I kind of selfishly like that the Fat Acceptance movement exists. Though they harm millions, one can easily generate a good fitness and diet program and set of ideals from doing exactly the opposite of what they champion and advocate.

It’s not every day that a movement offers such a clear and coherent guide on how to live, so that is truly a notable and rare achievement. All one has to do is to reverse the signs and one can become healthy and fit with little cognitive effort.

Those who argue that math and physics is, like, the hardest, have probably never really studied any other field. I have no talent for math, but I know that means I just have no talent, not that it has any particular claim for supreme difficulty.

For instance, here is the a bit from a book on linguistics I am reading, The Syntax of Comparative Constructions Operators, Ellipsis Phenomena and Functional Left Peripheries by Julia Bacskai-Atkari:

I do have talent for this area (unlike math) and I enjoy it, so that is pretty comprehensible to me, despite being at a post-grad level. But maybe one out of 100,000 people would have any clue what that is talking about, and no math person would.

But sure, the only difficult (“hard”) fields with any rigor are math and physics. Right. (In reality, it just means that those are the only fields social fuck-ups can easily prosper in.)

Biden has a chance of being the next president. That is, if we do actually hold elections. As incomprehensible as his ascendance might seem, his rise is rooted in the most dangerous of human emotions: nostalgia.

The problem is that some of the worst problems America faces today—including Trump’s presidency itself—are in many ways the products of the Obama years, during which inequality grew worse and average life expectancy dropped. Obama’s vice president hardly seems like the leader that Americans need to tackle them. Political operatives may not know this, but historians do: time moves forward, never backward. There can be no return to the past, “normal” or otherwise.

If Obama had done the right thing in 2009, Trump would’ve not been possible. He didn’t because he wanted to become a billionaire himself, so here we are. Obama is not solely to blame for all our problems, of course, but he is mostly responsible for Trump — and that is an unforgivable offense.

I was going to build out a hilariously over-complicated & fiendishly expensive WordPress architecture as a joke, but unfortunately @awscloud beat me to it. pic.twitter.com/M8kcWwOV8t

— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) April 16, 2020

That architecture is aimed at a WordPress site that serves millions of users and requires four or five nines. It’s reasonable in that context and close to what I’d build.

If you wanted to launch a small-scale WordPress site fairly easily, here’s what you’d do. That’d cost $10-$15 a month wheras the other one would probably be at last $2,000 (haven’t priced it out) and potentially a lot more depending on autoscaling.

For an architecture that’d do just fine in almost all cases, here’s what you’d do. That’d work for 99% of enterprise clients.

There’s just an enormous difference between infrastructure designed for four or five nines that serves millions of users and a WordPress site that sees hundreds of visitors a day.

It’s kind of shocking we haven’t seen more violence and unrest with this sort of thing happening.

I put myself through college, graduating with a reasonable $40,000 in debt and an education degree right into the beginning of the recession. The debt has ballooned, after I’ve gotten halfway through a master’s degree, to about $70,000, despite my paying it back for almost 15 years.

Is there any world where $40K in debt balloons into $70K is just? Fair? Reasonable? If you think so, I don’t want to live in your world.

At this point my payments don’t even cover the interest. It’s so, so far gone. And there’s no getting out of it. It’s like a black cloud over your head.

I’ve met more than one person who just stopped paying their student loans as there was no hope of every amortizing them. Yet another sign of a failed state.

Though I wish the pandemic and the Great Recession a decade ago had never occurred, one feature of crises is that they allow you to see who is all hat, no cattle. It is revelatory. You learn so much, mostly that other people cannot think their way out of a cardboard box with one end open.

I don’t wish these times on anyone. But they are useful to me because I’m not imprisoned by cardboard.