Category: Uncategorized

For 99.99% of human history, one’s personal life was private by default. Only in the past 20 or 30 years has basic privacy come under serious threat. The first systematic invasions of privacy started with the mail system. Once society at large found ways to deliver messages and items using a relatively fixed address system […]

I mentioned in my last post that it’s entirely possible for modern IoT devices to include wifi bruteforcing code in their firmware, and use this as a covert channel to communicate back to company servers without showing the user had ever connected the device to the internet. It would not at all surprise me if […]

I recently started reading a book describing the surveillance dragnet constructed in a very large East-Asian country. I thought the book would focus specifically on that dragnet, but was surprised to find that the dragnet was largely constructed to shutdown dissent among minorities in the western portions of that country, no doubt a trial-run for […]

Last month, I made the effort to find an older Pixel so I could install an alternative operating system on it. I’m a little bit of a privacy nut, but not nearly as nutty as I could be, so although I write a lot about my life in this blog (which has its own risks), […]

The idea that one perfect, universal diet exists and can be followed by everybody is highly problematic and is entirely unlikely to be true, but that hasn’t stopped various diets from making the outrageous claim that they have super secret access to the Divine. One thing that really troubles me is how specific diet ideologies […]

For as long as I’ve been alive, people have been calling different foods “healthy” or “unhealthy” without any explanation or justification beyond popular belief. I would say this is akin to black and white thinking and, dare I say it, ‘religion’, but it tends to be passed down as a matter of fact, rather than […]

I see a great deal of logical fallacies being used to persuade people toward one diet or away from another, toward one food or away from another, even from YouTubers whom I otherwise like, so I decided to put a little post together detailing some of my “theses” concerning how to approach food and diet […]

The hardest part about trying to be an objective thinker is that you often find yourself sandwiched between your own bias and the bias of another person. If you can acknowledge the biases in both of you, that seems like an intellectually honest thing to do, but then you often won’t project the air of […]

I recently purchased a book on financial independence written by one of the FIRE couples whose blogs I used to read. I was a little shocked just how the lead author approached her life. Having grown up in abject poverty, her general contention was that this poverty had the positive side effect of teaching her […]