I remember when this was “impossible” and “would never happen.”
All the “best” economists said so!
Annoying
Never Start Always Stopping
Drivers Celebrate the Demise of the Most Hated Feature in Their Cars.
Good. That start/stop feature was such an annoying, worthless piece of crap. Especially growing up with cars that often would just shut off randomly, it increased my aggravation level higher beyond all reason whenever I was cursed with a rental that had that execrable feature.
It truly sucked so much to drive one of those cars.
No one will miss it. No one should.
KuberNOTes
Kubernetes is such absolute shit to work with. It’s one of the worst tech products I’ve ever used. It perpetually feels alpha-level. Partially that’s because it’s based on the priorities and “needs” of developers, so it favors extreme complexity over everything else — with security, networking and performance as a very late afterthought. Infrastructure people wouldn’t overlook those items. But the reality is, most devs don’t care about them and don’t understand them. (Many devs think a millisecond is “not much different” than a microsecond, for instance.)
It’s also an example of “new, cool, so must be good.” Tech is much the same as the fashion world. Surprisingly similar, in many ways. Various flashy products emerge, most of which don’t perform in any way as well as the old versions, but offer some cachet, some sense of being “in style” and are adopted by people shilling things or too clueless to actually understand anything other than the latest headlines.
And then MBAs and poor tech leaders pick up on this and force others to adopt that tech, even when it is completely inappropriate to the use case. Kubernetes experienced significant growth and usage from that.
Kubernetes is needed by maybe 0.01% of companies. Everywhere else, it’s an absolute waste and pointless.
Soc Wel
This is not correct. Of all social welfare (including Social Security and Medicare), native-born US citizens receive ~90% of that money. In fact, 60-70% goes to old people in the form of Social Security and Medicare.
Look, I’m against unrestricted immigration too. But it’s best to be accurate about what’s really happening. Fighting clowns with truth is much better long term than pummeling them with lies. Then you too become a clown (see the “Israel did a genocide in Gaza” doofs for examples).
Moon Mushies
Pro tip: There is no nature on the Moon. If anything, we should put some nature there.
Here is who has the authority to extract resources from the Moon: whoever fucking can. The rules you think are rules are only excuses for the weak and the worthless. You deserve what you can make, take, bake, or fake.
Strait Crooked
I truly do not think Trump had no plan about the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. He knew Iran would shut it down, and I believe his inaction there was deliberate.
Trump is not a genius (quite the opposite), but he is strategic, and he is revenge-driven.
The US could’ve easily kept the Strait of Hormuz open by enough prep in advance. Not doing so was a choice. A poor choice, a misguided one, but a choice nonetheless. And the point of that choice was making our allies look bad, embararasing them, and inflicting pain on the rest of the world for their lack of support (or for being rivals, like China) for our actions in Iran.
Remember, the US is energy self-sufficient now1 and we cannot even refine the oil that comes out of Iran. Our oil infra is not set up for it at all.
Though I do not believe attacking Iran as we did was the best choice, I don’t care even a little what happens to the mullahs there, and they were likely getting pretty close to having a working nuclear weapon (unlike Iraq back in 2003). This would’ve been bad for everyone, but far more so for the rest of the Middle East and Europe.
Thus, the closing of the Strait was Trump’s revenge on those who did nothing to assist in an action that directly benefited them — i.e., significantly degrading Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The rest is just noise.
Once Normal
Is it normal to not be offended by men loving my skin tone?
This sort of thing used to be normal — that is, appreciating people for who and what they are. Then a ton of pseudo-feminist PMC liberal women got in a snit and let their intrasexual competition go fucking wild. That led to them declaring everything that was obvious about anyone being “offensive” to admire, especially if it wasn’t you admiring them only.
Then we passed those horrible norms down to Gen Z and mental health-wise screwed them over for life.
Not great.
Cutoff
Woke bullshit almost solely exists in English. We shouldn’t infect anyone else with that nonsense.
Pretending
Canada has no politics of its own. From what I can see, 90% of Canada’s politics is either people being angry that they aren’t Americans (Ian Welsh et al.), or angry because they are too much like America and don’t want to be.
The other 10% is just people upset because they are so close to America, but falling drastically behind due to self-caused issues. Canada is a pretend country that can’t defend itself and is rapidly self-destructing.
