Wriking Striters Unite!

If Heaven has a web-based, streaming media-content provider based on a popular cable channel show of the same name, then it must be Jon Stewart guarding the pearly gates of that ... I don't know what, lol.

Hypocrisy on tap at Toyota
In unrelated news, fuck Toyota. These shitheads want to talk the talk without walking it now that they've got a #1 auto manufacturer dick to swing that's all but guaranteed them in the next year or so. How can you read this bullshit and not realize the hypocrisy inherent in these statements, namely:

a) Toyota is stalling on CAFE standards as well, which are, um, NATIONAL!

b) Toyota's reluctance to introduce more diesel cars, on the grounds of higher sulfur emissions. Fair enough, but what are the benefits of the greater fuel economy versus something like requiring their vehicles to use low sulfur diesel?

They talk about recycling paper and water at their plants, about all the "options" they're giving consumers to go green (like the new hybrid Lexus that actually burns more fuel on the highway than its regular counterpart), but whereas Toyota used to be the leader, they are fast slipping from that position. Honda already touts that it has the most fuel-efficient fleet in the US (overall), and GM and others are ready to one-up Toyota with things like the Volt - assuming vehicles like that make it to production, which is a big hurdle in the auto industry. Still, Toyota could be doing a lot more, and it's not.

Girls Who Game
If you were ever wondering what a male's concept of a Gamers' Heaven looks like, I believe this is it.

Hell comes later, after you realize the girls can kick your ass! :oP

mad borals

I firmly believe that most of the people who fall for neo-conservative tripe simply cannot read.

No rational person can believe that cutting emissions will not spur American business and innovation. Republicans campaign as "hard-working," but they're intellectually lazy. If you forced Detroit to adhere to higher CAFE standards, how would that put people out of work? That's insane, you'd need to hire more engineers, consultants, and skilled labor to comply with the regulations, not less. Leaving them the same would be the case for corporations (which are supposedly marching relentlessly towards ever more efficient, profitable, and leaner operations) to cut jobs because the processes are well-established and understood.

eat shit OR die

Small difference, but it could enhance your life in the long run. Apparently, there is much truth in jest:



God I love George Carlin. He's actually quite right about germs to "practice on" - of what do you think most vaccines are comprised? There never is any magic bullet in human technology, just deviously clever, one-step-ahead-of-the-curve quick fixes.

On an unrelated note, I've noticed the Dutch police sometimes randomly set up checkpoints to check motor vehicles. Not like, check for drunk drivers check, but check the tires, under the hood, etc. They also set up checkpoints every so often and search everyone coming off the tram (usually the #17 by Hollandspoor in Den Haag). I'm not sure how such searches jive with personal freedoms. I can understand if someone's called in a threat, but I suspect it's more banal than that. I think it's a "random" routine because a lot of expats use that particular tram, so it may either be a target, a former target, or a tactic the police use to keep people feeling safe. Not sure if the latter is a valid reason any longer, because if I am to believe some recent news articles, the Dutch aren't as adamant about all the freedoms (for which they've garnered quite the reputation) as they used to be.

I am your Farker ...

I hereby claim the title Son of Fark: the cultural unlearnings of a man for make great the glorious Internets surface roads.

financial literacy training

People are complaining that credit card companies are poaching college students. I disagree with the proposed remedy, that people need "financial literacy training&qout;. What people need are anti-stupid pills, which would not only allow them to become credit card deadbeats, but also avoid such unnecessarily idiotic statements as:

They should put warnings on credit cards like they do on cigarettes," Rhoades says, "to make sure people know how dangerous the cards are.

Someone help, I used my credit card twice a day for 4 years without having enough income to cover my expenditures. Now I am in debt, and it's all the company's fault. Why did they give me easy access to credit? Why?! Think about that suggestion - the students are already ignoring the writing on the credit card applications, how much more likely are they to read another warning instead of just, um, ignoring it also?

I'm not defending the credit card companies when they are being evil (which, incidentally, they are quite talented at), what I am saying is that children who are attending college should not be so dumb. Shame on them. Just signing up for a card doesn't make you liable for what you do with it, and roughly half of the people who do own credit cards not only manage, they carry little to no debt month-to-month.

the clothes make the corporation after all ...

Wow.

Wow.

So if I wore a shirt that said "cunning stunts," I had better watch out? Maybe I just won't travel. Maybe I should buy the most offensive t-shirt I possibly can for my upcoming trips.

WHY ARE YOU ALL SUCH SHEEP!?!? Toughen the fuck up.

