designed by engineers clueless about nearly everything.

Here’s what an IPv4 address looks like: 10.100.50.20

Easy. Not too bad to remember.

Here’s what an IPv6 address looks like: 2001:db8:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566

Get all that? Yeah, me neither. And I have actually used IPv6 in the real world. (And it sucks.)

But to get back to the main point, IPv4 addresses are indeed in short supply. But not in the way you’ve been told and it’s not some huge danger that threatens us all, and there are things we could do to mitigate the problem if we wanted to.

*Really good network engineers will know that I am not being entirely accurate here.

I want to believe this is a troll. Oh, I want to believe.

But I know it’s not.

That sort of crap is now dogma in the fat acceptance movement.

By the way, 2000 and especially 2500 calories a day is more than most people throughout all of human history have gotten per diem.

A starvation diet for most people would actually be 800 to a thousand calories a day.

I eat 1,200 to 1,600 calories a day and I’m just fine.

Anyone who thinks there is anything natural about home prices or the housing market is on all the drugs.

Absent Fed manipulation and other catering to the rich, and depending on the market, the average house should/could be about 40% to 90% cheaper.

If we weren’t so intent on propping up the rich’s riches, nearly everyone with a job could afford an ok house nearly anywhere.

And this reminds me of where I grew up.

Now some rifle nerdery.

The girl on the left has probably never fired or even held a rifle before. The girl on the right probably has.

The left weapon is an AR-15. There is no magazine, though it can hold one in the chamber like that. The one on the right is probably a Remington 770.

I have fired both weapons. The Remington 770 was in .30-06. It is a great rifle. The AR-15 is not that bad, but by comparison is a piece of crap though they are intended for different purposes.

I like bolt-action rifles, which the Remington is. If I cared about hunting — which I do not — I’d buy one much like that. It’s cheap so if you break it, no big deal, and it’s accurate out to about 500 yards.

If you need to shoot something more distant than that and can actually hit it — well, I’m impressed.

Reminds me of being in the Sinai.

The desert there is littered with old military hardware, some of it lethal. There are still land mines; sometimes the feral dogs will stumble on one and you’ll feel and hear the rough roar of an explosion savage the silence of a warm desert night.

Most of the time the dogs are too light to set one off. But not always.

Being in the Sinai and in the Middle East there is no mistaking that it has been and is a conflicted place. A rusting armored personnel carrier, its door canted and one-hinged, fills no longer with personnel but with sand. The turret of a bombed tank rests atop a dune, beetle-like, its main gun’s barrel an antenna bent to the sky.

Tanglefoot. Barbed wire. Concertina wire. Fences with razor wire on top. Cement barriers. Fifty cals in your face at a checkpoint, AK-47s slung, M-4s on a casual stroll — in a McDonald’s. At the beach.

So many things designed to keep others out, others in, repel the threat. To destroy.

I don’t miss being there. But it was a learning experience.