What grinds my gears

There's a quite big irony with regards to the United States: It's one of the very few countries in this world where you can actually refuse to ID to the police unless they suspect you of a crime (that they can articulate). This is a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The irony comes from the fact that, at the same time, the United States is one of the very few free democratic countries in this world where the police is constantly demanding your ID for the most minor of interactions, even when they don't have the legal right to make such a demand. (Indeed, in most other free countries, especially in Europe, the police very rarely demands your ID when they interact with you, even when the country in question is a full-on "stop-and-ID state", ie. the law gives police the right to demand your ID for whatever reason they want, in any situation they want, no reason need given. They would have the legal right to demand it, yet they...

There are many tests out there that can be used to find out where (according to that particular test) you land on the so-called "political compass" (which is usually a two-dimensional graph where the horizontal axis depicts left-vs-right mostly in terms of economy, and the vertical axis depicts libertarianism-vs-authoritarianism in terms of sociopolitics.) Generally, when you do one of these tests, it will show you the "political compass" and a dot depicting where you are aligned. The problem with this? That single dot does in no way depict how "spread out" your opinions are on different topics. Some people might very narrowly fit one single small area of the "compass", while others may be all over the place. In other words, if you were to draw a dot for each individual opinion, rather than just showing the average of them, some people would have a rather small grouping of dots somewhere, while for others the dots would be all over the place. And...

During the latter half of the last century Zimbabwe was one of the most agriculturally rich countries in Africa. The agricultural produce of the country was so abundant that the country even engaged in rendering food aid to neighboring countries. The "problem" with this? The vast majority of those agricultural farms were owned and run by white people of mostly European descent. In the early 2000's the then dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, decided to correct this "problem" and forcefully expropriated all of those farm lands, kicked out all of the white farmers, and gave the lands to the native people. Unsurprisingly the agricultural production of the country plummeted very fast. It didn't take even ten years before the country was facing an enormous famine. It was so bad that very soon Zimbabwe was in need of aid from its neighboring countries rather than the other way around. It became so bad that Mugabe reversed his policies... almost. He begged for the...

As if the Academy Awards ceremonies had not already been cringey enough for many years now, the latest one had several winners give completely embarrassing speeches supporting "sex workers" and the "sex worker community", and how they want to decriminalize prostitution. Ok, they can have and express their opinions. That's their prerogative and their fundamental right to free speech. If they want to embarrass themselves in front of millions of viewers, I'm not the one wanting to stop them. However, would it be too much to ask for some consistency rather than having double standards? These are the exact same people who got the so-called "grid girls" banned from Formula 1. These are the exact same people who have been somewhat successfully campaigning against having sexy female characters in video games. These are the exact same people throwing temper tantrums when Asian video games depicting sexy female characters become immensely popular. Because of...

Because they are told to protest, and they blindly obey. That's the only reason. The vast, vast majority of the protestors have absolutely no idea what's going on. I am absolutely certain that if you went to ask these leftist protestors even the most basic questions about the conflict, they wouldn't know any answers. Ask them why Russia attacked, what reasons or excuses they used to attack, and they might throw some blind guesses but they wouldn't know the actual answers. Ask them about anything related to the war, any details, no matter how basic and broad, and they wouldn't know any answers. Ask them at all what Trump is doing and how he's approaching the peace negotiations, and they wouldn't know any answers. They have absolutely no idea whatsoever what's going on, or about any details of the war, no matter how basic and broad. Nothing. They are not interested in doing any research whatsoever. Even if you asked them to do some research on the subjec...

A man is driving along a road when he suffers a major seizure, causing the car to veer off and drive off the road to a ditch, thankfully at such low speed that the man is uninjured. However, he is unconscious and unable to move. Witnesses quickly call the emergency number and tell them about the man's seizure and accident. The cops are informed by dispatch that the man had suffered a seizure, so they knew this when going to the site of the accident. Medical personnel was also alerted. At the site of the accident a firefighter (rather than a paramedic, for some reason) tries to assess the condition of man and asks him questions. The man is clearly confused, doesn't really know what's happening or where he even is, his responses are incoherent, and he is constantly going in and out of consciousness. In other words, his medical episode is still fully ongoing, and he is in need of medical help. The firefighter (again, rather than a paramedic, for some reason) tells the man that...

