I wish I had this typeface when I was at university: Times Newer Roman looks like a teacher-approved font, but it actually lets you cheat on your paper, as this typeface runs bigger than the regular Times Roman.https://t.co/g8xiW5V05a

— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) September 18, 2018

I need Times Older Roman, that looks the same but compacts the font. Never have written a paper or article that didn’t run too long. I can keep going forever, as I am sure you can tell from this blog.

A 3,000 word paper? Sure, will have it done by lunch. What next?

I want a microwave for offices that detects when someone is attempting to make popcorn and then forcefully opens the door and ejects it onto the floor.

Just as one should not take a dump in the hallways at the office, one should never make popcorn. I believe my popcorn-ejecting microwave should be an OSHA requirement in all offices.

Why else do we have all this AI and such? We need to direct it to the truly important problems.

“Now if we consider together the two points that have just been made — the point that no argument can add to the content of its premises, and the point that all arguments have to rest in the end on unproven premises — it becomes clear that the widely accepted notion that every truth needs to be proved, and that only what has been demonstrated is true, is the opposite of what is actually the case; in fact every proof must rest on foundations whose truth is not demonstrated, must go back eventually to something which is not the conclusion of an argument. We may be inclined, for as long as we do not think about it, to suppose that human knowledge about the world has come into existence through chains of reasoning, and is embodied in their conclusions, but in reality all the information we have is already embodied in the premises from which those very chains of reasoning begin — if we know anything about the world we know it not because it has been demonstrated or proved but because it has been directly experienced or perceived, or else because it follows by logical processes which contribute nothing all in the way of empirical content from what has been directly experienced or perceived. In this fundamental sense, all knowledge precedes all demonstration.”

–Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

Remember when everyone just knew that Taylor Swift had no talent and that it was all autotune? This song captures anxiety better than just about any song ever written, except perhaps “Time Baby III” by Medicine.

I think “All Too Well” is perhaps one of the best songs ever written from any time, but “Out of the Woods” is probably my favorite Taylor Swift song because it just resonates more for me.

Love this next performance, too. It’s so simple yet so effective.

When I was in the army, I could deadlift 400 pounds. That’s a lot for someone my size and my bodyweight at the time (174 pounds, 8% body fat). But it’s all I could do. I don’t think I could have ever lifted much more because that’s just about the limit of my frame. Maybe if I trained really hard for many more years I could’ve gotten to 450.

So watching these World’s Strongest Man competitors deadlift nearly 1,000 pounds is humbling.

I am going to get back into weightlifting in the very near future. It was the form of exercise I enjoyed the most in the army and if you do it right, you are only competing against yourself. I routinely lifted with guys who could deadlift 600+ pounds and they were ecstatic when I hit 400 for the first time.

It’s also one of the few forms of exercise with well-done and valid scientific studies that show both quality of life and longevity increases, so it’s beneficial to everyone. (And no, women won’t “look like men” if they start weightlifting. Unless you take steroids or work out 8 hours a day, it’ll feminize your shape more than anything. Jessica Biel is a gym rat. Think she looks like a man?)

Deadlifting 1,000 pounds. Damn. That’s half a small car.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about the pastries and baked goods I’ve eaten in Germany, Italy, China and other places and get angry. Like burn down the building kind of angry. Except the building’s this whole country of atrocious food.

I appreciate that Matt Taibbi’s article spends so much time refuting the “no one could have known” narrative that was firmly established by propaganda during and post-Great Recession.

The blog “Calculated Risk” spoofed this even at the time with their “hoocoodanode?” taunt (fuck I miss Tanta to this day*) and it seemed obvious to me — who at the time was only vaguely paying attention to this — that the inevitable housing crash was going to cause problems of some type.

This colorful language – dominoes, a confidence game, an “iceberg,” a “storm” – artfully disguised reality. This wasn’t weather coming at them, but the consequences of years of untrammeled criminal fraud.

One of the most successful propaganda efforts in all of history was that poor little babies, just no one could have known that all of the criminal fraud, money laundering, and financial “engineering” was going to lead to trouble. Really, that probably kept a few thousand bankers, mortgage lender CEOs and other similar slimeballs out of prison.

And I was amazed how well it worked! I had friends explaining to me confidently that the callow delicate CEOs who only had access to every blatantly criminal activity and had explicitly approved everything undertaken by their organization could have had just no idea the wild speculative fraud and swindling their companies were up to.

I’d write or say, “You know, that’s not how companies work, right? No one puts $50 billion on the line and the CEO and top execs don’t know every detail about it?”

And they’d say,”But I read in the NYT that they didn’t know!” Or something very similar.

“Oh, ok then. That makes it true.”

As I said, one of the largest criminal conspiracies in history was followed up by one of the most well-organized and successful propaganda efforts of all time. Taibbi is one of the few who refutes that revisionist history every chance he gets. As the propaganda effort was to the benefit of most journalists and others, most didn’t bother to say a word against it and never will.

*I am puzzled how I can intensely miss someone I never met in person, never did anything but read words on a page, heck never even knew what she looked like until after she died. But I do, and so do a lot of other people. One of the best non-fiction writers ever to live.

I was reading this today, and made me think about that the stupidest fucking thing many academics do — and I don’t know why this happens — is that they believe if you can’t draw clear boundaries around something and locate it specifically, it doesn’t exist.

This is not the way the world works! A species is a human construction. So is a generation. Or even a star, or a galaxy. These things are not in the world; they are in our minds.

I don’t know what to call this tendency as it’s not quite reductionism. It’s a very strange mindset since when you examine it closely enough, what completely discrete phenomenon even exists in this universe? Above the quantum level, zero. This universe is one of continuous gradations, of unclear boundaries. This ridiculous fantasy that something must have an extremely clear border to be able to discuss it is something so inane and witless that I don’t know how anyone can believe this, much less “educated” people.

Techie types almost always assume they know the way someone else should be using their product, and they are almost never right.

To this day I miss phones with physical keyboards. They are so superior to on-screen keyboards, which are just dismal, it’s not even a contest.

I’m always surprised by people who will make their lives 10x harder for the sake of “convenience,” but it seems a common human failing.

10 years later.we have learned nothing
Lehman collapse was not the cause…it was a symptom

— ℭhi 🛢️ (@chigrl) September 15, 2018

Yes. I see all the time the contention that if we’d just saved Lehman that there would have been no financial crisis, no wave of foreclosures, that all would have gone along humming just fine into the infinite future.

That’s what the public has been propagandized with (along with “no one could have known”) but it’s just completely false. Saving Lehman would’ve shifted the time scale a bit and the crash would’ve happened in another way. No matter what, all those CDOs and CDSes were garbage, inter-bank lending would still have frozen up and people still would’ve been unable to pay their mortgages, etc.

Recognize that “we should’ve saved Lehman” is just propaganda for the next crisis so that we make sure to save every bank and rich banker rather than letting even one of them fail.