27 February 2009

Why Do CEOs (still) like Ayn Rand?

/raises hand/

I know this one - it's because they're single-dimensional shallow fuckwads incapable of reasoning even at a Neanderthal level!

This answer is incorrect.

23 February 2009

what the f*ck is wrong with Greece?

Are you serious? LMFAO - the criminals have better transportation than the cops!

04 February 2009

I was all /sadface/

Until these gems lifted my spirits!



You better watch out, you'd better not cry, your computer sucks, and he's the reason why. Watch Bill Gates get his face ... pwnd!



Mmmm ... now that's American Psycho!

Nuck Fostradamus!

Yet again, George Carlin proves prescient. I hate the anti-bacterial craze, but not quite as much as I hate these new "anti-viral" bullshit advertisements I'm seeing.

In the immortal rant of good saint George (the video of which has been yanked off YouTube):
Let me tell you a true story about immunization ok. When I was a little boy in New York city in the nineteen-forties, we swam in the Hudson river. And it was filled with raw sewage! OK? We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off. And at that time the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something? In my neighborhood no one ever got polio. No one! EVER! You know why? Cause WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE! It strengthened our immune system, the polio never had a prayer. We were tempered in raw shit!

So personally I never take any precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people who sneeze and cough. I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor I pick it up and eat it!Even if I'm at side walk cafe! IN CALCUTTA! THE POOR SECTION! ON NEW YEARS MORNING DURING A SOCCER RIOT! And you know something? In spite of all the so called "risky behavior ".... I never get infections. I don't get em. I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, And you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system! And it gets a lot of practice!

... and a Hungarian shall save them -

lost tax revenues!

I've been talking about a simpler tax plan for years - where's my soapbox?! I envision one in which you could just let the government know that "nothing's changed" from previous years (I mean in terms of things like housing, dependents, etc. - you'd just have to fill in a few fields, like income). This is basically how things like TurboTax and the rest of the tax software works, except you're paying for something the government should be providing. Yes, I still have 2.5 children. No, they don't live at home. Yes, our house is paid off.

Oh, and the revenue-enhancing Hungarian is John Szilagyi, who thought it'd be a good idea to force people to list the SSNs of their dependents. I agree: it's a simple and effective deterrent to tax fraud.

Customer Disservice: now on Twitter

Oooh, Bank of America has found a new medium through which it can irritate its customers. At least you can fight back with spam, hate followers, etc.

Speaking of customer service, it seems cell phone technology may be reaching a saturation point. According to this guy, the industry's "salad days" aren't over:
Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, is one of the skeptics. “I don’t think anyone would argue that the salad days of the wireless industry are over,” he said. He added that in terms of subscriber growth in North America, “we’re awfully close to saturation.”

I both agree and disagree. I think the market is very close to saturation, especially in the developed world, where you have individuals with multiple phones. However, I don't think the industry, especially on the service side, will ever stop tossing salad, especially its customers'! BOO-YAH.

Irrationally Predictable: froin laven!

I like Fast Company for short-but-informative articles, this time about a book called "Predictably Irrational." Sounds like a good read.

Here's the funny part (to me) though - if you go to the book's website, you'll notice that there are different covers for different countries. Ok, fair enough, people associate different things with different principles in other cultures, that's all well and good.

Take a look at the Dutch cover. WTF. I couldn't have made that up if I'd tried. I wish I could make shit like that up - my life would be a daily laugh riot.

So the Dutch apparently translated "predictably irrational" with a sexual twist, punning "shortcomings." Yes, because breeding is a predictably irrational Dutch pastime. I mean, does the world really need more Dutchmen?

03 February 2009

Holy Carp!

Google Ocean! I'm totally gonna mod Mars to show its glaciers melting and its space colonies relocating to the blue marble; "Not for us, but for our children's sake!"

01 February 2009

Patriotism and Efficiency!

I don't understand why this process makes Joe Moser feel proud. Let's review the events:

1) He was shot down on a routine bombing run and subjected to the physical horrors of Buchenwald and the mental horror that 2 Frenchmen had been shot on his account.

2) Despite the "Fog of War", he was able to discover those Frenchmen weren't killed after all, long before the US government even found his lost paperwork.

And this is France we're talking about, where when bureaucrats are given the motivational book "Who Moved My Cheese" (oh my god, there's a video ... with music ... shoot me like a Collaborateur!) immediately take off the next month trying to get to the bottom of the unsolved mystery. Not exactly the model of efficient civil bureaucracy, those French.

3) He wasn't awarded the medal that was rightfully his, one he'd earned by risking his life, until he co-wrote a book and gained some small amount of fame.

So the lesson is that you can make all but the ultimate sacrifice for your country in her time of greatest need, but if you're not even mildly newsworthy, the hell if the government will bother with you. I feel prouder already. Hell yeah, let freedom ring!

UPDATE: It's not just him either, apparently 50 years is something of a standard timeframe for the military to deal with such recognition. So does this mean that we'll find out who orchestrated the JFK assassination in 2013? I sure hope so!