There has never been a sitcom or sitcom-like show that I’ve enjoyed watching. I guess that format is just not for me.

Something about sitcoms just seem like too much nothing. The only one I didn’t hate was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, because that show kind of reveled in its artificiality.

What is something small that you have achieved in life that you wouldn't put on your resumé but that you are extremely proud of?

— Olivia Solon (@oliviasolon) April 21, 2020

This occurred after being frustrated by the lack of education in my eleventh grade AP English class and multiple conflicts with the teacher. One day, I stood up in the middle of class and said, “You’re not qualified to teach me anything.”

Yes, I was an enormous jerk, but I am also proud of myself.

Later on after that class, a girl who I thought disliked me came up to me and told me she was glad I did that as she was just as disappointed as I was and that she wished she had the guts to do the same.

Perhaps not the best approach but you have no idea how frustrated and done I was with entire sham.

It has been dispiriting to see computers get more difficult to use.

Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, “User Friendliness”, is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion. On comparatively new platforms, I.E. smartphones, it’s inevitable: the input mechanisms and interactions with the display are so different from desktop computers that new paradigms are warranted.

Worryingly, these paradigms have begun spreading to the desktop, where keyboards for fast typing and pixel-precision mice effectively render them pointless. Coupled with the flat design trend, UI elements are increasingly growing both bigger and yet somehow harder to locate and tell apart from non-interactive decorations and content.

I wonder if part of the impetus to make computers hard to use is to push people to shitty smartphone experiences? That was explicitly the goal of Microsoft’s “Metro” disaster, so that’s quite likely.

Overall, designers of desktop applications seem to have abandoned the fact that a desktop computer is capable of displaying several applications and windows at the same time and that many users are accustomed to this. Instead, we’re increasingly treated to small-screen, single-app paradigms copied from smartphones. That’s a turn for the worse in its own right, but perhaps more troubling and annoying is the recurring sidestepping from the tried and true UI design that is so ingrained in many users it’s practically muscle memory by now.

This is something I’ve discussed with my partner. Even if you’ve actually found a better user interface or paradigm, forcing hundreds of millions of users to change their workflow and to learn new approaches wastes hundreds of billions of person-hours. So it must be really, really great to warrant such a change. In almost all cases this is not worth it especially considering that the new UIs are almost always far worse than the old ones.

Have there been any other industries that have deliberately destroyed so much time and value as this one? I want to understand more about what drives this.

This made me laugh:

And what it makes it even funnier is that the economic left isn’t even correct about the “uses” for that money because, again, they don’t understand how complex dynamic systems work, how money works or where it comes from, or follow-on and stimulus effects.

Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free.

That is actually a really good sign. If this holds, and the vast majority of those people never develop symptoms, it means we can treat this pandemic much differently than we have been doing.

However, some confounders: Navy personnel tend to be much fitter and healthier than the average same-age population, and to not have chronic conditions. This also will matter a lot, I suspect. It’s not enough to hang any hope on, but bears watching.

The darkness and chaos of Billie Eilish’s music, and that it is so very popular with the youngest demographic, presages major political changes as this cohort matures.

Especially now, after the pandemic and the economic destruction it will cause.

Music like Billie Eilish’s back when I was her age was called “industrial” and it wasn’t all that popular in comparison to hiphop and lighter fare. It couldn’t have been; those were optimistic times and even much of the “dark” music wasn’t very, in retrospect. A lot of it sounds comical today. Anyway, the only young people who liked industrial music then were fringe rejects — like me and my friends. Now something much darker, that scrapes the underbelly of human existence, is the mainstream and Billie Eilish its most sinister specimen. This is why.

I’m not a big fan of historical determinist literature like “The Fourth Turning” that are often touted by futurists. But a valid point that books like that make is that generations are shaped by the historical circumstances they have experienced. We’ve had a generation that has been shaped by terrorism, endless foreign wars in the Middle East, blatant government corruption, decreasing living standards, a financial panic that devastated the global economy, staggering levels of inequality, unaffordable housing and rampant homelessness, and now a global economic depression caused by a pandemic worsened by forty years of anti-government neoliberalism. They are angry and desperate. They’ve seen the world disintegrate in front of their eyes. They’ve endured extreme suffering. Their hopes and dreams have been dashed forever. There’s no way they are going to vote for the status quo when they gain the reins of power (assuming voting is allowed, however, see below).

The pandemic will only heighten this, accelerate it, and the generation who obsesses over Billie Eilish music will destroy the status quo or be destroyed by it in their quest for survival. Easy to predict.