Academics — who tend to move around all the time – have great difficulty understanding in their informal writing and in their official monographs why poor people don’t just up and move when economic conditions decline in an area.

If you’re already destitute and don’t have a job lined up already, traipsing to another faraway city where you have no social connections and nothing to fall back on is just a terrible idea. It makes no sense at all.

Also, I shouldn’t have to mention but I will the fact that most people actually want to live near their families and friends and not abandon them every two years when the neolib overlords decide to blow up the world again.

It can all be true — yes, all at the same time — that unrestricted immigration is harmful to some, beneficial to others, overall not the best path for a nation and will harm women while improving overall welfare by several measures.

And it can be true that those who oppose unrestrained immigration are both racists and largely right about the perils thereof, and that the left who defend open borders can also be racist (and usually are in their “defense” of immigrants’ rights to trample the rights of people already present).

Simpletons want to reduce everything to dichotomies, to some Manichean conception of the world.

If only it were so easy. If only.

Been reading too many books that break my brain, that I can barely understand. Or in some cases, cannot understand.

So today I will read this finally.

Aye, that’ll be a big change from Cognitive Evolutionary Neuroscience edited by Platek, Keenan and Shackelford and Supersymmetry in Quantum and Classical Mechanics by Bijan Kumar Bagchi.

Shit, that last book is a bear. I have an easier time by far understanding quantum math than anything for classical phenomena. It’s just easier — at least the basics. So much more constrained than classical phenomena. Just throw out all your intuitions about the macro world, and it’s pretty cake. This damn book is a mix of both, though, and I have to say I only understood about 50% of it. That was even with pulling a Tony Stark and trying to get up to speed a little better.

The classical stuff is just too hard for me, and I don’t care enough about math or have enough skill to go any deeper. Everyone has limitations, and that’s mine.

Well, gonna start on The Fifth Wave now.

This reminds me of being in the grocery store one time and asking for “oven-roasted garlic cheese” that was stocked in the deli case. That is exactly what it said on the sign: “oven-roasted garlic cheese.”

So I ordered some. The woman behind the counter snottily said to me in the most dismissive and immediately angry way possible, “Sir, there is no such thing as oven-roasted cheese.”

Arrogant dismissive confidence while being completely and hilariously wrong is one thing that sets me off and even though I try not to be a jackass to service workers she — for lack of a better term — triggered old instincts.

I said, “Look, I’m just reading the damn sign. Says ‘oven-roasted garlic cheese’ right there. Turn it around and read it yourself.”

I felt bad later about that, but not that bad, because she never admitted she was wrong nor apologized or otherwise made any indication she started down the path of asininity while I just closed the gate behind us.

The cheese, at least, was good.