On an unrelated note, I wonder if he downloaded Team America: World Police ...

the information superparkinglot

I make the following claims.

1) When you visit such an establishment, dead chickens are not a primary concern for you.

2) Nowhere on the "Information Superhighway" is it stated you have to have a wheelchair ramp like a Target parking lot.

I'm not saying companies shouldn't make the effort, but how much can you expect when you cannot see the visual interface? Are there verbal commands, like "click at the link at the bottom of the page for more results." How would one execute such a command? How does this jive with advertisements and other audio content - does the software displace the original audio of the website?

This case seems akin to saying that movies need to release a DVD that is like an audiobook - someone reads the script that describes the action on-screen. I think that's a bit absurd. Are you going to have BlindTV too? If the screenplay was adapted from the book, just get the audiobook (it'll be better anyway). You can't have equal everything. The deaf have subtitles, but there are no requirements that a movie theatre has to have screenings with subtitles for people who are deaf. I am not saying they couldn't, I'm just saying there is a massive difference between being accomodating and making something mandatory.

gone nukin'

Actually, I happen to agree: nuclear power is one option to mitigate global emissions. I can't believe anyone can seriously levy the argument "you emit when building the plant." Are you retarded? You emit to build a COAL-FIRED PLANT AS WELL! Talk about grasping at straws ...

Associative Proof

How NBC's new television show, Heroes exemplifies the design argument central to Alan Cooper's book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum," and, subsequently, the design theory for his company, Cooper.

You don't please the masses by catering to the masses, you please the masses by catering to one facet of societal norms. That is the secret to success of things like M*A*S*H (Korean/Vietnam war vets), Seinfeld (yuppie Jews), Friends (yuppies), House (cynical people), Law & Order (those with OCD and those who wish their lives were better organized), CSI (OCDs who are closet voyeurists, lol), etc.

It all goes back to that old adage, "do one thing and do it well."


... or was that "Jack of all trades, master of none; oftimes better than master of one?" :o)


... just so long as the trade's not humor I guess, because then you get a fat slice of oppression from the political machine! Be careful now Romney, or you might wind up in Putin's cabinet! haha

how to lose "yous guys" in 7 days

I give you: Trumpia! If you think about it like I did, it's like the anti-social social networking/communication tool.

With further ado, I give you: the comment I left them! (which I wonder if they will answer):

Dear Trumpia,

Let's say a friend of mine is using your service and I get contacted via all my devices until I respond to one. I feel included, and I didn't miss the change of venue for our club meeting. Now let's say I want to sign up for Trumpia. What are the odds that I will want other people to "blast" me on all my devices when, say, I carry my phone with me "all the time?" Close to zero. So I will set my own personal settings to the "path of least annoyance" - the device I have most frequently with me. Odds are also that the person who contacted me originally will have done the same thing. And so on.

Everyone is going to tend toward that setting, especially after the first time they happen not to have their most convenient device with them and they get blasted on all channels. So your service only works well until people either sign up (and change the permissions) or opt out. In the former case you end up back where you were before Trumpia, with everyone being no more connected than the days of just e-mail or chat or text, all of which were supposed to connect people (and did, until they got used to the tech). In the latter case, you aren't using Trumpia, so it's no longer relevant.

I'm not trying to knock your company, because I think it's a move in the right direction, but to me this is a downside that says "fad" rather than "game-changer." Everyone wants to be connected yet no one wants to be annoyed, and I believe people are going to opt for, as I said, the path of least annoyance to them. This will result in the sum of all their communication devices bringing no additional benefit beyond their most commonly-used device.

Have you done user testing to see if the above is an issue?

freedom of information

NYTimes and IHT abandon Times Select. "It was a success." What a terrible, bullshit argument. No business, especially not the struggling newspaper dailies, would dare shelve an idea that was actually making them money.

I'm also glad that a bespeckled geriatric is one of the few people in America with the testicular fortitude to state plainly that the war in Iraq is over OIL and that Bush is a nitwit. Christ, people, W A K E U P!

mmm ... Orwellian

Couldn't have said it better myself:

"After all, it seems the burden of ending the war will fall to the next president. Bush was clear on Thursday night - as he was when he addressed the nation in January, in September of last year, the December before that and in April 2004 - that his only real plan is to confuse enough Americans and cow enough members of Congress to let him muddle along and saddle his successor with this war that should never have been started."

Thanks for that concise and scathing summary of our failures, International Herald Tribune!

lunatic lottery-winner

In stunningly vivid irony. What a greedy son-of-a-bitch. Why is it so hard for society to call a spade a spade? This is greed, exemplified, and yet we'd prefer to make all sorts of excuses for our behavior.

