On stage at Goldman Sachs event, Travis Kalanick compared his company’s woes to Ferguson.

This is what happens when people fail to get their love of flashy analogies under control.

Everybody talks about “consumer mentality” but almost nobody can provide a concrete definition. People know that consumer mentality is something vaguely bad and that the appropriate facial expression when the words are pronounced is a condescending wince. Most of them , however, have no idea what they are wincing at.

As somebody who has lived both in a society of consumers and in a pre-consumerist society, I can tell you that consumerism is vastly superior to its alternative. This is why I always proudly declare that I have a consumer mentality. 

Consumer mentality is the expectation that goods and services will be available to satisfy your needs. If you come home, turn on the lights, and there is no electricity, a person with consumer mentality immediately thinks, “WTF? I’m paying for the service, I’d better be getting it”, starts calling the electrical company and demanding to know what’s going on. And a person with pre-capitalist mentality finds a candle and sits there staring at it without protesting and trying to figure out what happened. I grew up among such people, and let me tell you, such societies suck. 

If a person with consumer mentality buys a pair of shoes and they start leaking the next day, s/he will go back to the store, return the shoes, and write an angry review online. A person with consumer mentality believes that such a situation is not normal. 

If a person with consumer mentality discovers that there are shortages of oranges or notebooks or tablet devices, s/he will not perceive such a situation as normal. The passive acquiescence and fatalism of the pre-capitalist mentality are not natural to a consumer deprived of goods.

Consumer societies get a lot of flak because their members only abandon fatalism and passivity when they want their goods and services. A consumer sees the world in terms of goods and services to be purchased and gets unhappy when anything gets between the consumer and the purchase. However, any criticism of consumerist societies arises from comparing consumers to a non-existent lofty ideal and not to actual existing alternatives. I believe that it is already an enormously big deal that human beings have abandoned the attitude of patient resignation at least in one sphere of their lives. 

People who detest consumerism the most are those who have come out from a very strong monotheistic model and are now displacing their religious feelings away from the religion they abandoned and onto the secular world. The lack of self-abnegation and modesty that consumers exhibit hurts the religious sensibilities of such recent converts to secularism. If you observe the most passionate detractors of consumerism closely, you will see that they exhibit many of the signs of religious fanaticism. However, consumerism is hard to resist. Try depriving these passionate anti-consumerist bunnies of running water for a week or of their favorite designer tea for a day, and you will see an irate consumer awaken in each one of them.

The invention of the Jewish nose.

Do you remember the scientist with a crazy shirt? And here is a response to the scandal with the shirted scientist. The whole thing is beyond hilarious.

And here is another post on the shirt debacle.  This will soon become the most important shirt in the history of humanity.

A really disgusting way to serve a cappuccino. (Work-friendly photo, in case you are wondering.)

Fifth-graders are stupid.

Gosh, wouldn’t people tell themselves to rationalize their miserable lives. Here is a guy who blames his sucky personal life on. . . his upward social mobility. Yeah, making money and moving up is a total no-no if you want to get a date.

An important observation: “Not only is your work addiction way more similar to a drug habit than you’re probably comfortable admitting, it’s probably also distressing the rest of your life just like any other addiction would.” Just like alcoholism and drug addiction, workaholism is a way to disconnect from personal pain and numb oneself to it. It’s more socially acceptable to work one self into an early grave than drink oneself into it but that’s where the differences end.

“When I think of a man being effeminate, I think of a man being the total opposite of manly. Actually, I consider him taking on all those things that should be relegated to womanhood. . . Let the women dress like women.” And how is it that “women” dress, I wonder?

“The only reason you should ever not date someone is if you are not attracted to them.” Great point! And if you are over the age of 11 and you are not attracted to anybody for more than a short period of time, it’s a reason to see a doctor.

And this is why I love Americans: “Fifty-seven percent of Americans disagree with the statement “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control,” a considerably higher percentage than the global median of 38%. Similarly, Americans place an especially strong emphasis on the value of hard work – 73% think it is very important to work hard in order to get ahead in life, compared with a global median of 50%.”

The countries that face the highest and the lowest climate change threat.

“Vladimir Putin is the world’s corrupt policeman. He finds the seediness in every country and nurtures it. On some occasions, he exploits cynicism and paranoia at once; on others, he banks it for later use. Often he appears to fan corruption for the hell of it because that is all he knows how to do.”

A new product that empowers women’s vaginas. Somebody needs to empower the creators of the product with a bucket of cold urine poured over their idiot heads.

Ukraine: a university in exile.