You may think this is a rant, but it's not what you think. It's some drama here and I'm a little bit mean, but read to the end please. This may seem like I'm bashing, but I'm actually telling the story in my way from my perspective.

When I think back to my time trying to get somewhere in Ruby, one company really stands out: PowerSet. I'm not sure if you remember, I'm sure none of you do, but they were going to take on Google. They were also that search engine that showed gay pornstars when you looked up politicians, so already they were actually satisfying an under-satisfied market. Namely toe-tapping Republicans.

What made PowerSet annoying is that they hired all these Ruby guys very early on and then that somehow made PowerSet and these Ruby guys awesome. These fairly nice gents became giant ego maniacs overnight and everyone had to deal with them all the damn time. You see, there was (is?) this channel a bunch of Ruby on Rails guys hung out in called caboose. Really caboose was this annoying slander factory where people could talk shit about DHH when he wasn't around or bitch about how they should be 54 on Working With Rails rather than that asshat zenspider (I was usually #1 mostly because I didn't care).

So here we were, and these asshats get jobs at a time when everyone was begging to use Ruby in a Java/.NET world. They were made men, on a level with the 2 or 3 other companies that were actually making shit with Ruby. And oh man did they start letting us know it. Day after day we'd hear about how boss the PowerSet stickers would look on their laptops. Yes, 'cause a guy with a dick on his chin looks so fucking boss.

Since Google seems to think that I asked it to draft up a heavily biased set of laws that only benefit itself and Verizon I thought it was only fair that I draft my own proposed recommentation for Google. Normally if the FCC wants your fucking opinion they'll come and ask you...oh and some professors, and some politicians, and some ISPs and some law enforcement guys, and other people the FCC has to care about. But oh no, Google and Verizon seem to think that somebody wants them to make laws. I mean, last time I checked, the politicians that they pay off with massive donations are the ones who make the laws.

Why can't Google and Verizon just keep doing politics the old fashioned way? With bribes, and graft, and lobbyists. I miss the old days because at least back then there was some time before shit happened. Now we get corruption in Internet time.

Well, I figure, what the hell, I might as well team up with some dude and draft my own resolution for Google and Verizon to shut the fuck up. So I present to you, Google, a bi-lateral compromise on why you should shut the fuck up between myself and A Random Hobo.

Incidentally, I'm not sending this to Verizon because I already know they're crooked as shit. That and I don't want the NSA to hand over illegally obtained information to the FBI so I can be arrested like they did with Qwest's CEO.

I'm not a picky eater. I'm willing to eat every meat that is legal in the United States and wouldn't mind traveling to places where the laws are different. I have this strange desire to try pickled insects in a third world nation. I often eat things I don't like, such as eggplant.

However, the truth is that I really loathe mac & cheese. I hate cooking it, I hate eating it, I hate cleaning up after it. I've thrown away pots that have been used to cook it. I claim to be different because I despise this American staple, and silly as you may think it may be it is my preference not to have anything to do with cheesy pasta. Heck, it ain't even healthy.

Note: I sometimes like some cheese on top of tomato based sauces or chili that has pasta mixed into it. This is not the same thing as mac & cheese.

Yet the complication I face is that I have dear friends and family who think that their prize-winning homemade mac & cheese made from imported unpasteurized cheese will be something that I love. That I'll change and they'll get the chance to smugly say that it was the quality of what I've eaten that discouraged me.

Dear Gartner,

I didn't know you hired racists. I mean, maybe racist is a bit of a stretch, but there's no other word for "asshole who arbitrarily stereotypes potential customers" so let's just call Andrea Di Maio the racist piece of shit he is. I say this, because in addition to pretty fucking racist comments about programmers, I'm pretty sure he's full of all sorts of other stereo types that are just lovely. He probably thinks Blacks are stupid, Latinos have big families, Women should shut up and poop out kids, and Jews are cheap and killed Jesus.

Because, let me tell you, where there's smoke there's fire Gartner, and any man who'd just come out and say anything about who I am because of my profession has got to harbor all sorts of evil bullshit mythological beliefs in his tiny little pathetic mind.

But what do I know, all of the above is just guessing, and Andrea may be a pretty upstanding guy. Hell, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't give me and just say I take back all the things I just said about him being a Nazi racist fuck. He's probably alright, even if he is a little fucking ugly.