He's beset by sob stories? Here he is on CNN, another sob story. Here is a modest business proposal: if you want to be remembered, be like Buffett. I'll found your non-profit donation (and make sure to funnel 40% of the profits to myself, so that the organization generates no net profit).

Men are from Mars ...

If there were Martians, their preferred method of transport would be second-hand motorcycles.

these are a few of some interesting things

1) Random Mastadon-ness!

2) Just plain cool. (hint: it's a trick of the mind)

3) not cool ... not cool at all. A warning label would add what, $0.04 to the cost of manufacture? It may be a ridiculously small percentage of lives saved from injury, but it's undue injury. And if you merely think about how many teens ride with severely reclined seats, even when driving (not that teens would heed the warning labels). Also, even if you don't heed the warning, you do retain some of the information (like advertising). The potential for an airbag to deploy improperly and unduly injure you is very slight, but vehicles still carry warnings about those.

And given the yearly stories of dogs and babies killed in overly hot cars, maybe there should be a warning on the windows. Stupid individualistic sheep need constant reminders in order to maintain their vigilance of their fragile, ignorant little lives (and the lives of their pets - children included).

meal rusiness beetings

They're run absolutely nothing like this. I mean, come on - no one that old knows wtf "pwnd" means!

RIAA = asymmetric profit structure

Yeah, where was this support when Apple launched? Nowhere. Now that it's actually a successful business model, the corporate drones want a bigger slice of the theoretical pie. Theoretical because I sure as hell am not going to pay more than about $1 per song.

The artists are the ones who deserve a larger percentage of my dollar, not these fat-cat executives!

They aren't getting it - they get TEN PERCENT OR LESS of the revenue from each song sold on iTunes! That's not Apple's fault, it's the fucking bullshit industry. Why do you think artists are quick to open their own sites and tour so heavily? That's their only chance to make a decent profit from their work.

Also, if you think about it, how exactly are NBC and its cohorts going to undermine Apple? They can't promote another service that charges more for media, so they'll subsidize some cheap knock-off in order to gain market share, then jack the prices sky-high. Sounds fun, I can't wait until you help them do it! Yes, you, you fucking ingrates - where are the how-to articles on getting real music back on the radio and break the recording industry's stifling grip on artistic talent? That'd be too "subersive" for the mainstream media (and against the media conglomerate's interests, since Universal owns NBC, which owns MSNBC, and the whole thing is owned by GE).

some people can do no right

I don't normally read Forbes because I think it's tripe, but this "welcome screen" (a.k.a., welcome to unwanted advertising interfering with your reading experience) really caught my eye:



On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.

To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.

So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.

So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).

Arguing Against Renewables is like ...

... arguing for a hole in your head when you don't believe in trepanation. Check it out:



Ruining the "view"? Why do we vote for new coal-fired electrical plants - how does doing so enhance one's view?

It only enhances the view because we put the site on unwanted or cheap land, and then fence it off so you can't get too close to actually see how ugly the giant, smoke-billowing towers wreak havoc on you and yours. Oh, and if you are no longer able to see the horizon due to smog and such, because your precious cheap/convenient electricity has pumped too much particulate matter into the atmosphere, how will that haze impact your view, you short-sighted, greedy, selfish, pathetic excuses for a sentient being?

There's only one quasi-logical argument against wind power: migratory birds.

If your argument is that "big" wind is evil because it disrupts migratory birds and/or kills them, what do you think the particulate matter from a coal-fired generator does to their lungs if it can cause asthma and cancer in humans? Isn't a long, drawn-out death from illness worse than a spontaneous, near-instant death? Nature is red in tooth and claw - I recently watched 2 larger birds force a smaller bird into a pond, from which the smaller bird could not get out b/c his feathers got wet and it could not fly. It kept bobbing up and down, trying to get to the edge, but it drowned before it could get there. It took something like two minutes to play out, and it was gut-wrenching to watch. The bird that was forced into the water had recently flown into a glass window of a nearby buiding - it was obviously no threat to the 2 larger birds and in no shape to defend itself properly, but that's just survival of the fittest, isn't it? I guess how you view it depends on whether you believe in social darwinism or you find it ironic that it takes some of mankind's greatest intellectual capacity to understand the most brutal, possibly immutable, laws of the natural world.

Or you could view birds as deserving of the exact same rights as people, in which case do you also think that birds, if they were endowed en masse positions of relative power and a sentience at (or above) our level, would not hesitate to kill a few humans if it meant they could all have labor-free nests or access to practically inexhaustable supplies of food?

thought

all our fantasies are faded by routine ...

