Most small businesses fail relatively quickly, and a large percentage of those fail because they are run by morons.

Seems to happen a lot particularly in the restaurant business.

Here’s a personal example. There was a pizza place that opened up when we still lived in St. Petersburg.

It was on a busy strip of road and there weren’t a lot of competing pizza places nearby.

So far, so good.

But they bought an actual fleet or cars to run delivery with. Not pay for use of employee cars – no, they paid for a fleet of SmartCars. At least four. Perhaps more – I don’t really remember. Not a good idea, having a huge CapEx at a low-margin business. Already a bad sign.

And the kicker is that I went in one time to try the place out thinking they’d have slices of pizza for sale.

Nope, they had no such thing, despite that being their best business proposition in that area as it was surrounded by commercial properties and not residential. The lunch crowd could’ve been very large, and would’ve paid a few bucks for a slice.

Making $3 per slice is a lot better than competing with Domino’s at $10 or $11 per pizza. $3 per slice plus a drink is way, way more profit.

And the even worse thing is that when I went in to ask about pizza in slices they were utterly rude to me. Like dripping with venom. I am sure they called me an idiot as soon as I walked out the door.

As I walked out I said to myself, “This place won’t be open in a month.”

Sure enough, about two weeks later it closed and was gone.

Utterly predictable. If it’d been a stock I would’ve shorted that business into the ground from day one.

So they did no market research, no business analysis – nothing. They can’t have, because they made every mistake possible to make.

I know nothing about the restaurant business, but I do know something about not being a huge dumbass so if they’d paid me $10,000 to tell them also how to avoid being huge dumbasses they’d probably still be in business today.

I dislike how common Southern expressions especially outside the South are presumed to be AAVE and I am accused of “appropriating” the way that I grew up speaking from 9 months old on.

No, dumbasses, Southern speech and AAVE overlap significantly, so much so that when I visited my Northern relatives when I was but a wee marauder they said I “talked like a black person.”

The Southern diaspora of black people into cities in the north is often the only exposure that Northerners have with shards of Southern culture.

Learn some history, please. Learn anything. Learn something.

But most important, shut up.

To the men arguing that more women entering the tech industry is displacing someone (and the women arguing against this idea) – yes, that is true, women entering the tech industry probably does cause a displacement effect*. That someone displaced is usually male. That’s just simple economics and inarguable. More labor + roughly same number of positions == harder to get job, pay is lower.

But so what?

And I thought all you male libertarian laissez faire free market fetishists were all about that competition?

No?

Well guess what, motherfuckers, that’s competition right there.

Get used to it or shut up about your free market idolatry. Damn.

*It is much more complicated than this, but I don’t have time for a 5,000 word post nor do I care that much.

Of course major media outlets are censoring news about Ferguson.

These are capitalist organizations we are talking about. As such, they rely on advertisers to function.

Advertisers do not like controversy and do not like alienating racists, since open racists are 30-50% of their market.

All ya’ll were the ones who decided to embrace the corporate and closed platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et. al.

Now you have nothing to complain about save your own actions. This was expected behavior. Anything else would be surprising. Corporate censorship is the default state, not some anomaly.

Use and build open platforms and this doesn’t happen.

As much as people love to hate on Richard Stallman, he was right all along.

It’s increasingly looking like Margaret Atwood in her MaddAddam trilogy got it right about how future American and world civilization will structure itself: very rich oligarchs living lives of exorbitant luxury, a very tiny “middle class” who are basically their servants, and the impoverished rabble who are seen as utterly savage, base and expendable.

Everything points this way; nothing indicates another outcome is likely. In addition, something similar to that is how most human societies have been structured throughout post-hunter-gatherer history.

Just on the basis of the tendency of regression to mean, this is a likely outcome. The reality and already underestimated effects of climate change only make this far more likely, not less.

What a fucking great performance.

Talent isn’t always rewarded, but sometimes it really is. (Also, YouTube at 60FPS? LOVE IT.)

Yep – this is something that gets ignored when you hear how some display tech is “enough for anyone.”

There are plenty of people that can see flicker well above 60Hz (and I am one of them), and the variance is large in humans.

I can see flicker up until about 85Hz, and sometimes up to 100Hz if I am particularly alert and the conditions are right.

Now tell me again why no one needs this or that.

That’s the whole reason back in ancient times – the late 90s – I paid thousands of dollars for a Sony monitor that could do 1280×1024 at 100Hz.

It weighed nearly 100 pounds but it was so worth it.

Wow, sed is so powerful it’s basically impossible to use!

Much like iptables.

You know a Linux/Unix utility is fucked when there are experts in just that utility. People more obsessed with their tools than what they get done will always be a puzzle to me.

People who dream about murder may be more aggressive during waking hours, a controversial new study finds.

What if you frequently dream about your eternal war against the werewolves?

What then?

Watching all the liberals mumblingly defend Obamacare like it’s some great thing is pretty embarrassing.

For them, at least.

Sorry, I just can’t get behind a complete giveaway to insurance companies no matter if it helped some people.

So now we’re stuck with it and with little chance of anything better.

Good job, I guess?