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I got curious about how many comments my "The Difference Time Makes" journal entry had last night after replying to what seemed like the millionth comment on it, so I checked. It had ninety comments even. That seemed like a lot to me and got me wondering how it stood in relation to other journal entries, so I checked. It turns out I had just tied for the most commented journal entry of all time on the site. When I checked again this morning I was ahead. Thus the title of this entry.

Now I'm by far not winning in most entries in the top ten but you take your victories where you find them. Without further ado, here's the top ten list for most commented journal entries of all time:

+-------+--------------------+------------------------------------------------+
| Count | User               | Entry                                          |
+-------+--------------------+------------------------------------------------+
|    98 | The Mighty Buzzard | The Difference Time Makes                      |
|    90 | aristarchus        | It's over.                                     |
|    87 | aristarchus        | Should I stay, or should I go?                 |
|    84 | aristarchus        | Ethics for Soylentils                          |
|    79 | The Mighty Buzzard | Fun For the Whole Family                       |
|    75 | Open4D             | Proto-submissions                              |
|    69 | aristarchus        | Breaking Frontpage!                            |
|    69 | aristarchus        | SuckOylent!                                    |
|    68 | DeathMonkey        | Before and After:  Movies                      |
|    59 | takyon             | Sex Harassment and the Office Christmas* Party |
+-------+--------------------+------------------------------------------------+

I've been thinking about time this morning. How just a little of it can make a world of difference.

When I was a wee little kid, David Allen Coe put out a song called If That Ain't Country. The song's got nothing to do with race but somewhere in it there's the phrase "workin' like a nigger for my room and board". That phrase, and the change in its meaning over the years, is a particularly interesting example.

The song was released in 1977, so forty years and change ago. Back when it was released, there was no question in anyone's minds that "workin' like a nigger" meant working your entire ass off. Say precisely the same words today and (aside from getting screeched at by social justice types, physically attacked by any black folks in earshot, and receiving disgusted looks and head shakes by pretty much everyone else) it's going to convey the exact opposite sentiment. I find that intriguing. And, frankly, quite depressing.

Depressing because of the way the change in meaning came about. Let's talk about that for a bit.

An adult black man black in 1977 expected to have to work his entire ass off if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family. Make note of that entire sentence there; every word and clause of it is extremely important.

Essentially not one bit of that applies to an average adult black man in 2018.

The prevailing wisdom in the black community in 2018 is that no matter how hard you work, "institutional racism" will keep you from ever getting ahead in life if you follow the rules. The quotes around that phrase are there because, while it is said on a remarkably frequent basis, it is a fundamentally disingenuous concept. "Institutional <type of discrimination>" essentially means "we need something to blame for <group>'s lack of success but lack any proof of actual <type of discrimination>, so we're going to call it institutional and eliminate the need to back up our claim".

Why do they believe that? Because it's all they've been told since MLK was murdered. Anyone claiming to support the black community and spouting anything except "oppression, oppression, oppression" has been vilified and cast out. Non-black people not toeing the party line are called racists and black people who dare disagree are called Uncle Toms. After several decades of this, the black community has almost entirely lost what MLK was essentially the last one to be allowed to preach: Hope.

Let's be real clear on this, no group or individual is ever going to succeed at anything in life without hope. If you do not have hope, you will not even try, which guarantees that you are not going to succeed. Making no effort to succeed does not go unnoticed by those around you either, thus the change in assumption regarding the work ethic of a generic black man.

Thus also my utter contempt for those who profess the loudest to support the black community while nothing but doom and hopelessness passes their lips when speaking to said community. They have robbed entire generations of a race of the hope of a better life that should be their birthright as Americans. And they've done it while lining their own pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of a large group of, let's call them fools for kindness's sake, who genuinely believe the black man is oppressed to the point of hopelessness. I have nothing to say to them, because trying to convince a fool that they are foolish is itself foolish. I really wish they could be made to see that taking someone's hope away absolutely ensures their failure though.

That's pretty much all I have to say about the changes in conventional wisdom on their work ethic but do you remember that sentence I told you to remember? I'd like to address another part of it while I'm at it. Specifically the bit that said "if he wanted anything other than ghetto life for his family".

Unfortunately, that desire no longer exists on average. Primarily because it is based on the assumption that he has or even desires a family. This is not in fact the case anymore. Of the black babies that dodge Planned Parenthood's stated anti-black eugenics agenda long enough to be born (and in NYC one year this decade (I forget which and can't be arsed to look it up), that was less than half of them) , over three quarters of them are abandoned by their fathers.

Being raised in a single parent household is the single largest predictor of future poverty in the US. So, unlike imagined oppression, this actually does put future generations of black children at a factual and serious disadvantage in life.

And, no, the absent black fathers are not all victims of the justice system and in prison. Factual, verifiable numbers call you an idiot for even thinking that.

