When you achieve major goals in life, it’s very difficult not to send intensely petty emails to all those who told you that you could never do something, who vehemently pronounced that it just wasn’t possible for someone like you. They’d be along the lines of sending a scan of my offer letter with, “You said I couldn’t, and look what I done did!”

I won’t do such a thing. There’s no reason for it. But it is tempting.

I really should be thanking them, though. Nothing is more motivating to me than someone telling me I can’t do something that I want to do and know that I can do. That’s like the best fuel there is. So, thanks.

Something liberals particularly tend not to understand is that regulations, especially as we do them, tend to strengthen the competitive position and market power of large, existing players. Conversely, regs also tend to eviscerate smaller companies who are not well-funded.

So when you support greater regulation, essentially you are enshrining the existing players for nearly all time.

This is not always the case, don’t get me wrong. Net Neutrality benefits smaller players more than it benefits large corporations.

However, even regs as salutary as the Clean Air Act mostly benefit those who are already ascendant. It’s always a balance between what will promote true competition and what benefits the public. In this case, regulating Google and Facebook might be worth the cost. Make no mistake, though: by regulating them with any of the proposals I’ve seen circulated will enshrine them nearly forever in their current state.

The sheer number of people who try to gaslight folks who say rational things like “I don’t like certain things about this city and want to move somewhere else” by telling them they’re imagining it is astounding.

— ✨Yael Grauer✨ (@yaelwrites) April 27, 2018

Yes. The “wherever you go, there you are” philosophy only extends so far. When I decided to leave North Florida and never come back, people tried to gaslight me the very same way. “Oh, things are just the same everywhere. This is where you belong.” Or, “If you hate it here, the problem is with your attitude.”

No. Just no. I hated North Florida because it was terrible and toxic to me. Several people there literally tried to kill me. If I would’ve stayed there, I’d most likely be dead. I never would’ve been CTO of anything. Maybe CTO of a prison cell. The best — by far the very best — decision I ever made in my life was leaving Lake City, Florida. Bar none, no contest.

Gaslighting gobermouches can stay wherever they wish to. I, however, will choose what’s best for me and head out for somewhere that I can enjoy a life not punctuated by random stabbing attempts and the like.

This is how many queries are blocked even after extensive ad-blocking on local machines in our home network. This is using Pi-Hole.

Why yes, we do have 15 clients on a network for only two people. Actually, a lot more than that. Many are just locked down from leaving the local network, so never make DNS requests. I’m completely not joking about our home having a more complex infrastructure than some small- and medium-sized companies. Anyway, here’s the Pi-Hole blocking stats:

I hate mobile everything and all being optimized for smartphones. So much that used to work just does no longer. Puzzlingly, it doesn’t work on the web or on a phone all that well, despite being optimized for that — allegedly.

Fuck smartphones.

I’ve never interviewed with Google and I never will, but I’ve had these sort of “technical” interviews before.

One I remember is that someone asked me it were possible to reach the internet on a Windows system without a default gateway set. I said, “Of course it is. You can have use a browser like Firefox that supports a proxy. Or you can use the system-level proxy. Or you can get creative with the routing table. There are other ways, too, that are more complex but would also work, but I’d have to look those up to be completely accurate.”

The interviewer said, “Wrong. You can’t reach the internet with no default gateway set. The traffic must pass through some sort of gateway. That is the default route.”

Of course, because I’m me I argued with the interviewer, finally telling him, “Give me 10 minutes and a Linux box. I’ll set up a squid proxy and then we’ll set no default gateway on the Windows box and with Firefox I can still reach the internet using its proxy capability.”

I didn’t get that job. Can’t imagine why. In my experience, you never get the job when your skills are beyond those of the person interviewing you.

I’m fortunate by chance and training to have enough of the skills required to compete in the capitalist economy, and am also unusually adept at putting myself into places where opportunity not only knocks but jumps up into my arms like an over-eager cat.

This time is no exception.

Hello, everyone, I’m now a CTO.

Well, almost. I haven’t officially started yet. But I will June 1. It’s a small but growing (and accelerating in its rate of growth) company that I helped get off the ground from scratch four years ago, and have worked for as a contracting consultant ever since then part time.

