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?

It’s interesting how human thought always follows parallel tracks even in supposedly positionally opposed groupings.

Blasphemy is profaning the sacred. “Triggers” in Tumblr-speak and its outgrowths is the broaching of taboo topics that violate the supposed sensitivities of various assumed-to-be traumatized groups.

However different these may seem, both evolved eventually to achieve the same end: to control the ideological direction of thought and to proscribe any out of bounds thinking on any issue.

Humans shamble down the same worn paths time after time. It gets a bit boring, really.

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in June (Sucks, Sucks, Sucks).

Yep. People are cheering the 223,000 jobs added but if you actually dig into the report at all it’s a whole different story altogether.

Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima.

OMG there’s a real Cosima. Well, she’s on the dinner list. Along with real fake Cosima. Or fake real Cosima.

In other words, Tatiana, you’re invited too. Ha.

But it’d be cool if Tatiana M pretended to be Cosima Herter, while Cosima Herter pretended to be Cosima Niehaus.

“The hand-wavey, pacing around, going off on tangents about all kinds of weird things while she talks, is a similar characteristic (one that my friends often tease me about). She’s cheeky, mischievous, curious about everything, and sincere – I think that’s pretty true-to-life. And, the ‘I’m kind of always late, so I’m kind of always sorry’ is embarrassingly accurate.”

-Cosima Herter about what qualities she and Cosima Niehaus share

In a way it’s nice to see that CEOs as inept as Ellen Pao can rise to the top and fail so spectacularly and be so incompetent.

It’s not when amazing, peerless women are permitted power that a signifier of equality is achieved; no, equality is at least in sight when someone as terrible and clueless as Pao can also wield power and be as bungling and foolish as Steve Ballmer without it being a commentary on her gender.

About the fired moderator, I’m guessing she was canned because she wasn’t part of the management cool kids club, had no MBA and was therefore completely alien to someone like Pao.

It’s kind of fun watching Pao destroy Reddit because it’s a good illustration of how not to do so many things.

Lessons for the future. Always good to have.

Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation” is mostly a crock.

Just like with the Wright brothers, most important innovations are only obvious in hindsight. There is a long history of world-changing technologies being written off as irrelevant toys even years after they were developed.

There are several nascent innovations happening or about to happen that are going to change lives completely in the next 20-100 years, assuming technological society continues and all that.

This list isn’t comprehensive; I’ll miss many. But I can guarantee a few of these will come to fruition, seem obvious in hindsight but be widely derided and scorned as “playtoys” or “impossible dreams” now:

1) Lab-raised meat.

2) Fusion.

3) Widespread and greater-than-human AI.

4) VR.

5) Neural implants.

6) Uplifting animals to human-level or greater intelligence.

7) Genetic engineering.

8) Anti-senescence treatments and a general cure for aging.

I could go on. But some that will definitely change nearly everything aren’t on this list because likely even to me they look like inconsequential playthings or just don’t exist yet.

Typical Florida driver.

I’d not be surprised to see this in Florida. Where I live now, I’d not expect to see something like this.

But Florida, yep, just another day.

Funny that Windows is still utter shit at handling 4K and 5K, even in Windows 10.

Stranger still are the text-scaling issues found even in Metro. Microsoft’s new interface design is supposed to handle high pixel densities without issue, yet some aliasing is obvious in text found on the login screen, the taskbar and the Start menu.

Metro apps suffer similar problems. The Windows Store, for example, has made little effort to ensure images scale as well.

On my 5K iMac, even old applications usually look pretty good.

I had planned to switch back to Windows when it supported 4K and 5K properly. But it looks like that will be roughly never, so Mac OS it is for the foreseeable future.

What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? It’s not like high PPI displays are going to get less common, or become less used.

This article is funny, but I like to nitpick.

So I will.

That planet is what, twice the radius of earth? At that radius and assuming the average density of earth for the larger planet, gravity would logically be close to twice earth normal assuming the earth-normal density of 5.5 g/cc.

Twice normal gravity would be a bit difficult to deal with, but doable.

Water has a lot lower density than most of our planet, so if the larger planet had a lot more water to lower the average density to 4 g/cc gravity would be about 1.44 times earth normal. This would be a lot easier to handle.

Also, a planet with no tectonic activity would not be long-term habitable most likely. It’d be essentially dead. Subduction/obduction, orogeny (and the related iron cycle) and other geological processes bring a huge amount of minerals and other nutrients to the surface that are required for continued vital biospheres.  (The piece later says there are volcanic peaks which probably can’t happen on a rocky planet without tectonic activity outside of meteor strikes or similar.)

Anyway, there’s more but that’s all I feel like nitpicking for now.