The first ten on today’s playlist:

My family thinks I am dating under “my league.”

I’ve been on the other side of this. I was dating a really beautiful and gregarious girl from a decently well-off family. And at the time I was an army hard charger with no college education and was definitely more than a little rough around the edges. Her family absolutely despised me because they saw their daughter as way out of my league. By then, though, I was already doing a lot of stock trading and what the family did not know is that I was already pretty loaded for someone only 21 — and very ambitious.

It was this woman that I wrote about earlier.

It turned out that she was terrible and abusive. After me, she ended up with someone she deserved from what I heard, someone who treated her terribly (which is what she seemed to deeply want). Her career also fizzled and she became an obese barely-employed alcoholic completely dependent on her husband.

Meanwhile I continued to get more awesome every day. Love it.

Beneath the Skin of CPI Inflation, December: Not in the Mood to Just Go Away.

So, in other words, don’t believe the “transitory” lies and victory declarations. Inflation is picking up again. Not conspiracy — just data.

Core CPI, month-to-month, accelerated to 0.31% in December from October, the second month in a row of acceleration and fastest increase since September. Annualized, this increase amounts to 3.8%.

But these two commenters said it best, I think:

The narrative that the econs want you to believe is (as usual) the direct opposite of reality. Again, not conspiracy. The data is just right there for anyone to see.

Has been interesting to watch this reverse over the years:

1995: You’re on the internet and talk to people there? And even meet them sometimes? You’re some kind of bad and evil weirdo!

Now: You’re not on the internet and don’t meet people from the internet? You’re some kind of bad and evil weirdo!

Something you realize after living on the planet for a while is that people truly are herd animals and have very little (with rare exception) reflective capacity and don’t really consider anything deeply. When I was young, I thought that most people were more like me than turned out to be true. Most people, though, just go where their friends go and do what their friends do and very little else. That explains phenomena like Nazism and cults more than any other single factor.

Related:

Popular myths about sleep, debunked.

For many people — including me — most of these myth debunkings are in fact myths themselves. Not everyone is the same and nearly none of this applies to me.

For instance, if I can’t fall asleep in five minutes I get up because I know I never will.

How do end users have this kind of time?

I am in this post and I do not like it.

And I have often wondered the same damn thing myself. One of the reasons I believe David Graeber was mostly correct about “bullshit jobs” and their pervasiveness is that I’ve frequently had to deal with users who at most — at very most — do maybe 15 minutes of actual work a week.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Do you feel like you’re being held to a completely different standard than most other roles at your job?

Definitely. I’ve written about this many times before. Sysadmins (and nearby fields) are expected to know not only how to use their own tools, but every application ever written in any OS ever and, relatedly, how to do everyone’s job in the entire company better than they themselves can do it.

It’s in-fucking-sane. But it is very common. Enough that it is nearly ubiquitous.

The reason this occurs is that IT has more generally-competent people than other career paths. In an average company, about 1-2% of people outside of IT can handle complex tasks, deal with abstractions, and follow directions reliably. In IT departments — and especially among sysadmins — these high-level capabilities are found in up to 40% of the population. That’s not being arrogant. That’s just reality — a sysadmin’s whole job is dealing with complex and ever-changing abstractions across many disparate areas, and in a way that no other role really does to any great degree. Thus, IT in general and sysadmins in specific become a dumping ground for tasks too complex for other departments to handle, no matter what they might be.

About the breadth of what’s expected in my field, I’ve designed a new network architecture from scratch, determined why DNS wasn’t working, done troubleshooting on a malfunctioning switch, punched down physical phone lines, created a website and fixed a receipt printer — and that was all on the same fucking day. There is nearly no other job where that breadth and depth of knowledge is required all at once.

Because we do in fact know a lot, people assume we should know absolutely everything and be able to train them in fields and software that they should already be experts in. And then they cry like little babies when we cannot or will not do this.

But at least the pay is good.

What is your IT concept you just cant quite get your head around?

Containerization. For most applications, it just adds excessive complexity for no real purpose and it’s actively harmful to anything performant. Its base concepts just make no sense as they are poor and woefully-misunderstood implementations of superior and better-designed technology.

So it is something that is created in a way that can only be senseless. And so it is.

Living well is a pretty good revenge, I agree. However, seeing your former enemies fail and harm themselves through their own ignorance and incompetence is pretty goddamn fun too.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I Was the Villain in My Relationship.

Nice that she admits it, but if the gender roles were reversed the man would be condemned for eternity for being predatory, exploitative, and generally terrible. However, if a woman pulls this sort of crap it’s usually seen as practical and, as they say, Yassss Queeen!

Now I wonder why that is?

The first ten on today’s playlist:

Why did the body acceptance movement kinda skip over men?

I don’t think the top-rated comment currently is really correct about this. Like most things most people write, it’s a surface-level gloss of an apparent cause but doesn’t really understand any deeper causal factors. Also, it must be noted, the so-called “body acceptance/body positivity” movement morphed into the malignant fat acceptance movement that told people near death from excessive adiposity and who could not walk across a parking lot without stroking out that they were fine as they were. Any other concern was then ignored or discarded altogether.

The deeper reason — at least the top one of a few — that the body acceptance movement became prevalent among women and skipped over men is that women have a lot more intrasexual competition. Thus, women who increasingly could not compete in the arena they’d been given attempted to create a new one where their primary negative trait of unhealthy obesity was de-emphasized.

However, even in its initial form it failed as it misunderstood a few important facets of human nature and what men do and do not find attractive. Also, once the food companies hijacked it and it became the de facto obesity celebration movement it was completely done for.

Too many asides. To get back on track, the body acceptance/fat acceptance movement only cares about women because it was mostly a semi-conscious and hamfisted attempt to eliminate threatening competition from other women. It did not work, and could not have worked due to the fundamental miscomprehensions mentioned above — but that is a story for another day.

One of those most fun parts of leading and mentoring juniors in my field is they do something, say it’s completely finished and then assure you it’s correct. You don’t have time to check it and believe them when they say it’s done and sorted — then you have a flurry of messages Monday morning complaining that it’s not working right.

Welcome to my Monday! I just do not have time to audit every single thing everyone on my team does. But I have to let them do things without me as I also do not have time in my day to do it all.

Dammit.