The argument that adult humans shouldn’t drink milk or consume milk-related products because no other mammal does so past the infancy period is a fundamentally stupid one.

Some other arguments in the same vein:

1) No other animal cooks their food. Seen any wildebeest or kangaroo cooking? No? Then humans should not.

2) No other animal* practices organized agriculture. Therefore humans should not.

3) No other animal ferments their food. Therefore humans should not.

4) No other animal uses utensils to eat**. Therefore humans should not.

The problem is that some people think because they are lactose-intolerant or otherwise don’t like milk, no one else should be allowed to drink it. Some liberal nutjobs even think milk is racist because more people with African heritage tend to be lactose-intolerant.

But here’s the thing: don’t fucking like milk, don’t drink it. More milkshakes for me.

Problem solved.

*Yes, I know about the damn fungus ants. Read about them when I was six or seven. Most people don’t, though.

**Yes, I know about stick-using corvids, chimps, etc. See above.

I hate the phrase “thinking outside the box,” mainly because of its misuse in business environments.

But I have noticed that a lot of people just get…stuck. Inexplicably. Where I work, there is an entire team of people when one thing goes wrong, they get stuck for hours. Irrevocably, until someone effectively reboots them.

Something I’d just skip over and try to find the answer later (or make my own), everything on that team comes to a dead halt, like a car out of gas on the edge of the highway.

Often I’m not even the closest to the smartest in the room but I rarely if ever get halted like that. I’m expert at dodging around, finding another answer, doing something a different way, even charging ahead where someone has told me I could not go. And I don’t care much about rules or breaking them, so that helps too I guess.

Increasingly I’ve observed that people objectively much smarter than me have trouble doing what I do because they just got immediately mired in quicksand that I dance over without even realizing it’s there.

Don’t think any IQ tests can measure that, even as much as I believe they are measuring something.

Here’s what something reads like when you could have made a good point, but seem to have gotten lost in your own word salad.

How unsurprising, then, that the infamous 1984 commercial for the Apple Macintosh, which unleashed the personal computer revolution, featured a sexy, skimpily-clad woman shattering the gray political passivity of scores of lonely, propaganda-watching men.

Sexy? Skimpily-clad? What the hell is she talking about? It was just a woman in track clothes. She’s not sexualized at all. And what does any of that have to do with the rest of the article? Of course I could write that about nearly any paragraph in the appallingly poorly-written piece.

The Apple ad was supposed to depict someone athletic, vibrant, free from restraint. That she happened to have breasts was just due to the fact that she was a human female (and the fact that Apple very much wanted to appeal to women, as opposed to other computer companies).

Also, while it’s a myth that female voices are easier to understand, both men and women do find female voices more pleasant and less threatening than men’s.

So for most companies there’s no percentage in making the default AI voice male — you’ll displease far more of your customers.

I think I get more annoyed when an article could’ve been insightful and interesting and was not, than when an article seems to be crap and I read it and turns out that, yep, it’s crap.

So how could this piece have made some good points?

It could’ve examined why both men and women find women’s voices more pleasing. It could have done some analysis on why threatening AIs often have male voices (HAL in 2001, Agent Smith in The Matrix, Sonny in I, Robot, etc.). It could have examined how gender relations will change as both men and women use increasingly-sentient sex robots (and yes, women will use them too — perhaps more than men).

It could have made some mention of how genderless robots (BB-8, R2-D2, Jinx) are assumed to be male, and also why we humans need to assign everything a gender. It might have looked at how the Fembots in Austin Powers is a satire of and pushback against the idea of feminized embodied AI. It might’ve actually discussed the film Ex Machina and its huge relevance rather than just using some de-contextualized photo of Alicia Vikander as Ava, and also used that to segue into the fact that many men do actually want something with free will that nevertheless belongs to them. And then gone into the morality of creating any AI of any gender in the first place.

I could go on.

Article fail. Enough said.

Sometimes I only realize I’ve slipped deep into economics jargon when everyone at the table stops talking and looks at me funny.

I’m not a big fan of specialist lingo in general, but often it does express in a few concise yet polysyllabic words what takes paragraphs or even books to explain sans those terms.

This is good.

Consider the recent standoff in Oregon between militia members and federal officials. While that was ongoing, wags in the blogosphere and the hip end of the media started referring to the militia members as “Y’all-Qaeda.” Attentive readers may have noted that none of the militia members came from the South—the only part of the United States where “y’all” is the usual second person plural pronoun. To the best of my knowledge, all of them came from the dryland West, where “y’all” is no more common than it is on the streets of Manhattan or Vancouver. Why, then, did the label catch on so quickly and get the predictable sneering laughter of the salary class?

My partner is from that general area (dryland West) and you know how often I’ve never heard her say “ya’ll?”

All the time!

(These glorious rhetorical constructions don’t come free. Oh wait, yes they do.)

About HRC though — if her presidency is as amateurish as her campaigning, we are in deep trouble.

Seriously, has an assured win ever been managed so poorly? She basically had to do absolutely nothing to win the presidency in a walk. Instead she bought a couple of revolvers and a speedloader and began merrily shooting herself in both feet.

She’d’ve been better off not campaigning at all than this mess that’s all her own doing.

Has there ever been a worse-campaigning Democratic front-runner?

In the future, linguists and lexicographers will put her face beside the phrase “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” in idiomatic dictionaries.

I watched the Argentinean movie Relatos Salvajes tonight.

Very good. If you like Poe translated into the modern, you’ll enjoy this film. None of the stories are Poe’s directly, but his influence drips from the tales like blood only you can see.

There aren’t nearly enough anthology movies out there, and this is a fine one. Recommended.

Though start-up culture is a delusional, discriminatory bro-fest in many was, one aspect that I like about it is that there is little to no concept of “paying your dues.”

