Month: July 2019

The Trick

Chill Regular-ass Post

I do think most scientists are attempting to be honest most of the time, but this is a common scientist trick where they control for anything and everything that makes any difference, and then declare there is no difference. What a shocker, there. Kevin Drum pulls this one, too, but he’s definitely not attempting probity.

There is of course a political agenda* with examination of millennials and their proclivities, so that is always more distorted than most other areas but even outside of this it seems a pervasive scientific blindness to the world to “control” away most of what you are explicitly attempting to measure and then declare it does not exist. Why this is the case even outside of political point-scoring I don’t know.

*The agenda here being to show that the world is not changing, therefore has no reason to change.

No Repurpose

Chill Uncategorized

Oh please tell me this is a joke. I want to believe it’s a jape, a jest, some drollery because if not this is horrific and a fail train. This will already be dropping packets like drunk Aunt Cora at a family reunion carrying a tub of potato salad, and will only get worse over time.

For those who aren’t familiar with Ethernet cabling, Cat 3 is made to transmit 10mbs and although it can carry more, it is unreliable — meaning it drops a lot of signal at the physical layer, thus dropping packets at the data layer, making the connection by default slow and unreliable even when it’s technically pushing more than it can actually handle.

For non-networking folks, this is like Lucy from I Love Lucy in the chocolate factory scene — that scene is exactly analogous to what is happening on this network.

This is terrible and I feel the pain of the condo owners who have to endure this inevitably shoddy connection.

Never, ever do this.

Hunger

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think that the world of The Hunger Games presents a fairly-accurate representation of what the planet will look like 400 years hence: a much-reduced human population due to war and climate change, the elites keeping some measure of power, cloistered from the deplorables who have been relegated to far-away work camps and labor collectives.

No, I don’t think anything like the Games are likely (though certainly given human history not impossible), but the Hunger world itself is eminently possible after climate change and a few nuclear exchanges.

People really seem to hate their children, or perhaps they just don’t want to know how bad climate change is going to be.

The true Hunger Games, then, are how the Boomers and Gen X are perfectly fine consigning their own kids to fighting over the scraps of a disintegrating civilization.

E Aww

Chill Uncategorized

The Honda E Is the Electric Car I’ve Been Waiting For.

Cute car. I like it and would drive it, but not in the US. It’d be a deathtrap here. I drive a 4,000 pound large sedan and it’s almost a deathtrap since it has to compete with 5,000-7,000 pound mega-SUVs and large trucks that sit much higher than my car.

The Honda E weighs just over 3,000 pounds and is small. I would not want to drive it on modern US roads.

More regulation is needed to eliminate large and high-riding SUVs and trucks except for strict work purposes (and work purposes would also need to be stringently enforced).

Distancing

Chill Regular-ass Post

There’s a reason I bought roughly a thousand plastic straws recently. Have to do something to battle against useless doofus incursions.

Current corporate and political climate change and environmental strategy is a very intelligent one, overall. It’s a version of denialism, really, and that is to prioritize small changes that really make no difference at all, to value the centrist view, the “reasonable.” Meanwhile, the true reasonable in the face of such a vast threat is to be running at full war footing, Apollo program x 10, to adapt, mitigate and even to reverse climate change with a combination of the known and trusted with some smaller part of that portfolio consisting of crazy plans that also might work.

I draw very little distinction at all between outright, classical denialism of the Republican variety and that of the Drum/Scalzi variety. Both will result in little difference in the end, and aren’t actually that far apart other than as a matter of ideological aesthetics.

We occupants of the last few hundred years of capitalist dominance, who know nothing else, can think nothing else, will all be lumped together in our varieties in the judgment of history, a menagerie of debased humanity: Republicans, liberals, Nazis, Democrats, Socialists, populists, theocrats, authoritarians and libertarians alike — all those of the generations who poisoned the planet, who despised their own children and grandchildren so much that they were perfectly willing to literally kill them.

We’ll all look the same in the judgement of history, and that judgment will be correct.

One Of

Chill Regular-ass Post

One of the interesting things about not holding predictably ideological views is that I’ve been called everything from a Republican puritan to a ultra-Marxist to a white supremacist to someone who hopes the white race is extinguished by the scary brown hordes…sometimes by the same people a few months apart.

The charts, I am off them. Apparently. People I think don’t like it when you don’t fit neatly into their boxes.

Why Boomers and Gen X Hate Bernie

Chill Uncategorized

I was a bit surprised how much vitriol the Boomers and Gen X (like Scalzi) actually possess towards Bernie Sanders, so I started thinking on why.

To be clear, I am not a strong Bernie supporter and have never voted for him and would’ve preferred he didn’t run in 2020. That said, there is an enormous dichotomy in how all the people below Gen X view Bernie and people like Scalzi and older feel about him. This emerges from a few trends of those generations, I think.

The first is that they are from a time where there was some reality but mostly the illusion of comity and bipartisanship between the parties. Tip O’Neill working together with the Democrats, Clinton and his collaboration with the Republicans to pass the execrable crime bills and welfare reform — in the Gen X/Boomer mind, these were halcyon days of bipartisan coalitions and happy alliances. The reality, of course, was much different but that’s how they perceive it.

To those two generations, however, Sanders destroys this felicitous fantasy of civility and decorum by opposing in the strongest terms the ideal and the actuality of bipartisanship. He resists conservative plans completely and won’t “cross the aisle” at all. For this, they hate him.

Leading into the second point quite naturally is the severe Boomer/Gen X nostalgia. This is perhaps — in the US at least — the most powerful force in politics. Many people yearn for a varnished and preserved version of the 1950s that they did not even live through, and people like Scalzi are even worse for they yearn for yearning for it, unconsciously. This nostalgia leads to the hatred of any substantive change. Since Sanders wishes to make substantive changes, they despise him despite that his program will greatly help their own children and grandchildren.

The third reason for the Bernie hatred, dare I say, is more understandable given the precarity of the financial situation for many people in the US, including those in the Boomer/Gen X demographic. This is the natural fear of Sanders altering enough where their house prices fall and they lose a little of their retirement security. Of course if Sanders actually made the changes he’s been discussing they’d be more secure in their retirement, but fear of change is natural and comprehensible. I feel sympathy if not empathy for them as they’ve largely been responsible for despoiling the world and destroying the dreams and the aspirations of their own children and grandchildren, and are attempting to avoid the culpability for this, while often being in an uncertain financial situation themselves. It’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for anyone to handle. And wow, they do not handle it well at all.

Those, then, are the three main causes behind the Boomer/Gen X Bernie hatred. He is a repudiation of everything they stood for and the enshrouded narrative by which they’ve lived their lives. There’s a natural aversion, even if they don’t articulate very well, mainly noting how “unpleasant” and “annoying” he is without further examination. Examination, of course, would lead to actually thinking about why they feel this way and that would be painful, so this they do not do.

Gan No Stan

Chill Regular-ass Post

The reason I would not eat these corporate vegan foods is they are not healthy. They are filled with almost literal garbage. They are in no way healthful or worth eating other than for religious reasons.

Aside from that, veganism is not a healthy dietary option in general. Adults can survive on such a debased diet for a while (though evidence shows most vegans backslide as they are not getting enough nutrition), but it’s actively dangerous for kids and those with chronic illnesses.

Veganism is a religion, really, masquerading as a diet. And corporate veganism is even worse.