I mean I know the Internet hates Flash atm, but did you ever think that it's all a bunch of groupthink?

As for the slow video thing.

Flash Cookies are there because normal cookies suck, they're adding similar stuff in HTML5 for that very reason. Don't panic they're limited to 100k unless you specifically grant more space. Chrome's "Clear data" dialog has a link to a url to help you manage them too, why don't other browsers do that I don't know.

As for the broken HTTP status thing. I don't know what you're talking about.

For a couple weeks now, the usual sources of nerd news have been gushing like a BP disaster with stories concerning Facebook and its various alleged infractions against users' privacy.

While I'd like to think that none of that crap applies to me, I'd be remiss to overlook some interesting and rarely discussed issues around this whole social networking privacy snafu in the first place.

You see, I don't use Facebook.

I have never used Facebook, and I will never use Facebook.

According to [1], there were 500 iPhone apps available for the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008. According to [2] there were 180,000 apps available April 8, 2010. That's roughly (assuming 260 work days a year) 345 application approvals a day. Assuming a 100% acceptance rate. Given a review team of 100 people, that's roughly four (accounting for vacation, sick, etc days) successful apps a day. (I'm unable to source a number for an expectation of eight apps a day per review team member I recall reading but it would fit the order of magnitude.)

There have already been reports of automated analysis of AppStore submissions from November 2008 for private API usage [3]. The infamous Flash-to-iPhone packager works by compiling ActionScript to native ARM assembly [4]. This would quite assuredly break static analysis.

iPhone OS 4.0 now includes various API's for background processing. Assuming [5-6] are correct this is based on Grand Central Dispatch [7]. Given that applications are now allowed this freedom, it would make sense that the static analysis tests are going to be more stringent.

Who wants to bet against the idea that the new 3.3.1 isn't a lawyer's attempt at phrasing engineering terminology for what is testable?

... and that it takes all of Adobe and their bosom buddy Microsoft with it ...

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, it should take its other bosom buddy apple along.

Your rant is justified, but apple has become as bad, arrogant, selfish, greedy, etc. as adobe, ms, the riaa, the mpaa, the wipo, or who else.

Flash sucks orc balls - but that's no reason to fuck off users by patronising them about flash support. If they want it, they should have it. If they don't, they can have it turned off. By not providing ANY fucking means to use it (save except maybe for a half-working gnash port for jailbreakers), apple fucks users harder into the posterior than adobe by publishing a completely fucked up "rich content platform".

It's a sad state of affairs if programmers can no longer be famous for coding. But really, were programmers, at any point in history, capable of being famous for coding? I'm fairly young so I don't know much about what it was like to program back in the assembly, cobol and fortran days but it seems to me like the famous programmers weren't famous for their code back then either, rather they were famous for the academic papers they wrote.

Then, as far as I can tell it transitioned to the famous programmers being the ones that wrote books or possibly magazine articles. Then came the famous blogger/programmer, with blogger definitely the key part of that dichotomy. Now it's the ones founding companies and making a lot of money.

Is this really a problem though? Sure, it makes programmers a second class citizen, relegated to sweat away like the cog they are while others take credit for their hard work but is that likely to stay that way?

Well, yes and no.

Before I begin my rant about people who code like assholes, I would just like to say, that if you are learning to code from Giles, and you're actually paying him, then you're wasting your money. If you want to be a better programmer then feel free to email me for free and I'll give you advice. You can also go grab Learn Python The Hard Way for free and learn Python if you are a total beginner. Ruby is on its way out, and Python is on the up. Python is also better if you're a beginner, and I actually care enough to help you out, for free.

Life's too short to learn from people like Giles, and I want to create the next generation of compasionate coders, not asshole coders like him.

Now, let's begin!

Works Is Not Good Enough

Today FedEx came to deliver a package. I'm going out of town soon, so I can't miss this package or it will get sent back while I'm away. Now, you would think that if you are paying some mother fucker to actually hand you a package he would try to do that. You know, I give you $50 and you give me my goddamned package.

Nope, that's not how it works. I have easily 10 communications devices on my computer right now. I can go to google and punch in exact GPS coordinates and zoom in on the top of your fucking head and count your hairs. I can send text messages, twitter, emails, phone calls and even automate all of this. The ease with which FedEx or UPS could tell me that a driver is outside my door, right fucking now, or will be in 10 minutes is staggering.

