What grinds my gears

For quite many decades now the Republican Party in the United States, the "conservatives", have been notorious for their pro-corporation policies. They endorse and drive policies and laws that would maximally benefit corporations and their economic wealth and growth. They drive for low or no taxes for corporations, tax breaks, minimal governmental regulation and interference, and so on and so forth. The Democratic Party, the "liberals" (in the American political landscape sense), on the other hand, have always have a significantly less corporation-friendly attitude, wanting more control, more regulation, higher taxes, higher minimum wages, and so on. In this context, it seems very strange and highly unusual for most of the major American tech corporations and financial institutions to seem to oppose the Republican Party, the Republican administration, and on the contrary support the Democrats instead. In fact, since the mainstream media failed in 2016 to have ...

For some time now I have been joking in the comment sections of many YouTube videos which deal with the racism and racial segregation of the regressive left with things like "how long before they start demanding DNA samples before they allow people to (do, say or permitted into whatever is being discussed in this video)?" Well, seeing the direction where things are going, and how fast they are going there, I'm not sure if this should a joke anymore. Perhaps at some point in the near future they will start actually demanding DNA samples in order to measure your genetic purity (eg. how "black" you really are) in order to allow you to do or get into something particular, or condemn you for something, and to classify you in a hierarchy of oppression. After all, we are already seeing the first hints of something like this. There was this infamous case of that American congresswoman who tried to prove that she has American Native ancestry (and, quite hilariously,...

The picture on the left is a common sight in San Francisco (and, I'm sure, in an ever-increasing manner in other places as well). The "rainbow flag" used to mean something relatively innocuous, yet day by day it is changing its symbolic meaning, and becoming more and more a symbol of totalitarianism. More and more alike the flags on the right. (Yes, the left-right arrangement of these two pictures was intentional on my part.) This is, once again, the so-called "horseshoe theory" in action: The more you go to the extreme left, the more the ideology starts resembling the extreme right. The more similar they become. The symbol on the left is changing from a symbol of tolerance and positivity into a symbol of totalitarianism. It's changing from a symbol that says "we are not ashamed of who we are", into a jackboot on the throat of any dissenter. Into a symbol of oppression and totalitarianism. Into a symbol that says "either you submit to o...

One of the major problems with the modern regressive leftist social justice warriors is that they have been successfully indoctrinated into activism, and there are thousands and thousands of them, and thus they have become useful tools for whatever ideology the social justice ideologues want to do. This is a problem because there is essentially no such organization among their opponents and critics. In later months the social justice ideologues have discovered that due to the current political climate, they can effectively weaponize financial institutions and online platform services for their agenda, in order to attack, discriminate, shun and shut down any criticism. They are highly organized. What they are in practice doing is that they are looking at the major online platforms and financial institutions, and recruiting indoctrinated people into, effectively, bullying these organizations until they relent and start changing their policies and banning people. It only requires a hu...

Do you know what I hate more than regressive leftist social justice zealots? Anti-SJW people who are hypocrites. These are people who, for example, have a YouTube channel and regularly make videos criticizing the regressive left, their ideology, and their latest antics. When doing so, they are stern supporters of free speech, and oppose and criticize the regressive leftist social justice warriors for their totalitarian ideology where they want to limit freedom of speech and "deplatform" people, ie. remove all means of communication from them by banning them from all social media and video sharing websites. But then, give them the right sort of "bad guy", and these same critics turn around and start spouting the exact same deplatforming rhetoric themselves. Suddenly all that fancy talk about freedom of speech goes out of the window, and suddenly they start advocating deplatforming and banning some person that they don't like. As a recent example, one suc...

All the way since the social justice ideology started invading video game journalism three or four years ago, and several major publications colluded into engaging into a massive anti-gamer campaign, with their "gamers don't have to be your audience, gamers are over" articles, and with the subsequent massive consumer revolt against this attack and the rampant corruption in game journalism, and these journalists jumping to the defensive by accusing the consumers, ie. gamers, of being misogynists and sexists, and painting the whole revolt as something that it simply cannot be, the regressive leftist video game journalism has been painting gamers as hating women in video games, both in terms of female players, as well as female playable characters in the games themselves. This narrative is so prevalent that it seems that many video game journalists and social justice warriors honestly seem to believe that most male gamers seriously object and get upset about female playabl...

