Microsoft is going to provide better privacy controls in Windows 10.

Irrelevant and immaterial. The vast majority of people will never change this and their data will be slurped without their consent. Of course most people, being very dumb, do not seem to care.

However in a sane world, any company that attempted something like the data-thieving in the first place would have their corporate charter revoked and be dissolved, or at least be sold off to someone who wouldn’t make the world so much worse.

We do truly live in a dystopia, but we’re accustomed to it. Utopia is impossible but much better than this is also possible.

The logic of the market fetishists (most economists) is so bizarre.

It is: the market is perfect, so even if there is something the market is not providing, or not achieving adequately, since the market mechanism is perfect, this service/product/idea/practice is actually unnecessary.

No evidence will convince most of them otherwise.

Hence why I and many others call economics a secular religion. This isn’t the only bit of the doctrine, but it might be the central dogma.

I think I have less trouble easily recognizing and calling out Obama’s narcissistic sociopathy because I share many of those same tendencies.

I’ve always wondered over the years what Obama is really like, if there is any there there. I think that there is not. That the left was so very easily hoodwinked by a grinning flimflam artist is proof though that they in fact deserved to be conned.

It does indeed take one to know one.

Yep, a suppressor reduces the sound of a gunshot from that of a car crash to the sound of slamming a car door as hard as you can. It doesn’t make a gun silent. Nothing can do that, except firing it in space.

Source: have fired a suppressed weapon a few times, and regular rifles, handguns, military weapons etc. thousands if not dozens of thousands times.

Thought process when someone at work describes the very capable, superbly talented and intelligent intern you’ve been mentoring as “eye candy:”

“That guy is kinda big. I wonder if I can pick him high enough to bodyslam him into this water cooler, and would the resultant prison time be worth it?”

While it is not true that human nature in its primal form is all that malleable, we are going to mallet the shit out of it in the near to medium future. Advances in biotech, changes in cultural norms and status competition almost guarantee this.

Should be an interesting thousand years ahead, if we survive it.

When you are in the grip of an ideology, you simply cannot grasp its contradictions. Like xenon, the currents of its incursion into your mental environment are invisible to you and when too much of it is in the air, it becomes deadly. One of the most apparent (to those not in the grips of the ideology) is the idea that as automation increases, somehow jobs magically will be created elsewhere in the economy that are as good or better than what existed prior.

The “logic” usually goes something like the below.

The “replacement” for these jobs was supposed to be service sector jobs. We’ve been simultaneously told that these jobs would replace the lost manufacturing jobs, and then when the low salaries are questioned, we are told that these jobs are only for teenagers or people living with their parents, despite these businesses being open year-round and during school hours, not to mention being the plurality of the newly-created jobs. Any attempt to raise salaries in this sector, we are told, would spur automation and joblessness, yet we are simultaneously told that “automation does not kill jobs,” and the “the amount of work to do is unlimited.” Left unsaid is that, by this logic, only by paying salaries that are so ultra-low that they are competitive with machines can we have sufficient jobs for people.

With an ever-falling labor participation rate (and not just due to Boomer retirement) and concomitantly with the vast majority of jobs being created consisting of low-wage, no-benefit service jobs, it is just not the case that the neoliberal economist’s Harry Potter fantasy of magical job creation is occurring, or will ever occur.

As automation’s effects were masked by the focused immiseration of urban blacks, the risks could be denied by economists as this population simply didn’t count. Now that it is affecting whites and with the rise of Trump, it’s harder to ignore.

Society, to be clear, does not have to be this way. Automation could allow us to have lives of comparative leisure. If we lived at 1960 levels of consumption, a 10-hour workweek for most would be more than possible.

That’s not the choice we made or will make though it appears. No, we’ve chosen to give the bounty of all this automation to the rich and to leave the rest of us brawling over the one percent of scraps left over.

Here’s some more typical pseudo-Democrat misunderstanding of, well — everything. Just everything.

The data is (sort of) sound, but when you pass a bill like the ACA, guess what? You own what happens to health care then. You own it, like it or not.

For the average person who can barely afford health care anyway, the premiums “only” going up 20-30% vs. a projected 50% does not matter. It’s all financially out of reach.

Appealing to a world that doesn’t exist — one with no ACA — to show how something people already can’t afford would be even more unaffordable is a typical farcically boneheaded Dem technocrat thing to do.

Throwing data at people in these circumstances doesn’t help. It hurts your case.

Do the Democrats just not understand the damage they’ve done, forcing people to buy mostly-bad insurance in a huge giveaway to insurance companies, and then financially penalizing the shirkers? Can they really not understand how utterly destructive this is?

The ACA is probably the real reason Hillary Clinton lost, or at least a major contributor. But that will never make it into the narrative, will it? Putin will jump out of a closet and stab a motherfucker.

The first 10 songs in my current playlist:

Supposedly, Monica Crowley (who btw seems like a generally vile human being) plagiarized some portions of her book What The (Bleep) Just Happened.

Here’s the evidence.

Again, this is the sort of plagiarism that no one outside of academia gives a crap about. It’s meaningless. I don’t feel like unpacking this fully sociologically at the moment, but it springs from the academe’s apparitional and aspirational notion that all ideas should be novel, springing ex nihilo from one’s uncompromisingly dazzling intellect.