There's no other Cheney quite like this Dick

I found it! Score!



After which came the Cheney apologist (from the WSJ no less, I'm sure Murdoch is salivating):



Where is the answer to Stewart's simple question? Why does it take a Comedy Central to air these types of serious questions? History will mark Haye's silence, due to the utter lack of rational justification for the administration's actions, and treat the Bush administration with the contempt it deserves.

The only thing that "changed" after 9/11 was that the administration knew it could get away with lying because people were single-mindedly fixated on swift revenge. Since they (the political elite) often see the general population as uneducated baboons, they knew people would take dubious pronouncements at face value (and that those who did not would be out-shouted by the war-mongers).

For my Republican friends, you can not say I always disagree with your party, but what I agreed was sound policy in 1994 was not so severely altered by faulty intelligence in 2003 that it justified what the administration did (and continues to do). For those of you that knew me then, you've known I've been a critic of Bush since he first lost the 2000 election. I've disagreed with nearly every policy decision by this White House, save attacking Afghanistan and the marine refuge created around Hawaii. Attacking Iraq opened up a second front in a war (essentially on Iran if you look at a map), which is already an extremely poor military strategy to begin with, Generalissimo NeoCon. Idiots.

What the war-mongers do not understand is how to fight an ideology, ironically despite the fact they themselves subscribe to a very similar, reactionist ideology that they subsequently demonize when referring to their enemies. As a result of 9/11, the terrorists are already winning. Your liberties have been restricted. You wring your hands about traveling abroad. You take out extra life insurance and fret about "what if", and Fox News and the like are right there, in your face, reminding you that we can never lapse in our vigilance (while our nation's ports and nuclear facilities go under-protected, and our airports remain insecure). Many of you think such measures are necessary, but a terrorist does not care about the reason people are frightened or have their freedoms restricted, they care only that it occurs. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

You are all less free. For what? For a few extra dollars? For a few extra corpses? For the business interests of the elite who control the U.S.'s military-congressional-industrial complex? (original term by another Republican, 2-term President Dwight D. Eisenhower) Where is the 'outrageous' conspiracy theory when you've got a Vice President, a public servant, who has closed-door sessions with industry on energy policy and who refuses to stop receiving payments from his former employer, who happens to be gouging the US military in Iraq? Here's a hunt that would make Waldo jealous - find the weak link in those logical implications! Basic capitalist theory supports aligning people's personal interests with their actions. The simplest way to profit off a war? Use your influence to start a war! Why deny that people are acting in accordance with the very theories used to justify cutthroat business practices on a daily basis? If it's good enough for our corporate elite, why not for the soldiers fighting for their profits?

If you want to provide the appropriate counter-incentive to the current sytsem of collusion, it's very simple: require every Congressperson to send their son(s) or daughter(s) to fight in whatever war or other military action they allow the President to undertake. It's like a draft-lite, just 535 possible families, not quite Vietnam-era enough. But it's a great step toward a system of true checks and balances.

If you wish to debate the point above don't talk to me - just call your representative (and hopefully ask to get the U.S. the fuck out of Iraq). Or, for a more personal response from the government, just call someone you know who's currently abroad so that your government can (il)legally listen in to the overseas call. If you don't know who to call, just dial me - lord knows I'm enough of a pinko commie liberal to pique the NSA's interests. I mean, Hungary's still Communist, isn't it?

our bestest friends

"China loves me, this I know, lead-tainted Sa-arge, told me so!"



Erin Burnett is a shining light of logic in these dark, lead-colored times. Keep your friends close, keep the tainted pinko Commies closer, Erin! haha

you are dust

... and to (space) dust you shall return.

Reminds me of the Bill Hicks sketch:

"Today young men on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one conciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves ... here's Tom with the weather."

vicarious irony

I walked into the break room and CNN International was showing a story on Paris Hilton's release from jail. I found the situation amusing because the reporter on scene was reading a viewer's statement, and that viewer was questioning why the media was there. The reporter, of course, treated it as the rhetorical question it was not.

Breaking News - You are the media! Why are you there?

Random stories that have caught my interest of late.

No one told me that the circus was coming to town! And here I am without any popcorn ...

So, how does international law work again? State-running tyrants are evil, but state-sanctioned tryanny is A-OK? To be fair, I am sure they were asking for it.

Things would be so much easier if only the same rules applied to everyone!

Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a RIM technician!

