What grinds my gears

As I have written before , flat-earthers cognitively live in a strange and bizarre world which is akin to the Bronze Age with modern technology. In other words, even though we have super-advanced technology that can, for example, measure distances to the nanometer accuracy, locate your exact position on Earth to the millimeter accuracy, measure the strength of gravity at any given point to parts-per-million accuracy... we still don't know how far for example Cape Town is from Buenos Aires, much less what's beyond the sky, or how the universe works beyond just a few kilometers up, and all that scientists do, just like the philosophers and religious leaders of the Bronze Age, is make completely wild unjustified guesses about that stuff and, for some unfathomable reason, all the millions of scientists from all around the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds and sociopolitical beliefs, believe one unified guesswork belief system with no doubt, no skepticism, no co...

Particularly in certain states of the United States the "trans" ideology has invaded the medical profession so deeply and profoundly, very much including all therapists and psychologists, that it's literally impossible to actually get help if some has some form of "gender dysphoria" and would want some help with it. "Gender dysphoria" is not a complete fabrication and invention of the modern far left. Some forms of it do actually exist as a psychological issue, and this has been documented in medicine for probably at least a century. The most common age bracket of people who suffer from some form of it is teenagers and to some extent young adults. There are many forms of it, but it's actually relatively normal among teenagers sometimes: A teenage girl might have huge self-confidence issues and feel like she is not like the other girls at school, especially the popular and beautiful ones. Because of these insecurities she might be very shy and intro...

The Trump administration has once again recently declassified a bunch of US military documents about "UFOs", and some people are going crazy about it, claiming that it confirms that UFOs are real, they are physics-defying alien spacecraft, and that the military has confirmed their existence. Yet, what does this evidence consist of? A lot of written reports, and blurry footage. That's it. That's all we got. That's all the military got, for all we know. And, indeed, all of the photos and video footage of alleged UFOs always show blurry blobs. It's never sharp in-focus footage showing clear small details. Do you know  why  all the UFO footage is always blurry? Because when the footage is not blurry, when it shows the object in question in sharp intricate detail, it's always very evident what it actually is. That's why. So it's a kind of "natural selection" process: When the footage is sharp, clear, in focus, showing intricate detail, it just...

Five years ago I wrote about the question of whether the Western World is going to disappear just like the Roman Empire . For quite a while now this "soft empire" of sorts that we have, the so-called "Western World", and especially Europe in particular, has felt too big, too powerful, too stable to ever fall, to ever cease to exist, to ever crumble into pieces and become a disjointed set of small warring states, most of them either totalitarian or run by pure anarchy, accompanied by a complete economic collapse and the ensuing death of millions of people. Europe in particular seems too successful, too rich, too strong, too stable for that to happen. Yet, we have many precedents for this in history. No better example than the Roman Republic, later Roman Empire. It lasted for about a thousand years, was the largest superpower on the entire planet, controlled the majority of the known world, and had a military, governmental and economic power that no other nation could...

As of late, you are experiencing massive monetary losses in your gaming business, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars on completely mediocre projects that end up failing. By this point your losses have likely surpassed a billion dollars, and all you have to show for it are a few crappy games that nobody wants to play and everybody is laughing at. You should reflect a bit about why that is. Start by looking back in time, some 15-or-so years. Many major game studios were publishing several gigantic triple-A games per year, most of which received great acclaim, huge sales, and which are considered some of the best games ever made. Not one game in five years, but two or three games each year. And the kicker? Each of these games took somewhere around one to two years to develop and had a budget that was a fraction of your multi-hundreds-of-millions of dollars budgets. And we are not even talking about some big publishers subsidizing several independent smaller development studios. We a...

From some time maybe in the 1970's or 1980's to some time in the early 2000's, and to some extent to this day, a strange notion started spreading in Finland. And that was the notion that people should not waste tap water needlessly, and only use as much as was needed and no more. Don't leave water taps running for longer than necessary, don't flush the toilet unnecessarily, and so on. In fact, water saving toilets became extremely widespread during that time, with two flush levers: One to use a smaller amount of water and another to use a larger amount, and instructions on when to use which. The thing is: Being conservative on how much tap water is being used makes sense in many countries where water is scarce and being wasteful about it is detrimental. However, Finland is not one of those countries (and neither are most of the northern and central European countries, or Canada, and many other similar countries). In Finland (and other Nordic Countries) water is not ...

More and more teachers in the United States have been uploading videos and posts about an extremely worrying trend that they have experienced, and have been doing it for quite some years now. And the phenomenon is the astonishing degradation of literacy, skills and cognitive capacity of the average student. Literacy among students has become poorer and poorer during the last ten-or-so years. Even many high school students are literally incapable of reading and understanding text that's even slightly more complicated. They don't understand most "big words", they don't know what they mean, and often they don't even know how they are pronounced. Give them almost any book that's even slightly more advanced in the literary sense, using even slightly more uncommon terms and concepts, and they are unable to read and understand it. And we are not talking about some advanced philosophy or science, but just regular prose that anybody in their 30's and older can ...

