Month: August 2019

Pushback

Chill Uncategorized

I like that in this article there is some pushback to the Fat Acceptance child-harming trend of, “It doesn’t matter that little Sally is the size of a house. Let her ‘intuitively eat’ 20 slices of cake so she has to be rolled to the school bus every morning.”

Dr. Elsie Taveras, the division chief of general academic pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital and a specialist in childhood obesity, warned against a “none of this works” approach, asking, “What are we supposed to do with this large number of children who not just have obesity but severe obesity and its associated chronic diseases — do we not think that some changes in their nutrition are warranted? Wouldn’t you call that unethical to not offer treatment and support?”

The Fat Acceptance people, sponsored of course by the food industry, are literally criminal because of what they do to children and the vast harm they cause there, and are immoral and unethical in other ways that doesn’t stray into brute abusive criminality. The food industry execs, as with the execs of most major corporations are more to blame for their destruction of society and culture, but the FA types also bear some blame, too.

It was good to see one article not just buying into the absurd FA/food industry claims.

See Culture

Chill Uncategorized

Something that really emphasizes the impossibility of truly comprehending other cultures is that modern technologists and those interested in that area can’t even understand the culture of BBSes and shareware that existed in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. They haven’t a clue, and that was very recent and in the same field as they are currently interested in and/or working.

I lived through and participated in that BBS and shareware culture and am a current technogeek so I know just how skewed most representations of that era are. At the same time, I have no interest in writing a history of the era as that’d take just too much effort and research and I don’t have the necessary levels of nostalgia to turn it into a passion.

My larger point is that if people in the field can’t even understand something nominally in their same domain that happened less than 40 years ago, what hope do we have of understanding how the Romans or the ancient Mayans thought and lived?

My answer is that, truthfully, we do not.

Centristic

Chill Regular-ass Post

Something else that centrists said was impossible. It turns out centrists don’t know a damn thing, unsurprisingly. All that centrists believe is based on anything at all changing in any way that might inconvenience them. The rest is just rationalization.

Realizing Fit

Chill Regular-ass Post

Realizing how comparatively little work it took to propel me into the top 10% of fitness levels of my age group is a bit sad. Like, I worked hard but it wasn’t absurdly hard. Anyone without a disability (and many with one, depending) could have done this.

We expect so little of ourselves, our world, our environment, and that’s exactly what we get.

Complex IT Up

Chill Regular-ass Post

The complexity is the point, not some side effect.

Give me a few million dollars, a half dozen good coders and a year, and I could come up with something twice as good as the current mess, 1/100th as complex, and that used fewer resources and was easy for anyone with minimal IT chops to use. That’ll never happen, though, because it being difficult is the whole idea.

Awarded

Chill Regular-ass Post

I agree that Campbell was pretty vile, but I also have a problem with complete history erasure like this. Taking a red pencil to the past doesn’t work well and it’s fundamentally a lie. The truth is that Campbell had and still has — even long dead — enormous influence on the sf field. Just papering over this because he’s now persona non grata doesn’t actually improve anything.

I don’t really give a crap if some particular award is named after the guy. That matters less than nothing one way or the other and is a distraction from the real issues. But I do care that we are forced to pretend in some Ministry of Truth liberal orthodoxy that he never existed, or that absolutely everything he did was some unmitigated evil. It wasn’t, and without him it’s unclear that the sf field would’ve developed to be anything close to what it is today, even with all its flaws.

Mitigate on and improve upon the inequities and iniquities of the past, but erasing the past is something that is, first of all, impossible and second, actually hurts instead of helps people. Yes, even people of color and women.

Leave the past as is; improve the future.

Sopwith

Chill Regular-ass Post

This used to be my favorite game when I was young, until I got a computer handed down to me that was too fast to play it, that sadly had no Turbo button to slow down the CPU:

If you don’t know what the hell a Turbo button is, don’t worry about it. Some archaeological computer shit.

How Your Children Will Die

Chill Uncategorized

The climate emergency is the perfect disaster to slip right past human cognitive flaws. It’s a long term problem, so the consequences seem remote. Others will mostly bear the costs (for now), so it’s hard to summon concern or empathy — even if those others are the children and grandchildren of those now living.

Another part of the reason for the lack of action is that people don’t understand how dire and serious the emergency in fact is due to frequent millenarian and apocalyptic nonsense in human history over the years.

Well, this time the potential apocalypse is real and not nonsense, but no one wants to hear that since yet another human cognitive flaw waylays this perception: optimism bias. That won’t happen to me or my kids. That’s for other people.

Bolsanoro burning down the Amazon is probably the last straw. We’re done, I’d guess, and we’ve found the Great Filter.

No, I don’t think climate change will cause human extinction directly. Though, is that our sole criterion, just to avoid extinction? Is that the best we can do? I have no idea why so many centrists/ liberals use this as any sort of standard. Because it’s definitely going to cause civilizational collapse and if you think that’s so much better, we have nothing to talk about.

But the nuclear and conventional wars that are inevitably part and parcel of the climate emergency likely will cause extinction or nearly so, and that’s how your children and grandchildren will die.

Not Fed Up

Chill Regular-ass Post

I eat way more food than I did a year ago and am still not gaining weight effectively while lifting. I don’t think I can eat much more as I am just not hungry enough and overeating is just unpleasant (unless you’re a Fat Acceptance type, I guess).

Ah well, still gaining muscle, just more slowly than I could be.