I’m so tired of reading headlines like, “The Trump Presidency Is Done This Time For Really Really Real” etc.

I’ve been reading those for 450 days now and for 450 days they have been incorrect and will continue to be incorrect. There are only two things that could cause Trump to not be president, and those are: a) he resigns or b) he is impeached.

The probability of either of those is extremely, extremely low.

Just saw a few more of the same stories today. Liberal wishful thinking might be fun, but it doesn’t help anything.

“Haute finance, an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world. It supplied the instruments for an international peace system, which was worked with the help of the Powers, but which the Powers themselves could neither have established nor maintained.”

–Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation

What is different now is that the major corporations and the defense industry find crisis capitalism to be more profitable, so disasters and wars are welcomed if not actively created. Why is it different, and what altered the balance? I am not sure. Still thinking about that one.

Whatever dumbass decided to make Live Photos by default active on the iPhone deserves to be blasted into the sun.

If I’d know that feature was enabled by default and difficult to turn off, I would’ve likely gotten an Android. Apple is definitely getting worse since the death of Jobs. It’s a slow slide, but definitely a slide.

Please don’t give me hints.

95% of the time, I won’t get them, or I won’t understand in time. If you want to tell me something, just fucking tell me. It won’t hurt my feelings, and if it does, so what? I’m a big boy. I can handle it.

No hints, please. Save those for people who might understand them (and that is far fewer than many people think).

Google Search is remarkably useless since quoted search hasn’t worked in many years, and so-called Verbatim search doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

The more specific search term you need to find, the less likely you will find it now. Terms I could’ve found easily 15 years ago on a much-smaller internet now are essentially undiscoverable.

Remember this when you read Pinker’s claptrap in Better Angels of Our Nature:

“The nineteenth century produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western civilization, namely, a hundred years’ peace—1815-1914. Apart from the Crimean War—a more or less colonial event— England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only eighteen months. A computation of comparable figures for the two preceding centuries gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each.”

That’s Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, one of the books I am reading right now. We’re in an age of relative peace. Will that last? I have my doubts. We’ve been in those periods before, and then the “unthinkable” was always re-thought.

I wish Pinker were right. I really do. But signs point to…nope.

Colony is nominally a show about an alien invasion. What is’s really about at its very highest level, though, is hyper-capitalism and its amorality and de facto psychopathological nature. It’s a critique of inequality, extractive neoliberalism, and (to borrow from Polanyi) the attempt to disembed the economy from the rest of society.

Do you think the writers and creators were just picking city names out of the air when they decided the Occupations’s Global Authority headquarters is based in Davos, Switzerland? That’s not accidental. Of course it isn’t.

You can’t just get on the air in the US (or on the internet) and say outright that global hyper-capitalism as practiced is now mostly destructive, socially, societally and culturally. Your show would never, ever air.

You can, however, be a bit smarter than the suits who’d normally censor you and create a show about a nameless, faceless alien entity wholly concerned with the “productivity of the bloc,” and who throws away people like garbage if they are for some reason deemed unproductive — such as by being disabled — or are otherwise non-compliant.

Yeah, you can make a show like that, and the creators did just that.

On another note, and also telling, is that the only time genuine good happens in the show is when the people see past the capitalistic “interfaces” they’ve been forced to adopt and start treating each other as individuals being vested with humanity outside of their economic and political utility.

Reddit redesigned its site and it could kill discussion subreddits.

This is the point of the re-design. No platform actually wants unrestricted user interaction. It’s harmful to ad spending, ad viewing, and now with FOSTA/SESTA laws, there are direct financial consequences by way of government censorship.

However, Reddit knows it can’t just immediately ban all commenting. That would destroy the site in mere days. They can, however, de-prioritize this in a re-design and claim it was an accidental result of a much-needed design update. This is exactly what they are doing and will continue to do.