This article has a neat chart, which attempts to formulate growth of college majors versus the political ideology of their corresponding faculty. Interestingly, my college major-- way back in the day-- of Computer Science skews slightly conservative, if I'm reading the vertical axis correctly.

The reason I find that mildly surprising is because I had the overwhelming sense my college professors were liberals. And even professionally, the leftist programmers will openly make anti-Trump jokes in meetings. Turns out this is just a case of the liberals being the most vocal, as usual-- and the conservatives keeping their mouths shut, also par for the course.

Sometimes I also wonder if I'm in the right career: look at the explosive growth in Computer Science majors since 2011! I was also alarmed by the "Learn to Code" joke-- notice that it wasn't "Learn to Sew", or "Learn to Jackhammer". I wonder if my field is on the brink of being totally commoditized?

In other political news, and not just to brag, I got another one spot-on; check out Mark Dice's coverage of the breakdown of Google's search results. My prediction is totally coming true: their results are basically worthless for anyone even remotely right-of-center politically, and it's all because of what I laid out in that post.

In other totally unrelated news, my sister sent me this-- it's the 3DO's "The Need for Speed", but corrected to make the car pace match what they would actually be in real life. I passed a couple of cars once in real life going 140 mph in my 350z, so I can attest to the rate at which slower moving traffic comes and is left behind, as shown in the video. Of course, the gearing and speedometer is all broken-- this is just a hack, after all.

But it brings up an interesting game design discussion: the 3DO's NFS is probably the best designed video game I've ever played, from the standpoint of making realism trade-offs in exchange for superior gameplay, but in a way that still feels convincing. A superficial example is that the driver is sitting too high in the game's cockpit view-- so they raised the camera a bit, and it does wonders in improving visibility, while still feeling realistic.

But the best example comes in the form of the game's pacing. "Digital Foundry" did a frametime analysis of the title some years ago, and it only runs at like 13 fps. I was shocked-- how could the game feel so butter smooth at such low framerates? Then it dawned on me: rather than "frameskip", the developers made the engine simply render every frame, then balanced the game so that the distances traveled made sense given the low framerate!

In other words, if you divide the number of kilometers traveled by the amount of ground the car moves each frame, multiplied by the framerate-- such as 13-- the math actually works out! To put it yet another way, they eliminated the framerate issues by just building the entire game's design around that limitation! As for the other cars, they are moving "too fast" relative to the player-- but this was also intentional, because just like the cockpit view situation, the game is way more fun and balanced, while still having satisfying passing maneuvers.

Back to the hack then: the hacker "unbroke" the game and made it "realistic". While it's a fun exercise and a way to explore the game's brilliancy, also notice how it's basically unplayable as a result. It's a cool testament to just how clever of a release 3DO's NFS is.

If anyone ever wondered about the unbridled spread of "division of labor" over the past one hundred and fifty years or so, look no further than how stock market investors award the improvements in efficiency.

Interestingly, the part of that story in which Sony's "PlayStation" team was upset also reminded me of how free wheeling businesses used to be, for better and for worse-- it struck me as refreshing!

I'm going to need to re-evaluate "Civilization VI".

I got it as part of a "Humble Monthly" collection back when it was a relatively new game, played part-way through a single match, and wrote it a glowing review. Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a great deal on the Switch port, and am part-way through my first game there. And now that I'm battling through a major war, some serious balancing issues are emerging.

But before I get to that, let me say that my current match-- played as "Cleopatra", on the "Warlord" (third) difficulty-- is more emergent and ludo-narratively rich than any match of "Civ" I've ever played, and I've been at the series since "IV" was brand new, fourteen years ago. I have "Phillip" of Spain adopt Judaism, followed by Montezuma and his Catholic empire, both on my continent waging war against one another. Hilarious, those damned crazy Catholic Aztecs!

After some really exciting early game shuffling, a prolific Montezuma was in pole position via the "Religion" victory condition-- which forced me into allying with those nutty Spanish Jews to do a joint war against the aforementioned cross-bearing jungle guys. I was even able to use the game's phenomenal city state mechanics to recruit an extra army for my use! And hence, the fighting began.

And that is also where the problems began.

