Things I don’t care about:

1) The recent election.

2) What some Tumblr superstar who knows about two ounces of history thinks about cultural appropriation.

3) The street artist “Banksy” and whether he/she is a woman or man.

4) Disrupting the innovation or innovating the disruption or innervating the eruption or any similar Silicon valley buzzword bullshit.

5) How terrible some artist/actor/novelist/dancer/sports star is in real life. Most people are terrible. So what?

This list is clickbait idiocy. I regret reading it. I will probably regret writing about it.

Many of the items cited aren’t even emblematic of the South, just rural areas in general. The South is very large and diverse. Many of them apply only to some (very small) areas of the region.

The only one I noticed that is pretty universal is sweet tea; it is fairly easy to find someone who knows how to make good sweet tea in the South. It is nearly impossible to find outside the area.

Also, mosquitoes are only really bad and ubiquitous in Florida for the most part. By ubiquitous, I mean exactly what that word means. In Florida, they are around in great density nearly always, while in other regions they might be bad in specific areas at specific times but it is possible to get away from them.

In Florida (and parts of Georgia), they are everywhere just about all the time.

For instance I am in Tennessee now and I was told several times by locals that the “mosquitoes can get bad here.”

To a Tennessean, a bad mosquito problem is that you see one or two every few minutes and get bitten once or twice. This is the height of summer, by the way.

Now to a Floridian, that is the bare minimum. That is winter. That is what I as a Floridian call “no mosquitoes.”

Also, I’ve yet to find a really good rib or barbecue joint outside the South, so that is true, too.

Telling kids graduating high school what to study so that in 4-5 (or more years) they might get a good job doesn’t work.

But it’s very frustrating that Kurtzleben, and essentially our entire elite policy media, doesn’t go a step further: trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy. Jobs in petrochemical engineering have been exploding, because of a largely-unpredictable boom in American fossil fuel reserves. Becoming a contracting engineer for a construction firm was a great idea in 1999, but by 2005, was a very risky proposition. Going to law school was the epitome of mercenary self-interest until, suddenly, it was the epitome of laughable, deluded foolishness. Teaching kids how to code Python now, when they’ll be hitting the job market 20 years from now, is ludicrous, especially in a world where there’s every reason to think that tech firms will continue to have very low employee to market cap ratios and where computers might take over the bulk of coding. Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can. If you’re telling me that you know what every freshman should start studying in 2014 so that s/he can get a good job in 2019, I think you’re full of it.

The economy changes quickly. I know IT really well, so I’ll talk about that.

Roughly 80% of the day-to-day technologies and skills I relied upon to do my job in 2004 are now irrelevant or quickly being deprecated, or just weren’t used widely (or present at all) in the enterprise. There’s 20% of them that will basically never change – the core knowledge of the field such as binary math, etc.

So what does this mean?

Well, in general, universities tend to be behind in most IT/CS-related fields by 10-15 years. So if you get an MIS degree, by the time you get out of university you are likely to be 15-20 years behind the leading edge of tech (where the money is).

So you then have a lot of debt, and at least in IT are extremely far behind.  Yes, you are probably more likely to get a job than someone with no college degree, but if you didn’t get an internship and get some real-world experience, you are going to have problems because your knowledge is so archaic.

I realize this isn’t a real statistical analysis, etc., all the usual disclaimers idiotic pedants require hearing, &c., but looking at all these old photos of Silicon Valley really belies the notion that women were not present in tech history.

This of course and obviously means that the lack of interest by women in CS and related careers is due primarily to the putrid and misogynist culture that is present and is actually retrenching in that arena.

There are other factors, too, but that is the main one.

The woman with the huge “Trying to Think” poster is great, though. I need that.

Why, yes, I will help you find your start menu while I am trying to figure out how to redistribute OSPF and EIGRP routes from a network with 200 routers.

I just realized today that my side has it all backwards. Liberals think that if they triumph at identity politics (which is not possible), then justice follows.

When in reality, triumph mostly follows economic and legal victories wrought in collective action.

Identity politics is the exact wrong approach to achieving real justice for the people most liberals and social justice types are attempting to help. In many cases, it’s actively harmful. In the majority of cases, it allows them to celebrate victory having actually achieved nothing.

The implicit denigration of fundamental research is bizarre considering that’s where nearly all of the modern world came form.

This week, Rice University said that Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad science division, has invested $11 million in this autocomplete programming project, dubbed PLINY, after the ancient Roman author of the first encyclopedia.

