What really pisses me even more about the wildly-fanatical Windows 8 supporters is when they claim that the distaste is just because, “You don’t want to learn new UIs.”

Right, as they talk to someone who used to use Solaris from the command line to get my daily work done. And someone who has used somewhere more than 20 different OSes and 30+ different UI paradigms so far in my life.

And the thing is, Solaris was easier to use than Windows 8. Its UI was more consistent (as long as you didn’t stray too far into CDE!) than Windows 8 by far. By very far.

So fuck them all, crack-smoking assclowns.

The problem with the start menu going away isn’t that it was a great UI in the first place. No, it wasn’t even all that good.

The problem with it going away is that it got thrown away, and then replaced with something even worse.

To make one of those unavoidable car analogies, it was like replacing a 1986 Chrysler LeBaron with a 1978 Chevy Pinto. Yes, both are crappy, but the Pinto is so much crappier than the Chrysler is why people complained, not because the Start Menu was the end-all and be-all of good UI design.

Something else I just thought of.

About a decade ago, I had a friend who was pretty active in academia. He also had a popular blog that covered some scientific topics related to his areas of interest..

I told him to be careful about the blog as that could hurt him academically, since any contact with us horrible laypeople was frowned upon in his world.

He scoffed at me and told me that I was being ridiculous, and that surely no one cared.

Well, all of a few weeks later his advisor called him in and told my friend that he had concerns that his blog indicated he wasn’t serious about his research work, and that if he wanted to pursue anything worthwhile in academia the blog should be shuttered and not worked on anymore.

Well, my friend being nearly as stubborn as I am didn’t shut down the blog (at least not right then) and chose not to continue in academia, though I am quite sure he was smarter than about 99% of the people in his department. (Considering that he passed a high-level quantum mechanics course with flying colors while being drunk and high nearly all the time, pretty sure I am right about that.)

All human enterprises eventually become status competitions if allowed to go on long enough.

I’ve seen this occur personally as ideas I’d had on old blogs years ago (mostly related to economics) were lampooned and roundly denigrated, and are now becoming or are already accepted in the mainstream.

If I’d worked at Harvard, the same ideas would’ve been much easier to promulgate.

I’m not bitter. I don’t even really care as I’ve never had the slightest interest as an adult in being an academic.

But when credentials matter more than ideas and results, the entire enterprise is in danger.

Writing below how about anyone who went online was once considered a complete anti-social undesirable loser made me think about other huge social changes in my lifetime.

Another really large one – at least in the US –  is how the profession of teaching has gone in only a few years from one that was once revered and considered honorable (yet underpaid) to one that is considered by a larger and larger percentage of the population to consist of only avaricious leeches who deserve to live in poverty.

This is a massive and underappreciated shift of popular consciousness, and one that I believe presages the devaluing of all paid labor.