The good thing about if I ever became a billionaire is that I’m already as big a jerk as I’m ever going to be. It wouldn’t change me much. I’d probably just give away a lot of the money, not fake give it away like a lot of billionaires do.

People would still get angry at me, though, because I’d do an expedition to Mars just so I could put a pull-up bar on Hellas Planitia. And when people asked me, “Mike, why’d you put a pull-up bar on Mars?” I’d say, “DUH, so I could do a pull-up on Mars, what are you, some kind of dumbass?”

Well, you see what I mean.

This is a real-life example of the Baudrillardian simulation replacing the real, obliterating it completely.

The woman had likely never smelled a real lemon (even if she had seen them in grocery stores), but had only experienced lemon-scented products. Thus, “lemon” to her was not connected to anything other than itself. It did not exist apart from its product associations and their scents.

I see examples of this fairly often, but this is pretty egregious one.

On a brand-new install of Windows Server 2019, I search for “powershell” (which this computer definitely has installed, it’s a default) and nothing:

How can you make something so broken?

I was reading this interview with Kristen Roupenian (found by way of my friend’s blog) and though I liked it, I still have trouble wondering why there is such a push, after all the victories of feminism, to re-infantilize women.

This appears to be something many women actually want. Are women more immature, childish, than men at the same age? I have never found that to be the case but perhaps it is now true. I don’t know. And while I have no desire to date or sleep with twenty-year-olds in general, I can’t help but frame this as more about elimination of dating market competition than any other imperative.

I think Roupenian herself is a more nuanced writer than that, but many people (mostly women) want to downgrade women to naifs barely capable of making their own decisions.

Perhaps we should raise the age of majority of women to 35? Would that make feminists happy, that women are legally considered children until that age?

I don’t feel much different than I did at 20, or act much differently, though I am a lot less angry. Is that not the same for women? What’s going on here, apart from dating market competition?

Just a note: formally barring non-English speakers from the UK is not "dog-whistling". It is undisguised, openly hostile racism.

— Guy Lodge (@GuyLodge) February 19, 2020

Note first that I think barring non-English speakers from anywhere is a truly atrocious idea. Just absurdly stupid.

However…racism? So, disallowing a 6’4″ blond white Swedish dude who only speaks Swedish is racism? Can someone please explain this “innovative” new definition of racism the left is using, because I can’t say I understand.

Note that this would not bar the majority of Nigerians, who are almost all black, because 53% of Nigerians speak English. So…racism is looking awfully different these days.

The iTunes algorithm for shuffling a playlist is total shit. I have a 10 hour “90s on 9” playlist, where I’ve heard some songs every single time I shuffle while others have never come up.

— “Bad” Billy Pratt (@KillToParty) February 12, 2020

It likely uses a naïve shuffling algorithm which tends to do things like that, instead of a Fisher-Yates algorithm. Too many shuffle functions are bad for just this reason.

Why Does Anyone Think Michael Bloomberg Would Beat Donald Trump?

No one really thinks that. But they do think Bloomberg might take away lots of votes from Bernie when Bloomberg runs as third-party candidate in the general. The DNC has plans to do what Perot did for Bill Clinton in 1992, except the beneficiary will be Donald Trump.

If you think about it, this is the only reason Bloomberg’s candidacy makes sense. He’s a guided missile aimed at Bernie possibly winning the nomination. The DNC would much rather lose the presidency than have Sanders win the general. Much rather.

strongly, strongly believe that there is a Changing Places style bet that has been made at some Davos sex party that the poor can be talked into eating bug https://t.co/LQ3hqjrsIb

— pronoun user (@AliceAvizandum) January 23, 2020

Nah, this is (probably) not literally about eating bugs, though the plutes would be happy enough if you did that. It’s to force the choice to eating mostly plants and worse garbage foods (seed oils, etc.) so the rich can keep the resources they want — access to meat, cheese, eggs, the like, as climate change worsens.

So much of what passes for progressivism now seems to be about forcing people to put up with infantile temper tantrums and to pretend that they’re actually exquisitely crafted logical arguments.

Over time, this will destroy women’s sports. But that’s modern feminism for you — hurting most people to help a few. In most cases these days, it’s harming everyone to help a few rich white women. In the trans ideology case it’s a little different but still no better at all.