Duck eggs are quite a bit different in taste and consistency as compared to chicken eggs — and larger, too.

I think in many ways I prefer the ova of the cluckier fowl, but I’m glad I didn’t duck out on dabbling in this new (to me) cuisine.

Their shells, though, are much harder to quack. I am sure you are going to drake me over the coals for that bad pun — but that is your mallardy, not mine.

Hey ya’ll, xrdp is pretty brilliant.

I use it with Xubuntu (thus, XFCE) and a guide for that can be found here.

If you want a GUI for remote Linux boxes and are tired of goofing around with VNC and its tendency to break from release to release, this is your ticket. It also supports session persistence, is stable and pretty fast.

I like it in particular because I can toss it in with my other RDP connection files in MacOS and it just works, but I’ve tried connecting from three different OSes now and it works flawlessly.

When Cleopatra was queen of Egypt, the Great Pyramid at Giza was already older than all of the surviving iconic Roman monuments extant today. To Cleopatra, the Giza pyramids were literally ancient history.

The sheer scope of time that pharaonic Egypt survived is astounding — nearly 3,000 years. We will likely never see such an enduring human civilization again.

Look at this goofy assclown.

Yes I'm a straight, normal, married man so I don't go out making friends with women, nor do I have any desire to https://t.co/7DUHEAeXj2

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) March 30, 2017

I’m not married, but I’ve been with my (female) partner for 11 years now — and I am so thankful for the women I’ve made friends with over the years in the various places I’ve lived. They’ve enriched my life greatly and I’m incidentally going to visit a (woman) friend in a few weeks (and I’m very excited about this because she’s the coolest).

You’re a sad little fuckstick, Matt Walsh, and your family tree is probably a cactus because everyone on it is a prick.

I don’t have a good name for this concept yet, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about mental “glitch traps.”

I’ll illustrate by exposition. Ran into one at work yesterday with someone I was attempting to explain something quite easy to. But because it didn’t fit into their worldview, they just could not comprehend it at all.

Stripping out the specificity, there were a pair of items where the item in question is almost always found singularly. And no matter how hard I tried, the person just could not understand that this one time there would be two of them.

In the end it was me repeating over and over again, and here summing up many many words, “This time there are two. I know there is usually only one and the tool is built for only one. But this time there are two. Just ignore one.”

And then the person would say something like, “But there are two? What do I do with two?”

I must have repeated the same set of instructions in different iterations a dozen times before I basically just gave up.

But the person in question just could not understand. There being two of the item just completely did not fit into their conception of the world and so they were unable to proceed past that point. They simply could not go on.

Glitch trap. Mental breakage.

So that now has me wondering, when do I run into these (since I must) and is there any way to break out of them without looking as foolish as the person at work to anyone above the maze, looking down?

I really have very little in common with people my age.

I mean, I never have much in common with anyone at all but people my age — fuck, I don’t give a crap about your golf score, your mortgage, your kids or their antics, your investment “advice,” how the 70s or the 80s was the best period for music EVAR or any of that other crap. If I have to listen to one more rambling digression about some 1970s TV show I think I will barf at light speed. FUCK M*A*S*H. DAMN.

Guess that’s why I tend to mingle most with the interns at work. We listen to the same music, have a lot more essential freedom in our lives, and we are not completely set in our ways. The interns listen and consider. People my age are so ossified they might as well all be named “Femur.”

And as for talking to the interns, it’s really funny sometimes when I do mention something older like The Breakfast Club and it’s a complete mystery to them.

Every place a person stands is its own country, with an inhabitant of but one. There is no other way to be in this world. Your eyes saccade over the contours of the known yet this process is not reversible: a grace and a curse. There can be no ascertaining the arrangement of any other person’s map of their own private nation, no method of discovering the symbol on the legend that marks your name, your being, in that strange other’s mental topography. Is it a dagger for danger? A bridge to always cross to reach a welcoming shore? A gun; a fire; an uncanny artifact ever unknown even to the cartographer.