Flat-earthers love to present hundreds and hundreds of silly arguments. Some of them might make a tiny bit of sense, others are completely nonsensical and incomprehensible. On the more incomprehensible and ridiculous side is this one: "If the Earth was a globe, then airplanes would need to be constantly pitching down when they fly, in order to follow the curvature of the Earth." And that's it. That's the entire argument. They don't explain any further. They don't explain what exactly is the problem that they are seeing in that. Yes, they seriously present that argument as I presented it above, without any further arguments or points, apparently because it, all on its own, shows something impossible and ridiculous, or something that everybody knows that just doesn't happen. They present it as if it were somehow completely self-evident what the "problem" is, without having to explain it any further. My answer that argument is: "Yes, so what?...

Suppose that you visit some exotic foreign country, like China or Japan, and during your visit there's a big local religious festivity going on, and one custom of it is that people will say some traditional well-wishing saying to other people, including you. Now suppose you were to become extremely offended by this, and proudly proclaim eg. on some stupid TikTok or YouTube video how offensive you feel it is, because that's not your religion, and it goes against your religion, and you start making demands for them to stop saying those things, to change their customs and culture to suit your personal sensibilities. I think we can all agree that you would be being a complete dumbass. I think this would be one thing where left, right and center would all agree: Don't be such an entitled prick. When you are in such a country as a visitor, you should respect and appreciate the local culture. Complaining about the local religious culture and how it offends you is being an egotisti...

If there's one thing that humans are incredibly creative at, it's coming up with ways to scam other people. One of the newest (or at least somewhat new) forms of scamming is selling used or even completely non-functional GPUs as "new" on Ebay and other online marketplaces. People and even companies selling completely unsealed products as new on such websites is nothing unusual, as they have been doing that for literally decades. For many companies it's just effectively another distribution platform, and in fact one that cuts many middle-men and thus can be cheaper. Thus finding completely new unused products on Ebay and similar websites is nothing strange. What some scammers are doing, however, is purchasing used products, such as GPUs, for very cheap and then selling them as "new", for a much higher price (close to the retail price of that product). They might disguise themselves as genuine sellers, or they might just say "purchased by mistake, bra...

Doctor Mike is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, medical doctor celebrities on YouTube, with over 13 million subscribers, most of his videos getting over a million views. He is an actual licensed general practitioner in the United States. In at least one video (and possibly others) he has very clearly and explicitly instructed his viewers "do not let your dog lick your face". The reason for this is that dogs (and other animals) often have bacteria (most prominently capnocytophaga bacteria) in their mouths that can cause very severe (and sometimes even fatal) infection in humans. This is one main reason why dog bites should always be taken very seriously and immediately treated by medical professionals. However, the bacteria can be transmitted by licks as well: It's enough for a dog to lick your hand, and then you picking your nose with that same hand, for it to be possible to get an infection, which could be extremely severe in the worst cases. Thus, Doctor Mike...

The open source projects GNOME, Librerwolf and hundreds and hundreds of others have become notorious for being very openly run by far-leftist extremists who have take an absolutely totalitarian political stance: Not only do they openly declare their extremist political views but, more importantly, they absolutely and categorically forbid any dissenting opinions and discussion, and quickly ban anybody who even dares to question their policies. In other words, these "free" software projects espouse the exact opposite of freedom: They are their own totalitarian oppressive dictatorial mini-regimes within their own domains, expelling and banning anybody who presents even the slightest of political dissent and criticism, which is so typical of modern far-leftism. My message to all these projects is this: You do not understand what you are doing. All of the project members embracing this ideology and these draconian oppressive measures: You think you are safe because you are toeing...

Some days ago I saw the most cringe and embarrassing newspaper front page I have ever seen in Finland: It was nothing but a black page with white text on it. It was a message directly to Donald Trump, with a list of bullet points about why he was wrong about Russia and its involvement in the Ukrainian war, and how Russia is fully to blame, and all the wrongs that Russia has done to Ukraine. I'm not exaggerating or making it up: It read exactly like someone's random social media post, ranting about Trump and something he has said. This on the front page of a major mainstream newspaper. It's the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen. Finnish journalists, here's a wild idea: How about we end the war peacefully first, and then you can play the blame game afterwards? Priorities. Just end the war as peacefully as possible, stop people getting killed, no matter what it takes. Once that has been achieved, then you can start throwing your tantrums about who the bad guys ar...

I have written about this several times in this blog, but I think it deserves repeating because the claims are so utterly pervasive. The claim that "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is utterly false . Freedom of speech means PRECISELY freedom from consequences. That's its VERY DEFINITION. By saying that it "does not mean freedom from consequences" you are trying to define it as the exact opposite of what it is. It's like saying "a free meal does not mean you don't have to pay money for it". No, a "free meal" means precisely that you don't need to pay money for it. Likewise "freedom of speech" means precisely that there are no negative consequences for exercising it. That's the very definition of the concept. If there are negative consequences from your expression of opinion, then it's not free speech anymore. It's punishable speech. It's restricted speech. (And no, "negati...

