What grinds my gears

I wrote in an earlier blog post how I'm highly skeptical of the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx "interquel" game by Valve because it's a VR game, and Valve has been notoriously idiotic about their design approach to the (few) VR games they have made: "Room-scale" only, "teleportation" movement only... and probably will be like 2-3 hours long. Probably more like a demo than an actual game. However, as more details have surfaced, my skepticism has turned into cautious optimism. It seems that the game will actually support three modes of movement, including free movement. It will also be playable sitting down, without requirement of room-scale. Also, apparently it will be a full-length game, rather than some 2-hour demo (although I have no idea how long, in hours, it will be), set fully in the Half-Life 2 canon continuity. Maybe it will be good after all... I'm cautiously optimistic.

I find it endlessly frustrating how the vast majority of people, including politicians, journalists, activists and pretty much everybody else, is rooting for something to be done about CO2 emissions and the climate change it's causing, yet pretty much all the solutions they are proposing are absolutely idiotic, from paper straws to proposals to limiting car driving, to hindering the industry and the economy. Do you know what's the major source of human-produced CO2? It's not cars. It's not even the industry. It's this: That is what should be fixed. My proposal to fix it? Change it to this: Even if just that "coal" part were to be replaced with nuclear, that would be enormously better than stupid paper straws.

This is an excellent article published by the Hoover Institution in 2011 discussing how the United States and the European Union have diverged in the recent past when it comes to freedom of speech, and specifically concerning laws restricting "hate speech". I recommend reading it. The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws While members of the European Union have been forced to enact ever-stricter laws limiting freedom of speech, the United States Supreme Court has time and again ruled any such laws to be unconstitutional, thus reinforcing the protections granted by the First Amendment. In today's Europe it's actually a bit hard to believe that the majority of western European countries actually used to be in agreement with the United States, that they used to oppose hate-speech laws. Laws that restrict freedom of speech are unconstitutional (in most countries that have a constitution), but that doesn't seem to stop them, perhaps because the Constitution means...

For centuries, heck, millenia, for as long as there have been governmental elections of any kind (I'm sure since the times of the Roman Republic and even earlier), candidates have always tried to garner votes by promising things that benefit the people voting for them. Of course for as long as this has been so, also the cliché has existed of the lying politician: Politicians promise everything between the Heaven and Earth, yet very rarely keep their promises (or keep them to the extent that was promised). But anyway, for pretty much as long as there have been elections there have been electoral candidates who promise benefits for their voters. Things that the voters will find beneficial. One of the most common classical promises is, of course, the reduction of taxes (or, at the very least, the promise that taxes will not raise). Other classical promises seek to ensure and expand the freedoms and rights of the citizens, of the voters. Likewise the promises of protecting the ci...

Perhaps unsurprisingly Google isn't above virtue-signaling with their "progressiveness" and wokeness. What can be a bit surprising is where they decide to do so. How idiotic they can be about it. Google finally launched their "Stadia" service, which is effectively a service where you can play video games remotely, running on Google's own servers (and thus the graphical quality is not dependent on your device). Not very surprisingly, that turned out to be quite a shitshow, but I'm not going into that now. What I find most hilarious about the whole thing is that part of the Stadia service is a custom game controller made by Google, and for whatever unfathomable reason Google could not resist the temptation to virtue-signal about it. You see, they are proud of the fact that their controller is "gender neutral", and thus, apparently, garners to people of all sexes. What the actual fuck is a "gender neutral" controller, and how ex...

In one of those "fat acceptance" articles published at an online journal, some writer lists things that people should understand and stop doing when it comes to fat people. One of the points listed, which I see repeated over and over, is this: "Understand that diets don't work and are the evil child of capitalism and body-shaming culture. Over 95 percent of people who lose weight through dieting put the weight back on within five years. If diets worked, the diet industry would be financially unsustainable." This is the most idiotic thing I have read in a good while. It's no different from saying, for example: "Weightlifting doesn't work! When I stopped weightlifting I lost all that muscle mass in five years." Well, duh! Of course dieting works. It's even admitted in that very text: "they put the weight back" means that they lost the weight . So the dieting did work. Rather obviously if you stop dieting and go back to your o...

I have written previously a blog post comparing the Constitution of the United States to that of Finland , and how in Finland the Constitution isn't actually a law, but more like a guiding principle for the government. A quite loose guiding principle that gets broken all the time by the lawmakers, the judicial system and the police, often with complete impunity. Sometimes the Constitution even gets amended to retroactively justify the unconstitutional decision of a judge (as mentioned in that blog post). Othertimes blatant breaches of the Constitution are just ignored without even a comment by the authorities who should be in charge of enforcing it. Recently I heard in the Finnish news that the police had raided the compounds of a "neonazi" group (that's notorious in all the Nordic Countries), and were investigated if they were in breach of a court order that they had received in the past forbidding them from organizing any activities and congregating for that purp...