Dover

Same for me as with Devon. Fighting global climate change and liberalism (in the non-political sense) are incompatible. That’s just the way it is.

I don’t know what’s coming next. Liberalism, conservatism, fascism and socialism have all failed or are failing. Society is stagnating, constrained by a past it can no longer inhabit and a future it cannot yet imagine. Good ideas are scarce to non-existent. There is much anomie but no aim, much dissolution but no resolve.

We are poised on the edge of a world not yet visible, toes over the cliff’s edge, eyes on the sky. Leap or be pushed; either way we’re going over that precipice. What’s at the bottom, I don’t know. No one does.

Upchuck

Absolute fucking horseshit and Firefox is full malware now, if it wasn’t before. What kind of utter shit-for-brains in the Mozilla org thought this was a good idea, I haven’t a clue. But they shouldn’t be allowed to work in the tech sector again. They are not fit for washing my damn car windows.

Cabling Bling

This thread is great.

When you’re in networking training classes they tell you that patch (networking) cables either work or they don’t, that there is no in-between.

THIS IS A LIE.

Patch cables can degrade in all sorts of ways that aren’t complete failures, and I think I’ve seen just about every one in nearly twenty years of professional IT work. If you think there is a software problem, or a routing problem, or see some persistent issue that no amount of twiddling settings or changing parts out seems to correct, even if you have a tested fine “working” cable, change that out and a lot of the time that’ll resolve it.

So to juniors I seem like a magician sometimes when they ask, “Why are you changing the cable out? We know it works!”

And I’ll say, “Do we?” And slap the cable in and all starts functioning again.

Economics is a Scam

Let’s start with something not written by a total assclown fuckwit.

According to Harvard data, as of 2013 11.2 million households paid more than 50% of their income to cover rent.

Just as I’ve noted before, anywhere that you are likely to be able to get a decent job rent is very high. Economists like to take the nationwide data and smear it all together and claim that the problem doesn’t exist. Never mind that in rural areas and even in many medium-size cities, there are no real jobs to be had. What use renting an apartment in Cornstalk, Kansas, if there are no jobs there? Rent’s cheap, though!

But let’s look at a place that’s not even that expensive, like Jacksonville, Florida:

Screen Shot 2019 09 09 at 11 54 04 AM

Even there, 27% of renters are forking over more than 50% of their income on rent/utilities (which is fair to add to rent because if you rent a place you must have utilities).

I hate that utter dipshit dumbasses like Kevin Drum and Jeremy Horpedahl are able to dominate the discourse when the data directly contracts their Pollyannish and absurd views.

Also, I am glad I am not in academia I can call a fucking dumbass a fucking dumbass. And Jeremy Horpedahl is in fact a huge fucking dumbass.

If We Had

If we had started twenty years ago, and if the left weren’t largely against nuclear power, we’d have much fewer issues preventing and adapting to climate change, and all without the left’s joyful litany of all the things they will be forced to take away.

This mostly isn’t the left’s fault, mind you. It’s the right’s and fossil fuel companies for spending so long denying and fighting against doing anything at all about climate change.

What is the left’s fault, though, is their ecstasy and passion for seizing anything that makes life worth living. They want your meat, your air conditioning, your home — next they will probably come for your refrigerator and your washing machine. In fact, I almost guarantee it. Why would they not? Their goal is to have us all live like 13th Century peasants, after all.

We actually have to give very little of that up — or we wouldn’t have to, anyway, if the left as mentioned weren’t so dead-set against the best methods of handling the problem. And if they didn’t think any effort at population control were ab initio eugenics most evil, but that’s a whole different topic altogether.

The left and the right are the Dumb and Dumber of the climate change crisis, and I have no sympathy and want no ties with either side. Both have no minds capable of dealing with any possibly or likely future.

Falling

And the funny thing is from this description, the friend seems to have no idea that she’s reproducing exactly the same behavior that she’s experiencing and decrying.

That’s easy to explain, and I don’t blame her; men are guilty, too. People absolutely have to be hypocrites about dating, what they really want, and their own minds in reference to this, or it’d all fall apart. And then they have to deny their hypocrisy and play-act being extremely offended if you point out that they are in fact acting hypocritically.

Women are absolutely as guilty of this as men, but just like men they don’t see it — because they only observe and care about the hypocrisy of (usually) men and have no idea how they must and in fact do betray themselves and their own ethics.

It’s a consequence of being apes barely up from the savannah in a world we’re not constructed for, and it’s probably unavoidable.

Haze

Nearly every day since I read it many years ago, I think of the Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” I think about how Menard’s version of Quixote would be a radically different book despite containing all the same words. I ponder, as Borges was, what this means for meaning and its continuity.

We can project so much into the future but the future’s past also reaches back to us with a touch we can’t feel but is just as real as this moment. I think Borges might have been then and still now the only person alive to understand what modernity really meant, and what a break with the past it in fact was.

Free College

I’ve had people argue with me about this. Very clear evidence of even the recent past, readily available, does not sway most people. Humans are flawed and doomed and new minds probably are not enough, or won’t be ready soon enough.

Reality is we could provide free college for all right now for the amount we spend just subsidizing college already. Just like Medicare for All would be cheaper and better than our utterly broken medical system, not only would free college at state schools be cheaper, it’d be superior.

Flying Through Clouds

That’s because both of them are totally fucking moronic ideas, but the left doesn’t understand the cloud and largely doesn’t know what it is, but all of them have been on an airplane. Banning flying, therefore, appeals to their Antonian authoritarian asceticism but they don’t know enough to write even semi-coherently about the cloud.

Ceramic

Better yet is to carry a few shards of ceramic from a spark plug. Much harder than glass, and even casually tossed at a car window will easily and quickly shatter it. Takes hardly any force at all. Eggs just mean the car gets wiped off, with little damage done.

Ceramic shattering the front or rear window, though, means minimum $150 repair and if it’s the front windshield, the car in undriveable.