Little Rants

[Catoptric]

HOA just seem like a scam.



They also seem to be corrupt and involved in HOA foreclosure scams.

Generally they take advantage of situations and lack of legal knowledge. Some aspects of what they try to enforce are also illegal.

https://qr.ae/p2SpZG


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Also:

Masters Degrees and the Bureaucratic Boom in Bullshit Jobs
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/masters ... 2021-08-20

I think of the majority of Master's degrees as representing an entitled trustafarian culture whose entire existence is merely extracting as much resources from whomever is within their proximity; be it family or serfs, while believing they are the chosen people to represent the status quo of mediocre cultures--devoid of any semblance of soul or identity apart from some privileged mediocrity.


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[Catoptric]

Against Democracy (2016) Jason Brennan


The voting populace are too god-awful stupid to make reasonable decisions on who should be elected.



The Trump Threat to Democracy Has Only Grown
https://www.project-syndicate.org/comme ... lu-2024-08


Jerome Charyn: 'November 5 could very well mark America's last legitimate presidential election'
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/artic ... 25_23.html

"In an op-ed, the American writer expresses his concern in the event of another victory for Donald Trump, who risks governing as if the US were a private company that he could destroy at will."


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Mattis feared Trump would order a surprise nuclear strike, book claims
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pent ... ok-claims/


The situation in Ukraine scares the shit out of me, not to mention Iran.




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Related. . .




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Google is hot garbage for a number of reasons. . . Editing a location where the hours of a store are completely different from what is posted, while even including the hours of the store in a photo, which automatically gets rejected every fucking time for no damn reason, is a shitty system to have.
https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2 ... sometimes/

[HighlyIrregular II]

I wish manufacturers of briefs would say what size the unstretched waistband is. I suspect Jockey's 26 3/4" waist is small for a size 38. The resistance when you expand it matters too but that's harder to measure.

Limey once commented that I'd be swimming in my XL underwear. I know why he'd think that, but I don't like the waist to be so tight. I once bought XL briefs and they provided no support and I didn't like them, but they may have been full rise. I just ordered mid rise in XL. The experiment continues.

[HighlyIrregular II]

Today I bought and initiated a return of Affinity Publisher 2. I had difficulty doing a couple of simple things, but after looking up how, I was able to. But then I just wanted a border around a text box. Way beyond unintuitive. Couldn't do it. So, just as in my old web development days when I resorted to conditional comments and images for text layout and sometimes background images because regular images wouldn't work, after hours of trying to do things the right way, I'm stuck doing that same crap in Microsoft Word. I already had been opting for images of text for descriptions of screenshots in Word, but my current work is more text-heavy with fewer screenshots so I tried not to, and succeeded on my own machine, but then I tried emailing the docx to someone and all hell broke loose. They couldn't save it, they couldn't print it, elements were missing, and I tried docx, doc, and odf. Odf came closest. So, I tried Publisher and no good. Now it's back to pasting images into Word.

[Catoptric]

Crypto (billionaire) entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2m
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... 1732876454


NYC fruit vendor, 74, who sold banana devastated after it became viral $6.2M artwork: ‘I am a poor man’
https://nypost.com/2024/11/28/us-news/n ... -6-2m-art/

'Comedian. . .'

People have inherent biases and motivations, or are in their own "bubble." Most of human behavior is molded by neuroticism that influences how people interact or form dependency on self-image preservation. Most of societies' problems stem from traumas that keep people perpetually in a self-destructive mode (and hence why people like Donald Trump get elected, is due to people that latch on vicariously through him, or those like him; much as religion or organizations like education and business create proxies that people feel compelled to part of.) People develop tunnel-vision that makes them part of a silent majority in a world that depends on conformity to social norms, even if it is actually opposed to who they are represented as an individual.

And yes, people do need to broaden their experience and be more grounded by it, but too often people fall short of tolerance for such perspective and don't really empathize with others (people feign sympathy and mistake it for empathy,) and too often are driven by shallow self-preservation insticts (such as, any idea that don't reward social hierarchy are to be ignored) or due to not being able to understand that perspective; things are tolerated so much as it doesn't infringe on their perspective and belief about what seems rational (such as, if someone believes the sky is blue--even though it is yellow--they might still say it is such, and not bother investigating it or questioning their paradigm of reality.) Much of this might be due to desire to do as they always were told.

[HighlyIrregular II]

I miss the good old days when there would be an "out of order" sign on a machine or two and worst case scenario was you had to wait another hour or two for a free machine. Building management emailed me this today:

The office building Laundry Room is off-line, washers and dryers are not working. CSC has been contacted for repair.  An email will be sent when the laundry room is back on-line.

I actually need an app on my phone to do laundry.

[Catoptric]

The "Depressing" Reason Our Workplaces Have Gone From Bad To Worse
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/depressi ... se-crowley


CMV: I think that capitalism is inherently evil


Building a Better World Without Jobs
https://wrk3.beehiiv.com/p/building-a-b ... thout-jobs



RFK Jr will be a nightmare for healthcare
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024 ... s-nominee/

[Catoptric]

Elon Musk looks like Ed Gein.



He only wants to control/own OpenAI while pretending to be "not for profit" (while using AI algorithms to favor his biases in politics that benefits his greed and pathological need for attention.)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... fa911&ei=7