Mozilla Firefox claims to be about protecting the user and security, but the main thing they want to protect is their ability to track you while locking others out from doing the same.

That explains nearly all of their user-hostile moves and the asinine claim that security and customizability are at odds. These goals are only at cross-purposes if one chooses to make them so; it’s not some natural state.

Fucking idiot rat bastard transparent liars.

Cancel Culture Is Chaotic Good.

Disagree, but it’s interesting how the narrative is that if only people you dislike have been cancelled, cancel culture does not exist.

But oh how the tune changes when someone liked gets cancelled….

How do people become infrastructure engineers? Do you just like, start doing infrastructure work at your job?

— Tara Vancil (@taravancil) October 5, 2019

My path was a fairly long one, but it all started with being on the night shift (in a non-IT job), and being the only one who was able to find the power button to hard-reboot a hung production server at 1AM, preventing the on-call engineer from having to drive to work in the middle of the night.

Two other people had been in there, couldn’t find the power button. I found it (having never seen that model of server before) when I was still twenty feet away from the server….

It helped that I’d been playing with and working on computers since I was four years old. From there, helpdesk, then jr. sysadmin, then onward and upward…till eventually infrastructure engineer roles.

I know it’s fashionable to hate Quentin Tarantino by those who don’t really like or understand movies that much and are embroiled in identity power jockeying, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a movie that causes one to think about it days after viewing. How many movies do that? I’d say maybe one in twenty I watch, if that.

That said, I mostly agree with this review. As I noted earlier, the movie is sort of a mess. But it’s a glorious mess.

And this scene really did shine.

Tate represents an innocence about show business that is best realized in a scene where Tate ducks into the Bruin Theater in Westwood to watch The Wrecking Crew, in which she appears alongside Dean Martin’s James Bond knockoff Matt Helm. Listening and looking around at the audience as they laugh and respond to her performance, Robbie makes Tate’s delight palpable and heartfelt — the sheer, unfiltered joy of making movies (for perhaps the director as well) captured in her dazzling smile.

Kudos to Robbie to selling that so well with no dialogue and sitting down, too. Whatever his flaws, unlike a lot of directors Tarantino consistently gets top-notch performances out of his cast.

This, all the way from 2010, is probably the best expression of why Obama was and is such a huge disappointment. Say what you want by how “limited” he was by Congress (which is mostly a lie anyway), he had the greatest opportunity of any president since FDR to make substantive changes that would have helped average Americans and he simply chose not to do so.

I think he had that opportunity, to carry the new way his campaign lifted him up and use the same energy to lift up everything. At least then, if it failed, it wouldn’t have been his failure, it would have been ours. But he didn’t even try. Not even a bit.

I can point you to the exact moment of my disappointment. I was suckered by Obama’s pitch. “The fierce urgency of now.” I thought that when the new whitehouse.gov went live it would be about us, the people of the United States, but of course it wasn’t — it was about them — those who took the standard places in the White House to do what they always do. Maybe slightly different. But nothing like the change we were promised, and some of us expected.

If Obama wants to know why he’s being treated like a disappointment, the answer is simple, we are disappointed.

Such potential squandered, but the truth is that Obama wasn’t interested in doing what was right. He was interested in getting absurdly rich after office and actually fighting against the banksters and their allies would’ve prevented that.

So we got we got. And Obama got absurdly rich.

I’m mystified by how often companies — usually media companies — harm themselves egregiously and never seem to correct their mistakes.

Ironically, by winning when it comes to ebook pricing, publishing seems to have hurt its ability to convince readers that print books are worth spending money on.

I don’t buy ebooks because they are far too expensive and are locked in by useless DRM. The publishers made a huge mistake and only harmed themselves by not embracing ebooks. And, by the way, they are lying about printing/binding costs being small. I am/have been acquaintances with a few people in the industry and they tell me that these costs account for more like 30-40% of the price of a hardcover, not $2. Of course, this depends on the publisher and the book. (If you disbelieve this, ask why paperbacks are generally half the price of hardcover or less. Then one should become enlightened.)

We have a monopoly disease in this country is the true diagnosis, and the pricing of ebooks is just one symptom. And publishers are the worst, because in general they are both evil and stupid — a terrible combination.