What grinds my gears

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 ...