I know this first-hand — I worked for a start-up briefly in the late 90s.

I saw a promising job ad online and applied with no real hope of getting a call-back. But I did get that call and according to them, “blew them away” with my writing sample — so much so that they didn’t believe someone could compose something so polished so quickly. They had me draft another sample in person right in front of them, which luckily for me turned out even better than the first.

I was hired on the spot with the title “lead writer.” I had just turned twenty-three years old. I had no college degree, and though I had been a photojournalist for five years already I’d never been lead writer anywhere.

This was a fairly well-capitalized startup and my compensation was large. It wasn’t one of those “make crap for pay and it’ll be all in stock later, *wink, wink*” deals. They were not exploiting me; I would not equal my earnings there for another 15 years in my workaday career.

And of course here is no chance at all that I’d’ve been hired at any other “established” company for a similar role or with similar pay, no matter how great my writing skills. I had not paid my dues, you see, so no matter how good I am (and I was and am very good), my merit means nothing to most companies.

Though start-ups aren’t actually a meritocracy, at least the idea of that makes a difference sometimes.

But alas the start-up wanted me to move to Minneapolis (not stated when I accepted the job), which I had absolutely no intention of doing so I left after less than six months.

The whole idea of “paying your dues” means that the mediocre leverage time in place to advance, while the better people are shunted to the side (or self-shunt out of frustration).

This leads to “bozo explosion” in many companies.

No, start-ups aren’t perfect. But only a start-up would’ve (and did) hire someone fresh out of the army with no college degree in a lead writer role. I was great in the role, too, but certainly was not moving to Minneapolis for any amount of money or fancy title.

As for the start-up, it had a poor grasp on the direction the fast-changing internet was heading and went out of business two years later.

Fun fact: Since my 17th birthday, I’ve never lived in a single place for more than 1.5 years.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve moved, but somewhere around 20. Maybe more.

For many years of my life, I owned compared to most Americans almost nothing due to moving so often.

Won’t these old dumbasses just die already?

Like Scalzi (omitting any on his list), off the top of my head:

James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
Kelly Link
Doris Dungey (Tanta)
Harper Lee
Vanessa Veselka
Annie Dillard
Adrienne Rich
Molly Crabapple
Margaret Atwood
Maya Angelou (prose, don’t care for her poetry, like written by a completely different person)
Ellen Willis
Shulamith Firestone
Andrea Dworkin (don’t agree with all of her views, but her writing sizzles like bacon grease on a too-hot griddle)
Rebecca Solnit
Jo Walton

That’s the ones I can think of in a few seconds. There are more. What the hell is wrong with men like Talese?

Hillary Clinton will probably make a competent — for a neoliberal — president. Standard issue warmonger, etc.

But damn is she ever a terrible campaigner and her own worst enemy.

I know it’s because a college degree is at least 60% (if not more) an achievement designed for signalling that you are the right social class and other second-order signalling effects, but it’s too bad that there is no path at all for autodidacts.

I figure there are about 10 degrees I could take some sort of equivalent achievement test with about 3 months of hard studying and pass easily — things like sociology, anthropology, English, etc. Both because I’ve read most of the relevant works/textbooks in these fields and because they are mostly non-mathematical at the undergrad level.

This has nothing to do directly with how smart I am or not, but just annoyance that people like me are automatically punished for not wanting to waste so much time and very much money for so little (that we’ve already gotten ourselves).

Ok, this made me laugh.

Etymologies. Even in official sources many are often wrong or at least highly suspect. Often even many of the corrections and refutations are unsound or are little better than urban legends.

Language has a strange and twisted history and just because something seems to be obvious, doesn’t mean that it’s actually the case.

I’m always surprised by how naive Kevin Drum is, and how willing he is to shit on millennials. Of course, he supports Hillary because he is depending on and supportive of the inegalitarian governmental and financial coddling of older generations. For this reason it is almost required that such an ex ante status quo supporter be a Clintonista as it is hugely in his privileged interest that she win because a terrible and unthinkable tragedy like his house falling 5% in value might occur if she doesn’t.

But in this article, he really just has no clue about why millennials are voting in such overwhelming numbers for Bernie Sanders. The stats he gathered are useless for discovering that — and many things can’t be found in stats at all.

However, if Drum had bothered looking any deeper than the shallow puddle of his insight, he could’ve examined job tenure numbers for a starter. The Forbes piece frames job-hopping as a choice, but most of the time it’s not — it’s lay-offs, being replaced with H-1bs, being forced to move from bad job to bad job and city to city to survive.

Or Drum could’ve taken a gander at housing costs and how millennials often can’t afford to buy or rent. In 1960, for instance, it was easily possible to afford the average apartment in nearly any city with a part-time job.

There is nowhere in the US where this is now possible. Nowhere with jobs, at least.

The three things that are most vital to establishing a good life are now out of reach or very, very expensive for most millennials: housing, education and reliable health care (no, the ACA didn’t really help with this).

In addition, what jobs exist are far more precarious, more demanding and less reliable than what their parents or grandparents knew.

And outside of the stats (which actually matter more than the numbers, as stats are always post hoc), it’s clear that climate change is going to absolutely torpedo their lives, as it won’t the Boomers because they’ll all be dead by then.

The millennials are perfectly aware that the Boomers have been for decades and are currently looting the future while destroying the planet, and then telling the younger generations (as Drum does) that they are entitled and ungrateful if they object to these facts.

Doesn’t take a damn genius to see why they vote against someone like Clinton who is promising more of the same, with some added unnecessary wars thrown in.

Or for something more concise if you are dismissive of my massive missive, check out this tweet from a friend of mine that explains it all pretty well.