I don’t think anything in the tech world has ever made me angrier than what Firefox is doing to itself, and how useless it’ll be after it does it.

Literally no useful extensions will be left and the browser will be worthless and no better than IE at that point. There has rarely been such an epic incident of foot-shooting in the tech world.

Such a goddamn shame.

If you were thinking of buying an SS — which I heartily recommend if you can swing it — do buy a new one.

Not really worth it to buy a used one. Not if you can bargain at all.

I paid not that much more than that, and got the full manufacturer warranty and two free oil changes and services, too (for a car like the SS is a $200-$250 value or so).

Even the olders SSes are pretty dear.

I expect it’ll actually rise in value (as the GTO did) after people realize what they missed.

I also figured out why a few people have asked me at gas stations and such, “Is that a BMW?”

SS:

BMW M5:

I like how BMWs look just fine, but won’t pay the extra 50% for the nameplate, so that works for me!

Today, Charles Darwin would be hounded out of science and academia as he was a slow worker and didn’t use any math in his work.

In fact, many of the world’s greatest scientists of past era would receive the same treatment.

If anyone thinks that is a good thing, then you and I have some huge fundamental disagreements.

The best proof that AI is possible is that it’s already built.

Look in the mirror.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

What a strange world we live in where we have Juggalos set to do battle with Nazis with Donald Trump as President while a hurricane destroys Texas.

If you’d written this in a novel twenty years ago, it’d’ve been dismissed as utterly implausible trash.

But now we live in an utterly implausible trash reality.

Ah, wish we still inhabited such a footloose and fancy free era where we cared about the Juggalo opinions on magnets vs. whether Nazis kill them in street fighting.

Why I do not support Kamala Harris:

its chelsea @SenKamalaHarris never supported me she stands for the fascist police state you love so much ‍♀️ you are the same https://t.co/TGg99IN8Cr

— Chelsea E. Manning (@xychelsea) August 24, 2017

She’s a torture-supporting neoliberal.

Simple as that.

However, I do support Tulsi Gabbard and Tammy Duckworth.

Almost everything everyone does on Twitter these days would be much better-suited to a blog.

It’d be easier to read, easier to link, and much easier to aggregate.

The future seems to be using stupider and worse technology so you can get idiotic, low-value things done more quickly.

Great.

Co-worker riding in my car after I did a quick u-turn and sprinted away like a demon with a tailwind of hellfire.: “This…this doesn’t drive like a family sedan.”

He didn’t have any idea what the car was. Such a fun car to drive!

Macron spends $30,000 on makeup as policies stall.

But he was the great neoliberal hero. WHAT HAPPEN???

Macron’s presidency looks about like Clinton’s would have had she won.

Better than Trump? Yes. Just like a brushfire is better than dumpster fire.

Good? Helping much?

Nope.

Well, this is telling:

Just found this in the Village Voice, April 27, 1967. If you read it, click and read the whole thing. pic.twitter.com/H5FjY6WT85

— Erin Blakemore (@heroinebook) August 23, 2017

Hey. Hey ya’ll. Remember when I said several times on this and other websites that many people who supported Sanders in the primaries would vote for Trump if Sanders wasn’t in the general?

And you remember how I was excoriated, and told this would be 1 in 10,000 rare (actual quote from another website I commented on), and that it’d basically never happen?

Well.

1 In 10 Sanders Primary Voters Ended Up Supporting Trump, Survey Finds.

I’m not good at politics. But I do know something about how humans behave and tend to think.

Most predictable thing ever really.

Something I’ve realized only recently how surface level most people’s gloss of events and motivations for those events are.

I knew people were ignorant. What I didn’t realize is just how willfully ignorant they are. It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t even want to know.

At another site, I posted a comment about how Google’s HTTPS push had nothing to do with the best interests of the consumer and everything to do with Google’s desire to shape and to control the market — including in advertising.

At that site, you’d think I’d suggested that it was ok to decapitate kittens with lawn mowers. Not only was I some sort of deranged conspiracy theorist, of course the HTTPS push/putsch was all being done because fluffy, cuddly little Google cares about you and just wants to make you safer.

It’s not just that specific issue that concerns me — though that one is pretty blatant — but the general phenomenon. Not only are most “intelligent” people content to understand nearly nothing except received wisdom, they are also happy to lampoon anyone who wishes to comprehend anything below that perfunctory surface-level gloss.

I’ve realized it for a long time, but smart people as societally-defined usually aren’t all that smart.

Some of them — many of them, perhaps most of them — are in fact mulishly moronic, and not only don’t mind, they revel in it.

This is something I haven’t fully consolidated in my own mind, but this is sort of antipodal to conspiracy theorists — it’s the obstinate denial of the complexity of the world or that there is anything operating under the surface at all.

I haven’t made sense of it yet. But unlike those people, at least I realize there is something to make sense of.

Everything is obvious — once you know the answerhttps://t.co/xERAd1Fnv5 @duncanjwatts pic.twitter.com/WRAMAibQq6

— Dean Eckles (@deaneckles) August 21, 2017

Many people insist that sociology and psychology are worthless — because physics envy is so inculcated into everyone, no one can believe that a science that doesn’t deal wholly in numbers and equations has any value.

However, what many people perceive as “obvious” in the social sciences is obvious either way, as the tweet above points out.

I agree that it in many cases sociology and psychology need to be held to more rigorous standards (and no, I definitely don’t mean making them more like physics). However, asserting that they are valueless ignores the mountains of valid findings that have influenced nearly everything about our society.

All of this is true of Florida, but mainly because it is a huge state. Or rather, it is long. Very long.

To drive from Pensacola, FL to Key West, FL is a 13 hour trip (if you don’t stop) and 832 miles.

North Florida — where I grew up — is very Southern indeed. South of Gainesville, it gets less so as you proceed further down the interstate. On the coasts, it depends on where you are.

One time in the Army I had a guy ask me since I was going to Florida could I take him to Miami when I went. I said, “You know I’m going somewhere close to Jacksonville, right? That’s a six hour drive from there to Miami.”

He wanted to visit a friend there, and wasn’t very familiar with the state. He thought it was 30 minutes away.

And I think that is true of many people — they perceive Florida as being very small, perhaps because they’ve only flown over most of it.

But yeah, 832 miles from one end to the other (with a bend in the middle) over land. And a lot can — and does — happen in 832 miles.