Does anyone really wonder why a lot of the world hates the U.S. and its brand of laissez-faire capitalism more generally? A lot of people claim to, but they seem to miss the more subtle, often cultural cues.

They do get part of it right, in that a large part of it has to do with envy — envy that something as frivolous as "Blackberry Thumb" can be a person's sole reason for visiting a doctor.

If there are any doctors to be had, that is. Because, you know, doctors live just around the street corner everywhere in the world, just like milk and apples come from your local supermarket conglomorate.

Behold, the ridiculously small-minded American excecutive. Your thumb hurts? Boo-hoo. Either work out or stop typing so many useless e-mails! You aren't providing leadership or clarity, you're cluttering the already-saturated information channels of your colleagues.

Also, for those of you that aren't aware, Research In Motion (RIM) are the makers of the Blackberry, which has become ubiquitous in the modern business environment. The title has nothing to do with rimming, though that would make for an extremely amusing title.

"What do you do?"

"Not much, just working as a RIM technician right now, looking to get into something a bit more advanced later on. You know, something that stretches my skills a bit."

" ... I'll bet you are!"

Though it is said that developing world countries are contracting our maladies, so I guess they are going to need a lot of RIM technicians after all.

All this text is making my fingers cramp ... medic!

Walking home from bowling I had a thought: the current Industrial Revolution (e.g., 'modern' society post 1700-ish) is experiencing a condensed form of resource abuse in the same style as agriculture did. The Middle East used to be quite habitable, and there is evidence to suggest intensive farming by humans is a large part of the reason it's so arid today (not universally). Until people thought of things like crop rotation or terraced farming, we were on a path to self-destruction (albeit over a much longer time horizon and with a lot lower public knowledge of the consequences). Industry finds itself in the same predicament today, whether it cares to admit it or not.

My hope/dream is that we can one day find new ways to fully make use of the land, in the same way modern farmers have been able to (and like native Americans used to in their hunting). If we could live in a "carbon neutral" society, whereby we exhausted only those emissions absorbed by plants through photosynthesis, or didn't emit anything beyond negligible emissions at all, that would truly be a great achievement for civilization.

To pay proper homage to our vanity, MySpace and Facebook should merge to become MyFace.

goddammit! (looks fake though)

Random thought: "no external being can do more than distract us from ourselves." Yup, that sounds just about right: the perfect philosophy for the angst-filled, single, and childless! w00t!

A human behavioral universal: "The surest path to failure is that of least communication."

I don't know if anyone's said it before me (Google agrees I'm the first to string that particular string of characters together in such an order in recent, technologically-documented history (lol, can we have BC, AD, and TD - technologically documented? or maybe DD - digitally documented or ADHD - All Documented on Hard Disk)).

Yes, I use nested parens, because my logic be so wicked thick the standard syntaxes wilt under its force. :oP

I think I'm becoming de-sensitized to stupidity.

I mean, I'm all for discrimination against fat people, but what are overweight people supposed to do? Avoid looking in the mirror? Become even more delusional? Skinny American girls will not only starve themselves whole-heartedly (now that they're going to be encouraged by their mothers to focus even more of their waking hours on their body image) but they're also going to be hit by buses more often as they recklessly swivel their heads away from fat people crossing intersections.

Personally, I say confront a caloric monster and either knock the food from their hand or run circles around them while poking them with a stick. They'll soon tire of trying to swat at you and since you're filling their vision they'll be even more motivated ("prodded" even) to envision themselves as being skinnier, lighter, and less prone to furniture collapse.

European attitudes toward sex, Part II:

prostitute monument!

(a nice complement to the Homomonument)

However, in a lame attempt to pre-emptively put Europe to shame, the US has its own, not nearly as nice, monument. However, it is only for a single prostitute.

Nothing to compare to an entire society for greater prostitution awareness!

I dub myself the Oracle of Cynicism. Check these extrapolations from a single news article:

1) Corporations don't give a shit about your average worker. What is GOOD FOR YOU IS BAD FOR THEM. Case in points:

"The average hourly wage jumped 8 cents, or 0.5 percent, to $17.04, versus forecasts for a 0.3 percent increase."

How does Wall Street respond?

"On Wall Street, stock and bond prices fell as the report raised inflation concerns and dashed hopes that the Fed might cut interest rates soon."

"Stock traders basically got a little bit of good news on employment front since they were worried about weakness, but they'll be concerned about the wages," said Anthony Chan, chief economist for JPMorgan Private Client Services.

