What grinds my gears

Flat-earthers oftentimes have a hard time understanding why Earth's atmosphere is "next to a vacuum" and doesn't get "sucked" by the vacuum. I explain the reason here . Oftentimes these same flat-earthers will use vacuum chambers as examples of how vacuum "sucks" air into it: The walls of the vacuum chamber are under enormous pressure, and if it's opened, it "sucks" air in very rapidly. This is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening. The actual reason why vacuum chambers experience an enormous amount of pressure by the surrounding air, and why the air rushes in at enormous speeds if it's opened, is very closely related to what I explained in that other article. To help understand, consider the atmosphere as if it were water. This is, in fact, not far-fetched because both liquids and gases behave in a fluid manner, quite similarly to each other. Their densities may be quite different, and this density behaves a bit dif...

Prank shows have existed for almost as long as television (and, of course, the practice of pranking itself goes back millenia.) Maybe the show is called "candid camera", or "just for laughs", or whatever. Unsurprisingly, a lot of such content has been uploaded to YouTube since almost the beginning of that site, as well as all the other video sharing platforms. A lot of people, quite justly so, heavily criticize and oppose prank videos where the pranks are mean and done in bad spirit. Scaring people, assaulting people (in American legalese "assault" does not necessarily require physical contact, just the physical movements needed to make the person seriously believe that he will get physically hurt, even if physical contact is never made; if physical contact that causes injury does occur, the legal term is "battery"), causing them stress, worry or panic (eg. faking some accident that makes nearby people panic and think that something horrible has ...

I have written before about YouTube channel that upload outright fake and fraudulent videos , such as fake "primitive building" videos, fake "restoration" videos, and so on. These are fraudulent in that they completely mislead their viewers about the genuineness of what's shown in the video, and thus inducing a lot of views and thus ad revenue, and sometimes even fraudulent donations. There is one type of YouTube channel that has a significantly more complicated and fuzzy status. It can be a bit hard to imagine for the average YouTube viewer, but for bigger youtubers making videos is actually their primary and only job and source of revenue. Not only that, but some youtubers are outright rich. Literally millionaires! If you are getting millions of views, the ad revenue can be surprisingly lucrative. YouTube and most youtubers (with some exceptions) are not completely open and clear about how much revenue a channel can get, but a rough estimate is about 1 cent pe...

The Linux kernel has always been written in C for the entirety of its existence since its first version, published in 1991. Linus Torvalds himself, as the creator and owner of the project, has always defended this decision very, very strongly (sometimes to the point of outright embarrassing behavior), for decades and decades. One of the more rational strong arguments why the kernel has been kept using pure C is this: C is the  de facto  universal embedded systems programming language, and the amount of C experts, who know the language inside out and have several decades of experience (often literally 30, 40, and even more years) is enormous. Thus the pool of potential developers, maintainers and experts with the proper qualifications is huge. Unsurprisingly, dozens and dozens of alternatives have been suggested over the decades, pretty much since the very beginning. The total list of proposed alternative programming languages would probably be quite large, perhaps even in the ...

I have written several blog posts about the absolutely crazy  bona fide  conspiracy theory that so many American "sovereign citizens" believe, primarily summarized and detailed in this one . Very brief summary is: They have concocted this ginormous theory (based on literally just a few words and short expressions in a few legal and some non-legal documents, isolated from their context) that secretly, behind the scenes, the US government is actually a "private corporation" and that citizens "contract" with said "private corporation" and that, moreover, you can game the system by knowing all of this stuff that's happening behind the scenes and using certain code words and expressions, a secret code, that lawmakers, judges, lawyers and law enforcement officials are secretly privy to and obliged to respect . Their use of this "secret code" is particularly common when they are driving and stopped by a traffic cop. You can recognize them ...

Prices of products increase all the time. This is completely normal in a healthy economy, and one of the driving factors here is that inflation is always kept slightly positive, if possible. (A positive inflation means that the purchasing power of money decreases over time.) There are very complicated reasons why a constant small positive inflation is good for the economy, and an experienced economist could probably hold a 2-hour lecture explaining the details of it. Of course there are myriads of other reasons besides inflation that causes changes in the prices of products, as the global economy is an extremely complex dynamic system. For example, the cost of raw material production can change quite a lot over time. Sometimes it changes to be more expensive, sometimes to be cheaper. However, manufacturers of products extremely rarely will adjust the prices of their products down, only up. It's almost unheard of that some product becomes permanently cheaper. Anyway, economics is co...

