There Never Was a Real Tulip Fever.

Beware of this. While the extent of Tulipmania has almost certainly been exaggerated, this bit of historical revisionism is an effort by the economics profession to advance the dogma that there is no such thing as a bubble; that whatever the price the market decides for an item is the correct price and that the price is rational.

There is actually very little economic data from that time, and any accounts are pretty speculative — so whoever writes definitively about this topic is probably at least 50% wrong.

Knowing when you are being subjected to propaganda is difficult. That piece, though, is both the result and the spearpoint of some pretty effective propaganda. It is weaponized intellectualism and “expertise” at work.

Ok these pants are kind of epic.

But things were even worse before Photoshop. That woman isn’t even there! That’s some sort of cardboard cutout, which is very apropos to the whole spirit of the ad and the text below “her.”

I still want a pair of those pants, though.

Holy tater tots, I have too many windows open on too many different machines.

I try to like St. Vincent’s (Annie Clark’s) music. It seems like something I should like. But it just leaves me cold.

I do like one song of hers — the one song most unlike her other songs.

Odd when that happens. You think something should be right up your alley but it just isn’t.

Note that Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski are still members of the Motion Picture Academy.

So I got a new 5K iMac. It’s noticeably faster than the older model, mostly because of the doubled GPU memory, and SSD improvements.

The old one was called “5KofGlory.” This one is called “5K5Glorious.”

I should make Vin Diesel doing manly things with cars my background to really complete the theme.

It’s damn annoying how much effort you have to put forth these days to stop computers and apps from attempting to save to the “cloud.” (Really, just someone else’s insecure data center with full NSA/FBIA/CIA access baked in.)

I don’t want to save a single goddamn file to the cloud. Not now and not ever. I rip all that garbage out of the OS right away.

And if you’re saving your passwords in the cloud through LastPass or something like that? What the hell? Why would you ever do that? That’s not going to be stolen. It’s already stolen and you just don’t know about it.

Pretty cool command for MacOS:

caffeinate

If you open a terminal and enter that, it’ll keep your Mac from going to sleep until you do a CTRL-C.

Can also control with some options:

caffeinate -u -t 10800

That’ll prevent your Mac from sleeping for 10800 seconds, or three hours.

This is very cool. I have been there many times and that’s the area where I grew up; that river is probably the place I know the best in the world.* The information below the video is a bit inaccurate, unfortunately.

The Santa Fe River is not always dark. It’s tannin-stained certain times of the year and under certain conditions. Generally, the water is coffee-dark in the winter and spring, while in the summer (depending on rain) it is primarily spring-fed and becomes quite clear. I have seen it become crystal-clear enough that I could see easily to the bottom of 30 foot deep spots in the river, just like looking through a window.

The tannic acid also comes from oak leaves, not just cypress.

Another slightly misleading part is the info about the spring. There is no spring actually called “Devil’s Spring” at that location. The entire three-spring system is called the “Devil’s Spring System.” That system comprises three springs: Little Devil, Devil’s Eye and Devil’s Ear. The park itself is called “Ginnie Springs” and it is privately owned, though it should be a state park.

The diver is most likely in Devil’s Ear, which is right on the Santa Fe.

I have swum in all three springs and in just about every spring on or near that river at one time or other.

*My partner was looking at photos of the Santa Fe with me one time and was marveling that I could identify where on the Santa Fe a photo was taken by the arrangement of trees and rocks. Those, though, were my navigation points for fishing and estimating my boating time.

Funny how STEM types declare that emergent properties are completely deterministic and then talk about things like heat and pressure with a straight face.

Maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong…but the funny part is the lack of doubt with irreconcilable statements, not the truth either way.

Also:

Twitter suspends Rose McGowan while Nazis post freely.

Destroy Silicon Valley and tech bros.

Twitter Suspends Rose McGowan’s Account After She Speaks Out Against Sexual Abuse.

Because of course they did. Twitter: what should be a few RFCs and a protocol is instead a Nazi-promoting, sexual-abuse-denying shitheap.

In the most imporant news of the year, Wal-Mart also has eggnog. I went there looking for Silk Nog for my partner, who can’t tolerate much dairy.

They had no Silk Nog, but they did have a few brands of eggnog: Southern Comfort and Hood. Not my favorites, but eggnog is eggnog.

Just a note for those who love eggnog. (Those who don’t, what the hell is wrong with you?)

The first grocery store we’ve seen with eggnog (and I check frequently, trust me) was Earth Fare on October 7. They had plentiful stock of Homestead Creamery brand eggnog, which as luck would have it is my favorite.

Earth Fare is only in the Southeast and Midwest, and even at that it exhibits a bit of a clumped dispersion, so beyond that I cannot help you.

Still, eggnog on October 7! That’s a new record.

Recently, my partner and I bought a pillowcase set that came with a pillowcase case.

I announced that we should start a company that sold pillowcase case cases and corner that market before other competitors barged in.

She was not for some reason amenable to this investment of capital in an obviously groundbreaking company, one certain to be greater than Juicero.

She’s just not an innovator, I guess.