Well, looks like geoengineering or space engineering it’ll be.
Humans only do the right thing after all other ways are attempted, so soon that’ll be the only choice.
So that’s what we will do.
The next 100 years of human history are gonna be frickin’ crazy like you can’t even imagine. Like Justin Bieber riding on a manatee shooting AK-47s into the sky kinda crazy.
Yeah.
Health care costs set to rise 25 to 50%.
PPACA is not bending the health care cost curve downward as promised. It is sending premiums into the orbit. NYT reported:
Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected.
But the useful idiots of the left like Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte assured me this was absolutely impossible and all merely evil right-wing lies and propaganda!
When in fact it was utterly predictable and predicted by me and many, many others possessed of even a tiny lick of sense.
Interesting facts about me:
1) I have terrible balance. I can’t roller skate, use a skateboard, roller blade or anything like that. Also I fall or nearly fall up and down stairs a lot. No medical condition indicated. Have been this way all my life.
2) I (and many other people) set a world record in 1997 for the longest-distance non-stop parachute operation in the world. Two mid-air refuelings, 19 hours flying. Then the jump. This record likely still stands though I haven’t looked into it.
3) Dogs freak me out in some metaphysical way. So needy. Cannot deal.
4) I tried lucid dreaming in the 5th grade. Got hooked on it. Thanks, Omni magazine.
5) By the time I was 10 or 11, I’d subscribed (thanks to my grandparents) to Scientific American, Omni, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Popular Science and some other magazines. Also read National Geographic cover to cover starting when I was six. Nerdiest kid alive? Hell yeah.
6) I once asked for a strange girl’s number in a Waffle House in the middle of the night. This is something I almost never do, but I got it, and it was I think real. I never called her as my life was just too busy at that time.
7) If I had a superpower, I’d want it to be the ability to speak, read, write and fully understand any language fluently without training.
8) I used to be able to hold my breath for more than two minutes while swimming underwater. What living on a clean river in Florida will do for you. Used to freak people right the hell out.
9) I used to read 9-12 books concurrently.
10) I don’t naturally have much empathy. Think I was just born this way. I try to rein it in and not become a complete sociopath but it’s a lifelong battle.
What a voice.
I’d like to write an sf novel written in Egyptian (late period) hieroglyphics.
I spent much of my early life creating my own languages, and during that time as I was studying enough to attempt something like that, I examined very deeply many other languages and writing systems*.
I attempted to learn to read and to write late Egyptian hieroglyphics as well. I did that for about two years, and it is much harder than any currently extant human writing (or reading) system. Those are relatively easy for me. Hieroglyphics not so much.
Even at the height of my learning I could only accurately decipher — after much effort — 20% of even the simplest writing.
But if I had infinite time on earth, I really would learn it and then write an entire sf novel that way just for my own amusement.
Now that would be cool.
*Which let me tell you is so so much harder in a hick town pre-internet with basically no real library and no transportation, as compared to now. When I look back at what I was able to achieve with basically no resources and so many people even in my own family actively, violently hostile to me, I’m frickin’ amazed. Go early me!
It’s way, way too far out to do this but I’m doing it anyway.
With all the soothsaying savvy at my command, I predict that Scott Walker will be the Republican nominee and if the economy is in a downward trend during the presidential election, he will be the next president of the United States.
If the economy is in an upward or flat trend, it will be Hillary Clinton, narrowly, and Bernie Sanders will be her running mate.
Not intending to get into deep sociological analysis here. Like most things I write on this blog, this is reactionary and typed up in five minutes or less.
But I miss the old web. Before social networks and the vast invasion of the stupid people and the corporate conquest and subjugation. It really was a bit of a weeder when it was more difficult to do anything useful.
People are content to give away their life and their freedom for 10% off at Outback. I will never, ever understand this. Fuck those people and everything they stand for, everything they are. We have no common ground at all.
At least I got to live through the wild west of BBSes and the early web, and to feel that promise even if at the time I recognized it as probably false.
Humans are like any other animal: their own doom and their own nemesis. Why would we be immune from any natural laws that govern other creatures? We are not. We’re just acting out an old, old play on a larger stage.
