Dear Obama Hater – You Just Wasted A Decade Of Your Life.

No. I hate Obama and I find it pretty satisfying.

I wrote back in 2009 on my old blog after Larry Summers was installed as a conquering king in the Obama administration that nothing would be different in the Obama presidency.

I wish I had been fucking wrong.

What’d we get? The ACA, that giveaway to insurance companies? More killing of innocent brown people? Guantanamo still open and inequality rising, with no end in sight. Nothing done about climate change, and no real attempt to do so.

Sounds great, where do I sign up?

Obama is a drone-murdering lapdog of Wall Street whose defenders should be laughed at. He had an ineffective passive presidency during the most opportunity for possible real change in history during the financial crisis that he completely and utterly fucking squandered. A dead cat could’ve done better. Majority Dems in Congress, and no real change. (In fact, the old order was fortified and enlarged.)

I see little baby pseudo-liberals pitching fits like three-year-olds on the floor in Wal-Mart, about those meanies just won’t worship poor Obama like they should.

No sympathy here for such deficient thought. If you can’t evaluate evidence, got no use for you and haven’t got a thing to say.

(And no, “It could have been worse” is not a valid defense.)

Reminds me of something that happened to me.

Some amount of hissy background noise, you see, is unavoidable for analogue audio links. Analogue broadcast radio, landline phones, pre-digital mobile phones. But digital systems don’t work like that. They pretty much work perfectly, or not at all. There may still be background noise because microphones pick up environmental sounds from traffic or weather or the users’ heavy breathing or what-have-you, and mobile phones can have drop-outs in the signal when one or both handsets in a call just can’t hear a cell base-station, but nothing in the transmission system creates its own hiss.

Yep, a little tiny bit of background hiss is artificially inserted into 99%+ of phone systems today so that people realize they are still working (and they are used to hearing it).

A few years ago, we put in a new VOIP phone system at work. Since bandwidth on the network was plentiful, I changed the codec to be much better and to produce much higher quality calls. I basically took the quality from standard analog phone quality (bad) to a decent-quality MP3.

Oh, the complaints were epic.

It didn’t “sound natural” or it sounded “too natural” (yeah, I know – contradictory). It “made voices sound weird.” And more.

Note that there no technical problems at all. It worked perfectly. People were just not used to hearing very high-quality voice over the phone.

I had to change it back in less than four hours. People couldn’t take it.

I learned that people mostly actually prefer very low-quality audio over the phone, at least with colleagues and acquaintances. My guess is that because it feels less intimate.

Wow, people are really uncreative.

A long time ago, I tried to convince an ex-girlfriend to name the new cat Cat R. Pillar, but she’d have none of that. I figured we could call her “Pill” for short which I think is a good name for a cat.

No wonder we broke up.

This is one of the reasons I don’t consider myself a liberal.

Humor is one of the best ways to deal with trauma, both as an individual and as a culture.

I’ve been in life and death situations a few times in my life.

Strangely enough ( to idiots like the above), humor did not vacate the premises.

When I was almost shot in the head by ricochets, one of the first things the dude standing next to me (who was also almost shot) said after the bullets went screaming by was, “Guess it’s too late to say ‘duck.’”

We both laughed.

And if you’ve read anything at all about the people who actually suffered from and survived the holocaust, humor was present – shockingly to fucktards, I know – in the very death camps themselves.

Liberals are mostly self-serious assclowns who mistake ideology for morality, pseudo-intellectuall faffing about for ethics, and making the right faces at the right moments for caring.

Another thing I won’t have any goddamn part in.

The problem I have with some of the hating “Nice Guys” – even though I agree with much of it – is that all too often, perhaps most of the time, it becomes an exercise in bullying and nerd-shaming.

For most people, especially people who are used to being underdogs, there is nothing more satisfying than being able to bully someone who can’t fight back.

This is why I hate most people, by the way – the bullied are often just as content to become the bullies when they can get away with it.

And shaming socially awkward people (mostly men) is one way that some (most?) feminists and others can get away with it at the moment, in the guise of shaming Nice Guys.

Look, I hate the whole Nice Guy shtick, too. It’s vile. But just like with the concept of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the concept – while useful at first – morphed into something that came to encompass anyone who is socially awkward and male at the same time. And lately, I’ve even seen socially awkward women shamed by these idiots.

There is no one easier to shame than unattractive, socially-awkward people. That’s why it’s done so much!

Rarely do I see anyone but the rare few like Edward Snowden attempt to shame the truly powerful.

Fuck, that shit is dangerous! That’s why aint’ nearly nobody doing it.

But denigrating those too weak or awkward to fight back, now that’s pure fun!

When I first started seeing talk of Nice Guys it was an honest critique of a genuine phenomenon, of clueless and entitled young men attempting to parley (usually disingenuous) friendship into sex and then being grossly offended that this transaction did not ring up at the register.

Lately, this idea of the “Nice Guy” has more become a method to attack and shame those who are usually physically and/or socially unattractive (usually both) who express the shocking desire that they might one day want to be in a relationship.

And that’s bullying, and I won’t have any part in it no matter what it costs me.