Malefic
Is that first tweet serious? Because as Wil points out, all three bio men are wearing male racing gear.
I mean, come on. What the fuck.
Cooking Class
To be fair to Rebecca, she’s tenth-tier now, but was not then; back in the day, she was quite popular and respected.
Elevatorgate ended that, though. Her incessant petulant whining about something rather harmless (though admittedly tone-deaf) was the first nail in the coffin of the New Atheist movement. No one wants to be around prudish humorless scolds, so from that the movement began to dissolve.
She was not wholly responsible, of course. But once it began treating men as default rapists (as was the custom then, which continues to this day), it was, as they say, cooked.
EV Inde
American auto companies killing their EVs and Americans not embracing EVs is fucking insane. Just a huge idiotic self-own. No matter what doofish decisions are made now, the simple fact is — despite the screechers on the left and the right — that electric vehicles are the future. The rights’s absolutely moronic “batteries, solar and wind are gay” is just as dumb as the left’s most braindead beliefs, and probably more consequential.
And part of why EVs are inevitable is because they mean total energy independence from Gulf states and other places we’d prefer not be sending truckloads of money to as well as relying on for basic operations.
Frens
You Have Misunderstood Friendship.
The idea that people should simply exclude half the human population from the pool of potential friends is extraordinary to me. If you genuinely cannot fathom why anyone would ever have a friend of the opposite sex, I would suggest that you cannot really fathom friendship at all.
I know that one has been in my “Links” posts, but wanted to say a little bit about this. I also find it nearly-unutterably idiotic the idea that men and women cannot be friends. I’m extremely grateful for my women friends. I am not “orbiting” them (whatever that means); they are not orbiting me. We hang out. We do fun things. We watch movies. We share thoughts, ideas, and advice. We laugh. We visit museums. We go to restaurants. Just like male friends (though most of my friends are in fact women).
The fear beneath the dogmatic claim that heterosexual men and women cannot be friends is, of course, that friendship might lead to romantic or sexual attraction, with all the complications that could follow, particularly if one or both people are already in relationships. But this concern reflects a curiously immature understanding of human relationships. Mature human beings generally move through the world encountering many attractive people while simply not acting on that fact. Attraction does not compel any action and, in partnered adults with rudimentary impulse control, it generally functions as an observation that passes through the mind and passes out again.
Exactly. I find all my women friends beautiful in different ways. That does not mean we have to sleep together. Anyway, why in hell would I want to hang out with someone of either gender I did not find attractive or interesting in some way? Sounds stupid, like something a clown would do. And I’ve spent my life attempting to avoid clownish shit.
Men who cannot be friends with women and vice versa are intellectually stunted and not full human beings. Simple as that.
Cuts
The economist idea that AI is not eliminating jobs is ludicrous. Of course it is. The best models now can do about 95% of 10% people’s jobs already. All white collar, of course. In a few years, it’ll be 40% of white collar jobs.
That MBAs won’t cut jobs like Freddy Kruger slicing up people is fucking absurd. Of course they are and will.
DA Factor
This clownery is just someone who has a bullshit job and doesn’t know how to use the tools.
AI can be extremely useful — if you work with it correctly. For instance, today, using something I’d already developed in ChatGPT, I fed a questionnaire a company sent in (for an RFP) to my custom ChatGPT project. The normal time it would’ve taken me to complete a long questionnaire like this is a couple of hours.
Including the time it took me to verify it and tweak it after, it took five minutes. AI saved me one hour and 55 minutes, and produced a better result than I probably would have.
Like any tool, AI does not work if you don’t use it correctly. If you use a slide rule as a rock hammer, you’re gonna have a bad time. Why can’t people get that through their heads?
Another example. The other day, I ran a fairly complex financial analysis in ChatGPT. If I’d done it myself it would’ve taken 4-6 hours.
ChatGPT completed it (fully correctly, with some small tweaks) in 30 minutes. It also resulted in us saving about $5,000 a month in Azure costs. Real money, not whatever pretend shit the Twitter doof is going on about.
If you use the tool not like a damn clown, it can make you vastly more productive. But the crucial part is: do not be a huge fucking clown. And that’s where most people fail.