But now, these stupid companies decided to write their shit in Forth and now they can't use any modern technology to accomplish the one fucking thing I am paying them extra for.

I am not paying them to drive my package into the city and then make me pick it up from a fucking warehouse. I am paying for the box to be on my doorstep with a fucking smile and goddamned signature.

Everyone knows I think reddit is full of a bunch of complete fucking morons. The only section of reddit I frequent is /r/guitar because it's actually very tame and useful. The rest of reddit is full of the absolute worst of the 20-1-percenters you could ever find. Completely incompetent totall blowhards who couldn't find their ass with both hands and a bag of rusty handgrenades will spout off there like they know shit.

If you contrast this with HN it's night and day. HNers are intelligent, and while they seem unable to read sometimes, they at least have interesting things to say. I used to love reading the HN comments, because even when they were brutal about something I wrote they were insightful 90% of the time.

Reddit is the equivalent of squeezing every pimple on every teenage nerd's face into a giant cup, irradiating it with gamma radiation, and then feeding it to the The Commic Book guy with an Star Trek phaser enema. They're pointless useless little morons, and one day I decided to troll them as hard as I could.

The end result is that I've trolled reddit so hard that they end up trolling themselves, and I'm going to explain to you exactly how I did it.

While at oppugn.us I reject any threats of violence to humans, I am all about threats of violence to evil, shit filled, bug ridden, antiquated, horribly maintained piles of dog shit technology like Flash.

Just in case it's not clear, I absolutely positively hope that Flash is totally wiped out and that it takes all of Adobe and their bosom buddy Microsoft with it down into the dark depths of Cthulhu's anus where things that die are dead for so long that even death is now dead and they are out of my fucking site.

Why? Because for the very last time, I am finally sick of Hulu playing video like it's a covered in molasses. Of course my more technically oriented friends will think that makes me a moron. It works great for them on their Neckbeard 9000 Triple Quad Dual X Neon Nvidia NIOPIATE computer with SSDs in RAID-26 configuration.

Nope, this is on a Mac, or Linux, or Windows and on some reasonable hardware. 1.6GHZ CPU with a decent Nvidia card designed to show HD video. In fact, I can play perfect video from Netflix on both my Mac and my Windows PC with no problems. Just watched "Up" and it looked fantastic from Netflix.

i guess it has a lot to do with where you're from
    where you were born and raised
i have a little trouble trying to understand
    nature's rolling ways
i am as open minded as the next folk is
    maybe even more
sure enough love to see all that diversity
    walking through our nation's door
i travel every corner of this continent
    bus train cab and silver bullet
but i never get my head around this enigma known
    as the strong mud flappin' mullet

-- The Mullet Song, Mingo Fishtrap

Every culture has a mullet. Some hideous fashion disaster that's accepted by everyone as just, well, the way a dude appears if he wants to be taken seriously, but still rock out. When you ask a southern man why he wears a mullet, his response is:

Bidness in front, partay in back.

I find one of the most fun things to do on the internet is interacting with trolls. I know, many of you can't fathom why someone would bother trying to troll trolls, but it's incredibly entertaining. By their nature trolls are pathetic little men who act like bullies online in order to make themselves feel better about their pathetic lives. That simple part of their nature makes them easy targets. People are afraid of them, in much the same way they're afraid of bullies, but the truth is because few people stand up to them they're actually very easy to rip into.

I know, you probably read that sentence and thought, "Well shit Zed, that's what you do asshole." You're right, but I restrict my ranty words to assholes I feel are hurting other people, and I can take it as good as I get it. You got something to say? You think I fucking suck? Rock on, go ahead and say it.

But, you better fucking know your shit, 'cause I sure as hell do.

Let's take an example of a troll from today named Chris Alex Thomas who decided to pathetically attempt trolling me today. At first I thought, "Oh a worthy opponent, very interesting." Then as I read his tweets:

I can't help but grin each time I run across a developer posting about the coming extinction of the systems administrator, who will be done in by the noxious vapors of "the cloud" and the clever devs who, armed with miraculous management software, are finally free to launch their beautiful code into the aether. Some in the sysadmin profession, like myself, might find this notion insulting and, perhaps, threatening. I, however, think these ideas are hilarious and I wholeheartedly encourage every developer who harbors these thoughts to fly free from oppressors such as myself. In my experience, 90% of devs barely understand HTTP, much less how to configure Apache, don't know what an open-relay is and couldn't spell LDAP if their life depended on it. Go ahead and abandon the folks who have spent years honing their knowledge of systems management and it won't take long before hubris has reared it's ugly head in the form of rooted EC2 instances and an uptick in the volume of spam flowing through the internets.