How much is veiled even to that author of the map is what is more unnerving still — that some Jungian ur-memory resident since the Devonian could overrun it all at any moment, redraw the boundaries, a revanchist lusus naturae marauding across the bunched mountains and huddled hills which in this case actually is the map and the territory, and with no recourse but to watch the unfolding invasion.

(This is an example of my “real” writing. Took me as long to compose as 15-20 of my blog posts.)

If Bernie Sanders manages to kick into gear a real drive for single payer, he’ll have helped save more lives and bettered the lot of more people than nearly anyone who ever lived — all without drone-bombing anyone to freedom.

Bernie was always better as not-president. Admittedly, though, nearly anything is better than Trump.

It’s nice to have skills people want.

I raised my consulting rate yesterday by 35% and the company I consult for part-time (my second job) just said, “Ok.”

I’ve been doing much more work for them and much harder work, so it was justified. But, cool, a raise.

Another little-examined area where inequality of a sort exerts itself is how large companies tend to baselessly litigate smaller ones out of existence. Just as importantly, want a reason why productivity has been slowing down? The below and this explain that stat all too well.

Tiny manufacturers who can’t afford to litigate have been forced to fold based on Acushet’s accusations alone, with no proof of infringement. For example in 2015, Acushnet sued five small golf-ball makers. The co-founder of one of these companies, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the terms of the settlement, told Quartz that’s just how business is done.

Yes, it’s about golf balls but this occurs with nearly all products. I’d be really reluctant to start any business in the US that went head to head directly with anyone large — just think about how much competition that is preventing.

The Democrats consistently argue that policy matters but then insist that when it comes to employment and immigration and the economy, that the fickle winds of fate are what matter — that we can’t do anything about long-term unemployment, or job loss due to globalization or automation, or about the decimation of unions.

This does not compute.

Was and have been thinking about immigration levels and the long-term viability of social welfare programs.

From the reading I’ve done over the past few weeks or so, what appears to matter ceteris paribus reference immigration and social welfare programs are a few things:

1) Perception of rising or falling immigration and relatedly whether it is under or out of control.

2) Integration success or failure (much less strong).

Unfortunately, there has not been a lot of good research in this realm, and further high-quality research is probably taboo as it might discover something that discredits a wishful narrative.

But Germany, the UK, and a few other countries are currently running a nice natural experiment that we can learn from!

Since Germany and the UK are very large, I’d rather use those rather than smaller countries that might have more confounding factors.

So, a prediction or two:

1) Over the next 10-15 years, I’d expect both Germany and the UK to reduce support for or eliminate altogether some or perhaps many social programs, including educational and apprenticeships (common in Germany).

2) I’d also expect the (already-extant) rise of rightist or nationalist parties to exacerbate these trends and lead to some pretty bad outcomes in at least a few large-ish countries.

Note that wishful thinking can’t wish us out of number 2 occurring as it is part and parcel of high in-migration rates — as shitty as number 2 always is! A common effect of higher or perceived out-of-control immigration is that these right-wing parties achieve ascendance as discontent spreads among the already-xenophobic and the neutral begin trending that way, too.

A sub-prediction: those countries which experience the most immigration from the most-disparate cultures will crash their social welfare programs the hardest, though I think this will be more challenging to gauge (especially with my lack of statistical/mathematical ability) since so much is just contingent and always will be.

The null hypothesis being of course that social support and social programs remain unchanged or increase rather than become diminished (or exhibit divergent results, which will then require further examination).

My thinking though is amenable to being changed by evidence either way. These are just hypotheses awaiting the test of time.

Pro tip: the diminutive of Vladimir in Russian is very much not “Vlad.”

When you position yourself as an expert on Russian matters and you refer to Putin as “Vlad,” it just shows that you are a moron.

However, “Voldemort” is a cognate of Vladimir by way of Ancient Germanic and Lithuanian, so go nuts with the Harry Potter references if you must.

Carrie Coon has a lead role in Fargo‘s Season 3.

I am so all over that.

She’s so chameleonic; I can barely recognize her from role to role. For instance, here she is in Gone Girl:

Who dat?