What grinds my gears

Perhaps not so much in other countries (as of yet), but especially in the United States more and more new college/university students who are actually competent are finding themselves in an unusually frustrating situation. You see, in the United States over the last 5+ years there has been an absolutely gigantic decrease in literacy and basic math skills among high school graduates. More and more college professors have been complaining that a big portion of freshmen don't even know the most basic arithmetic, such as how to add two two-digit numbers, even though this is something that even first-graders (as in, 7-year-olds) should know. Their literacy is also abysmal, and they just don't read anything besides social media, and their writing skills are likewise abysmal. So what's happening more and more in American colleges is that the few students who are actually studied, learned and smart, who actually do read and are proficient at math and writing, are being constantly a...

In the era of about 2010 to 2015, give or take, when the far-leftist political invasion of American universities was in full force ("invasion" not being a figure of speech, exaggeration or hyperbole, as in many campuses it was literally a physical takeover by activist students and professors, even up to including pretty much in essence taking university staff as hostage, not even making that up), the concept of "feminism" was being  extremely  aggressively being pushed onto society. Everybody was talking about and declaring themselves to be "feminists". Heads of state, such as Justin Trudeau, were openly and proudly declaring themselves to be "feminists", entire governments were declaring themselves to be "feminists" (such as the governments of Canada, Finland and several others), a institution after institution, especially universities, were declaring themselves to be "feminist" (and not even just in the United States), and s...

I have been ranting in this blog for quite many years about the sometimes really aggravating use of the pronoun "they" to refer to one single person, which has been very actively (and often aggressively) pushed by the modern far left for the past 15+ years. One particular pet peeve of mine is how the math popularizer famous youtuber Matt Parker started actively (and excessively) using it for that purpose some time in 2019, and has never really stopped (good example blog post here .) Because I like to be fair and academic, I would like to present here three different sides to this question, three different positions and arguments about it. 1. The modern leftist position It's very disrespectful and hurtful to just assume someone's gender, and with some people it could outright trigger a mental episode. Assuming that someone is a "he" or a "she" can be the wrong assumption to make and thus can be very hurtful, even psychologically violent, and thus on...

I have written about this exact subject before, so I'm just repeating the same ideas, but feel like I need to write about it once again because I just keep seeing the same thing again and again. There seems to be this strange psychological phenomenon, especially in the United States but also in many other parts of the world, where people are bothered by cameras filming them in public... but only if the camera is being held by a person. They might literally walk in full view of 20 fully and clearly visible conspicuous cameras attached to walls, ceilings and poles, and they pay no attention to it and are completely ok with it (even though in many cases they have absolutely no idea who those cameras belong to, or where that footage is going.) Moreover, they might walk across the front of cars with visible dash cameras inside them, and even modern "smart" cars with a dozen small cameras all around them... and not be bothered at all (even though, once again, they have no idea ...

Soviet-style Communism (which is no way better than any other totalitarian ideology such as Fascism or Nazism) has somehow gained a lot of foothold particularly in the United States as of late (possibly because of the actions of the KGB three-four decades ago .) Like with so many other things, some basic slogans of Soviet-style Communism are being blindly repeated by the brainwashed American leftist masses with next to zero understanding of what it actually means. One of the most prominent such slogans is, of course, that they "support the working class" and want to give the power back to the "working class", that they are fighting for the rights of that class, and want to take down the oligarchs and seize the means of production for the working class and yada yada yada. Their political parties (most prominently the DSA) also love to claim that the "working class" overwhelmingly supports them back, particularly the oppressed minorities who are, according t...

In my line of work I sometimes need to write technical or other types of documents. I was once tasked with writing what was essentially an explanation and tutorial on a particular task in a particular embedded system scenario using certain libraries, as I had been working on that and they wanted me to write a clear tutorial and specification of how it was done, for others employees who may need to work on the same or similar things. The document ended up being, if I remember correctly, about 30 to 40 pages long, and I took particular care to make it as clear and legible as possible, paying special attention to its layout. I added page breaks if needed to make sections, sub-sections, tables, lists and code samples be all contiguous on the same page if needed, or if eg. a code sample was so long that it necessarily needed to be on two pages, I made certain that the page changed at a clear logical place in the code (rather than being, for example, between an "if" line and its bo...

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, and not only is he very openly and brazenly socialist, but he ran his campaign on very socialist promises, like promising free public transport and free food, and to "tax the rich". Unsurprisingly, when the actual reality of the economy of the state of New York hit, it turned out that creating his Socialist Utopia isn't actually as easy as he promised. He can't increase income tax (because that's decided at the state level, not at the city level, and the New York State Senate has clearly indicated that they have zero intent in raising income taxes), running free public transport actually requires money that the city doesn't have, and trying to build new state-owned Socialist grocery stores is not only enormously expensive but also very inefficient, and would be a constant money sink. (Such a construction project is also likely to last longer than his 4-year term as mayor. It assumes that he will be eternally re-ele...