Michael Alan Miller

Not that this is any secret, but organic food is mostly a scam.

Some supporters of organic growing claim that the danger of non-organic food lies in the residues of chemical pesticides. This claim is even more ridiculous: Since the organic pesticides and fungicides are less efficient than their modern synthetic counterparts, up to seven times as much of it must be used. Organic pesticides include rotenone, which has been shown to cause the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease and is a natural poison used in hunting by some native tribes; pyrethrum, which is carcinogenic; sabadilla, which is highly toxic to honeybees; and fermented urine, which I don’t want on my food whether it causes any diseases or not.

This guy is an apologist for big ag, which makes little sense to me, but he’s right about organic food. Most of it is just a very smart way that companies have found to charge image-conscious or misinformed health-conscious people more for less.

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I don’t understand the urge to reproduce.

Really, I just don’t. Why anyone, male or female, would want to spew more humans onto the face of the earth is just beyond me. Not to mention that if you do in fact care about the environment, not having kids is one of the best ways to improve it for generations to come.

Children are demons. I know, because I was one. Both a child and a demon, that is, though most of my relatives would probably put those descriptors in a different order. Especially the ones that I bit hard enough to leave deep scars.

Well, that’s neither here nor there. The problem is the planet is already well past its carrying capacity, and something must be done to curb population growth.

People who have one child should see their taxes go up 20%. People who have two should see a 40% tax rate increase.

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My partner and I are abnormal consumers, and for housing particularly.

We don’t care about living rooms at all — our current abode doesn’t really have one, despite having more than 1,000 square feet — and instead place value on having a large kitchen with a lot of counter space.

Most places we look at seem to have very small kitchens, indicating that most people’s priorities lie elsewhere, or at least builders think this is the case.

Finding a relatively large place with a commensurately-large kitchen is a surprisingly difficult task.

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I am very disappointed in Obama’s economic appointments. He seems to have chosen the same crooks who got us into this mess, which is no surprise. It’s the way the system works, and Obama is now a part of that system.

But I would’ve chosen Krugman, because he was one of the few who saw this economic crisis coming.

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It’s amazing how many Luddites there are, even in the tech community.

Many of those people, especially the first commenter who was upvoted extensively, would have been the same folks proclaiming Lord Kelvin-like that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, or that going to the moon was similarly impossible.

I have no idea if the effective elimination of death is impossible. I have no idea if human-level AI is possible, or if whole-brain emulation is possible.

The thing is, neither do any of the tards posting over there.

Does that make the problems not worth working on, not knowing if they are possible?

Well, I guess I should then ask do you think personal computers were worth working on? The germ theory of disease? Transplant surgery?

Because, for a very long time, these things were assumed to be impossible by a large proportion of the very smartest people in the world.

I have little patience for the fetishists for the way things are; they have great knowledge, but little wisdom, and I’d let them have their own little land of diminished hope and foreshortened dreams, if I could.

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I’m always the one to spoil the party, but the lines here aren’t as clear as she’s drawn them.

Yes, randomly harassing some woman on the street is scumbag behavior, and any guy who does that deserves to be maced in the face. But like one of the commenters pointed out, there is no standard of behavior, no matter how courteous, that pleases many — or perhaps most — women (or men, I’d guess, but I’ve never tried to flirt a guy up).

A perfectly innocent, “That’s an interesting book you’re reading. Want to go to the coffee shop down the way and talk about it?” is likely to get you accused of sexual harassment from one woman, and from another to garner years of unparalleled companionship and mind-blowing sex.

No, I am not saying that anyone deserves either of those treatments — I am saying the world is more contingent that Marcotte pretends that it is, and many guys with perfectly good intentions making an effort to be non-creepy and friendly (and sometimes, only friendly with no other intent at all) often — as in most of the time — get treated like they were asking the woman to get down on her knees and suck them off in the library.

A woman at work once said to me, “The difference between sexual harassment and good fun for most women is if she’s interested or not.” Alas that this is true, as much as most ideologues would have it be another way.

I don’t completely agree with her statement in every situation, but it’s true enough most of the time, and I’ve certainly observed similar events often enough.

My point isn’t to condemn any one group. It’s to observe that most people are fighting for their own advantages at the expense of everyone else, and that this is nothing new in human history.

What I care about is equality, and few seem to truly care about that at all, no matter what they say.

Update: It also pisses me off when an obviously-attractive woman assumes I am helping her because she’s attractive, which occurs an alarming amount. I helped the ugly 60-year-old Office Max guy unload his paper yesterday — which I didn’t have to do — does that mean I want to fuck him, too?