They want workers to work more for less, DESPITE the US's consumer-driven economy:

"Chan said the report could show that consumers will keep spending at higher than expected levels, which could limit any expected slowdown in the economy this year. "Betting against consumers is like betting against the house at the casino," he said."

2) You may think that's hypocrisy, but this is even better:

""This is further evidence that the president's economic policies are working and producing strong wage gains for America's workers, and we should be cautious of future policies that would slow these gains," Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said in a statement."

Ohhhmmmm ... ohhhhhmmmmm ... I'm seeing a vision ... it's ... it's President Bush and his minions ... they're opposing something vehemently ... the blue-blooded, overpaid failures of executives and felons within the administration are opposing ... RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE.

Wait, hold on ... the Democratss are being labeled as being just as bad as the bloodsucking Republicans for not both raising the minimum wage AND tying it to inflation, so that it'd actually be somewhat fair. Possibly even livable. The conservative pundits insinuate they're failing to push their agenda through due to lack of leadership, but the situation is a result of the Dems being forced to compromise with the unyielding Republicans, who'll allow a lower wage hike as long as they can piggyback something on the bill ... what is it ... I see numbers and ... oh it's another corporate kickback to make the "transition" more bearable for corporations. And also more 'competitive', at your expense.

Hard is Easy

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People often wonder how how I find so many odd links online. Today I searched 'ferrous' online just to be sure I had the definition correct. This was on the first page of the Google results. Check out 'filthy scum.'

Also hucking filarious, especially the karaoke version.

New corporate acronyms
Demonstrating an Understanding of Marginal Benefits - DUMB
usage - "Man, I remember when Ford bought a stake in Mazda. They were dumb."

Corporate take on poetry: Process-Oriented Emotive Mechanism - POEM

Finally, if you're wondering what the tone of my book will be like, this is a good indicator :-P

Random thoughts I had to purge from my mind:

1 Those who most worry about the afterlife are those who fear death most.

2 It's weird to think how much money has changed. Imagine it's 1800's America and you've got a few cents. You could buy quite a bit for less than a dollar. (I'll look up what the housing prices could have been like, but even recent examples illustrate the point.)

For the sake of argument, imagine a house in 1820 is $2000. Today, say a house of a similar size would run you say $200,000. Now, I'm not interested in the exact numbers and the inflation rates, currency adjustment, changes in technology, etc., but what's interesting to me is the principle. If you had 10 cents in 1820, the value of that was a lot more than today. The money was worth more relative to your house and also could buy you more in the store. Yet in both instances it may have been necessary to mortgage your home in order to be able to afford it. One would think that we'd be less attune today to things like those marginal sales at most retailers (10% off this, 30 cents off that - with coupon, etc.), yet if anything those types of minor discounts and disparities, in sales, loan rates, etc., are more prevalent than ever before. Who would have conceived of a second mortgage in 1820, let alone 1950? Yet they're happening today, with all sorts of minute differences in rates between various lenders.

Aside from all the formal (governmental and financial institutions) changes to currency, it's interesting that cents, such as they are today, are still valued. To a large extent, I believe this is a result of economies of scale. In 1820, your local tailor may gripe over a penny would have been because that penny had real purchasing power - not because it would or would not cost his shareholders (like he'd have any!) so many thousands of dollars. Today, we may not gripe over pennies, but we do gripe over all sorts of values under $1 - despite the fact that those cents are far less valuable to us than they possibly ever have been. Part of this is also because we're so hyper-aware of prices in our intense consumer atmosphere, but behind that intense consumerism looms the giant corporations who make or lose millions on our pennies. It's in their best interests to keep meticulous track of every penny to maximize their profits and offer consumers appropriate incentives to sell their products.

I'm not saying we should be frivolous with our money. This is a principle that very much cuts both ways. If anything, the focus on small denominations of money is a good thing in general, as it should foster much-needed fiscal responsibility on both the corporations' and consumers' parts.

I'm merely fascinated by the fluidity of our monetary construct.

3 As history progresses along its spiral, we seem to be heading (and all distopian novels echo this) toward a society in which "the state" (primarily government, but increasingly corporations) supersedes the family as the societal 'safety' net. Corporations are obviously reluctant to fill this role (and certainly don't do so out of any obligations to moral or altruistic constructs), but they still provide pensions so they do participate. The government is still primarily responsible for wealth distribution and this is the role which used to be played primarily by the extended 'family' - e.g., tribe - in more ancient Western cultures (or in some non-Western cultures even today).