By this point I have watched literally hundreds and hundreds of videos of American cops doing a traffic stop (footage coming from either the cop's bodycam, a citizen's camera, or both.) One pattern almost always repeats, and I will never, ever understand it. Just consider these situations: If the car has invalid license plates, fake license plates, or no plates at all, they do not consider the driver an extremely dangerous armed-to-the-teeth criminal. They just approach the car and speak to the driver with no worries in the world. If the car was eg. speeding, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous.  If the car has windows that are so heavily tinted that you literally can't see anything inside, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous. If the driver has no valid driver's license or outright refuses to provide one, and refuses all forms of identification, they don't consider him armed and dangerous. If the driver starts arguing with the c...

It seems like Sony Entertainment just don't learn from their past mistakes, do they? In the recent past they spent hundreds of millions of dollars (a commonly-cited figure is 400 million) and 8 years of development time on the biggest flop of the entire history of video games that has ever existed. In other words, Concord: Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, 8 years of development time, the game completely shut down in less than 2 weeks from publication and all purchases (a few tens of thousands of copies) refunded. Literally zero revenue, no exaggeration. As mentioned in that blog post, one would think that a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars would mean the game was an absolutely massive open world experience with an absolutely enormous amount of assets and content, an absolutely massive amount of NPCs with scripted lines, a massive amount of quests and missions and so on and so forth. Nope. In actual reality it was just a so-called "hero shooter" wit...

I have written before about some of the most insane laws in the United States: American cops can cause literally millions of dollars in private property damage , and neither them, the city, or any part of the government has to compensate a single penny. It's 100% the person's loss. His property is just destroyed by the cops, and there's absolutely no recourse for the owner. Nothing. It's his loss, 100%. But what if you are involved in a car accident with a police car , and it was 100% caused by the cops and you are 100% innocent of anything, and courts fully judge it as such? Do you at least then get some kind of compensation for the damages and loss of property? Nope. You will not get a single penny. Even your insurance company will not give you a single penny because it was a police car (because of some insane loopholes in their own rules). It's, once again, 100% your loss, and you have no recourse. If you buy a plot of land 100% legally and by the book, and plan ...

Matt Walsh is an ultra-conservative American Christian who has a very big YouTube channel and overall media presence, and who has even produced several quite successful movies about the invasion of modern far-leftism and its excesses. He often makes very good points and is very rational reasonable. "Often" being the most important word there, rather than "always". Because sometimes his rationality and reason is shoved aside by his ultra-conservative ultra-American-Christian activism and propaganda. Don't get me wrong: He is perfectly entitled to his Christian beliefs, and in fact a lot of things he believes in, and believes should be the norm, are much better than most alternatives (including a particular other religion). However, the problems start when he starts engaging in propaganda and outright historic revisionism in order to promote his brand of Christianity and his religious ideals. For example, he is one of those American conservatives who strongly beli...

Last year I wrote about how I have become utterly tired of "prank" videos . Not just the mean and stupid ones, but  all  of them. Including those shown in prime time television (eg. "Candid Camera", "Just For Laughs Gags" and so on.) There's a somewhat similar thing I have also gotten completely tired of in later years, and that's all the "thinking outside the box" type problems. In other words, puzzles, problems, riddles and so on, where the solution requires something that's surprising and wasn't apparent from the setup of the problem in question. You know, the kind of problem where the solution involves a sentiment like "nobody said the lines you draw can't go outside the grid" and the myriads of other similar problems. And that sentiment reveals the very reason why I'm so tired of them: They are intentionally designed to be deceptive. For all intents and purposes they lie by omission: The problem is always se...

In the United States, trial by jury, having a jury of regular fellow citizens in criminal cases, is considered one of the most fundamental core aspects of a free constitutional democratic society with a fair justice system. One of the core ideas with it is that justice is not in the hands of a minority elite, ie. those who are in power, but in the hands of the people. It reduces and avoids tyranny and oligarchies, where the elite ruling class judges and sentences citizens. Not all countries have implemented the concept of trial-by-jury of citizens. Instead, in many countries criminal trials are judged by a panel of judges (and, sometimes, other kinds of legal experts). In other words, a panel of highly educated experienced licensed experts with advanced law degrees and years of experience. While trial-by-jury might sound like a good and fair idea on paper, the recent Lindsay Clancy trial has really showed its main problems and drawbacks. Two of the most prominent problems with regular ...

Consider this description of Lysenkoism in Wikipedia: "Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific political campaign led by the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting." "More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned." Now, does that remind you of anything happening in the modern world? Incidentally, even related to biology...

I once again stumbled across one of those neo-socialist videos where the author compared the net worth of billionaire CEOs with the salaries of entry-level workers who had just been hired into one of the companies of said CEO. About how the CEO is worth such-and-such amount of billions of dollars, while the entry-level worker gets a salary of such-and-such amount of dollars per hour. In this particular video the author was advocating for a "wealth tax". There were several things wrong with that video. The fact that a "wealth tax" of billionaires would do jack squat to the salaries of entry-level workers was just the least of those. (The only thing that a "wealth tax" would do is to increase governmental tax revenue by a small fraction of a percent, all of which would just be wasted on the same things they are wasting that tax money anyway. The entry-level workers would see little to no benefit from it at all.) One of the major problems in the video, someth...

