It won’t be long before the EULAs of anything you buy will become really short, instead of the 200-page legal bewilderments currently used.

The reason they will become short is because they will simply read: “Go fuck yourself, asshole.”

My favorite guitarist is now Danielle Haim.

Damn she is good. What tone and precision she gets from her instrument.

And what a beautiful guitar she has, too. It’s a Gibson SG, which was also played by one of the Gospel progenitors of rock ‘n roll, Rosetta Tharpe.

The textbook I’m reading now.

This is my leisure reading at the moment. It’s a good break from routing protocols. Some major parts I only understand about 50% of. That’s ok. I don’t plan on actually being a biomedical engineer. And I’ve never taken any course or read any lower-level textbook on this.

I just like to know things.

The parts on kinematical gait analysis are the most interesting so far, though I only understand about 20% of the math in that particular section. If I had any ability at all at math I would’ve been truly intellectually formidable. But, alas, and such.

For some lighter reading, I also read the Southern Reach trilogy recently. It’s worth reading, but it didn’t go far enough or deep enough with what it was attempting to do.

“The biologist” is a great character, though. Both of them.

You’ll see what I mean if you read it.

Computer geeks like to claim that they use icons in the interfaces these days instead of words because “icons are universal.”

The problem is that icons are not universal. Very much not. When I’ve done intensive tech support in the past most users had no idea what 99% of icons meant, while they could almost always pick out key words like “Print” and “Save.”

The real problem is laziness and management attempting to save money by avoiding translation of an interface into many languages.

Icons are only universal among the 1-2% of very tech-savvy users out there.

For others, they are almost all indecipherable and probably always will be.

This “icons are universal” claptrap is one of the biggest myths in UX, and a persistent one at that, because it allows executives to skimp on good design.

I don’t have anything against Islam in particular.

Just against religious fundies. Many of them made my life hell when I was growing up, and fundie parents made many of my friends’ lives worse every day for years.

I’ve lived in an Islamic country (unlike 99.99% of people who have an opinion one way or another) and saw in person how women were treated there in the name of religion.

It is worse, far worse, than most Americans can imagine. And that’s only what I saw in public.

But it’s not that I have anything against Islam in particular, to clarify once again. Just that Islam does actually in reality have more fundies, does oppress women more, and is more regressive, than other current religions.

I care about practice not doctrine, and in practice Islam oppresses hundreds of millions of people (mostly women) around the world every single day.

I see no reason to defend that, just as I don’t defend patriarchy anywhere else. Why make some stupid exception for Islam?

What’s so special about it?

I’ve seen numerous articles like this neoliberal scatological leaving at Slate proclaiming the impossibility of paying McDonald’s workers living wages – never mind that other countries do so quite well, thank you.

Part of that is just to shift the focus to an individual corporation, and thus to deflect attention from the systemic in an effort to forestall reforms, but even more of it is about that most people – including this clown at Slate – can’t actually even see the problem.

The system in other words is so natural to them that it is completely invisible. Of course it is impossible to pay more. Of course that would hurt McDonald’s competitiveness. Of course everything has to be exactly like it is.

In psychology this is called the status quo bias. It’s incredibly common in human reasoning.

But most of the writers I read are allegedly well-educated. Weismann is a graduate of Northwestern University, for instance.

And yet it seems that most of these so-called educated people cannot think their way out of a flipped-over refrigerator box.

Why is this? What are people learning at university that they are so ignorant of history, of other nations, or other possibilities, even of how to better educate themselves?

If that’s the best universities can do, I’m glad I am an autodidact.

It’s interesting that this seems to also be true of programmers as it is in my field (IT infrastructure design and implementation/network design and implementation).

In fact, in my experience, people with computer science degrees are not the best programmers. That’s because computer science isn’t really about programming.

As I said, having hired quite a few people I’ve noticed the same in my own specialties in IT.

Having a degree in some IT-related field often means that the candidate is behind the times 10-15 years, and is also often very theory-focused without any real experience or knowledge, and most often they don’t know how to do anything.

