America.

Reminds me of something. Driving thorugh Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998 or so with my then-girlfriend.

She says after hearing some loud pops, “Oh, cool, someone is lighting off fireworks!”

Me: “Those weren’t fireworks. Not fireworks at all.”

To become a high earner, hone skills that will protect you from automated competition.

If only it were that easy. Not everyone has that luxury.

However, I do so that’s what I’ve been working on the past seven or eight years.

My current job is number 10 on the list: Solutions Architect.

I’ve been an IT Manager before, too.

Solutions architecture isn’t really automatable because is requires pretty deep comprehension across a very wide array of knowledge domains, involves quite a lot of customer contact and understanding what the customer actually needs (versus what they say they want), and often involves on the technical side understanding the difference between what the manufacturer claims some product can do versus what it actually behaves like in the real world including in various non-standard environments. And lots of other soft skills, too: high writing ability, negotiating between different technical teams, assigning research and doing direct research and…well, more than I want to list here.

So, if my sub-field is ever automated, I’ll be long-retired by then because it’ll be one of the last to go that way.

Status quo-supporting people like Kevin Drum never are able to grasp the real issues. It’s what I meant in a previous post about the pundits as “aliens among us.”

Like this.

Why are American anxious? Because under both Democratic and Republican presidents, their lives have been made far more precarious, they’ve been forced to take on more risk for less reward while plutocrats receive Croesan volumes of unearned wealth — which they go on to flaunt while admonishing their inferiors for a lack of gumption and grit.

This is why the anxiety; this is why people support both Trump and Sanders. And it’s something people like Kevin Drum — with high-paying jobs and luxe health care packages — will never see in their wilful blindness.

Daisy Ridley — I haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie but I already like her a lot from this little bit of evidence (and a few interviews with her where she seemed very smart). She rolls hard into this moron’s Instagram and uses the Force on some imbecility.

Her full response which was omitted above:

You go, Daisy. You’re much nicer than I am or will ever be, but great response. Force choke them into oblivion if need be.

What’s strange about this presidential race is that nearly no mainstream pundit, journalist or writer understand Sanders, Trump or their supporters so nearly everything you read about this topic is bizarrely inaccurate — like a space alien writing about American burial customs.

“Xyzgxian scientists theorize that humans place a protective layer of black sheathing around their pseudo-carapaces during funereal ceremonial observances because their exothermic output decreases as a physiological response to loss of a co-resource provider. Since human funerals are held in the view of an M-class stellar body, black external sheathing increases heat abortion allowing the humans to regulate their body temperatures in this physiologically hostile environment.”

This is what the NYT and others writing about Trump, Sanders and supporters sounds like to me.

I knew almost all pundits are utterly clueless about all but themselves and their upper-class friends and contacts, but damn. I had no idea it was as bad as it is.

I ordered a bunch of used physical books last night.

I don’t like physical books. I’d rather have the ebook. But most of the used books were $4 out the door shipped, while the ebooks were $12 and up with the added “bonus” of DRM. So why would I ever do that?

If publishers would price ebooks sanely I’d buy those every time. If the books I’d bought were $5 each in an electronic version, I’d’ve done that even with DRM (I can easily crack it).

But when I can get one version for $4.00 with no DRM and the other is $11.99 and up, no damn way.

And so the publisher gets nothing, the writer gets nothing — how again is this an intelligent strategy? (Not to mention the externalities of shipping, storage, etc.)

The whole idea that corporations are efficient or sensible in any way is deeply deeply delusional. This is just another example. They choose to hurt themselves and their writers and have done so for years and years now at the gain of everyone hating them even more than they already do.

That does not a successful strategy make.

It’s become accepted, uh, “wisdom” in the Fat Acceptance community that if a woman deliberately misrepresents herself in photos and/or lies about her weight, if the man then goes on to reject her then it is a “double standard.”

However if I told these same women I was 6’2″ when in reality I am 5’8″, you know what I’d be? Rejected. And you know what they’d be? Fucking right to do so.

I think Lorde’s “Tennis Court” video is my favorite music video of all time. I love its sparseness. I love her expressiveness, her alienness. Her barely-restrained ferality. How it creates a sense of drama and anticipation with so few tools. Actors and directors could learn a lot about acting and filmmaking just from watching this video.

