Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Letters and Such

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About once a month, someone will comment here about my use of language or some typo/misspelling I missed. In some cases, I just fix the typo and move on. I post these jeremiads from all sorts of devices, and I read them once before posting. That means some hilarious spellcheck issues from time to time, which I often leave in place, just for yuks. But the spelling and punctuation are sometimes out of whack.

From time to time, I reply and explain why I left “gorilla war” in the text rather than fixing it. C’mon, that’s comedy gold people. I’ll briefly go over my casual writing versus formal writing stance. I guess the readership has grown to the point where most readers simply don’t know my style guide so I thought it might make a worthwhile post. I actually have a strong interest in writing styles, and I have strong opinions on the matter.

My first rule of writing is that it has to be readable and clear. I get that the grammar police struggle to read and understand anything with a typo or misspelling, but most people, I think, appreciate clarity and simplicity in their choice of reading material. If you can punch up the copy with some zingers, then all the better. Who among us does not enjoy a good dick joke now and then?

The reason anyone writes anything is to communicate information to the reader. That assumes the reader is there to receive the messages you’re sending him. If the reader is here to grade my penmanship or fidelity to the rules of grammar, then that person will enjoy the coded message embedded in this post I cooked up just for him. The key for that is chrysanthemum.

As an aside, the reason academic work is never read is because it is deliberately made unreadable. The ridiculous neologisms and insider jargon are a deliberate barrier to entry. It’s a good way to get published in a “peer reviewed” journal without ever stating anything that can be held against you when the fads change. “Compellingly develop functionalized methodologies” will never get you in trouble, since no one knows what that means.

The second rule for me is that grammar is optional. The purpose of commas, spaces, hyphens, sentence structure and so on is in support of the first rule. The flow of the text should relax the reader, so they are more willing to engage the writer through the text. Throwing a comma in that stops the reader’s eye, simply because the style guide says you are required to set off subordinate clauses with commas, strikes me as a violation of rule one.

Just as important, in this sort of writing, is the need for deliberate ambiguity in order to get the reader thinking about the topic. The loosey-goosey use of language to create some confusion, followed by a few well defined points of clarification can really drive your point home, without beating the reader over the head. As with most things in life, form follows function in expository writing, blogging, fiction, signal intelligence, etc.

My third and final rule is that you write for the purpose of the writing. No one wants dick jokes in their how-to books. At the same time, a dry recitation of facts makes for terrible fiction. A blog should be close to being a stream of consciousness thing. I write these posts in about 30 minutes, read over them for obvious mistakes and then post them. I keep a running list of crackpot ideas that came to me on previous trips to the opium den, so I pick one and go at it.

No one is coming to my blog for answers to life’s tough questions. I’m not compiling research data on the Zika Virus. More important, it’s free. That means you get what you pay for here. I do this for fun. When I finish my book, I promise I’ll spend more time proofing it than writing it. That’s a different medium with different rules. If you want the Queen’s English, buy her book. Here, it’s whatever pops out of my head at the moment, naked and raw baby!

Finally, there’s the issue of formatting. People read off tablets, phones, desktops and who knows what else. Paragraph and sentence structure needs to respect that fact. That’s why I write some of these on tablets. If I can write it on a tablet, I think it can be read on a tablet. But that’s something I don’t think anyone has quite unriddled. Writing was much easier when it was printed on paper in a standard format.

What I have developed for my use is a couple of formatting guides. I stick to 800 -1000 word rants. Those Ron Unz 10,000 word essays are too long to read on-line. The other thing I do is try to keep the paragraphs around five lines. Standard length paragraphs that you see in magazines are somewhat dizzying on a tablet. I don’t know if it works, but it forces brevity, at the minimum.

So, there you have it, the Z Blog Style Guide.

Chrysanthemum

2016 Predictions

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When you’re in the blogging rackets, there are some things you have to do if you want to survive. The most important thing to do is let everyone know you’re badass. You can, for instance, pick out the biggest blogger on the yard and beat the hell out of him to send a message to the other bloggers. Alternatively, I went for the hand over the candle move, as I found it more aesthetically in tune with my oeuvre.