It’s not that I won’t hire a person with a college degree in my field; I will and I have.

It’s that I have to be extra-careful to make sure they actually know anything at all, or at least can learn it. Often they do not and can not.

But when I see someone who has been working in the trenches of IT for many years, who started on Novell 3 or Windows NT 3.5, who remembers when Cisco was barely a name anyone knew, who can still rattle off DOS or even TRS-80 commands – I know I’ve gotten someone who’s real IT.

Perhaps I’m just hiring people who are like me, but I think it’s more than that.

To work at the level that I do, you have to have seen a lot. A whole lot. You have to be passionate about it. You have to have fought with recalcitrant routers in the middle of the night and put things into debug mode and then stared despairingly at the output for eight hours until epiphany struck.

You have to have read the 800 page official product manual and then know and have researched enough to conclude that the manual is wrong and then re-write part of it.*

People with college degrees urged on them by their guidance counselors, who have no real affinity for the field – even if they’ve been in the field for 10+ years – well, they are not going to have that.

I’m sure that’s just as true of programmers at is in my arena.

Again, I am not saying that all IT people with college degrees are bad in their field. My partner is a CS major and she’s a crackerjack programmer. I’d trust her to do anything and to do it right.

But given the choice in my field of someone who can look at a router and say, “Oh yeah, I remember this model had this bug I researched and figured out it wasn’t present in version 12.1 of the OS” as compared to the, “Well, I’ve seen a router before, I think, but I have a college degree and a certification in Cisco gear,” needless to say I’m going to choose the salty old vet every time, even if he or she didn’t graduate 8th grade.

I know I’m making it seem like it’s about experience, but it’s not. For instance at one job I worked, there was a 23-year-old guy, eight years younger than me. He had no degree. But he was incredibly good. He was absolutely passionate about the field, and knew everything there was to know about Microsoft products.

And he had a GED. And a list of certifications a mile long.

*I have done all of these things. All real-life examples.

Why Apple’s New Font Won’t Work On Your Desktop.

Link actually goes to a comment on how to switch it back to a less shit font which is not easy in the Apple world.

Even Apple is “optimizing” the desktop for phones and tablets. Why do this?

This is a great line about John Dewey.

In fact, he believed in liberal education. This is something that has largely been abandoned in the modern debate about education. Now it is all about how we can create more STEM graduates, as if all we need is better technology and the rest of our culture can just rot.

Of course this attitude extends from the plutocratic focus of our society, but it has been fully imbibed by nearly everyone so it’s hard to see, much less question.

STEM is non-threatening (as it has no ideology, nor the real possibility of one) so that is the main reason it is championed – that, and it leads directly to profits for those already wealthy.

The humanities, however, are dangerous to the elites so there is much propaganda about their uselessness and soft-headedness.

Funny, though, I bet if you ask people what the best time they’ve had in their lives, the vast, vast majority of those experiences would be pegged firmly in the realm of the humanities.

But we’ve chosen what kind of society we will have, and that is a faux laissez faire fascistic dystopia.

For the most part, and even though I’ve done some of it myself, I think this sort of bashing of the Baby Boomers is over the top.

However, one thing about that cohort is true: they grew up in the time of greatest prosperity the nation had ever seen, decided that it was good enough for them – and only them – and then pulled up the ladder behind them.

That is the inexcusable part, and it is generational as far as I can tell. The stats show this.

That ladder-pulling I can’t grasp, as it harms their very own children and grandchildren.

Saying, “I deserve my Medicare and Social Security but my daughter and son do not” is the worst kind of selfishness, but seems very common – in statement or in action – in that generation.

I’m not a dog person. I don’t really understand them and will never belong  to the club of people who feels much of anything in common with dogs.

But what’s great about literature is that it can make you feel and be things that would never be possible if you didn’t read.

Literature humanized me. Reading did that. Without that, who knows what I’d be. Probably terrible. Or at least more terrible.

Reading this, I understood what people get out of dogs, what dogs mean to them.

I wouldn’t add it to my ten best, but it is a great essay, and does all the things that great essays do.