Before I started the war with feather outfit-adorned Montezuma, I checked his resources: no ability to make iron or gun powder-based units, and only seven gold to his name. His army consisted of crappy "Eagle Warrior" units, which were no match for my knights, swordsmen, and crossbowmen. "No problem", I thought: at that point in the game, it takes several turns just to make a single new unit.

Not five turns into the battling-- whereupon I rapidly razed one of his cities-- a knight approached. Then another. Then another. Then another. In just a few turns, he was able to make an entirely new army of powerful units, filling the screen. With seven gold. How?! So I did a bit of investigation online, and found this forum thread. Apparently when you turn up the difficulty, the only thing which changes is that the AI cheats! One comment even explicitly states: "Difficulty level = cheat level".

I bet if I had some magic code to turn off the fog of war, the AI was spawning one or two Montezuma knights per turn, just off screen, maybe even in the middle of a plains or something.

Apparently the AI in this series has always worked that way to some degree-- but I've never encountered anything as egregious as this Montezuma war. I remember the game taking flak when it was brand new for the AI being "too easy", and I wonder the developers panicked and patched in "AI can spawn infinite units" code, just to superficially make the game more challenging?

The whole point of a strategy game is to test the player's ability to plan-- and "Civilization VI" gives you a myriad of amazing screens and tools via which to do just that. And they're all pointless, because the rules of the game will pseudo-arbitrarily change as soon as the AI starts to lose-- it's like "Mario Kart 8 blue shell" crap, in a different genre. Frustrating!

I've read that the Switch port is several patch versions behind the PC version-- so maybe they've improved the AI situation more recently, and Nintendo's platform will benefit from that eventually? I hope so, because this handheld adaptation is amazing: the controller interface is fantastic, the graphics are essentially identical to the PC original's, and even the performance is wonderful! And nothing beat having Ghandi almost randomly and hilariously finger-waving at me after I'd declared war: "You're so evil..."

Just found an article which lists my 2017-vintage "B350 Tomahawk" motherboard as getting Ryzen 3000 support!

This is awesome, because it means I can just drop the CPU into my existing PC without doing a single other thing; swapping motherboards is as much work as building a brand new PC for Pete's sake.

In a lot of ways-- number of supporters, all-time points table, and typical squad value, to name a few-- Lazio are the sixth "best" club in the Italian football pyramid. Interestingly though, in terms of trophies Lazio are fourth, behind only Juventus, Milan, and Inter.

This is an interesting macrocosm to my personal experiences as a die-hard Lazio fan for the past fifteen years, where Lazio have mildly overachieved in terms of actual outcomes, versus their means. Turns out, despite down periods this has historically been true of the club.

Speaking of the final itself, for those who missed it here is the club's highlight reel, and here is the league's-- between the two you can get a good picture of what went on. Regarding the "missed" Bastos penalty situation, eagle-eyed wifey pointed out something even I hadn't realized: "Uh, that shot was going way wide-- the hand took it towards goal, which is probably why VAR watched and ignored it."

At the very end of the league reel, just check out the absolutely surreal imagery with "Olimpia", the team's eagle, adorned in sky blue and white, behind the trophy: Lazio are the coolest football club in the world!

This is another example of Tom Woods at his best: a "real deal" academic PhD historian and ultra well-connected with facts and the Libertarian community, but also one of the most down-to-Earth chummy people I've ever encountered, who takes the time to explain complicated multi-faceted historical and economic concepts in the kind of plain manner which anyone can follow.

He's one of the very first people I always steer others onto when they express an interest in Libertarianism.

We did it! So proud of the team today, they worked ultra hard from the opening whistle to the dying seconds. That ninety five yard counter attacking solo Correa goal put a serious exclamation mark on an exciting and deserved seventh Coppa Championship in our fine club's history. Forza Lazio!

Due to the inflationary "debt is money" fractional-reserve banking "financialization magic" Monopoly money scam era, plus car-specific "safety" and "green" State gunpoint-enforced laws, cars are now entering into the realm of apartment buildings: too expensive for the common plebe to own, leaving renting as the only option.

It's not only yet another example of the ever-diminishing standard of living for people in the West, but will further "income inequality", because it's yet another thing "commoners" will be spending money on simply to service their standard of living, rather than accumulate ownership of their own wealth. It's like another form of usury.

Notice how video games are going this way too: big publishers are now "leasing" access to an ownership of a game as a "service", whether via server access or streaming; gamers pay their dues for months and years, spending the traditional cost of buying a game many times over, while never winding up with an actual copy of the game to have in perpetuity.