Yes, I know women have more problems in this respect by far than men do. But that doesn’t negate my right to complain about unfair treatment, either.

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This article talks about academia’s antipathy to the Internet, something which has long puzzled me as well.

For a new generation of graduate students the internet is an invaluable resource, a telephone, newsreel and the biggest reference in the world all in one. But in many schools, where the internet is acknowledged at all it is painted as an evil source of cheating and laziness. The problem is that kids are smart: for all its problems the internet is the greatest informational archive ever created, and if you tell a kid that using it is wrong then that kid is going to file you under “lying or stupid” and ignore everything you say.

Often, academia’s sources are prized not because they are more correct (often, they are not any more correct than Wikipedia, etc.), but because they are more difficult to use — that’s the same reason many people use Linux. It’s a common human urge, to create barriers to entry and to prize the more difficult over the more-easily achieved.

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No matter how many times I think about it, or how many people I discuss it with, I don’t understand the lack of outrage and pure old rage at what’s happening in the country right now.

Where are the general strikes? The protesters? The burning buildings? The assassinations and uprisings?

Looking back to history, I can see some precedents. The decline of an empire usually doesn’t bring that much resistance. During its decadence and subsequent involution, an empire and its peoples are usually too effete, too vitiated to stir up much trouble. It’s only when things slip to their lowest point and then get better for a while — then and only then do the people finally wake up and resist.

I don’t know why it is this way, but history follows this pattern. My guess is the rage will come with the recovery, not with the decline.

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Using the recession as an excuse to scuttle plans to move to cleaner and greener technologies would be a grave mistake.

Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.

For me, though I believe global warming is real, it’s less concerning in the near-term than simply running out of fossil fuels and industrial society collapsing. While the consequences of global warming may mean an additional few million early deaths, the collapse of industrial society as a consequence of being unprepared for the unavailability of fossil fuels would result in hundreds of millions or, at least as likely, billions of deaths.

The good news is, no matter the reason we move to cleaner tech, it will help to combat global warming.

The bad news is, we appear too short-sighted to do what’s necessary.

Glad I’m living now, and not 100 years from now.

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One of most incorrectly-used phrases of all time is, “Violence doesn’t solve anything.”

Violence solves many things, but it’s a messy, dangerous tool, like a chainsaw with a bad link. It can often turn on you, when put to use. Violence “solved” WWII. Violence solved Carthage. Violence solved the guy making a ham and cheese sandwich on my dad’s newly-painted car in the K-Mart parking lot.

Given the travesty of the Citigroup bailout, I’m beginning to think violence is the answer to the actions our government is taking that endanger our future and will harm America for generations.

I’m not advocating anything specifically. I have no idea what level of violence would be appropriate or that I’d be comfortable with, but taking direct action against many bank executives and other such thieves would be a good start.

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Incidentally, Typealyzer categorized my blog as written by an INTP, the same result I’ve gotten the two times I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs.

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Good piece on the loss of perspective that occurs in finance.

And exhaustion and loss of personal boundaries is an ideal setting for brainwashing, which is why people who have spent much of their career in finance have such difficulty understanding why their firm and their world view might not be the center of the universe, and why they might not be deserving of their outsized pay.

The same thing often seems to occur in academia, despite the lack of outrageous pay. It seems to be a peril of any system where there are many who wish to enter, and few who rise to the top. An annealing process has to occur, and this leads to abuse of both the system and its participants, and those who emerge at the end believe they are one of the gods of the universe, despite the fact that outside of their field, they often know less than nothing of any importance.

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Geek note: I just confirmed that you can almost seamlessly drag and drop your entire .mozilla folder from Linux into Windows (and, presumably, vice versa) with few consequences. The only thing I had to alter is my fonts, and that was a 10-second change. Most people will probably have to change nothing, as my Firefox is extremely customized.

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I was thinking again today, as I often do, about ideology and how it warps people’s minds, and I decided that I will no longer ever identify myself as left or left-leaning, or liberal-leaning, or feminist-leaning, or any of those other labels. Since I already take reasonable ideas from every camp, and since even those factions with which I identify possess almost as much ideological thinking as those which I generally oppose, it’s not really self-consistent to identify as being ideologically in concert with any of those groups as I do not believe in ideology at all. It gets in the way of evidence and rationality.

Let others self-identify me as they mistakenly will — in the past I’ve been called everything from a frat-boy Republican to a communist who hates America — I will continue to value evidence and investigation, and if this leads to conclusions others do not like because their ideology does not support evidence-based reasoning, then I want nothing to do with them anyway.

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This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in years.

That is also the perfect antidote to those “history doesn’t matter” types you run across every so often.

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