It’s not a publicly-traded company, so it’s not like I’m getting absurd stock options or anything like that, but it’s a group of people that I’ve known and worked with for many years now and I trust them. And likewise, I hope.

C suite…that doesn’t even seem real. The North Florida misfit I was all those years ago wouldn’t believe it.

One of the strangest ideas — particularly among so-called liberals/leftists — is that one be immaculately free of errors or mistakes. I’ve seen this trend of expected perfection develop from essential non-existence during the 1980s and 1990s, to reaching its current level of absurdity that is the present. But no one is free of mistakes of thought or morals.

Everyone is going to find things they said (in writing or otherwise) from 10, 15, or 20 years ago and realize that some combination of personal growth and changing mores combine to make it seem dated and inappropriate now. If you think that’s not true in your case, there is an outstanding chance that you’re lying to yourself and even greater a chance that you’re dangerously narcissistic and see yourself as essentially flawless and incapable of error.

This is very different from the “consciousness raising” and other dialog methods of the 1960s. Yes, they seem hokey and dated to us now, but I’d argue they are more realistic and more aligned with how humans actually work. After all, achieving an error-free state is not even remotely possible. Those who claim it are lying, ludicrous hypocrites.

It’s likely that increasing polarization led to this, but that can’t wholly explain it. Probably also it has to to do with the isolation and essential disconnectedness of internet dialog as well.

I didn’t want it to be, but holy hell, A Wrinkle in Time was a very bad movie.

Can anybody find a plot anywhere and put it in that movie? It’s in dire need of one. Nothing in the film made the least bit of sense. It literally could be recut and assembled in any order and be just as comprehensible.

Yes, like most books, I have read the source book and it didn’t have (as far as I can recall, I read it when I was 20) the same problems as the film. The nonexistent plot, though, wasn’t the sole issue. Wrinkle was miscast, poorly shot, had an over-reliance on CGI, and did we really need a twenty foot tall Oprah Winfrey? I’d argue that we did and do not.

Worst of all, the film strongly implied (really outright stated) that bullied people deserve it and bring it on themselves. Despite all the other flaws of the film, this was the very worst part.

In some ways, it is comforting that a woman of color can make a film just as unbearably bad as anyone else. It was so awful that if I’d had anywhere else to go at the moment, I would’ve walked out of the film.

Do not recommend for any age, or for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. Just a terrible movie.

This is where Kevin Drum lets his full economically clueless side show.

He’s always been a “nothing is possible” centrist, of course. Also, he claims to understand politics but really does not. For instance, among the many other nuances he misses, Bernie’s proposal is how you start a negotiation.

Simplest and most effective negotiation tactic in the world is to begin the ask with more than you ever realistically expect to get. (As opposed to the Obama negotiation technique of giving everything away in advance and hope the other side cedes some bare crumbs back out of pity.)

Let’s take a look at Drum’s “insight,” though.

This is why even our lefty comrades in social democratic Europe don’t guarantee jobs for everyone. It would cost a fortune; it would massively disrupt the private labor market; it would almost certainly tank productivity; and it’s unlikely in the extreme that the millions of workers in this program could ever be made fully competent at their jobs.

First of all, no. Second, massively disrupting the private labor market is the whole fucking point. Goddamn Drum is without a single bit of clue.

Third, have you noticed that we have a really massive military, and a large number of government employees? Why does he (nor any other centrist) examine it from that perspective? There are about 1.5 million active duty military members currently. In addition, there approximately 22 million government employees of all types in the country already. That is out of about 155 million full-time and part-time workers total.

In other words, government and military jobs are already 15% of all existing employment in the country. Adding even 10 million people (Kevin Drum’s horrific nightmare scenario) will make that a whopping 21.6%. Oh my, how will we ever pay for that increase back to…just a bit above what it was during the unbearable year of 1972.

Surprised? I’m not, because I know my history and I know exactly what has Kevin Drum all angsty and yet embarrassingly clueless at the same time. Being a “no change is possible” centrist means you are more concerned with your house price than the future generations; more cognizant of the possibility of having to share your gold-plated health care plan with someone who doesn’t deserve it than with how the next generation is even going to live; and more interested in fighting the future than with helping your fellow citizens also partake in the great prosperity Drum has enjoyed his entire life — including that Drum went to a nearly-free college in the 1970s that he also cites now as an impossibility.