I didn’t watch any of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony as I have no doubt she was assaulted by Kavanaugh and I’ve already witnessed enough women’s trauma in my life. That comes with having many female friends. Heck, I couldn’t even finish The Handmaid’s Tale because it’s just distilled misogyny. Well-acted, well-depicted, but I don’t need to watch a TV show to see women mistreated.

Kavanaugh is the worst of America, the elite mediocrity elevated far above his morality or intelligence, entitled he believes to take all he wants when he wants it, with few willing to disclose to him just how middling and prosaic he truly is.

I don’t regret spending so much time on the internet the past few decades. It wasn’t time wasted. I met some wonderful people there, including my current partner and a great, remarkable friend. I learned many things and advanced my career.

But that time is coming to a close as now it’s just a spyware-infested corporate propaganda arena with no usable browser any more to even access it.

Already, I’ve been optimizing my life since this resource is disappearing. I’ve acquired a keyboard (of the musical type) and am playing again. I’m getting back into weightlifting. I’m reading more books. So the internet essentially becoming an electronic turd is not all bad, though I will miss it in some ways.

Even I was very hopeful about the internet and its future in the 1990s, when everyone was more optimistic and the future seemed like it could be better. That’s not the path we took, though.

If only the press had examined Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial and financial background as studiously as they have his nomination since sex and scandal has been brought into the mix.

Even if Kavanaugh were squeaky clean, were he appointed to the court he would still harm millions of women, far more than he harmed at any frat kegger. It seems the press can only report what’s “fair,” not what is the truth, and then only if the whiff of scandal is involved.

Of course the sexual assault should disqualify him. But he should’ve been out the door a long time before that even came up.

John Scalzi said something very insightful today.

But if you understand yourself and you can assess yourself well, then ego can be a good way to backstop yourself when others are pummeling you with negativity, or when you feel uncertain or unsure. I think it’s good to have an ego, if you know yourself and your talents.

Ego is what allowed me to survive my experiences in North Florida. The entire time that all those people — including many in my own family — were telling me how terrible and worthless I was, I knew it just wasn’t true. Every time I bowed to them, was beat down by them, I knew one day I’d rise above them and leave them so far behind that if they ever thought about me at all it’d be to wonder why a loser like me could’ve done so much better than they did.

That’s exactly what I did, too. And it was because of ego. I knew what I was good at. I knew how good at my various talents and abilities I was (very). And I knew that if I lived, one day I’d use those talents to be a far better version of a person and of myself than they could even imagine.

Thank you, ego, for helping me live through those terrible years.

Wow, this is all just false or limitedly true in a very, very small set of circumstances.

Human bodies just don’t work like that. They simply do not. Muscles don’t even start being broken down until at least 24 hours into a complete fast, not the moment you get hungry. Frankly, that whole post is fucking moronic.

Then, about 2-3 days after the body begins taking nutrients from muscle, it slows this down and goes into ketosis.

By the way, your body primarily breaks down muscle to obtain glucose, so if you drink something with glucose even if fasting otherwise, your body won’t go after muscle all that much and will instead tend to continue to burn fat.

In addition (and I am going to link to a summary here, though I have read many of the studies) there is pretty good evidence that intermittent fasting is beneficial to your health, likely because it mimics the evolutionary environment of most of human history.

Why do Tumblr people believe that if you are hungry for more than a few minutes, you go into starvation mode (which isn’t even really a thing), and that if you don’t eat to absolute capacity at every meal you are at risk of the dreaded starvation mode?

There is literally nothing correct in that Tumblr bit I linked. Also, you do not have to starve yourself to lose weight (unless you are using the Tumblr definition, I guess). This going to the extremes is why I think a lot of Americans have issues losing and keeping off weight.

A minor calorie deficit a few hundred calories a day means you’ll lose 30+ pounds in a year.

One thing I didn’t realize being the CTO of a company that provides a software application to other companies is how often you have to fix — unpaid and way out of scope — the IT infrastructure of third-party companies so that your software application works correctly.

I’m not talking about minor brokenness here. I mean we have to routinely go in and fix out-of-scope areas for entire large companies with whole IT departments bigger than our entire company when they say “Your application doesn’t work and it’s definitely your application. Fix it.” And then we go remote in and look around and see that their DNS is entirely non-functional, their Citrix does not work, their network is set up in a way that could never function correctly, and their “failover” does only the first part but no “over.”

Note again that we are not an infrastructure company. We provide a single software application (that can be customized to do many things). Technically, our contract is for the provision of that application only and absolutely nothing else. But functionally, we are on the hook for correcting poor infrastructure because inevitably our application gets blamed for other IT departments’ completely broken environments. So far in the new job, I have done a few hundred hours of unpaid infrastructure consulting so that other companies don’t blame us when our application doesn’t work because their infrastructure is so terrible.

Like I said, I wasn’t expecting this. I knew a lot of IT departments were horrendous but to this level I had no idea.

I was semi-joking with the CEO yesterday that we should start an infrastructure consulting business as well, since we already spend so much time doing it for free. However, these companies rarely believe their infrastructure is the problem, and instead insist it’s something to do with our application. But so far, it never has been because it’s just a small application that requires very little to work correctly.

I can really see why users tend to hate IT because all the users that we end up helping are very thankful that for once someone fixed something after we remote in and correct or work around all these out-of-scope infrastructure issues.

According to liberals, we should get rid of the space program, and the Olympics*, and anything that has anything at all to do with enjoyment or that frivolous “fun” stuff and live in high-rise concrete boxes and undergo constant penance for our grave sins.

This is primarily why I am not a liberal, even though my outlook overall aligns most closely with typically-liberal views.

Liberals are increasingly authoritarian, ever-more on board with censorship, just dandy with neoliberalism and predatory capitalism, and are fans of innately insane ideas like completely open borders.

I want no part of any of that. But mostly, many liberals are just completely against fun or adventure or actually attempting to make anything better, and I really want no part of that in particular.

*The Olympics should be held in the same place every year. No stadium building and all that. That is ridiculous.

The first eggnog of the year has been detected, and it’s at Earth Fare. This is perhaps the earliest ever. It’s Homestead Creamery, too, which is the closest to homemade you can get (it also goes bad fast, so drink up).

Eggnog! Eggnog!

My boss, the CEO, said something today that I really liked. We were discussing someone at another company closely associated to ours and who had completely fouled up a major calculation that resulted in all sorts of erroneous billing.

Instead of relying on our expertise, this young, brash person who is also a know-it-all just decided to attempt to do the (very complicated) billing calculation himself rather than rely on someone in the company who is one of the top world experts in this type of business and had already offered to help.

Anyway, what my boss said was, “This isn’t school. There’s no A for effort. You don’t get it 90% right. You either get it right or you fail. Just because he wrote a valid SQL query doesn’t mean he knew anything else. And he doesn’t, but he’s learning that the hard way.”

He’s right. In the real world, there is no A for effort. You either get it or you fail. That’s a huge difference from school, and I bet it takes a lot of people a while — if they ever do — to make that transition.