Blogs are once again becoming less stylish and less used – mostly the consequence of mass migration to social crap like Facebook.
Perfectly fine with me. It just means the smarter people who can handle long-form, complex discussion will still visit blogs while the simpering masses will inhabit Facebook.
I see no problem here. I’d rather have one smart, engaged reader than 10,000 morons.
No great loss.
I was reading this article about hiring.
I’ve hired a lot of people in my life. Many of them turned out to be terrible. Some turned out to be great. I had no way to predict this from the interviews.
Something I’ve always wanted to try but no HR department would allow is to hire people completely randomly (well, sort of). I’d find resumes that are at least very minimally qualified for the job, put the names in a hat or a randomizing computer program and hire the first person it picks.
I bet the results would not be much different than the rigmarole of interviewing and such. In fact, they might be better.
Are game developers fucking idiots? Apparently so.
Yeah, because the market for new cars was destroyed by having a used cars market. Or the market for new laptops, or cameras.
Actually it is pretty well-known economically speaking that a healthy and robust used market supports the new-goods market. After all which product are you more likely to buy: a brand-new product for $100 which is impossible to resell and has to be thrown away if you do not like it, or a $100 product which you can resell for $75 if you don’t like it?
Q.E.D.
Even at home, I realized I routinely use four different machines. Try that on a damn tablet.
1) My main machine. Right now, running Windows 7. In the past, it has run everything from various KDE-based distros to off-brand Linux distros only heard of by some housecats living in rural Minnesota.
2) Our Linux server that I remote into using NX and\or putty.
3) A virtual machine running Windows XP for various work-related tasks.
4) Another Windows 7 virtual machine for testing/security.
That’s what I use just at home. And yeah, I really do use those all at the same time.
There are many cognitive fallacies that humans are susceptible to.
One of the most insidious and difficult to detect is I believe the false dichotomy. I find myself falling for that one even when I am aware of it. Those very good at setting up false dichotomies (conservatives, Tea Party plutocrats, banksters, etc.) are much more likely to persuade folks than those with more nuance (liberals, anarchists, socialists, etc.).
There is no easy way around this though constant vigilance to avoid it is worth it. One must be aware though that other areas may suffer as a result, causing a person to become more likely to suffer other cognitive fallacies since processing power and attention is finite.
What makes this great catch so funny is that she is the daughter of a baseball catcher so well-known that even I have heard of him, and I’ve never seen a baseball game nor do I know really anything about it.
Was reading today at a tech site how nothing consumer level needs nor will ever need 10Gb Ethernet connectivity.
I remember when that argument was being made about 10Mbs Ethernet connectivity.
Hell, I remember when it was being made about 56K modems.
People never learn, do they?
Today I solved two big problems at work that no one else could figure out — using a combination of archaic knowledge learned the very hard way, brand-new knowledge and a bit of dirty hacking.
Some days you ride the wave and some days it rides you. Today I rode it all the way to the beach and someone handed me a margarita as I stepped off the board onto the gleaming sand.
That’s just how smooth it was.
Since I was young and read Skeptic magazine, I’ve been interested in the formal skeptical/secularist movement. I thought it might be a good place to meet some like-minded people one day.
It’s clear that they do not want women in their organization(s), and want to support harassers and other lowlifes more than women who wish to participate. I cannot and will not ever support an organization that holds such priorities.
I’m always surprised, no matter how many times I see it, at the sheer number of (mostly, but not always) men who seem to actively hate and in some way fear women.
Yesterday this post from Roxane Gay that a friend linked to also caught my attention. Appears that progress is impossible, even in something so obvious as the fact women are fully human and deserve to be treated as such at all times, no matter how much some entitled dudebro wants to do some harassing.
What’s unfortunate is that I am as suspicious of men as most women are forced to be – I know it’s not the same, really, as I am not afraid for my physical safety as women nearly always have to be, but I just assume because the evidence points that direction that the average man I meet will be so misogynistic that he is not worth getting to know.
So far, I have rarely been wrong about this.
Right now we live between two neighbors, one of whom has a “I want your lipstick on my dipstick*” sticker on his vehicle, while the other has a sign up in the garage that reads “Man Cave: Women by invitation only.”
Those are my two immediate neighbors. No special looking for this shit required.
*Which is such a stupid phrase that I insist on remembering it as “I want your chapstick on my lipstick” most of the time.
Together, my partner and I have a household income in the top 8% of US earners. Yet, like many people, even now we could not truly afford to buy a decent place in most major North American (or global) cities.
Also, the company I work for has an office in NYC. I don’t believe a single non-executive (nor even most of the execs) actually live in NYC. They just can’t afford it.
The rich are gobbling up everything.
I sometimes think in my more conspiracy-minded moments that the financial and housing crisis was premeditated and deliberate, serving to greatly reduce asset prices so that the one-percenters could swoop in and steal houses and land from Americans at fire sale prices.
Whether premeditated or not, that is what occurred.
This is only going to get worse, by the way.
Of those 617 [movie] showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men. The movies making up those 561 showings: Man Of Steel (143), This Is The End (77), The Internship (52), The Purge (49), After Earth (29), Now You See Me (56), Fast & Furious 6 (44), The Hangover Part III (16), Star Trek Into Darkness (34), The Great Gatsby (16), Iron Man 3 (18), Mud (9), The Company You Keep (4), Kings Of Summer (9), and 42 (5).
And yet I am watching this tonight. It is getting more difficult noticeably to find movies with any major female characters. TV is better, fortunately.
Just wanted to add this.
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
I just don’t understand how this could happen. Yes, yes, I know the history – I’ve probably read more books about feminism than most people have read books, period – but I still don’t understand. That’s half of us, disappeared.
List of common misconceptions.
Although several of them are incorrect, it is a pretty good list. Too bad most Wikipedia editors are total putzwagons or I’d go in and correct them myself.
One of the best articles on Wikipedia I think.
I barely care about consoles at all, but the Sony PS4 is so much better than Microsoft’s spying, DRM-infested, anti-consumer pro-publisher nightmare that it almost seems like a joke.
Really, Microsoft’s utter defeat couldn’t have been more obvious if the Sony CEO had come out on stage and taken a dump on an Xbox.
Note: We have Nintendo Wii and one game that we rarely play. I’ve never owned any other game console as an adult.
I liked this this piece and my thoughts are not a response to it; they just happened to parallel something else that I was already thinking about.
Was thinking about an old Amanda Marcotte piece on “dealbreakers” in relationships and how women are (rightly) allowed to have any they want – and so are men.
I don’t have many deal-breakers for a long-term relationship, but the person I’m interested in having tattoos is definitely one of them.
No problem being friends. Whatever. Do with your body what you like, but that means I also can choose not to go out with you. I don’t find tattoos at all attractive and the more I look at them the less attractive they become.
Strangely, I’d date a woman without a second thought who was heavily scarred or even disfigured. But I’d really never date one with tattoos.
I don’t even really know why, nor do I care. It’s so visceral in me that examining it is pointless.
It’s a dealbreaker and I’m allowed to have it, and even if I weren’t I would anyway.
General rule of thumb for life: if anyone has a “man cave” or expresses support for a “man cave,” it is best and easiest to avoid them.