The previous owner of my home replaced the pressure regulator, but just installed it next to the old one. What happened was when certain taps were running together, a water-hammer developed between the pressure regulators and made an unbelievable roar and racket. It sounded like the house was trying to get up and run away.

New CEO --> layoffs ----> line go up ----> ops, not genius after all ----> deploy golden parachute.

Say what you want about the Mormons, but at least they knock on your door during the day.

Eugenics is the single stupidest idea in human history. To advocate for it now is to deny biology and history.

It relies on the same misunderstanding of evolution that underpins ‘great replacement theory’.

You know, it’s perfectly OK to group voters by identity, so long as that identity cannot exclude “Normal” people. Soccer Mom, Six pack Dad, Middle class, working poor, labor, Small Business owner, Rural, Urban, and Suburban are all perfectly fine to promise these groups political power. But you do the exact same thing for queer people or black people and that’s identity politics all of a sudden.

If you invented something unique your first problem is going to be describing it to yourself. You’ll need new nomenclature. The second problem is describing the unique thing to someone else.

One could argue that anything that can be nailed down by language cannot be unique because the metaphors and phrases to describe it preexisted.

Here is the install manual

I’d rather be on the Ukrainian front than any place accurately represented by Blood Meridian.

Russel’s paradox is so wild. Set theory was supposed to unify mathematics and logic into a single coherent system and Russel was like actually, no.

When I finished reading Blood Meridian I said WTF, turned to the first page and read it again.

Like almost any marginalized group, atheists get caricatured by their most vocal members.

I probably would have become atheist a decade sooner if I hadn’t associated it with the logocentric, Western chauvinist, and plain old bigots who first represented atheism to me.

There are plenty of us who aren’t obsessed with religious debates; we don’t hate religious people; and our cultural, political, and philosophical ideas are not frozen in 18^th Century Europe.

This is Spinal Tap (1984)

One of the things not addressed in this interview is how the ideology of libertarianism is central to the transition from markets to fiefdoms. All the big tech bros are huge libertarians and that’s not an accident.

And I do think this is a new phenomena unlike classic capitalism. Marx thought that a post-scarcity society would mean more leisure, he didn’t anticipate that that leisure was just another source of value to exploit. Think of reddit selling it’s “content” to an AI company. That content wasn’t produced by coerced labor paid unfairly, it was produced by voluntary labor paid nothing.

when the courts operate on the basis of “innocent until proven guilty”.

This is a slogan, a hypothetical that applies to a spherical defendant in a vacuum. In over 90% of all US criminal convictions, the prosecution has no burden of proof.

Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don’t know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don’t speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.

If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I’ll give desktop Linux another shot.

This said, I’ve self-hosted on a Debian box for years.

God forbid a Star Wars movie be interesting or play with fan expectation. Trying to please the Star Wars fandom is like a battered woman trying to make sure that dinner is ready and hot when he gets home.

You gotta listen to what you like. Should I not listen to Matisyahu or Mos Def because they’re religious? Should I ditch Nas because of the homophobia or JayZ because of the capitalism?

Jesus Christ if I got strict about misogyny, I’d have to stick to instrumental.

There are no “true” libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.

It’s not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can’t think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who’d rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.

(I’m told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I’m talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)