This comment is so right.

From my experience, controlling and limiting the UI has become a “religious thing” amongst young programmers who believe they know best and want to impose that on the rest of the world. The lame excuse I see most from the script-kiddies is “we don’t want to re-invent the wheel!” So they make the wheel square and claim it’s “betta’ than eva’!” and call it a day.

During the 90s — when programming such things was much harder than it is today — nearly every UI was configurable. That capability to configure hasn’t gone away for technical reasons or ease of coding for that is easier than ever now, but because of these religious views on UI.

As the culture at large has gotten more authoritarian, software developers have gone right along with that. They are swimming in the same stream after all.

Sometimes I’m so good at troubleshooting it is scary.

Well, scary awesome.

I spent 15 minutes today looking at a problem that half a dozen other people had been looking at for days and fixed it. Just. Like. That.

I don’t get paid enough, I really don’t.

There are no circumstances under which I will vote for Hillary Clinton.

I will vote for Bernie Sanders if he is somehow nominated, though this is extremely unlikely.

I would’ve voted for Elizabeth Warren.

But Clinton? Hell no. That she’d be (very, very) slightly better in some areas (and worse in others) than whatever horror the Republicans throw on the ballot means absolutely nothing to me.

The demonization of John Green is all of a piece with the relatively-new identity politics-fueled received wisdom that an author should not create a character save for one exactly like him- or herself.

I can’t understand it, really. And I have no interest in being an author, but if I were most or nearly all of my characters would probably be female, though I doubt I’d write any teenagers as that category has been well-covered indeed.

The reason is that I don’t really understand modern masculinity and I could not write a realistic male character who seemed to exist in this world.

Perhaps some far future sf where masculinity had been utterly redefined. I don’t know. But I’m just not interested.

But I really can’t understand the whole idea that authors should only write about characters exactly like themselves. That means that a novel like Seveneves would not exist. Most of the main characters are women, and nearly all of the important ones. (And if you are wondering if you should read the work, hell yes you should. Best hard sf book in a decade at least and I am not a true Stephenson fan.)

By conventional identity politics wisdom, fucking great characters like Tekla Alekseyevna Ilyushina, Ivy Xiao and Moira Crewe would not exist. All of the characters would’ve been white males just like Neal Stephenson.

Does this somehow make sense? Is this desirable? I can’t imagine how requiring Neal Stephenson to write white male characters just like Neal Stephenson helps anyone.

Reddit Bosses Are Doing Everything Wrong.

Pao is clearly the wrong woman for the job right now, but Reddit’s problem goes much higher than that. Pao and her bosses at Advance Publications, one of the world’s largest media companies, are acting like Reddit is run by their employees, who will follow their instructions because they’re paid to do so. But it isn’t.

Yep. Pao is a highly-paid moron. When I could do a better job as CEO, you are the wrong person for the job.

And I’ll tell you what, my main “task” CEOin’ would be sitting in my office watching Orphan Black and occasionally screaming out the door for some more pizza to whatever assistant happened to be nearby while I awaited the IPO and my options to vest.

And I’d still be better than Pao because with my, uh, hands-off CEOin’ I wouldn’t actively be fucking things up.

I wanted to like Pao because hey, woman as head of a large internet media concern. But alas women can be just as MBA-infectedly incompetent as men.

The Greek crisis got me thinking along these lines again, about yet another one of those huge cultural shifts that has occurred in my lifetime and that a great number of people will frantically insist has never been any other way.

This one is back in the “old” days — say pre-2005 or so — if a bank made a bad loan, nearly all of the responsibility for taking such an ill-advised risk rested on the creditor — that is, the entity making the loan.

Since ~2005 however, the responsibility both actuarially and just as important morally has been shifted in the common discourse to the person or entity receiving the loan.

This is a huge shift, symptomatic of the now utterly dominant neoliberal mindset and benefiting no one but a very few rich and large institutions.

In other words, if TBTF, Inc. made a loan to Rianne in 1990 and Rianne could not pay back her loan, the question would have been, “Why would the bank have been so stupid to have loaned $500,000 to a waitress making $8,000 a year?”

Now this has shifted almost completely to, “Rianne is an evil scoundrel for taking a loan out from a bank with terms she didn’t understand, marketed at her ceaselessy, meanwhile she was assured that she’d later be able to refinance — and oh yeah the loan officer lied to her, changed her application without her knowledge to be fraudulent, and also signed her name for her after she had doubts. Obviously Rianne is the evildoer in this scenario!” says the neolib apologist.

The same with Greece. It’s all the Greeks’ fault, despite the fact that the EU and Germany knew that the loans given were extremely unlikely to be repaid.

I don’t intend to delve into the details here. Debate them elsewhere. The point is that the responsibility for making a bad loan used to lie 90% with the creditor. Now that has irrationally shifted to the receiver of the loan.

A huge shift that nearly everyone now takes for granted and many insist has never been any different. Very strange.

There’s someone doing good research on this now which is not yet completed, but I bet if you scratch the surface the HAES and Fat Acceptance movement receives large amounts of funding from the US processed food industry. And:

I will be absolutely shocked if the FA/HAES movement is not mostly funded by food interests. I think there is about a 100% chance of that being the case. Otherwise it makes no sense as a cultural phenomenon.

(Yes, GSElevator seems like a real tool. Which is why I didn’t link directly to his Twitter feed. But being an asshole doesn’t make someone wrong.)

We’re having elk burgers tonight.

Found it on sale for $3.00 a pound at the local grocery store. Well worth it as it’s so much more flavorful than beef.

So yeah, good grub tonight to say the least.

Or for the more erudite, a cervid comestible which is immensely digestible.

In honor of America’s birthday, here’s three reasons the American Revolution was a mistake.

In other words, we’d be more like Canada but warmer. Would that be so bad?