Month: November 2024

Reconfirm

Chill Clowns, Politics

Trump didn’t win just because of white voters. He didn’t win because all the rich people voted for him, he won because the working class shifted toward him. Trump won because an incredibly diverse electorate voted for him.

Yep. Many liberals are now completely lying about this, but it’s true. I saw Heather Cox Richardson just today completely making up false data and using utterly-transparent fabrications to justify why the win was all the fault of straight white men. The reality, though, is that only a few small demographics shifted away from Trump. Every other American group went Trump-ward — including black men, Native Americans and most of all, Latinos.

The liberal deniers of this sound just as clown-ass as the election-denying MAGA types. And will be even less effective. And I say this as someone who believes that Trump 2 will bring about the most disastrous era this country has seen since the Civil War. It’s just that I prefer to deal with the world as it is — uncomfortable facts and all — rather than whip up some absolute nonsense to reinforce my worldview.

You don’t win that way. And you aren’t right, which is even more important to me personally to be completely honest.

Chill Links

James Webb Space Telescope Finds Evidence for Alternate Theory of Gravity.

Astronomers discover two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens.

Trump transition team compiling list of current and former U.S. military officers for possible courts-martial.

They’re going to waste our collective time to accomplish nothing. Such a great comment.

Female competition stress linked to disordered eating across the lifespan.

The reason I’m writing this is to shoot holes in the “If you haven’t done anything wrong, don’t worry” story. That story is one of the stupidest fucking things I’ve ever heard. And that says a lot, as I grew up in rural North Florida.

Russia’s Battering Ram Strategy and It’s Mission in the Donbas: Is Russia Reviving Its Operational Art?

Probability Is Not A Substitute For Reasoning.

Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase “due to inflation,” despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise.

Finding the money to make Europe great again.

Degrees of Degrees

Chill Tech

Please stop lying to people about Cybersecurity being in high demand and graduates getting jobs.

This high demand is only true for people with a lot of experience. For newbies, there is no demand. The reason is that you have to have seen a lot of things to be any good at cybersecurity, and someone with only a college degree hasn’t seen and doesn’t know shit.

I’m not even a cybersecurity specialist, but I do have 20+ years experience in my field. And with that knowledge I can run rings around the new-grad cybersecurity people without even the least little effort. IMO no one should be allowed to go into cybersecurity without at least 10 and preferably 15 years of experience in IT Operations and/or programming.

Not That High

Chill Politics

The Covid pandemic is starting to get so far behind us now that I occasionally meet or see a non-political Gen Zer who was young enough when it began to view it as, “Something that adults used to ruin my high school life completely for no real reason.” There is a lot of very deep, raw anger and resentment there. A ton.

Agree with them or disagree with them1, which way do you think those people are more likely to vote when they do pick up some politics?

Now look at the results.

  1. And I agree, by the way.

Conditional Collapse

Chill War

Ian Welsh and those types have constantly claimed ridiculous stuff about the war in Ukraine like, “Russia could win in a week if it really tried!”

No. Just no. That’s not how wars work. Especially not that kind of war. That’s a fundamentally ignorant take on the nature of war in general and what is occurring in the region. Russia possibly could have won quickly if they’d not completely misunderstood what sort of conflict they were getting into.

However, no country — not even as one as callous about human life as Russia — tolerates 1,000-2,000 KIA a day for months and years if they could just defeat the enemy if “they really tried.”

Ian Welsh just hates the West and the United States in particular and loves Putin. Everything else he writes and believes springs from that poisoned well. And he understands warfare about as well as a turtle understands astrophysics.

Chill Links

The most remarkable thing about wood frogs happens not in the summer when they transform from tadpoles to frogs, but in the winter when they hibernate.

As you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.

The sad decline of on-the-job-training.

If you haven’t been car shopping in a while, brace yourself.

‘No Place For Discontent’: A History Of The Family Dinner In America.

Yes, stocks are crazy expensive right now. These 5 charts show just how extreme valuations have become.

Expect the Worst From Russia and North Korea.

Meteorite 200 times larger than one that killed dinosaurs reset early life.

Getting as active as the top 25% of the US population could extend your life by at least five years, according to a new study published Thursday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine

Beast Mode

Chill Clowns

It’s weird how Ian Welsh and other clowns like to pretend that being beastly strong gives you no advantages at all. Like, I can do tons of things I just could not do before.

And not even all large-scale ones. For instance, I can type for much longer now without my fingers getting tired. And that’s just one of hundreds of noticeable changes.

The left is so weird about stuff like that.

Intrasex

Chill Regular-ass Post

I was considering writing something similar a while ago (note: I did not and in fact cannot read the article). I believe the denial of female intrasexual competition was part and parcel of feminism transitioning from a movement about equality to celebrating female ascendance — while simultaneously attempting to dodge all responsibility and accountability that should ride along with power. In this transition, all negative female qualities were minimized and/or denied. Anyone who did not play along was severely punished with cancellation and disapprobation.

Also, there was the attempt to claim that women and men are exactly the same in every way. And to believe that, of course, you have to deny a lot of obvious evidence. For sure, there is male intrasexual competition. But it truly pales in comparison to the female variant which is vicious, cruel and lifelong (males usually age out of this mostly in their late teens and early 20s).

Women, being so steeped in this intrasexual competition, often cannot believe that most men just do not really experience it and if they do, it’s minimal. But ladies, it’s true. In that way being a man is definitely better. All that toxicity is just not something we have to worry about.

(And 99.9999% of the “concern” about age gap relationships — especially when the woman is younger — is actually well-disguised female intrasexual competition manifesting.)

Priorities and Cost

Chill Tech

Is it normal for admins to never follow up with users?

The service desk/help desk should be handling contact with users, especially in large orgs. This is for a variety of reasons, among them that it’s simply not time- or cost-efficient to have those making high salaries and with more important business priorities spending an hour helping a user find their start menu or use Excel.

In addition, once the users have the contact info of someone like me they start reaching out directly about issues like the above. It’s insane for the business to spend what I make an hour to help Jen from Accounting figure out how to format a PowerPoint slide.

For instance, a project I’m working on now matters a whole lot to our existing and our potential large enterprise customers. If I complete the project (which I will, I fucking rule) it will mean millions of dollars in potential revenue is easier to acquire and to retain.

Now, all that said, how does me spending two hours on the phone helping someone learn to bold items in Word make any kind of sense?

Chill Links

The brain summons deep sleep for healing from life-threatening injury.

Analysis of the economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe.

The treaty between Russia and North Korea signals a new era on 2 continents.

Ukraine Shows U.S. How To Beat China In Drone Battery Wars.

The New Driving Force of Identity Politics Is Class, Not Race. Which is actually a good thing.

Did the Courts Just Break NEPA?

The German Curse.

The HR-ification of the Democratic Party. The party of norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule following, language policing, and compliance.

Get Ready for Higher Food Prices. Trump vowed to lower food prices. His policies will almost certainly do the opposite.

F-15E Pilot Recounts Having To Switch To Guns After Missiles Ran Dry During Iranian Drone Barrage.