Its worth noting that the Puppet project was founded by a sysadmin and that the primary audience for the software has always been other admins, who aren't all as myopic and territorial as the cliche of the BOFH would have us believe. I've known some devs who could qualify as Unix experts, had read all of the relevant RFCs and needed very little help from folks like me. I've met many more, however, who didn't have the time or inclination to learn the intricacies of configuring Sendmail and would rather have someone else do it. Not everyone can be a programming or operations expert and even fewer can do both.

Before I get into Mark's weird comments, I would like to suggest people take a look at Think Python and tell me what you think. Is it a good book for beginners? Did you learn Python from it? Programming? I suspect it may be a good replacement book for Mark's and would like to start getting it out there to people who are interested in learning.

Now on with the show.

I find it funny that some folks have tried to say I'm too hard on Mark Pilgrim, despite the fact he's just as outspoken and ranty cursy as me. I mean, double standards much? Dude is a Class-A jerk who's attacked people in the past, and I have yet to run into too many people who think the guy is that great.

In a way, I kinda like that, like a rant brother in arms. But he's seriously got some thick rose colored glasses on when it comes to his own value and the quality of his writing.

I've had it. Dive Into Python is one of the worst books for learning Python and it must die. I've had too many potential programmers find this book and get tripped up by its horrible design decisions that I'm declaring war. The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples, and Mark Pilgrim is too much of a neckbeard ass to listen to anyone about it:

09:42 @diveintomark @zedshaw Completely rewrite the first 3 chapters of a book I haven't touched in 6 years? Yeah, I'll get right on that.

11:32 @diveintomark @zedshaw you sure do have a lot of opinions. You should start a blog!

This is his response to me saying that he should remove ODBC from his book. Yes, OH DEE BEE CEE. He has a goddamned book that purports to teach people programming that still, in 2010, references a piece of crap technology from the 90's. Yes, he actually used that technology to teach Python in the beginning of his book six years ago. Even back then that was a stupid fucking decision.

Yes, I hate the word "cloud" too. I'm just as annoyed as any of you by this trend of using some dummy catch phrase to sell something. Words like "2.0", "microblog", "checkins", "service", "enterprise", or "cloud" seem to infect the technology and journalism industries like little moron viruses blinding everyone to mountains of bullshit being used to sell technology to managers who know very little about technology.

However, I absolutely love the idea of the cloud. You know why? Because it means the death of the Bastard Operator From Hell once and for all. The days of that entrenched system administrator who does nothing more than hoard knowledge in order to keep his tiny little kingdom of power managing a few machines in some half-assed manual ssh-poking manner are over.

We all know this guy and absolutely hate him. He actually doesn't do shit until his fucking little house of cobbled together perl script cards collapses. Then he's running around in a panic, sshing into boxes manually, hacking away at configs guessing at what might be wrong, and barely getting things up and running again with no plan for preventing it in the future.

Each machine is different from the next. Nothing is documented. There's no password database. None of the configuration files are under version control. Automated deployments? Hahahahaahahahaha. Oh he doesn't fucking trust "automation". Says it causes too many errors (unlike his fat fingers).

NOTE: And I'll (Zed) take it on the head with this one too. Thanks Richard!

Love the hate, but in my book good 'writing' also includes some basic research and a little spell check. If you had devoted more than 2 hours to this exercise in MS-bashing you might have discovered that 'microspotting' isn't some johnny-come-lately, faceless marketing exercise but a fairly long running (c.2007) blog by Microsoft's internal marketing staff. You might have destroyed microspotting.com but its predecessor lives on at http://microspotting.spaces.live.com. And the font is spelled 'Arial'. 'Ariel M Stallings' is indeed flesh and blood. I know this because my wife obsesses over her other blog, http://offbeatbride.com. You could have easily discovered this yourself with a little google, e.g. try her home page http://arielmeadow.com.

