The first 10 on today’s playlist.

Space Exploration Isn’t Just About Science.

Yep. The whole point of space exploration is and should be boots on the fucking ground.

Sending robots to poke rocks is very cool, but ultimately pointless. It’s just preparatory.

I’m bewildered by people who are so small in spirit and lacking in passion to think that sending a robot to molest some Martian hematite is a substitute for Sunita Williams picking it up with her hands and looking at it with her eyes under pale Martian light.

I’m not for human exploration because it’s useful, nor because it’s good economics, nor because it is safe — I am for it because it is the opposite of all of these things.

The wider left’s play acting that cultural change via immigration is not a valid concern only loses and alienates people rather than wins them over.

Remember, it only takes a few percent of people in the US to swing elections completely.

Culture matters to people. Whether it should or should not, it just does. Having your neighborhood or your city transformed by newcomers nothing like you is not just a concern of cackling racists. Or even of white people.

I know this automatically makes me a horrible racist — and perhaps Hitler himself — in the Manichean monocolture of the puritan left, but communities and their construction and destruction is something that people are rightly concerned with.

Denying that this matters will not help you, or them, or immigrants, or the country.

James Franco would have a much cooler name if it were Frames Janco.

I know it seems very strange to many who aren’t Americans but in most American cities and rural areas, if you can’t scrounge up enough money for a car, that also means you can’t get or hold a job.

You see, the public transportation infrastructure outside of a very few major cities in the US is terrible to non-existent, and many employers if they discover you are using public transit simply will not hire you anyway.

Even if they do decide to hire you, using the paltry and pathetic public transit available just does not work.

For instance, I live about seven miles away from my office, in one of the densest areas in the state. It takes me about 15 minutes to drive to work. Taking public transit would cost me nearly three hours — one way. I could literally walk there faster, if the area had sidewalks. But it does not, like most of the US.

In this country, often one cannot get a job due to a lack of a car, and one cannot easily buy a car due to a lack of a job. And if your car breaks down and you cannot afford to repair it, you lose your job by default.

You can obviously see what a trap this leaves people in.

No, not a dystopia. Not a dystopia at all.

Must I point out the obvious?

I guess I must.

Even if Russia was somehow involved in hijacking the election and is in some mysterious way controlling Trump as he cavorts like some titian-tinted marionette under Putin’s string-pulling, do the Democrats think their Russian obsession is going to help win elections?

Will it change the fate of the country? Help the disadvantaged? Save the ACA? Save the EPA? Win in 2018? Win in 2020?

Nope, it’ll do none of these things.

Which is kind of the point, really, of obsessing over it.

We are so screwed.

This is mostly moronic.

But first, I do truly think everyone would be better off if they evaluated people less superficially.

At the same time, telling people they are wrong for liking or preferring certain features is never, ever, ever going to work. Just ever. It will only make the world worse. It won’t change anyone’s minds and it will only cause people to code their preferences differently, and to obfuscate them.

The problem is that there is no path from the current state (people have fairly-strong and nearly-unchangeable sexual and relationship preferences that are solidified pretty early in life) to the desired result (everyone should in principle and in practice be attracted to everyone else for some reason or other).

The list of women I would not date for various reasons (physical and other) is vast — it’s nearly 3.6 billion people. And that’s just women. There’s a list of men that’s just as long!

I am so evil that I would not date approximately 7.1 billion people no matter what. Damn. Get me my Loki headpiece.

Look, I understand. As one who was often in life considered not the ugly duckling but the ugly duckling’s shit stain, I know very well how it feels for people to just pass you over for something you can’t control and can’t change.

It’s hard and it sucks. But mandating it and shaming people into being attracted to you is…better? Somehow?

This as usual reminds me a lot of the ninny-filled MRA movement.

BTW, using s.e. smith’s framework, one of the most discriminatory features of the dating market is that the vast, vast majority of women will only date tall men.

Notice how little ever gets written about that. Hmm, wonder why that is?

Every time I am about to say something hilariously stupid, right before that I plan to say in sage, orphic tones, “Time for some game theory.”

The problem is knowing that you are going to say something hilariously stupid.

Ok, time for some game theory: if you invalidate the Chuch-Turing hypothesis, then one can calculate in advance all possible configurations of dumbassery in one’s world line, and then when a DA configuration approaches, one can unleash “time for some game theory.”

I game theoried all of that, fuck yeah!

Four reasons to drink beer with your breakfast.

Turns out my mom was a foodie hipster.

Why, she could imbibe as many as 18 beers with her breakfast. No, in fact, the beers were her breakfast. Double-hipster, then.

