Censorship and book burning is always the leading edge of Fascism.

Yeah, my heat exhaustion event was a quarter century ago. It’s just gotten worse and worse over the years.

Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.

My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.

There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.

…I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.

Oh, thank goodness.

If they really hate Canada so much, they should emigrate - America is due south. Pack up and leave!

I have a really big thing for 70s PNW homes done really, really well. The vaulted ceilings, open concept main areas with multiple levels, the sunken living rooms, the cedar used everywhere… just leave out the shag carpet and I’ll be A-OK.

Good brutalist architecture can take your breath away. It’s so solid, so permanent, so delightfully uncompromising.

38% of people hate their communities, and want everyone but the wealthy to suffer for the crime of being poor.

A fair proportion of our population have been absolutely hoodwinked and brainwashed by the snake-oil promises of conservatism and capitalism, both of which serve only the wealthiest 1%.

Can confirm… it’s brutal.

And I’m a guy that cannot take heat. Whatever temp you find comfortable, that’s the level of comfort I likely feel ten degrees colder. My own office typically sits between 15-18℃, and that’s with me in shorts and shirtsleeves. Pants and dress shirt? Think 12-15℃. RIP electrical bill.

Anthropogenic Climate Change is going to be fun. /s

we should just all start fucking robots

That’s… not going to work out like you think it will.

When the subject of men having sex with robots comes up, feminists end up in fits of frothy rage. Ostensibly because “robots cannot give consent”, but that’s a blatantly bullshit answer at every conceivable level.

With all the criticism women give men for treating them as sexual objects, you’d think they would be overjoyed that it’s coming to an actual end. You’d think they would be relieved that it won’t be happening anymore, and that men can now turn to a sex robot for sexual relief.

But scratch beneath the surface - as in, dig deeper to actual motivations - and in many cases it’s because women are losing their status as sexual objects, and are deeply threatened by that loss of power over men.

It’s no different when a man that a woman has absolutely no interest in stops paying attention to her, and stops being a so-called “beta orbiter” – a fair number of women go nuts and try to destroy his relationship with the new woman, or start a campaign of belittlement and harassment (especially if there is no other woman), calling him an incel and coordinating with her peer group to socially shame him for not paying attention to her anymore. It’s all about the leverage they can extract out of men, and not any actual interest. A man turning away is the loss of a potential or actual source of resources/entertainment/ego. And that just cannot be allowed to happen.

Which is why the single biggest opponent to sex robots are feminists. Especially the “kill all men” ones that lead the movement. They are the ones fighting sex robots with all the fury they can muster, even though men’s trivial access to sex robots will mean far fewer women being pestered or harassed or assaulted or raped.

You’d think a dramatic reduction in harassment, assaults, and rape would be a good thing, but where sex robots for men are concerned, it’s apparently a horrid evil.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

Follow the money. Some crony, somewhere in Alberta’s system, profited wildly.

• San Francisco
• New York
• Literally any other city with rent control

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/

New research examining how rent control affects tenants and housing markets offers insight into how rent control affects markets. While rent control appears to help current tenants in the short run, in the long run it decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood.

Over the long term, rent control has never seen more positive benefits than negative ones, regardless of city.

Rent controlled properties create substantial negative externalities on the nearby housing market, lowering the amenity value of these neighborhoods and making them less desirable places to live.

https://iea.org.uk/media/rent-controls-do-far-more-harm-than-good-comprehensive-review-finds/

• However, 14 out of 17 studies found that rent control leads to higher rents in the uncontrolled sector.
• 12 out of 16 studies found negative effects on housing supply, while 11 out of 16 studies found negative impacts on new construction.
• 15 out of 20 studies found rent control leads to reduced housing quality and maintenance.
• 25 out of 26 studies found rent control reduces residential mobility.
• All 14 studies examining the issue found rent control leads to misallocation of housing.

https://financialpost.com/real-estate/rent-controls-hurt-rental-supply

We reviewed the studies cited by the author and found they all unequivocally demonstrated that rent controls contribute to a slowdown in rental supply, thus hurting the very people that rental advocates intend to help.