Is it legitimate for Microsoft to attempt to humanise their image with genuine posts about staff members? Or must they accept the image you have of them as a clunky but hardcore coding shop for big business? I have no special love for Microsoft but in this case I have a little sympathy: the reason they have to try sites like microspotting in the first place is to counteract the paranoid hatred epitomised by your parody site.

In order to remain competitive, Microsoft has to recruit beyond the narrow band of socially isolated geeks keen to work on new programming languages and build new OSs. They need the odd 'Ariel M Stallings' or two, and maybe even some ruby fanbois. So lets call this for what it was, not a righteous take-down of a 'big mega marketing firm' but an expression of Zed Shaw's dislike for the new social media kids on the block. They might not be able to mind-meld with iPhone OS using their impressive C, but they can at least write.

I believe one of the things that separates smart people from stupid people isn't whether they're consistently right, but whether they can consistently admit when they're wrong. Today folks, I've posted two excellent rips into me for being a totally fucking moron. I am admitting I was wrong when I said that Ariel MS was not a person. In fact, here's her rebuttal:

I can't believe you're debating if I'm a real person when a web search shows I've been all over the web for 15 years, have published a book, been on national television, etc etc etc x 500 bla bla bla? Hilarious!

I left Microsoft last year, which likely explains why Microspotting.com is down. It's all ancient history to me at this point, but I'm *still *not sure how a site that said on the homepage that it was run by someone who worked for Microsoft could be seen as astroturfing. But whatever: it's flattering that a year later, you're still freaking out about my work blog.

Apologies

I've been following this case about the Lower Marion school district using laptop cameras to take pictures of students. If you haven't heard it yet you can read the latest in this philly.com article where they talk about evidence that Carol Cafiero had not only captured 1000's of photos, but that she had email exchanges with other school employees about how they loved the software and the "little [Lower Marion School District] soap opera".

Reading the case so far, I'm constantly wondering why the hell nobody is in prison yet? Let me put this in perspective by explaining it this way:

Imagine that you read a news article where I was caught with the following:

1. Chat logs from underage boys and girls on my laptop.
2. Photos of underage boys and girls sleeping, eating, who knows what on my laptop.
3. Software installed on their laptops without their knowledge or consent.
4. A trail of email where I said I loved it and shared them with other freaks.

Being as this is a collaborative rant site, I thought I would throw out a discussion topic I have been pondering for a while. Now, to be honest I don't know if I'd write this idea up as a rant or as something more serious for shedding bikes but I'll put this out there and see what kinds of responses I get.

The idea is simply this statement:

Programming languages are nothing more than a ponzi scheme.

Looking at the history of programming languages over the last 15-20 years we see a succession of languages that become dominant and then get wiped out by a more popular language. That's a given and not necessarily part of the ponzi scheme I'm talking about, but more just how technology works.

Remember this name: Ariel M. Stallings.

The story goes like this. I was bored one day so I turn on my computer and go to hacker news to check out what's going on. Right away I see on the front page some story about some recruiting site being done by Microsoft called "Microspotting".

Now, for years I've kind of felt sorry for Microsoft. They're perceived as being bumbling idiots in the tech world but honestly compared to many of their competitors they probably produce more interesting and better tech. For example, what OS has Google created? From scratch? Multiple times? What programming languages has Google created? What virtual machine did they create? How many hardware platforms runs that OS they actually didn't make? How many applications run on that OS they didn't make?

There's nothing I love more than rhetoric. Rhetoric is so much better than logic because its entire purpose is to deceive and convince rather than to be provable. It's where we get statements like, "I know it's true because it feels true." When dealing with rhetoric everyone is hypocritical, inconsistent, illogical, and stupid. It's the real masters of rhetoric that can wrap this inevitability in enough words to convince you that what they say is true.

As much as programmers love to think they walk around life like the perfectly logical Colonel Sanders from the Matrix, they're really more like Robot SPD-13. Their insistence that they're so logical is so far from the truth that they end up just running around in circles never actually making any complete cohesive conclusions.

But, most importantly, this insistence on logical thought makes most programmers completely oblivious to the tricks of rhetoric and to any form of satire or subtext. To them any factual error, no matter how funny or hyperbolic, is inexcusable. Simply toss a few difficult to prove factual errors inside a rant about Steve Jobs being an evil super genius with a cat and they will focus on the error like a pink laser.

