MIT Media Lab Scientist Used Syrian Refugees to Tout Food Computers That Didn’t Work.

These are our “best and brightest.” People think I have a case of sour grapes when I mention that Ivy Leaguers (MIT is not Ivy League, but you know what I mean) don’t impress me, after having met more than a few.

They are, mostly, people who got lucky (i.e., had the right parents) and are good at parroting answers their teachers want to hear. It doesn’t take much to be smarter than the lot of them, and if I had been or were offered full-ride admission to MIT, Harvard, etc., I would turn it down without a second thought. I have better things to do with my time and that degree is meaningless to me.

Not sour grapes; proper time management skills.

Google mail isn't any better.

You would think that the world-renound search team would be able to find an email from my boss last month, but I guess not.

— Andy Hallberg (@Andrew_Hallberg) October 24, 2019

Search in email must be much, much harder than I realize, because neither Microsoft nor Google can seem to get it right, or even have it work half-decently. And it’s not just email. In Windows even the Start Menu search for the default items doesn’t work half the time, including on a fresh default install.

How this level of failure is possible, I don’t know. I’ve been using Outlook since 1997 and search has never worked correctly and I guess it never will. I’ve not used gmail since 2005, but search didn’t function then and it appears to still not be adequate for many people.

So, why is search so hard when there is known, predictable access to all the data? Do not enough users depend on it, so no one cares? Or is it just far harder than I suspect? I doubt the latter because I think I could throw together a simple guaranteed functional keyword search in PowerShell in few days over known data, and I am a crap programmer.

Government Loophole Gave Oil Companies an $18 Billion Windfall.

This is a subsidy, among the trillions (yes, trillions) the fossil fuel industry has received over the decades.

Remember this when you hear about all the subsidies renewable energy receives, which are only a very, very tiny fraction of what fossil fuel companies have received over the years and are still getting today.