What grinds my gears

The Trump administration has once again recently declassified a bunch of US military documents about "UFOs", and some people are going crazy about it, claiming that it confirms that UFOs are real, they are physics-defying alien spacecraft, and that the military has confirmed their existence. Yet, what does this evidence consist of? A lot of written reports, and blurry footage. That's it. That's all we got. That's all the military got, for all we know. And, indeed, all of the photos and video footage of alleged UFOs always show blurry blobs. It's never sharp in-focus footage showing clear small details. Do you know  why  all the UFO footage is always blurry? Because when the footage is not blurry, when it shows the object in question in sharp intricate detail, it's always very evident what it actually is. That's why. So it's a kind of "natural selection" process: When the footage is sharp, clear, in focus, showing intricate detail, it just...

Five years ago I wrote about the question of whether the Western World is going to disappear just like the Roman Empire . For quite a while now this "soft empire" of sorts that we have, the so-called "Western World", and especially Europe in particular, has felt too big, too powerful, too stable to ever fall, to ever cease to exist, to ever crumble into pieces and become a disjointed set of small warring states, most of them either totalitarian or run by pure anarchy, accompanied by a complete economic collapse and the ensuing death of millions of people. Europe in particular seems too successful, too rich, too strong, too stable for that to happen. Yet, we have many precedents for this in history. No better example than the Roman Republic, later Roman Empire. It lasted for about a thousand years, was the largest superpower on the entire planet, controlled the majority of the known world, and had a military, governmental and economic power that no other nation could...

As of late, you are experiencing massive monetary losses in your gaming business, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars on completely mediocre projects that end up failing. By this point your losses have likely surpassed a billion dollars, and all you have to show for it are a few crappy games that nobody wants to play and everybody is laughing at. You should reflect a bit about why that is. Start by looking back in time, some 15-or-so years. Many major game studios were publishing several gigantic triple-A games per year, most of which received great acclaim, huge sales, and which are considered some of the best games ever made. Not one game in five years, but two or three games each year. And the kicker? Each of these games took somewhere around one to two years to develop and had a budget that was a fraction of your multi-hundreds-of-millions of dollars budgets. And we are not even talking about some big publishers subsidizing several independent smaller development studios. We a...

From some time maybe in the 1970's or 1980's to some time in the early 2000's, and to some extent to this day, a strange notion started spreading in Finland. And that was the notion that people should not waste tap water needlessly, and only use as much as was needed and no more. Don't leave water taps running for longer than necessary, don't flush the toilet unnecessarily, and so on. In fact, water saving toilets became extremely widespread during that time, with two flush levers: One to use a smaller amount of water and another to use a larger amount, and instructions on when to use which. The thing is: Being conservative on how much tap water is being used makes sense in many countries where water is scarce and being wasteful about it is detrimental. However, Finland is not one of those countries (and neither are most of the northern and central European countries, or Canada, and many other similar countries). In Finland (and other Nordic Countries) water is not ...

More and more teachers in the United States have been uploading videos and posts about an extremely worrying trend that they have experienced, and have been doing it for quite some years now. And the phenomenon is the astonishing degradation of literacy, skills and cognitive capacity of the average student. Literacy among students has become poorer and poorer during the last ten-or-so years. Even many high school students are literally incapable of reading and understanding text that's even slightly more complicated. They don't understand most "big words", they don't know what they mean, and often they don't even know how they are pronounced. Give them almost any book that's even slightly more advanced in the literary sense, using even slightly more uncommon terms and concepts, and they are unable to read and understand it. And we are not talking about some advanced philosophy or science, but just regular prose that anybody in their 30's and older can ...

By this point I have watched literally hundreds and hundreds of videos of American cops doing a traffic stop (footage coming from either the cop's bodycam, a citizen's camera, or both.) One pattern almost always repeats, and I will never, ever understand it. Just consider these situations: If the car has invalid license plates, fake license plates, or no plates at all, they do not consider the driver an extremely dangerous armed-to-the-teeth criminal. They just approach the car and speak to the driver with no worries in the world. If the car was eg. speeding, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous.  If the car has windows that are so heavily tinted that you literally can't see anything inside, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous. If the driver has no valid driver's license or outright refuses to provide one, and refuses all forms of identification, they don't consider him armed and dangerous. If the driver starts arguing with the c...

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...