One of my favorite topics-- that of so-called "animal rights"-- came up during this session, and I wasn't entirely pleased with Stefan's answer. I don't want to belabor the point-- since regular readers will know I've written about this topic many times before, even offering up for mental digestion a bullet or two in my summary post-- but I feel compelled to wrap a better bow on the issue than did Molyneux.

I look at the world through the lense of "natural rights", not the "non-aggression principle". Non-human animals and plant life don't have the ability to formulate or will maxims, so the body of natural law-- both on the "accountability" and "granting of self-defense rights" ends-- does not apply to them. Molyneux gets this part right, offering up a similar line of reasoning, but adapted to the "non-aggression principle".

Where he goes wrong is that he fails to articulate that this is a one hundred percent, absolutely pure question about categories: humans have the capacity for reason-- to formulate and will maxims-- whereas non-human animals and plants do not. The questioner poses, "what if a plague reduced all human intelligence to a low level"-- then yes, absolutely "natural rights" would no longer apply to humans either! Because humans would no longer belong to the category of rational beings.

For some reason Molyneux didn't want or think to answer this inquiry with its totally obvious answer, which is why I wasn't satisfied with his treatment of the issue.

On the concept of "outliers", a person with Down Syndrome, or someone who is drunk or asleep, still falls under the "natural rights" umbrella, in the sense that they are a part of the category "human". Similarly, an unusually intelligent ape does not. However, taxonomical categories are not "forever"-- indeed, humans were not always rational beings. And perhaps some day in a million odd years, the category of "dolphin" or something along those lines will need to be re-evaluated, once the intelligent "outliers" are no longer "outliers".

Of course, I recognize that all of this is lofty and abstract, and that in the real world things are complicated, messy, and often unclear. That's why murder trials often have hours or even days of jury deliberation, to determine not only whether murder occurred, but to what degree-- none of which obviates the abstract principles underpinning the concept of murder.

Applied then to the case of this "animal rights" issue, if a person with Down Syndrome commits a brutal murder in the messy real world, the specifics of that case-- did the perpetrator even understand, and to how far of a degree, what they'd done?-- would need to be examined. Similarly, if a super-human intelligence-level monkey, with an "Ape Escape" Spector-like brainiac helmet suddenly appears and commits human genocide, then the specifics of culpability in that case too would need to be analyzed.

And I'm not merely "weaselling out" through a logical consistency escape hatch here: in all morality, classifications and generalizations need to be used to establish guiding principles-- but in the end game called "real life", necessity dictates that it's individual organisms and circumstances which need to be acted upon.

Last "Soph" post, I promise-- I've just been on a kick with her content today. The reason I've been on a kick is because her stuff is downright profound! Just check out this, and this. These are as packed full of "truth bombs" as any of Ayn Rand's works, or Stefan Molyneux's videos. That's high praise coming from me, because both of those people have been very influential on my way of thinking.

Of course, having been around for awhile I've heard all of these arguments before, having formed many of them independently a long time ago from my own experiences with parental observations and my experiences in school. But the unbelievably content-dense way in which she delivers them is remarkable! And for viewers freshly exposed to the concepts... I can see why she has such a following.

Picked up Taco Bell for lunch today, and the cashier asked if I wanted to "donate one dollar for scholarships something-or-another." I instinctively said "no, thanks"-- why would I want to voluntarily funnel money into the pump-and-dump college debt scam cartel?

Shortly after, I noticed a poster they had up advertising the promotion, which I just now found online. As you can see, it's a hispanic (of course) thot "political science" major (i.e. nutjob) with hair extensions who has a "passion for justice" (translation: racist sexist). The only money I'd put toward this is that she's not going to be a "next generation innovator", whatever that even means; more like a regressive Nazi SS watch dog. Of course, she's probably just a paid actress "fake person" anyway.

On to a different topic: provided she's not the "dumb one" in her family (distinct possibility), I'm sure Susan Wojcicki scores well on IQ tests, considering she comes from a lineage of Jewish PhDs. But holy buckets does she have zero wisdom or common sense! First, she doesn't understand that the political ideologies she's pushing are quite literally Fascist, and lead to police state despotism. Second, she's leading her company off a cliff and into major financial losses through sheer foolhardiness. Classic "book smark but total idiot" type.

