What grinds my gears

It seems like Sony Entertainment just don't learn from their past mistakes, do they? In the recent past they spent hundreds of millions of dollars (a commonly-cited figure is 400 million) and 8 years of development time on the biggest flop of the entire history of video games that has ever existed. In other words, Concord: Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, 8 years of development time, the game completely shut down in less than 2 weeks from publication and all purchases (a few tens of thousands of copies) refunded. Literally zero revenue, no exaggeration. As mentioned in that blog post, one would think that a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars would mean the game was an absolutely massive open world experience with an absolutely enormous amount of assets and content, an absolutely massive amount of NPCs with scripted lines, a massive amount of quests and missions and so on and so forth. Nope. In actual reality it was just a so-called "hero shooter" wit...

I have written before about some of the most insane laws in the United States: American cops can cause literally millions of dollars in private property damage , and neither them, the city, or any part of the government has to compensate a single penny. It's 100% the person's loss. His property is just destroyed by the cops, and there's absolutely no recourse for the owner. Nothing. It's his loss, 100%. But what if you are involved in a car accident with a police car , and it was 100% caused by the cops and you are 100% innocent of anything, and courts fully judge it as such? Do you at least then get some kind of compensation for the damages and loss of property? Nope. You will not get a single penny. Even your insurance company will not give you a single penny because it was a police car (because of some insane loopholes in their own rules). It's, once again, 100% your loss, and you have no recourse. If you buy a plot of land 100% legally and by the book, and plan ...

Matt Walsh is an ultra-conservative American Christian who has a very big YouTube channel and overall media presence, and who has even produced several quite successful movies about the invasion of modern far-leftism and its excesses. He often makes very good points and is very rational reasonable. "Often" being the most important word there, rather than "always". Because sometimes his rationality and reason is shoved aside by his ultra-conservative ultra-American-Christian activism and propaganda. Don't get me wrong: He is perfectly entitled to his Christian beliefs, and in fact a lot of things he believes in, and believes should be the norm, are much better than most alternatives (including a particular other religion). However, the problems start when he starts engaging in propaganda and outright historic revisionism in order to promote his brand of Christianity and his religious ideals. For example, he is one of those American conservatives who strongly beli...

Last year I wrote about how I have become utterly tired of "prank" videos . Not just the mean and stupid ones, but  all  of them. Including those shown in prime time television (eg. "Candid Camera", "Just For Laughs Gags" and so on.) There's a somewhat similar thing I have also gotten completely tired of in later years, and that's all the "thinking outside the box" type problems. In other words, puzzles, problems, riddles and so on, where the solution requires something that's surprising and wasn't apparent from the setup of the problem in question. You know, the kind of problem where the solution involves a sentiment like "nobody said the lines you draw can't go outside the grid" and the myriads of other similar problems. And that sentiment reveals the very reason why I'm so tired of them: They are intentionally designed to be deceptive. For all intents and purposes they lie by omission: The problem is always se...

In the United States, trial by jury, having a jury of regular fellow citizens in criminal cases, is considered one of the most fundamental core aspects of a free constitutional democratic society with a fair justice system. One of the core ideas with it is that justice is not in the hands of a minority elite, ie. those who are in power, but in the hands of the people. It reduces and avoids tyranny and oligarchies, where the elite ruling class judges and sentences citizens. Not all countries have implemented the concept of trial-by-jury of citizens. Instead, in many countries criminal trials are judged by a panel of judges (and, sometimes, other kinds of legal experts). In other words, a panel of highly educated experienced licensed experts with advanced law degrees and years of experience. While trial-by-jury might sound like a good and fair idea on paper, the recent Lindsay Clancy trial has really showed its main problems and drawbacks. Two of the most prominent problems with regular ...

Consider this description of Lysenkoism in Wikipedia: "Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting." "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned." Now, does that remind you of anything happening in the modern world? Incidentally, even related to biology...

I once again stumbles across one of those neo-socialist videos where the author compared the net worth of billionaire CEOs with the salaries of entry-level workers who had just been hired into one of the companies of said CEO. About how the CEO is worth such-and-such amount of billions of dollars, while the entry-level worker gets a salary of such-and-such amount of dollars per hour. In this particular video the author was advocating for a "wealth tax". There were several things wrong with that video. The fact that a "wealth tax" of billionaires would do jack squat to the salaries of entry-level workers was just the least of those. (The only thing that a "wealth tax" would do is to increase governmental tax revenue by a small fraction of a percent, all of which would just be wasted on the same things they are wasting that tax money anyway. The entry-level workers would see little to no benefit from it at all.) One of the major problems in the video, someth...