History, prove me wrong. But is so very rarely does.
The term “cloud” makes me laugh as it’s all just crap on a server somewhere, just like always.
Just now the server is farther away, performance is worse and your data is also really insecure.
To stamp out anonymity with the intention of making a more civil or humane online environment is to choose a technological solution that merely papers over the underlying social and political problems.
–Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
What the fuck is wrong with Mozilla?
Drop FTP support? Why, why would you ever do this?
FTP sites for downloads are incredibly common. This would be an enormous mistake and even regular users would be turned off as their browser would often appear “broken.”
Of course the goal is to push people to app stores and other walled gardens, so in that context this makes perfect sense.
Fuck Mozilla.
Yet another technology implemented by Mozilla in Firefox with nary a thought to its potential harm.
In Firefox to disable, do:
§Enter “about:config” in the address bar and press enter
§Press the button “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
§Type in “media.peerconnection.enabled” in the search bar
§Right-click the entry choose “Toggle”, the column “Value” should now be “false”
This vulnerability is also present in Chrome but I don’t and won’t use that privacy-thieving piece of shit so I have no idea how to disable it there.
Lucid dreaming for a while this morning.
I was morphing bodies and other cool stuff, Mystique-like.
As I was beginning to wake up, I actually forced myself to stay in the dream. Been a long time since I’ve done that.
Two tiers of thought: surface and reverie — is like thinking with two linked brains concurrently. It feels very strange, like being two people at once.
Lucid dreaming is the nearest thing I know to living in another world altogether.
Ellen Pao is now gone as CEO of Reddit. Good riddance even if it was some strategy to enact unpopular changes and then have a scapegoat. I don’t believe the Reddit staff is that smart, personally.
But at least one person at Slashdot understands what the bans were really about.
Don’t mistake what the FPH ban was : a political move to gain mainstream political correctness point in the eyes of the HAES and FA movements. Remember : 70% of americans are now overweight (source : http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx [nih.gov]). It pays to cater to the majority.
The Fat Acceptance SJWs think they won a great victory. But if SJW crap falls out of favor, their subreddits will also be shitcanned faster than a CEO racks up dollars in Caymans bank accounts. (By the way, I think Pao was making $500 an hour as CEO, not that high as far as CEOs go.)
FA in my mind stands for “Failure Acceptance” these days. FA: for when you’ve well and truly given up.
The same bug is in Chrome, though they probably don’t call it a bug.
It arguably made sense not to cache HTTPS content in 2000. Not in 2015. Not caching HTTPS means that when you go back, the page loads afresh from the current URL.
Which means when you go back to look at something, there’s a good chance it won’t be there again.
This is terrible, terrible behavior, anti-user and violates all sorts of usability guidelines.
I used to use Opera because it was the only browser that implemented caching correctly.
When I hit the back button, I FUCKING WANT GO BACK AT WHAT I WAS LOOKING AT BEFORE DAMN.
Last week Oregon’s insurance commissioner, Laura Cali, announced that the state had approved a 25 percent premium increase for the largest health insurer on the state’s exchanges. The second largest insurer did even better: It received permission to boost its monthly charge to consumers by 33 percent.
Oregon might be the first health insurance exchange equivalent of a penguin getting shoved off an ice floe, but it won’t be alone in the freezing-cold waters for long. For example, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee requested an average 36 percent price increase for the plans it offers—after receiving a 19 percent bump last year. And that sounds like a relative bargain compared with Minnesota and New Mexico, where the BlueCross BlueShield family is looking for increases of more than 50 percent. Even if the final numbers are lower than the asks, it seem
But Kevin Drum assured me that the premium increases would “only” be 4.8 percent. What happen!
How dumbass Dems can continue defending the ACA I have no idea.
There was never a chance in hell that the ACA would do anything to control health care costs for individuals. Now that it’s passed and the initial furor has died down, the insurance companies are going to jack the rates right up and continue to do so.
I don’t mind saying I told you so, so: I told you so.
So there.