My mom was leading food trends, pioneering culinary and libatory adventures, all the way back in the late 1980s.

Oh no, wait — she was just a North Florida drunk. Never mind.

Do the Democrats now seriously believe that no Americans should ever meet with any Russian, even when it is part of both of their jobs?

How exactly is that supposed to work?

This sort of dreck reminds me of why I stopped visiting Crooked Timber.

So much is ignored or obfuscated that is relevant that it’s like reading a book on astrophysics that doesn’t mention baryonic matter at all.

This is what I meant the other day about being forced (well, in this case, I forced myself) to listen to people dumber than I am.

Most of the assertions in the piece are ludicrous, lies, or expose someone who has never held anything but a job in academia. I’ve held a wide range of jobs over the years (soldier/paratrooper, photojournalist, proofreader, editor, night shift team leader, title examiner, various IT positions, low-level executive, etc.) and in no case for actually performing the required tasks did having a college degree matter a bit, and here’s the proof: I don’t have a college degree.

The job I hold now is not something anyone could learn to do in a short time, but that’s because I have many years of experience that was gained — you guessed it — on the job. There is no college graduate alive who could do my job fresh out of school with no experience.

The wisdom of spending $100,000 for a college education to learn to use Microsoft Office — well, I’ve read more aggressively stupid things in my life, but I’d probably have to go to my hometown to dig up some old KKK newsletters I used to see passed around to top that bit of “wisdom.” The truth is that a relatively-bright person can learn Office in a weekend, and can learn most jobs (especially at the entry level) in a few weeks to months. By the way, the skill levels required to perform many jobs has been reduced by automation as the degree requirements have only risen.

Quiggin doesn’t actually examine any of the reasons that people complain of credentialism, or why it is a problem that requiring ever-more college education to do nearly the same jobs as were previously done by high school grads just as well (such as journalism) is a problem societally or individually. That is but one example. There are many more problems with his (broke-ass) thesis and with credentialism in general.

I wish I had an intellectually-worthless (as it did not make him any smarter) but prestigious credentials like Quiggin so that I could get paid to spew weak and poorly-argued columns into the ether and have easily-misled people laud me for them.

No, I don’t, actually. I’ll take real intelligence and insight over unearned plaudits any day because I enjoy thinking for myself and unlike Quiggin I take no joy from attempting to justify my decrepit ratiocination and pundit-lite gimcrackery with appeals to self-interest and the flattering of my peers.

I have such fun clowning on intellectually-pitiful Crooked Timber crew; maybe I should visit more often. I mean, it’s like playing tackle football with toddlers, so it’s not really fair but it’s fun when you want an easy challenge.

What happened to economics is happening to traditional Spanish literature and culture courses now, among others.

Linguistics is a field that I’m interested in, but I’ve noticed that it’s moving to mostly-worthless quantification rather than attempting to find true insight — but had never thought about it in the context of the post I linked above.

But it makes perfect sense that as linguistics becomes more pseudo-scientific while attempting to appear more “true” by mathing everything up, that it’d also be used as a maul to chip away at semi-related humanities-oriented fields like literature and cultural studies.

Well, that explains a lot of other things I’ve been noticing but didn’t really understand until now.

Linguistics is not a replacement of any sort of the wide-spectrum cultural understanding and insight a literature course can bring to students. In no way is it adequate — but linguistics has little visible ideology, and even less so if you make it into (bad) pseudo-physics.

But for the technocratic neoliberals who now have full control of academia, a field that doesn’t make people have any dangerous and unapproved thoughts is perfect.

I hate urban noise-scapes.

Trump nuked the expedited H-1B option for now.

Good.

The H-1B visa is a scam that allow firms to shortchange American workers, is nearly indentured servitude* for the workers involved, and lowers wages in general. The CNN article is full of lies, by the way.

While the visas are used to fill the US skills gap….

There is no US skills gap. There is a gap between the wage that firms wish to pay and what highly skilled workers will accept. That is the gap. Again, I repeat: no matter what you read in the press, there is no skills gap in IT, period.

What happens is the going rate for an SAP principal (if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it) salary is about $150,000 a year (as it should be). However, firms only want to pay $80,000 a year for this role — so they bring in a barely-capable H-1B visa-holder in to do the job.

You get the picture. Trump should eliminate the H-1B program altogether, in my opinion. It’s anti-labor and exploitative in two different respects.

*An H-1B visa holder is not a regular worker; they cannot leave their present firm unless another firm sponsors them, and their contract might not permit this anyway. They are basically stuck where hired.

Economics: using garbage math to promote destructive policy to the ignorant and clueless.

Surely a path to a good future.