The American "sovereign citizen" ideology is a huge and absolutely insane conspiracy theory which I go into more detail here . A big part of the ideology is their constant use of particular terms and expressions that only they, and people who have researched their ideology, understand. (Quite ironically, no lawmaker, judge, law scholar, law professor, lawyer, law enforcement officer, or any other such person understands that vocabulary either, unless that person has experience with the conspiracy theory itself, even though the sovcits believe they do, secretly behind the scenes.) In fact, you can easily recognize whether someone subscribes to the conspiracy theory or not with how they speak during traffic stops . I have discussed before the reasons why they so often demand a supervisor (particularly during traffic stops), and why they so often use expressions like "I'm a living man" , and why they usually have such a huge problem with stating that they "un...

One of the favorite stupid arguments that flat-earthers love to make is that if the Earth were a globe, that would mean that airplanes would need to be constantly pitching down in order to follow the Earth's surface. This argument is stupid and hilarious because they seem to have some kind of problem with the notion that yes, indeed, airplanes  do  pitch constantly down when flying even slightly longer distances. I don't even understand what the problem is, or why they think that's a problem. (Well, actually, like I explain in this other blog post , I  do  know why they have a problem with it, and that's because they think that "constantly pitching down" requires the pilot to be constantly pushing on the yoke of the airplane. They don't understand that's not how airplanes maintain altitude. Airplanes maintain a particular altitude above the surface using the autopilot, which itself mostly uses trimming, not the main control surfaces. Even if the pilot ...

Quite notoriously and infamously, the former President of the United States Joe Biden issued more presidential clemency grants than any other president in the history of the country. A so-called "presidential clemency grant" is either a so-called "reprieve" (which is a delay in carrying out a sentence), a "commutation" (which is a reduction of a sentence), or a full-on "pardon" (which is the complete annulment of a sentence). The top 5 so far, as of writing this, are:  Donald Trump, during his first term in office, granted 238 of them. Ronald Reagan granted 406. Bill Clinton granted 457. Barack Obama granted 1927. Joe Biden granted 4245, setting an all-time record, by a huge margin. What's particularly notable and telling is that about 2500 of them were granted and signed during Biden's last three days in office. That's more clemencies granted in three days than any other president has ever granted in their entire terms in office (inc...

There's one thing that appears to be, at least my view, astonishingly common: People who consider it outright sacrilege if a steak is anything above "medium rare". I'm not even kidding: Tons and tons of people consider even "medium rare" a bit too cooked, but barely acceptable, and think that the only correct way is a full-on "rare" steak. Ask any "steak connoisseur", or any professional chef, and he will tell you that. Heck even celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay thinks that. Well, I'm going to commit sacrilege here: I  hate  rare steak. I  hate  medium rare steak. Medium well done is still on the more disgusting side, but bearable. I love well done steak. A rare steak is just disgusting. I don't like the taste at all. I once went to a more expensive fancy steak restaurant and ordered a well done one, and it was literally the best steak I have eaten in my entire life, no exaggeration. If I had ordered it rare, it would have been ...

Because of the recent solar eclipse, flat-earthers all over the internet are once again making tons and tons of social media posts and videos about how the eclipse is not caused by the Moon being in front of the Sun and yada yada yada, making up all kinds of random stuff using completely made-up arguments and blurry photos. Yet, once again, I have not seen a single mention, a single comment, a single reference to, a single explanation attempt, a single excuse, not even a vague hand-wave or dismissal, nothing, not a peep, about the one question that they just have zero answers to. From the thousands and thousands and thousands of posts and videos, I have yet to see a single one that tackles this problem, mentions it in any way, and much less tries to explain it. And that is: How exactly are scientists able to predict solar eclipses literally decades in advance, to the accuracy of seconds, and where the path of totality and partiality will be, to the accuracy of meters? Indeed, scientist...

I recently saw a YouTube video that was a sort of interview of a player who had started playing Star Citizen and had spent a whopping 11 thousand dollars on that game in one year. Not even going into the quality and state of the game, even if it were the best and most polished game in existence, spending 11 thousand dollars on it is just completely insane. I am quite an avid gamer myself, and have been buying video games for over 30 years now. I did a rough estimate of how many games I have ever purchased and how much money I have spent in total on them during these 30 years, and it's in fact somewhere on that same ballpark, actually. Maybe a bit more. Say, very roughly somewhere around 12 thousand dollars in total, ie. about 400 dollars a year. I think about 400 dollars a year in video games is quite moderate. I very, very rarely buy full-priced 60+ dollar games, and almost always wait for a significant discount. During those 30 years I have, perhaps, bought about 20 or so games a...

