Absolutely, and the headline here isn’t that extreme wealth inequality is not the result of human nature, greed, or anything. It’s actually an emergent mathematical property of the system itself. It’s unavoidable, even if everybody acts honorably. Proof by physicists that capitalism is wack.

If you have read it yet, you may find The Case Against Travel interesting.

Look up the car-crash head injury rates yourself.

I live in Wisconsin. There are tons of deer here. I know wherefore I speak when I say, if you think that deer are all easily visible, you’re Just-Worlding, or kidding yourself. They’re not always looking at you; sometimes oncoming headlights hide them. Sometimes the road curves, and your headlights don’t illuminate them until the last second. Somehow, drivers don’t see them, and there are always roadkill deer on the side of the highway every few miles in season.

But that reminds me of a creature that drivers talk about in near-mysterious terms— black ice. That is usually visible, if you slow down enough to pay attention. It looks like wet pavement.

Just sayin’, it’s not a bad idea to be visible when walking, but the person engaging in the inherently dangerous activity (driving) has the moral responsibility should something bad happen. It also happens to be a good idea to slow down and not overdrive your headlights.

(My college roommate’s brother died that way.)

Seatbelts are good, too, but they don’t protect the head, and head injuries from mild to severe are still quite common. It’s utter stupidity not to wear a helmet in the car.

As is driving a car without a helmet, given the number of head injuries that result. But here we are.

If I am responsible for my safety I should be allowed to carry a brick handgun at all times.

If we’ve learned anything from ICE, it’s that a vehicle is a deadly weapon, and shooting a driver in the face is sometimes justified.

/s

I like to point out that if you can’t see a person wearing black in time, then you can’t see deer in time, or a fallen tree, or a broken-down vehicle, or a garbage bin. It’s not the world’s responsibility to get out of the way when you’re operating your vehicle.

Saying this generally makes drivers very angry. (Well, angrier.)

One of my most unpopular comments ever on Reddit was about…

*checks notes*

…how Wisconsin state parks don’t have an admission fee, what you pay for is a parking pass.

I dunno, car drivers are miserable jokers. It’s understandable, because driving sucks so bad, pretty much everybody doing it is miserable and angry. I think it just becomes mindset. (At least, I hope they’re not reading and downvoting while driving.)

ETA: They like to retort that, akshually, they love driving, it’s the most fun thing ever, they just don’t like dealing with traffic, and I’m like, “But that’s what driving is…”, and then they really get mad. That was one of my other most-downvoted comments over there.

Honestly, I don’t have such a movie to suggest, I don’t think such a movie can exist, due to the Backfire Effect. Changing people’s minds takes time, and the impetus to change has to come from within. The handful of times that I’ve managed to do it involved sharing an idea or observation that doesn’t immediately trigger their defenses, but metaphorically is like dropping a grain of sand in the gears of their mind, and then letting it do the work of grinding away at the teeth, until one day their old thought process breaks down. It can take months.

Favorite is relative, usually the one I’m listening to at the moment. But I keep coming back to the Okkervil River album, The Stand-Ins. It’s a companion album to The Stage Names, about the losers and also-rans, so it’s full of sad songs.

My favorites, though, are the last two:

Calling and Not Calling My Ex, about a man who stagnated after breaking up with his girlfriend while she pursued her career. (Rumored to be inspired by Will Sheff’s relationship with Scarlett Johansen.)

Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979. Campbell was the first openly-gay rock star under the name Jobriath, and now mostly forgotten. He was manipulated and exploited by his manager/agent, and retired from music in 1975 to an apartment on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. He died there of AIDS in 1983.

Life pro tip: While humans are indeed vulnerable to gamma rays from uranium, it’s usually all around more expedient to just hit 'em with it. And for that, many rocks will do, even just plain old feldspar.

That looks like it should work. Just a couple of thoughts: The default gateway is irrelevant. That’s only where the OS sends packets that don’t match the netmask. Since these addresses all lie within the same /24 range, the default gateway will never be used. It wouldn’t hurt to check the ARP tables of each OS to see whether the VM MACs ever show up on the remote host or VM. Are the two hosts connected with a cable, or via WiFi? If the latter, VirtualBox has to do some software trickery to make bridging work, and I can imagine that perhaps some WiFi devices wouldn’t play nice.

Groups of people systematically underrepresented in popular media? Nonsense! Here’s a man that still doesn’t have a movie:

Honestly, it’s a weird sex thing. Taboo stuff is hotter.

Indeed. I stopped going to general admission live music shows years and years ago, because no matter where I’d stand in the crowd, that’s the spot that people would choose to force their way through to the bathroom, or bar, or to smoke, or wherever drunk people at a show go. (And go they do, the shifting around never lets up.) There’s really only so much being elbowed in the side or shoved in the back constantly that one can take before it starts to feel personal.

Then I realized that when other people would scan the crowd for an opening, it’d seem like the spot where I stood was a good choice, because there was visually a gap. Above my head. Because I was usually the shortest man there. (Which is somewhat unusual for me, but the fact that it was always the case at shows should’ve been a hint.)

I did try to stand my ground a few times, but then just risked getting into fights with drunk people, and/or getting slapped with the bullshit Angry Short Man label. Best just not to go. Especially since I couldn’t see the band anyway, what with the 6’6" guys who’d decide to stand up front.

So yeah, really tall people do see things differently, and if you see others as figuratively beneath you, or as invisible, well, I hope you have to sit in a coach seat for a flight to New Zealand.

Oy vey, I’ve experienced this for the past 30 years, in which time no Democrat has ever been able to give me a positive reason to vote for their candidate. Rather, only browbeating about how I’m to blame for Republicans winning, like I owed them my vote.

Even though I’d never voted for a Democrat for President. Well, until Biden, and then as a sort of Hail Mary last attempt to forestall the fascist takeover that’d been openly brewing for at least those 30 years. And what’d I get for voting for the Democrat? Sweet fuck-all, that’s what! The signs were there that Biden was not the man to meet the moment, and several op-eds I read even before the 2020 election warned that his win might be a Pyrric victory. (Nor to diss the man; he’d have made a great Republican President in the 1950’s.) And then he did nothing about the COUP ATTEMPT for 2 1/2 years. I voted in-person absentee, and [REDACTED] filed a lawsuit to throw out my vote, not absentee ballots in all of Wisconsin, mind, but my county specifically, and Biden did nothing.

Then, after I voted for Harris, and she lost, it came out in a few quiet news articles that her campaign knew that her support of the Gaza genocide would cost her some votes. To re-state that: Killing civilians in Palestine was more important to the Harris campaign than allegedly saving the U.S. Ho-lee fuck!

So that’s it, I’m done. If the United States can’t come up with even one major political party that opposes literal genocide, is it worth saving? (And no, I don’t buy that line about protecting other marginalized groups. Once a party has decided that it’s okay to throw people under the bus, it’s only a matter of whom, which they proved almost immediately by speculating that maybe they should’ve ditched trans people.)

Hmm, yeah, I’m triggered. Nice to have a rant now and again.

Not a very useful heuristic to identify bots and paid shills, given that there’s always an election in the future, eh?

This line is extra hilarious after the election is over, and they’re still here.

An incomplete image, since all of those other groups are just slightly further down the track on the D side.