I have written quite many blog posts about this particular subject, but here's a summary if you haven't read them: Matt Parker is a very popular math popularizer on YouTube (with over 1.2 million subscribers, which makes him one of the biggest if not the biggest youtuber of this kind). I have been following his channel for quite a long time (over ten years now) and have always been a big fan. It became quite a pet peeve of mine, however, when some time in the latter half of 2019 Matt started some kind of personal campaign of trying to make the "they" pronoun the universal "gender-neutral" third-person singular pronoun. I indeed checked when this change happened, and it was around that time: Prior to late 2019 he pretty much never used "they" to refer to a single person, and there are countless examples of him using "he" and "she" without any problems. Then, some time in late 2019 not only did he suddenly and completely change th...

Earlier I wrote a blog post about how " medical practice is full of unscientific beliefs ", where I noted that even though we tend to think of modern medicine as being this extremely strictly tested and controlled endeavor, a surprising amount of it is based on nothing but customs and beliefs rather than actual meticulous medical testing (and how there's example after example of medical practice that was popular for decades and decades being changed and obsoleted as further actual studies have shown them to be ineffective or even detrimental.) In a lot of cases it's hard to pin-point the exact source of this belief-based medicine (although enough digging through medical material would probably end up uncovering the original source of the myth). However, sometimes there's a very clear culprit, especially if we widen the subject to not just strict medical practice engaged by doctors, but to a wider notion of health practice engaged by authorities and the society as ...

Ubisoft's newest game (as of writing this), Assassin's Creed Shadows, has been marred with controversy for something like 4 or 5 months now, if not even longer. It was initially touted as depicting a historically accurate character, which on closer inspection turned out to be almost entirely a pure fabrication invented by a single person who made up the history of that character almost completely, which has caused controversy among many Japanese people, including historians and politicians. Not only that, but the game has been marred with even more culturally insensitive controversies in addition to that, so much so that even some Japanese officials have announced they will be looking more closely at the game. Something like three months ago Ubisoft announced that they would be delaying the release of the game by three or four months (no doubt costing them quite some millions of dollars more). Oh good, they would be fixing all these problems, removing or changing the historical...

So-called "short multiplication" is a method, an algorithm, that can be relatively easily used to multiply a multi-digit number by a single-digit number, using pen and paper (or even in your head, with enough practice). "Long multiplication" is a similar related algorithm that allows relatively easily to multiply two multi-digit numbers (no matter how many digits they may have), using pen and paper. It is, essentially, doing short multiplication of the multiplicand with each digit of the multiplier, and adding up the results. Long multiplication is a relatively simple and straightforward method, and its genius is that it scales up to large numbers extremely well: No matter how large the numbers to be multiplied are, the task doesn't become significantly more difficult. It will take longer, but it's not more difficult. If you need to multiply a 2-digit number by another 2-digit number, long multiplication is the easy way. If you need to multiply a 10-digit nu...

The YouTuber who goes by the nickname SciManDan is one of the biggest flat earth debunkers on YouTube (620K subscribers as of writing this), and thus quite famous among that crowd. As far as I understand, he is a physics teacher (I'm not sure at what grade), so he does have at least some scientific background (at least at the level that's required for such a teaching position). Most of the time he does a decently good job at debunking flat-earthers (and sometimes other conspiracy theorists). However, what I really don't like about him is that he sometimes makes the most egregious and obnoxious errors in his explanations. As an example, in a recent video he commented on this particular picture created by flatearthers:  He says: "The three people on the bottom photo are all very close together so their shadows would look the same. The three examples on the top photo are all really far apart, so perspective comes into play here." I facepalmed when he said that. It...

Photographs and video footage has been staged, doctored, manipulated and fabricated for almost as long as there has existed the technology to create photographs and video footage. Most often this has been done for entertainment purposes or to create genuine art. However, sometimes this has been done for nefarious purposes, to fabricate evidence, to make such footage appear to show something incriminating or damaging to someone or some group. One of the most famous early examples of this is the so-called Cottingley Fairies photographs from 1917, which were staged using paper picture cutouts. At the time these photos were so convincing that they even fooled the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The thing is, for literally a century this was something very non-trivial to do. It required skill, knowledge and a lot of work to create convincing fakes. Photographs, being just single still images, have always been easier to fake than live action footage, but even faking photographs has al...