The American "sovereign citizen" ideology is a huge and absolutely insane conspiracy theory which I go into more detail here . A big part of the ideology is their constant use of particular terms and expressions that only they, and people who have researched their ideology, understand. (Quite ironically, no lawmaker, judge, law scholar, law professor, lawyer, law enforcement officer, or any other such person understands that vocabulary either, unless that person has experience with the conspiracy theory itself, even though the sovcits believe they do, secretly behind the scenes.) In fact, you can easily recognize whether someone subscribes to the conspiracy theory or not with how they speak during traffic stops . I have discussed before the reasons why they so often demand a supervisor (particularly during traffic stops), and why they so often use expressions like "I'm a living man" , and why they usually have such a huge problem with stating that they "un...

One of the favorite stupid arguments that flat-earthers love to make is that if the Earth were a globe, that would mean that airplanes would need to be constantly pitching down in order to follow the Earth's surface. This argument is stupid and hilarious because they seem to have some kind of problem with the notion that yes, indeed, airplanes  do  pitch constantly down when flying even slightly longer distances. I don't even understand what the problem is, or why they think that's a problem. (Well, actually, like I explain in this other blog post , I  do  know why they have a problem with it, and that's because they think that "constantly pitching down" requires the pilot to be constantly pushing on the yoke of the airplane. They don't understand that's not how airplanes maintain altitude. Airplanes maintain a particular altitude above the surface using the autopilot, which itself mostly uses trimming, not the main control surfaces. Even if the pilot ...

Quite notoriously and infamously, the former President of the United States Joe Biden issued more presidential clemency grants than any other president in the history of the country. A so-called "presidential clemency grant" is either a so-called "reprieve" (which is a delay in carrying out a sentence), a "commutation" (which is a reduction of a sentence), or a full-on "pardon" (which is the complete annulment of a sentence). The top 5 so far, as of writing this, are:  Donald Trump, during his first term in office, granted 238 of them. Ronald Reagan granted 406. Bill Clinton granted 457. Barack Obama granted 1927. Joe Biden granted 4245, setting an all-time record, by a huge margin. What's particularly notable and telling is that about 2500 of them were granted and signed during Biden's last three days in office. That's more clemencies granted in three days than any other president has ever granted in their entire terms in office (inc...

There's one thing that appears to be, at least my view, astonishingly common: People who consider it outright sacrilege if a steak is anything above "medium rare". I'm not even kidding: Tons and tons of people consider even "medium rare" a bit too cooked, but barely acceptable, and think that the only correct way is a full-on "rare" steak. Ask any "steak connoisseur", or any professional chef, and he will tell you that. Heck even celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay thinks that. Well, I'm going to commit sacrilege here: I  hate  rare steak. I  hate  medium rare steak. Medium well done is still on the more disgusting side, but bearable. I love well done steak. A rare steak is just disgusting. I don't like the taste at all. I once went to a more expensive fancy steak restaurant and ordered a well done one, and it was literally the best steak I have eaten in my entire life, no exaggeration. If I had ordered it rare, it would have been ...

Because of the recent solar eclipse, flat-earthers all over the internet are once again making tons and tons of social media posts and videos about how the eclipse is not caused by the Moon being in front of the Sun and yada yada yada, making up all kinds of random stuff using completely made-up arguments and blurry photos. Yet, once again, I have not seen a single mention, a single comment, a single reference to, a single explanation attempt, a single excuse, not even a vague hand-wave or dismissal, nothing, not a peep, about the one question that they just have zero answers to. From the thousands and thousands and thousands of posts and videos, I have yet to see a single one that tackles this problem, mentions it in any way, and much less tries to explain it. And that is: How exactly are scientists able to predict solar eclipses literally decades in advance, to the accuracy of seconds, and where the path of totality and partiality will be, to the accuracy of meters? Indeed, scientist...

I recently saw a YouTube video that was a sort of interview of a player who had started playing Star Citizen and had spent a whopping 11 thousand dollars on that game in one year. Not even going into the quality and state of the game, even if it were the best and most polished game in existence, spending 11 thousand dollars on it is just completely insane. I am quite an avid gamer myself, and have been buying video games for over 30 years now. I did a rough estimate of how many games I have ever purchased and how much money I have spent in total on them during these 30 years, and it's in fact somewhere on that same ballpark, actually. Maybe a bit more. Say, very roughly somewhere around 12 thousand dollars in total, ie. about 400 dollars a year. I think about 400 dollars a year in video games is quite moderate. I very, very rarely buy full-priced 60+ dollar games, and almost always wait for a significant discount. During those 30 years I have, perhaps, bought about 20 or so games a...