What grinds my gears

Suppose you read an article in a big-name reputable economics journal about a person who got lured into investing into a certain banking company, and who lost all of his money. The article goes on to say how the people at the banking company used manipulative tactics to lure this person to invest, and didn't warn him clearly enough of all the caveats and risks. If you are a normal person, like everybody else, you'll just believe that article. After all, it's written in a reputable journal. They couldn't possibly make such a thing up. That would be way too egregious. Except that kind of thing happens all the time. In fact, this particular example is based on an actual such article written in an actual journal about an actual banking company. It turns out that the person described in the article doesn't actually exist, and it's a complete distortion of what actually happened. Somewhere along the way somebody invented a fictitious person, full of fictitious det...

Homeschooling is, for some reason, quite prevalent in the United States and Canada (and possibly some other countries). The advocates of homeschooling present all kinds of claims of how it's superior to sending your kids to a public school. Since I live in Finland, I am of the quite strong opinion that homeschooling is more detrimental than useful, and I more or less oppose the idea. Here are some of the reasons, and one concession (mostly from an American perspective), although perhaps not in the same vein as American homeschoolers present. Most Americans seem to live in some kind of societal bubble where, while they know that other countries exist, they don't pay much attention of how society works in those other countries, and only think about the United States and how things work there. They seldom look to other countries to see what works there, and think if it perhaps could work in the US as well. (On the contrary, quite often when people present them alternatives tha...

Or whatever part it is by now... It won't be long that regressive leftist social justice warriors will declare chess to be a racist game. After all, it's white vs. black, and of course white goes first and thus has the advantage and privilege of the first move. (I'm actually quite honestly surprised this hasn't been a thing yet.) A more serious one: In the near future it's very possible that regressive leftists will start opposing inter-racial relationships and marriages. Which of course means that white men can't be in a relationship, nor marry, non-white women (perhaps not even non-white men). This second one is already showing some signs that it might be happening. There are already feminist articles out there that declare that if a white man finds Asian women attractive and desirable, that's "racist." Somehow. (You can never quite fully comprehend nor predict social justice logic.) The logical extreme of this is, of course, that at some p...

I recently watched a video of a university student talking about how she's becoming utterly tired of the social justice feminism in that institution. (Incidentally, she's a black woman. Not that that matters, but at least in the eyes of the regressive left she's probably seen as some kind of traitor or someone with "internalized racism", because the regressive left cannot judge a person by her opinions, but by her gender and skin color.) She describes how at the university she's attending social justice ideology is injected into everything. She gives as example English literature classes. Everything is taught solely from the perspective of regressive leftist social justice ideology. Even students taking purely STEM courses (science, technology, engineering, math) are forced to take gender studies and social justice classes as part of their mandatory curriculum. For the longest times universities were places where people were taught to think critically, and...

The main goal of a private company is to make money. That's it. As crude as that might sound, that's just the core of our economic system (and it's actually a fact that's even taught in university economy courses; personal experience). Whatever other goals a company might have, those are secondary to that of making money. Therefore a company should always strive to do things that maximize income and minimize losses. Less scrupulous companies might resort to underhanded shady tactics, playing with fire with regards to the law, other companies may be much more honest and always play by the rules, but the bottom line is that whatever they do, the main goal is to maximize profit. One thing that will not maximize profit, but instead will potentially cause diminished income, perhaps even losses, is a company taking a socio-political stance, and openly advocating for a certain political view, especially if controversial. In other words, when they engage in virtue-signalin...

The regressive left, especially in the United States (but pretty much also everywhere else), the media at large, leftist celebrities, and pretty much everybody who hates Trump, is comparing him to Hitler, and constantly bringing out how much of a "racist", and "sexist" and a myriad other buzzwords he is, and how he is worse than Hitler and commits atrocities, and what not. Yet they have very little to show for it. If you ask them what exactly has Trump said or done to deserve all those accusations, the evidence is quite bleak. So he banned the citizens of certain countries from entering the US... hardly an atrocity (especially considering that those exact same countries have banned the citizens of Israel from entering theirs, something that no regressive ever acknowledges or pays attention to). He wants tougher stances and enforcement on illegal immigrants... something that pretty much every prior US presidents has done as well, very much including Obama (you can ...

