Month: September 2020

The Z Solution

Chill Uncategorized

Something I’ve only recently figured out about experts: they know extremely specific information about their own field relatively well, but due to how our educational system works, they aren’t able to generalize this knowledge at all outside of its tiny application area. Thus, they can’t understand it or use it removed from that context and when they stray even a little from the very minute application area for their specific knowledge, what they claim (again, even in their own field) is often wildly incorrect or absurd.

That means that people like Zeynep Tufukci can beat the pants off of experts even in fields that she is not a true expert in, because outside of the restricted areas of very circumscribed scenarios the so-called expert is no better than anyone else — even in areas nominally in the expert’s own field.

Big Whinedown

Chill Uncategorized

This would probably never happen in the US so it’s hardly worth worrying about — but I’d be for it (though it needs to be a bit higher) the moment it’s also paired with a ban on the Fat Acceptance movement and on the sale of harmful ultra-processed factory foods. Banning higher speeds would save what, a few thousand, if that, a year? Banning FA and ultra-processed foods would probably save 100,000+ a year over time in the US alone.

Now that’d cause some big whining! I love that idea, pairing them that way.

Don’t Really Want That

Chill Regular-ass Post

While I agree that “Reply Guys” are to some extent a real thing, most of it is just illustrating the fact that the dictum that “treat a woman just like you’d treat another man” is not really what women want, no matter how much they claim that to be the case. Or how much feminists believe that should be done.

Because most “reply guys” interact in a very similar way to how men interact with other men.

Jean B Knew What Was Up

Chill Regular-ass Post

“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies – the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals – are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”

-Jean Baudrillard in Impossible Exchange

Effic

Chill Uncategorized

Exactly. For example, even with supposed “inefficient” green power technology, when you take the externalities of fossil fuels into account it turns out green tech is always either a bit better or hugely better than fossil fuels.

There are hundreds of examples like this, by the way! Most of the time, as James points out, efficiency is traded off so we can make life worse for 90%+ of people.

Not VCR

Chill Uncategorized

Read the whole thread. This is happening all over the country.

As I said months ago, you don’t put an economy on pause. It just does not fucking work like that. For a little while, if you do it just right, you can sort of achieve something like it, though it’s just really just a slowing of the deterioration.

But we didn’t do any of that, really, and so now we will be dealing with our failure and inaction for decades.

Why anyone thinks that economy can be “paused” like a VCR tape from 1987 I have not the first idea. Our education system is utter garbage.

Not So Angelic

Chill Regular-ass Post

I watched Charlie’s Angels. It was ok. Not bad, not great. Too many tonal shifts — it shifts more than an F1 driver at the 1969 24 Hours of Le Mans. It had no consistency at all in approach or feel. It was like it was directed by two very different people. This is often a sign of studio interference, but who knows what was the case here.

The best line, though, was by Kristen Stewart as Sabina.

Sabina: There was a gunfight at my wedding.

Jane: Wait, you’re married?

Sabina: No. I was the better shot.

The movie is some weird mix of the Nathan Lane and Robin Williams version of La Cage Aux Folles and 1960s James Bond. I think that could work, but in this case it just did not. That said, there were a few really great and funny scenes in the movie.

The most unrealistic part of the film was how the MIT grad who had never experienced real violence is mostly unaffected by it. People who’ve not been exposed to that side of life don’t just adapt so readily.

Don’t recommend it, unless someone makes a highlight reel of the 15 good minutes for you.