The face you make when you realize you’ve somehow opened about 20 science papers over the last week and see you’ve read about a quarter of all of them:

Both the left and the right are too enamored of magical solutions to hard problems to achieve anything before calamity.

The left believes that strategic magic words, the sheer power of identity, and a weird new form of censorious prudishness will solve everything.

The right believes that re-confining women to the kitchen, creating a white nationalist state and lots and lots of guns will certainly right the ship.

Of course, like all magical solutions, none of this is useful though some of it is very harmful in itself. Hard problems require large changes. The magic approach is just a way to forestall these changes.

There’s nothing you could do to convince me to wear AirPods or other wireless headphones. They sound like a trash bin, look worse and I’d lose them every day. I guess the modern age is just not for me.

I was looking at houses today and saw this:

Now why in the world would I want to launch my boat WHEN I’M NOT FUCKING IN IT? I think real estate agents are aliens sometimes. Many of them seem to have no idea what it is that normal humans are likely to do or to want.

My partner and I have to have two incomes to live as well as my maternal grandfather did 40ish years ago on only one.

Don’t get me wrong — he lived pretty well and so do we. But notice again that we have to have effectively twice as much money coming in to exist with roughly the same quality of life as he did.

People who say things haven’t changed are just daft deluded dipshits.

For centrists and “liberals,” taking down sites like 8Chan and the Daily Stormer has and will become the substitute for useful action. While these sites are vile and I (mostly) don’t have a problem with their removal from the open web, it won’t help as much as the centrists think it will, and is mostly a performative action that will stop there.

It’s like banning plastic bags — a pointless action that doesn’t hurt much, but also won’t help much, and most importantly doesn’t solve the real problem that causes or allows frequent mass shootings.

In a lot of ways, “infrastructure as code” is a scam designed to flatter developers and part them from their (company’s) money. It’s automation designed to conceal how much is being spent on likely-needless infrastructure by making it absurdly easy to spin up a few new instances — or a few thousand.

If I were AWS as Azure, I’d make it as easy as possible to spin up anything in an automated fashion, and would be propagandizing this capability far and wide. I’d be flattering developers that infrastructure is just code, and that you don’t need those useless old-school infrastructure people anymore to determine the best path and what is sensible. And then I’d work on making it easy for those same developers, who don’t actually understand the first thing about infrastructure, to demonstrate their superiority by deploying tons of rickety, poorly-designed “automated” infrastructure willy-nilly.

So it’s no surprise what we are seeing. It’s actually pretty brilliant. It’s a great strategy for separating the clueless from their money.

Remember when Dylan Roof walked into a church and killed people while they were praying and the police took him to get Burger King afterwards? I think about that a lot.

— nino beige 🎨 (@indigogloves) August 4, 2019

This is an example of good policework, and how it should be done. Giving a suspect something they want and appearing to be their friend is an excellent way to:

1) Get more information on their motivations which can lead to

2) Finding out if they had any co-conspirators or other plans were about to kick off which then leads to

3) Preventing other possible mass shooting or exposing a network, if they had any, and gaining the info necessary to convict them or others who may have aided them

We shouldn’t be criticizing police for working the right way, but rather for encouraging that sort of procedure even when the suspect is brown or black.

Just a reminder that two things the GOP says are impossible — affordable universal health care & low levels of gun violence — are realities in every single developed economy except the US.

— David Roberts (@drvox) August 3, 2019

The word “impossible” is often used by Democrats (particularly about health care) as well, so it’s not just the GOP — it’s all those useless centrists joining right in. When asked to explain why literally every developed country in the world has these features and the US does not, there’s a lot of hand-waving, hemming and hawing, but in reality it’s the Kevin Drum answer: it’s slightly more convenient for them if nothing changes.

The reality is of course that the US could have these things, and free or very cheap college, and it would save money and resources over time compared to the privatized/free market alternative, which of course is just a scam to funnel money from the poor and middle class to the rich.

The FA nutterbutters are always complaining about the expectations society has on them and such. But who gives a crap about that? What about the expectations you should have for yourselves? I expect to be able to walk up a few flights of stairs without gasping and sweating. I expect to be able to reach my car in the parking lot without nearly having a heart attack. I expect not to need to eat something every 30 minutes to avoid going into (fake) starvation mode.

In the arena, I don’t care a whit about what society thinks. If everyone save me disappeared, I’d still want to be able to do those things and more. I’d still keep lifting weights (as long as I could find enough food). I’d still keep being awesome every day — and so very humble, too, obviously. Society has nothing at all to do with that. That’s my commitment to myself and making the best use of the time I have on this planet. Is posting on Instagram about “every body is beautiful” while obviously being deeply unhappy and eating 6,000 calories a day really fulfilling? Obviously it isn’t or we wouldn’t hear so much guff about it. Happy people don’t need to broadcast about it all the time.

In some ways, I hardly blame them. Society is perfused with propaganda. Most people aren’t that smart and just parrot what they hear and what the environment presents them with. I have no doubt that the FA movement is completely sponsored by food company cash or else it wouldn’t be so prominent. Just not possible.

Self-love needs to be replaced with self-respect and whatever the opposite of self-delusion is.