The other thing you have to do is write a New Year’s prediction post. I did one last year and one the year before that. Last year I got most everything wrong, but in my defense, I was not trying very hard. I was going for yuks. I did think the economy would perform better and the stock market to bubble up, so I was wrong on both scores. The GDP will come in under 3% for the year and the DOW finished a shade below where it started.

On the political front, I missed the Trump story entirely, but I can be forgiven for that as he was not running when I wrote that post. On the other hand, I would never have predicted his campaign anyway. I have been right on the larger theme of disintegration, just not in the details. I figured the Democrats, for example, would be in full meltdown by now. I think Trump sucking all the air out of the room has been a great benefit to Clinton, so far.

That’s enough of that. Let’s dust off the crystal ball and look at what it says about 2016.

The Fed will settle into a pattern of incremental rate hikes, showing a willingness to err on that side in order to claw back toward normalcy. Obama is a lame duck, so the politics are right for taking the pain of rate hikes in 2016. The quarter point hike was shrugged off by markets, so we’ll see similar hikes through the first half of the year as long as the waters remain calm.

The Federal Reserve has a tricky problem to solve in that they have to rebuild their tool case so they can address the next emergency, but they have to do so slowly so they don’t touch off a new emergency, requiring them to blow their reserves. The best time to do that is when one party is on the way out and the other is on the way in. That way, a recession can be blamed on the loser.

The political class is in a full panic over the rise of Trump in the GOP and the disastrous performance so far by Hillary Clinton. Not much attention has been paid to Hillary and her terrible campaign thus far, but that’s about to change. Donald Trump has played the Bill Cosby card on the Clintons and so far, the liberal press is playing along. The Post and the Times have signed off on discussing Bill’s rape problem as a legitimate campaign item.

I’ve been saying for years that the Cult will eventually purge the Clintons. As valuable as they have been to the Democrats, their verminous rapacity offends the sensibilities of the typical Progressive. In many respects, the Clintons represent a part of the past the Cult would like to memory hole and this election may be the perfect time. 2016 will be the year the liberal media turns on the Clintons, even if it scuttles the Democrats chances of winning the White House.

Speaking of Trump, I’m going to say he finishes third in Iowa, but close enough to make it meaningless. Cruz will win because he has the support of the religious groups and they tend to rally around one candidate. Rubio looks like the horse the establishment plans to ride. My guess is the Carson vote goes to him as they have always been the most skittish voters. The final totals will be a virtual three-way tie so while Trump will be third, he can pitch it as a tie.

Trump will win New Hampshire and by a big margin. His performance in Iowa will be enough to dispense with the idea that he will fade away. It will also reassure New Hampshire voters that he is not a religious wacko or beholden to them. This means more to these voters than commonly understood. Trumps big win in the Granite State will cause the Old Man of the Mountain to spontaneously reassemble.

Shifting to something lighter, I’ll pick the New England Patriots to make the Super Bowl and they will face the Arizona Cardinals. Similarly, I will pick the Red Sox to win the American League and make it to the World Series. The shocker will be that the New York Yankees become the first team in baseball history to finish 0-and-162.

English soccer leagues will not go bankrupt this year as I expect to be in attendance for games in the spring. That means I’ll either have to find some other excuse, but I’m leaning toward sucking it up and indulging in some good old fashioned hooliganism. If my British readers hear of an old man speaking with a funny accent leading a soccer riot, it’s probably me.

On the technology front, cord cutting will accelerate through the year and begin to threaten the current arrangements. The math of cord cutting is obvious and now the technology is making it easy. Old habits die hard, but they die faster when the new habit is easy to acquire. Plugging in a magic box and watching TV on demand is reaching the point where anyone can do it. By this time next year content providers will be scurrying to find a way to survive in an on-demand world.

Finally, let’s make some predictions about the foreigners. The collapse of oil prices will further destabilize the Middle East leading to more migrants flooding into Europe. The story of 2016 will be the sudden shift in the political consensus with regards to immigration as the established parties seek to check the rising parties of the Right. Suddenly, it will be Ok to talk about borders, deportations and assimilation.

The Russians will quietly begin to court the Kurds, offering low-level military aid with promises of more aid to defend against the Turks. The Turks will respond with even more aggressive acts against Russia air and sea assets. The first real crisis of NATO since the Cold War will be how to handle the potential outbreak of war between Turkey and Russia.

