Kevin Drum and I are on the same (high-resolution) page about how much pixel density matters if you don’t want your eyes to bleed out of your face.

I’m a bug on pixel density. As far as I’m concerned, the first real tablet in the world was the iPad 3, with its Retina display. I won’t use anything with much less resolution than that.

Right on. I’ve waited my whole fucking life for screens like that, and am still waiting for 4K monitors to be cheap enough for me to want to buy one on the desktop. I figure I’ll have one in about a year and a half since another large project stands in the middle.

I’ve noticed that I read the same material on my iPad about 50% faster than I do on other screens because the fonts due to the pixel density are so vastly, incredibly superior.

I am always amazed when people look at eye-shatteringly bad fonts on low-res screens and cannot tell the difference between that and the gorgeous iPad screen. There’s just no way I can see that much better than other people (due to the limitations of physics), so I can’t explain it at all.

The most damaging and widespread fiction in the US that both the Left, Right and Middle believe and implicitly subscribe to is that the government’s fiscal affairs in any way resemble that of a household or have any relation at all to bank accounts, loans or saving as experienced by the average person.

Anyone’s checking account or piggy bank under the bed is about as related to the monetary affairs of a sovereign fiat-currency-issuing governmental body as a roller skate is to an interstellar space probe.

I was going to say that it is vastly more complicated, but that isn’t even the case. It’s that the two are utterly unrelated.

I was reacting to the many utterly dumb and vapid comments that are found here, though those comments only hint at what set me off.

Why does this matter? Because in just one example if the government prints up a bunch of money and simply gives it to a bunch of people in a depressed area – everyone is better off. Including the people of course who will oppose the other group getting something for “free” as the receiving group will then be able to spend their money buying products and services from the group in opposition. (This is known as “welfare,” by the way, at least in the US.)

Yes, yes, inflation. Inflation does occur in a supply-constrained world. Does that look like the world we are in to you?

For instance, if the US government simply sent every single person in Mississippi $10,000 right now (the poorest state in the union), the entire country would be better off immediately.

Where did that money come from? It didn’t come from anywhere. Why won’t it spark inflation? Because the economy is and has been for a long time nearly deflationary due to depressed demand.

But one example of many possible.

What sort of dumbass at Mozilla thought it was a good idea to remove the favicon from the address bar? I know, it’s been gone a long time (since Firefox 14), but what a huge design fail.

I only noticed it because I changed my Mozilla variant to get away from idiotic Mozilla decisions and the extension I had to make that part of browser behave rationally had not yet been re-installed.

It seems like the entire user interface is now being designed by people who have neither seen nor used a browser or computer in their lives.

All-Cash Home Sales Hit Record 42% of Sales.

The rich crashed the economy, and are buying the housing stock so they can rent it back to us at inflated prices. Disaster capitalism at its finest.

(And no, I don’t think it was a formal conspiracy, just very powerful people looking out for their best interests selfishly with no attempt at regulatory restraint.)

On average, I sleep 18 hours less per week than my partner, who sleeps a normal amount.

That is a whole lot of extra time I have in my week compared to most people. Not something I am attempting to do, and I don’t think getting a too-short amount of sleep is something to be proud of – especially when it affects you negatively.

I’ve just always been an incredibly light sleeper who doesn’t sleep much or at “normal” times. Can’t help it. Doesn’t harm me and couldn’t sleep more if I tried, so I appreciate the extra time.

Also that a lot of websites don’t work correctly if you don’t allow them to use their shitty custom fonts is un-fucking-believable. The days when I can no longer use the web at all are closer than I thought I guess.

It’s simply staggering how much I have to change to make Firefox, Google and other once-good services usable again.

Targeting everything to the stupid and clueless makes the whole world worse.

It’s sad that blogs are in decline, as they are the only truly interesting new cultural phenomenon to emerge from the internet. Twitter and similar services are useful, sometimes entertaining, but Twitter entire and anything like it could be thrown into the sun and nothing of value would be lost.

The same could be said for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. I am not denying they are important to the people using them, but will they contribute anything truly new and valuable to the culture and the (hopefully) ongoing Enlightenment?

Doubt it; hasn’t happened yet and probably never will.

Blogs, though, are a place where you can interact and learn from the smartest people on the world on any topic, to glean insights that were impossible to get in any way before, by anyone.

Where else could you read in real time about Fukushima from a real nuclear scientist, in depth and detail? How in the past could you have learned about breakthroughs in science by the very researchers discovering them?

Not to mention how blogs reinvigorated and re-energized feminism.

