It is fascinating how so many people get so many things exactly wrong. Hint: shooting missiles at civilian ships is classified as a war crime.

And shooting retreating uniformed combatants is very much not a war crime. If I were a commander, I’d shoot anyone — retreating or not — who did not surrender to me. I’d gladly and without conscience shoot any enemy right in the back unless they were offering legal surrender. It’s the right thing to do. Those retreating today will be butchering you tomorrow. War is a brutal business. It never will be anything other.

The opinion of the average person on anything is worth about as much as a donkey fart.

I’m not woke or anti-woke. I’m not left or right. I’m not liberal or illiberal. None of those categories matter any longer.

I’m anti-extinction. And what this means is that we must engage in a bold, pointless quest that will take a billion years. It’s conquer the galaxy or die. This is not a lark or a joke. Evidence suggests this sort of endeavor is the only thing that keeps humans going. Get started, or die. It’s our choice.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

That’s it exactly. Especially if you’ve worked helpdesk or have any user contact, you are exposed to the nadir of user and general stupidity. And it often causes you tons of extra pointless effort. On Reddit, I saw someone who had to fly 21 hours each way to press a power button much like above. That kind of crap makes you jaded.

I will never understand heterosexual dating culture’s obsession with height. Just get a footstool!

It’s not hetero dating culture, it’s women who are obsessed with height. I don’t understand it either. Of course not all women, but of those obsessed with height, it’s 99% women. It’s some sort of sickness. I don’t think this person is correct to blame the patriarchy, though. That’s just a bizarro copout.

Even if a man towers over you it doesn’t mean he will protect you. Since the moment a guy sprouts overnight in high school and becomes prom king (Zac Efron’s height is 173cm by the way), they know how big this advantage is, and it’s reinforced constantly. This knowledge, and huge leg-up in dating, means a lot of the men being thirsted at have never really had to try.

Yep. The same is true of beautiful women. Many have terrible personalities and no achievements because they’ve never had to actually work hard for anything. Again, not all beautiful women. But far more than average or ugly women! Don’t read me wrong here. I have several very beautiful women friends (including my partner) who are simply lovely, hard-working, empathetic human beings (but that’s because that’s the only type of people I want to be around). But if you’re a gorgeous woman you can coast through life so much more easily. Many do — and end up as shit humans because of it. The same is true of tall men, to a lesser extent.

Anyway, I’ve beaten the absolute hell out of several guys much taller than me who attacked me (and were bullying me). That’s because I actually had to learn how to fight and couldn’t rely on my height alone to intimidate people. So there’s that.

I’m only relaxed when I’m hypervigilant. And I’m only happy when I’m mildly grumpy. Daryl Dixon, il est moi.

Did you hear? Waffle House has a new policy. You don’t have to be drunk to come in after midnight!

But you still have to know how to fight.

A woman speaking German with a French accent is much cuter than I would’ve thought.

I’ll never not be confused about how so many women now think it’s empowering to have abandoned a feminism of freedom and that bending the knee to the HR department is the way forward. That’s just embarrassing, among many other bad things.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Also, been there, done that:

A few years ago, I worked at a very small software vendor. We provided one software application for insurance claims. It was not complex and used nothing at all unusual. A web server and working DNS is all it took to get it going.

Nevertheless, I was often off the books tasked with fixing entire large company’s networking environments, DNS, Active Directory, virtualization environments and Citrix to make our small application work. And I know most of you who read this are not in IT, so this would be like having a plumber come around to fix a faucet and then have them do your interior decorating, tutor your kids on algebra, replace your alternator in your Buick, and also re-do your landscaping. It’s insane.

I did all this so our application could have an environment that worked well enough to allow it to function. Absolutely none of it should’ve been done by me, but many companies had such broke-ass environment that we had no choice (and my boss said to do whatever it took to get the application working, so I did).

One time my boss there asked me, “If they’d had to hire enough people to do what you did for them in their busted environment, how much would it have cost and how many people would it have been?”

I thought about it for a bit and told him — accurately — that it would’ve been 4-5 people and they’d have to pay those people total about $500,000 a year to do what I’d done.

There’s just so much incompetence in every field. It’s a shock anything gets done. But I truly do think a lot of it is ameliorated by people like me, working behind the scenes and off the books, fixing shit.

Rant: “I wasn’t trained on how to do that.”

In my field, other than a few bits of VMWare, I wasn’t trained on a single thing I do or have ever done. Taught myself and figured it all out myself. I’ve never even had a mentor. No one. 99.999% of the things I know in IT has been and will continue to be all my own self-teaching.

However, the younger gens seem to have little to no troubleshooting or self-teaching skills. Learned helplessness, I guess. I’m not totally blaming them — it’s the environment they’ve been stewing in. Autodidacticism or in any way coloring outside the lines is not rewarded for them at all. And everyone responds to the incentives present, so it’s not entirely their fault they can’t figure out a damn thing nor teach themselves how to do something.

But it does make it difficult to give anyone under 35 or so IT projects as they need handholding every tiny little wee baby step. And that gets very tiresome.

If Russia does manage to achieve victory in Ukraine, much of Europe will then be fighting it in Poland and the Baltic states 5-10 years after that. I hope this next point is obvious, but we should not allow that to occur. Mostly, it should be Europe doing that but they seem not to realize what’s about to happen if Ukraine loses.

But they gonna fuck around and find out I guess.

Many people are worried about Canada’s economy in recent months. The country’s real per capita GDP — the most common measure of living standards — has been falling for over a year now.

This is an inevitable consequence of the housing market being so out of whack there. It’s why we reconsidered and decided against emigration. Our standard of living would be in active freefall in Canada.

And it will only get worse unless Canada does something about how much a drag housing is on everything there. I predict they won’t, and it’ll lead to a 20-30% total from-peak decline in per capita GDP over the next decade or so.

The first ten on today’s playlist: