Annoying

Live Like

Chill Annoying, Political Economy

Even though many US idiots will says it’s “impossible,” we could have good universal health coverage like other developed countries.

When I told a UK friend of mine how health insurance works in the US and how bad it is, she thought I was pulling her leg. She truly believed I was lying and trying to make her laugh or playing a prank (she was not at all familiar with US politics). Then she looked it up and said something like, “People actually live like this?”

And that is the reaction of people from sane countries when told how the US handles health care. People cannot believe it. Because no other developed country does it as crappily as we do.

Acsex

Chill Annoying

Indeed. At least 50% of the “age gap” nonsense is this, as refracted by women’s intrasexual competition.

Start Spiking

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

I am using Windows 11 on my work laptop now as I need to experience what my users experience.

And it is. Fucking. Slow. OMG SO SLOW. Who wrote this, a snail? It’s amazing how absolutely abysmal the experience of using modern software has become.

A Big Fat Lie

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Nearly everyone lies, but fat people lie a whole damn lot on such surveys. I saw one obese woman claiming she’d only eaten 500 calories a day for decades and had lost no weight.

And no matter how obese you are, you’d die after a year or so on that sort of diet. Just not physiologically possible.

Face It

Chill Annoying, Clowns

I broke up with my GF after she got a face tattoo.

Appropriate reaction to any tattoo; if you want to despoil and deface1 yourself, not wanting to be with you is a very appropriate response to that self-destruction.

  1. Pun intended.

Take My Apple-cation

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

Is this serious?

While by no means perfect, Apple’s machines just work, are wicked fast and their laptops last a whole day on battery. Even their high-end machines. And no, I do not mean a whole eight-hour work day. I mean an entire 24 hours. I brought an M2 Macbook Pro to a three-day work conference, used it for hours after the conf each day and didn’t charge it the entire time I was there. Try that with any other machine.

The Macbook Pro might be the only actually-good laptop on the market. It is truly an excellent machine, the exemplar of what a laptop should be. Lenovo, Dell, HP and any other maker now just seems to churn out absolute crap in this category. They appear to have just given up. Using an Apple machine feels great in comparison.

The M-series chips are pretty damn innovative, by the way.

Apple’s products are overpriced only if you don’t care about quality, reliability, supportability, usability, resale value, and not having to fuck around with your machine for hours to get it to do something that Apple ones just do by default. Or in the case of Windows specifically, spending half a day evicting all the surveillance and ad infrastructure — only for it to be reinstalled on the next update.

And Linux — don’t even get me started. Using that as a daily driver is about as smooth as sliding 300 meters on concrete. Clarification: I use Linux all the time. I was working in three different Linux VMs today that I have doing various things on our network. But as my main machine? Hell no. Too much bother and hassle.

As I mentioned, Apple machines are not perfect. Finder is absolutely chock full of bugs, is ridiculously slow, and has not improved at all in more than a decade. Pseudo-security has been ramped up too much — as with most companies — so you have to actively fight your machine to make it do what you want.

But compared to using Linux or Windows? Or a tablet running any OS? It’s not even a choice. Apple is the way to go.

Crawlers

Chill Annoying, Tech

Only people who didn’t know anything about anything thought that was true.

I personally — and I mean with my own funds — could build enough infrastructure to crawl 90%+ of the web every few days and store the metadata. It’s just not that much data. It’d take about $200,000 of gear and connectivity. That’d buy me a dozen petabytes of storage and a couple dozen 10Gb links. And that’s enough. The software is all open source.

Google’s moat has nothing to do with the ability to crawl or digest anything and more to do with their former search algo dominance.

Powerlessness

Chill Annoying

What in the hell are people even talking about a power imbalance when there is an age gap? Like, yeah, I can understand if someone is dating a minor. Definitely power imbalance and should not be done. Fully agreed there. It’s unethical and immoral; there has to be a line somewhere.

But what is this mysterious enormous power that they imagine being older gives you? I’ve seen little to no evidence of it, especially if the younger person is older than 21-22 or so. I’m not in the market, but I’d absolutely date anyone 22 or above if I were. It’s not too likely I’d want to date anyone younger than that but if we got along and we were crazy about each other, why not? Not every relationship should last infinitely (and 95% of them end with break-up, age gap or not).

I think a lot of this “power imbalance” pseudo-concern is from people who know they themselves would attempt to do terrible things to the other person if they thought they could get away with it. And of course a lot of it is about women’s intrasexual competition, which has nothing to do with me. Only about 0.2% of the people complaining about age gaps actually care about protecting anyone from harm. The rest is pure bullshit.

Religiosity

Chill Annoying, Politics

And the funny thing is the pro-immigration and anti-immigration people largely agree on this! That is, even the pro-immigrant side sees immigrants as punishment for alleged past Western sins.

Not very healthy on either side.

Cooling Off

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Oh, fuck you, lady. You can always tell when dumbasses live somewhere that never gets all that hot or humid. And where it cools down at night.

Put her in Florida or Texas or Southern California and she’d be begging for AC. I hate those clowns so much.

Neverest

Chill Annoying

Why do people who aren’t funny and don’t make jokes get offended when it’s observed by others that they aren’t funny? Like, they aren’t even trying to be funny so why do they care?

It’d be like me getting offended if someone tells me I’ve never climbed Everest. I’ve never even tried or wanted to make the attempt. Why would that bug me?