I’m not black, but I was poor.

If you’re poor, you involve the police as an absolutely last resort. And sometimes not even then.

There are only three things that can happen as a poor person when you call the police:

1. They arrest someone you love/need for rent and food.
2. They arrest you.
3. They kill you or someone you need/love.

Yeah, this happens more to black people. But poor people receive the brunt of police brutality and ill will, no matter their skin color.

When I was young the chances of my family calling the police about anything was very damn slim because of those three facts above.

Much of evolutionary psychology is absurd, but it’s also fucking ludicrous to insist that neither men nor women were selected evolutionarily for features that were attractive to the other sex.

This is just the way it is, sorry, hurt feelings won’t change this. Evolution doesn’t give a crap about your wishes, beliefs, illusions or utopias.

That this even has to be stated is what’s absurd.

When ideology meets reality, I’m gonna choose reality every time.

We now have an answer to the Fermi Paradox and what the Great Filter is — it’s climate change.

My opinion vacillates from day to day and week to week, but given human nature and our lack of any long-term scope, I think the chance of an actual civilization on this planet surviving climate change (rather than just ragtag nomadic bands of survivors with very low tech) is around ten percent.

Does every advanced culture experience climate change, thus dooming their civilizations as well? Not enough data to go on – but I doubt we are special, so even with the lack of information I think it likely.

The chance that we do anything substantive about climate change is almost nil. Liberals and conservatives, both being human, are just as susceptible to the same biases — the primary one being that because it’ll happen over hundreds of years, that it is not in fact a slow-motion apocalypse.

Most people can’t see beyond their own noses, so this is no surprise.

Humans are extremely maladapted to what’s happening now, and of course at the very worst time for it, old people who will experience no consequences of climate change are in charge and slurping up all resources for themselves.

It’d be a different world if 25-year-olds were in charge. Though other things would suffer, some correct decisions on climate change would be made and really, that’s the only meaningful decision domain there is today.

The rest really don’t matter at all long-term or even medium-term.

Don’t trust anyone over 30 indeed….

I was re-reading this great post of Clarissa’s from a while ago and realized that I don’t trust people who don’t or won’t read fiction.

These are the usually extremely-dichotomous thinkers and those who also believe everything can and should be priced and then monetized.

But all these beliefs seem to usually go hand-in-hand with not reading or not understanding fiction. Or just despising it outright.

I once saw a saw a store called “The Shop.”

This made me conceive of other potential extremely generic store appellations.

So I thought of calling my potential retail operation “Commerce Activities.” Lately, I thought I’d go fully postmodern and call it “Consume. Acquiesce. Obey.” But then I might attract hipsters, and no one wants that. They are so hard to get rid of; traps and spraying do nothing.

The iPad Pro is something I could never use to get anything done.

A device that doesn’t expose a real file system is something that is incompatible with serious work.

It might be fine for someone who does very little, but as a tool that real professionals use, it’s junk.

It’s hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment.

Yep, I remember that. Culture can change fast and people deny it was ever any different when it does.

How do people fall for this?

I know that I am contrarian and incredulous as all hell, but just…what?

It’s brave of her to write about it. But my response would’ve been to laugh and hang up the phone. The IRS just doesn’t operate that way.

Automated Scanning of Firefox Extensions is Security Theater (And Here’s Code to Prove It).

This was always, always about control and power and nothing else. Mozilla’s approach is simply not how you do security. Hell, Mozilla’s approach is not how you build a browser that anyone wants to use.

Mozilla has more morons per square meter than anywhere else on the planet outside a Republican debate.

Hello, academics, and welcome to the world that non-academics have been enduring for 15 or so years now.

Not that non-academic job applications ask those specific questions, but along the same lines.

I’ve seen questions like these on job applications, with the responses I wished I’d sent:

Describe why you are a better fit than other candidates?

I don’t know the other fucking candidates. How the hell would I know? Isn’t that your job to figure out?

What makes you excited to work at (insert company here)?

It’s mainly the paycheck. And, you know, the paycheck.

And more. So many more. I’ve abandoned job applications because they wanted me to answer 10-15 essay-length questions.

The trials and tribulations that academics are put through generally lag behind the rest of the world 10-20 years, so it’s been interesting how as the crucible of modern hiring practices reach academia only then do you hear about it in the press (because these days only those who’ve gone to Ivies really are allowed to be in the mainstream press).

So welcome to the rest of the world, guys and gals! It’s not fun but we’re all in it together it turns out.

Why do journalists get assigned to cover topics they know absolutely nothing about?

That Adele’s album was not streamed has nothing to do with why it is or is not on the top of the charts at Pirate Bay. Not streaming it was never likely to drive that many people to pirate it. This is a false dichotomy anyway (or a double-false dichotomy), and is verging into the territory of “not even wrong.”

First, Adele is not interesting to most of the users of sites like The Pirate Bay. That site and file-sharing sites in general are dominated by 90% fairly misogynist men. Adele is a woman — and a woman who sings emotion-laden songs — so therefore icky.

In other words, her album was never as likely to be pirated as others more interesting to that demographic.

Second, Pirate Bay only shows information from trackers. Nearly all clients these days use DHT, which would not show up on Pirate Bay or any other site. Tracking it by going to Pirate Bay and looking at their charts is like sampling how many fish are in the Pacific Ocean by looking in your bathtub.

Hey, journalistic organizations, I know a lot about a lot of things. Send me money and I’ll make you less stupid.

The reason large-scale resettlement in Europe is a mistake is not that Syrian refugees are dangerous. Rather, it is a mistake because large-scale resettlement will require an equally large-scale commitment of resources that European governments, and European voters, are unwilling to make.

And soon will be completely unable to make, with climate change, declining populations of productive members of society and automation leading to homegrown crises, a decreasing tax base and lowered incomes, respectively.

But that destabilization might be the whole point.

Angela Merkel sure isn’t agreeing to accept a million Syrians for humanitarian reasons and for the good of her country; politicians of her ilk just do not think that way, stupid-ass liberal fairy tales aside.

Hint for the dim: it’s part of the ongoing neoliberal project of eviscerating the welfare state, and for the annihilation of the state talis qualis both as an ideal and an actuality.

What comes around once, comes around again.

Admittedly, it is funny — but it’s been going around on BBSes since the 1980s. I suspect it passed around university labs before that in the 1970s.

I first saw a variant of it around 1986, for reference….

Ben Carson is a good illustration of how extremely intelligent people are often even more clueless and more worthless in areas outside their expertise than the hoi polloi, as they overestimate their competence and knowledge greatly.

I call this “engineeritis” because it is most common in fields like engineering and physics, but is present in every arena where overly-intelligent people cluster.

I think the only way I’d vote for Clinton is if the changed her name to Chillary Clinton, collaborated with Taylor Swift and started dropping some really hot EDM singles.

Better and more constructive than what she’s going to give the world: more war, more right-wing fear and safety-net slashing, more avoiding dealing with climate change.

Come on Chillary, get in the studio. Give the world something worth a damn.