I would like to revive the Roman word “Religio”, as a word for the shared rituals and solemn pronunciations on virtue that bind a nation together, and symbolize people’s trust in each other to do the expected thing, and a word for the suitably solemn and respectful observance of these rituals and pieties. What we need is not religion, of which we have oversupply, some of them good but walking dead, some of them alive but disturbingly evil. What we …
No Peak Oil
If you ask what are total estimated reserves of some resource, and divide by the amount produced and consumed, the answer is usually about ten years or so – and has been about ten years for the last several thousand years, because people who look for resources look for resources that they intend to use in the near future, and if they find more than they can use in the near future, they forget about them or conceal them, for …
Famous Barbie realism
A commenter draws my attention to the Barbie book “I Can Be an Actress/I Can Be a Computer Engineer (Barbie) (Deluxe Pictureback)“, which appears to be directly and accurately based on the actual careers of real life affirmative action female engineers in the gaming industry. Barbie is off away in the the art harem, to keep her out the hair of the boys who do the actual programming. I urge those of my readers with experience in the gaming industry …
No enemies to the left, no friends to the right
Scott Alexander’s blog used to be good, but now he has been terrorized out of politics. Therefore boring. The problem was he purged all frequent commentors to the right of him out of the comments, which means that he had only enemies in his comments. And, being the rightmost, was persecuted. He has stopped posting on politics, I assume as a result of this persecution. Every so often I see someone reeling in shock and horror that we cannot possibly …
The decline of Google
Originally, Google was famous for hiring the very smartest engineers, and this was reflected in the superiority of its products. Originally, it looked as if Google’s massive supercomputer was doing extraordinary things, that one would not expect of a mere computer. And the very smartest engineers were all male and mostly white, and those of them that were not white were east Asian. As Google became more and more intimate with the government, and in particular the NSA, it found …
Obama gets the finger
How sweet it is. Hat tip Urban Future In the photo op for the Apec economic leaders meeting, hosted by China, they positioned Obama away from the leaders and with the wives and mistresses of leaders, they placed a tall man behind him to make him look short, and the man behind him gave him the three finger horns. Also, while everyone else is wearing their polite photo op smiles, the man giving Obama the three fingers has a big …
Tim Cook “I am proud to be gay” spys on Mac users
In the recent release of the Mac operating system: If you set up an email that does not belong to Apple, the OS phones your email domain home to Apple to help them dox you. No matter who you use a search provider, the browser reports your search strings to Apple
Silk Road 2.0 goes down
“This hidden site has been seized” We are going to need a heavily decentralized solution, so that if a relatively small number of nodes get shut down or taken over by law enforcement, the network continues to function correctly, and, because no single node is central, no single node has traffic patterns that make it stand out. The Tor hidden site system will always fail if a hidden site generates too much traffic for too long. We need a non …
Emmet Till was not lynched, but he should have been.
You tube video of white woman walking for ten hours through the vibrant part of town. Numerous catcalls and numerous menacing pickup attempts, 108 catcalls and crude and menacing pick up attemps, one every six minutes, all of them from vibrants. You tube video of white woman walking for ten hours through the white part of town. A few stares, mostly from vibrants, no catcalls, and two courteous pick up attempts, one every five hours.
Inner Party always wins
The tea party, upon being elected, deems it impossible to repeal obamacare, despite the fact that it is unpopular, about to become more unpopular with startling price rises, and that it was quite popular to run against obamacare. Meanwhile, in a move that has absolutely no connection to obamacare, we are seeing a movement to publicize sedative overdose as a peaceful happy death. It generally is not. The dying person makes horrifying sounds that sound very much as if he …