Sep 06

The Z Solution

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Something I’ve only recently figured out about experts: they know extremely specific information about their own field relatively well, but due to how our educational system works, they aren’t able to generalize this knowledge at all outside of its tiny application area. Thus, they can’t understand it or use it removed from that context and when they stray even a little from the very minute application area for their specific knowledge, what they claim (again, even in their own field) is often wildly incorrect or absurd.

That means that people like Zeynep Tufukci can beat the pants off of experts even in fields that she is not a true expert in, because outside of the restricted areas of very circumscribed scenarios the so-called expert is no better than anyone else — even in areas nominally in the expert’s own field.

Sep 05

Big Whinedown

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This would probably never happen in the US so it’s hardly worth worrying about — but I’d be for it (though it needs to be a bit higher) the moment it’s also paired with a ban on the Fat Acceptance movement and on the sale of harmful ultra-processed factory foods. Banning higher speeds would save what, a few thousand, if that, a year? Banning FA and ultra-processed foods would probably save 100,000+ a year over time in the US alone.

Now that’d cause some big whining! I love that idea, pairing them that way.

Sep 05

Don’t Really Want That

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While I agree that “Reply Guys” are to some extent a real thing, most of it is just illustrating the fact that the dictum that “treat a woman just like you’d treat another man” is not really what women want, no matter how much they claim that to be the case. Or how much feminists believe that should be done.

Because most “reply guys” interact in a very similar way to how men interact with other men.

Sep 05

Jean B Knew What Was Up

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“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies – the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals – are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”

-Jean Baudrillard in Impossible Exchange

Sep 04

But Then

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Wow. You can get a lot in Northern Michigan for not a lot of money. But then, you are in Northern Michigan.

Sep 04

Effic

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Exactly. For example, even with supposed “inefficient” green power technology, when you take the externalities of fossil fuels into account it turns out green tech is always either a bit better or hugely better than fossil fuels.

There are hundreds of examples like this, by the way! Most of the time, as James points out, efficiency is traded off so we can make life worse for 90%+ of people.