And it was on a blog that I met the woman that I consider my closest friend, though she is far away (hello in Vancouver!).

Some of the best writing I’ve read in the past decade has not been in books or even in magazines, but in blogs.

And that’s all going away, slowly but inevitably.

I’m not sure why, really. Certainly blogs are disliked by our de facto rulers – corporations and their associated viziers – but there has been no direct censorship in the West for the most part.

Perhaps it’s that the smart (and in many cases affluent) people found the internet first, but are now being drowned out by the rabble.

Either way, I’ll miss blogging when it’s only something old women and men do, as Twitter II takes the fore and messages are restricted to emoji only.

Not a world I’ll care for at all, and much will be lost.

The health care enrollment forms at my job for some reason had a space for a nickname.

So my nickname is now “Dazzling Mike the Magnificent.”

I don’t know if anyone reads those things, but I am so terrible at filling out paperwork that I try to spice it up a bit in any “free” blanks that I come across. Or sometimes not even free ones, depending on what mood I am in.

One in the far but not unimaginably distant future, our descendants will wonder and marvel that we ever got by without genetic algorithms that lead to evolved AIs.

“How did they have time to do anything?” they will ask.

Much as we ask the same about a time before washing machines, vacuum cleaners and rapid forms of transportation.

I doubt it is possible to create an AI, but I think it is possible to create the conditions for one to evolve. That is inevitable, and not too far away I think.

My grandfather grew up in southern Georgia. He was old enough to remember when south Georgia and North Florida were much wilder places than they are now. Fishing in modern Florida is not bad, but he could recall when fish were so plentiful in the rivers and lakes that the moment you threw in a scrap of bait, multiple fish competed wildly for it.

Then, you could catch as many fish as many times as you cared to toss your line in.

Hearing stories about such abundance, I used to not believe them. I thought they were all “back in my day…” sort of tales, but turns out that ridiculous fecundity is supported by the academic research. In non-marginal areas wildlife was absolutely plentiful, such that those hunter-gatherers who lived there – assuming they lived past childhood – had relatively easy lives compared to what we have today.

Meaning, that is, they had a lot of leisure time. Leisure time is easy to obtain if catching your next meal is as simple as dipping a basket in the water and there are so many fish that a few just end up in there. That world seems insane today, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history for most people, that is the world they experienced.

Not that I believe that being a hunter-gatherer was great. No. Personally I like my big-ass monitor and my GTO. I don’t want to be rid of those things. But with the trade-off that most people in the world I know spend most of their time working, with little hope of retirement coincident with decreasing living standards and climate change-induced environmental calamity on the way, the life of a hunter-gatherer doesn’t seem all that bad sometimes.

Is there ever a wrong time for Wild Flag? No, no there is not a wrong time.

Been dealing with a lot of people in my general field lately and have realized something rather startling. Most of them are very, very specialized. Capable, but limited in what they can just do without instruction.

For instance, I’ve asked some people to complete tasks that I do routinely, and they did not know how – these are things I just assumed every IT person knew.

The assumption of similarity bias in action, I guess.

I’ve always been a generalist, but it’s startling to find out that the average person in my career area is so restricted. Even in their specialty (and we are talking about a dozen people here), I can do 90% of their work and tasks, sometimes only 80%, but they can’t do any of the things that I do at all.

I really had no idea. I just assumed I was the baseline.

Unfortunately that leaves me running around doing everything, for the most part. Yes, I will configure that Solaris box, and write a Powershell script, and set up Exchange, and figure out how to automate printer installs by office while the other six people do…what? All they know is a small part of one product.

Training would be fine and good, but in a major deadline-constrained project, where is the time?

I don’t even think I am all that good, but I just have done nearly everything and it shows, but didn’t realize how much it showed until this past month or so.

Female students banned from speaking at Islam seminar at University of Leicester.

Yes, I realize it is The Daily Fail, but that nevertheless did occur.

Liberals for some reason are afraid to criticize Islam and its practices. But I have no respect at all for any culture or religion that does anything like this. Fuck Islam. Fuck Mohammed and his child-raping ways. Just because the US is wrong (very, very wrong) to go murder brown people doesn’t mean that if follows on logically to it being wrong to criticize a culture that harms millions and millions of women.

What, thought I was a milquetoast liberal? Think again. I’m a militant liberal, geared up for radical equality and I don’t really give a shit who I offend. I don’t care if I make things better or worse in the short term either, as some things are so wrong all you can do is raise your middle finger and spit in the face of those who oppose civilization.