It's rather incredible that the nation that gave us Magna Carta nowadays has less speech rights than countries like Russia. Indeed, while in Russia about 500 or so people are arrested every year for their expression of opinion online, the UK recently surpassed the 10 thousand arrests per year landmark, for people expressing their opinions online. And it's not just the staggering number of arrests: It's the severity of the sentences. You can literally be given a longer jail sentence for something you say online than for raping a minor. And that's not hyperbole or exaggeration, is there have been actual cases. And the thing is, you can be put in jail for some time and given a fine completely at the discretion of and judgment of police officers and their personal opinions of whether what you said was "offensive" and might have caused "anxiety" to someone. Indeed, a cop can decide, all on his own, based on his own personal opinion, whether to issue you a...

Australia has a Ministry of Truth... eh... I mean, Sex Discrimination Commissioner. She's one Anna Cody. She has been recently interrogated in Australia's senate about her role and what the "Sex Discrimination Act" is about, and she is apparently incapable of answering even the most basic questions, is completely confused, gives completely self-contradictory answers, and doesn't even seem to know what exactly she is supposed to do. The sheer level of incompetence and ignorance is astonishing. And apparently she has a doctorate of some kind. For example, when she was asked to define "man" and "woman", which is precisely under the core purview of the Sex Discrimination act and her very job, she repeatedly could not answer. When pressed about it, she gave this absolutely gem of an answer: "The Sex Discrimination Act does not define 'man' or 'woman'. It has an inclusive definition of 'women' that includes all women. So ...

They are going to give Link a speaking role in the movie. Read my lips: Link. Does. Not. Speak. Period. That's not negotiable.  If Link speaks in the movie, he's not Link, and it's not a Legend of Zelda movie at all. Period. 

Pretty much nobody has escaped the occasional e-begging that Wikipedia engages in, as from time to time they plaster every single page with a big banner begging for donations, "in order to keep Wikipedia independent", in other words, so that it can run on its own without being owned by some big private megacorporation with its own vested interests. And, indeed, running the servers is not cheap. Millions and millions of people access Wikipedia every minute. The amount of data that Wikipedia needs to serve is staggering. According to their own financial reports (which are public by law because Wikipedia is a non-profit), it costs about 3 to 4 million US dollars a year to run the servers and for the hosting costs. 3 to 4 million dollars annually is quite a chunk of money indeed. It certainly is not peanuts. So where's the fraud? In the fact that, according to those same reports, Wikipedia is donated about 200 million dollars every year, give or take. The same financial repor...

And that question is: Do you want to be a political activist trying to engage in social engineering... or do you want to make money? There's currently an online trend going on where people are taking screenshots and promotional pictures of purposefully "uglified" female characters in certain modern video games, and asking AI to "make her beautiful", and the AI versions result in absolutely gorgeous stunningly beautiful women. This trend is sending a message: "We gamers want this, not what you are offering." And, unsurprisingly, all the typical far-leftist pundits (most of whom don't even purchase those video games) are throwing a hissy-fit. But the fact is that beautiful women sell games. Just look at what happened, for example, with the game Stellar Blade, first on consoles and especially later when it was published on Steam. It hit sales records for the publisher. The leftist pundits scream about "the male gaze" and "unrealistic ex...

If there's one thing that American leftist politicians are good at, it's lying and fabricating. They are the epitome of the joke: "How do you know that a politician is lying? His lips move." For example, recently one senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted: "Under President Trump, electricity prices are surging, up 11%, leaving millions behind in their utility bills, with past-due balances at an all-time high. American families deserve better." And, indeed, under Trump's second term in office electricity prices have gone up by about that much on average. So where's the lie? It's a lie by omission, of course. What she's failing to tell is that electricity prices were going up at that same rate, and even more, during the entire presidency of Joe Biden. She is implicitly giving the impression that the electricity prices only started going up after Trump's second term in office. In reality, the prices have had an upwards trend for a long time. And, in ...

I probably don't need to even explain what "mukbang" is, although its history is actually a bit more interesting than it might sound at first. You see, originally "mukbang" wasn't actually about overeating (and streaming it online). As the name suggests, the term comes from South Korea and it actually originally consisted of people (usually young women) just filming videos as if they were on a dining date with the viewer. In other words, they would just eat a completely normal meal and talk to the camera as if she were on a date with the viewer. It was kind of a "fantasy date" form of video, where the viewer could imagine being on a date with the (usually young female) streamer. In other words, eating the food itself was not originally the main point of the video. It was merely a setting. The main point was a simulated "date". However, these streamers and video authors quite quickly realized that most viewers formed a sort of "semi-f...

Some American TV series of the 1980's (including quite fondly remembered ones, like Knight Rider) had this strange habit of showing a kind of "teaser" of the contents of the episode at the beginning of the episode. Or at least some of their TV broadcasts did (I think these were cut from or never added to VHS and DVD releases of these series, although there might have been some that did.) This was actually relatively common in many TV series of the time. As far as I remember, this habit was eventually dropped by the 1990's, and almost no TV series used it anymore. However, for some strange reason the habit was caught and rekindled by other types of TV shows, particularly the "reality TV" ones: Indeed, while not all, some of them, even to this day, do the exact same thing: They show a kind of "teaser" of the contents of the episode at the beginning. Whether this is considered ok or annoying depends a lot on the individual viewer, I suppose. For some ...