North Korea will test a fusion weapon setting off a true crisis in Asia. China can tolerate a crude atomic weapon in North Korea, but she cannot tolerate them having a fusion weapon. Similarly, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan will have to fundamentally rethink their defense posture. The great shift in 2016 will be from containing China to working with China to deal with the NORKS.

Star Wars and Fake Nerds

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The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction, so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that, and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd, and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But they dress them up as nerds, anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything, so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.

Cutting The Cord

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Yesterday I got home early and flipped on the news for some reason. The only time I bother with TV news is when something big happens and they have pictures or video. Otherwise watching some dunces read from the teleprompter is of no interest to me. The shout-shows are even less interesting as they never have anyone on representing my ideological perspective. for whatever reason, I had the urge, so I put on Fox News.

They have a show called The Five starring Greg Gutfeld and some other people who are unknown to me. I saw a middle-aged guy who reminded me of every marketing VP I’ve ever met. There was a little blonde scold that I think worked for Bush. Being Fox, they had two bimbos with big hooters to fill out the set. Presumably, the gag here is they have five people on the set, hence the name.

I only watched for a few minutes as they were taking turns showing their outrage and dismay over something Trump said about a reporter. It was like an AA meeting where instead of taking turns confessing their sins, they took turns confessing Trump’s sins. “Hi my name is Greg and Donald Trump is a big meanie.” The way they were carrying on I thought maybe Trump dropped the F-bomb on some nuns, but it turns out he just said something mean to a reporter.

As I turned it off, I was thinking about why Fox would be anti-Trump. It seems to me that their target audience overlaps quite a bit with the sort of people who like Trump’s bluntness and candor. From what I gather, they have a parade of chattering skulls day after day saying bad things about Trump and his supporters. That strikes me as foolish, but maybe I’m misjudging the Fox New audience.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the cable news rackets. I’m about to cut the cord and go Kodi/Sling for my video entertainments and the one thing I will not have is a cable news channel. I’m not really sure I care, but I suspect the reason none of them offer a cable-free service is they know there’s not that much interest. I’d watch free, but I would not pay and I doubt many people would pay to see Fox or CNN.

The thing is, American news operations are pretty much the opposite of what they claim. They always talk about speaking truth to power, but that’s nonsense. They are not reporting on the doings of the powerful for the benefit of the people. They are lecturing the people on behalf of the powerful, operating as a propaganda organ for the managerial state.

Conservative media like Fox was supposed to be what the Progressive media claims to be, but it really has not worked out that way. Instead, they function as the media arm of the Republican Party. One of the reasons I no longer watch Fox News other than when there is a disaster is that I know what they plan to say before they say it. It’s the same old cheers I’ve been hearing since the Bush years.

One of my themes here is that the two parties are really just two sides of the dominant culture of America. You see this with the cable news operations. In the 90’s, CNN was the dominant operation and reflected the ruling consensus. It was called the Clinton News Network for a reason. Fox came along simply because CNN was so flagrantly biased in favor of one side.

In the 2000’s, MSNBC became the super Progressive challenge to CNN. This reflected the Progressive takeover of the Democratic Party and ruling elite. Fox boomed as the other side of the coalition needed a media outlet of its own. Poor CNN, which represented the old Clinton-Bush consensus, fell to third place. There were times when CNN had no ratings, suggesting no one was actually watching on purpose.

Fast forward to now and CNN has absorbed the MSNBC crowd to become the left hand side’s media outlet. They are now #2 in the ratings behind Fox News, which is the right hand side’s propaganda outlet. Whether or not the viewership numbers reported are accurate, I don’t know, but hardly anyone watches any of these channels. They exist as entertainment for the political class.

That’s why they are fighting the cord cutting and unbundling. Make CNN optional and they lose 99.99% of their “subscribers.” Fox would probably lose 95% of their subscribers. Fox could probably live off ad dollars, but as a much smaller operation. MSNBC would go bust in a week and the extra channels like CNBC would be gone in an hour.

Like so much of modern life, normalville is farmed for taxes and fees to keep the managerial elite in the lifestyle they expect. Working men are paying $100 a month for TV service so Bill O’Reilly can peddle his crappy books. If you want to be an optimist, the coming implosion of the cable model is one place to look. This rentier system that is the modern American economy is slowly unraveling, one cord cutter at a time.