I wonder how much this has to do with individualism - I won't take a handout from my dad (to prove my independence) but free money from the government? Bring it! I'm not sure I understand fully the motivations behind this shift, but it's there and I think it's not too difficult to extrapolate from it a future society in which people socialize in familial ways with non-relatives (obviously quite far in the future, since even in the most extreme examples Western culture has not yet totally eradicated the familial ties - though children divorcing parents is arguably at the cusp of such a reality). My idea (which is part of my coming novel, Aanthe) is further along the time line - a time when children don't know who their parents are, are raised communally according to genetic predispositions (possibly administered by the state/corporations), and where the random genetics that dictated who was born into what family are instead manipulated such that aptitudes dictate your place within the state/corporation (e.g., engineer, biologist, doctor, etc.). People of that time would look back on the randomness of the genetic ties that bind us today as an absurdity because they can much better control the genetic odds to group people into what they would presumably perceive to be much more rational groupings based on inherent aptitudes and temperament.

London can only be described as exactly like the time I ate a bowl of rabbits.

This is what I mean about American complacency and its relation to ignorance. The following is self-evident to nearly everyone not living in the U.S.:

"Beginning in 2000, newly elevated President Vladimir Putin restored Russian stability by concentrating political power in the Kremlin, curbing free expression in the country's media, and consolidating economic power in the hands of the state. (The tripling of oil prices over the last four years has made his work much easier.) This forceful reimposition of order has earned Putin a 70-plus-percent approval rating. Broadly speaking, Russians have chosen the order that flows from authoritarianism over the chaos they believe was generated by ill-considered attempts to impose Western-style democracy." (article)

Many people in the U.S. would argue with you until they were blue in the face that the Russians do have a democracy simply because they can vote. They cannot understand that you can freely choose authoritarianism (see: Hitler) just as easily as you can vote against it.

Wait, didn't Sir George say we were going to Mars? Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran - it's all the same as long as they don't have nukes. He must've figured Martian bacteria must have developed nukes by now, so it's safer to invade the moon.

What is most upsetting is that we're holding people to two different sets of standards for free speech based on age. How is it that a minor has any less right to voice an opinion, however controversial, than an adult? If anything like the situation at this high school occurred at the university level, it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow. That is unfair and hypocritical, and yet it is being seriously argued as appropriate by Ken Starr.

I rail on the American people in general for being ignorant in general, but nothing is 100% applicable all of the time. If you wonder why a President who was impeached continued to remain popular, it's partly due to the obvious bias of the people doing the impeaching. That's why no matter how much Bush caters to his radical base, he'll never convince most Americans that stem cell research is morally reprehensible – it's just too large a hunk of horseshit for people to swallow.

These are exactly the types of paradoxes that stymie most American workers – perform better by working less.

This is why I like Taoism and love reading Lao Tzŭ's masterpiece, Tao Te Ching (particularly Stephen Mitchell's translation – absolutely brilliant).

Also, in case you hadn't notice, irony has been recently redefined.

This, however, is just damn funny.

What is most disturbing to you:

- the fact that Mormon underwear looks like something from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange,

- the fact that our constitutionally secular nation is hyper-fixated on candidate religion,

- or that the Mormons have an entire website devoted to their undergarments (I've left the link text for effect), http://www.mormon-underwear.com ?

PS - my favorite part of the Slate article linked above:

"Romney's faith is of particular concern to evangelical voters who make up the GOP's key voting bloc—some of whom believe Romney belongs to a cult."

The evangelicals think his religion smacks of cultish tendencies? Spectacular. I don't think I've had enough compassionate hypocrisy just yet today, let's go for one more.

How about righteous indignation at something which displays the degradation of morality within society. Yes, by golly, we are not going to stand idly by and just allow the truth to be told – these blasphemes must be censored for the greater good!

Wait, it's quite likely no evangelicals read that because Silicon Valley is the modern-day Gemorrah. Duh! Let's just blame the liberal media! Yeah, so liberal they failed to make an issue of the well-documented connections between this current unethical Bush administration and the Iran-Contra fiasco. Media bias is not defined as asking pointed questions at a press conference, no matter how much the inept Bush giggles or condescendingly tries to side-step the queries.

Does anyone else notice that? This so-called "average Joe" president is unbelievably smug whenever he talks to the press. I'm sure the idiots not watching at home are probably thinking "yeah, that's it Georgie, you stick it to those Blue-blooded liberal pansies!" Oh wait, these are the same geniuses that need to be told in excruciating detail how driving slower and less often can reduce America's oil dependency, advice which they promptly ignore because they're just one person.

