The first ten on today’s playlist:

Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work.

What a load of horseshit. Spreadsheet wankery of the worst type. This is holding all else steady and assuming the GND and all of society itself will not adjust, and that battery tech won’t improve and that in-fill power sources can’t be used to cover gaps.

This isn’t a ceteris paribus situation. It’s more an acta non verba and mutata erunt omnia sort of thing. And other Latin shit. Use a phrasebook, English too limited.

You can use spreadsheet wankery to “prove” all sorts of garbage. I remember getting kicked off peak oil and energy forums in the late 90s and early 2000s for asseverating we should look into solar and wind and being told that it’d never be cheap enough to be used for anything. And they had the spreadhseets to prove it!

But they were wrong.

So is Yves. Garbage in, garbage out.

I wish people were smarter.

Saw Julie Fowlis in concert a few years ago. Great concert; if you ever get the chance, do go see her. She has a lovely stage personality and is absurdly talented.

In this video, though it’s all great, if you really want to be blown away go to the three minute mark. That someone can sing so quickly while enunciating so well and staying on pitch is some kind of miracle. Julie’s vocal control is unbelievable.

I now utterly despise dogs for just this reason.

I sold my previous house precisely because of noisy neighbors (or rather their dogs). Their three dogs lived in the backyard permanently no matter what the weather – never seen them walked. Talked to the neighbors twice about the noise – no action. Called the cops at 3 in the morning – still nothing. Finally, I decided to sell the house and move somewhere where there is low dog density. I developed a dislike for dogs because of my previous neighbors. Even now, three years later, a barking dog drives me nuts, gets my heart going fast and blood boiling.

I just need to hear a dog barking once and I get immediately enraged. I don’t mean mildly angry. I am talking I can barely contain myself. The reason? In NC, we had a place where various neighbors’ dogs barked sometimes for 18+ hours straight. Constantly, unrelentingly, at all hours and for any and no reason.

When we first moved in, it was a very quiet neighborhood. That all changed. For whatever reason people with dogs moved in. Many, many dogs. At least three close neighbors had 2+ dogs each and they all barked constantly.

So if you wonder why I utterly loathe all dogs, that is why. If a dog barks I am immediately triggered into a rage storm that I can barely control. If every dog and dog person on the planet disappeared, I’d love that so much.

As I get older, I seem to be moving the opposite personality-wise of most people. I have increasing trouble watching older movies, listening to older music. Even works I’ve never seen or heard before just don’t click with me; they feel antique.

I suspect it’s because the culture is changing very quickly indeed now, though it’s extremely difficult to see this when one is embedded within it. Nothing older speaks to me because it’s now outside this light cone, in some other universe. It has nothing to do with me. The novel shares the universe, walks the same mental pathways as I do, while the old just feels like a world gone stale before the langoliers come along to devour it.

Why did they have to change font rendering in macOS Catalina?

Do they think it's fun to read old books in a new font?

— Trishank Karthik (@trishankkarthik) October 11, 2019

Because like Mozilla, they hate their users. The font rendering in the OS is now utter dogshit. It was changed before Catalina, though.

Apple (and apologists on Hacker News) claimed no one would notice. But a lot of people have, like Trishank, who aren’t even mega-geeks like me. This is what happens though, when you come to despise your users, just as Mozilla did.

We see where that got them.

I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s.

This is not some kook; this is the dude who ran the Viking experiment in the 1970s.

I agree with him, though I am no expert, and here’s what I think is going on: NASA does not want to know if there is life on Mars because that opens up all sorts of issues about the ethics of exploring Mars, of even visiting that planet in the first place. If we find life there (and I suspect we already have) then that drastically alters our future efforts in exploring the planet, other planets and moons (such as Europa, where life is also possible) and of course leads to questions about our place in the larger universe.

And NASA, as much as I love it, is a government agency. Discovering (or admitting to the discovery) of life on Mars changes the status quo enormously, and most of all government agencies do not want that. That’s why there have never been any more experiments designed to detect life, and probably never will be — at least not from NASA.