It’s hard for me to cry for someone in this situation.

Tim Trampedach, a 36-year-old business owner who lives in San Francisco, has seen his home’s value soar from $1.2 million to $1.6 million in the past three years. He and his wife want to move into a bigger place, but there are simply no homes within their price range in their Portrero Hill neighborhood.

For $1.6 million in many (very nice) parts of the country, you can buy 7 or 8 really great houses.

Listening to rich people whine about living in an expensive place is not exactly music to my ears. Don’t like the San Francisco prices, move the fuck out of the San Francisco area.

You could live in the same $400,000 house in Portland, and have $1.2 million leftover.

And then shut the hell up because as we’d say where I grew up, your problem ain’t even approachin’ one.

It’s nice to see all of the commencement speakers rejected lately by students. It’s the one area where the students have the tiniest bit of leverage, and good that they are using it.

But it’s got the elites up in arms, and their journalistic bulldogs telling the students what spoiled brats they are and all that. It’s sort of funny to see, since of course the elites still unaccountably and absolutely rule the country and being rejected as a commencement speaker truly does nothing at all to harm the individual or the institutions they are a part of.

They just aren’t used to being rejected, and that’s why it’s become a big deal. Telling someone “no” who has never been told that in his or her life in any real way is seen as a true crime, especially by those in journalism who both fawn over those already in the firmament of our society and who hope to move up to such status.

The offense in other words is being rude to a powerful person – even one who very much deserves it – when it’s not considered out of form to be unpleasant to a waitress at a diner somewhere.

In reality, both are the same.

I just realized I have the same visceral reaction to Dr. Who and Terry Pratchett: DO NOT WANT.

I don’t even really know why. It just is.

It’s something about both of them trying too hard, but that’s all I can really articulate.

It’s so much more pleasant reading someone who knows what the fuck they are writing about reference ISPs, infrastructure, and bandwidth.

Cringely also said the same thing I have all along, that it’s just a matter of turning up a few more ports on a router somewhere and doing a crossconnect and this whole “problem” would be solved. In most cases, it would cost literally a few hundred dollars (network engineer time + $50 fiber cable + NOC crossconnect fee).

Those who deride the space program as useless and unnecessary seem not to realize that if the technologies and experience developed there allow it to save even one major city from an asteroid strike, it will have paid off a million times over.

Never mind that if it one day allows us to somehow divert a planet-killer asteroid, it will have paid off, well, for everything.

Anyway, some things humans should do just because they are awesome and amazing.

Unfortunately, I’ve found those who oppose space programs and the like are not nearly as practical as they imagine themselves to be. Practicality also involves resilience, and knowing that for even the smartest person not all ends can be seen.

Bad-ass photo. It is of Virginia Hankins, who is “ia self-professed warrior, actress, stuntwoman and knight. She played Joan of Arc against William the Conqueror on Spike TV’s hit show Deadliest Warrior. She is currently one of the industry’s leading stunt archers, mounted weapons trainer, jouster, woman motorcycle rider, and the first female knight in the 50 year history of the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire.“

Greatest crossover idea ever: the organization responsible for the clones on Orphan Black is a subsidiary of Cyberdyne Systems, the corporation that built SkyNet in the Terminator series.

So most of the clones + Cameron + Sarah Connor team up to battle SkyNet and patriarchy.

Sarah Manning and Sarah Connor kicking ass together? Oh. Hell. Yes.

Sarah Kendzior is busy killin’ it every day.

What she said about Ezra Klein’s Vox made me laugh as it’s so true: Vox = Wikipedia – facts + condescension.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art—we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

– Anaïs Nin

A friend once accused me of reading all of the books I do because I wanted to escape the world. I told him that I wasn’t escaping anything, but finding everything.

Now he lives in a trailer, drunk and broke in the town we grew up in.

I’ve been all over the world.

Who exactly was escaping?

Internet: 1969-2014.

Was nice while it lasted. But was no surprise. The government is now an arm of corporations and the rich. This was inevitable, as was DRM infecting the open web.

Yeah, this is about how good I was at picking up hints when I was younger.

My brain just doesn’t operate that way. I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience a lot of men’s brains don’t, especially those who are attempting not to be presumptuous of women’s consent. (Which is a good thing to do and to be, I might add, before any of the “poor reading comprehension” tribe comes out of the woodwork.)

So it’s a bit of a no-win situation: either you have to somehow magically know these social cues (that no one teaches you), but if you fail at doing so then you are either made fun of or demonized.

I know, I know, it makes me a terrible person and so so evil, but I had and have sympathy for the Elevatorgate guy because when I ask someone if they want coffee, I mean, “Would you like some coffee?” Though I never would’ve asked anyone in an elevator. That I think he was wrong about, completely.

It wasn’t until years (years!) later that I figured out that a female friend of mine wasn’t just coming around to “listen to music.”

She was probably equally confused about why I never even attempted to kiss her or anything.

It was because I had no fucking clue. None.

And there is no way to win even talking about this, because doing so makes me a “nice guy” or a potential rapist, but ask me if I give a fuck.

Answer: no. No I do not.

I don’t think men’s problems or concerns should be at the top of anyone’s lists of problems to solve. But pretending that the world can be mended by fixing only one set or side of problems is just daft, and wrong.

It would take me roughly 5-10 minutes to type this sentence on my phone.

How is it even possible to type so quickly on a phone?

On my old Blackberry, I could’ve maybe done that sentence in 45 seconds or so, but on the new phones with no real keyboards, typing is very very slow for me and always will be.

(Note: I can type 90-120 wpm on a regular computer keyboard, and am a touch typist.)

I haven’t said much about Piketty’s Capital because I haven’t read the book, and probably don’t intend to.

The r > g hypothesis is almost certainly true, as Piketty is just expanding on research done by other scholars that I have read.

What’s more interesting to me is that r > g seems to me to actually create the conditions for its destruction (inequality leading to eventual war, etc.)

I’d like to see more research on that. I would definitely read that.

Photos of an NSA “upgrade” factory show Cisco router getting implant.

Welp, there went the US tech industry.

Right now, Comcast has a 300GB data cap in many places. It’s also planning to roll data caps out everywhere.

The word is that the cap will eventually rise to 500GB per month. Seems generous, right?

Not really. 4K video is coming. (Actually, it’s already here. Netflix streams some items in 4K already.)

Doing some basic math, a 4K video stream will eat 20 to 30 GB an hour

Say you have three family members or roommates who stream 5 movies a month each – not an unreasonable amount. (I have known people who watch 20-40 movies a month.)

So three people watching five 4K movies a month on Netflix == 750GB+. More than 250GB over the data cap set by Comcast. And that’s assuming they do nothing else at all with their connections. No online backups (which consume massive amounts of bandwidth). No web browsing. No connecting to work. No transferring photos. No YouTube. Etc.

If for some reason you think that 4K is some futuristic technology that no one will ever use – well, I remember when the same thing was being said about 1080p not all that long ago.

And now everyone nearly has a 1080p capable TV or monitor.

Comcast’s data caps are ridiculously low, and in fact should not exist at all. In my opinion, data caps are just as large a threat to the internet as “fast lanes” and should be opposed everywhere they crop up.