I have come up with the theory that when it comes to political activism there are, roughly speaking, two types of activists: "Genuine" and "dogmatic".  "Genuine" in this context does not necessarily mean "good", as in doing political activism for a good cause. Many activists are completely genuine but advocating for absolutely detrimental policies. By "genuine" I mean that the activists are fighting for a specific cause, to correct a specific wrong (at least in their view) and, most importantly, if that "wrong" is corrected, they will be content and stop their activism. Problem fixed, it does not exist anymore, thus there's no need to do any more activism, and they can go on with their lives. The vast majority of this kind of activism is for a good cause, some is for a rather irrelevant cause, and sometimes, as mentioned, it might actually be detrimental. But the crucial point is that it's a cause that the activists ge...

I happened to stumble across one of those "1950's ads that didn't age so well" videos on YouTube. Some of the ads in question have indeed not aged well at all. Such as a medical doctor (or, at a minimum, someone claiming to be) exalting the virtues of smoking a particular brand of cigarettes. Or an ad showing medical research results about how a particular brand of cigarette is good for the throat and sinuses. Or an advertisement about a beauty product containing actual radioactive radium (with the ad prominently stating that fact, and claiming that it's not dangerous in such low doses.) The same video, however, also had a couple of ads that showed an archetypal 1950's happy housewife doing something nice for her husband, like for example preparing and serving him coffee (of the particular brand being advertised, of course.) And... that's it. There was nothing more to it in those ads than that. Both had the actress talk about how she wanted to make her hus...

In June I wrote a blog post about how " AI might destroy the Linux kernel ", where I pointed out how the Linux kernel has, during the past months, been absolutely flooded with AI-generated merge requests for patches, fixes, new features and new drivers, with literally thousands and thousands of such AI-generated code being submitted for review every single month. And the pace isn't slowing down. On the contrary, it's only getting worse and worse. I posited that this will be absolutely detrimental to the development and quality of the kernel development because of two possible approaches that the maintainers could take, neither of which is very good: Either 1) they start reviewing every single merge request for validity, which will grind the actual kernel development pretty much to a halt because there are so many of them, or 2) they will become sloppy and start accepting merge requests with only cursory reviewing and supervision, which may introduce bugs, degraded per...

There exist quite some conspiracy theories about statins, about how dangerous they might or might not be, and people having these doubts about their safety and efficacy include some doctors of medicine. However, this blog post is not about that. I don't know if they are safe and beneficial or not. Maybe they are. But this is not about that. Recently I had a routine blood checkup with an employer-provided health benefit physician, and almost all blood levels related to obesity were above recommended levels and good cholesterol was below recommended levels. In a followup phone consultation the doctor  immediately  suggested statins, and gave a spiel about them that almost felt rehearsed. He gave several points and several arguments, literally like a rehearsed speech. I'm not even kidding. What's most curious about it is that he had never seen me personally and, most importantly,  he didn't ask a single question  about my health and life habits. He didn't even ask abou...

One of the most fundamental principles of freedom of speech is the right to make public reviews of commercial products. In pretty much every single country where there's a right to free speech (and probably even a few that don't), product reviews are an  extremely  protected form of speech. It doesn't matter if they are positive or negative. The idea behind this protection is, of course, pretty simple: It's a form of consumer protection. Consumers have the right to know what they are buying by being able to know about the experiences that others have had with the product. If there's some kind of flaw or negative aspect to a product, consumers have the right to know before buying. Sellers and manufacturers cannot be expected to reveal every single aspect of their product, so protecting the right of people to publish their own reviews is extremely important. Which, of course, means that in most countries a company trying to sue a reviewer for giving a negative review ...

Recently the Spanish prime minister undermined once again the sovereignty and borders of the country by passing a law that gives amnesty to any person who arrives in the country by the sea, no questions asked. Literally tens of thousands of Moroccans immediately took advantage of this and started a literal full scale invasion of Ceuta and Melilla. That's not hyperbole, a figure speech, or exaggeration. Tens of thousands of foreigners entered those places en masse and immediately started doing what invading forces always do when they invade a country: They started looting stores and breaking into homes, breaking doors and windows. And where was the Spanish police when literally hundreds of invaders were breaking into and looting stores? Absolutely nowhere to be seen. In fact, the police forces were restricting the locals from doing anything about it, with video footage showing the cops literally beating Spanish citizens with batons. While doing literally nothing about the hordes of ...

