Tabs. Way too many open tabs.

Focus on what you’re good at, and nothing else! - Neil Patel


TJIC on getting things done.


JEP on TSA

The TSA is only doing its job, and it's becoming clearer that that job is to make Americans understand that they are subjects, not citizens. Humiliating the Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador Extraordinary of the world's largest democracy fits into that: everyone is a subject to Security Theater. I know that these "officers" only mean well, and are dedicated to keeping America safe. They haven't yet caught a bomber, but they will, real soon now.

You can go strangle yourself with that yellow ribbon, or, here is what I want you to do instead of shaking my hand.

The military is ultimately a reflection of our culture or what we would like to believe about our culture. We would like to believe that our military is an all-volunteer force filled with young and old people who represent the diversity (class, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, non-religion, talent, skills or politics) of our country. We would like to believe compulsory national service has failed to win wars in the past, that a draft is the penultimate form of a dictatorship and that today's military is better than any in our history. But is it really voluntary? Is compulsory national service as threatening as some libertarians would view it? Is the all-volunteer military the "best" our country has ever produced?

Nassim Taleb looks at what will break, and what won't

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

Gov't crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS.  Beats my idea of a ginourmous /etc/hosts.


Getting Close To The Machine - Ellen Ullman

The problem with programming is not that the computer is illogical - the computer is terribly logical, relentlessly literal. It demands that the programmer explain the world on its terms; that is, as an algorithm that must be written down in order, in a specific syntax, in a strange language that is only partially readable by regular human beings. To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the rational, line-by-line world of computer language.