if it weren’t already grandfathered in, even the politicians i like would be saying that free, universal elementary school was pie-in-the-sky and too expensive, propose “affordable” schooling on an ACA-ish means-tested sliding scale. sigh. https://t.co/HYToujN2Su ht @paulkrugman

— Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) February 18, 2019

Very much the same for public libraries, Social Security, Medicare, etc. It’s all just propaganda so that the rich don’t have to give up a little, just as it was when these things I mentioned were new.

DFIR interview: Need you to reverse this packed malware with zero reference materials, write your own Wireshark protocol analyzer, and list 50 malware friendly reg keys from memory.

DFIR first day: Just look for AV alerts and tell the client to wipe and rebuild.

— The Cyber (@r0wdy_) February 18, 2019

But this is every IT job in the history of ever. The interview questions are always one in a million occurrences, or inane trivia questions. On the job is routine stuff that could be and should be automated, but no one has time or inclination.

That’s the IT world in a nutshell.

I originally watched this to see if it was a cover of the excellent Selena Gomez song. It was not. However, the video (though not the song) is quite good and the dancer is just enviably graceful and powerful in her expressiveness.

The video is about how sometimes you give someone your all, everything you have, and they just don’t give a damn or really even notice — something we can all identify with I think.

My Wife Was Dying, and We Didn’t Tell Our Children. The choice was unusual, but loving: We wanted them to live without the shadow of their mother’s mortality hanging over them.

Total shit parents. What a bunch of monsters. Not telling your kids something like this is child abuse. If I’d been in an actual loving family and my parents pulled something like this on me, I’d never have forgiven them.

(As a side note, how they met and started dating would be considered harassment today, as would 95% of pre-2005-ish relationships.)

In this universe, strict rationality gets you nowhere because of informational limits. Rationality is bounded by these limits are their infinite combinations, and the universe from our perspective is not; therefore intuition and probability must come into play. Probability and its actualization in statistics despite what you’ve been told is outside strict rationality and logic as it’s a method of formalized guessing (or post hoc correlation if “guessing” is too strong for you.)

Rationality and logic are all very fine, in a toy universe. But this is not a toy universe and if it is the manual has long since been lost and we have to get by on gut feelings formalized (probability, statistics), correlational frameworks, and heuristics (another quasi-scientific name for “guessing”).

Formalization of methods is better than not, but it can also lead down paths where the numbers in the spreadsheet or the R program are seen as truth when in reality they are the result of well-done guessing and correlation. Rationality is an overlay that helps, but it can conceal as much as it reveals because what’s known seems rational and what is unknown seems not.

What the fuck is this shit?

Is the doofus having a laugh?

But wait … what if you could put your own computer “in the cloud”?

Wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds? Reliable connectivity, plus a nice low monthly price for extremely fast hardware? If this sounds crazy, it shouldn’t – Mac users have been doing this for years now.

Does he truly not realize this was the first model of “cloud” computing? The first remote datacenters where, yep, people would buy their own computer and place it there were, check it out, started in the late 1960s. Mac users have nothing to do with this and it was being done before the Mac even existed, when Steve Jobs wasn’t even in his teens yet.

Before “the cloud” was anything but a bunch of water vapor and dust in the sky, I was racking wholly-owned servers in remote datacenters. Surely the person who wrote this can’t be this clueless?

One of the reasons that STEM is emphasized so strongly now is because being in STEM requires for the most part zero critical thinking and little to no systems thinking (outside of the super-tiny focus area). STEM grads are no threat to anything. Funneling people into STEM neutralizes them.

It’s better to have someone running around who knows a lot about one tiny little (mostly inconsequential) thing who can build a missile at the end of all that propaganda…er, I mean education, than someone like Clarissa or me, who can tell you the entire sociocultural history of the effects of such decisions and furthermore what makes them a bad idea.

I Can’t Eat Much Meat on the Planetary Health Diet—But I’m Feeling Better When I Do.

Good for you. When I don’t eat meat, I feel like a trash bin being savaged by an angry moose. Everyone’s physiology is different I guess.

All of this crap, this propaganda, is to make sure individuals make choices, disconnected and all alone, and have no chance of changing the system at all. It’s designed to stultify you and individualize your every thought, all the better to sell you something.

Some economics, ya’ll.

Even tons of people choosing not to eat, say, beef, will have zero, absolutely nada, zero, NO EFFECT on beef availability or environmental impact because beef is in a sense a luxury product for much of the world. Meaning that when cow meat meets reduced demand in one area (say North America) and the demand curve shifts to the left, in China people are going to say “FUCK YEAH BEEF” because it’s now cheaper and they will then consume more beef since it’s now affordable. Therefore, in China the demand curve shifts to the right due to the  price elasticity of demand and bam, you are right back where you were before. This is and will definitely happen with most meat, absent enormous systemic changes that have nothing to do with individuals making disconnected decisions like this.

Note this isn’t true of all products, merely those that are in demand but that many people can’t (yet) afford. Unfortunately, or fortunately, meat and beef is one of those products.