Microsoft: taking imbecility to a new level

I am sure that every user of Excel has noticed that it's been designed by extreme date-whores. Whenever there is the remotest possibility of interpreting an input as a date, Excel automatically displays it as a date. Needless to say, the user is not allowed to turn off such a vital function.

I have thought for a long time that Excel's AI (artificial idiocy) can no longer surprise me. I was wrong. Today, it did something truly hilarious. I wanted to enter the number "3,3" (I use the comma as decimal point), but mistakenly typed "3.3". Of course it wouldn't occur to the AI to interpret is as a number. No, it corrects two initial capitals all right, but the idea that one could accidentally press "." instead of "," (or vice versa) is beyond the Microsoft programmers. So, it goes without saying that "3.3" means the 3rd March, right? Right. Except that in this case, I had the cell formatted as number with 2 decimal places. So Excel... no-no, it did not turn my input into "3,30". Get real. It turned the DATE into a number and so displayed "41366,00".

I think Microsoft has earned an honourable place in the history of medicine, because clearly it has discovered a form of mental retardation so far unknown to the science.

On anti-male shaming tactics

I saw an article today that attracted my attention. It is very enlightening. Please read it and then return here for my comment.

The Catalog of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics

Everything in that article is basically correct and fine. There is only one flaw, and that is a huge one – all his suggestions are only good when one is dealing with a logical person. And women are not logical persons. When a woman says something like "You're just afraid of losing your male privileges," it is pointless to logically explain that your feeling is not exactly fear, or to start comparing men's privileges to women's. No, it's definitely not "constructive to ask why any man should care about the accuser's welfare since the favor will obviously not be returned". The author fails to realise that she doesn't say it in order to prove her point to you logically. Those things women say are shit-tests. She is playing with your emotions. She is throwing offensive statements into your face to see how you will handle it. She couldn't care less about the abstract question if anger is a legitimate emotion or not. She wants to get to know your emotional profile, which is one of the important things for estimating your suitability for progenation. If you fail to see this mating-game context and begin to logically respond to the mere meaning of her words, she'll just go on throwing more feminist insults at you, and she has a huge advantage in the argument – you have bound yourself to the rules of logic and she hasn't. And even if you win the argument logically, it'll mean nothing to her because that's not what she was after in the first place.

To really deal with such situations, men need an emotional response, a way to call her bitchy attitude, to show her that you are too strong to be thrown off balance with such methods, that you can handle her offensive behaviour in a calm, controlled, manly way. And that is extremely difficult. Finding logical arguments to counter with is, however, very easy – as well as totally useless.

So the advice in the above article is completely misguided and counter-productive. Even walking away from the bitch and breaking up all contact with her is a lesser evil than letting yourself be dragged into a factual argument. That is a definite no-win. She'll just have found a button which she can press to make you act in a predictable way. And in that case it's likely that she will soon get bored with you and continue looking for a man whose buttons are not so easy to figure out.

In short, the author fails to realise that in such situations the woman is playing a game with you and if you take it seriously, she will perceive you as unmasculine.

In this article, I will give you a couple of ideas on how to turn the game around and retort to a woman's attack of illogic with an emotional response.