Not a big fan of Less Wrong, but yes to all of this.

And then you run across somebody who tries to tell you, not just that they can’t outguess the stock market, but that you’re not allowed to become good at it either. They claim that nobody is allowed to master the task at which they failed. Your uncle tripled his savings when he bet it all on GOOG, and this person tries to wave it off as luck. Isn’t that like somebody condescendingly explaining why juggling three balls is impossible, after you’ve seen with your own eyes that your uncle can juggle four?

I’ve literally had people tell me what I do in the stock market is “impossible.”

And I look in my bank account and it sure doesn’t seem impossible. And I tell them this. Then they tell me it’s “just luck” and I say, “Twenty plus years of luck seems pretty unlikely.”

People have a very hard time accepting that there is something that you can do easily which they cannot do at all. Which, fine, I will gladly take their money too.

Wireless is a trap.

Agreed. If you can go wired, do so. Wireless, no matter how good, has high latency, very high jitter, is prone to interference and is generally a worse experience.

My co-workers wonder why I never have any trouble with audio or video on my meetings online. It’s because I have a 10gb wired network at home and only use wireless rarely. Wired is still and always will be superior to wireless.

I think what bothers me the most about the liberal idea of relationships today is that they want them all to be a boring contract negotiation between supposedly equal parties. By their definition, every relationship I’ve ever been involved in would have been someone “grooming” me or vice versa. Every single one. Because by their definition, getting to know someone is “grooming” from what I can tell.

To be clear, no one above the age of majority should be dating the underaged and if you are older than 30 dating anyone under 20, that is probably (but not always) a bit weird. What that comedian lately whose name I can’t remember was doing was illegal and morally wrong.

I also obviously really despise how the liberal relationship desired dynamic really hugely infantilizes women — though many women today are perfectly content to be infantilized it appears.

Does any of this appear to anyone to be truly “protection from harm,” as claimed? I can find no signs of that, otherwise the concerns and actions would look much different. Under the modern liberal ideals, dating anyone with more than two year age gap is rape, and dating anyone not of your exact ethnic background is racism. How did this happen? Well, I have some ideas, but am too lazy to post about them now.

There are three really weird ideas that many academics believe that they are kind of forced into by other, equally-wrong bad things academics used to espouse.

The first one of these is that if distributions overlap, then those two distributions are really the same. This is because of the history of racial “science.”

Another is that if something does not have a discrete point at which it occurs — say the fall of Rome — then it isn’t real. Thus, there was no Dark Ages because Rome didn’t really ever fall as any single identifiable event. That’s only one of hundreds of examples. Utterly absurd but has to do with relativism that has infected the academy beyond all reason.

The third (what I call the Cosma Shalizi fallacy) is that if something isn’t discretely localizable in space, then it also isn’t real and can’t be generalized about. This is used in many areas, such as IQ, against the idea of personality types, etc. Also clearly wrong.

Once you see these ideologies revealed, you can see how ridiculous they sound. But now they are just accepted “truths” in most of academia.

It’s interesting that having nice arms is what we take as a sign of being strong, when in reality a solid core is actually what makes you beastly. It wasn’t until I strengthened my core significantly that I could bench 200 pounds. My arms didn’t help much with that. My back and abs are absurdly strong now and that’s where the real power comes from.

Women say my arms are pleasing to behold now, and that’s what most people pick up on, but that’s mostly aesthetics. Looks cool, but matters not that much comparatively.

Admittedly, I worked out my arms a lot knowing it was mostly cosmetic but also did a lot of work on my core because I wanted to be truly fucking strong.

Both were worth it, but for different reasons.