The thing that liberals seem not to understand about re-negotiating NAFTA or similar is that any transition to a new state will result in some pain. That something might hurt is not a reason not to do it.

For instance: going to the dentist hurts but is better than letting all your teeth rot.

I am not actually advocating for or against re-negotiating NAFTA here. What I am arguing against is the contention that if something causes any discomfort or even a period of re-organization, that it is therefore not worth attempting.

Curiously, (pseudo) liberals had no problem excusing or even declaiming the merits of all the difficult re-adjustments that occurred and are still occurring due to treaties and other agreements such as NAFTA.

Funny that, huh?

Ha, yes, I’ve noticed this too.

I do think that’s a real generational difference. More Millennials than any other generation either have a retail/service job that they know they’ll likely never leave, or have friends with those jobs.

It creates a lot more empathy than a Boomer who had such a job for six months one summer and then headed off on a real career track. Also see this.

There are other causes and differences, of course, but good observation.

I had a longer post in mind — about how the neoliberal project has been masterful in winning, and then in denying its own existence — but that is too long to unpack with the energy and time I have available.

So instead I’ll mention how whenever renewable energy is mentioned you hear about the “massive subsidies” it has received.

Yet when fossil fuels are discussed, unless you are hearing it from a very, very left-oriented source, you hear nothing about the absolutely staggering subsidies fossil fuels have received over the past hundred years — and continue to receive.

What’s strange about the “I have a boyfriend” thing that many women do – and yes, yes, I understand why they do it — is that it is not very effective against the very guys they are attempting to target with it.

Sure, it’s effective against some guys, most of whom would be fine with a simple “I’m just interested in being friends,” but against the guys who don’t take no for an answer, it’s probably actually an incitement and not any form of dissuasion at all.

I’m not a woman and I don’t intend to tell anyone how to behave (as obviously many women believe their strategy to be effective), but I am a guy and I’ve known (many, many) misogynist creepy guys, and I can tell you from experience with them that “I have a boyfriend” means absolutely nothing to them. Nothing at all.

I think it is just one of those things that humans do that is self-effective rather than being that effective in the world (like taking antibiotics for viral infections). It doesn’t help, but it feels like it helps, and that is enough.

Lately (and it doesn’t happen as often as it used to) when a woman says that to me, I just as quickly say, “Cool! I do too!”

It just confuses the hell out of them which is fine with me. Historically, most girls who think I am flirting with them I want absolutely nothing to do with….

Reading Tanya Huff’s Valor’s Choice actually made me miss being in the military. It successfully captures both much of the gallows humor that is ever-present in a combat unit (and that many people with no experience insist doesn’t happen) and the camaraderie that exists there.

Like Battlestar Galactica, it strikes the right tone and I could tell without even looking up her bio that Huff had served herself at some point.

Not that non-military folks can’t write good mil-fic. Some can and do. But it is exceedingly rare.

Huff gets exactly right how military people actually talk with one another and that is something seldom found anywhere in mass media fiction.

Obama is a multi-millionaire and I can’t quite believe people are passionately defending his need to take $400,000 from Cantor Fitzgerald

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) April 27, 2017

Yes, this has been extremely puzzling. I’ve seen people (many, many people) portraying it as “sticking it to the man.”

Motherfucker, Obama IS the man. Millionaire ex-president rolling in more dough than a Pillsbury factory explosion. That is the very definition of the man.

The Clinton- and Obama-bots are comical in their vapid clueless dopiness.

Update: If you think I am exaggerating, look at this shit:

That’s barely worth responding to, but Jane Sanders is Bernie Sanders’ husband, not Bernie Sanders. This is the same crew of course that repeated ad nauseam that we should not judge Hillary by anything that her husband had done.

Second, Jane Sanders was not accused of any crime, much less charged with one. She appears to have just been a poor and rather clueless manager. If that were a crime, half of America would be in jail.

These are also the same people accusing Trump of being delusional, by the way.

It’s sad as for several years Kendzior was my favorite writer. And now she’s just a regular ol’ American nutcase — a leftie Alex Jones or Stephen Bannon.

I don’t mind making mistakes, but I hope I never descend into the pitiful and shameful depths of self-parody that the Drums and Mannions and Kendziors and Marcottes of the world have now reached.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”

-E.O. Wilson

Yep. Most of us are mostly unsuited to our current civilization.

Genre fiction: Life with all the boring parts cut out.

Literary fiction: Life with all the boring parts left in, and extra boring parts grafted on after being trucked in from somewhere even more boring.

Glad this did not happen to me.

I like Lorde’s first album as much as any album I listened to in my teens or twenties. “Bravado” and “Tennis Court” from that album might be the best pop songs released in the last twenty years. (You know an album is peerless when the most well-known song, “Royals,” while still being great isn’t even in the top five best songs on the album.)

Anyway, I listen to a wider range of music now than I did in 1994 when I was 18, and I think music in general is better now — with perhaps early Tori Amos excluded. Only “perhaps,” as she was sui generis and there will probably never be an album like Little Earthquakes made by anyone again as it is an artifact of a particular time and place.

Glad I find new, great music all the time. It’s out there.

Often one of the most racially & ethnically diverse places in a town is the Walmart.

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) April 26, 2017

Yep! One of the reasons I actually like going to the WMT near my office.

We live in a world where I could have this delivered to my house in two days but where we cannot provide adequate, affordable housing or health care or education or meaning to even the majority of our citizens.

Whatever happens to us — and much will due to climate change and related crises — we deserve it.

"Intellectual elite"= people selected ability to get:
1 statics, not dynamics
2 actions, not interactions
3 low, not high dimensionality.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) April 15, 2017

“Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution.”

– Francis Bacon (De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623)

Everything done to make computers easier to use for stupid people makes them vastly more difficult and annoying to use for me.

Also, did you hear about the homeopathy rally in Washington? Though no one showed up, it was still very effective.

If every form of behavior (as Ted Chiang states, summarizing the default view of science) is compatible with determinism, then determinism has no predictive power.

Does determinism fall out of the laws of the universe? That’s a far stretch from what we can and cannot observe. A likely stretch, but still a far one.