What grinds my gears

Recently, there was quite a controversy because in some high profile tennis match one of the players was handing his hat as gift to a young boy in the audience when, suddenly, some middle-aged man just snatched it and took it for himself. What was particularly egregious is that this man is a multi-millionaire CEO of some Polish company. This was quite literally a "stealing candy from a baby" moment. Or, in this particular case, a grown-ass super-rich man stealing a hat from a young boy, because of greed and nothing else. The tennis player was rather obviously outraged about this and later sought out the boy and gave him another identical hat. Unsurprisingly, the wider public was also outraged at the CEO's action, which was incredibly petty and heartless. Stealing the hat in that situation from  any  person would have been inappropriate (and perhaps even outright criminal), but doing it to a child is a hundred times worse. The fact that he is a multi-millionaire CEO of a c...

A piece of neo-communist propaganda is making the rounds: Unsurprisingly, many people just believe what it says without any criticism or any doubt, even though it's just a random picture created by a random anonymous person making random claims, providing absolutely no sources. (This is, in fact, a rather interesting psychological phenomenon: Why do so many people tend to believe such unsubstantiated claims made by completely anonymous faceless individuals who don't even cite any sources? Are people really this incapable of critical thinking and skepticism?) Also very unsurprisingly, those numbers are completely meaningless and are not even close to anything resembling the real world. Did the author of the picture just slap some random numbers on it from the top of is head, or did he actually do some calculations? Perhaps a bit surprisingly, whenever there are these types of claims (particularly when they are politically motivated), the numbers are often the result of  some  c...

I wrote a couple of years ago a blog post about why are uncontacted peoples still so primitive , where I give two (non-mutually exclusive) hypotheses to answer that question. Lately I have been thinking more generally about the vastly different developmental levels of different parts of the world, particularly before (mostly British, Spanish and Portuguese) imperialism, and later internationalism, spread the same level of technological and societal developmental level almost everywhere around the world. After all, consider that almost all if not the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the entirety of the American continent was still literally living in the stone age, with people living in straw and mud huts, hunting for their survival, with their most advanced weapons being spears and very primitive bows, at the same time as in Europe there were huge cities of even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, gigantic castles, massive gothic cathedrals, multi-storey buildings, paved roa...

For almost a century South Africa was not just one of the richest countries in Africa, but in fact one of the richest countries in the world. However, it had quite a bad problem: Apartheid. An astonishing strict separation between white and black people, at all levels of society, and where disparity between the living conditions of the two groups was off the charts. Apartheid was gradually ended, which in itself was a good thing. The problem was that it was, essentially, ended in the wrong way. Rather than starting over and building a new prosperous harmonious rich society that would keep the standards of living and economy of the country, black people have essentially taken over and are engaging in petty revenge against the "white oppressors" (which, of course, includes  all  white people the country regardless of what they may or may not have done.) South Africa has become a warning to Europe about what happens when the country is suddenly flooded with millions of hostile ...

As I have written earlier, Japan, one of the safest and most high-trust societies in the world, is in the early stages of going the path of "multicultural enrichment" and adopting the far-leftist cancer, and what that will entail in the future if they do . Since Japan is still not there and is only in the very early stages of making this mistake, they would still have time to reverse course and stop it from happening. Sadly, it appears that they are not going to do that. It appears that the Japanese government, regardless of all the protests by their own people, is set on continuing this self-destructive path of population replacement. They are already designating areas in the country where they will be importing massive amounts of African and Middle-Easter immigrants. At this moment they are fully set on continuing this madness, and apparently there's nothing that the Japanese people can do to stop it. It appears that it's going to happen no matter what. I feel sorr...

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about how some American companies, especially in the tech industry, had apparently started to awaken to the problem of "leeches" among their employees , and started to lay them off in large numbers. I call a "leech" in context someone, very typically a far-leftist college or university graduate (although that's not a requirement) who has spent her (most typically it's a she, although there are of course male examples) entire studying career learning about far-leftist ideology, doctrine and activism rather than learning something actually useful that could help them get a good job and career, and would contribute to society. From those people, the "leeches" are the ones who somehow manage to get a job at a company, typically a huge tech company with thousands of employees, perhaps via connections, perhaps by somehow managing to pass the job interview (which may be much easier if the interviewer is herself su...

