DRM makes it impossible for farmers to repair their own tractors.

Another example of very successful propaganda, the implementation and pretty widespread acceptance of DRM.

It doesn’t help artists, it doesn’t create or protect innovation and it robs our culture from us. And yet many people who should know better are utterly convinced it’s the only thing preventing anarchy.

I like studying corporate propaganda because it is really instructive as to the flaws in the human psyche.

“Night Will Fall.”

But, like, The Hunger Games has such a ridiculous premise.

Meanwhile, all that occurred in living memory. Mental self-protection, I know. But I am always kind of appalled by how self-deluding people are.

There is no one explanation for why prices rise in a market, but one big reason that college and homes are so spectacularly costly as I’ve pointed out before is because loans are widely available.

Cathy O’Neil says the same thing.

Ok, some basic economics. In an ideal market, prices are determined by supply and demand. Duh. But they are also determined by supply of money. And here’s the thing: all money and all monetary instruments are fungible.

Loans, insurance, IOUs, bonds, treasury bills, promissory notes, etc. – all of those (with various risk discounting built in) are as good as money. They are the same as money, which is what “fungible” means. Not all are perfectly fungible, but loans and currency are.

So this means that a loan, a grant and cash money chasing the same product – say a house or a degree – serves to drive the price up quite a lot vs. a non-loan, non-grant environment. (My back of the envelope calculation tells me that homes would be ~60% cheaper if no loans were allowed ever.)

More money chasing the same thing is called “inflation,” of course. Loans cause college costs to rise. Loans cause house prices to rise.

The more loans, the higher the price. Very simple (though many cannot see it).

Eventually, economics tells us that loan amounts for college should equal expected income vs. some risk discounting rate – meaning that college prices can rise far, far more than they have.

And they will, too, sans outside interference.

Without some regulations and constraint and given risk discounting, I’d expect college loans by 2050 to consume approximately 15-20 percent of the new graduate’s total lifetime income.

Unless that is we do something to prevent it.

What the hell is this?

IT is not a professional occupation? Tech support is not?

I know I couldn’t be a programmer, but I also bet that dude (and you know it has to be a dude) couldn’t do my job either.

I’ve built call centers from the ground up (all infrastructure) in a very, very short amount of time. I’ve solved problems that even the vendor of the software in question claimed were “not resolvable.”

I later called the vendor back and told them how to fix their own product.

But I’m not a professional, I guess.

Also, a good tech support person is worth their weight in gold and can solve problems a developer wouldn’t even imagine. Also not a professional, according to this idiot.

IT does get lumped in the “computer janitor” category fairly often. People don’t seem to know what to do with us. They want to treat us like janitors*, but also we usually get paid more than they do and are generally conversant in our job and often in theirs**, so it creates just huge cognitive dissonance. They want to treat us as worthless disposable cogs like they treat janitors, but can’t dispose of us as things start to go downhill rather quickly when they do.

IT people also bother management. They have a lot of power by the nature of their jobs, but management sees them as innately inferior. And we’re also seen as a huge cost center. So management is very, very averse to IT in most companies.

One of the reason programmers want to shit on IT is to avoid the de-professionalization that IT people experience — to say, “I’m not like those IT guys who do unimportant stuff like build the networks my code works across, deploy the servers on which I work and which power my applications. I’m also not like those lowly help desk minions who support my fuck-ups and figure out my code is broken ten ways to Sunday. I’m not like them at all.”

*Note: Janitors should get paid more and in no way should be besmirched. But most people view janitors negatively and want to view IT the same way.

**I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to figure out how to do a significant part of someone’s job on the fly so that I could help them use software that they should’ve already known how to use. Maybe 300 or 400 times in my career?

Time Warner’s has a 97 percent profit margin on high-speed internet service.

Not surprising to me at all, though it is to many people since there has been a very, very successful propaganda campaign from incumbent ISPs asserting that bandwidth is just so expensive.

In reality, bandwidth and even ongoing infrastructure costs are fantastically, ridiculously cheap and literally decline in price every single month.