People That Need To Go

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When I’m ruler of these lands, there will be a lot of changes. I’m not talking about the structure of government or the status of cultural institutions. There’s a long list of items that fall into those buckets, but that’s a topic for another day. The changes I have in mind are the people changes. By that I mean there will be a whole bunch of people on the proscribed list when I’m king.

For instance, I don’t watch a lot of golf, but when I do there is always some d-bag yelling “Get in the hole!” at every tee box. Caddy Shack, the movie that started the gag, came out in 1980. My guess is it stopped being funny by the end of that summer. Yet, there are jerk-offs throughout the English speaking world still doing that at golf tournaments. Under my benevolent leadership, the authorities will round up these guys so they can be sent off to the mines.

The thing about pruning the human shrubbery is that you have to use quality of life as a proxy for social and intellectual aptitude. People who go out of their way to make a nuisance of themselves are going to have kids that go out of their way to be pests. The apple does not fall far from the tree so if we want to weed the garden of humanity, you have to focus on the pests, as well as mix your metaphors. The “Get in the hole” guy is a pest.

Similarly, and this is one that is very common around the Imperial Capital, is someone I call the “rolling roadblock.” Drive around Maryland, Pennsylvania or Virginia and you inevitably run into someone doing ten miles below the speed limit on the interstate. I’ve driven all over, and I see this person everywhere, but no more so than in the Mid-Atlantic. Further, this person is almost always a Maryland driver, and they tend to camp out in the left hand lane.

Under my rule, the police will be instructed to pull these people over, have their cars towed away to be crushed and the driver will be sent to the mines. Maybe they will be made to walk to the mines, just to add an artistic twist to the punishment. These are selfish, stupid people who put the rest of us at risk. I’m not sure they deserve to be sent to mines, but I’m going for “benevolent” dictator here, so I’ll let them live out their lives in the lithium mines.

Next on the list is someone I call “inappropriate dress” guy. The other day I’m in the coffee shop getting my coffee and muffin. It is late fall here, so the morning temps are in the 40’s meaning jackets and sweaters, along with long pants for men. It’s not winter so you can get away without a jacket if you’re an office man in shirtsleeves. That’s the way all of the normal people were dressed in the coffee shop, except one guy.

“Inappropriate dress” guy has to be wearing shorts and a t-shirt in late fall. Maybe in a snowstorm he is in shorts and a sweatshirt. It’s not that he trying to prove he is tough or that he can handle the cold. In the summer this guy will be wearing a knit cap or maybe wool socks and boots. I have to assume this is a psychological defect of some sort so as a nod to the eugenicists, I will have these guys rounded up and sent to the Antarctic. I will provide them with the inappropriate clothing for their trip.

Finally, at least as far as this post, is the guy every traveler despises. Since the invention of blue tooth, there have been guys wandering around airports talking to themselves and doing so loud enough so everyone else has to hear one half of their conversation. Last month I was in the DFW airport and on either side of me was a guy talking on his mobile using one of those idiotic blue tooth earpieces.

The thing that makes this guy super irritating is they are always boring morons. They never have anything interesting to say. If a Hollywood star or TV personality wants to share the details of their life with the rest of us, well that could be fun. If some guy wants to talk about how he is catting around on his old lady that might be interesting. Instead, it is always Larry from the Wichita office talking to Thad from corporate about how they are going to kill it at their demo. When I’m ruler of these lands citizens will be allowed to strangle these guys on the spot.

If you are one of the above described people, you now have one more reason to hope I’m never ruler of these lands.

 

Travelogue: Texas

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Travel is one of the best ways to see the world. I’ve been lucky in my life in that I have had the luxury of traveling quite a bit on someone else’s dime. Business travel is not vacation travel, but I think it is often a better way to see the world simply because you have long stretches with nothing to do so you look around, explore, adventure. On vacation, you have “stuff’ that fills every waking moment, usually within the confines of the Potemkin vacation area.

I’ve been to Texas many times. I used to travel here often for work matters. Thirty years ago when I first visited Texas on the way to Mexico, I thought this is a place I should live. For some reason, it just seems to fit my sensibilities. Every time I’ve come here, I have had the same thought: I don’t think I’m going back. But, here I am nearing my jump into the void and I’m still just a guy who visits Texas.