On the latter point, she gets taken apart by my new favorite online personality, who makes the following arguments: Susan Wojcicki doesn't want pressure, so she's thinking extreme short-term "how can I relieve the pressure"; she's doing this by continually appeasing the censorship mob-- who will never be appeased, because they'll just keep shifting the goal posts; doing this paints her into a corner long-term, because the mob is too fickle to be reliable revenue generators, and the censorship only alienates the reliable content creators. Logically sound take if I've ever heard one.

Regarding "Count Dankula", even if he were still a Communist and even if I did find his dog "Roman salute" ironic joke distasteful (I thought it was hilarious-- reminded me of something you would have seen in a classic "Monty Python" skit), I'd still support him and his cause just as much. Because people like me want the same consistent rules applied even to people with whom we disagree. And a free society simply cannot function if people don't have the ability to criticize, critique, debate with, and poke fun at others.

Regarding "gen Z": I thought the generations were just getting dumber and dumber-- but as it turns out, I think the "millenials" were just a blippy low-point. For example, Zero Hedge posted this article recently, which shows even as "gen Z" people start to become wage earners, they do idiotic things with their money at lower rates than do "millenials". This is anecdotal, but I've also heard several "gen z" commentators online say that in their schools, huge swathes of their peers are highly suspicious of the State, conservative in their values (save money, be responsible, deferred gratification, etc.), and think "millenials" are idiots.

I don't know that I've ever had these acting skills, but if I were fourteen years old today instead of back in 1995, I'd probably be a lot like this girl. At that age, I too was very tech-savvy, sardonic, and had strong linguistic skills. I even had brown hair, blue eyes, and braces.

For me, my frustrations took the form of "blogging"-- years before the term was even coined-- after I'd taught myself HTML 1.0, and hanging out on IRC and Usenet with fellow rambunctious teenagers. I've actually preserved the oldest surviving example of my writing, when I was just a few years older than her. The bitter "l33t h@x0r sp3@k" was strong with me at that time.

I wasn't nearly as politically aware as she is, but the "internet" wasn't even remotely the same back then, so I didn't have the resources she has. Which is why I say I'd be just like her today, given apples-to-apples time periods. In a way, for people like me and her, this is the best time in human history to grow up, because of the today's 'net. Maybe I was born just a smidgen too early. Specifically, I would have benefited greatly from exposure to "MGTOW"-- it would have explained and resolved one of my greatest frustrations back then. I spot-listened to a few of her videos, and even though she's a girl she definitely understands the toxic role women traditionally play in sex relations, which is very instrumental for someone her age.

Of course, I also wonder what's going on in her home life. I was being raised by not one, but two narcissistic parents. I spent my entire life, up until a few months ago (yes, age 37) caught in the parental "drama triangle" shown in the second link, without knowing why I was so anxious all of the time. Both of my siblings also have dealt with depression and anxiety their whole lives. So, I hope this girl is doing ok, I'm happy she has a healthy internet-based outlet for self-expresion, like I did as a teenager.

Speaking of that, I laugh at the famous "liberal compassion", yiking like a bunch of dumb dogs for YouTube to take down her channel because of her political views, versus being happy that a hurting teen has a medium to vent stuff out of her system, and to develop skills while making a few bucks at the same time. It would have been like my parents or a nosy neighbor taking away my computer back when I was that age.

Dragon's Dogma is a pretty fun RPG. It's a weird mix of "The Elder Scrolls" and "Demon's Souls". A few years ago, I played part-way through and reviewed the game on Windows. Of course, on PC I was playing at a native 2160p, at a locked 60 fps.

Maybe I'll buy the Switch port some day, and actually finish the game! I don't remember why I dropped my first playthrough-- I think I just got busy with other stuff.

I laugh hysterically every time some tech company boss says, "I know you don't trust us currently, but just look at these new privacy controls we built into our product!" It's so illogical it makes my brain hurt.

Unless the hen house is either Free or independently audited by a trustworthy third party, and not the fox, it simply can't be trusted; it's trivially easy to have button event handling code do nothing.

It's really funny how, when you dig into the various highly-promoted and publicized scare-mongering reports or even historical records, there is invariably tons of history behind them.