These are the same kind of guys who go see "Hot Tub Time Machine" and complain that the physics are totally wrong. "There's no way that time machine would work. The quantum dynamics of the force reduction drive would fail if it were immersed in water like that! (snort)" To them, the ridiculous and idiotic is not funny, it's simply an annoying fuzz filter on their incredibly boring, serious, and conservative lives that they probably absolutely hate.

Your recent post "Steve Jobs Says Fuck You Ruby Fanbois is pretty biased and very lazy. While you have tools to help you with memory management, you need a little help on the topic of perspective. Here it is:

First its factually inaccurate. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 and Snow Leopard on my Mac. Guess which one is ready to go for Ruby Development? Ubuntu's installation is easy, but its still an installation using aptitude. If Jobs hates Ruby so much or other loosely typed languages, why does the Snow Leo OS come ready for PHP/MySQL. No configuration on that assemblage either.

My first language was C, second PHP, third Java, and now I'm learning Python. This one or the other nonsense is dumb. Different languages accomplish different things. If I want to do something fast I'm all for PHP. If I want lightening speed C or Python. If I want neat elegant cross platform code then Java it is.

The great advantage to some of these languages like Ruby is that different types of people can get into the programming game. Aesthetics have a big impact on usability. Usability is what you want for the most important person in all programming projects: The end user. So cheer on with your elitist bullshit but their are plenty of hard core coders that are making some pretty excellent stuff with easy languages. Face it, the dominance of socially isolated C programmers is past. People who understand users are now in the game and its a good thing.

Zed,

I agree with 99% of everything you say here. People who think they can program without understanding (at a fairly fundamental level) How Things Actually Work Under The Hood are just the kind of people who drive around mindlessly, without any understanding of mechanics or physics. (How much room do you need to brake in before you hit that group of kids crossing the street? In the rain?)

Valgrind, in particular, is almost something that should be automatically invoked by the compiler. Anything more complex than "hello, omniverse" can break in ways that are hard to find in inverse proportion to your command of such tools. (BoundsChecker, back in the day, saved my career. At least twice.)

However, the swipe at agile development is something I do take strong issue with. There are good TDD frameworks for C as other languages (I use CuTest myself http://cutest.sourceforge.net/). Just as no serious project these days operates without some SCM tool, and every serious programmer knows how to use a debugger and at least one diagnostic tool (like Valgrind), in the very near future, every serious developer will at least make sure his code is fully covered by tests, if not managed under a full continuous-integration system entirely. The single biggest improvement in my productivity in the last 30 years has come about when I know that any changes I make that break anything are guaranteed to not keep that breakage hidden. Your mileage may vary, but I seriously doubt by much.

I happen to love coding in C. C is a simple language with only a few moving parts, but more importantly, C is pretty damn close to how a computer actually works. It's not as close as assembler, but it's close enough.

Yes, you have to worry about memory management and buffer overflows, but if you have valgrind you're set. Valgrind is awesome because it detects most memory errors fairly flawlessly, assuming you're not an asshole who codes retarded C tricks. Valgrind hates tricks. In a way coding C with valgrind forces you to do it right.

And honestly C isn't that hard, it's just that people who are used to shitting out whatever is in their head into a text file have a hard time with it. To code in C you have to know what you're doing and you have to know how the computer works. Sure, that's a pain in the ass, but did you ever think that maybe that's a good thing.

I firmly believe that learning C as your backup language is a great way to make you better in every other language you use. I wouldn't want to do a web application in it, but fuck yeah I'd do another web server in it.

The way people throw their rights and wrongs at you these days, it seems as if morality is something more than just a purely human concept. In reality, it isn't. You can shout, scream and hold signs all day showing your vehement opposition towards abortion, because you think it's wrong in terms of the moral framework laid down by your sky-fairy; but simply put, repetition doesn't make it any more real.

One could argue that a moral framework is an absolute necessity for a functioning human society, but don't let that though fool you for a second. Moral rights and wrongs don't only differ from society to society, but they change over time. The most important aspect however, is how morality changes with power.

To elaborate on this relationship, we need to see what motivates and influences human actions. One factor that influences actions is how favorable the consequences of that action turn out to be. Are they optimal? Are they optimal only to the human entity causing the action? Are they optimal to entities directly or indirectly related to the human entity causing that action? So we see that some people think only of themselves, and some people think about people surrounding them, the environment and so on. Between these extremes lay people with mixed emotions.

