I’m not planning on voting for Trump or Clinton, but it’s not clear to me that Clinton would be less damaging to the nation or the world than Trump. Clinton will be more effective than Trump, almost certainly, and that is a danger in itself.

That she’s firmly in the pocket of Wall Street in a way that Trump isn’t matters. That she’s more likely to start overseas wars matters. That she will wield imperial power more effectively — that matters too.

Say what you want about Trump, but becoming president is not going to give him magical powers no other president has possessed. The US is a big ship, difficult to turn, hard to stop and even harder to get moving. Trump isn’t going to build any wall across the fucking border (Republicans have been threatening that since the 1920s at least), and he’s not going to ban Muslims. He’s not going to do anything that he’s claimed. That’s just bluster to get the (racist) vote out.

But Clinton? She will hand over more of the country to Wall Street. She will bomb plenty of brown people. She will help upper class white people some. And she will do nothing at all about climate change, and perhaps even make it worse.

Trump’s risk is mostly in his unpredictability. In some circumstances, that might be a good thing.

Clinton’s risk is in her extreme predictability combined with not being incompetent.

In a country where you’d literally have to be crazy to want to be president, is it any wonder who we have a the best we could produce? Any wonder at all?

The nightmare that is Windows licensing is discussed in this thread.

Makes me think about path dependence, sunk cost fallacies and bad idea traps — in the context that I had a person at work try to justify to me one time why it made sense that at many companies it requires one and sometimes two people to do nothing but specialize in complying with Microsoft’s onerous and incomprehensible licensing.

Listening to someone explain why something has to be a certain way when it absolutely does not is one of the reasons that I have given up on humanity, because it happens so damn often.

Do people mistake the reasons that something came to exist for a teleological inevitability? Do they truly believe — as this person did — that Microsoft’s bonkers scheme is the best possible solution rather than one of the worst?

I think some people — most people — just take the world as a given, and then perceive any attempt to change it as a threat. Even if it’s something as byzantine, bizarre, and useless as Microsoft’s software licensing racket.