In this case, it turns out that the "50,000 species per year" number has a long past of nonsense, to the point of getting laughed at. Then it suddenly gets resurrected, and people who have known about it for years can only roll their eyes. It reminds me of the "six million Jews gassed by Hitler" deal.

Remember when I wrote about how Windows will probably just be a GNU/Linux distribution some day? We're inching closer.

Hah, regarding the "tweet" in this article: unless you're some form of anarchist, you sure did consent to facial recognition scanning at the airport, according to your own logic! Statists say that simply by being born, you "consent" to "lawmakers" making "laws" which must be followed.

I remember having this debate with my father some years ago; I was arguing that you can only consent to delegation of rights that you have as an individual-- as in, I can't delegate to my friend to have a party in your house, because I don't have that right myself. "Nope", he argued, "you are delegating to them the right to make 'laws'!" And my father is nominally a minarchist, not some kind of nutty commie!

So when a non-anarchist complains about some kind of usurpation of power by the State, I just smile. Hoisted on one's own petard indeed.

"Minecraft", "Freedom Planet", "Sonic Mania", and... that's about it-- the only three games of the past decade I've liked without reservations. I think there is about to be a fourth...

Marriage of 16:9 pixel-perfect art without even a sniff of bearded hipsterville craft beer pretentiousness? Check. Early-90s style DSP-esque music, but without chippy obnoxiousness? Check. Complete absence of SJW or Dudebro themes? Check. Hell, this basically looks like a modern-day "Neo Geo" game, made back then!

The only thing it sort of has is the "evil capitalist" thing, with the premise of the game being that you extort protection money as a sort of simulation mechanic. But I'm just going to treat it as a "government establishment simulator"-- can I extort 100% of the people like governments do? "Pay your 'property taxes' or die, biznatch!"

It technically comes out tomorrow, but seeing as how this looks like a potential "ActRaiser" or "Dragon Force" to me, I'm going to wait for a "physical" edition so I can have a case and game card.

Remember when I recently wrote about how uninteresting the games are on the current platforms, versus the consoles in any other prior generation? Take a gander at this collection of peoples' top PlayStation 4 games. Other than "Monster Hunter World", which shows up in a few instances... blegh!

I was thinking today about that topic of so-called "externalities", which are so often used to justify the State apparatus. The principle is that people's actions sometimes cause unintended consequences on others, and so pre-emptive laws are required to stop people from causing potential harm.

But aren't the laws used to "govern the externalities" creating externalities of their own? In fact, if you just look at your own lived experiences, which set of others' behaviors cause you the most unintended unpleasantness: someone inadvertently polluting your water, or police officers constantly hounding you every time you drive a car, the thousands of laws governing what you can do with your property, taxes, and so forth?

In other words-- and which seems to always be the case when it comes to justifications for the State-- the consequences of the State's presence are always significantly more harmful than the problems they are apparently meant to stave off. In this case, the State is by a mile the biggest creator of "externalities" of them all!

The announcers in the Lazio-Atalanta match are driving me nuts. They're complaining about Wallace getting booed, after he essentially and single-handedly committed his dozenth match-losing embarrassment. Then out of frustration, they pulled the "all Lazio fans are racist" card: "Well it's not the worst thing Lazio fans have done recently!"

Footballers are entertainers who middle and lower class people pay their hard-earned money to go and watch. Between transfer fee and wages, Wallace has cost the club millions of Euro, and he's done nothing but make stupid mistake after stupid mistake. It'd be a travesty if he wasn't booed! If a Shakespearan actor kept flubbing his lines, he'd get booed too, and this isn't any different.

In any event, the only reason I'm even watching Lazio still this season is to see which individual players are even worth keeping. It's like one extended pre-season at this point.

Songs like this make me laugh: it's one of many examples of a metal composer and musician doing pop music ten times better than actual, full-time pop composers and musicians.

Like all pop music the mid-tempo song structure and the repetitiveness of it all is as basic as it gets-- but just listen to the contrast between the major and minor keyed sections! It gives the song a ton of character. The transition chord itself actually gives off Castlevania vibes. Not to mention the insane guitar solo.

The sports equivalent would be like LeBron James trying his hand at football and being instantly better than Cristiano Ronaldo. Embarrassing!

This is somewhat scummy, in that knowing the enthusiast community as I do, people would definitely have shopped around with this in mind had they been aware. I know I would have! Interestingly, I got lucky anyway: my card has the "A" variant.