DARPA created the internet. Was that mad science? To the clueless at the time, I guess so. The thing is all really creative things will seem absolutely harebrained and useless at their inception.

Humans are very limited in their cognitive scope mostly (I’d guess) due to evolutionary history.

Even Wired is very, very conservative in many areas.

If “mad science” gave us the internet, self-driving cars (also kicked off by DARPA) and so many other cool and useful things, I’ll take “mad science” for $2,000, Alex.

I would personally like to punch every Firefox developer in the face.

No, seriously.

What this means is that Firefox now prevents you from logging into any older device such as routers, switches, RAID systems, load balancers, and so, so many more devices that lack certain newer security measures (don’t feel like explaining it all here).

Most of these devices are not capable of being updated to something new. Either the vendor does not have an update or is out of business.

These sort of devices are not rare. At the last place I worked, there were probably 20-30 of them on the network.

This is not at all unusual.

So it means that these devices – which all have web interfaces (only) – can not be managed by Firefox. At all. With no way to override this idiotic behavior.

What are these annoying fucklet developers even thinking? Are they even thinking?

When you are so convinced you are right, not even the dumbest thing possible can convince you of anything else.

Hell fucking yes.

As for whether humans “need” or “get used to” a Retina resolution, that way of thinking is backwards. The default state for humans is real world resolution (no pixels), or for text, the resolution of ink on paper (600dpi to 2400+ dpi). What we had to “get used to” was the unnaturally chunky, low resolution of displays from the first computers until now. Those Dark Ages are over and now we can enjoy computer displays that have the resolution they always should have. A 96 dpi monitor is not “normal,” it is as archaic as a dot matrix printer.

People arguing that hi-dpi is not needed just boggle my mind. The world is hi-dpi, all the way down to the Planck Length, the “pixels” of the universe. Why would you not want readable text? Why would you not want excellent graphics?

Status quo bias in action, I guess?

I try to avoid writing about politics on this site because in the US it is mostly irrelevant. The moneyed class will get what they want the hard way (Republicans) or the easy way (Democrats), and there is only difference on the margins between those two.

But this guy, though I disagree with a lot of what he says, is on the right track: Hilary Clinton would be a continuation of the Obama presidency, which was a continuation and in many ways an intensification of the Bush presidency.

Politically Obama and Bush didn’t govern that differently, all the heart-rending cries from dumbass self-deluded liberals aside.

I don’t support Hillary Clinton for president because I don’t support any war-mongering, high-finance-coddling, poverty-inducing colonialist assbag for president, regardless of gender or experience.

By the way, yeah, the Republicans took the Senate. So what. Know how much difference that’s going to make despite all the howling you’ve heard?

Absolutely none. American politics and outcomes – especially on the national level – is largely not influenced by voting, despite what you’ve read.

That’s a lie you’ve been sold.

But don’t believe me. Believe instead the evidence.

It took some doing, but I just installed a hypervisor on top of another hypervisor.

More specifically, I installed ESXi 5.5U2 on top of Microsoft’s HyperV in Server 2012 R2.

So now I can test and run features of ESXi without having separate hardware, as well as of course HyperV itself.

Going to need a server with more memory and a better processor real soon now.

It wasn’t easy, but now it’s running like a cheetah.

If you don’t have any clue what I am talking about like most things on this blog, it’s not really important.

I’ve always seen David Foster Wallace accused of being sexist and misogynistic. Yet I’ve never seen any evidence of this in his works or anywhere else.

Yep, he has characters who are sexist, but check this out: we live in a world that is sexist and misogynistic, so having characters who putatively live in that world and who never, ever exhibit those characteristics would be rather inauthentic, wouldn’t it?

A lot of people it seems have trouble discerning fiction from reality.

Here’s is DFW’s reading list from his former course.

Notice anything?

Yeah, six of the nine authors are women.

Outside of a specific course in the women’s studies department, that is highly unusual. I’d bet in 99 out of 100 English departments you walk into, 90% of the assigned authors would be male.

The specific accusations that DFW is a misogynist seem to spring from envy than anything else, and misreading of his works by those who should know better.

But when you have an ideology to push, “knowing better” is no obstacle.

I was on the phone with a recruiter today about a contractor position that I might be interested in.

He was looking at my resume and said something like, “It’s unusual for someone to have this level and number of certifications in such disparate fields.”

And my reply was basically, “Welcome to awesome!”

I didn’t say that phrase exactly, but that was pretty much the gist of it.

Both the people who hate Lena Dunham and Lena Dunham are idiots, just different kinds of idiots.

That is all.