I have written before about the actual reason why American cops are so insistent about ID'ing you , and that actual reason is that it's not merely that they want to see your ID, but they have to enter it in their computer systems, which then gets logged in the NCIC , which is a massive computer database owned and run by the FBI. Not that it required much confirmation, as it's already quite obvious, but in this video an American ex-cop very explicitly confirms that yes, they are indeed taught at the police academy to always demand people's ID and, particularly, to always enter it in one of their various computer systems that are directly connected to the FBI's NCIC system. Two things, however, that he does not confirm or speculate about in the video, though, at least not directly: 1) The reason  why  they are so insistent in entering everybody they ever encounter into the NCIC, and 2) how come this is so universal across the entire country, the same thing being taug...

The United Kingdom has become very infamous in the past ten-or-so years for having started to police people's speech and expression of opinion, for reasons that literally nobody knows (nor have I ever heard  where  that policy is coming from. It appears to be kept under the wraps.) It's very telling that, factually and without exaggeration, the UK incarcerates more people every single year for their expression of opinion online than Russia does. And by a quite large margin at that. Let that sink in for a moment. I believe that the UK broke the 10-thousand arrests per year landmark a couple of years ago, which is a staggering amount. And all that while, at the same time, solving actual crimes, such as burglaries, thefts, assaults, vandalism, rape and so on, has plummeted. There are several cities in the country where the police solves less than 1% of all such crimes. Indeed: They literally arrest more people for their expression of opinion than for actual crimes such as theft a...

An American police officer arrives at the scene of a relatively minor fender bender that had no injuries. After investigating a bit he wrote some citations for the 63-year-old man he deemed the culprit of the accident. He then asked the man to sign the citation. The man refused to sign it, which is actually his right. In the United States you are not legally obliged to sign those citations if you don't want to. However, the cop insisted. When the man kept refusing to sign it, the cop assaulted the man, started torturing him, and then murdered him by tasing him repeatedly. And, indeed, this was confirmed by the coroner, who ruled it a homicide. In other words, it was not an accident or some kind of medical episode, but a homicide: The man had been killed by the direct action of the police officer. And the only reason for the murder was because the man refused to sign a piece of paper. That's it. That's the whole reason. So, what happened to the cop? He got fired from his pos...

Recently the far-leftist stupidity once again raised its insane head by allowing a man to steal the trophies and prizes of women, this time by a man entering a "World's Strongest Woman" competition held in Arlington, Texas. Isn't it funny that for decades they complained about men invading women's spaces and taking away opportunities from women, and now all that has been reversed and they are actually  supporting  men participating in competitions against women and taking away their prizes and victories? At least some of the women in the competition, particularly the one who came second (ie. would have won if it wasn't for this man), didn't appear to be very happy about it. The second-place competitor outright walked out of the stage during the reward ceremony, quite clearly in protest. Well, like I have written a couple of times before, I actually blame the women in the competition. Why? Because they would have the  perfect  tool to combat this, yet they ...

Sometimes when American cops deal with so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe they don't need a driver's license to drive a car on a public road, the cops will say "driving not a right but a privilege". Sometimes other people (such as youtubers who make videos about sovcits) repeat the same adage. I wish they stopped doing that, because it's confusing and misleading. Sure, perhaps for certain particular definitions of "right" and "privilege" that sentence might be technically correct, but for the most generally and commonly used definitions it's just false. Consider it from this perspective: Do you have the right to build a house in the United States (and other free countries)? Yes, yes you do. There is no law against it. However, that doesn't mean you don't have to follow the relevant laws, codes and statutes. Do you have the right to create your own private business corporation to manufacture and sell products? Yes, ...

Several youtubers have in recent years tried to raise awareness of one of the most innocently devious phenomena in modern medicine, a statistical bias that fools even most medical professionals, and it's related to the success of cancer treatment. It is widely known and lauded that cancer survival rates have gone significantly up since the 1970's and earlier, which, according to these statistics, is a huge success story in modern medical science. However, as many people (including medical professionals and researchers) have pointed out, this is actually a statistical anomaly, not an actual fact. Yes, life expectancy has genuinely gone up thanks to more modern cancer treatment, but not even nearly as much as these misguided statistics would indicate. The main problem is that "surviving cancer" in these statistics is not measured by how many people were completely cured of cancer. One would think that that's precisely what they are looking at, but perhaps a bit surp...