The " motte-and-bailey " fallacy is an argumentative tactic where a larger questionable ideology, when challenged, is defended by retreating to a small portion of the ideology that's generally more accepted. The analogy is that in normal circumstances ("peace time") the ideology preaches all of its tenets, most of which are morally or otherwise questionable (in other words, it operates in the wider "bailey" area), but when questioned and challenged ("war time"), the apologist retreats to the more defensible much smaller area of the ideology (in other words, the fortified "motte" at the center). Here are some concrete examples of this very tactic used by the modern far left, which clarify how this tactic is actually being used in practice out there: Feminism Especially 10+ years ago (perhaps a bit less nowadays because the concept of "feminism" has got a bad reputation among the left, mainly because of J. K. Rowling ), when...

Or, perhaps, "theft" is not technically speaking the right term to use, because it implies that the action is illegal, which in these cases it might not technically be. However, it's an extremely common practice and it's tiresome. Whether one likes YouTube's copyright enforcement system or not, at least it does have the positive effect that if you create and upload an original video, if someone just downloads it and uploads it as-is on their own channel, you can take it down immediately when you notice. However, what happens when the footage is public domain, or in other ways not really falling under copyright of an entity who could take it down? One example of such footage is, in the United States, court camera videos: These are in the public domain by law, and thus anybody can distribute them as they want. There are also many other similar examples of footage created by the government or other entities that do not fall under copyright (or where the copyright is ...

If you watch, for example, this video by the YouTube channel Team Skeptic, where the author comments on yet another "sovereign citizen" who is foolishly representing himself in court, you'll notice how, particularly in one part of the video, he again and again insists that he "doesn't understand anything". He uses lots of other words that mean the same thing, but he just outright refuses to say that he "understands" a single thing. He "comprehends", he "grasps", he "knows", he yada yada yada, but most definitely and categorically he doesn't "understand" anything. This even though the judge quite clearly expresses that she herself doesn't understand why he is having such a huge problem with that word, and why he is playing that kind of word games. The judge makes it pretty clear that "understand" just means the same thing as to comprehend, to grasp, to know what's being said, there's...

Unlike many American far-leftist activists love to claim, the US does not have "hate speech" laws. So-called "hate speech" is not illegal because it's, still, considered to be speech protected by the First Amendment. Of course that doesn't stop cops and courts from prosecuting people for "hate speech" anyway. They just masquerade it as something else. As the saying goes, "the good thing about laws is that there are so many of them to choose from". It's the stalinistic principle of "show me the man and I'll show you the crime." Or, in this particular example, the woman. Some time ago a controversy arose when someone published a video of a white woman using the "N-word" against a child, as well as some random man who was loitering near the playground (not related to the child), in the city of Rochester, New York. Obviously that sent the far-leftists completely crazy. The city wanted to sue her because quite obvio...

Some time ago the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts , had installed a system called ShotSpotter , which is a series of directional microphones installed on building roofs, and computer systems able to detect if gunshots are being fired, and locate their position in the city, for rapid police response to possible shootings. Because the city in question is extremely leftist and, thus, filled with far-leftist activist zealots, those zealots came up with the conspiracy theory that this system could be used to spy on people and that it, somehow, puts black and brown people, trans people and so on in danger, and that it causes "overpolicing". Thus, they organized a protest against it at the city council, and one after another they argued that the system is dangerous, and that they don't need it for the community to be safe. The city placated to the zealots and removed the system. Two months later, on the 4th of July of 2026, a shooting happened, with the victim bleeding to death...

This argument is so asinine and so utterly silly that it feels like parody, or like a straw-man invented by anti-leftists (ie. something that some anti-leftists claim that pro-immigration leftists are saying even though they aren't). However, it's a real argument. And not just by some random anonymous twitter users, but actual elected politicians in the UK and some other countries. And the argument is: Without immigrants we wouldn't have exotic foods, like curry or falafel. And yes, those politicians are presenting that argument in all seriousness. It's not like they are lightening the mood with a joke, or doing a bit of self-parody or something like that. They are presenting it 100% seriously. It shouldn't even be necessary to explain why that's a completely asinine argument, but here we go anyway: Firstly, you don't need to import any immigrants in order to be able to eat foreign cuisine. This should be so utterly obvious that it shouldn't need to be e...

During the past 15-or-so years the United States has become astonishingly racist. And I truly mean it. Actual racism, actual racist discrimination by the establishment, by megacorporations, by large powerful institutions, by universities, by schools, everything. American universities have engaged in blatant and clear racial discrimination in admissions, even though for them it's actually illegal in the United States. For some reason the government has been very slow to react to it, even though it has been going on for at least 20 years. American corporations have also been engaging in clear and blatant racial discrimination for at least 15 years. According to recent statistics that examined the top 500 tech companies in the United States, only 6% of all new hires were white people, even though they account for over 80% of the population. This is not some kind of strange anomaly or coincidence, as it's very explicitly enforced by the higher-ups in these companies. For example, I...