I used to be firmly in the snobby anti-tarot card camp. Then I started researching the effectiveness of psychological counseling – talk therapy – and similar “treatments.”

Realizing that really they weren’t much different, and that talk therapy had as much pseudo-science inherent in it as tarot readings, I lost my disdain.

Mostly people benefit from talk therapy and tarot card readings due to the care effect. And the fact that about 1/3 of people get better on their own no matter what.

(In one of my few actual original thoughts, I was thinking about the care effect and its existence – though not in those words – before I’d ever read about it anywhere.)

Now I’d recommend people go to a tarot card reader than the psychologist as a tarot reader is probably much cheaper and would be just as effective.

“Talk therapy” is basically a very expensive scheme where you pay for a friend. Why not do it more cheaply, and have more fun?

After all, tarot cards have really great iconography and semiotics. I’ll probably mount some on the wall one day.

I can’t understand this – both the misogyny and the “guilty pleasure” concept.

The Shame Cluster artists include Lana Del Rey, Blue Swede, Miley Cyrus, The Bangles, Madonna, Kesha, Blondie, Lorde, Pat Benatar, Robin Thicke, Andrew W.K., The Cure, Soft Cell and Billy Joel. At left are the five genres (as determined by Spotify) in this cluster with the strongest weights.

This means that 44 percent of the artists in the cluster were tagged as “pop,” and so on. In other words, pop accounts for less than half the music within the cluster. It’s a diffuse group of artists. “It’s sort of pop through the ages. A lot of female, a lot of pop, but not exclusively any of those,” Kalia said.

“A lot of female?” What the fuck is that?

The misogyny actually bothers me more than the “guilty pleasure” bullshit. The latter is just hurting yourself; misogyny hurts everyone.

While disagreeing with the entire idea of The Shame Cluster, why those artists? It seems to be mostly that they are women. Lorde’s album was easily the best of last year, no contest there. Nothing was even close. It will stand the test of time, too. When you turn on whatever passes for radio in 2050, I guarantee you’ll hear “Royals” on the “oldie” stream.

And “The Cure?” Even if you do make distinctions between innovative artists and “pop” artists, The Cure changed music immensely in the 80s and have influenced literally thousands of artists. There’s hardly a band outside of the the Big Three who have done more to shape music.

All of this looks like another instance of bro culture, except in music snob form – nearly all of the artists in The Shame Cluster are either women or seen as feminine/soft in some way. Seems pretty obvious when you look at this dumbass’s list that way.

Mozilla has created its own problems. It has no one to blame but itself for its now-inevitable failure.

It will be a great loss. Its add-on/extension model allowed for the first and probably the last time a browser to be something more than just a content consumption engine but rather a real productivity tool.

And it’s also the first time that I’ve ever had a browser that could do exactly what I wanted it to do.

But that’s all going away with the rest of the interesting parts of the internet as it all becomes  sanitized.

This article is good, but ignored in it is how Mozilla has inexorably removed customization options from its users, and made the browser into a toy.

Australis was the tocsin of death for Firefox.

While Firefox usage was already declining, the advent of Australis was when the power users and tech evangelists started abandoning the browser in earnest. This abandonment means that any tech product will eventually die as they are the people who tell regular, non-technical people (about 99% of the population) what to use.

I used to recommend Firefox to anyone who’d listen. I even had a Firefox T-shirt at one time. Now I tell people just to use whatever browser came with their machine, and to avoid Firefox as it’s become unpredictable and user-hostile.

Regular users are highly confused by Australis, especially if they’ve already used Firefox. But the hamburger menu helps no one, contra even Chrome.

Mozilla had a real chance to distinguish Firefox as a non-Chrome browser. They blew it and won’t get another chance.

It’s unfortunate but it’s what’s happened.