The funny thing about Texas is it is remains the one place in America that is brimming with confidence. Texas is not a terribly sentimental place. They will knock down an old building for a new building without giving it a thought. In the Northeast, an army of weirdos will be there guarding the old building, even though the weirdos will have no clue why the old building was built. It’s just old so they think it has to be saved.

At the same time, those same weirdos will claw one another’s eyes out to cancel the school Christmas play. There’s the lack of confidence. In most of America, our betters conduct themselves like the ne’er do well grandchildren of a successful man. The kids compete with one another as to who is the most reverent toward the old man, but not a one of them tries to emulate him. The best they can do is have a big picture of him in their house, which he bought for them.

Texas does not have the problem yet. Texans love being Texans and they love being in Texas. There’s really nothing special about Texas. Dallas is a massive suburb that looks like every other suburb in the South, but they are proud of it and you see that everywhere you go. Texas plays Oklahoma today in the Cotton Bowl and tickets are selling for $500 on the secondary market, even though UT is terrible. It’s just a great celebration of Texas football history.

I think that confidence is why Texans are soft on immigration. They are cocksure that if you move to Texas, you will become a Texan. They are right about it too. Vietnamese refugees landed in Houston and are now Texans whose ancestors came from Vietnam.  Of course, Texas has always had loads of Mexicans from the northern part of Mexico. A big part of what makes Texas tick is the blend of Southern culture and northern Mexican culture.

In Massachusetts, there’s zero cultural confidence. If America were invaded, the good thinkers of the Bay State would surrender on day one and begin taking classes in the language and culture of the invaders. That’s why the northeast seems to be leading the charge on the immigration fight. They are scared. A friend here in Texas, who is from Mass, is a rock-ribbed Trump man now and it is all over immigration.

In the South, illegal immigration is an issue, but mostly because it offends the people’s law and order instincts. It’s not seen as a threat to their way of life. In many respects, migrant workers are a part of their way of life. The South would be a very different place without the flow of migrants into the agribusinesses. Go into a poultry plant in Virginia or North Carolina and you see nothing but Hispanics. It’s been that way for generations.

The same is true of Texas. Mexican migration in and out of the state is just a part of the state’s character. The Mexicans who live here permanently came here because a part of what made them Mexican also made them Texan. The transition was easy. Of course, there are Texas families who were here before Texas was a place. The result is most Texans feel they have a good handle on how to manage Mexican immigration.

Finally, kicking around here it strikes me that the Cult hates Texas for the same reason they hated Sarah Palin. In the case of Palin, the idea that dirt people could live the feminist ideal while hanging onto dirt people culture enraged the Cult. Palin was the living negation of the One True Faith. There’s a similar thing with Texas. here, diversity is on display all over, but it’s held together with the dominant Texas culture.

The Cult believes this is impossible. For them, diversity means obliterating all culture by running it through the blender of multiculturalism. The result is the exact opposite of vibrant diversity, but the screaming and bellowing makes it impossible to point it out. A state like Texas puts the lie to the Cult’s blathering about diversity. Texas has boatloads of it without adopting any of the Cult-Marx nonsense.

Now, I’m off to eat my weight in fried food.

Pizza Rat and Bureaucrats

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One of the things most people fail to comprehend is the logic of bureaucracy. When we bump into it and inevitably get frustrated by the results, we assume it is due to sloth and stupidity. The image of the callous, incompetent bureaucrat is a stock figure on TV and in movies. In America, the Post Office is the example held up as emblematic of the dull-witted and disinterested government functionary.

The truth of it is, many of the people working in the bureaucracy are quite competent. The average is probably about the same as you would find at any private sector company. The difference between the government bureaucracy and the corporate bureaucracy is what gets rewarded. In government, it’s all about advancing the interests of the bureaucracy, while the private firm is motivated by profit. The latter encourages competition among employees, while the former encourages cooperation.

The most obvious example is corruption. City police departments are often bedeviled by corruption because cops never rat on one another. That’s a good way to get killed. Instead, the honest cops look the other way and the crooks collude to advance their corruption. In the private sector, employees rat out crooks and loafers all the time, because the crooks and loafers are seen as a drag on the organization. The peer pressure in the private sector is to advance the goals of the group, which is always about profit.