I love technology, but I don’t really fit in the modern era in most ways. Social media is just lost on me. It’s a mental trap that sucks you in and makes you dumber.

“The volume is much greater,” Reichelt says. “Now, keeping up with people non-stop on social media is mundane, not a novelty.”

The idea of keeping up with social media makes me feel nauseous.

This was one of the dumbest decisions Microsoft has ever made.

It’s the main reason that any home lab I make in the future will be running on CentOS (clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and one of the reasons I decided to obtain my RHCE – if Microsoft like Mozilla decides to alienate its core evangelists, then its future might be limited.

I had to set up a Microsoft lab to obtain my MCSE, but when I rebuild it, it’ll be with CentOS.

Good work, Microsoft. See you’ve learned well from Mozilla.

Upstream Color is the worst film I’ve seen in the past few years.

I watched it over a year ago now and it stuck with me like a case of antibiotic-resistant staph.

All style and no substance, all gimcrackery and hackery with so much pretension that it even appeals to people who apparently don’t even like movies.

The first 10 minutes are actually pretty decent. It had the base of a good story, perhaps.

But then it went oh so very wrong.

It’s probably not the worst film I’ve ever seen – I’ve seen thousands of movies – but it’s certainly in the top 20 or 30 or so.

I need to build a fucking robot that follows around and punches all Firefox developers in the face every 30 seconds. For infinity.

For the first time today, I got bit in the wild by the ridiculously fucking idiotic decision to drop support for a type of encryption that millions of devices that use a web interface (even in the enterprise these days, that’s most of them) use for config.

Yeah, that’s right. No way to log in. None. This isn’t some software from ancient times. Nope. It’s a NetApp SAN simulator from 2013. There is no newer release. This is current software. I am learning NetApp SANs and since I don’t want to spend $50,000 on one of their SANs…yeah, you get the idea.

And Firefox doesn’t support it at all.

Whoever the assclown ignoramus who made this fucking decision should have my infinity-punching robot set to initiate walloping every second.

When I am in an enterprise environment again, I will make every effort to eradicate all installs of Firefox on the network — both with corporate policy and with scripting — with extreme prejudice.

I no longer recommend anyone use Firefox under any circumstances.

By the way, I was able to use Chrome to log in.

(Note: I actually use PaleMoon, but this code is also present in PaleMoon.)

Systemd and Gnome Shell were designed by complete and utter morons who should never work in IT again.

That is all.

I hate the term “privilege” and even though I sometimes use it myself, I mostly wish it would just die. As presently used, it harms any analysis rather than helps.

Strangely, someone on Tumblr said it best to self-referentially discredit the privilege police.

Privilege isn’t a neat little math equation where you can add and subtract how many rights someone has based on a bunch of check boxes. You can’t assume either that just because someone technically should have a privilege they are automatically better off because of it. A lot of privilege stuff is just better odds in a lottery you can still lose.

People need to stop measuring the level of rights real people have based on a hypothetical chart that cannot possibly cover every variable. It’s fucking harmful and dehumanizes everyone.

Most of the time it’s just used to shout people down, and most of the time the people you’re screaming at about it don’t have a clue what you’re on about.

Much of the time, it’s also used as a weapon against people who’ve already been harmed in some way.

Sorry, being informed that I have privilege is useless to me to “make it all better” when I’m being stabbed in the face.

For instance being told my complaints are invalid because I had “privilege” when my family was on the bottom of the totem pole in rural North Florida where people acted like we were true scum when we had the gall to walk into a bank – yeah, not going to help!

It’s fine in an academic setting. Other than that, it’s worthless and harmful.

This is true. It’s happened to me.

Conversation with a recruiter several years ago who had called me by accident and was backpedaling after realizing I didn’t have a degree, lightly edited and as best I recall:

Recruiter: I apologize, I didn’t realize you did not have a degree.

Me: No degree, but I’m currently doing the job that you’re hiring for.

Recruiter: But you’re not qualified for this position due to no degree.

Me: Ok, but I’m actually currently doing this job in real life, like right now. I’m at work doing what you’re hiring for right now.

Credentialism doesn’t help anyone as Sarah Kendzior often points out. It doesn’t help companies as someone having a degree or not in 99% of fields only has a really middling relationship with their actual job performance.

And of course it really hurts individuals.

If you don’t hire me, your loss.

I’m fucking awesome at my job.

Young people are just as technologically and politically dumb as old people. Or conversely, age doesn’t equal wisdom in either direction.

we finally got rid of files. dropbox, google drive, soundcloud, spotify, netflix, hbogo, youtube, wattpad, kindle, and a host of other cloud based services finally killed off three letter filenames like mp3, mov, doc and xls. spending a week in the caribbean with young adults and bad internet was the tell on this one for me. they don’t even have mp3s on their iphones anymore!

As if getting rid of files is some laudable goal. If you don’t have the file, you don’t have shit.

It could be taken away at any time and some big company could force you to re-rent it again. The perpetual rental model is something the copyright industry has been striving for since at least the 1930s and probably earlier.

Technologically, they are finally able to achieve it.

So you people don’t keep anything locally? Good luck keeping anything at all long-term.

I guarantee at some point it’ll be taken from you by some large corporation.