Recently the government of the United Kingdom passed a draconian and Orwellian "Online Safety Act" that requires UK citizens to provide identification for online services. As a result, more and more companies all across the world are hurrying to implement such identification checks. And many of them not just for people who are identified as being from the UK, but for everybody. This is genuinely baffling to me. Since when has the UK government become the government of the entire world? Why are eg. American companies implementing limitations to all users mandated by some foreign government in some foreign country? Since when has the UK government had the power to dictate what companies in other countries do? If American companies had any balls, they would just give the UK government the middle finger. Imagine if, for example, Valve told them "no, we aren't going to implement these draconian measures. What are you going to do? Fine us? Well, go ahead and 'fine'...

Many flat earth believers will often say and write things like: "You are telling me that the same gravity that keeps oceans in place can't stop a butterfly from flying?" or something similar (oceans and butterflies seem very common, but any other objects of vastly different masses are often mentioned.) The simple answer to this is: The force caused by gravity between two objects is directly proportional to the masses of both objects. In other words, the heavier the object, the stronger the gravitational force that it experiences. This is not as asinine or "made-up" as it might sound at first. Think of it like this: Push a 10-pound object with enough force that it reaches a particular speed in a given amount of time. Now push a 20-pound object with enough force for it to reach that same speed in the same time. You needed significantly more force for the 20-pound object than for the 10-pound object, didn't you? This only makes sense: It requires a stronger for...

I have written about this before, but I feel compelled to do it again: Government of the United Kingdom: Your country is a  bona fide  police state. You are literally, explicitly and unironically policing speech. The latest incident where your police arrested (not just warned or cited, but literally arrested) someone for simply saying in public that he likes bacon, is but the latest notorious incident of speech policing. At the same time there are many places in your country where more serious crimes, such as burglaries, theft, home invasions, vandalism, destruction of private property etc. have an arrest rate of less than 1%. The vast, vast majority of incidents are not even investigated  at all . The cops are not even sent to investigate. Conviction rates for many of these crimes are absolutely abysmal. Your country has no free speech. Your police forces have speech policing as a higher priority than many other crimes, and are arresting people for completely innocuous w...

I'm not here referring to the "big" famous flat-earthers and their debunkers, but about the average  follower  and believer of those big flat-earthers having discussions with the average person. If you read the comment section of big flat-earthers' videos (warning: this may cause loss of brain cells), among the thousands of comments that are nothing but ego-stroking and d**k-sucking of the author, and the comments that just present completely asinine and incoherent claims, you'll sometimes find comments written by people who, at least according to their own words, have tried to convince people (such as family members) of the "truth" of the Flat Earth and how they either rejected it dogmatically or presented asinine counter-arguments. That part about the average person presenting asinine counter-arguments I actually believe, at least at some level, and here's why: The average person is not an expert on physics, particularly astrophysics, geology, and ...

If you ever watch videos about flat-earthers (or even  by  flat-earthers), there are several names that constantly pop up because they are people who are extremely active and vocal in that community, and are pretty much "celebrities" both in the flat-earth community as well as among the flat earth debunkers. One of these flat earth "celebrities", who is very famous among those two crowds, and who is very active and makes a lot of flat earth content, is one Eric Dubay. He is very big on YouTube, having over 220 thousand subscribers. Pretty much all flat-earthers, particularly the notable activists, are fundamentalist Christians, often of the young-earth creationism denomination. That in itself isn't very surprising. I wonder how many of his fellow flat-earthers and his followers and subscribers actually know that Eric Dubay is a  bona fide  anti-semite of the worst kind? And I really mean that: The form of anti-semite who strongly believes in the conspiracy theor...

Many non-Americans might not be fully acquainted with the political landscape of the United States, and the names of the different political parties don't necessarily ring any bells, so here's a very short summary: The "Republican Party" of the United States are the conservatives, the so-called "right-wing" (in the American sense). It's the party of Donald Trump, George Bush, Ronald Reagan. The "Democratic Party" of the United States are the "liberals" (in name only), the "left-wing". It's the party of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill (and Hillary) Clinton. Perhaps a bit surprisingly to many, Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous and important presidents of the United States, and under whose administration and direct activism slavery was abolished in the country (by adding the 13th and subsequent amendments to the Constitution), was a Republican. Indeed, it was the Republican Party that ferociously advocated for and drove...