As with so many things, when it comes to virtue signaling, and anything related to the social justice ideology, "fat acceptance" might have had a somewhat reasonable point, to one degree or another, but it has evolved into a completely ridiculous denial of reality. And, likewise as often happens with these things, the original idea is being used to justify the ridiculous extreme. In fact, they are even calling it "fat pride" now, as if there was something prideful about being obese. The original idea stems from the desire to end "fat shaming" in our society. Kids making fun of, or even harassing, obese kids. Adults making nasty remarks and having all kinds of prejudices about obese people. And so on. Fine. Some degree of decency and good manners could be expected of society. We shouldn't be making fun of, or shun, or harass, anybody because of how they look, or any other sort of external characteristics. If they have some kind of personal problem (...

The people of the United Kingdom voted for the country to leave the European Union. That happened in June of 2016. Almost a year and a half later, the United Kingdom is still in the EU, with absolutely no signs of leaving yet. And it's likely not going to ever happen (unless something like a total collapse of the EU happens, which may well be a possibility.) One would think that since they decided to leave, it would be a rather quick process, taking maybe some weeks, a few months at most. But apparently not. It actually would be a relatively fast process. The EU cannot force a country to stay in the union. (Of course the EU could act like the organized criminal thugs they are and try to impose sanctions on UK for leaving too soon, but the UK is rich enough and with enough connections to the rest of the world that they could well just ignore those pitiful threats. Seriously. The UK would have absolutely nothing to fear from the EU mafia.) The problem is, the majority of p...

One of the unfortunate side-effects of huge megacorporations that effectively have a monopoly status is that they can get away with pretty much anything (as long as it's not outright illegal), no matter how much their customers and users may protest. For example, some time ago Google announced their "YouTube Heroes" program, which would allow certain users (who are not employees of google, but just private citizens) to, among other things, mass-flag videos. I think the YouTube's advertisement video for this broke some kind of record by having almost a million dislikes, and something like a 99% dislike-to-like ratio. It caused a controversy storm, and hundreds of critical videos. (The original video has comments disabled, which is quite telling. They probably got tired of all the criticism and attacks.) So, what happened? Google just ignored all the negative feedback and went ahead with the project anyway. And do you know what's scarier? People just stopped...

In the same way as it seems very difficult for some people to accept that 0.999... = 1 , it appears that likewise some people have really hard time accepting that 0 0 (ie. zero to the power of zero) is indeterminate, rather than 1. No matter how you try to twist it, the expression 0 0 , in itself, is indeterminate in mathematics. In other words, it has no value. The expression is, in some sense, invalid. It simply has no meaningful value of any sort. The reason why some people are so adamant that it must be 1 is that if you take smaller and smaller positive values of x, the expression x x approaches 1. In other words, the limit of x x , as x approaches 0 (from the positive side) is indeed 1. However, limits are not the same thing as the value of the function at that point. Just because the function might approach a value as the variable approaches certain other value, doesn't necessarily mean that the function itself has that value at that point. (With many functions this ...

Legalized racial discrimination... eh, sorry, I mean "affirmative action" (which must be one of the most obnoxious euphemism for discrimination ever) may in some cases actually discriminate against non-white people (even though, in general, "affirmative action" is always and everywhere created to discriminate against white people, especially white men). You see, since pretty much the beginning of time (or, rather, since universities have existed), universities have admitted in students based on personal merit: They need to have demonstrated proficiency and knowledge, and the ability to be able to pass the demands of a higher education degree. This usually means good scores in lower level schools (eg. high schools), as well as high scores in a demanding entrance exam. Nowadays, however, this purely meritocratic principle is being targeted by the political correctness cancer, because it causes an imbalance. For one reason or another, probably because of culture, u...