The Differences Between the Moderna and Pfizer Vaccines Are Starting to Matter.

That’s the reason I wanted (and got) the Moderna vaccine. I knew it’d be more effective. Those virology textbooks paid off. They aren’t really the same vaxes, and not just because of dosage.

See here for more info.

Everyone claims that the Moderna and the Pfizer have the same coding. But they do not. The proof is above.

Kind of bizarre to think Elon Musk is a “fraud” at this point. An increasing number of Musk projects are proving themselves to be very real and very transformative. https://t.co/k2Yh6jG3s9

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) September 20, 2021

It is weird. Yeah, some of the stuff he does and his companies do is complete BS. But here’s something to think about: that’s true of anyone who has done anything major and worthwhile.

Really, liberals are mostly angry at Musk because his companies do big, hard things in the physical world, which they see as déclassé and dishonorable. Most of them are highly concerned with using the right words in the proper places and thus anyone who builds a big fucking rocket and does cool, useful shit with it is seen as no better than the (from their view) nasty, uneducated auto mechanic who works on their car.

The same for anyone who builds up an actual car company. Musk has done both.

It’s time to depose the word-slingers and let the builders and makers take over. Hopefully, though, we could do it with more government works and less Musk. He is not ideal, I’ll admit. But his actual faults are not why most liberals despise him, unfortunately. The antipathy truly does emerge from the fact that he does world-expanding hard shit that changes the shape of human possibility. And for that, in their minds, he must be destroyed.

L.A. Affairs: Why I stood him up on our very first date.

This reminds me of all the social stuff that trips geeks and nerd types up (hello, this used to be me!). Everyone knows where stuff like buying drinks for a woman in a bar is leading, but at the same time everyone must pretend like they do not know. The minute you acknowledge that, on either side, you’ve lost! This is very hard for geeks and nerds because oftentimes they do truly just want to buy drinks for a woman at a bar, with no ulterior motive, and this is absolutely 100% impossible for normals to understand. On the other hand if a geek is straightforward about it and says, “I am buying you drinks because I want to take you home and have sex with you,” which everyone knows is what is happening (including the woman in question, no matter if she plays innocent), then that makes them horribly creepy and predatory.

This stuff is not taught anywhere and if you are not a natural at it, it takes a very long time to learn. I don’t generally pick up women at bars, but I did eventually learn this stuff through trial and much error. Those who are naturals at it assume everyone is just born that way (see Elevatorgate from years ago) like they were — when nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s a game I don’t like playing, but at least I know how to play. Many people truly do not and that’s seen as them just being assholes. A lot of the time, though, they just do not have the skills at all.

I think I’ve figured out where liberals are coming from with their over-broad definition of what constitutes “harassment” now. And it amounts to this: if it inconveniences capital, or causes a person to be unpredictable to the algorithm or the system, it’s harassment. This centers the interests of capital and the cult of productivity over any concerns about love or partners actually being good for one another or even any matters of deep love and affection. Capital does not care about love or affection; capital cares about predictability, compliance and control.

I know, I know, it seems obvious when you state it like that but I hadn’t quite connected all the threads that way until now, even though I had discussed many parts separately before.

Since liberals are just tools of capital, they must do nothing but parrot its priorities and demands. Thus doing anything but dating your “appropriate” algorithmic choice is harassment because it is illegible to the interests of capital.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Y'ever get struck by how much of "the tech sector" is built around treating general purpose home computing as a mistake?

I'm serious. From closed app stores to restricting screenshots while streaming to cloud based storage & subscription software.

— Clarissa Littler (@ClarissaAdjoint) September 17, 2021

It has been a tragedy, but a predictable one. Powerful corporations and the media (in the most general sense) have always despised general purpose computers and have been on a decades-long campaign to root them out. Now they have almost succeeded.

A large part of this has been by a very effective campaign to snooker the rubes by claiming it’s all been done for “security.” Even some of my very smart friends have fallen for this flimflam. (Sorry, friends, but if you believe they need to remove the ability to install what you like has anything to do with “security,” this is only true in the sense that they want to make the computer secure from you, the user.)

There was a brief time — maybe 15 years — when information became more widely available, computers were powerful and free of tampering and censorship, and there was no limit on the possibilities of what one could do with them. That world is gone now and not coming back. The great project of the last decade and now this one too is stuffing the information genie back in the bottle, and then burying the bottle under two miles of rubble.

Saying "pregnant people" functions for the cultural left as saying “the election was stolen” does for the cultural right: the willingness to publicly aver such utter bullshit represents a “costly signal” as to your commitment to a tribal political identity https://t.co/Xx10e4oIgp

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) September 18, 2021

I do think the trans movement as it is now is largely harmful to women, and is getting worse all the time. Luckily, most people will rightly reject this nonsense just as they reject biological males dominating women’s sports.