This is not an anti-abortion or a pro-abortion blog post. I'm not commenting on that particular subject, nor taking a stance. Instead, I'm going to criticize the argument "my body, my choice". (This counter-argument could be construed as being anti-abortion, but my only intent is to show that it's a bad argument for abortion. Even if you are pro-abortion, I don't think you should use it, and here I explain why.) Many pro-abortion activists argue that it's "their body", and nobody should have a say on what a woman can do with her body. It's nobody else's business. But the thing is, this is ultimately a selfish argument, at the expense of another life. Another human being. We could have an endless argument about at which point a fetus becomes a human being with all human rights, but I would say that, even if we considered it to be a gray area (and gradual process), at some point before birth the baby is a full human capable of su...

One of the biggest ironies about the multiculturalist intersectional regressive leftist social justice ideology is an inadvertent subconscious superiority complex that many critics have named "bigotry of low expectations". This is when a "woke" social justice ideologue, most often white, thinks that he or she is advocating for, speaking on behalf of, or helping "oppressed minorities", without realizing that he or she is actually inadvertently demeaning those people by considering them somehow lesser capable, lesser able, or in some other way inferior and not equal. There are many, many examples of this, but I think this one, which came up recently, is very illustrative: Darren Criss will no longer play LGBT characters . The subtitle of the article is the most telling part. Emphasis mine: "Darren Criss says he will no longer accept LGBT scripts because he doesn't want to deprive gay actors of roles ." What he doesn't realize is th...

Suppose four different people were to say or write these statements, eg. in social media or some other platform, and get a lot of visibility: Person 1: "I'm proud of being black, and of my race, and I think white people are the most destructive force in the world." Person 2: "I'm proud of being Hispanic, and I hate white people." Person 3: "I'm proud of being Asian, and I think all white people should kill themselves." Person 4: "There's nothing wrong in being white. All people should be treated equally as individuals." Only one of those statements would cause outrage and accusations of racism. Rather obviously, the last one. We have become a society where, if you are not ashamed of being white, if you are not constantly living in guilt and expressing it, and if you dare to express that there's nothing wrong with being white, you will be accused of racism and "white supremacy". If you do not think that t...

For a couple of decades now the regressive leftist multiculturalists have been pounding on how immigration is a net benefit because of all the new labor force that's coming into the country. (Because of the current self-imposed "refugee crisis" in Europe, where everybody knows that at least 99% of the immigrants aren't very highly educated or trained, this narrative has taken a bit of a backseat, but some of those multiculturalists still maintain that same claim when the question comes up.) In order to back this claim up, they just love to take individual examples of immigrants who indeed are highly educated and trained, for example being a mechanical engineer, some kind of lab researcher, or having a doctorate in medicine (and quite happily ignoring the fact that those people form a microscopic minority of all immigrants and people seeking refugee status.) But yes, it is indeed so: Some immigrants are indeed highly educated and trained, for example as medical do...

It has been for quite some time public knowledge that not only is Google politically biased, but in fact they go out their way to manipulate search results in their search engine. Perhaps no better indication of this is the autocompletion feature of the main Google search page, and a comparison to the DuckDuckGo search engine, which prides itself for being unbiased and opposing censorship and manipulation of search results. For example, writing the name "hillary clinton" in the Google search box results in these completion suggestions: Any word that's in some way negative seems to be conspicuously missing in the completion suggestions. Now let's compare it to what DuckDuckGo gives us: "Indictment" and "email scandal" appear as some of the top suggestions. What happens if we write "hillary clinton crim" in DuckDuckGo? And what happens if we do the same on Google? Need I even say anything?

