Month: August 2020

Short Memories

Chill Uncategorized

BBSes are very much social media, and have been around in general use since the early 1980s. UseNet has been around since 1980. Millions of us used these social media technologies during the 1980s and 1990s.

Six Degrees came out in 1997, 23 years ago. LiveJournal started in 1999, 21 years ago.

Social media did not start with MySpace, Facebook or Twitter.

Bug Out

Chill Regular-ass Post

No one is ready for what’s coming because it hasn’t happened in more than 80 years — and most people don’t read history. My only wish is that we’d emigrated a long time ago to somewhere more sane.

Boom Bloom

Chill Uncategorized

Yeah. When I was in the army, I got to help part of a Special Forces team set off C4 charges on the range. Even just a few pounds of C4 rocked my entire body and shook the ground like an earthquake. And I was behind an earthen berm about seven feet thick!

Movie explosions are completely unrepresentative. A real explosion is shockingly violent. Just a whole different thing altogether.

Surveil Fail

Chill Regular-ass Post

People care far more about image than substance. Obama presided over the largest decrease in African-American wealth in modern history. He also vastly increased the scope and scale of the surveillance state and drone warfare. He also gave banskters, crooks, and criminals permission to loot the economy and did nothing to check this at all — in fact, he encouraged it.

Obama was a failure of a president, who, though not wholly terrible, made America worse and allowed others free rein to do the same.

Ship It

Chill Regular-ass Post

Yes. Give me a trillion dollars and a great staff, I could organize to build a starship that’d make it to the nearest star in a few hundreds years — a generation ship, of course.

But everyone would be dead, because I don’t think even a trillion dollars would be enough to figure out how to create a self-sustaining ecology resilient enough to maintain the hundreds of people on that ship.

Jump in the Pool

Chill Uncategorized

I think one of the reasons dating has become so fraught and so many more innocuous behaviors are viewed as harassment is there are many, many fewer high-quality guys on the market lately and, largely, women control dating in most practical ways.

So it’s now tailored to suppress\weed out low-quality potential mates with minimum possible effort.

This makes total sense! I am not even criticizing women for it. The pool of men they want to date (which is very different than the pool of available men) is bad (from their perspective) and shrinking all the time.

Of course they want to use whatever leverage they can find to make sure hobo Kid Rock doesn’t get up in their face. When you understand the incentives, the choices made seem more sensible.

FS

Chill Uncategorized

The problem I have with Slack is that it’s a product “designed” for what MBAs like, rather than a product for what working people actually need.

It’s MBA-centric because it:

  • Expects immediate response
  • Requires excessive chattiness by its design
  • Prioritizes “presence” over achievements
  • Need chumminess to really work
  • Is like having 30 or 40 email inboxes instead of just one
  • Is about managing impressions rather than getting shit done

Fuck Slack.

Morality

Chill Uncategorized

This is liberal religion. It goes along with their prudishness, or that’s the well from which this weird moralizing springs. They really believe that “if it’s fun, it must spread the virus.” This is why all the shit-for-brains whining about people being outside without masks and the beach photos and the like.

The virus has no morality, though. It just is.