One day my manager pulled me aside in the open office. “I got a new manager as you heard who now works in this office, and we’ve been talking restructuring the team,” he said, with a grave tone, “And he says you don’t type at your computer enough.”

— Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) April 22, 2019

This happens a lot in IT. Had a manager tell someone who worked for me, “I don’t see you working on the servers enough.” The employee tried to explain that we remoted into them and had no need to be at the physical console almost ever, but the manager didn’t understand this at all.

I’ve also gotten criticized for staring at my screen “doing nothing.” I had to explain that I do a lot of design, and if I think about something for two hours I need to actually think and not type, not read (though reading breaks help the unconscious work), not have meetings, and not chat with co-workers (all crap MBAs absolutely love to do). I got a little snippy and said that I might stare at the screen for two hours, but when I was done what emerged on said screen was correct and didn’t need all the re-work of the social butterflies.

Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere.”

Yep. Teaching all students anything beyond very basic algebra is a vast and futile waste of time, like teaching everyone to use an enormous industrial combine because “all our food comes from farms.”

This will only be more the case over time as math becomes the domain of expert systems and AI.

Very good article, that, and one you don’t often see since the math scam is so pervasive and influential.

Say it with me again. America health care, including hospitals, operate like a criminal enterprise. https://t.co/FeQUuSq540

— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) April 22, 2019

They don’t operate like a criminal enterprise — they are a criminal enterprise. Just because they provide some benefit doesn’t mean they aren’t also mobsters and racketeers. Loan sharks and the mafia provide sometimes very-valuable services to the communities in which they are embedded, for instance, but no one would term them humanitarians.

The medical community meets many of the de jure requirements of the RICO act: fraud, embezzlement, racketeering and extortion among them.

I am not exaggerating for effect. I do believe that the American (in particular) medical community is a criminal enterprise. Only effective cultural influence (propaganda) muddies that obvious conclusion.

The Forbidden Truth About Analog Technology.

The problem with this is that one has to remember that much digital technology has been optimized for the convenience of the surveilleurs and the MBAs, and not for the average folks who will use it.

Is a lot of digital tech inferior to its analog counterparts when we had different priorities? Absolutely. Is this some inherent feature of digital tech? No, not at all. Welsh acknowledges this a bit, to be fair, but we get what we optimize for. This is a choice. Always a choice, even if people fervently insist on some false teleology.

Just thinking about this girl I knew a long time ago whose last name was Rockett and how she drove a Toyota Supra twin turbo with a custom plate that said RKTSHIP.

She was something else.

There is no such thing as a “woke” corporation. That is not something that can exist, millennial fantasias aside.

Any corporation, because it is not a person, will sell you out if there’s money in it, harm you, poison you. How can people be this naïve? All corporations are amoral, which de facto makes them sociopaths if anthropomorphized into human terms.

Given the reaction to Sanders M4A argument by the FOX audience, it’s clear that, unless the Democrat operatives are shamelessly rigging focus groups, they simply must know that it’s a massive vote winner, enough to walk 2020.

That they dodge it still shows they’d rather lose.

— Ben King (@Grimeandreason) April 16, 2019

Yes. The thing is, the Democrats have absolutely no interest in governing. That is hard, and it’s much easier to not be in power, to sit mostly on the sidelines, raking in cash, “resisting,” than it is to lead, to point the way, to attempt to do what is right. Corporate cash and cushy jobs don’t flow like water in spring from all that inconvenient being ethical and doing right by the American people crap.

The Democrats deliberately sacrifice races and wins to keep that sweet corporate cash flowing. It’s not a conspiracy, but it is a scheme to make loads of money. And one that’s working. For just as long as it works, it’ll keep on happening, too.

This thread is a good illustration of how so many pseudo-liberals are more concerned with language policing than anything else.

“The wild” is now racist? Huh. I go to the wild areas of Florida all the time. I plan to keep calling them that no matter how racist it might be. If an area has a bunch of animals, trees, and not that many buildings, it’s wild.

You know, when regular people witness stuff like this they think, I don’t want my taxpayer and my kids’ tuition money wasted on this kind of crap. And then academia gets de-funded. I want academia to be funded so I wish no one would engage in this sort of sophistry and holier-than-thou behavior. And to be fair, I think normal people are perfectly correct to have that sort of reaction to linguistic hair-splitting and absurd white-saviorism. It makes part of me want to pull the plug despite all the good I know academics also do, for low pay and little prestige.

But this, this is how a community foot-shoots with alacrity.

This bit about terrible security questions reminds me that sometimes I come across a list of such questions where not a single one is relevant to me. Not a single one in the list. Never been married, don’t have any kids, don’t have any pets, don’t know my parent’s birth dates, etc.

These days, I just make up some garbage and store it in a secured password manager but it’s annoying the assumed uniformity of everyone.

I hope I never have to say any of them over the phone. “Why yes, my oldest child’s nickname is Shitty McPoopinpants.”

Almost all ambitious people seem to have high anxiety. It’s hard to find a counterexample (other than myself). I got supremely lucky in that I am fairly ambitious and have no anxiety at all.