What grinds my gears

One of the core characteristics of the modern far left is that doubt, dissent, skepticism and criticism is not only discouraged, but outright aggressively punished. This extreme enforcement of adherence to the ideology has only escalated during the past 20 or so years, to the point that nowadays you could literally get physically assaulted if you show any dissent or doubt (as physical violence has been actively normalized among the far left during the past 10 years.) This makes the hordes of brainwashed far-leftists very obedient, submissive and easy to manipulate. Whenever some new far-leftist doctrine starts gaining popularity among them (often started by some leftist academic or other influential person among their ranks), it gets immediately adopted and accepted without doubt, without criticism, without skepticism, without any research. Most of them are literally too scared to show any dissent or doubt. (That is, for example, the reason why they get so uneasy when asked to define w...

Some studies of human DNA among different ethnicities and regions of the world have suggested that most of the world's population has a small amount of Neanderthal DNA mixed in with their original human DNA, with the exception of some African ethnicities, who lack this Neanderthal DNA. While I have not corroborated the veracity of these studies, I have little doubt that they are likely correct, or at least on the ballpark. (The reason for this separation is that Neanderthals did not evolve in Africa, and only mixed to a small extent with humans when some groups of those humans emigrated from Africa to other parts of the world, starting with Europe. Most of these groups of people never migrated back to Africa, and thus some African human populations never got that DNA.) Unsurprisingly, black supremacists, who are way too happy and eager to jump to the opportunity to flip the script, essentially "appropriating" the white supremacist script and turn it on its head, have jump...

In the United States legal system, the target of a lawsuit can submit a so-called "motion to dismiss" to the judge presiding the case. If the judge deems the motion valid, then the case will just be dismissed and will not proceed further. Rather obviously, the motion to dismiss has to give a good argument why the lawsuit should be dismissed and, also rather obviously, these arguments need to meet certain criteria (so as to not infringe on the legal rights of the person suing.) In general, a "motion to dismiss" argues that the lawsuit is invalid. There are several reasons why a lawsuit may be legitimately invalid. For example, if the lawsuit fails to actually cite any existing law that has been allegedly broken. If someone sues someone because he thinks that someone looks too ugly, that's a quite clear immediate dismissal because there is no law for that, and thus the lawsuit isn't even citing any law that's allegedly broken. Another reason is, even if th...

For several decades Sweden was the "rape capital" of Europe. In other words, most rapes per capita of all European countries. For several years now, however, the UK has surpassed Sweden also on this front, and by quite a margin at that. The approach to this problem by these governments has been a bit different, though. While the Swedish government (and their lapdogs, ie. the mainstream media) engaged in an extremely strong policy of denial and censorship, the UK government, while also doing that to some extent, has instead opted for deflection, gaslighting and scapegoating. Perhaps the systemic rape problem in the UK is too big to ignore, and thus they aren't outright denying it. Instead, what they are doing is deflecting and gaslighting: Who, according to the UK government, are to be blamed for the rape epidemic and the UK having become the "rape capital" of Europe? British teenage school boys. That's who. I'm not even kidding. But still, that's too...

Plagiarism has been a plague on YouTube for pretty much as long as it has been an immensely popular platform to publish original work. If someone publishes an original video with original material on YouTube, and that video gets immensely popular (eg. millions of views), it's pretty much  guaranteed  that at least 3 or 4 other channels,  at the very minimum , will copy the idea and make a recreation of that video to one extent or another (in the vast majority of cases not crediting the original, of course.) Oftentimes a similar type of popular YouTuber from a different (usually non-English-speaking) country will just blatantly copy the idea of an even bigger YouTuber. You can be pretty certain that, for example, (what effectively amounts to) "the Mr Beast of country X" will copy many if not most of the ideas of the actual Mr Beast videos, the amount of imitation going to really egregious extents. Of course it doesn't always need to be someone from another country spea...

A couple of workers are on their way to do a roofing job in some American suburb, and some neighbor sees them retrieve some tools from the house in question and calls a non-emergency police line telling them that there are a couple of people she doesn't recognize. The police precinct, apparently because they are bored and have nothing better to do, send a whopping 8 police cruisers on the case, lights and sirens at full blast, driving at extreme speeds, dangerously waving through traffic, like they were on their way to a bank robbery or mass shooting or something. This merely because of a report of a couple of younger men being in some neighborhood. When they arrive, one of the cops spots one of those men and starts running towards him at full speed, screaming like an absolute psychopathic lunatic, and not like angry screaming but a joyous "wooo!" yell, like he were a frat boy at pool party jumping into the pool or something. When he catches up with the guy, who is in no ...

Some years ago advocates of the Rust programming language started very strongly pushing the idea of adding support for it in the Linux kernel source code. For reasons unknown, the creator and owner of the kernel project, Linus Torvalds, made a surprise move and actually accepted that idea. (This is very surprising because over the past 30 years Torvalds has summarily rejected, sometimes very aggressively, literally dozens of other programming languages that have been suggested for the kernel, several of which would have been perfectly adequate for it. It's unclear why he suddenly decided to make an exception with this particular one, out of literally dozens.) The Rust advocates have already started replacing perfectly valid and working pieces of C code in the kernel with Rust versions. In most cases there's no reason for the switch, other than changing it for the sake of changing it and nothing else, as in most cases the original C code has been battle-tested for literally deca...

YouTube just now happened to recommend a video that had a title like "this is Trump's America". The comment section is flooded with angry people calling the cops shown in the video "gestapo" and how they are engaging in "racial profiling" and asking how this is different from Nazi Germany, and calling Trump and the cops all their favorite pet names, and recounting how they have allegedly seen masked ICE agents take non-white people off the streets simply and solely because they were non-white, and yada yada yada ad infinitum. So the video must be really bad, doesn't it? Surely it shows something like an army of ICE agents storming some street, rounding up black people, assaulting them and putting them in handcuffs and taking them away, threatening them with weapons, with people screaming and crying... stuff like that? Nope. The video shows a car stopping and three men, who might or might not be federal agents, stepping out, and the guy with the cam...

Since several generations now, most Intel CPUs have shipped with two types of cores: "performance" and "efficiency" cores. The "performance cores" are your normal full-on full-power full-speed cores, as normal. The "efficiency cores", however, are slower but less power-consuming cores. That's not a big secret, Intel is completely open about it, and pretty much every tech-savvy PC user knows that. However, most PC users greatly underestimate how inefficient those "efficiency" cores actually are. The "efficiency cores" allow Intel to proclaim impressive numbers. For example, an Intel Core i9-13900K processor has 24 cores, which support hyperthreading, and thus have 48 threads! 24 cores (48 threads) sounds quite impressive! Problem is, only 8 of those cores are actual performance cores. The remaining 16 are "efficiency" cores. And "efficiency" cores are very, very inefficient. In actual reality you are get...

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 channels 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 p...

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...