The goals of government organizations are about protecting the prerogatives of the organization. The people inside are entirely focused on what happens inside. The people at the Post Office, for example, don’t care a wit about the customers or the service they are allegedly providing. They simply care about their place within the blob and protecting the blob against outside threats.

This story about “Pizza Rat” in the NYTimes provides an excellent example of how the internal logic of the bureaucracy looks insane from the outside.

Even in a subway system often cluttered with trash, it stood out: a whole slice of pizza left carelessly on the floor.

The slice found its way into the grip of an ambitious rat that dragged it down the stairs of the First Avenue L station in Manhattan early Monday. A video of the spectacle spread quickly online, amassing more than two million views on YouTube, and a star was born: Pizza Rat.

A day later, Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, released an audit that questioned whether an effort by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to reduce trash and rats on the subway was working. Mr. DiNapoli said that a pilot program to remove trash cans from some stations had shown little evidence of success.

“After four years, the best one can say about this experiment is that it’s inconclusive, except for the fact that riders have a harder time finding a trash can,” Mr. DiNapoli said. His office declined to comment on the video of the rat.

The authority has removed trash cans from 39 subway stations in recent years to encourage riders to take garbage with them instead of dropping it in overflowing trash cans and leaving scraps for rats to feast on. On Tuesday, the authority defended the program, saying it had reduced the number of trash bags collected at those stations.

“We wholeheartedly disagree with the comptroller’s opinion,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the authority, said.

Now, to normal people the obvious solution to over flowing trash barrels and the subsequent rats is to empty the trash barrels. If the trash barrel in your office fills up, you empty it. If you use a service, maybe you have them come more often. If you have a rat problem, you get a service to eliminate the rats. In other words, the problem needs to be solved and that means the problem stops being a problem. The trash barrels get emptied and the rates go away.

To the bureaucrat, the problem is not the overflowing trash barrels and the rats. They don’t care about that. The problem is how to create activity. It’s always about creating activity, which is why problems never get solved because solved problems create the need for new activity. In this case, overflowing trash barrels means pilot programs, committee meetings, budget hearing, endless activity as long as rates are dragging slabs of pizza around the subway platforms.

 

Little Green Men

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Over the last week or so I have been going back and forth with a friend about the timeline in the Terminator movies. With the new one coming out, the old ones have been on cable. I either forgot or I was unaware that they had made a fourth movie, based around the John Connor character, so I watched it the other day. That film tries to address the timeline issue, which is what spawned the discussion.

The trouble with time travel, of course, is the paradox. In this case, sending Kyle Reese back in time could alter the timeline in such a way that the future no longer includes the possibility of sending that same guy back in time. That’s the paradox. It is the old bit about going back in time to kill your parents. It’s a logical impossibility.

Therefore, the only way the movies can make any sense is if the future guy is destined to be a part of the natural timeline. Your attempt to go back and kill your parents always fails, but in the attempt, events are shaped in such a way that you one day decide to go back in time to kill your parents. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In the movie four they try to tidy up this bit of the plot, so they make it clear that John Connor knows how this works. He knows he sends his father back in time to save his mother. The trouble with that is he could roll the dice and decide to just shoot the man destined to be his father, thus scrambling the whole thing, but then that would mean someone else was his father.

The point here is that time travel as a plot devise is fine as long as you don’t think about it too much. The only way to make it work logically is to either accept determinism or the multiverse. The former naturally appeals to humans, while the latter is incomprehensible to most people, so Hollywood preaches a weird form of fatalism in these movies.

There’s a similar problem with space aliens. Logic say that intelligent life evolving on another planet is most likely going to look a lot like us.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.

Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

This is most certainly true, to a point. A planet the size of earth orbiting a sun similar to ours would probably be very similar to earth. In order to support carbon based life of any complexity it will need to look very much like earth. An intelligent species evolving on an earth like planet will therefore come out pretty close to humans. Maybe all the smart people are black instead of Chinese, but otherwise things would be pretty close.

“An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought,” he told The Independent. “The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

“The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement.”

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth’s.

