What grinds my gears

As I wrote in November of last year , Zohran Mamdani, an open socialist, was voted as the mayor of New York thanks to his promises of raising taxes for the rich and offering free services to the public, such as free public transportation. Unsurprisingly, none of that has happened. In fact, it has only gotten worse for the citizens of New York, who are now realizing the error of their ways. I wrote in that previous post how the mayor of one city has no say on the tax levels of the state (in other words, the mayor of one city cannot just raise the taxes of certain people willy-nilly). However, I have to make one correction: There is at least one tax that the city can decide, and that's property tax within the city limits. That's indeed one thing that an individual city and its mayor can decide, because it only affects the people living in that city, not in the entire state. And what do you know, that's exactly what Mamdani has done: Raise property taxes because his government...

The answer is very simple: Recoil. Surely you are familiar with the concept of recoil? The most famous example of this is, of course, with firearms: When you shoot one, you get a "kick": The firearm experiences a strong force back, ie. the opposite direction that the bullet goes to. That's recoil. (The reason why that happens is due to conservation of momentum, but that's not all that important. The important to thing is to understand that it happens, and firearms are the perfect most practical example.) And yes, the exact same recoil happens even if the firearm is shot in a vacuum: Put one in a vacuum chamber, suck all the air out, and fire it using some mechanism: It will experience the exact same recoil. It being in air or in vacuum makes no difference. And this happens with everything: Push a friend with great force, and you will be shoved back in the opposite direction by your own push. That's also recoil. If you were floating in a weightless environment (eve...

AI-generated videos are becoming more and more convincing by the month. Where just a year ago they looked absolutely ridiculous, at the moment of writing this blog post they are already reaching that critical point where you can  barely  distinguish that it's AI-generated. In most videos there are still some telltale signs that you can see if you know what to look for, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's without the shadow of a doubt that within the year AI-generated slop will be completely indistinguishable from actual videos. The scary thing is that YouTube is actually  encouraging  this. They want  AI to become a tool for people to use to create videos. Their rationale is that it allows people to easily express their ideas, so that video creation becomes available to everybody, not just the microscopic minority of people who have the talent, knowledge, experience, resources, tools and time to put their ideas in video form. This view, although it might s...

A dozen or so fully armed and heavily armored police officers engage in a special operation to arrest someone outside their jurisdiction, and they go there in the middle of the night when the suspect is sleeping, start banging on the door, and soon shots are fired and the suspect is killed. The problem? They went to the wrong house and killed a completely innocent man who had done nothing wrong. The house number, which they had been told by dispatch several times, was 489. So they got confused. Perhaps the house where they incorrectly went to had a very similar-looking number, like 488, or 498? Easy mistake to make? Nope, the house that they wrongly went to was number 511, which looks nothing like 489. And yes, the house number was clearly visible from the front. So, why did they go there in the first place (particularly because the house was outside their jurisdiction)? Was the (original) suspect some kind of wanted criminal who had committed armed robbery or murder? Was he a known dr...

What is "toxic positivity"? Well, it's one of the several things that happens when a company hires a bunch of political activists who have been brainwashed, indoctrinated and trained at American colleges and universities. As these brainwashed drones have gotten more and more power and influence in these companies, by now often having (for some inexplicable reason) climbed the corporate ladder into positions of power within the company, they have been doing their hardest to make these companies an extension of the university campuses that they came from. To apply the same rules with an iron fist, the same conduct requirements, the same ideologies. What they were taught and lived at university, they are now enforcing in these companies. These rules are authoritarian, extremely strict, and very numerous (most of it relates to illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions), but one of them is what has been coined by critics as "toxic positivity". And what is that?...

For some years now the American far-leftist activists and politicians have adopted the word "democracy" as one of their pet buzzwords. Everything they don't like is "a threat to democracy", and many of their insane demands are "to protect democracy" according to them (even though quite often it does the exact opposite, like for example allowing anonymous voting, ie. not demanding people to ID themselves to vote.) I predict that in the following years their tune will change, especially when they finally realize that their fear-mongering and abuse of the buzzword isn't working. I expect one of two possible changes: 1) Less likely but perfectly possible (because the far-left is completely happy to reverse positions on the blink of an eye), they will actually start  opposing  democracy. After all, democracy allows people to vote for the "wrong" candidates. If they do this, they will argue that democracy has failed and is not a good system bec...

Quite a while ago I wrote a blog post about one of the biggest flaws in the Finnish judiciary system . You see, unlike for example in the United States, in Finland the winning party in a lawsuit gets automatically his legal fees paid by the losing party, no questions asked. On paper this makes sense: If you are innocent, you must not be punished in any way, shape or form, and losing money to pay for attorney fees would be such an unjust form of indirect punishment. Thus, the legal system has been built onto the foundation that the losing party pays for the legal fees of the winning party, period. If you are guilty, your victim must not suffer any monetary losses because of the lawsuit. If you are not guilty, then you must not suffer any monetary losses, because you did nothing wrong. On paper, and at first glance, that makes a lot of sense and seems very justified. The problem? It actually gives the lawyers of the winning party pretty much free range to punish the losing party however ...