Someone recently cited “tall poppy syndrome” as an illustration of a person who resents someone who has more wealth than they do. The implication being: we shouldn’t resent rich people, but instead celebrate their wealth.

This principle is a good idea! You should be happy when your friends get wealthier, or do better than you, or accomplish tasks that you could never hope to achieve!

…to a point.

Deceptively, “tall poppy syndrome” is used to justify the existence of billionaires, and the analogy breaks down. Being happy if your friends do twice as well as you do, or even ten times, is one thing; but being told to be happy when someone does a thousand times better than you is not reasonable.

A median poppy is around 3 ft (1 m) tall. Say the US median household has $1M in assets (a generous overestimate). A billionaire poppy is not only a little taller than the average, it is a thousand times taller. That’s one poppy in a field of millions that stands 0.6 miles (1 km) tall, all by itself. Jeff Bezos, with a $237B net worth, will be a poppy 711,000 ft tall, or 134 miles (237 km) tall, its flower sitting well inside the darkness of space.

“Tall poppy syndrome” is for feeling happy when your friend gets a promotion. It’s not for when someone exploits ten thousand of your friends to get a thousand times richer than anyone can reasonably hope to be.

• #opinion

Religious babble

As we round the orbit to another season of Christmas, I’m once again bringing up as an ex-Christian that a lot of “Christian doctrine” that believers lay claim to was actually written by Paul, then expanded over time by countless Catholic expositions, Protestant philosophers, and modern-day Evangelical charlatans.

Almost everything that we know about what Jesus personally taught can be read in the three and a half gospels (the Gospel of John is less of a historical record and more a philosophical interpretation of what Jesus did from a certain religious perspective, but anyway), and when you focus only on what Jesus taught it’s…actually not that much.

Jesus taught that love for your fellow humans was more important than adherence to Law. He taught empathy for the misfit, the oppressed, and the marginalized. He despised relentless monetization. He fed the hungry, lifted the downtrodden, and “healed” without condition. He preached nonviolence and a separation of religion and power.

Read more…

• #opinion

Because you “worked hard” on something doesn’t entitle you to be free from harsh criticism of your public work. An observer is entitled to form their own opinion of your work regardless of how much sweat you poured into something. Scolding the public to “be nice, because they worked hard on this” is rather infantilizing.

When beginners set out training, they often look for a safe environment in which they can display their nascent skills and expect to be judged only against their personal progression. Within such a supportive incubator, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that one’s work be judged kindly, with a focus on personal improvement.

But when you display your work in public and without qualifications, you must expect people to cut you no slack. They are entitled to evaluate your public work against all other public work, past and present, and give their unvarnished opinion, even when it hurts.

Your public work must stand on its own merit. And you must deal with it.

tl;dr: “But I worked hard on it!” is not a legitimate defense against “That sucks.”

• #FridayDevAdvice

Those silly, gigantic urban trucks are the modern equivalent of high heels in Renaissance Europe. High heels were a practical invention that let horseback riders maintain a firm foothold on the stirrups, but they eventually became the status symbols of aristocrats. French men in tights wore heels in the 17th century because they were impractical. They couldn’t walk on muddy or cobblestoned streets or for long distances with them on, but that was the point. They wanted to show that they didn’t have to walk like a commoner; society had to accommodate them.

(Women started wearing heels in the 18th century, and men lost interest soon afterward, because…obvious reasons).

I think men driving alone in sparkling clean F-250s, and having trouble fitting into parking spots, even in huge suburban malls, are exhibiting similar behavior: the truck is primarily a flex. The cumbersomeness and socially-maladapted inconvenience of the truck is the point. Society simply has to accommodate them.

• #opinion
• #cars

Client-side scanning is so absurd, so dumb, so easily abused and bypassed by criminals, that the only practical targets that will fall under Chat Control are the masses of casual users who aren’t using encrypted services for anything nefarious.

People sending illicit content will quickly wise up and avoid using endpoint software that perform monitoring, either by building their own clients with modified source code (after all, a server with published API can’t verify that their clients actually performed any kind of scanning), or by building another layer of encryption, so that data sent through the endpoint software are already encrypted, relying on a meta-client to do the actual encryption and decryption.

In short—like every attempt to bypass end-to-end encryption—Chat Control isn’t crime control; it’s surveillance.

Beware of people shouting “think of the children!” as they push surveillance on the masses, because they don’t actually care about the children at all.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Chat Control, which EFF has strongly opposed since it was first introduced in 2022, keeps being mildly...

www.eff.org

• #opinion
• #technology