Call Out

Who’s on first?

This reminds me of when I’m on calls with customers. Where I work now, I do many, many things. Too many, but it’s a small company. What can make it challenging is that we serve extremely large enterprise customers, mostly1. That creates weird imbalances.

Often, I’ll be on calls alone where the customer has 12+ people. And it’s funny when they don’t realize that I’m doing the role of those dozen or more people on the other side.

They’ll be like, “Is the compliance person here from the vendor?”

And I’ll say, “I’m here, on the call.”

And then someone from the customer will say, “Is the security lead here?”

“Right here,” I’ll chime in.

“Is the technical architect here?”

“Also here,” I’ll offer. At that point I’ll usually cut in and say that I’m the one on the call doing all the roles they had listed and I’m the only one who will be there.

It’s always funny.

  1. Trust me, you’ve heard of nearly all of our customers.

Spector

Do men inspect every girl they see?

“Inspect?” What is this shit?

Yes, I build a complete 3-D mental model of every girl that comes within sight range. I run sims of every aspect of her physique and likely personality and spend 75,000 years exploring them until the perfect scenario emerges. I have millions of mental virtual machines alone devoted to this.

Reality is that I barely notice anyone I see. Most men are like that most of the time. We aren’t some girl-hunting cyborgs.

Jesus Christ.

You don’t have to swallow frogs. Klein and Coates show that if you don’t know what your core beliefs are, you’re going to get played. “But pundits rarely shape politics.” LOLWUT?

The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months.

Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol.

How has mathematics gotten so abstract?

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name.

Trump Is Shutting Down the War on Cancer. Americaโ€™s cancer research system, which has helped save millions of lives, is under threat in one of its most productive moments. Fully fucking moronic beyond any words.

Is This the End of the Dictionary?

Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism.

Trump Has No Mandate to Destroy America.

Golden retriever boyfriends and ick lists: gen Zโ€™s dating rules are making them โ€˜constantly disappointed.โ€™

Funds Shifted To Develop New LC-130J โ€œSki Birdโ€ Polar Airlifters.

A Memo To Corporate America: How To Stop Being Cartoon Villains.

Getting What

That’s often true. I got with way, way more women when I was appreciably a jerk and let my more right-wing tendencies be vocalized. It wasn’t even close.

Women might claim they don’t like jerks. Whatever. The reality is that most of them do, or at least it’s true that they mistake jerkitude for confidence so often that the difference is immaterial. And most feminists are the, “Feminism for thee but not for me” types. These days, nearly all.

Not all women (heh), to be clear, on any of this. But a very large majority.

Overwhelm

I don’t think Europe or really anyone else has an answer for their societies being invaded and overwhelmed by third world immigration waves (largely Islamic) with values averse to Western culture.

This will destroy the societies they invade, of course. And I think Western civilization is worth saving. Both for selfish reasons and because it’s a damn sight better than scrabbling around in the dirt with sticks that Islamic culture will lead to for the foreseeable future if allowed to fester.

Fascism doesn’t work but liberalism also does not work. It invites the infection in. So…what now?

Hiring only senior engineers is killing companies.

A blue jay and a green jay mated, researchers say. Their offspring is a scientific marvel.

FAA decides it trusts Boeing enough to certify the safety of its own planes again. I’m sure that will end well.

How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition.

The โ€œLock-in Effectโ€ and Mortgage Rates: Update on Unwinding a Phenomenon that Wrecked the Housing Market.

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped.

Correctness Isnโ€™t Competence.

The death of the corporate job.

A world with two predatory superpowers. Nations must work out how to contend with Trumpโ€™s America and China.

The Russian spy ship stalking Europeโ€™s subsea cables.

Boeing Has Started Working on a 737 MAX Replacement.

Hamas

It is amazing to me that millions of liberals worship and have such affection for those who would not hesitate to rape, murder and parade their bodies through the streets if they got the chance.

I think that speaks to something inherently self-hating and self-destructive in the modern liberal project.

Hit

Can being bullied as a kid still affect you as an adult?

Of course. I’m hypervigilant at least in part (probably mostly) due to being bullied.

And migraines don’t run in my family, but I have them. I often wonder if they were induced by frequent head trauma when I was young. There is no way to answer that definitively of course, but I suspect they were caused by external factors rather than being congenital.

Being hit in the head a lot is not good for you.

Patagonian Welsh.

The Long Strange Trip from Silica to Smartphone.

A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans.

Inside the Jaguar Land Rover hack: stalled smart factories, outsourced cybersecurity and supply chain woes.

Angry Tortoise Liquid-Fueled Hypersonic Missile In Development For USAF.

Ukraine Is Now The Strongest Ally Europe Can Rely On. Sad but alas true.

Europeans Privately Tell Russia Theyโ€™re Ready to Down Jets. Time to start shooting.

Costa seeks to bypass Orbรกnโ€™s veto on Ukraineโ€™s EU membership bid.

How to hold Russiaโ€™s propagandists accountable.

Major bank issues warning that thereโ€™s a 93% chance of a recession in the US this year.

For Want of a Ferryman, a Two-Century U.S.-Canada Link Is Severed.