Aug 05

Boom Bloom

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Yeah. When I was in the army, I got to help part of a Special Forces team set off C4 charges on the range. Even just a few pounds of C4 rocked my entire body and shook the ground like an earthquake. And I was behind an earthen berm about seven feet thick!

Movie explosions are completely unrepresentative. A real explosion is shockingly violent. Just a whole different thing altogether.

Aug 05

Not Slick

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Slack might be the shittiest, most productivity-destroying “enterprise” product I’ve ever used.

Aug 05

Surveil Fail

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People care far more about image than substance. Obama presided over the largest decrease in African-American wealth in modern history. He also vastly increased the scope and scale of the surveillance state and drone warfare. He also gave banskters, crooks, and criminals permission to loot the economy and did nothing to check this at all — in fact, he encouraged it.

Obama was a failure of a president, who, though not wholly terrible, made America worse and allowed others free rein to do the same.

Aug 05

Ship It

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Yes. Give me a trillion dollars and a great staff, I could organize to build a starship that’d make it to the nearest star in a few hundreds years — a generation ship, of course.

But everyone would be dead, because I don’t think even a trillion dollars would be enough to figure out how to create a self-sustaining ecology resilient enough to maintain the hundreds of people on that ship.

Aug 04

Jump in the Pool

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I think one of the reasons dating has become so fraught and so many more innocuous behaviors are viewed as harassment is there are many, many fewer high-quality guys on the market lately and, largely, women control dating in most practical ways.

So it’s now tailored to suppress\weed out low-quality potential mates with minimum possible effort.

This makes total sense! I am not even criticizing women for it. The pool of men they want to date (which is very different than the pool of available men) is bad (from their perspective) and shrinking all the time.

Of course they want to use whatever leverage they can find to make sure hobo Kid Rock doesn’t get up in their face. When you understand the incentives, the choices made seem more sensible.

Aug 04

FS

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The problem I have with Slack is that it’s a product “designed” for what MBAs like, rather than a product for what working people actually need.

It’s MBA-centric because it:

  • Expects immediate response
  • Requires excessive chattiness by its design
  • Prioritizes “presence” over achievements
  • Need chumminess to really work
  • Is like having 30 or 40 email inboxes instead of just one
  • Is about managing impressions rather than getting shit done

Fuck Slack.

Aug 04

Slackjawed

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I’m using Slack at work now, and it sucks. It’s basically a clone of IRC from 1992, but it uses literally a million times as many resources.

Tech doesn’t advance; not really. Just more “geniuses” build poorly-executed copies of 25-year-old tech.