Recommended.

Seeing more and more help desk jobs ads that require a computer science degree.

For help desk.

For those not familiar with IT, that’s like requiring a master’s degree in international relations to work at Hollister.

Or requiring a degree in chemical engineering to be a short order cook.

Help desk is a difficult job. But it’s not all that intellectually challenging. I know – I used to do it. It requires mainly patience and self-control and a little bit of research skills.

Fastidious fifth graders could do the average help desk job. Probably better than many adults, actually.

When every job requires a PhD and 10 years of experience, what then?

The first comment on Google censoring their search results really said it best.

Censorship in the name of privacy bad. Censorship in the name of corporate interests good.

Hypocrites.

Google is one of the few companies who actually would have the power to tell the RIAA and MPAA to get lost. But that it might temporarily reduce profits 1% makes that untenable.

By the way, entire domestic movie industry revenue, 2013: $10.9 billion

Entire domestic music industry revenue, 2013: $7 billion

Google revenue, 2013: $57.86 billion

In short, Google alone is 3.2 times larger than the entire US music and movie industry combined.

So, yep, it is a choice to censor and yep, it’s also a bad one.

How the people who make this decision live with it, I can’t even begin to imagine.

This is the sort of dystopia I’m talking about that we are building right now.

Now, in many states, the law also extends to cover less well-defined knowledge, such as employee know-how, customer relations, and knowledge that is not used commercially. It gives firms control over employee knowledge that goes far beyond true trade secrets, reaching into basic knowledge that employees need to do their jobs. While most employers don’t push the limits of these powers, an increasing number have done so.

The combination of expanding trade-secret law and the growing use of employment contracts covering post-employment activity has a huge impact on the career trajectories of many workers.

The intent is to lock workers into one job, thus reducing salaries.

As for me, I will never sign a non-compete agreement. If one is suggested in an interview, I will walk right out the door (I’ve done it before).

There is little more thrilling in life I’ve found than when someone thinks they hold all the power over you and you get up in the middle of an interview and say, “Well, I am leaving now” and confidently stride out.

I’ve done that twice in my life.

I’ll probably do it again.

You might get the wrong impression from what you read here sometimes. In real life, I am very courteous and accommodating to a fault — until there is no reason to be. Ignorant people take that for weakness. But I grew up being bullied. When I feel like someone is attempting to bully me, or going down that path, they are shocked at the change it causes in me. Then, I am done. Just done. No more chances.

I am lucky to be able to do that, walk out like that, or to tell someone to fuck off. I know that, so no need to remind me. But I use my luck, too, and refuse to be a punching bag.

And I’m a really good IT worker. Why be modest? I know I am good at what I do. Experience proves it. That companies beg me to stay when I resign proves it.

So, employers, some notice in advance: I will NEVER work for you if you make me sign a non-compete agreement. Salary is irrelevant. A million a year? NOPE. My self-respect and freedom is worth more to me than that.

I was talking with my girlfriend last night about how corporations these days have far more power over individuals than the government. Just another bit of evidence for that.

A society that decides the merit and worth of everything by its utility is not a good society.

And yet that’s the sort of society we are choosing to live in – because it makes the rich richer, which has become the actual de facto goal of just about everything no matter what platitudes are mouthed on the news.

There’s evidence of this utilitarian focus everywhere: common core, diminishment of humanities studies, running universities as businesses, our mediocre budgets for arts, our disdain for fundamental research.

Nearly the entire flood of public-facing propaganda is designed to facilitate this as it busily informs us that if you aren’t directly in the service of making some rich white man richer, you are contemptible and have no reason to live.

Teacher? Parasite. Artist? Worthless. Research scientist? Garbage. Scholar? Shouldn’t get paid for doing something you love! Astronomer? Hope there is some hard currency on Alpha Centauri!

Perhaps a society can operate long-term like ours. Perhaps. But it won’t be a very joyful or interesting place to live.

People won’t read sf of dystopic fiction, and yet will resignedly live in such an environment with no complaint. I must say that fact does puzzle me.