Steven Hassan was a former member of the Moonies cult who obtained a PhD in psychology after being deprogrammed and has written books on the psychology of cult recruiting. Interestingly, he points out that the same tactics are often used by organizations that aren’t cults. I highly recommend reading one of his books!

Functional Programming Theory: 500 pages of lambda calculus and endofunctors

Functional Programming Practice: Quicksort

if this.time_of_year and this.time_of_day and this.part_of_country and this.location == 'kitchen':
    is_viewable = False

The existence of “echo chambers” is debated by scientists. It really doesn’t matter who you hang around with, you’re going to disagree with people.

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.

Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?

Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence

The action would have been done as vice-president, not president. Vice-presidents are held accountable. This is why Trump got in trouble for defamation of E. Jean Carroll.

He defamed her as president and called it an official act. The case was put on indefinite hold. Then he said the same things while he wasn’t president. A new case was brought against him and he was found liable. Then, Carroll’s lawyer asked the original case to be resumed arguing that Trump’s statements couldn’t be an official act of the president since he performed the same action while he wasn’t president. The courts agreed and resumed the case and he was found liable again.

The coke

The requirement for a steady paycheque is what keeps everyone working in terrible conditions. I’m lucky enough that I’ve always had a lot in savings and it has come in handy a few times. Twice I’ve walked off a job and never went back after failing to negotiate proper working conditions with the boss. Both times I burned through about $10,000 in savings while searching for a new job. Almost nobody has that much saved up. If they did, terrible bosses would lose employees on the regular.

“Fake it till you make it” doesn’t mean pretend to be happy until you are happy. I committed to a relationship I wasn’t happy in, a career I wasn’t happy in, and hobbies I wasn’t happy doing, all because I wanted the approval of others. A divorce, career change, and hobby swap made me much happier.

The wiki page on leading and lagging current might as well be “demons and shit”. Practical Engineering talks a bit about it in this video on power grids.

I give you cash, then you give me cash, what are we doing here?

This is why I don’t give people gifts and tell others not to give me gifts. Holidays arent about gifts. If I do get a gift, I give it back to them the next year. Bonus points for giving it back in the exact same gift bag. After a decade of this, people have finally stopped giving me gifts!

Peanut butter out of the jar.

First cousin once removed

There was a jogging app known as Strava that posted an image on their Twitter that was a heatmap of all the jogging activities of all of their users. Their idea was just to show how popular their app was by showing the entire world lit up. Twitter users were able to locate secret US military bases on that data alone. Turns out nobody jogs in circles in the middle of the desert except GIs.

Recently a group of Harvard students did a demo where they used Meta’s camera glasses and a chain of commercial programs and products to find out people’s names, address, workplaces, and family based only on their facial data.

These are just two examples off the top of my head. Essentially, the more data someone can accumulate, the more info can be analyzed from it. With things like AI tools, that analysis is incredibly fast even with huge datasets.

Technically he’s a tanuki, which is in the canine family

I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn’t a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn’t achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.

Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don’t have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can’t justify it and that’s just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn’t Musk, it’s the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.

It becomes false advertising when you prove them wrong in court. Few people want to do that so most ads are bullshit. Even if they do get proven wrong, the settlement money is typically peanuts to the impact their ads have on sales. Red Bull paid $13 million for their tagline of “red bull gives you wings” while making several billion a year.

I was a funeral director and got this question a lot.

1. That’s not how vikings had funerals. The only Norse who had that type of send off is Baldr, son of Odin, in Norse mythology. Real Norse were cremated or buried. Important people had huge burial mounds since they’d be buried with a lot of their possessions. In reality, if you burned a boat with a body on it, the result would be a charred decaying corpse floating back to land in a day or two. A ship doesn’t have enough wood to completly burn a body and bacteria in decaying dead bodies produce gas which causes dead bodies to float.

2. It is possible to “bury at sea” depending on the area. The Canadian government charges a significant amount for a permit to do so and it comes with a lot of conditions like a weighted and sealed casket and being dropped far enough from the shoreline. I’ve heard they make the process as difficult and costly as possible as a way to discourage the practice. However, there are no restrictions on scattering cremated remains at sea!

It’s honestly impressive how we went from “only nerds know tech” in gen x to “everyone knows tech” in millennials to “only nerds know tech” in gen z.

Don’t forget buying social media and amplifying the voices of Gotham’s worst

It’s always interesting that people are quick to talk about extreme weather changes but rarely want to address the causes. I ended up watching a video that touches on the topic. I hate Mondays.

Everyone hates Mondays and everyone loves talking about how Mondays suck! You’ll never have conversations about “fixing” Mondays though. That’s because Mondays are just a fact of life. There will always be a day you have to go to work. Moving the start day or shortening the work week doesn’t change the fact that everyone will still dislike the day their time off ends and their work hours start. You can’t “fix” Mondays.

There are also people who think other social problems are just like Mondays. Unfixable. Of course they agree it’s bad! But there’s just nothing that can be done.