The first 10 on today’s playlist. By the way, Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” is a master class in songwriting. Fucking brilliant.

So last week, out of the blue, the man who asked me to marry him remarked as follows:

“sometimes I wish you were just a teacher or a nurse because you wouldn’t think so much, it’s intimidating”

— Criminelle Law (@CriminelleLaw) September 6, 2018

I’m really glad my partner has a huge brain and thinks a lot. She’s smarter than me in many if not most areas. I’m also glad all my female friends think very big thoughts and in some areas in particular are very much smarter than I am. Because here’s the thing. I have trouble hanging around people who are roundly dumber than I am. It’s a flaw, perhaps. It’s something I haven’t been able to overcome, though.

But I love it when I’m struggling with some complex script and my partner comes over and punches it up and makes it work right in about 30 seconds. Shit, that saved me a load of time.

And I love it when my friend who is a scientist tells me something about science or her work that I didn’t know before.

I’m not intimidated by my brainy parter or my brilliant female friends. I’m inspired by them. My own thinking is amplified and propelled by them. I’d be far worse off without them.

Why are so many men so weak?

Firefox just released version 62, with more useless ad-friendly features added and more useful features removed.

I suspect in a year or two, I will wind down this site and my other link blog site as the web is becoming more hassle than it’s worth. That’s not a firm decision, but the way I am leaning as without a good browser to use it’s very difficult to do anything else.

Mozilla could’ve kept Firefox relevant with a strong 20-25% market share if they’d done mostly what I recommended over the years. Instead, I was banned from even discussing it. There’s no vindication in being right. The world would’ve been better if Firefox has stayed around to compete. Instead it’s now below 10% market share and dropping all the time. Effectively, it’s already in hospice well on its way to the grave.

And, as always, fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers!

I don’t need to be drunk to do this.

Today, I got absolutely hammered and noticed this familiar-looking chick. I walked up to her and said, “Oh my god, I know I know you but I don’t know where from.” Looking annoyed, she replied, “We’ve worked together for months.”

One time my friend Mary from the 90s was shopping in Wal-Mart in Lake City, my hometown. Except I did not know this, and as I was walking near the front of the store myself I saw some woman waving in my direction and proceeded as I usually do to pay no attention to her waving as what did that have to do with me?

I thought, “Wow, she’s pretty. I wonder who she is waving at? Huh, whatever” and then just ignored her.

Then I walked a few more feet sort of perpendicular to where she was and didn’t think another thought about it until I heard behind me, “Mike. Mike. Mike.” I turned around. It was Mary, of course, and she was smiling. Luckily for me. She said, “Just going to ignore me, huh, that’s how cool you are? Can’t be seen with me in public?”

I said, “Well, pretty girls don’t usually wave at me randomly in Wal-Mart.”

“This one does,” she said.

“Yep, this one does,” I replied.

Note that we were not acquaintances. We were close friends. I had even watched her kids for her a few times. (Brats, but funny, calm ones.) There weren’t many people I knew better in the world at that time. But in the store I did not recognize her at all. Not even a little bit.

It was good we met, though. She’d gotten off work early and we went to the river and hung out the rest of the day. Things were harder to arrange but a little freer in the time before ubiquitous smartphones.

People who aren’t for space exploration just boggle my mind. Like, where did you come from?

I think their largest issue is that they subscribe to a version of folk economics called the zero sum fallacy — the mistaken belief that there’s a fixed pot of money somewhere, and if a few percent is devoted to space exploration then that magically takes it away from somewhere else.

But that’s not how it works at the governmental level or anywhere else outside of your checking account. Just look at the military budget to ascertain the truth of this statement.

In the end, most people in places and times were and would have been and are against exploration of any sort. It’s hard and often unrewarding, and deadly dangerous.

One of my favorite quotes is from the JFK’s Rice Stadium Moon speech. It is: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

To many people, trying is just not cool. But hard things are worth doing — sometimes just because they are hard.

Socrates (by way of Plato) identified what I call engineeritis* over two thousand years ago:

“Finally, I went to the craftsmen, for I was conscious of knowing practically nothing, and I knew that I would find that they had knowledge of many fine things. In this I was not mistaken; they knew things I did not know, and to that extent they were wiser than I. But, men of Athens, the good craftsmen seemed to me to have the same fault as the poets: each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in most other important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had.”

Though I do not think that poets and writers are guilty of this flaw any longer; perhaps because they have been so beaten down by society in general for so long. No one would now hold up an engineer and a writer side by side in societal status these days, though Socrates would have.

*Engineeritis: the tendency to believe because one is an expert in one narrow STEM field (could be engineering, math, physics, etc.) that one is an expert in all areas. Named after engineers because their symptoms of this debilitating ailment are typically the worst, but can be found in any STEM or near-STEM field with varying severity.

To those of you shorting Amazon and AMD, thank you for your money. I will spend it on frivolous and unnecessary things that you can no longer afford, just like a good capitalist.

If you short on the basis of which stock “deserves” to be worth what money, you are forever doomed. This is not how the market works. There is no “deserve.” There is only what is and what is not. Fundamental analysis is not sensible when the market is not rational. Hint: contrary to what you’ve been told, most of the time the market is not rational. Examining the fundamentals except over the very long term will not help you here. Your algorithms also will not help you as they can only use past data. Past data cannot determine the future.

It’s actually easier to make money now that the market is so algorithmic. I worried that the opposite would be true a few years ago, but the algorithms by nature are far dumber than humans, and far easier to predict.

if u had to recommend someone watch 5 movies to really get a feel for u/ur tastes what five would you pick

— 💖 (@fozfens) August 30, 2018

These are not my favorite movies, necessarily, but rather a specific answer to the above question.

1) Another Earth

2) Evil Dead II

3) Interstellar

4) Hard Candy

5) Jennifer’s Body