• About

Things that only exist in my head…

~ …but leak out anyway.

Things that only exist in my head…

Category Archives: no-category

Elon Musk showed his hand

15 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

≈ Comments Off on Elon Musk showed his hand

And yes, it was a silly way to do it. Nothing about the child-sized rescue submarine made any sense in a real-world way. Yes, the thing would have jammed up in the caves. It would have cost time and lives to extract it so the rescue could get back on track. So why fly out to Thailand to try to take over the rescue?

The key bit of information is that the sub was made by the tunnel-boring arm of his business empire. To make his hyperloop a credible project rather than just a vanity project to be used against him in the boardroom, he needed a leap in tunnel-boring speeds that amounts to magic. Drilling fast and removing heat and spoil in water or other chemical medium might provide enough magic.

It might provide enough magic, certainly, if he only needed to convince enough idiots at the top of his organization. Actual progress was unnecessary. He could make do with a stunt. Even better, because he wasn’t allowed to actually fuck up the rescue, he didn’t suffer blame. Then he could blame the little people for not appreciating his vision.

So the incomprehensible shitfit he threw when he didn’t get his way in Thailand becomes more comprehensible. Maybe. It’s all marsh gas and rainbows, one way or another.

I dumped KDE yesterday

04 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

≈ Comments Off on I dumped KDE yesterday

I’ve been checking in on XFCE every once in a while to see if it’s close to the functionality of KDE 3.5.8. It’s been a few years. The last time I checked, XFCE ticked all the boxes for lacking the incompetent rot that’s afflicted the KDE world ever since Trolltech decided to chase billionaire venture capital with its phone-centric Plasma garbage.

But… nothing. The radeon driver is shit and apparently people using 4k tvs are persona non fuckyou in the Linux world. Because people who write code never know what’s important.

Volcano

31 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

≈ Comments Off on Volcano

For those who might be interested in seeing my words again, there are rumblings. Watch this space.

Also, the wordpress app isn’t terrible any more!

A title, because there should be one.

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, tech, writing

≈ Comments Off on A title, because there should be one.

Tags

thumbs

This is a test of the thumb-writing communication medium.

So far the thumb-os have driven me crazy. I may have to break down and begin using the aids. No, never! The thumbing aids are created by marketing people for hypothetical Consumers who don’t want to be confronted by anything so confrontational as being allowed to use a vocabulary that contains many jokes for oneself as well as the occasional obscurity. I just want to be able to type fast on a black rectangle with a keyboard that’s too small for thumbs if I hold it one way and too wide—but still too short—if I hold it the other way.

And that, I say in my best Gump, is what I have to say about that.

Let’s Dump Wednesday

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, tech

≈ Comments Off on Let’s Dump Wednesday

Tags

LetsDumpWednesday

What room is there for five days of work and two days of weekend? We’re supposed to have at least two lives anyway, balancing work, life, school, and play. For any stage of life, we’re supposed to pick two, but seven divides by nothing but one. Seven days is completely arbitrary, a token of change from one calendar to another. That change in late Rome happened during a time when astronomy was suffering from a hiatus of official interest. It was also a time when six days of non-stop physical labor punctuated by one of devotion to a deadly dull religion was an improvement. Nuts to that.

Should we add a day or subtract one? Should we expand the week to nine to provide a potential to make thirds? That question might hinge most on how long our weekends should be, and how much of the week to work. Three days on and three days off is attractive from the point-of-view of a shift worker. Shift-working might go away, but the equality of week and weekend is what intrigues me. A three-day-weekend is long enough to provide rest without being so long as to ensure forgetfulness. Four days is just too long. Six days, total, still allows for two-day thirds, giving workplaces the ability to work even more schedules together (even four-days on, two-days off) without having to figure out whether to insert or remove that extra, prime-making day.

All of these alternatives mean more free time than we have now. My vote is for six.

So given my desire to contract rather than extend, what’s the most useless day, dedicated to a forgotten entity, that we can get rid of? Wednesday, of course. It’s holy for practically no one and represents nothing but the drudgery of the dead expanse of the middle of the five-day work week. Let’s dump Wednesday.