Recently Microsoft announced that a system update for the Xbox One would add mouse&keyboard support, so that games can, if they so wish, use that form of control. This was a bit baffling and surprising to me. Why? Because the PlayStation 4 has always supported USB mice and keyboards, from the very beginning (ie. since its launch in 2013.) I find it quite surprising that the Xbox One didn't have any sort of support until now. (Actually I'm still a bit confused and not 100% sure about this. I don't own an Xbox One, so I cannot corroborate it for myself, and information about this is surprisingly hard to find online, but from the little I have been able to gather, it's my understanding that it's indeed so: Up until now, the Xbox One had literally zero support for mice and keyboards. If you connect one to the console, nothing happens. It's not recognized and it does nothing.) Not that it has made much of a difference on the PS4, mind you. You can use an US...

There are quite many reasons why communism (and it's slightly "lighter" variant, socialism) doesn't work, including economic reasons, and reasons related to fundamental human rights. However, at a more fundamental core level there's one major reason why it can't work in the long run: Communism kills the human instinct and need to succeed. It stifles and smothers talent, creativity and hard work. It destroys the human instinct to better oneself and one's surrounding society, to improve, to progress. How? Via the simple reason that communism eschews rewarding talent, hard work and creativity. Let's face it, for centuries and even millenia, money is the ultimate material reward that the vast majority of people strive for. Sure, money has caused tons and tons of crimes and injustice because of the pursuit of money and riches. However, it has also driven progress and innovation. We wouldn't be where we are, technologically and socially, if it were...

Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know that Nvidia's "next-gen" line of graphics card, the RTX-20xx series, has hardware support for raytracing, which gets us one step closer to the holy grail of computer graphics that has been almost insurmountable since the 1970's: Real-time raytracing used in actual video games for more accurate reflections, refractions and shadows (as well as, possibly, some other graphical effects, like better real-time ambient occlusion and global illumination). The new cards have had a slightly rocky start in that even after a couple of months having been available, only one game so far has raytracing support, and only a half dozen upcoming games have announced possible support. And, moreover, even in that one game (ie. Battlefield 5), turning raytracing on plummeted framerates, from something like 80-100 frames per second to less than 40 and even 30 at worst, with all other settings maxed out, using an RTX 2080 Ti. On ...

For some reason during the past couple months not only have all the major Silicon Valley megacorporations started engaging in a mass purging of "wrongthinkers" from their platforms, but, more scaringly, banks are joining these actions. It's one thing if online publications engage in slanderous smearing campaigns against someone or some organization. It's a bit worse when major technology megacorporations start actively banning and shunning those people or organizations, in an attempt to purge them from the internet completely. However, it reaches a whole new level when banks join the crusade and start refusing payment processing services from them, trying to erase them from existence. The free speech social media alternative gab.com has been the major target of a massive campaign by such tech corporations and payment processors, but it's not the only one. Expect this to only escalate. Expect it to start affecting you. You might think "oh, that sucks;...

In the modern world, professional movie critics have become more and more detached from their audience. Rather than critique a movie or TV series from the perspective of the people, they are in an increasing manner doing it from their own personal political bias. Two quite telling examples have been pointed out. Consider, for instance, the movie Death Wish, and its Rotten Tomatoes scores (Rotten Tomatoes is a review score aggregation site for movies and TV shows): Why such a big disparity between the average professional critic score, and the user scores? Because professional critics are not giving their scores based on the merits of the movie alone, and how good of a story it tells, from the perspective of the average viewer. Instead, the critics are giving it a low score because of their own political bias. They don't care how good of a movie it is. They only care whether the story of the movie clashes with their own personal political beliefs. A good example of the same...

"Dropshipping" is a system of online sales that has become popular in the era of online shopping (although similar businesses have probably existed for a very long time in one way or another) where an online website acts as a kind of intermediate between several online shops and customers. In other words, the "dropshipping" website essentially acts as a marketplace where several smaller businesses can sell their products in one centralized place. The website itself doesn't handle the products, doesn't have any sort of stock of them, or even gets the products themselves at any point. Instead, they just list products from online shops and take purchase orders from customers, transfer the order to the actual shops and have them ship the product directly to the customer. Obviously the price of the product will be slightly higher for the customer, because the "dropshipping" website will take a cut. On the other hand, it's much easier for the custome...