He said: “Certainly it’s not the case that every Earth-like planet will have life let alone humanoids. But if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower. If you want a fly there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to swim, like a shark, there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to invent warm-bloodedness, like birds and mammals, there’s only a few ways to do that.

The missing bit here is we don’t know what we will look like 10,000 years from now. We know, for example, that humans as a whole are about ten points dumber now than in the Victorian era. The main reason for that is stupidity is not as lethal as it was then. Similarly, we are physically weaker as a whole, due to the fact we do far less physical labor.

An intelligent life form on another planet that is able to traverse the stars to reach earth will be vastly more advanced than us and therefore further down the timeline of evolution. If the artificial intelligence people are right, they will have long ago figured out how to upload their consciousness into the machine and will no longer be organic, as we currently understand it.

Of course, a species with the ability to traverse the stars will surely have the ability to cloak their presence from us anyway. Therefore, the only way we will ever encounter space aliens is when we evolve to the point where we can traverse the stars and meet them halfway. Alternatively, we will see the humanoids of another planet when we visit, but they will look like retarded apes to us as we will have evolved well beyond our current meat stick form.

In other words, there are no little green men and even if there were, they would not reveal themselves to us anyway.

The Future is Not Now

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In my experience, the people most obsessed with disruptive technology, the robot future, AI and revolutionary technology are small bore liberals. These are the sorts who pass themselves off “nerds” having grown up on science and comic books. In reality they have never had much interest in any of that and they are usually innumerate and devoid of science.

It’s why my bullshit detector pegs at eleven whenever I hear someone prattling on about some new thing that will change the world. Inventions that changed the world were almost always accidents. In most cases the inventor did not know he was changing the world. Heck, in most cases there was not an inventor. Things just evolved to an inflection point and then took off like magic.

On the other side of the coin, most “revolutionary inventions” turn out to be Segways. Fifteen years ago Dean Kamen said he was about to change the world. Then he unveiled his two-wheel scooter that only managed to change our airports, letting fat cops on double time get from one doughnut stand to the next.

I’ve always thought 3-D printing was headed down the same path. There will be a narrow use of the technology, but otherwise it will be an expensive toy for hobbyists and weirdos. Exactly no one has ever sat around dreaming of the day they could manufacture their own household products. We used to do that. It sucked. That’s why we had the Industrial Revolution.

My skepticism seems to have been right.

The 3D-printing industry “is choking off its own revolution” with a combination of toy-like machines, over-priced materials and legal wrangles according to Francis Bitonti, the designer behind the printed dress for Dita von Teese (+ interview).

“3D printing has just become incredibly stagnant,” said New York-based Bitonti, who feels that many of the machines on the market are little more than “tinker toys”.

“A toy is not going to create the next industrial revolution,” he said. “The biggest barrier that we have in the studio is just scaling products because the price points are so high.”

Printing materials are too expensive, he added: “You’re paying 65 dollars for a kilogram spool of PLA, which is crappy plastic, and you can’t compete with injection moulding or any other type of production.”

Speaking to Dezeen in New York last month, Bitonti said that the 3D-printing industry needed to open up its intellectual property so that the design and manufacturing community could help drive forward improvements.

“They’ve got to open up,” he said. “It’s not that they need to open up all of their IP, but it’s a lot of things. You see a lot of tinker toys because they’re treating it like a copy machine. I think they need to change their mind and understand that it’s a manufacturing technology.”

He added: “The industry is just completely choked by intellectual property law right now.”

Maybe. It’s also possible that there’s not a lot of benefit to having a 3-D printer. If you are hobbyist who tinkers with things that have a lot of small plastic parts, maybe it makes sense for you. If you are producing volume, then this is a waste of money as you can get the work done better and cheaper by professionals.

The thing is, most people are not very creative or imaginative. Yeah, a creative mind with design skills can create magic on a 3-D printer. The other 99.99% of humans lack the creativity and design skills to create anything. We learned this with the PC. Even today, most people spend their time playing games on them, not doing productive work.

I could not leave this without my other criticism, which is that 3-D printing is whittling for the lazy. If you believe there was a huge barrier keeping a hungry populace out of the whittling game, then 3-D printing makes sense. If you really have an urge to make small things from big things, buy a pen knife and some wood. Put the $5K to better use.

