One of the things I like about the office where I work is that I frequently hear these languages: Spanish, Hindi, Slovakian, German and Chinese. And of course English.

I’m not anti-immigrant. Far from it. Just anti-moron, against the left’s asinine assertion that the immigration of millions of radical Islamic patriarchal men is the same as an Indian woman migrating for a project manager job and a better life.

Not the same. Not the same at all.

Every time I see someone write about Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter I can’t resist writing about it myself. It’s a sickness, I know.

This book spends 700 pages that feel like an infinity explaining things a clever 12-year-old can understand in an afternoon.

It’s a work of trite, hackneyed garbage. It’s the Gladwell-esque Outliers of cognitive science. It’s the Guns, Germs and Steel of formal systems and AI.

FUCK. THAT. BOOK.

How it achieved such cultural ubiquity and universal praise, I have no idea at all. Perhaps because most of the ideas were at the time relatively new to the intellectual set? And it was of course a big, imposing “status” tome that looked good on a bookshelf and identified your caste unambiguously.

Yes, I’ve read the whole thing. Parts of it twice, to see if I was missing something. (I wasn’t.) Seldom have I so sorely regretted wasting so much time.

Like Gladwell, like Lehrer, like Diamond this is one of those books where the more you know about the areas Hofstadter covers, the more dubious it all becomes. I’m no expert in any of those fields, but apparently neither is Hofstadter.

In his defense, it was written in 1979 and has not at all aged well. However, even in 1979 80% of it was already wrong, unfounded, or just plain delusional.

For one thing (and I’ll stop here), Gödel’s theorems have fuck-all to do with cognitive anything, but rather are concerned with the provability of certain axioms in formal systems. Hofstadter is trying to bridge the unbridgeable, and doing it poorly to boot. And that is the first of a million objections!

And god, now I am wasting more time on that rubbish book.

I’m the opposite of surprised this happened in Ocala.

Near where I grew up. I’ve been to Ocala many times. It has the highest Confederate flag to vehicle ratio of anywhere in the world, I’d argue. Racism isn’t present there; no, it’s a way of life.

There is a good Indian restaurant in town though, near the highway, but I can’t remember its name.

The thing that turns me off most about Clinton supporters is how whiny they are, even in victory. And no, I am not talking about just the women (though them too).

I mean, you won. Don’t continue to be upset that someone challenged your exalted one.

Unlike most of her supporters though and their reasons for backing her, I oppose Clinton for her policies and political tendencies.

Whine all you want; she’s still going to kill a fuckload of non-Americans.

The proof that quants’ forward-looking mathematical models of the market and economy are BS is that I outperform them largely by doing the opposite of their received wisdom.

A good heuristic is if a well-known macroeconomist says to do something, do the opposite. This won’t be a winning strategy every time, but 75% of the time isn’t bad.

(In general, if you are disciplined you only have to be smarter than 60% of the people and algos in the market to significantly outperform. Luckily, this is not difficult.)

The only way to beat inflation now is to buy a good basket of dividend-paying stocks.

Which is something that most people can’t afford to do.

Guess who owns most dividend-paying stocks? Yep, the one-percenters.

Funny how that works, just like a bank error almost never goes in your favor.

I’d be a terrible surfer if I could even do it at all, but I think surfing is the coolest sport humans have invented.

So wild that we can even do anything like that (some of us, anyway).

It seems that Docker and a lot of the containerization ideas are naive and unconsidered re-implementations of ideas from Smalltalk, applied by those who never bothered to study the past.

But hey, that’s how computing works, right? Some twenty-two-year-old re-inventing something that had been done better and more sensibly thirty years ago, IPOing with a busted-ass product, then retiring at 30 with a few hundred mil and the world no better off?

It wasn’t until I was 14 or 15 that I realized Bewitched was an extended allegory for the need for feminism.

Think about it: a controlling domineering fly speck of a man dictates that a woman both more interesting, intelligent and powerful than he himself is abjure using her powers or even teaching her greatest skills to her own daughter.