The funniest thing about so-called "Social Security" to me is that its "trust fund" is exclusively made up of US Treasuries! It would be like having your 401k consist of your credit card bills.

If you don't believe me, just read the "program's" actual FAQ, question "How are the trust funds invested?" Also check out the question about the rate of return: 2.988 percent for 2017! My cat could invest better than that!

Also note that all "social security" taxes go into the Treasury's general fund, to get blown by people in congress like Cow Farts Cortez-- they are not saved or earmarked specifically for the "program" in any way!

But back to the debt thing: only in this crazy world is a promise to pay yourself in the future counted on the books as an "asset". Of course, it only works this way for the State: no private bank would accept the outstanding balance of my mortgage as collateral for a loan application which I'm filling out. The loan officer would laugh me out of their cubicle!

About "social security" in general, setting aside some kind of doomsday scenario I'm set for retirement without a penny of it: I planned it that way from the get-go. So the whole scheme can go up in smoke tomorrow for all I care.

On a somewhat related note, I also saw this article in my feeds this morning.

Young people today, who are apparently being called "generation Z", want a magical college degree to get them a life-long six-figure earning management job, into which they'll get promoted six months after they start working. Boy are they in for a rude awakening if this movie plays out the way I suspect it might.

Meanwhile over in good old "millenial-ville", a provider of endless comedy, they say that they do not even "care about money". Oh really, that's interesting: Bernie Sanders's largest base is made up of "millenial" voters. And his exclusive appeal is that he steals money with his left hand, then hands out "free college" and other goodies with his right hand. Translation: millenials don't "care about earning money."

I'm equivalently at a level of mental retardation when it comes to fine motor skills. I once dropped a horseback riding class after just the second session, because I recognized that it was unfair for me to be holding up twenty other people from getting their money's worth, while waiting for me to get fifteen straight minutes of one-on-one help simply bridling the animal, every single session. I understood and understand this limitation about myself, and do my best to avoid situations where I'm just going to cause problems.

When it comes to logic, very nearly every other person on the planet is at a mental retardation level compared to me. Even fellow IT professionals, who are high IQ people overall-- much less the average person!-- are embarassingly bad at achieving even basic competency when it comes to reasoning and cogency.

But unlike how I remove myself from situations where my limitations are going to cause serious frustration, inconvenience, or even danger to others, other people have absolutely no conception at just how limited they are when it comes to rationality. They have no reservations about shouting their opinions from the roof tops, bossing people around, or making career path choices where they actively impede the business from functioning well.

My former horseback riding instructor undoubtedly had to exert great effort to be patient with me, probably even wondering "is this guy for real?" My equivalent needs to be, when working with others, making a conscious mental acknowledgement that I'm essentially dealing with Down Syndrome individuals: rather than get frustrated, I need to do better at taking deep breaths, smiling, and being patient. But my goodness is it difficult!

I like Lisa Su and I think she's done a good job with AMD: from a personal standpoint, I've been all-in on their CPUs for two years now. But at the same time, CEO talk in general contains a lot of BS: "it's all about the journey!" Pffft.

For example, a big reason why AMD is doing well is because of Ryzen. And my understanding is that the reason Ryzen exists at all in the successful form it does is because Jim Keller had decided to re-join AMD.

In other words, if it weren't for one guy unexpectedly and suddenly going to work in the trenches, she's not sitting there two years later giving this fluffy CNBC interview, talking about her "well thought out long-term plans"-- it's total bunk.

Lisa Su did not design a single circuit in Ryzen, nor did she do any of the marketing, nor any of the manufacturing. I think Tolstoy is right, in that historians and observers in general give way too much credit to "leaders" for things over which they actually had very little to do.

I just watched the "Get Smart" episode "The Groovy Guru", and it seriously makes me wonder if Larry Storch's character, or maybe even the entire episode, was a huge inspiration for the premise of "Jet Set Radio"!

As someone who was gobsmacked by the original in the arcades in 1992, and who absolutely adores and still regularly plays the 32X port, I almost fell out of my chair at how butter smooth and high resolution the Switch rendition is. I'll certainly be buying it as soon as it's released in the US "eShop".

