I recently saw a meme about a young woman who won $1m in a lottery and instead of opting to receive the lump sum, she opted to receive $1,000 per week for the rest of her life. It was tagged with the term “financial illiteracy”, and was dogpiled by people who thought she must be […]
Boosterism: Technology and AI as the New Gold Rush
I’ve recently been rereading “The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009”. I feel like I should remember this, but I’m struck by how much fraud went into the early Colorado Gold Rush. We talk a lot about fake news and propaganda in the media today, but this has existed for a long […]
Forming Political Opinions in the Church
Not too long ago, my pastor said something to the effect of “You should really support Israel”. This is my own paraphrase, and it doesn’t do justice to his more gentle demeanor, but it still caught me off guard, as I immediately found myself wondering, “What does that even mean?” Do I support the decisions […]
Specialization and the Exploitation of Skills
We all have limited time on this Earth, and consequently, we all have limits to the skills we can develop. This is not to discourage us from learning in general, or to suggest that we can never be competent at or knowledgeable of a number of things, but it is to acknowledge that life requires […]
Systemic Violence Against Privacy
Starting last week, I began to step away from the news cycle, simply because the violations against privacy taking place in the UK, as well as their rapid, cancerous spread across the West, are so distressing to me. You can only watch so many videos on YouTube attempting to assemble the pieces – every day […]
Investing is Overrated: Reflections from Extended Unemployment
Several weeks ago, I took a rather large distribution from my now much-reduced retirement savings. In theory, this distribution should get me through the rest of the year, but seeing how much I’ve spent over time got me thinking. Investing is overrated. Now, don’t get me wrong: setting aside money has made these years of […]
Reflections from the Garage Floor, Part 2
One great concern of volunteering to work on friends’ cars is the possibility of accidentally making things worse, and last month I very nearly did just that. [The image above features the control arms (the big long pieces), the left and right engine mounts (in the opposite order), the “dogbone” mount, and the toasted caliper […]
Adversarial Software
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 […]
Not Nearly Paranoid Enough
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 […]
The Challenges of Open-Source Ecosystems
Once upon a time, open-source software was passed around on floppy drives and copied to user systems. In the later years, you could order a CD for programs like the Linux operating system, before web servers made these files easier to download. I imagine the early years of open-source were quite exciting. You put in […]