And when are the only times conflicts and problems are truly resolved, to the fly speck invisibly and without fuss? When magic is used. Her magic, typically done out of his sight or at least without his consent.

Did people at the time realize they were watching a propaganda piece about feminism?

I don’t want to be too hard on this person because she is smart and thoughtful, but this post illustrates well the framing problem that so many people have reference the economy and markets, combined with the pernicious effects of nearly-ubiquitous neoliberal co-opting of the cultural conversation.

Let’s consider, though. Are markets a natural feature of the world, like water? Like gravity? Without humans creating them, does the concept of a “free market” or a “regulated market” or even just a “market” exist?

Is there a platonic market?

I don’t think so. I think the idea is absurd, actually. Something that is common to neoliberal-ish thought is the equating of created and mutable systems like the societal organization of resource distribution with natural laws and the behavior of highly law-constrained physical features. This creates a false equivalence that implies that markets exist out there in the universe, and we just discovered them and now have no choice but to obey their unalterable and ineluctable dictates.

It’s such an effective propaganda technique that I have to thoroughly applaud it while also despising it.

I do agree though that the pharmaceutical industry in the US is both under- and over-regulated in bizarre and counterproductive ways.

That doesn’t change the fact that pretending or worse actually believing that the market system is the only possible way to produce useful drugs and remedies is not borne out by any evidence, but rather asserted without proof as part of a pervasive ideology that has been so successful it has nearly extinguished the visibility of any other option.

Historically, most of the useful drugs in the market have been funded by the US government or by state-supported institutions, while all the profits go to public corporations.

This is something that you’ll never read about in neoliberal market fairy tales, and if you do it’ll be adjoined to some also-unevidenced assertion that the free market could have certainly done it better if it hadn’t been ‘crowded out’ by government spending.

I’m fine with people telling or even believing fairy tales. But at least I want them to be aware of it when they are doing so.

Unfortunately most neoliberals and their apologists have no such knowledge or self-awareness and when I see that in otherwise-intelligent people it makes me wonder how this could’ve occurred.

One thing I’ve learned though is that powerful-enough propaganda makes you not only believe it to such a degree that it feels dangerous and absurd to believe anything else, or even to posit that anything else can exist outside that framework at all.

I’m an Islamophobe because I’ve lived in an Islamic country and I’m a fundamentalist Christian-ophobe because I grew up in rural North Florida.

Both make complete sense once you’ve experienced both or either.

If I ever get the idea that I should purchase a home anywhere with an HOA, someone please tase me in the face until I become less of a moron.

I don’t yet have a unified theory of HOAs, but it seems like another haven — much like the police force — where bullies from middle and high school congregate in adulthood.

Never will I buy where there is an HOA. Never.

The 2009-2014 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China.

I have found the most boring book on Amazon.

There were times in my life where I’d fully read 2-3 books a day. That’s easy when you read all through your school day (ignoring all classes) and then for 8-12 more hours at home.

I miss those days. Now, I am lucky if I can manage one book a week.

Google Chrome to start marking HTTP connections as insecure.

This is on the path to blocking HTTP altogether, eventually.

Three real reasons for the HTTPS push, as it has nothing at all to do with security. If you believe that hogwash, I’ve got some water with memory I’d like to sell you.

1) To make security more difficult so regular users are driven to cloud services controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al. Even if certs are free, it increases the administrative burden greatly and is beyond most people’s technical ability.

2) To control computing ever more, apart from the above.

3) To avoid ISPs injecting ads and interfering with ad revenue, both by that ad injection and by monitoring user behavior. Too complex to write about here, but this includes as well other ad revenue protection measures such as downgrading in Google’s results the sites that don’t serve ads in HTTPS.

Note that I am glad that 3 is occurring, but don’t think my rights should depend on large corporations battling one another for supremacy.

Enforcing HTTPS has absolutely nada to do with security but rather with protecting revenue and generating new revenue sources.