Politicians, governmental representatives and law enforcement officials of Germany, this is my message to you: You are idiots, you are fat, you are stupid, you are tyrants, you are totalitarian fascists. Yes, that's right: You are totalitarian fascists. Germany is a fascist police state. If I lived in Germany, the police would be knocking on my door, confiscating all my electronics, dragging me to jail and giving me hefty fines that would ruin me, for saying the above. Which is exactly the proof: You are nothing but a tyrannical totalitarian fascist police state, and all your politicians are tyrants and fascists. When politicians cannot be criticized nor mocked, that's a clear sign of totalitarianism. You are not a free country. You are a totalitarian fascist country. You have learned absolutely nothing from your past.

The old adage, used in all kinds of businesses dealing with customers, "the client is always right", is often misunderstood. Rather obviously clients can be wrong, incorrect, mistaken or even just lying. The adage is not meant to say "always believe the clients, no matter what they say." What it is saying is that, in general, and whenever possible, you should deal with clients in such a way that they don't feel like they are in the wrong and being contradicted and corrected. In other words, a form of diplomacy: Don't be rude to a client, whenever possible don't contradict a client in a blunt manner. Instead, be tactful, approach the situation in a diplomatic manner. Soften the blow, so to speak. Don't directly say "you are wrong", or "that's not possible", or "that's incorrect". Instead, make the clients feel like what they are saying makes sense, and then negotiate with the client to veer the discussion towards...

Australia recently passed a law that criminalizes all "hate symbols" (the government, of course, giving itself the power to determine what's a "hate symbol" and what isn't), including the Nazi salute, with mandatory jail time. Margaret Brennan, the host of the CBS show "Face the Nation", recently argued on live broadcast that freedom of speech was the major contributing factor to the raise of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in Germany. (And she wasn't just making some kind of off-hand mention among other arguments. She was doing this explicitly and directly as an argument for why freedom of speech should be restricted.) These are just the tip of the iceberg. More and more countries over the last ten or so years have either seriously considered outlawing, or have gone and actually outlawed, "hate speech" and "hate symbols". Some countries, like the United Kingdom, have taken an astonishingly inclusive interpretation of what...

Historically, and for the longest time, the press had been one of the biggest and strongest tools of Freedom of Speech, one of the strongest assets that the citizens have had to keep those in power in check, ie. the government, the military, large megacorporations, and so on. Especially historically the press has always had an enormous amount of reach, as the vast majority of people read newspapers regularly and, later, watched the news on TV even more regularly, and thus the press has always had an enormous power to inform and influence the wider public. And, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, which is why most if not all members of the press are, at least theoretically, morally obligated to follow a widely agreed-upon set of journalistic ethics. These ethics delineate, among other things, the responsibilities of a journalist to try to seek and report the truth, to be impartial, to give everybody a fair chance of presenting their side, and to report as accuratel...

10-15 years ago, when the complete takeover of American universities by radical far-leftist activists was in full force (which was just a culmination of literally decades of more under-the-hood work by leftist professors and activists working at universities), one of their favorite talking points was that "one in five" women in universities experience sexual abuse of some kind. (And, unsurprisingly, this just got inflated more and more over the years as the takeover became more and more widespread, eventually becoming "one in four" and sometimes even "one in three", with literally no sources for any of these claims.) In reality the amount of sexual abuse in American universities is actually lower than in the rest of the population, and in the rest of the population is more like one in 35, or something like that. (Of course this is still admittedly way, way too large, but nevertheless, it's nowhere even near that "one in five" number.) The sou...

Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp" if he got elected in 2016. He was elected, and while he did many things, he didn't really do much in that regard. However, now that he was elected again in 2024 he has gone into full gear and has achieved in just a few weeks more than he achieved in the entirety of the four years of his previous presidency. Which is great, don't get me wrong. Finally someone is doing something. One of the many things that his administration is heavily planning to do is to declassify the governmental documents on several high-profile events, including the investigation and death of Epstein, as well as the documentation on the 9/11 attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, UFOs, JFK, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. On one hand this is absolutely great: Openness is always good. The people have the right to know. These are not huge state secrets that need to be kept secret for national security purposes (eg. the current location of military tr...

Most people tend to think that everything that's done in medicine, in medical practice, is the result of extremely rigorous testing using the scientific process. That nothing is allowed to be done in medicine that hasn't passed these rigorous requirements. That is, indeed, the case with many things in medicine, in most countries. Most if not all prescription drugs need to be approved by the highest authority in the country, and this approval is given only if the drug in question has passed some of the most rigorous testing procedures that exist in this world. The same is true for most medical devices. In fact, in many countries there are strict laws that regulate the use of such devices and drugs for medical purposes, or from any substance from being sold and advertised as "medicine" if it hasn't been tested appropriately. It is most probably for this reason that most people think that everything in medicine has gone through this rigorous testing. Sadly, this is ...