All ya’ll Democrats pissing your pants about Trump’s wish to update the nuclear arsenal appear to have already forgotten Obama was already doing the same thing.

Despite the lofty rhetoric, President Obama has launched what the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability calls the “Trillion Dollar Trainwreck.” That is the title of a new report on Obama’s massive plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear-weapons arsenal, to be released next Monday.

I don’t ask for humans to have self-consistent thinking. This appears to be impossible. But I do at least have the hope that some of them will recall what happened but a few months before.

Apparently this is just too much to ask.

This piece without realizing it sums up the problem with economics as practiced today.

Is there a disemployment effect from a higher minimum wage?

One thing philosophy teaches is that to receive an answer that makes any sort of sense, one must first inquire in the appropriate direction. The question above cannot just be answered with a blizzard of empirical data disconnected from sociological considerations. It just cannot. You can discuss the slope of demand curves until you’re blue in the face but it won’t help you understand the most important aspects of the minimum wage, which is: what sort of society do we wish to live in and what societal effects of a minimum wage demonstrate recursivity as to the relevant social mores and structures that collectively benefit the polity as a whole?

Economics has long had as its goal to remove the human, to deny that is a sociological science — and as a result you end up with atrocities on reason like the analysis to which I linked.

It’s a pitiful showing by someone — and an entire profession — with more formal education then actual wisdom, more dogma than data, and more de facto wishful thinking than Professor Pangloss.

All essentially to support ideologically some rich people who’d be happy to burn them with all the rest if they became inconvenient.

It’s weird when you click on something and you are prepared to be disappointed but then it actually turns out to be great.

Like this.

1. My: LibreOffice users want a “personal” UI, with different options capable of adapting to the user’s personal habits, and not a single UI without options.
2. User Friendly: of course, any UI should be as user friendly as possible, but LibreOffice users have clearly asked for a “modular” UI, where they can set their own level of user friendliness, and not a single UI without options.
3. Flexible: the increasing number of LibreOffice users deploying the software on different hardware platforms (for instance, a desktop and a laptop), each one with different characteristics and screen size and resolution, have asked for a UI that can be tweaked to leverage the screen real estate, and not a single UI without options.

Heretics! Sinners!

The user is not allowed to have any options. You will be reported to the Stasi immediately!

It’s completely unexpected for any organization to rebel against the removal of customizability and user control. It’s completely contrary to our authoritarian times, but wonderful to see.

I am one of these.

Just plays to my strengths. My brain naturally works this way; I’m good at knowing what terms to search for and looking through the returned data for what’s relevant even if to most people it looks very unpromising.

Many times in my life people have spent hours, days and weeks looking for something that I find in 30 seconds or less. For this reason, my partner asks me to search for things all the time. For a friend of mine once, I found the name of a rare book in less than a minute he’d been seeking out for years off and on.

I often say, “If I can’t find it, it doesn’t exist.”

Search skills matter in the world of today and I got ’em.

Ask me to do a math problem, though, and you’re screwed….

That all free trade agreements are axiomatically a good thing is just as much as a religious belief as transubstantiation or the healing power of crystals.

“A place there is below, from Beelzebub

As far receding as the tomb extends,

Which not by sight is known, but by the sound

Of a small rivulet, that there descendeth

Through chasm within the stone, which it has gnawed

With course that winds about and slightly falls.

The Guide and I into that hidden road

Now entered, to return to the bright world;

And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second,

Till I beheld through a round aperture

Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

That’s Dante and Virgil escaping from Hell. I’d forgotten how plum purty it was until I read it and a lot more again today.

Movies have plot holes because life has plot holes.

Just shut up about it already.

I’m so damn tired of hearing loony Dems (apparently now, all of them) saying things like, “We actually won because we won the popular vote by like 3 million!”

No, no the fuck you did not win. Not where it counts. Guess who is going to be inaugurated January 20. Hint: It’s not Hillary Clinton.

If that’s what winning looks like, we need less of that and more of the other thing.

The Dems were supposed to be the reality-based party. At least that used to be partially true.

No more.

If the universe is not fully deterministic, emergent properties might not be causally tied to fundamentally reducible and observable lower-level phenomena.

Reductionism just might not work in many cases, nor the possibility of its opposite.

I’m not a physicist nor do I have any aspirations in this field, just stating something more as an arena of thought and as chain of logic rather than saying “dark matter is fake” or whatever.

If emergence is at some levels causally disconnected or even disordered (time variance discrepancies, etc), then some mysteries will remain ever so (which I find likely).

Quote from a book I’m reading:

“Trisha Halgarth has gone back to Solidade, the Halgarth Dynasty’s private planet.”

Private planet^{private planet}

DO WANT.

This is much better than the original:

Studio version with better audio is here.

That’s how country should be done; that’s the real stuff right there.

First 10 songs in my current playlist:

The question of “overall benefit” of agreements like NAFTA and the TPP is irrelevant.

What is the overall benefit if such things contribute to vast localized poverty and misery while raising GDP? Put that into your cumulative distribution function and smoke it. And what exactly is the benefit if they result indirectly in the election of people like Trump and Le Pen?

When you’re operating on the fundamental assumption that GDP measures something useful in every other sphere of life (well, first, you’re a dumbass) then you can make statements about how “everyone has benefited” while some people enjoy the glorious benefits of being jobless, broke and dead.

Why would you offer a movie in 576p? What, do I look like some sort of savage here? Not enough p’s if you please.

Phishing emails have gotten vastly better. Since I first started seeing them way back in the mid-90s, they’ve been largely inept — bedeviled with glaring grammatical gaffes, bad fonts and unlikely scenarios.

Those I had to spend no cognitive effort sussing out their provenance.

Modern phishing emails I actually have to spend a few seconds looking at to determine their illegitimacy.

This is apart from the phishing emails I get at work which are of the spear variety — those are almost certainly corporate or state actors and so well done that I just no longer click on any email link found in my work address’s mailbox at all.