That said, it will be tough to go back to not having the added 32X content: the two new tracks were the best of the bunch, and I love using the Le Mans prototype cars. On top of that, the colors on the Switch version are seriously distracting: it sounds like a bug, so hopefully they'll be able to fix that. I also strongly prefer the 32X version's audio to the arcade's. In other words: it'll be a fun port but one with a lot of tradeoffs, versus the "ultimate" version for which I would have hoped.

In fact, I wasn't aware of that PS2 port-- I prefer the aesthetic of that one over even the Switch rendition!

This was an interesting read. During childhood, my friends and I-- born in 1981, or 1982-- were "in between": we bicycled around a bit in groups by ourselves, but individually we were helicopter-parented until maybe age twelve. As for "saaaaafety", I've never worn a bicycle helmet even once in my entire life.

I was a bit later in getting my driver's license-- 19-- but almost all of my friends drove at 15 and 16. Which is part of why I never bothered, since I had all of my buddies to gladly tool me around-- which we did, all over the place, almost every day after high school. I had the freedom, without the expense or responsibility, and I definitely did not want to go through the government's mandatory-- for those under 18-- "behind the wheel" training. It made sense for me to just wait and bypass that crap.

Once I did start driving, I quickly became an "enthusiast", and I do credit prolific bicycle riding as a kid, along with increasingly realistic video games like the 3DO's "The Need for Speed", with the early development of spatial judgement and awareness. So I think his observations there are spot-on.

As for my parenting style, I do not let my kids-- 9, and 6-- bicycle around by themselves. And that's not because I'm paranoid or "helicoptery"-- I'm a pretty hands-off parent actually, letting them resolve conflicts on their own before I step in. But rather, it's because today's American communities are flat-out dangerous: there are areas a ten minute bike ride from my house where I won't go as an adult without legitimate worries of harassment. Even in the very early 2000s when I was in college at the University of Minnesota-- not particularly far from my house-- I got hounded by frauds and other fringe elements on pretty much a daily basis. My best friend at the time got mugged at knife-point on the East-West bank bridge.

Yes, there are lots of over-reactive helicopter parents: when I take my kids to the park, I'm the only parent there who isn't literally walking around guiding their kid around. The park itself is rubber-matted, and has signs at each piece of equipment detailing the recommended age ranges! It's revolting.

At the same time though, neighborhoods aren't the same monocultures they were when Eric Peters was a kid. The realm of "this is where I live" has effectively shrunk from a neighborhood to a yard.

Is this from where most of the Donald Trump misconceptions arise? Make sure not to miss this link near the bottom of the article.

I see Trump in Scott Adams's second category. But that's because when I read stuff, I go straight to the source material to get the full context, even for people I don't like, such as Occasional Cortex: I don't trust the headlines or incomplete quotes, whether they're from conservative or liberal media. Scott Adams looks to be the same way.

The facts as I see them: Trump personality-wise is a straight shooter who says what's on his mind, yet who knows his audience from his decades in the entertainment business, and often plays "4D chess" to corner his opponents, to great effect.

He frequently engages in totally obvious comical facetiousness, which modern-day Leftists are socially unequipped to pick up on-- sort of like how they need "satire" in the headlines of obvious parody pieces because they can't "get it" otherwise, or how they constantly "fact check" hilarious things like "CNN buying a washing machine to spin the news."

In fact, this is a big reason for the gap in perception regarding Trump I suspect, because this incessant tongue-in-cheek dialogue is such a huge part of his character. And Trump never bothers correcting them: he thinks their lack of perception is just as funny as I do, and besides he correctly reasons that they're not going to like him no matter what he does, whereas to the people who matter, they understand his sense of humor perfectly.

Policy-wise, Trump is a Democrat from the 1990s or 2000s, before that party went off the deep end: tough on borders and crime, and a big believer in Keynesian-style cheap money and fiscal stimulus. Even as I strongly disagree with that school of economics, absolutely nothing in Trump's policy platform is even remotely controversial prior to as recent as 2010, maybe even a bit later.

Ron Paul, I could see Leftists getting their underwear in a bundle. But Donald Trump for Pete's sake? His positions are about as mainstream as you can get.

In a nutshell then, I think all of this unhinged "Trump Derangement Syndrome" comes from the media constantly taking every word he says out of context, like what the "Daily Show" did to Peter Schiff some years ago, then bombarding people with it 24/7/365.