Now, I don't know precisely why most black fathers are not living in a traditional nuclear family with their children and children's mother. I believe that a good chunk of it is their self-destructive culture but I can't honestly say how much. I can say it's a fucking tragedy regardless of why it's occurring though.

What does all of the above boil down to? That the black man was objectively better off when he was actively, openly, and legally discriminated against than he is now. And that there are a whole lot of people in this world that are in desperate need of a good ass-whooping.

Google found this hilarious forum thread where Paypal users are trying to get answers (none were forthcoming) about the legitimacy of some emails purporting to be from Paypal but containing links to a suspicious domain. https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Access-and-security/xxxxx/td-p/1164823?profile.language=en-gb

I started getting these emails at some point, but I've just been ignoring them. Account statement? What account statement? What's the point of it? I never clicked the links in the email, and could never find any "account statement" when I was logged-on to their website. I don't even know what it looks like.

It's funny just how well I was ignoring them. Today I saw the email, saw the mismatched domain name, and googled it to see what it was all about. I never did that before. Or at least I don't remember doing it. I probably suspected that it was phishing, but never took the first step of looking into it. If someone had asked me how long I'd been getting these emails, I wouldn't have been able to answer. After looking in my email archives, I see that they've been coming for at least four years! So every month for four years I've been getting an email about my paypal account and due to the uncertainty of its legitimacy or usefulness, I simply ignored and forgot about it. It reminds me of those times that an old forum thread gets resurrected and I read through some really interesting post, only to realize that it was written by me. This is what can happen when you start getting old, folks!

GPUs make a lot heat. They also do sums very quickly. You can buy GPUS these days that do well over a trillion floating-point operations per second. Some crazy people like to donate the computing power of their GPUs to distributed science projects. Some like to mine crypto-currencies hopefully to make a profit.

Suppose you could make a very simple computer that basically consisted of a cheap CPU and a few GPUs capable of somewhere between 1 and 10 TFLOPS, and would output heat at a rate of about 1kW, you could use it as a fan heater. Such a device would cost between £0.12 and £0.15 per hour to run at current UK prices.

Could that computing power be worth that much money to someone? Could you heat your house for free?

I just received a letter stating that my JCB credit card will expire at the end of April. It appears that they are abandoning the US market altogether. https://www.doctorofcredit.com/jcb-shut-us-operations-deactivate-cards-may-2018/

How will I sign up for nude model websites now?

It's half past nine and, as enjoyable as schooling you lot is, I've got other things to do today. If I don't have tons and tons of messages when I get the time and inclination to argue some more, I'll try and get everything that warrants it a response. If there are too many though, I'm probably just going to mass delete them and watch some anime instead.

[ Update: You folks really didn't want replies, I take it. ]

A Pakistani man who became a Humanist and renounced Islam sought political asylum in the UK. His application was refused. From The Guardian:

Walayat, who has lived in the UK since 2011, said he had received death threats from members of his family and community in Pakistan after integrating into secular British life, forming a relationship with a non-Muslim partner and refusing to conform to the expectations of conservative Islam.

In true British pub quiz fashion, the Home Office tested his claim to be a Humanist by asking if he knew the names of any Greek philosophers who were humanistic.

When tested on his knowledge of humanism, Walayat gave a “basic definition” but could not identify “any famous Greek philosophers who were humanistic”

The last pub quiz I was at, the question master was adamant that Apollo 14 was the last manned mission to the Moon... I see the Home Office takes things as seriously.

Walayat joined the Humanists UK organisation in August, but said he had believed in the basic principles of humanism from childhood.

Now more than 120 leading philosophers have signed a letter asking the Home Secretary to reconsider the man's case since "Knowledge of Plato and Aristotle is not a reliable test for whether someone is a humanist.”

Sometimes I despair.

I think I won it today. I managed to single-handedly fend off the communist and socialist hordes with logic and reason, only garnering a very few disagreements remotely based in reason and none that could not be refuted.

I'm done with that article now though. I can't be spending all day educating the ignorant. That and it's nap time.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are upon us, but alas, I am yet again trapped and subject to the Olympic Experience that NBC is compelled to provide me. Unless they make a fundamental change this year, I am not allowed to access their "free" and wonderful coverage of all of the events via their streaming service because I am a cord cutter and I do not have a cable account id to use to login (ESPN is notorious for providing "free" access this way as well). I keep toying with the idea, but I never get over the activation energy to do it, but I would love to VPN into another country (Canada, England, etc.) to get my Olympics fix, but I don't know who provides reliable endpoints.

Does anyone have any recommendations for companies they've used, or better yet, specifically done this to get Olympics coverage? I don't see this as a long-term thing and is something I would only set up for certain events (Olympics, Rugby World Cup) as needed.