Particularly in the United States, but in increasing manner in other countries too, whenever there's a city that's being run by modern far-leftist activists (ie. the city government is dominated by or even exclusively far-leftist), the quality of life of the city tends to go down the toilet: Streets become dirtier and dirtier, and more and more full of trash and human waste which takes longer and longer to clean up (this eventually and inevitably ending up in a situation where it's just never cleaned by the city at all). Homeless people and drug addicts start taking over and invading park after park, alley after alley, street after street, eventually even major streets. Homeless tent encampments become a common sight. And, of course, all these areas that have been taken over by drug addicts and homeless people become more and more dangerous to traverse, as crime soars. The police will effectively stop enforcing the law. The city government, of course, always uses all the ex...

When the American far-leftist cult at some point during last year (as of writing this) decided that Elon Musk is evil incarnate, second only to Trump himself, many of them stopped using Twitter because Musk happened to own the company, and migrated to another similar social media platform. Even though there are several alternatives (some of them even outright advertising themselves as anti-right-wing far-leftist heavens), for one reason or another they chose the site Bluesky as their go-to alternative. And, of course, when an idea starts spreading among the cult, everybody will blindly follow it. When the mass exodus started happening, quite unsurprisingly Bluesky reported about a massive surge of "abusive post" reports, skyrocketing from about a thousand a month to something like 40 thousand a week. Par for the course, of course. While the number of users and activity skyrocketed for a few months, both have now been on a relatively steady downfall for quite some time. The si...

It's pretty much the rule rather than the exception, and the rule pretty much has no exceptions in existence: Whenever you sign up to a paid subscription of something, whether it be a real-life product or a digital product, your subscription will be set to auto-renew (usually yearly unless the subscription interval is something else) by default, often without even telling you. Or even if it's somehow shown during the subscription process, it's usually relatively unnoticeable and, quite egregiously, there will quite often not be an opt-out option right then and there. Be it a PlayStation Plus subscription, or an anti-virus subscription, or an online website subscription (such as, for example, geoguessr, chess.com, YouTube, etc.), or whatever it is, the automatic yearly renewal option will be on by default. And most often than not, as mentioned, this fact will either not be prominently displayed, or if it is, there's usually no checkbox to turn it off. Many such sites wil...

The modern far-leftism cult has this doctrine that not only did white people engage in massive amounts of slavery in the past, but they outright  invented  the concept and were the  only  people who practiced it, and if any other peoples practiced it, it was only and solely because they learned the practice from white people, and even then mostly to sell the slaves to white people. Of course this is outright not true. (Just as one example among hundreds, the Aztecs practiced absolutely brutal exploitative and homicidal slavery long, long before they even knew that Europeans existed or had any contact with them.) However, there's something on the opposite end of that spectrum that if these far-leftists are asked about, they will refuse to answer, they might not even  know  the answer (because they have never thought about it, nor taught it), and by far and large with  refuse to accept  the answer. Or even if some of them at some level accept it, mo...

The current situation with Steam, itch.io and some other digital distribution platforms, and their payment processors, is very confusing. VISA and Mastercard both have made public statements that they don't police content, as long as it's legal, and that they have not contacted Steam or any other platform in this regard, nor made any demands. Valve also made an announcement through an online gaming journal interview that was superficially clear but still somehow extremely vague, which appeared to answer all the questions but in my opinion ended up not answering any. Well, at least one thing Valve made very clear in that response, and that was that, indeed, they have had no direct contact to or from Mastercard nor VISA. Instead, apparently there's a very complicated semi-hidden network of intermediate payment processors and banks that stand between those companies and Valve, and apparently some of those had made those demands (although Valve's statement didn't give a...

One of the strangest notions that modern flat-earthers have is related to gravity. Particularly, they think that it doesn't exist and it's just a lie. (Of course saying "one of the strangest notions" when it comes to flat-earthers doesn't really say anything because you could literally list a hundred such "strangest notions" that they have, but anyway.) Many of the things that they are saying at least has some kind of correlation to physical observations, even if these conclusions are very infantile, primitive and rather idiotic. At least "well, it looks flat to me" is based on  something  that can be observed, it's based on something that actually exists (ie. the visual impression that the surface of the Earth that you are standing on appears quite flat all the way to the horizon, at least if there aren't mountains etc.) It may be a very simplistic and naive interpretation, but at least it's based on something that can be seen and ...