This is not how the world works. This is not how the world has ever worked. This is not how the world will work any time in the future. In fact, the world is moving ever further away from this state of being.

Crowley’s book was not an academic tome where it is and should be important to cite all sources. It’s a damn pop politics book. Who cares if she assembled it from cutting up a bunch of old magazines, tossing the slivers up in the air like graffiti and then re-assembling the shreds on the bathroom floor.

Plagiarism most of the time is a senseless charge designed to dispose of political and ideological opponents. This is absolutely no different, despite my antipathy to Crowley herself.

People who “resist” Trump who did not also resist Obama are not on the side of right; they are just authoritarian in a different direction.

Please don’t misinterpret this for supporting Trump. I’d rather never have heard his name.

But if you don’t recognize that Obama was just a continuation of the George W. Bush regime then I don’t know what to tell you, other than that you are an ideologue.

I know, I know: Obama was cool. Does that matter when your family is getting drone-bombed? Murdered?

Your resistance is sad and pathetic because it has no meaning and no goal other than, “Go, team, go!”

Still don’t buy that the Russians did any hacking that truly influenced the US election last year.

The fact is the Russians and other state and non-state actors attempt to hack whoever they can every election. So does the US.

It’s mystifying to see liberals put all this blind trust in the US intelligence apparatus after so many years (basically since Iraq in 2003) asserting that they could not be trusted at all.

The other fact is that all the hacked material released was true, and furthermore it wasn’t revelatory. We already knew HRC and her crew were all Wall Street shills who would rather torch the destitute than help them. This was not news. No one even cared about this one way or the other because those who already knew didn’t care, and those who already despised HRC simply found it irrelevant.

When a great and unexpected loss occurs, conspiracy theories sprout up like weeds to “explain” the defeat.

This one it appears will be the accepted narrative going forward despite it being mostly a fairy tale built on a shallow foundation of events that occur every election.

Apart from having the opposite of natural talent, I think one of the reasons I don’t enjoy operational math and find it just devastatingly boring is that I don’t enjoy finding the solution to puzzles.

What I mean is that it’s obvious that many people experience some sort of joy (I’m only speculating here, based on observation of others) when they solve some well-posed conundrum. This appears to motivate people, to provide some sort of rush and reason to continue, that promise of reward at the conclusion.

Here’s what I experience when I solve a puzzle or a math problem: annoyance that I wasted so very much time on something I could’ve looked up or asked someone who cares to complete for me.

I don’t get angry while looking for the answer; no, I experience that afterward when I realize that my time has been sapped by trivia.

That’s why in ninth grade I wrote after some algebra problems I couldn’t or didn’t feel like solving, “This is why they make calculators and computers.”

Whatever it is that puzzles do to or for other people, I just do not have that component. Probably explains a few things.

Agreed, most men are like this. I’ve known many myself.

I’m a good cook. Do it several times a week. We usually cook together, though. More fun that way.

I wash nearly all of the dishes and never have a problem noticing when anything is out. I go grocery shopping by myself all the time to get what is needed (did it just yesterday). Why do all too many men seem incapable of this?

It’s not like I take care of everything, though — we do concentrate on what we prefer. I don’t like sweeping, so I don’t do that. And I don’t like cleaning mirrors. But we generally clean the bathrooms about half and half. Same with vacuuming and any other form of cleaning.

If we ever have to paint, though, I’m just not doing that. I hate painting, am bad at it, and refuse to do it. I’d rather hire someone, or just not do it at all. And no one wants me doing general house maintenance, if there is to be a house left standing at the end of it. I will gladly be the dumb muscle if my girlfriend decides she wants to do something, but if it’s up to me I hire someone.

I also don’t do yard work, but that’s why they make money.

But not being an oblivious dumbass is really not hard. I left childhood behind a long time ago. Why can’t more men do the same?

Hilariously, a lot of the now-popular “explanations” (such as some comic I saw recently) for quantum phenomena that purport to better clarify what’s really going on at that level are little better than the bad explanations they propose to replace.

Supplanting vernacular explanations with semi-mathemetical formalism doesn’t elucidate anything any more clearly, it’s just more descriptive of the math itself.

The events aren’t the math; the map is not the territory. Call it “superposition” or a “unit vector in two-dimensional Hilbert space,” the underlying phenomena are not clarified at all. Just as Feynman understood that knowing as a bit of trivia such as the name of a bird told you very little about it*, knowing the right words to say in the direction of a quantum event really helps you very little.

Unfortunately, all we really know to say are the right words, or the right formulae. In quantumland, you just accept, not understand. If you think you understand, that’s a sure sign you do not. What’s really going on might be a meaningless question or it might be incomprehensible. No one knows, really. But the math is not the event. And neither are the words.

Also note that the interpretation of the QM in the comic isn’t the only one accepted by even mainstream scientists (much less loons).

Anyway, scientists tend to mistake the math for the event — understandable, really, as math is their tool.

I approach things from a more philosophical perspective and recognize that a drawing on the wall is not really a cat, and ceci n’est pas une pipe. The math and the words are not the world and never will be.

*Though today, knowing that name is more important and more helpful since so much more of our brains are outsourced now compared to 1950.