Author: harold

My bicycle.

My dry, warm air.

My quiet.

I added a Cha Ching section with links to donate to yours truly.

Paypal.

Venmo.

Things are hard. Everything is so expensive. I lost a good gig in the pandemic, ran through my savings like a teenager through cereal boxes and job interviews often take months while bills are due every two weeks.

It’s also the end of the year and I know nothing will probably move until next year.

If you learned something from this blog, if you laughed once, or if you just want to be nice to me, I suggest that you send me some money, if you can, please.

It’s that hard right now.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you.❤️

I’m Black. My Son Is White. Here’s What We Deal With When We Leave The House.

It’s funny to me that people react to that article on the “let this family live their lives” basis as if families existed outside society. They don’t.

Families go out and deal with the rest of the world everyday. It is unavoidable. Bubbles are ephemeral. This kid will be on his own at some point.

So fellas, you need to understand how complex and manifolded the world, your son’s world view and how he’ll fit in will be to him. I have experience in this and thinking about this kid becoming a young adult makes me feel really anxious.

Adoption is always easy when we’re talking about babies because we’re talking about the parents having to deal with looks and emotions. That’s nothing compared to the adoptee, the baby that becomes a whole person, who will not have to face this as a phase for a little while, a few years. It will be for life, forever.

That’s a staggering difference.

Brace yourself for when shit hits the fan –when you’re an adult and that you have to navigate the society that we have. That’s when I hope this kid doesn’t implode. It’s going to be that hard for him, yes. Have you seen the world we have out there? They are banning books “challenging” society as I write this. Do you think an adopted white man with an interracial gay couple as parents is going to not feel anything out there? Not being targeted? Not being crushed by how vile and vapid things can be? He sure will. And it’s going to be overwhelming.

He will wonder why we keep striving for goals on paper and with our mouths while not doing the work at all. At first he will think that it’s normal, things take time. Then he will realized —by reading about the past that progress is so slow and incremental on empathy, understanding and society that he’ll think that there’s actually no progress at all. We should make progress in those areas as fast as Moore’s law does with silicon but we don’t.

I know the feeling. You’ll have to keep going, my friend. And build the world you want and need.

Computers are so crazy these days.

It seems like we’re constantly telling them to NOT do something instead of having them just doing what we need them to do.

Constantly saying no to this, toggling that off, closing this pop up, thanks I didn’t need that at all but OK, etc.

It’s pure insanity right now. And, they crash or bug for no reason.

I have the weirdest lags and bugs with Windows 11 I’ve never had before. Windows 10 can’t stop updating all the freaking time and being weird about it. I read that dude’s comment the other day:

My MacBook Air M1 (Big Sur) has crashed twice when watching Netflix.

Both times it was when I moved my mouse after 20 minutes or so of watching fullscreen via my USB-C monitor in Safari.

This is a machine that starts at $1,000. And many more obscure stuff. That is so unacceptable, I don’t understand how companies get away with this.

In 2021 computers are far more powerful than anything previously available and behave worse than any computer around 2009-2012. We can’t blame the chip shortage for that.

Just peep at the article talking about how it’s about religion and look at how it only talks about North Africa and Islam. It’s beautiful to see.

Everyone knows about “Liberté, egalité, fraternité.” But it is laïcité that defines the most ferociously contested battle lines in contemporary France. The term has come to express a uniquely French insistence that religion, along with religious symbols and dress, should be absent from the public sphere.

No. That’s not the idea. The idea is that religion has/should have no power, no influence over the democratic government. When I say the idea, I mean “in a perfect world, on paper, this is what it means”. And I think it is a wonderful and reasonable idea, fundamental to democracies (we can see how religion in the US gets in the way of far too many things).

The problem is that France plays a double standard game; it acts as if it was a true religion-less country but has always gone back to “I’m sorry we’re a Catholic, Jesus-having country over here” when it’s time to either side with our Anglo-Saxon friends, invade Muslim countries or manage immigrants.

That’s what the problem with religion in France actually is. And it compounded through history.

This double standard has fueled religion-based terrorists attacks in France and alienated its minority communities. Which in returns, have fueled an even more unnecessary and gross double standard from the government. So today it’s a mix of ultra-showing of religiousness or anti-religion sentiment. Profound disrespect of the state or good old French nationalism. It’s strange as hell and people are spreading across the country to avoid each other more than ever for what I get from family over there.

The contrast between France and the U.S. could hardly be sharper—but it conceals a common challenge. Whether the issue is religion, race, or region, both nations are trying to set the rules by which diverse groups exist and function within a unified whole. It is not an academic exercise. Liberal democratic states will not survive if they cannot strike a balance.

People cling to identities in hard economic times. Just spread the wealth more equally, you idiots. Nothing will change culturally if it doesn’t change economically. The principle being, let people live and chill and you won’t have to worry about no scarf. Maybe you’ll try to wear one if you really value universalism and secularism.

Fade away 40-footer three off dribble.

Feeling good. Staying on target. Let’s get it.

We have this dude at my day job who comes in and always asks for the most random stuff.

One time he asked a coworker,

“if I pull a leg on a frog, do you think it throws up?”

And my coworker, a nice and decent man, told him,

“I’m not sure but you probably shouldn’t do that?”

But before he had ended his sentence the dude was all,

“because I did it when I was a kid and it did throw up”

He is heavily screened and filtered now.

Congratulations to all of us in the US!

We’re about to pass 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 since February 2020. That’s double the number of deaths of India, which has over a billion people.

That’s a pretty good ratio for America.

A bit sad that we won’t reach a million before the end of the year although considering that the numbers are going back up, and that winter is when the ‘rona is doing very well, we might be borderline at the milli for the two-year anniversary of that stupid virus.

One of five nurses in the country is quitting her/his job by the way. The health care system in America has not hit rock bottom yet but when it will, it’s going to be something called a hecatomb.

But Thanksgiving dinner is so important, right?

His biography, The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself was pretty dope. I enjoyed the trip to Florida and down memory lane. How he randomly became multi-millionaire really highlights the “everything is about timing” that is so important in life yet, kind of out of our control.

Rodney Mullen owns a bit of skateboarding and is extremely smart. A free spirit and free man, it was nice to read his story.

I’d love to work with him one day.

“The Billion Dollar Torrent,” as it’s called, reportedly includes all the NFTs on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. These files are bundled in a massive torrent that points to roughly 15 terabytes of data. Unpacked, this adds up to almost 20 terabytes.

Let’s remember that “Fundamentally, I hope people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image,” Huntley explained. “The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I’ve seen are hosted on web 2.0 storage, which is likely to end up as 404, meaning the NFT has even less value.”

So again: if some folks have huge amounts of money to spend on something that has absolutely no value (digital files). If the central bank of America just “signs” out of thin air trillions of dollars for loans (which I’m told, are not going to be paid back), unemployment benefits, failed, 30-year long Army projects and Tesla’s birth (without the state, this “private” company wouldn’t exist).

Why do we keep telling people that they should work jobs for rates that don’t cover costs of life and bills? Why do we act as if money was scarce? We live in a world with $30,000 gifs that you can have for free on your computer right now.

There couldn’t be a better sign that we are prosperous as fuck. Abundance overflowing.

Give money to people to live well. Just shut up and give people money to live well.