The term "high trust society" has become somewhat of a topic of conversation in later years, particularly with what's happening currently in Japan , a country that has been widely considered one of the "highest-trust" societies in the world for decades and is in a real danger of that situation being quickly eroded. But what is a "high trust society"? Rather than writing an essay trying to explain it, I'll instead write a sort of questionnaire or checklist: Check each of these bullet points and score each one for your own country, city or town for example from a scale from 0 to 10, and then sum up all the scores. The higher the end result, the more of a "high trust society" you live in. More crucially, has this score gone down over time, particularly because of increased immigration?  1) How likely is it that you can walk down the street without being accosted, asked for money or something else, harassed, or outright mugged, especially if ...

"Democrats" in the United States, in other words those who primarily or even exclusively support and vote for candidates of the Democratic Party, can be roughly divided into two types: The radicalized brainwashed drones, and the moderates. A good portion of the democrats in the United States are of the first type: In other words, completely indoctrinated and radicalized drones who just believe and follow completely blindly whatever is the doctrine that particular week on their side, and who will always support it no matter what, and will always repeat whatever the talking points happen to be that particular week. If today their side decides that thing X is a good thing and worth supporting, then they will rabidly and blindly support it and shout from the rooftops how it's a good thing. If next week they decide that very same thing X is actually a bad thing, that it must be opposed, and that they never even supported it in the first place, they will shout from the rooftops...

I wrote earlier about how canine police units in the US are mostly a scam , and that's because not only are these drug sniffing dogs unreliable in these situations (having a considerable amount of false positives and negatives), but moreover the entire thing is extremely prone to abuse, and that's because whether the dog "alerted" is 100% based on the word of the dog's handler. If he says that the dog "alerted" then that's taken as gospel, it's the absolute fact, and there's literally zero accountability. (These incidents are never examined nor investigated for accuracy. It's the handler's word, and that's it. Zero accountability.) Rather obviously this very easily leads to abuse. Well, there's another thing in traffic stops that's likewise prone to abuse: Field sobriety tests. It's very similar: There are studies that show that the tests that are typically administered are unreliable, with a chance of false positives ...

One of the more curious and strange cultural phenomena that has existed for many decades and to this day, is this notion that primary and secondary school grades are utterly important. You see this all the time in all kinds of TV series, cartoons and so on (although admittedly significantly less today than 20 years ago), ie. parents being upset when their children get poor grades in school (The Simpsons might be one of the few cartoons that still play on this trope to some extent). And this isn't restricted to fiction, as it happens a lot in real life as well. This... cultural custom that primary and secondary school grades are of utter importance, and emphasizing to children how important it is, and sometimes even rebuking them if they get poor grades. In the United States in particular this is a very detrimental culture because the pharmacological industry is abusing and taking advantage of this by convincing parents that their children absolutely must take concentration-enhancin...

Concord cost something like 400 million dollars to make, and was the biggest video game disaster of all time, with all servers shut down and all purchases refunded in less than two weeks from launch, which is definitely a world record for high-budget games. You can read a lot more details about it in my previous blog posts . However, when Sony announced that they would be shutting down the servers, they didn't say that they would just be abandoning the project for good. Instead, they said that they will re-evaluate the situation and research their options going forward. Which, I assume, implies the idea of a complete redesign of the game. Well, if that's the case, let me give some ideas to Sony about how to make the game actually better: 1) Drop the "modern audience" stuff from the game. Drop the pronouns, drop the "queerness", drop all that. The "modern audience" are not your clients, and thus you don't have to, and shouldn't, placate to t...

Recently the Mexican government issued an advisory warning to its citizens traveling to England that the country, and particularly its major cities, should be considered dangerous because of its high crime rates. In other words, the risk of getting robbed or mugged, or other crimes being committed against you, is significantly high. That's right. Mexico considers itself safer than the UK, and it dangerous for its citizens to travel to the UK because of the crime rates. Mexico. Let that sink in. To the United Kingdom: Get your shit together. You are becoming more and more of a hellhole every passing day. 

Far-leftists have been protesting in the United States every single day without fail, non-stop, for the last 10 or so years. At any given moment there are probably dozens of protests all around the country, perhaps slowing down only during the night (but most of the time not completely stopping even then.) Some observations I have made about these protests: 1) The vast,  vast  majority of these protests, probably over 90% of them, have no specific reason, initiating event or target goal. They were not sparked by a particular event that happened at a particular place, nor are they aiming at a specific goal (eg. having the city officials do something particular, or having a particular person be dismissed from his position, or something). Instead, they are there just to protest for the sake of protesting, just shouting the same generic slogans that they have been shouting for the past ten years non-stop, repeating the same tired boring claims that they have been making for all th...