[…]

We were again surprised to discover that the IJHP paper painted a completely different picture. The authors said “more restrictive rental market legislation generally has a negative impact on both new housing construction and residential investment.” They concluded that the “received wisdom among economists of a negative construction and investment effect of rent controls seems to hold.”

https://capx.co/rent-controls-never-never-work

The issue with rent controls is not that they are novel or radical. The issue with them is just that every time they are tried, the results are exactly what the Economics 101 textbook would predict. They lead to a decline in the supply of rental properties, a decline in housebuilding rates, a slowdown in tenant mobility, a misallocation of existing properties, and a decline in the quality of rental housing.

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/does-rent-control-work

This study also sheds light on an important behavioural response to rent control by owners of rental properties: landlords substituted to other types of real estate (such as properties exempt from rent control). This lowered the housing supply and shifted it towards less affordable types of housing, leading to rents rising at an even higher rate.

This finding is largely consistent with the predictions of basic microeconomic models: rent controls lower the price of housing and at this lower price less housing is offered (Glaeser and Luttmer, 2003). Housing quality is also reduced as landlords can no longer make up losses from renovating properties by raising rents (Sims, 2007).

Reality doesn’t give two shits about ideology, it cares only about facts.

Anyone who is evidence-based as opposed to ideology based needs only to look at every single jurisdiction where rent controls have been enacted, to become a vociferous opponent to rent controls.

Rent
Controls
Do
Not
Work.

Not over the long term, and definitely not for new tenants.

Capitalism is expressly designed for neurotypicals.

If your particular deviancy cannot be monetized for the benefit of those who sign your cheques, you’re worse than useless - you’re actively dangerous to the profit stream flowing upwards to the Parasite Class.

Right now I’m taking a sabbatical for two main reasons:

1. My parents are reaching EoL, and as the executor of their estate I’m getting involved in them handing everything off to the rest of us. So this pause in my career couldn’t have come at a better time – how many kids have the opportunity to spend the last year or two of their parent’s lives with them to help them wrap stuff up? Not many.
2. My entire industry has gone koo-koo for AI. They are quite literally eliminating entire development divisions in favour of badly hallucinating LLM’s that create some of the shittiest code I have ever seen – it’s worse than having only juniors on staff with no-one else more experienced. So I am waiting out until the inevitable “ZOMG we need to hire everyone back” stage, just like Klarna is doing right now. Because as it is, 60+% of all job postings are ghost ads, with no intent to hire anyone, and the other 40% require applicants to go through 4+ interviews and have ridiculous requirements. Like, no. if the pope was appointed with only two rounds of discussions, your company doesn’t need to rope in 20+ people over multiple interviews and weeks of deliberations to hire my sorry ass.

But Sokets and wrenches?

For the longest time almost ⅓ of their Motomaster sets were rebranded Gearwrench. Especially the non-classic ones with extra features.

Now, Gearwrench may not be on par with Grey Tools or Snap-On. But it’s also significantly upper-shelf and definitely nothing to sneeze at.

Tools are pretty good bang for the buck

Don’t know what it is now, but for the longest time about ⅔ of the wrenches and rackets were rebranded Gearwrench, which is nothing to sneeze at. So OK, it’s not Grey Tools or Snap-On. But Gearwrench is solidly upper-end quality.

They exchanged a Motomaster battery charger that was almost 20 months old. It suddenly stopped working, and they didn’t even bother testing it to confirm my assertion.

The biggest headache was finding the purchase in my account’s history, as they can only search a month at a time, and not by product. Very bad usability for something that employees likely use on an hourly basis.

Confer the right to a portion of the profits, distributed as dividends. Or anything else, really.

Tell me you know nothing about stocks without saying you know nothing about stocks.

A company can create classes of stocks that confer zero ownership in a company.