Is there a forum or forum-like site that I’ve joined that I haven’t been booted off of? I can’t think of one. My own, I guess. That’s great. That means I am doing something right.

I don’t join sites or forums anymore because it is pointless. I need less groupthink echoing around in my brain, not more. A perfect 100% ban record means my priorities and intellect is pointed the right way.

Modern education is almost tailor-made to destroy systems-level thinking and understanding.

Fortunately, I never paid attention in school.

In 1985, US department stores took 14.5% of all retail spend. Last year they took 4.3%. The figure is still falling. The internet is often blamed for this. But the blunt truth is that US department stores just aren’t very good retailers. In fact, most of them are abysmal.

— Neil Saunders (@NeilRetail) December 31, 2018

So true. Amazon hurt them, but they mostly hurt and killed themselves. I guess it got to be a race to the bottom, and what a benthic bottom it was. Their main problem was and is instead of competing where they were strong, the chose to compete where they were weak. It takes a well-educated MBA (or a whole herd of them) to do something as boneheaded as that.

Let me try to explain.

College for All costs less than the increase in military spending passed in 2017.

That is the reality. https://t.co/jQSHxSFSFn

— Ari Rabin-Havt (@AriRabinHavt) January 1, 2019

Yes. And with the cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, we could’ve installed enough solar panels and wind farms to power the entire US, provided free college education for everyone, and upgraded and improved all the infrastructure in the US — and had some money left over.

But we have no funds for doing anything that helps people is what centrists and Kevin Drum types would like you to believe.

We should be raising and training women to be Valkyries, not weeping willows. We need warriors, not wilters. Third wave and millennial feminism have both failed.

Socrates was the Nassim Nicholas Taleb of his day. Have been reading Socrates lately and it’s so true. Both total jerks. Both often right.

When as a New Year’s resolution people say they are going to read 20 books…this year, I’m like, wait, don’t you mean this week?

Then I’m like…ohhh yeah.

UWP is fundamentally broken and the proof is that microsoft's own attempts to use it are pathetic failures. even the calculator is a piece of shit now. it's slow, it's clunky, keyboard input is flaky, drag and drop nonexistent

— Graviscera (@gravislizard) December 31, 2018

On a top of the line computer from this year, Microsoft’s UWP calculator is slower than a calculator program I used on DOS in 1985. No exaggeration at all. And yes, the 1985 program had a GUI (but no mouse support).

The problem with UWP — or at least a major one — is that it’s built using a slow programming language atop a layer that’s sandboxed atop a layer, atop a layer, atop yet another layer that finally gets to touch the OS calls themselves. This is going to be just incredibly slow. And it is.

it would really be nice if copyright durations were shorter than the lifetimes of the medium the copyrighted material is stored on…

Imagine how much the demagnetization of floppy disks will destroy

— today we are all nicole (@nerionaya) January 1, 2019

It makes me sad sometimes when I think of the computer culture of the 1980s and all of the little programs and applications and shareware that’ll now be lost forever. There’s already quite a lot of stuff that I used then that I can find no trace of on the internet anywhere — not the first record.

Not all of it was great. In fact, hardly any of it was. But it’s part of an important history and much of it is just gone.

I enjoyed Ex Machina not only because it was a great movie, but because it exposed how many people who are supposed to be intelligent are intellectually shallow and just parrot what others say.

So, yes, I like it for snobbish reasons. But mostly because it’s a great film.

It’s nice to see my dainty IT arms disappearing and my brawling arms returning.

My brawling days are done but it’s still nice to have the arms.