For many years now YouTube has made a yearly video celebrating YouTube content creators. This yearly video series is called "YouTube Rewind". They typically star famous YouTubers. At the beginning, these videos were very liked, and the like-to-dislike ratio was overwhelmingly positive. Two years ago (ie. "YouTube Rewind 2016"), there was an unusual amount of dislikes. Still not many, compared to the amount of likes, but still quite a lot. Last year, however, with "YouTube Rewind 2017", the amount of dislikes started to raise quite a lot, with the video having about as many dislikes and likes. Now, "YouTube Rewind 2018", released a couple of weeks ago, has broken two records: Most dislikes a YouTube video has ever received in its first 48 hours, and now, a bit later, the most disliked YouTube video of all time (in raw number of dislikes), breaking all previous records. At the moment of writing this the video has over 11 million dislikes (compa...

The Games Done Quick marathon is a biannual charity event organized by the Speed Demos Archive website, where speedrunners complete games as fast as possible, and donations are collected for several causes. It started very small, at someone's home, and the first event got something like 10 thousand dollars in donations. It quickly grew in size, getting several millions of dollars in donations every time. I'm a speedrunner aficionado. Not in the sense that I would speedrun myself, but I watch speedruns at a semi-regular basis. For many years I was excited for the Games Done Quick marathons, and often watched them for hours when they were live. Not anymore. I have stopped watching and supporting those events. There are three main reasons: 1: Deceptive donation policies The marathon happening in winter, Awesome Games Done Quick, collects donations every year for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. The announcers love to repeat over and over how "100% of donations go to th...

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple Inc, recently gave a speech that has immediately become infamous. I think this part perfectly summarizes everything (emphasis mine): "I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong. Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin ." I just love the religious undertones. This is the most direct statement I have ever seen so far that social justice is, in fact, a religious doctrine, and that Silicon Valley tech megacorporations are adopting it as their official religion. He clearly emphasizes how it's a question of morality , for example by saying: "And as we showed this year, we won’t give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the app store. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do . My friends, if we can’t be clear on moral questions like these, then we’ve got big problems." Well, I would have one qu...

It appears that one phenomenon seems to be becoming more and more common: A new game has promotional material that hints of it being politically charged with identity politics and social justice ideology... and those suspicions turn out to be completely right in the end. I already wrote previously how a trailer for the game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus seemed to hint of the game having heavy-handed social justice ideology shoved into it (and down the players' throats). It turned out that it wasn't just a rogue advertisement corporation trying to be clever, but the game was arguably an SJW game . When the first trailer for the new Battlefield V was released, people started criticizing it for having social justice ideology undertones. The reason for this is that the Battlefield series has always been based on real World War II battles and events, and this new one was no different, with the developers previously announcing that it, too, was based on real events that happen...

Despite the denial of reality of many individual users, it's by now widely accepted that the virtual reality craze became pretty much a flop. What was three or four years ago envisioned as a complete revolution of video gaming (with many even going so far as to predict that VR gaming would surpass and obsolete regular gaming using regular displays), became pretty much a niche. VR devices, especially on the PC side, have sold relatively poorly, and VR game development is in a rather pityable state, especially when it comes to triple-A titles (we can literally count triple-A VR games that are even worth mentioning with the fingers of two hands, even though the technology has been out there for over two years now.) Both VR device and VR game figures support this fact. About 0.7% of all Steam users have any sort of VR device. Recently Steam published some sales figures for VR games, and they didn't look very good. The most popular paid VR game was Job Simulator... with 200 thousa...

I have written several blog posts already about how Brexit will most probably never happen, and believing otherwise is just an illusion. For example here . To a bit of my puzzlement, to this day there are still many people living in the United Kingdom that believe that Brexit will happen. Or even could maybe perhaps happen. They are delusional. Brexit. Will. Not. Happen. Can this be said any more clearly? The UK government will make sure that Brexit will never happen. Why does anybody still live in the illusion that's not the case? If I'm wrong, and Brexit does happen, and the UK fully stops being a member of the EU, I will happily make a post about having been wrong. However, I'm afraid I won't have to.

