People are still — even after all these years — really stupendously bad at recognizing even to me very obvious and rudimentary phishing attacks. Today, I had to run around the office like a fire demon warning people not to click on on email “from” someone we do business with after their computer was hijacked and started sending out links to an offshore hijacked site with some nice malware on the other end.

Sure, yeah, we do business with this person — but were you expecting a document from this person? And one that was a nearly-blank PDF that contained a link to another site? And is claiming to be sent to you by “Adobe” in the PDF?

Sure, that sounds likely. Just go ahead and click right on that as that seems totally legit. Luckily I was paying attention to my email and not a single person got infected before I got to them. (One woman was literally starting her click on the bad link when I stopped her. Another 200 milliseconds, we would’ve been jacked.)

That was a close one. Probably saved myself and others about 20 hours of work (at least) with my fleet feet today.

It seems like companies that have publicly and widely disavowed the importance of the PC are coming to regret that decision as it turns out the platform is nowhere near dead.

— Jeff Kampman (@jkampman_tr) June 15, 2018

Exactly. The PC never had a chance in hell of dying. It’s the only place where productivity is possible, and probably will be for another ~25 years or more.

What happened is just what I said and thought would happen: those who are too dumb to use a computer, or didn’t have time to learn enough to properly use a PC or whatever the reason, went out and bought tablets or a smartphone or some other limited consumption device. At the same time, PCs started lasting much longer as both quality improved and chip improvement on the consumer side slowed quite a lot, making the average PC last 5+ years instead of 2-3.

These two factors reduced the market for a while, as was obvious would occur.

Further prediction: PCs will be where the money is (enteprise/creatives spend so so so much money compared to consumer), so as Jeff points out companies will eventually be forced back to the PC as that’s where they can pull in cash by the truckload. There is evidence of this in the market already. Expect more in the future.

I’m confused about all the liberal cool kids who are advocating not shopping at Amazon because of their terrible labor practices. Meanwhile, other warehouses, warehouse contractors, etc. have been conducting similar or worse labor practices for 20+ years and not a peep has been heard about any of that from these same people.

I support Amazon labor unionizing and I support much harsher regulation, by the way. Jeff Bezos should not have $150 billion. No one should have that much money.

Virtue signaling just makes me angry in a way that few other things do, and this in particular bothers me because I think this instance emerges from the fact that these addlepated liberals identify with Amazon workers more because they see them as less blue-collar than someone working at the Wal-Mart warehouse or the like.

Don’t shop at Amazon all you want. But that isn’t actually helping anything, and probably hurts more than it helps because it’s yet another distraction.

What’s the greatest “point of divergence” in your life, a point where you made a choice, and you still kinda wonder what would have happened had you made the other one?

— Todd VanDerWerff (@tvoti) July 16, 2018

Joining the army. A few months after I joined, a few former friends of mine fired a gun into what they thought was an empty car. It wasn’t empty and they severely injured a woman. They were caught, and went to jail for quite a long time.

If I hadn’t joined up there’s a chance I would’ve been in the car with them. I would’ve tried to stop them (I know myself pretty well), but not sure I would’ve been able to or even realized what they were going to do in time.

That’s not the only way I was likely to end up in jail or dead in North Florida, but that one was immediate and obvious. So glad I did not stay there.

I wonder when meeting in person and bonding over shared interests is going to become socially verboten. Probably not far away. We are already moving away from the world-that-was. These days, meeting not in an online meat market is becoming rarer, and having something “fraudulent” like a shared interest that prompts a connection and a relationship is becoming suspicious…because what if he (or she) only developed that interest to be a better person, and thus more attractive to others? Isn’t that deception? That’s deceit and dupery, right? One should only be judged on how one appears and nothing else. This is the world we are moving to, try to deny it all you want.

The incels are not completely wrong in their ideas — just that blaming and harming women won’t help in any way, and is morally corrupt.

The future really isn’t going to be cooler.

Given the divergence of our current built and social environment from that in which we evolved and as a species mostly dwelled in, it’s amazing that we handle it as well as we do. Humans are nothing if not adaptable.

However, thinking about how much more common depression, obesity, diabetes and suicide are, perhaps we are not handling it all that well after all.

Yes, a whole lot of bad things are occurring under the Trump administration.

But another heap of things are being blamed on Trump that go all the way back to the Clinton administration. Trump has become a convenient blame dumping ground for bad policies, bad actions and terrible decisions that other presidents and Congresses have foisted on the American people, and that Trump had little or nothing to do with.

Mostly, it’s liberals doing this, which makes sense. Everyone, though, is getting into the game.

I saw a headline that said “Rand Paul Downplays Election Interference” and I parsed it at first as “RuPaul Downplays Election Interference.”

Before I realized what it actually said, I thought we’d sunk to yet another new low in the popular discourse. Not yet. We will get there, of course, but not quite yet.

I know it’s hard for people to understand who didn’t lead traumatized childhoods where nearly everyone treats you like garbage, but this is so true. I usually don’t like things like this, but this one at least spoke to me.

When you emerge from that, when someone genuinely treats you with love and respect, you think it’s a joke. A prank. Because people have pulled “pranks” on you like that before. Many times. You get so that don’t trust anyone. Your every move is defensive, or pre-emptively defensive. When my to-be high school girlfriend expressed interest in me, I coldly rejected her the first time around because I thought she was running some game on me to attempt to horribly embarrass me. Luckily, she was persistent and patient and just as blunt and direct as she needed to be to convince me. Was she ever the right person at the right time. But the little speech she gave me and how she went about it all is a tale for another time.

Even with that, with people like her helping, it takes a long time to un-learn those negative behaviors. In some ways, they never completely disappear, just lessen over time.

Wish trains weren't 3 times more expensive than buses. Would make my stanning for the best mode of mass transportation a lot easier.

Dismantling our once extensive rail network then ramping prices through the roof was a disgrace. Just look at 1930s vs 1970s. Fuck FF and FG. pic.twitter.com/nGQ4YA11kd

— ⚧☘️Riley❤🖤 (@TheyOrShe) July 14, 2018

Well, the problem is that trains are very damn expensive. Much, much more expensive than buses to run, to maintain, to operate and to build.

Trains are more romantic, and that’s why people are attached to them, but most of the time trains make little to no sense when you could just have buses. Much cheaper, vastly more flexible, and with none of the other enormous drawbacks.

Trains cost roughly 10x as much as buses, all in. And when you consider that the road is already there….

In the army, I had to work out much harder than other people because I don’t sweat much. And because I don’t sweat much, people assumed I wasn’t putting forth any effort. That got me punished in some cases or at least pushed to do more in other cases. So I’d often end up doing 2-3 times or more as many reps as someone else, or run much farther.

It sucked, but it also made me at the time very buff.

I can’t help it that I hardly sweat. Been that way my entire life.