If TWC were to make a reasonable 15 percent profit, your monthly internet bill for say 100Mbs down should be around $20.

All of this is so familiar.

Every time I won some kind of prize in English my parents would praise me and say I was good and should feel good. My teachers would hold me up as an example and say other kids should try to be more like me. Meanwhile, when I would bring home a report card with a C- in math, my parents would have concerned faces and tell me they were disappointed and I wasn’t living up to my potential and I needed to work harder et cetera.

And I don’t know which part bothered me more.

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust.

Exactly. I too won essay contests, aced AP tests and other feats in English and related fields – and you know what? I never studied. Never. Not once. I did not study for a single minute in high school anything related to English or similar subjects, not for one second.

And I aced every fucking thing. In fifth grade I scored in the top 1/10th of one percent of reading comprehension, civics and science for high school seniors on a standardized test that I literally slept through part of, and to top it off I even read another book during the actual test. There was no possible way I could have put in less effort on that test other than not doing it all (which it was so easy for me that that would have actually been more effort since the teachers would’ve punished me somehow) and I still blew it away like a Minuteman missile impacting an unsuspecting village.

And I deserve about as much credit for being so unbelievably dominant in that domain as a cheetah does for running fast. It’s just what we do, you know?

But math. Math I studied so I could actually get out of high school with a diploma (usually in English, study hall, or other classes – I almost never studied out of school). Time spent agonizing over and studying math so I’d actually graduate? I don’t know, 10,000 or 12,000 hours? Maybe more.

And I barely scraped by. In my final high school math class it literally came down to the final test. I had to score I think a 70 to pass the class with the minimum 65 and thus graduate. I got a 70 even – honestly, too. That teacher didn’t (and wouldn’t have) given it to me, so I truly earned it.

I earned it by studying with a very math-conversant friend for three weeks straight. He was simply astounded by how someone as smart as I was supposed to be just couldn’t catch on.

The thing is, I am naturally good with languages. I can teach myself to read just about any language if I really want to in about two months.

But I can’t seem to learn to use a quadratic equation or do something more complicated than solve for x even if I very much want to and spend years doing it. It just doesn’t click, I don’t grok, no matter how hard I try.

Sorry, libs, sometimes there is such a thing as natural talent and some people have it while others don’t. For me, it’s in languages and systems and not in math. I am far more divergent than most, though – in most people it’s more well-balanced.

But yep, natural talent. It’s real and that can be sad. But that doesn’t make it pretend.

I’m constantly surprised by how poorly police are trained.

If the man on the ground had been so inclined, he could have grabbed the officer’s weapon. Guns are not an especially good weapon up this close.

Yep. In the Army, we were trained to hold anyone at gunpoint at least four and preferably six feet away. Reason is that no one that far away can easily rush you and take or grab your weapon before you have a chance to fire.

Up close, a reasonably quick and competent person can take your weapon from you and kill you with it pretty easily – especially if you are momentarily distracted.

Can’t happen if they are six feet in front of you with their hands on the back of their head.

Similarly, it always bothers me in films where the protagonist is holding someone at gunpoint with the gun pressed to their chest or back or head.

I always think, I’d have their gun and they’d be dead. In situations where I thought I had nothing to lose, I absolutely would try to take someone’s gun if they were stupid enough to hold me with it that close.

I know, in films and TV shows it creates dramatic tension as it puts the characters closer together but it still looks incredibly boneheaded to me.

I too miss old-school blogging, and obviously still practice it.

Twitter and Facebook have their uses (though I will never use either), but they do make the conversation far dumber and duller.

Of course as an elitist I recognize that there are more dumb and dull people on the internet now as it has democratized, so the state of Twitter and Facebook are but a fait accompli of this fact.

For a while, 90% of the people on the internet were fairly well-educated (either self-educated or formal) and the level of discourse was much higher, though of course still at times beset with trolls and other annoyances.

