Feb 11

Matric

Just a note that if you adjust for debt, risk, opportunity cost, and the (massive) number of people who do not graduate, attending university is no longer a net benefit for the vast, vast majority of people.

It’s yet another societal scam, in other words.

Feb 11

Cannot Resist

None. I don’t care what anyone thinks of what I read. Have read far too many books for that. GEB, though, is a book that I despise. It’s probably pretty good for eight-year-olds. That’s about the complexity level it’s at. It’s so widely loved because it makes stupid people feel smart without imparting much or demanding much.

GEB is definitely my most loathed book, and one of the few that I’m sad I completed. But in a way it was a good thing. I read that and then resolved to stop reading bad books as soon as I felt like doing so. Since that time I’ve abandoned hundreds upon hundreds of subpar books. In the end, the dreadful GEB saved me much time.

Feb 11

Not Working Wokeness

It’s weird that the white working class gets blamed for every ill, but voting turnout from the working class is very low, comparatively. And because of the general lack of wealth they of course have very little (almost no) political influence.

It was not white working class voters who were responsible for Trump, though they to be fair did vote for him in high numbers. Instead, what caused Trump was a long destruction of all of society by neoliberals and laissez-faire worshippers, all enabled by Third Way Democrats like Clinton and Obama.

But dopey little centrists want to blame the white working class for everything as a convenient scapegoat for their own massive failures.

Feb 11

Defem

How did feminism manage to go from vital and interesting to whatever the fuck it is now, and so quickly, too? Sad to see.

I used to read dozens of feminist blogs in 2003-2007 period. Now I read zero — and not because I support the movement less, in principal. White Karens commandeered the cause and now it’s just a boring whinge about how no one pays them enough attention and how people like Naomi Wu are dirty man-stealin’ whores.

What a precipitous decline.

Feb 11

One Way

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up And You Can’t Give It Away.

I try to tell people this but it just sounds arrogant. These days, though, I am too old to care how it sounds. To think like I do and to know what I know, you have to read at least 10,000 books or book equivalents. I suspect that’s probably the bare minimum if you’re already naturally very smart; most people will require far more.

Truly I have no idea how many books I’ve read in my life, or words. Probably 20,000 books or so if I had to guess. Could be as many as 30,000. For many years I read a few books a day nearly every day. My record was when I was 13 and I read seven books in a single 24-hour period. I was going for eight but I fell asleep. Typically I’d read 20-25 books in a week and I did this for roughly 12 years. My pace decreased after that and then I started reading more online, but I try to stay away from garbage (mostly), so I still think that is mostly valuable reading.

This is the only way to be able to think as broadly and as quickly as I generally do. I followed this path mostly by accident but it’s the only way to not be a dunce.

Humans have inferior hardware, so it takes a lot to get it to work reasonably well. The above is one way to do so.

Feb 11

Lady

I liked Lady in the Water, too. It was an exercise in Lynchian surrealism applied to a modern fairy tale. It was not supposed to make sense and it did not. It’s about archetypes and playing with them on the background of the mundanity of life and what it means to have a purpose within that quotidian banality.

I’m a sucker for a story about stories, and Lady in the Water is one because of course there is literally a character called “Story” in the story. The plot is essentially that the stories we tell are the plots that matter, and that there is nothing else.

That is why most people did not like it, and that’s why I did.

Feb 10

2500

I have done approximately 2500 pull-ups over the last 13 months, and that was nowhere near maximum effort. (Not an exercise I particularly concentrate on. And not to take anything away from Visa. That’s still a lot of goddamn pullups. I just work out tons.)

Feb 10

Hey Ya

Hey, another one of those things dipshits told me would “never happen” happening:

Next step is that they’ll block all non-HTTPS sites altogether. I guarantee that will occur.