What grinds my gears

I have written before about YouTube channel that upload outright fake and fraudulent videos , such as fake "primitive building" videos, fake "restoration" videos, and so on. These are fraudulent in that they completely mislead their viewers about the genuineness of what's shown in the video, and thus inducing a lot of views and thus ad revenue, and sometimes even fraudulent donations. There is one type of YouTube channel that has a significantly more complicated and fuzzy status. It can be a bit hard to imagine for the average YouTube viewer, but for bigger youtubers making videos is actually their primary and only job and source of revenue. Not only that, but some youtubers are outright rich. Literally millionaires! If you are getting millions of views, the ad revenue can be surprisingly lucrative. YouTube and most youtubers (with some exceptions) are not completely open and clear about how much revenue a channel can get, but a rough estimate is about 1 cent pe...

The Linux kernel has always been written in C for the entirety of its existence since its first version, published in 1991. Linus Torvalds himself, as the creator and owner of the project, has always defended this decision very, very strongly (sometimes to the point of outright embarrassing behavior), for decades and decades. One of the more rational strong arguments why the kernel has been kept using pure C is this: C is the  de facto  universal embedded systems programming language, and the amount of C experts, who know the language inside out and have several decades of experience (often literally 30, 40, and even more years) is enormous. Thus the pool of potential developers, maintainers and experts with the proper qualifications is huge. Unsurprisingly, dozens and dozens of alternatives have been suggested over the decades, pretty much since the very beginning. The total list of proposed alternative programming languages would probably be quite large, perhaps even in the ...

I have written several blog posts about the absolutely crazy  bona fide  conspiracy theory that so many American "sovereign citizens" believe, primarily summarized and detailed in this one . Very brief summary is: They have concocted this ginormous theory (based on literally just a few words and short expressions in a few legal and some non-legal documents, isolated from their context) that secretly, behind the scenes, the US government is actually a "private corporation" and that citizens "contract" with said "private corporation" and that, moreover, you can game the system by knowing all of this stuff that's happening behind the scenes and using certain code words and expressions, a secret code, that lawmakers, judges, lawyers and law enforcement officials are secretly privy to and obliged to respect . Their use of this "secret code" is particularly common when they are driving and stopped by a traffic cop. You can recognize them ...

Prices of products increase all the time. This is completely normal in a healthy economy, and one of the driving factors here is that inflation is always kept slightly positive, if possible. (A positive inflation means that the purchasing power of money decreases over time.) There are very complicated reasons why a constant small positive inflation is good for the economy, and an experienced economist could probably hold a 2-hour lecture explaining the details of it. Of course there are myriads of other reasons besides inflation that causes changes in the prices of products, as the global economy is an extremely complex dynamic system. For example, the cost of raw material production can change quite a lot over time. Sometimes it changes to be more expensive, sometimes to be cheaper. However, manufacturers of products extremely rarely will adjust the prices of their products down, only up. It's almost unheard of that some product becomes permanently cheaper. Anyway, economics is co...

It's rather incredible that the nation that gave us Magna Carta nowadays has less speech rights than countries like Russia. Indeed, while in Russia about 500 or so people are arrested every year for their expression of opinion online, the UK recently surpassed the 10 thousand arrests per year landmark, for people expressing their opinions online. And it's not just the staggering number of arrests: It's the severity of the sentences. You can literally be given a longer jail sentence for something you say online than for raping a minor. And that's not hyperbole or exaggeration, is there have been actual cases. And the thing is, you can be put in jail for some time and given a fine completely at the discretion of and judgment of police officers and their personal opinions of whether what you said was "offensive" and might have caused "anxiety" to someone. Indeed, a cop can decide, all on his own, based on his own personal opinion, whether to issue you a...

Australia has a Ministry of Truth... eh... I mean, Sex Discrimination Commissioner. She's one Anna Cody. She has been recently interrogated in Australia's senate about her role and what the "Sex Discrimination Act" is about, and she is apparently incapable of answering even the most basic questions, is completely confused, gives completely self-contradictory answers, and doesn't even seem to know what exactly she is supposed to do. The sheer level of incompetence and ignorance is astonishing. And apparently she has a doctorate of some kind. For example, when she was asked to define "man" and "woman", which is precisely under the core purview of the Sex Discrimination act and her very job, she repeatedly could not answer. When pressed about it, she gave this absolutely gem of an answer: "The Sex Discrimination Act does not define 'man' or 'woman'. It has an inclusive definition of 'women' that includes all women. So ...

They are going to give Link a speaking role in the movie. Read my lips: Link. Does. Not. Speak. Period. That's not negotiable.  If Link speaks in the movie, he's not Link, and it's not a Legend of Zelda movie at all. Period.