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.

Someone needs to do way more research.

1. The first IBM PC was released in 1981, not 1983.
2. Windows 95 was not (originally) bundled with Internet Explorer.
3. USB was not a replacement for SCSI. It was a replacement for serial and other slow buses. It later evolved.
4. There were really no consumer PCs with built-in or pre-installed NICs in 1995, as back then a NIC was $200+. And he calls them “Ethernet jacks” for some reason, which is something totally different.
5. The article shows a PSone, released in 2000, not 1995.
6. The PlayStation didn’t pioneer disc-based gaming. I think the Sega CD and several others had been out for a few years by that point. Certainly it helped to popularize it more but “pioneer” is completely wrong.

I am sure there are many, many other inaccuracies but those are the ones I noticed right away.

If you’re going to get some clueless fucking millennial intern to research your tech history, make sure they actually do the research.

Or just get someone who lived it. That’ll be easier.

Bridget Malcolm on Instagram.

Can we STOP with the skinny shaming please? I am extremely fit and healthy and am not in the slightest way anorexic. I have worked hard to look like this and am proud of my body.

Yep. Other than some extremes of the (gay male dominated*) fashion industry, most models are healthy, work out a lot and spend a great deal of effort on eating healthily and properly.

Yes, Bridget Malcolm certainly had good genes to look the way she does. But you don’t get a body like that just by good genes. It’s barely a start. Nope, what you do is you spend an assload of time in the gym and also (even more importantly) not stuffing your maw with whatever strikes your fancy.

Like me, she also has naturally long arms and legs for her size which make her look skinnier than she is.**

For all the fat shaming supposedly out there, I (and my girlfriend) often hear and see more skinny shaming in the real world.

Of course, most of the FA movement is just the incoherent spewing of laziness and jealousy. Envy is never pretty, and is especially vitriolic when the envious know that they could do the work to at least approximate a body like Malcolm’s.

*Why gay men prefer starving models is an open question.

**I’m a bit less than two inches taller than my partner, but I have over 5 inches of reach on her.

After Mozilla and Firefox completely dies, I will use it as a case study if I start a business on how to have the best of intentions and plenty of funding and still fail completely.

I can’t think of a better one that is contemporary and where they so deftly seized defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again.

Why are so many liberals endlessly supportive of and accepting of Obamacare’s failures?

It’s designed to funnel money to insurance companies and it’s not even doing that very well, much less helping Americans. It has basically failed at everything it set out to do, other than giving some people pseudo-insurance — i.e., insurance that they can’t afford if they actually have the gall to try and use it.

Is it just that Obama is on their team and they can’t criticize him for anything therefore? Can premiums that rise at twice or three times the rate of inflation and where you must change plans every single year to get a good deal seem like a great end result to anyone?

I just simply do not get it.

I’ve been trying to convince my workplace (slowly and subtly) to adopt a strategy like this.

Cheap and easy to replace. Getting away from enterprise-class hardware that is only such in name and price.

In my experience, “enterprise” hardware means that you just pay much more for much less.

To be clear, I don’t think there is any threat from the US welcoming many more refugees. The US is very large and is fairly good at integration and the welfare benefits aren’t generous enough to attract many of those who are unlikely to contribute much to society.

It’s a completely and utterly different story for small-population, demographically-declining countries like Sweden.

In other words, the US can take a million refugees in no problem, even if their anti-Englightenment beliefs make some areas of some cities worse.

Sweden cannot take a million anti-Enlightenment refugees in and expect to survive it long-term. It just simply cannot. The same is true for many other European countries.

Sweden will not be a good place to live in 30 or 40 years, especially for women. The same might be true in many other European countries in the medium term.

The US faces no such threat, at least not from refugees. Climate change, now that is a whole different story.

What in the hell?

What kinda mook doesn’t put in a buy-stop order when short selling?

A mook who has no fucking clue what he’s doing, that’s what kind.

I don’t feel the least bit of sympathy for this guy. He’s the one on the other end of my trades whose money I’m taking. If you’re going to play games like that, you better know what you’re doing or you’re going to be poor right quick. And I’ll have your money and be wishing you good luck on retiring to that Frigidaire box.

Sold a few stocks short. Lost very little money, made a large net gain overall. The reason is buy-stop orders.

A hard lesson, but if you are gambling understand the stakes. (This guy was gambling. What I do is not gambling.)

It’s funny how people who are “naturally fat” eat in my presence in an eight hour workday period more than I eat in an entire 24 hour period. Far more.

Just observations from work.

One guy consistently eats more calories in cookies alone than I eat in a day, of anything.

One guy’s “lunch” is as big as two of my dinners.

Etc.

Not intending to single anyone out. But I do observe what people eat because I have the data, but I also want to observe data in action.

Yes, strange how people who are “naturally fat” seem to have to eat so much more than I do to be that way.

Hmm…..

I’ll be very sad when Thunderbird dies.

I fucking HATE webmail. So, so ungodly slow and search also works so horribly.

And the interface changes every couple of weeks. And of course they are mining your data harder than a coal baron.

Webmail is a bad solution to a bad problem. When Thunderbird dies, send me a damn physical letter.