A second factor that's more important, is whether that human entity making a decision favors order versus chaos. Someone who decides to do the right thing, isn't doing it simply because it is right, but because they believe that by producing more order, they are decreasing the consumption of chaos; in other words, they prefer order because it assures them order. A person who refrains from threatening random people with a knife does so because it reduces the probability that someone else will do the same to them. In an economic sense, you can think of these people as risk-adverse. Similarly, there are people who tend towards chaos. The magic of the unknown thrills them. Not knowing the outcome of their actions influence their decisions. Like a risk-loving person playing a gamble, chaos influences the actions of a chaos-loving person.

There's nothing I hate more than people who rant about ranting. Is there anything more incredibly useless than basing your rant on the second order derivative of uselessness that is an already derivative rant?

You see, a problem most nerds have is that they think words are useless. It's actions that matter. Don't just complain about something, go out and fix it. Complaining does nothing. Writing, words, humor, are all pointless because society means nothing and social norms are nothing but a stupid obstacle to truly getting shit done!

Then, why the fuck are you ranting about it? Could it be, and bear with me here, that words actually are pretty damn important? Words have built societies, destroyed societies, founded countries, built nuclear weapons of chaos, inspired space travel, assassinated heads of state, and got lovers to make babies. Words are powerful, and when well written and transmitted through some form of communication technology, can have massive impact.

In fact, the US was founded by a damn rant. A bunch of pissed off white dudes who wanted their tea without taxes got riled up and said "FUCK YOU BITCH!" That rant convinced citizens to fight a war against an incredibly well trained military force and win. An entire very successful country was established and proved that a government run by the citizens could work. Most people don't get this, but at the time nobody in the world except Voltaire actually thought that peasants could run jack shit.

I can't fucking stand silly ranters who complain and think the world owes them something. If you're unhappy with something, apply some critical fucking thinking about a realistic way to effect your change, don't just point out the problem and give up!

The instant you point out that you're aware of the problem, but unwilling to fix it, I file you in my personal mental "giant fucking dumbass" bin. If you've just spent half a page describing something that gets your panties in a bunch, and then throw up your metaphorical hands and say "nothing is going to change, woe is me!" then you're a fucking useless drain on humanity productivity, and you deserve all the misery you endure.

Here's a hint - if you've got an issue with something, think about how to fix it. I mean, come on, this is third-grade stuff. Examine your assumptions of how things should be and see where you've gone wrong. If there is a legitimate problem, and you're not just making shit up, consider putting a modicum of fucking thought into changing circumstances so your little world is a little fucking brighter.

Until you're willing to act instead of just bitching, save us all some attention and just shut the fuck up and stew on it some more.

I found out there's a lot of dog and human shit on the ground in San Francisco. It's everywhere. Hobos pee or crap pretty much wherever they want. Although, sometimes the gigantic turds I see are actually from a dog, there's so much of it you just assume a human did his BM right in the center of the sidewalk and avoid it.

It's a common theme around SF. You'll dodge a monstrous brown baby on the ground and think, "How the hell did some homeless dude pound out a steamer right in the middle of the sidewalk before I even got up for work?" It's amazing the amount of literal crap you have to watch out for in San Francisco. But, it's also fairly believable considering the high number of meth-head freaks walking around at any hour of the day and night.

It's pretty nasty, but it stays on the ground and maybe the bottom of my shoes. I take my shoes off when I go in my house, so everything's alright by me. Dodge some turds, make sure I don't walk around on my carpet with my shoes, and I'm safe.

That is, until I go to work and have to tolerate dudes putting their feet on every piece of furniture in the office. I'm not kidding either. It's like some of these guys just had hip surgery and need to keep everything below their belly button elevated or they'll have a prolapsed anus.

I'm starting Oppugn.us as a place where I'll be writing my rants. I'm also inviting other people to write them and have them posted here. I of course will approve them first, but if it's good I'll post it.

The rants can be on just about anything, and could be responses to my own, but there's one simple rule:

NO THREATS OF VIOLENCE TO HUMANS.

Of course they also need to be well written, funny, clever, and just generally good, but the only thing I'll restrict is threatening to hurt humans. Seems you can say mostly anything you want as long as you don't do that.