Jerks Ruin Everything

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I’m fond of pointing out that jerks and a-holes will ruin the best of plans. No matter how carefully you work out the details, some jerk will come a long and throw  a wrench in your plans. It’s just the nature of things in the modern world. Everyone is walking around with a sense of entitlement and no one wants to be the heavy so the jerks run wild.

It’s a variation of the tragedy of the commons. In the standard model, individuals will figure out that it is to their individual advantage to take more than they contribute. This sets off a cascading effect leading to everyone taking and no one contributing.The most common examples are grazing lands or fisheries. Without regulation and policing, you get over grazing and over fishing.

The jerk variation is when jerks decide they have a right to do some activity simply because there is no explicit prohibition against it. Everyone will understand, for example, you should not let your dog poop on the bike path, at least without policing it. The jerk walks their dog on the bike path and let’s the chips fall where they may, as it were. When confronted, they respond by saying there’s no rule against it.

Another example of jerks make life hard for the rest of is right here on this site. Blogs and news stories invite comments. Jerks come along and fill the comments with work at home scams and penis pill ads. That means we have to have spam filters and police the comments sections. A good chunk of the code in a WordPress site is to fend off jerks trying to mess up a blog for no other reason than they are an asshole.

Anyway, the jerks are ruining the interwebs in a different way and that’s with ads. There are some sites I don’t bother to visit because they are so bogged down with popups, scripts and the worst thing of all, auto-playing videos. The guy who came up with that idea should be burned at the stake. There’s nothing worse than having some nonsense come blaring through your PC speakers as you feverishly look for the source.

Like most everyone, I have ad-blockers, script blockers, flash blockers, pop-up blockers, you name it, on my daily browser. I use Chrome as my video browser so if I wished to see something on youtube I open it in Chrome. My Mozilla-based browser has a flash blocker. It’s a bit ridiculous, but it is necessary to have a decent internet experience.

That is not without its consequences.

In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on the state of the ad blocking scene. According to someone who has advanced knowledge of the data, on desktop computers and on critical segments of the digital audience, the use of ad blocking keeps rising exponentially.

Along with The Netherlands, the German market is by far the most affected one by the ad blocking phenomenon. There, ad block use approaches 40% of the internet population. The reasons for the epidemic are unclear, but two elements are likely to play a role. First, AdBlock Plus (ABP), the most popular ad blocking software, has its roots in Cologne. Second, a cultural factor: German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance pushed by large media conglomerates such as Axel Springer SE.

In France too, ad blocking use is on the rise: about 30% of Gallic internet users are said to have installed extensions that remove banners and other modules; and the Millennials segment (born in 1980-2000) is twice more likely to use an ad blocker. The worst hit are Gaming sites with 80% to 90% of their views deprived of ads. More broadly, the more technophile an audience is, the more likely it is to resort to an ad blocking product.

The US market seems the less affected with 15%-17% of the internet population, again on average, using an ad blocking extension. Among the Millennials, the share is said to be twice the average. The UK is said to experience the same pattern.

Altogether, 300m people in the world have downloaded an ad blocking extension and about half have actually installed it.

This may not seem like a big deal, but ads are based on site views and site views assume the embedded ads are being seen.

For publishers, ad blockers are the elephant in the room: Everybody sees them, no one talks about it. The common understanding is that the first to speak up will be dead as it will acknowledge that the volume of ads actually delivered can in fact be 30% to 50% smaller than claimed — and invoiced. Publishers fear retaliation from media buying agencies — even though the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats.

One of the comments gets it right:

There are sites that I don’t block ads at. They usually ask me not to block ads. They also treat me with respect. No pop-ups. Not autoplaying video or sound. Good privacy policies.

Sites that respect me, earn my respect in return. All other sites earn blocks instead.

If this drives them out of business, I’m good with that. What would be better is if they learned to treat their readers with respect.

And that would be a win win too. Not only would they not be blocked, but since blockers like adblock often slow the browser down, I would see ads and have a faster browsing experience.

I don’t solicit Breitbart because it is infested with ads created by the nation’s dickhead community. Loads of viruses are spread through embedded ads as well. If a site has no choice but to go the jerk route with their ads, then they should go out of business. The world has plenty of jerks. We’re full.