Lorde’s eyes are naturally blue. So contacts I’d assume? Or just really well-done CGI? In general, I’m a fan of strange smart women, so of course it appeals for that reason as well. But it’s just genius. I wonder how many takes there were, since it’s all one shot?

Also, this woman did a great job of duplicating Lorde’s makeup from the video — and even the milkmaid braid.

Probably the best country song ever written, though Tedeschi’s version is much better than the original.

The front page of NBC News right now:

Did I time travel? Because I’m about to buy a load of stocks if so.

The worst bullying I ever received was in late middle school and early high school when I started dressing better, improving my fitness and in general trying to be more social.

It was only when I tried (and succeeded in, eventually) being more civilized and more interesting than I had been that people really tried to make sure I drowned in my previous life.

Heck, even some of my “friends” started to treat me poorly if not outright bully me after that. Until I got better friends.

Was thinking about this because of these Ani DiFranco lines.

and god help you if you are a phoenix
and you dare to rise up from the ash
a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy
while you are just flying past

So true. So very true. People want you in the tomb they’ve constructed for you. When you tear down the bricks, blow the lid off, oh are they pissed.

But dammit, I did it — I went from a complete and utter reject in middle school whom nearly everyone hated to someone at least most people grudgingly respected, with many friends, and eventually managing to spend a year with one of the smartest and loveliest girls in the whole school as my girlfriend (to everyone’s surprise, including mine!).

But that phase transition — hoo boy, it was a doozy. Never before and never since have I been so beat on, denigrated and trashed — even by teachers and school administrators.

I see why most people never do this because everyone and everything tries to stamp your head back into that hole. Thanks the gods I was born so stubborn.

One of the big problems I have with identity politics is its certitude that you can never even imagine what it’s like to be a member of some other group, to be oppressed, or to experience suffering in some particular way.

Of course, no, you cannot 100% understand what it is like to live that way each and every day.

But it’s actually quite easy to generalize individual experiences to get an idea of what it’d be like to not be able to go certain places without risk of assault. Or to risk being arrested for run-of-the-mill activities. Etc. Humans have this thing called empathy if they choose to use it (many unfortunately do not use it which is where identity politics should really focus).

The identity politics canard of “you can’t possibly understand so shut up!” is not even helpful to the people experiencing the oppression because human nature being what it is, the response of 99% of people will be, “Well, ok then, I give up and don’t care anymore.”

Only stubborn people like me will persist; the rest will vamoose.

I understand oppressed groups shouldn’t have to cater to my needs or to anyone else’s. But it’s strange when they harm their own causes greatly when it’s just not necessary.

If people get the message that they cannot possibly understand, help or otherwise be of use, they won’t bother trying — and unfortunately most of the identity-politics sends this message loud and clear every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

If there is a pop culture internet phenomenon I care less about than the musical Hamilton, I care about it so little that I can’t even recall it right now.

Those kinds of things just in general aren’t my thing, but that seems to be less my thing than most things. And that’s a lot of things.

Musicals in general leave me cold. But that one I think would leave me asleep.

I’m not sure that the oft-cited statistic that humans share 99% of DNA with chimps is as meaningful as it’s made out to be.

Or really worth anything.

We share 50% of our DNA with a banana, also.

My thoughts on this are pretty inchoate, but if you examine the binary sequences of computer code you could express the same similarity about, say, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.

There’s just more to it than that. A single-nucleotide polymorphism might lead to major changes (or none). It’s just more complex than the “99% chimp” talk makes it out to be.

And if we ever manage to create someone like Ava from Ex Machina, he or she will be 100% human despite having no DNA at all.

We use the wrong tools to measure things all the time. Hammer, nail and all that. Just another example I think.

Sure did trade a lot shares yesterday to make not that much money.

But hey, I have some cash I did not have yesterday.

Free money is fun. Don’t worry, I won’t take pictures of huge stacks of cash like some rapper.

A society where this is even possible is all kinds of fucked up. But I’ll take fucked up with money rather than the opposite.