I still find that people don't actually believe college was free for most of our history.

Here's a 1951 UCLA catalogue casually says tuition is free; fees are $400 in today's dollars. Watch out for that out of state tuition, almost $2K in today's dollars! https://t.co/CUYmLYuhzX pic.twitter.com/Dd2yjNCh6C

— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) September 5, 2019

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.

Data storage produces similar levels of emission (c. 2% of total) to flying and is growing at a far faster rate, but you don't get anyone writing pious pieces about how it's time to give up the cloud.https://t.co/PYdvrxHKvP

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) September 6, 2019

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.

Fold the rear view mirrors in, that way they lose whatever time they think they gained. If all pedestrians carried a carton of eggs, NYC would have a better driving culture.

— Chris Anderson (@jchris) September 5, 2019

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.

I think we have maybe a 20 year window to change the course of history and avoid irreversible worldwide civilizational stagnation.

— scientism (@mr_scientism) September 3, 2019

Agreed. The other great threat, besides global climate change, is the liberal apocalypse of everyone living like 13th Century peasants, except the culture has changed too much for us to really live like that and survive with any sanity intact.

Liberals are screwing up any chance they have of influencing the future and building something better because all they can seem to prattle on about is how much they are just going to be forced — forced, I tell you! — to take away from everyone.

I hope I don’t need to say this, but that’s not a winning strategy or even one that makes sense. But it appeals to their variant of authoritarian asceticism so it won’t go away, and they will lose much because of it.

Satire doesn't work if the satire is so underplayed the people you are satirising think it's actually a celebration of them; see also – Fight Club. https://t.co/uq5DYKKuKR

— Pharrell Hawggz (@Mister_Woodo) September 1, 2019

The real problem is that most people don’t understand that satire is in fact satire even if you put 200 point flashing fonts before, during, and after the work stating in unequivocal terms THIS IS SATIRE.

To the left, because we have dumb people, this means we should ban anything that makes any sort of satirical point. Not the best solution, really. I am so done with “liberals,” the left, any of that, because it’s all just recycling tired ideas from the dustbin of history.

Training hard now in my 40s, I notice very little difference from my 20s. It’d probably be more noticeable were I world-class athlete or something.

The main difference I’ve noted is that it’d take me a day or two to fully recover in my 20s, and now it might take an extra day. I can lift the same amounts relative to my progression, I am gaining muscle as quickly, and I’m not injuring myself.

It helps that I am not overtraining now and I was then, by force. Thanks, US Army.

If someone tell you that you can’t get really strong and muscular in your 40s, they probably are just attempting to keep you down at their level of apathy and lethargy. Don’t listen. Just show up looking all strong and fit and then avoid them after because they are an anchor.

Anyone who thinks that Jeffrey Epstein just happened to be taken off suicide watch while two guards just happened to be asleep while all the cameras just happened to malfunction while some extra unknown dudes just happened to be around and regular checks just happened to be missed is an enormous fucking fool.

Really. If anyone believe anything about that was on the up and up, they can’t be trusted with any idea or opinion. They are dipshits of the highest order.

When a known underage trafficker who had been supplying half of the country’s elite with girls dies, it’s not an accident. How could you be so damn clueless? Epstein had a burn book on trillions of dollars of wealth. No way he’d keep breathing to trial. None.

I guess it’s some sort of misguided wish and to believe that the system somehow works? I don’t know. But Epstein’s murder is the system.

I don’t think all of this is possible, but so much more is possible than aging Boomers and centrists claim is achievable. So very much more.

We’ve had a complete instigated failure of imagination and prerogative, and undermining of possibility, with countless near-mindless myrmidons of abridgment declaring that nothing that hasn’t been done yet is possible, even in principle. Not realizing they are corporate-sponsored guided missiles of expectation-destruction, they shamble across the land desultorily mumbling, “Buy who will pay for it?” Never mind that we squander entire countries’ worth of resources weekly, that entire inconceivable coffers of wealth are locked up in the accounts of billionaires, that the defense industry spends more in a few days than the entire R&D funding of the world in toto.

These missiles of hopelessness are of course controlled by corporations and their enablers, who need a stable, predictable environment to skim maximal profits, to loot society’s wealth and knowledge, to continue to exist parasitically. Their propaganda, not physical and cognitive reality, tells us what is possible and that “possible” coincides exactly with what will gain and hold for them the most profit and the most power. Nothing else.

If you think anything other, then you aren’t much of a systems thinker, or a thinker period.

Greta Thunberg is the only person I am aware of thinking reasonably and collectedly about her own future. No one in the mainstream seems to realize how destructive climate change will be. She does. She is the only climate realist most people are aware of, therefore.

Of course, part of her reason is selfish. Whose isn’t, though? Not wanting to die from climate change and its resultant wars is damn good motivation to do something about it.

What’s sad is how many adults act like she’s crazy or misguided or some sort of puppet, when in reality they are completely wrong — as events already are proving them to be. This will only get worse, but luckily for them by the time it gets really bad they’ll all be dead. The judgment of future societies will not be kind to them, though, nor should it be. They are the useful idiots of history.

People like me get told all the time that we know nothing because we have no credentials — that we can’t possibly have any idea what we’re talking about. But I’d just like to point out that I wrote this four whole months before the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 737 Max crash.

This automated pitch control system that relies on only one sensor (this is a big no-no in this arena) sounds truly moronic and it will likely result in more crashes as currently designed IMO.

Something I’m not exactly proud of being right about, but credentials are only worth as much as the intelligence and systems understanding behind them. And, usually, there’s not all that much there there.

I’d rather be right than anything else. It’s a lot harder work but it feels a lot better, too. If credentials gave me anything I cared about having, I’d get some. School and anything memorizable is absurdly easy for me. But credentials don’t give me anything I care about so I’ll just keep being right while others waste time making themselves dumber and more conformist.

Meet your heroes.

You will quickly reach something you think is utterly trivial, required knowledge, they know absolutely nothing about.
Your mental model of what’s essential, that you developed in isolation from others, is actually impossibly broken.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 30, 2019

Absolutely true.

People often ascribe high intelligence to me because I know twice or three times as much as they do. But I know two percent or even three percent of the available knowledge. They know one percent. So yes, I know twice or even three times as much but it’s an illusion in an important sense.

Because I still don’t know anything! And as you get older and wiser, you see more and more the vast gulfs in your knowledge and understanding that will never be filled, and can never be filled. The chasms ever widen and your brain still moves at the same old speed as before.

So someone is like, “You are so smart!” And then I’m thinking, “Damn, I’m an idiot, so if this person thinks I am smart….”