denis bider

I didn't post before because the data were not in, but now the data are coming in.

I suspected before that the Chinese lockdown approach is totalitarian and wrong. Dictatorships react to everything by clenching fists, they can't possibly let anything be and just accept it. So of course they would use their complete totalitarian machinery to clamp down on Covid, whether it is warranted or not. Because of the constant clamping down on everything and anything, they also have an endemic problem where being compliant and not being disappeared ranks far ahead of truth. So China didn't generate any useful data for the rest of the world, and they continue to suppress research and news. This is done, of course, by disappearing people who would do the research, or report the news.

I suspected that the data from places with early infections outside of China, especially Italy, are misleadingly alarming. Tests were scarce and of course they used them to best help people in need, not to…

If this video is to be believed, the Democratic Party is engaging in primary voting fraud to thwart Sanders:



They can do this by relying on non-traceable voting machines. Besides, if they get caught, their defense is that the votes are merely advisory. The party is a private organization and has no duty to run someone they don't want as a nominee.

Fraudulent promotion of Biden was apparent already a year ago.

In case you didn't know, Biden is an exceptional creep. That's a Twitter thread - click "Show this thread" to expand it. There's the story of his encounter with Tara Reade which goes firmly along the lines of "grab them by the pussy".

Biden is the face of status quo. He's a supporter of the Patriot Act and a champion of mass surveillance.

So the 2020 election is going to be Oligarchic Sex Predator vs. Autocratic Sex Predator. Fully corrupt on both ends.

This will alienate Democratic voters again. So Trump wins. And honestly, does it make a …

For decades, I've been typing on laptop keyboards, on the one hand because I like the flatness of the keys and the compactness of the layout; and because I didn't want to be clumsy with the laptop keyboard when I travel. As a result, I've been suffering from that laptop keyboards are straight and narrow and force the wrists into unnatural positions.

After kids, I now rarely travel, so continuing to use the laptop keyboard has become less justifiable. Of course, I'm too lazy to learn a new keyboard out of sheer strength of will. And so, the down arrow key on my laptop broke and it happens to be a model for which there is currently no key replacement. So I took this chance to look into more ergonomic keyboards.

I wanted to keep the flatness and compactness, so I found the two options in the title that looked the most attractive.

First, I ordered the Logitech Ergo K860. I used it full-time for 5 days, typing many emails, programming and gaming:
I came to dislike the fully …

Love and hate are both based upon self-identification in your experience. You do not bother to love or hate persons you cannot identify with at all. They leave you relatively untouched. They do not elicit deep emotion.

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized. A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations. The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems. If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love. A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, then, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly by an idealized love. (Pause.) You "hate" something that separat…

We are back to our regularly scheduled programming where I complain about things that were nice to me, but turned out to be sort of unbearable. In this installment, the nice country that delivered our son and let us live there for 5 years.

To start – there are nice things about Costa Rica:
Unlike the United States, it has accessible and high quality health care. It is a mixed private and public system where gringos like me can take a toddler to the ER at a private hospital and pay $150 to have him evaluated, sedated, and extract the foam he stuffed up his nostril. Meanwhile, everyone else also gets decent service at public hospitals and clinics, perhaps without luxuries like air conditioning (which is quite optional in Costa Rica's climate).Unlike most countries, it does not tax foreign income. This, it turns out, is less a feature and more a predicament.Unlike the United States, it has a reasonable immigration process.These factors contributed to us moving to Costa Rica in 2012, h…

I often see people proposing that an ideal society would do away with money. It would instead be based, say, on love.

Money is a method of social accounting. There are those who abuse it. But for most, it's what compels us to do lots of boring things that we're good at, which help others; instead of fun things we're not so good at, which help only a few.

We already have a society based on love. The fact is that the love of other people is not easy: the sacrifices it requires are hard. Money is a measure of how many boring, unfun things we've done to help other people, as if we loved them, for little benefit to us. Anyone who wants to do these things out of love, can already do so and collect payment as an afterthought. Since most of us don't actually feel this much love for others, money motivates us to do this work for those we do love.

What people are actually proposing is an economy based on fun. This would create about as much material well-being as a child cre…