Liberalism Needs Leftism

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, Who's Shaming My Demographic

≈ Comments Off on Liberalism Needs Leftism

Tags

conservatism, David Brin, leftism, liberalism, neo-paleo-classical liberalism, radical, red-baiting, scapegoating

Liberalism, classic 19th century liberalism, is being promoted by scientifically-minded Republicans as a way to pull their party back from its strange precipice of millenarian, racist insanity. The best parts of conservatism itself, an historically-aware aversion to risk, has been scuttling around under other labels for most of the past 50 years. Terms like “moderate”, however, have given over to “sane”, then to “former”. For those trying to resurrect the best of both conservatism and liberalism among the Fox Generation, leftism has become the third wheel they can distinguish themselves from, usually with cheap insults.

The problem is that like liberalism and conservatism, leftism also plays a vital role, and for the past thirty years that role has also fallen to ruin.

Leftism, at its best, organizes society against injustice, fighting the visible wrongs that society allows. At its worst leftism prosecutes a radical Jacobin urge toward revenge. At best, liberalism reforms onerous rules for individuals and applies those rules more equally in society as a whole. At worst, liberalism becomes a coöpted structure of rhetorical justifications propping up the authoritarian rule of establishment elites, the “most equal” individuals. Conservatism, at its best, argues for trying out new reforms in limited ways, risking as it were only a hidden corner of the upholstery. At its worst, conservatism throws itself wholeheartedly into radical, reactionary oppression of anything not aligned exactly with the long-established institutions of the ruling regime.

The worst of all three go together in a mutually supporting soup of discursive shit: the worst of liberalism uses caricatures of radical leftists and reactionary conservatism to label itself the responsible “third way”. In return the worst of conservatism and leftism portray liberals as venal if not explicitly corrupt and uncaring of What Really Matters. All three isms have their place and their dangers. Any public figure who cannot express the urge toward the best parts of all three impulses should be actively frustrated in their attempts to gain and exercise power.

Continue reading →

So, my laptop sleeps with Linux now.

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

≈ Comments Off on So, my laptop sleeps with Linux now.

Tags

lenovo, linux

And they’re very happy, but after two years together the transition’s been a bit awkward.

The BIOS update came just over a year ago, but I’d long since given up checking the drivers and updates page. I’ve gotten so used to not being able to sleep the thing that it’s going to be a little odd having a real laptop again. I would have preferred the kernel hackers to do a workaround rather than just yelling at Lenovo and passing the buck back to the people who created the bug. That’s the problem with intractable institutions: it’s often tempting to stop fighting and just work around them.

Who’s Shaming My Demographic?

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, Who's Shaming My Demographic

≈ Comments Off on Who’s Shaming My Demographic?

Tags

perpetrator, suburbanite, the f word, vigilante execution, white dude

Michael Dunn was convicted of attempted murder the other day. This was taken as a recapitulation of the Zimmerman acquittal by a number of notables, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jessica Williams and the writers of The Daily Show. The actual murder went unpunished, after all, and the value of a person’s life and equality before the law remains a relatively unserious concept. Continue reading →

Godwin’s Stagnation

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category

≈ Comments Off on Godwin’s Stagnation

Tags

brics, economic growth, exclusive patent rights, great depression, mints, productivity growth, secular stagnation

Economic crises are brewing in a number of countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, South Africa, Turkey, and Ukraine. They are all having trouble maintaining reasonable price levels on imports. Natural gas in Ukraine, for example, is one issue that has been pressing their civil society past its tipping-point. Because much of the private investment in these countries is denominated in foreign currency, devaluation doesn’t serve to unwind those investments and developing countries get both ends of a bad dynamic: a withdrawal of investment causes both local economic stagnation and wage-lagging inflation. For normal people it’s no different than deflation: their wages fall relative to the prices they pay for everything.

Continue reading →

Lickspittles of the World, Pat Buchanon has Good News!

17 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, sexuality

≈ Comments Off on Lickspittles of the World, Pat Buchanon has Good News!

Tags

the blacks, the gays, the scientists, the women, the writers, the zzz..., these assholes—they always get away with it, vlad the put-upon

You have a despotic strongman to unite underneath! Or for the Shakespearean-impaired let that read “Authoritarian followers of the world, Pat Buchanan is dropping you off for playtime with your new ‘uncle’.”

TPM link for the weak of stomach. The original post on Townhall.com, “Is Putin One of Us?”.

Continue reading →

← Older posts

Archives

February 2023
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728  
« Jul    

Pages

  • About

Topics

commentary fiction horror no-category poetry reviews scifi sexuality tech Who's Shaming My Demographic writing

Info

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Things that only exist in my head...
    • Join 31 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Things that only exist in my head...
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar