We don't generally allow politics on the forums.  With the obvious exception of The Political Machine.  The Political Machine - The Power of the Presidency Can Be Yours! Forums But the world trade situation is probably something worth discussing provided people can avoid assuming "the other" are stupid or evil or greedy or whatever.   Now, I'm a child of Michigan USA.  Detroit area.  That means cars.  And I can say, regardless of political association, t...

When I look at the people who have gotten "canceled" over things they posted on the Internet, it's disproportionately GenXers.   Why is that? I think it's the awkward timing. GenX grew up on BBSes and Usenet which were a free for all.  It wasn't until the Millennials and later GenZ came on the scene that the raunchy, insensitive, or intentionally trolling behaviors of GenX got us into trouble.  

So I turn 50 this year.  It's an arbitrary milestone but such milestones gives us an opportunity to take stock in our lives. I wrote on my Facebook page that I get frustrated being a failure.  My friends and family were quite worried and I should have given more context to my feelings which is what I am going to do here. We all have certain personality traits that can get in the way of accomplishing what we want.  Maybe you just want to lose some weight and you just can't...

Here's mine: I have no idea why the memes that use this tend to crack me up the most but they do.

Brad’s hand youth system. Hand on left: untreated. Hand on right: one day of Brad’s youth system. The secret ingredient: Bee stings!  

I do my first Spring inspection on the new hive.  The bees are really gentle so I don't bother wearing gear.  No problem. But when I go to put the hive back togoether, one young bee has managed to get stuck on the outside. Knowing that she isn't likely to find her way back in (she can't fly yet) I take her on my finger and try to get her to walk back in the front.  She insists on walking on my arm.   Eventually I gently blow to get her to move back towa...

It's funny how Twitter started out claiming it was a messaging service.  And yet, over the years, it has become as moderated, often with a political bias to its moderation, as any community forum. I wonder if it might be worth putting in effort on JoeUser.com .  Before there was Facebook or Twitter, we had JoeUser which was intended to be a place where people could easily share their thoughts with friends.

When it comes to dogs my views can be summed up by this incident this weekend... I am at the store and I need a USB-C cable.  They're $9.99.  I call my wife and tell her "I dunno, $10 for a cable, can you just bring the one we have downstate with you?" However, before I had left the store I bought a $9.99 "Super Premium" dog bone.   Priorities. Post your picture of your dog here. We have two dogs. First, the new puppy: This is an "English Creme" re...

I'm on an airplane right now.  I've been flying pretty regularly since I was 5 years old (parents got divorced and back then they could live in different states).  It's the flight experience where you can really see how much tech has changed.  More to the point, as Kurzweil has pointed out, tech is changing exponentially and it's gotten to the point where it's really hard to miss. On the way to the airport I was able to check in to my seat via the Delta app that put a n...

One of the challenges I face in my role as the CEO of a company is that I always live in the future.  My job is to project things that will happen 1 year, 3 years, 5 years from now.  As a result, I tend to worry about things all the time. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, wrote a book I highly recommend called Only the Paranoid Survive . It's been a boon and a curse to me because I have learned a lot from it but at the same time, it has resulted in me constantly focusing on th...

One of the less pleasant trends I've seen in social media is the lack of recognition that actions can have consequences.  It never ceases to amaze me to see grown adults behave in a beastly way and be shocked, shocked that their actions have resulted in consequences that were almost entirely predictable. One exercise that I think many people would benefit from would be to consider what someone else might do in return.  Rather than trying to guess what they might possibly do, c...

Sunday’s are strange. Do I have enough time to start a new book? Is the dog getting enough attention? She doesn’t seem to think so. i really want to play game X but shouldn’t I be working on Star Control? Or GalCiv? Or Ashes of the Singularity? My son has math homework. Shouldn’t I be helping? How much? People are mad at the Democrats/Republicans. Should I care? I don’t really care. its cold outside but the solar array inverter needs to be checked YouTube...

I have 3 children. I love them to pieces. But dogs? Obviously not in the same league but holy cow there is just something so touching in their unconditional devotion. Sometimes, especially with the smarter ones, their similarities to small children can be uncanny. For instance, my 6 year old Entlevucher brings her stuffed dinosaur to bed every night, she just sleeps with it. Who else here feels the same?

I don't know how common this is with dogs but my dog, an Entlebucher mountaint dog, has a fairly complex moral system when it comes to food.  Namely, she seems to have an internal rule set on what it is okay for her to take food. Here's an example of my dog's morality in action.  If my wife brings me a plate of cheese and crackers, she can set it right in front of me and the dog.  I could get up, leave the room and come back without fear that she would take it.  Howev...

I'm on my way to GDC.  I write this from first class on a 752-200 from Detroit Metro.  25 years ago I lived in poverty. How did I go from having nothing to being one of those 0.1%ers? The usual, hard work, self-discipline, delayed gratification. But there's another element that rarely gets talked about: Being born lucky. I took a political test and one of the questions struck me, "Some people are born lucky." as a True or False statement.  I remember watching a vide...