In 2001 or thereabouts the internet was a much better place, with much less corporate intrusion, no Twitter storms of utter ignorance, and no links from Facebook where the average IQ is about 60.

I do miss those days, though I know we’ll never return to them.

That ship has sailed, and with it any hope of anything better than what we now have.

I’ve always known Slashdot is filled with engineeritis-infected morons, yet I still go there anyway.

This black hole of moronity really reveals itself when any talk of Apple comes up.

If you listen to the hosers over there, Apple had nothing at all to do with the smartphone market taking off, nothing at all to do with kickstarting phone innovation, it was all an historic accident and marketing.

Strangely, an historic accident that Apple somehow keeps repeating over and over.

I agree that Apple doesn’t invent a lot of things. No, they do something better. They take something already invented – and refine it, then perfect it.

Invention is overrated, anyway.

I used a pre-Apple smartphone. It was an utter, utter piece of crap. One of my bosses at work had one. It was just terrible, to say the least.

There’s also the perennial complaint that “Apple is just the first to market.”

As if that’s nothing.

But yes, we have a name for this. When someone runs a marathon, we definitely have a name for someone who is first over the finish line.

We call her the fucking “winner.”

Someone said that a lot of modern EDM sounds like “two robots having sex in a dryer.”

My name is quoderat, and I approve this message.

The Case Against DRM Needs to Be Made Now.

Or rather, it should’ve been made 10 years ago or more. But no, then we were told – even by members of the tech press and many prominent geeks – that DRM was there for our own good, to “produce more content,” to “allow creators to have a chance.”

Well, it never had a chance of doing any of those things and was never intended to do any of them.

It was all about control and removing it from both users and creators, and locking up the entire culture in a rent-by-the-minute prison.

So easy to predict, no matter how vociferous and dismissive the opponents to this obvious conclusion were a decade ago.

I’ve seen nearly every one of these movies.

Most of them are very bad, except Evil Dead 2 and a few others.

They forget this, uh, timeless classic:

Even some blogs I like on Tumblr are full of some daft bullshit.

So let’s extend this further:

1) No one who is not Hutu should blog/write/show images of the Rwandan genocide. Yeah, that’ll help!

2) No one who is not Armenian should mention the Armenian genocide because that’s…cultural appropriation? I’m not sure what this idiot’s point is, exactly.

This is the danger of identity politics. I know, it’s lefty suicide to rail against identity politics, but how it’s practiced is an instantiation and perfect example of the right’s divide and conquer politics it has used successfully in the US for over 150 years.

The professional right actually loves identity politics and encourages it because leads to these sort of divisions.

I don’t even know what my heritage is other than mostly white, so I am not sure what I am “allowed” to write about exactly.

Nor do I fucking care because I will write about what I want.

This whole article from 2003 is darkly hilarious in retrospect.

To an amazing degree, the Baghdad-based press corps avoids writing about or filming the friendly dealings between U.S. forces here and the local population–most likely because to do so would require them to report the extravagant expressions of gratitude that accompany every such encounter.

Right. We know how that went.

On another note, there is something very wrong with the WordPress install or something related to this blog, so I might be deleting and restoring everything soon. Different articles appear if you go to www.technologyasnature.com vs. technologyasnature.com. No idea why, nor do I care to troubleshoot it.

I always see this photo posted on Reddit other places to “prove” that women are incompetent with firearms or just crappy in general.

First of all:

1) It’s a fucking air rifle, so no real recoil.

2) Her finger is behind the trigger guard, so there’s no substantial eye damage danger even if it were a real rifle.

3) She’s obviously using it to get a better look at something far away.

Because I liked shooting and couldn’t afford ammo, I had an air rifle with scope much like this as a kid. I bought it with my own money that I earned gathering pecans to sell by the pound.

So how do I know it’s an air rifle?

Almost all rifles eject their brass from the right side, since the vast majority of shooters are right-handed. See anything like that? Nope? Ok, that means it’s an air rifle. (There are other clues, too.)

Anyway, so that’s that.