For one reason or another, modern social justice ideology has become extremely anti-capitalist. According to them, capitalism is pretty much the biggest evil in the world, and it must be destroyed, squashed and completely eradicated from the world. Big megacorporations are greedy, exploitative and oppressive. They unashamedly and blatantly exploit cheap labor and natural resources in developing countries, and are pretty much the modern equivalent of colonialism. Corporatism is one of the biggest evils in this world. But the mind of the social justice warrior is as fleeting as April sunshine, and will happily swing to the other extreme when it suits them. It's very easy for a huge exploitative overly-powered monopoly megacorporation to turn social justice warriors to their side, and have a horde of ideologues defending them: Simply ban and refuse service to a famous personality that the social justice warriors hate. They can do this at the flick of a button, and suddenly they wi...

Yale University has published the results of a research that seems very unusual in this day and age, in the current political climate. (I suppose it's a bit comforting to see that at least some universities are still not completely and absolutely invaded by social justice ideologues.) This study seems to indicate that white American liberals tend to have more racial prejudices and patronizing attitudes towards black people and other minorities than American conservatives. More precisely, the project studied what kind of speech and vocabulary white people tend to use when addressing black people and other minorities, versus when addressing other white people. The study includes speeches made by politicians (eg. presidential candidates), as well as a separate study made for the project using random people. As the report above says, "white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act ...

When it comes to game consoles, Nintendo has always and traditionally been extremely "family friendly", starting all the way back from the NES and SNES eras. (One of the most famous examples of this is Nintendo's requirement that the first Mortal Kombat port for the SNES had its blood and most gruesome finishers removed or changed. Nintendo only relented with Mortal Kombat II, allowing it to be published uncensored.) Of course there has always been a distinct lack of overly sexual content for the Nintendo platforms (although there are some examples). In contrast, the other two major players, ie. the Sony and Microsoft consoles, have always been seen as the more "hardcore" gaming platforms, where almost anything goes. However, for some reason it appears that Sony and Nintendo are pretty much reversing their policies. Recently Sony announced that they will start demanding censorship of PlayStation games with overtly sexual content, especially when it comes t...

If you make a search for something like "most racist ads", you'll find tons of YouTube video compilations and webpages of advertisements which are supposedly "racist", even though clearly the "racism" is unintentional. There are tons and tons of examples, but one in particular comes to mind, given how clearly non-racist it is, with the "racism" being attached to it artificially by moral busybodies: A magazine ad, selling something I don't remember right now, but had something to do about the speed of some kind of technology, had a woman office worker standing, and a bunch of sprinters on the side in the typical ready-to-go position. What was the "problem"? Well, the woman happened to have light skin, while the sprinters were all black (in fact, if I remember correctly, just the same person copy-pasted over and over). And the ready-to-go position made it look like they were bowing to the woman. Quite clearly the sprinters wer...

Suppose that someone sends an illegal package through the postal services, or through a courier service, to someone. Such as a package containing illegal material (such as drugs), or something dangerous such as a bomb. When such a crime is being dealt with, nobody even thinks about suing the post office for facilitating this crime. Or suppose that someone makes a phone call in order to organize some criminal activity, such as organizing a terrorist attack, or purchasing illegal substances. Once again, nobody even thinks that the phone company should be sued for facilitating such illegal activity. This principle is sometimes called a "safe harbor principle", or "safe harbor status". This means that if a company offers a service that allows people to communicate in one way or another with each other, the company will not be held responsible for any criminal activity that some people might engage in, as long as the company remains neutral, and collaborates with the...

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become more and more commonplace, usually as an addition to, and in some cases even as a complete replacement to the more traditional mechanical Hard Disc Drives (HDDs). The advantage of SSDs is that there are zero moving parts (it's all electronics, with no mechanical parts, pretty much in essence a memory stick turned up-to-eleven), and seek times are many orders of magnitude higher than with traditional mechanical HDDs (because, essentially, there is no seeking time). HDDs have a mechanical reader head which physically moves inside the device along the surface of the discs, reading the data. This causes a (relatively) long time in physically moving this mechanical "arm" from one place to another. Curiously, when reading sequential data (ie. data that exists in the HDD as one single consecutive block), HDDs aren't usually significantly (or even any) slower than SSDs. However, since data can very rarely be read sequentially, and ins...