When I bought a beer yesterday at the grocery store, the cashier asked for my ID and I laughed a little and gave it to her. Then she said, “Wait, what? How old are you?” after she looked at the date.

“I’m 42,” I said.

“Huh, wow,” she replied.

Here’s an actual decent selfie taken a couple of months ago, though it doesn’t really matter when it was taken since I’ve looked pretty much the same since I was 22 or so. First one I’ve ever posted on this blog, I believe.

I look kinda like a priest because I’m in my full business goth get-up in that photo. Yep, that’s what I wear to work when it’s cool enough. I do weird abstruse rituals with computers so it makes some sort of sense.

It’s a day of covers it appears on today’s playlist. Six out of these 10 are covers. Only three are labeled as such; your mission if you choose to accept it is to identify the rest.

Sometimes, I watch YouTube in Opera because it handles a few things better, and since I don’t have much ad-blocking configured there I see an ad or two.

And tonight I figured out that YouTube thinks I am a woman. I saw ads for: some kind of foundation makeup, shampoo and then mascara. I am not surprised. I mostly watch women and consume media created by women, and not many men do that. But it shows how algorithms go wrong so often.

What a buncha idiots. Well, one is now dead, but still.

Using the equation below with the assumptions noted, it’s possible to estimate how far ammunition of that type should penetrate a material with that density:

3cm bullet with density 8000 kg/m3
Book with density 400 kg/m3
speed on impact 500 m/s
0.03 * (8000 / 400) * .5 = 0.3

That’s 30 centimeters — nearly a foot. Intuitively, that’s about what I would’ve expected. Books aren’t that dense and having shot books and at (abandoned) cars before, I know bullets go right through them like they were nothing, even from a handgun.

Assuming an average thickness of 4 inches, the “victim” would’ve needed to hold at least three volumes of the encyclopedia up to his chest to be reasonably sure of no penetration. I’d recommend four, or better yet not doing the stunt at all. But it’s too late for all that now.

Or he at least could’ve looked up some of this information in said encyclopedia beforehand.

Selective re-writing of history is truly something I thought only conservatives did, but I see that once again I have overestimated the integrity and memory of my side.

Family detention was started under Obama. Even some family separation was done under Obama. These are not new policies. This is not some anomaly that Trump pioneered.

FUCKU EVERYONE WHO VOTED THIRD PARTY AND REFUSED TO VOTE HILLARY! FUCK U JILL STEIN VOTERS! FUCK U BORNIE! BURN IN HELL!

Reality : pic.twitter.com/XdWwiukmHr

— The Coarse Whisperer (@CentristSlayer) June 19, 2018

I wish people were smarter.

One of the problems with gathering metrics like this is that you only tend to get reports from your least tech-savvy users. That’s because people like me and my partner turn that junk right off ASAP.

That explains at least 50% of Mozilla’s bogus metrics for Firefox and perhaps more.

Why don’t tech people realize that metrics they get back are skewed by their least knowledgeable users being the ones who mostly report?

I think they just don’t care, honestly, because these false metrics are just used as an excuse to take greater control and do what they want to do anyway.

When you grow up like I did and then join the army and sign up for a hard-charging unit, you don’t realize that you can be unintentionally intimidating to people. I try to tone this down — I really do, as it’s not healthy nor productive — but I think it’s mostly surprising to folks how quickly I can go from mild and meek to throat-slittin’ beast mode.

BTW, I never do this with anyone close to me, or that I care about. I’d never treat anyone I love like that. It’s mainly when someone in public sets me off with wildly rude or abusive behavior, or someone harasses a woman, etc. in front of me. And I really do try to restrain this tendency, but old habits, old reactions, old behaviors die hard, and they do (to use the favorite phrase of the SJWs) have triggers that just can’t be turned off at the flip of a switch. If it were that easy, I would be all fixed.

I think one of the reasons I’m so tightly controlled, why I never relax (nor want to) is that I need to keep that beast mode locked away for my own health and sanity and for staying out of the lockup. That kind of anger and that aggression kept me alive once, but now it’s a liability.

Those old ways are comfortable, though. I lived on rage and violence for years and years and in some ways, it’s what I know best. That reactivity and bellicosity will always feel like coming home, even if it’s a home you loathe with your whole heart.

The anti-immigrant mania makes no sense if you're worried about jobs and the economy (just about every study says immigrants are a net positive), but makes a lot of sense if you're worried about having to occasionally interact with brown people.

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) June 21, 2018

What a dumbass take by a typical liberal dumbass.

Read a damn book. Or anything. Shit. The information is right there. Right there. I get so infuriated with these types because they never get any smarter.

The “confusion” (really deliberate obfuscation) really comes from the fact that immigrants raise GDP (that’s the net benefit he’s citing in poor faith) but lower wages particularly for low-income workers.

At the most basic level, immigration increases the supply of labor in the economy. More labor means more goods and services being produced, so that national output (GDP) rises.

Immigration also affects the prices of the inputs that are used to produce these goods and services. Those inputs for which immigrant labor substitutes will suffer as the prices of their services fall. Simply put, “substitutes” means two things that are very similar to one another. As a homely example, red apples and green apples are almost perfect substitutes, so that an increase in the number of red apples would not only reduce the price of red apples, but also simultaneously lower the price of green apples by about the same amount. In the context of immigration, whereas we shall see many immigrants are unskilled laborers, the strong presumption is that immigrants are substitutes for domestic unskilled labor. Therefore, an increase in the number of immigrants will generally decrease the wages of domestic unskilled workers.

In other words, immigration will raise the wages of useless whiners like Matt Blaze while lowering the wage of people like most of the people I grew up with, and anyone who does low-wage labor.

There is no hope for Democrat types at all. They are just utterly clueless.

It bothers me more than it should when in shows and movies car and trucks that I know were never offered in a V-8 pull away with a V-8 sound.

Yeah, sure, maybe an engine swap…but realistically how many people do that in a stock-looking vehicle? Almost none.

The latest one: the Toyota Tacoma has never been offered in a V-8, so why the V-8 noises? I know a V-8 sounds a lot better than other engines, but my car nerd brain squirms a bit when I hear that bit of dissonance with reality.