There are many tenets to so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome that the vast majority of American far-leftists believe wholesale, and the list of these tenets would be quite long indeed, but one of these tenets, which relates to this blog post, is a quite petty and infantile one: And it's that Donald Trump is unintelligent, childish, petulant, doesn't know what he's doing, and constantly engages in childish rants and completely incoherent rambling, says stupid things, and so on. In fact, if you google for the expression "word salad", you'll find tons and tons of links to people accusing Trump of it, ie. that his speeches and what he says is often incoherent, dumb, childish and incomprehensible. And, like all the other tenets of Trump Derangement Syndrome, most of them just believe that and are constantly making that claim. The problem? They don't actually have examples of this. You know they don't have examples because if there were any, you can be godd...

European colonialism that happened about two to five hundred years ago, done by countries like England, France and Portugal, is most often painted in an extremely negative light: "White supremacist" nations invading, taking over and colonizing foreign lands of people they considered inferior, thinking that they have the God-given right to those lands and those resources, who exploited the lands and the people, stole their land and property, and took them as slaves, leaving only devastation and desolation behind. Then, during the past one to two hundred years ago all these European countries withdrew from their colonies and allowed them to become independent. What a horrendous episode in human history! Such a travesty! Such crimes against humanity! Lands ravaged, resources stolen, people abused and taken as slaves. Yet, when you actually start looking about the actual situation that happened before, during and after European imperialism, shoving the politics and moralizing asi...

Recently some rumors have been making the rounds that the highly anticipated next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, ie. GTA 6, will "feature pride parades and queer representation". As far as I know, and at least as of writing this blog post, these rumors have not been confirmed, and thus could be false. However, I am making a promise here: If the rumors turn out to be true and the game does feature those things, I'm not buying the game. Based on principle and nothing else. I'm voting with my wallet. That's a promise. I don't care if the game ends up selling 500 million copies and becomes universally acclaimed and considered the best video game that has ever been made, making games like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild feel like amateur trash in comparison. I'm still not buying it. There are thousand and thousands of other games in existence. I can perfectly well skip this one. 

If you go to the web page of almost any company, be it big or small, you'll most often find there some kind of "code of conduct" or extremely similar page that will placate to modern far-leftism to one degree or another. But the thing is: Surprisingly few companies actually want to engage in this kind of politics and would just want to remain completely neutral, just doing what they are best at, and leave politics aside. Yet, company after company after company have added all kinds of "code of conduct" and similar pages to their websites. But why? Have they been invaded by far-leftist activists who have pressured the higher-ups into this? Sometimes yes, but not even nearly always. So why is it so common? Why do so many companies feel the need to virtue-signal in this manner, trying to placate to modern far-leftism? It's surprisingly little known, and for some reason not talked about very much, but these companies are being effectively  forced  to add such ...

The social and economic situation in the United Kingdom has been going down for a couple of decades now, at an ever accelerating rate. Millions of immigrants, most of them completely illegal, are being imported into the country who for the most part do not contribute to the economy nor pay taxes and are pure beneficiaries of welfare, and the economy, governmental services have been going down. Crime statistics are going up, safety is going down, and police authoritarianism has significantly increased. The situation has become so bad that just last year, in 2024, a whopping 257000 working tax-paying citizens of the United Kingdom moved out of the country. In the previous year the number was 77000, which is itself also staggering, and shows that the mass emigration of the working class, which actually contributes to the economy and society, is only accelerating. So the UK has brought in a million people who only consume tax money, they don't pay it, and has lost over a quarter millio...

Recently in Germany six armed police officers raided in the middle of the night the home of a German citizen, seized all of his electronic devices, forced him to reveal the pin number to his smartphone, dragged him to the police station where they took a boatload of biometric data, including weight, height, multitudes of photos, biometric data from his hands, and a blood sample for DNA. Was he, perhaps, suspected of murder, assault, rape, robbery, or some kind of other severe crime? Or perhaps the electronics that they seized contained highly illegal material that he not only had downloaded but was also distributing? Or maybe he is a notorious hacker who has broken into computer systems and stolen boatloads of money? Nope. They did that because of one social media post that he had written. So surely the post itself was highly illegal to elicit such a reaction? Was it, perhaps, threatening to commit an act of terrorism? Or perhaps he was writing credible threats against someone's li...

I have written before in more detail about the beliefs and  bona fide  conspiracy theory of the so-called "sovereign citizens" of the United States (although, as mentioned there, while they used to use that term to classify themselves for decades, in later years they have stopped using it and outright deny it because of the bad reputation, especially among law enforcement and the federal government. Their beliefs and tactics have not changed, though, just how they call themselves.) One of the most hilarious beliefs that they have, which comes up oftentimes when they interact with cops, and which makes them sound outright bizarre, is that they believe that not only is the United States government a "private corporation", but that legally, secretly behind the scenes, every citizen is considered a kind of abstract "asset", a "corporation" of its own, that has a legal contract with this "private corporation" that's the government of th...