Anyone can complain while in the U.S. – I'm thousands of miles away and it still gets my goat every day! I hope North Korea nukes you to your senses America! You're on notice!

Darwinism strikes again!

Awesome!

... on a related note, Iran has submarines? Not that I care about the excuse, but still, wtf, eh?

The following style is, in a nutshell, why I am such an avid fan of Slate:

"If we had wanted our country to be run by James Baker, we had our chance. He was interested in running for president in 1996 but discovered that his interest in a James Baker presidency was not widely shared." [article]

Oh, I'm sorry, your answer is incorrect. All answers must be stated in the form of an '-izzle'.

The only consolation after Michigan's loss to Ohio State: a 3-point margin of victory signifies domination like 2 percentage points give a "mandate."

It's like they work at my office!. They even published a handy guide to sexual harassment ethics in the workplace.

I feel like my nonsensical writing talent is in danger of being pwnd by spam poetry:

"Vibrate vibrates quotunable copy or reached maximum. Dvd cd stuck However also thexbox access Live account. Search Supportkb Switch to Advanced Page Toolsprint this pageemail.
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Man, that is deep. It is so true that "yourself doing is void warranty problems," I've run into that situation many times before!

Many people say there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Yes, well, there are some minor ones I happen to like.

Also, some conservative sites keep railing on Rep. Joe Murtha. Granted, the guy made a pretty big mistake, but let's review what the arguments would be if he were a Republican:

- This happened 25 years ago, give it a rest! The fact that it's in the news proves the liberal bias of the media.

- He was never found guilty for any wrongdoing.

- It was a mistake he made early in his career; getting embarrassed like that would make him more ethical because he learned the hard way what a mistake like that can cost him.

And so on. Feel free to add any other excuses that would be used by the GOP were it one of their cronies.

In case there was any confusion over the definition of either "fair" or "balanced", leave it to that bastion of moral integrity, Fox News, to set the world straight. I guess they perceive their organization as being fair in dishing out anti-liberalism, thus balancing the "liberal" media.

Right.

The Dutch are officially nucking futs. Chess + boxing? Brilliant!

Not that this isn't whack either.

Wow ... let the brainwashing begin.

Wired News on e-Voting Paper Trails

I don't understand how anyone can claim that neglecting redundancy in something as critical as voting is a bad idea. This isn't even an argument:

"They're adamant that few voters will actually look at the paper record, negating its usefulness. During a test of paper trails last year in Nevada's primary and presidential elections, election observers estimated that fewer than 30 percent of voters bothered to examine the hard copy."

The usefulness of the paper trail does not lie with the individual voter, it's having the ability to verify the election results. Don't take it from me, take it from Kim Alexander, the founder of the California Voter Foundation:

"'It gives voters the opportunity to verify their vote, but it also gives election officials a meaningful audit trail to verify software vote tallies, and it's that latter purpose that has made the paper trail a no-brainer,' she said." [emphasis added]

This is an equally pathetic argument against paper ballots:

"Critics also say the printers will jam, break down or run out of paper, creating more labor for poll workers. And they argue that an election involving numerous races and candidates would produce an unwieldy paper trail that would be time-consuming for voters to review and difficult for election officials to recount -- especially if the thermal paper used in the printers is tightly curled."

. . .

Let me repeat that - we can't verify the results of the election because the voting machine's paper is just too tightly curled. Sorry. Better luck next election cycle!

These arguments are absurd. They didn't make these types of bullshit arguments when we had no other option but to use paper, why is it all of a sudden such a concern? How much was spent on electronic voting machines and how much labor goes into their technical support? Furthermore, who can honestly say they prefer an unproven technology that is demonstrably insecure with no backup or a backup? I guess scumbags like Diebold have no problem saying such things ...

So who says they're sucesptible to manipulation? Hell, even Fox News covered the topic (albeit with a ... well, believably biased headline).

Also consider Ars Technica's guide to stealing an election, the State of Florida's refusal to return to Diebold, and Princeton University's security analysis for electronic voting. But of course you, my dear John Q. Public, you alone are smarter than all of those ivory-tower types scattered across the internet and, um, at Fox News, and you know your vote will be counted correctly. Well, you sure can go home smug in your smartness, especially if you're one of the 18,000 or so Florida voters whose ballots were lost this election cycle. Brilliant.

I don't understand - just because our brains function as a collective "DEE-dee-dee!", that is no excuse for our elections to be less transparent than, say, Kyrgyzstan.

These security issues with electronic voting have been well-documented since the 1980s, and yet we are still have not implemented appropriate checks and balances two decades later.

What is wrong with people? What's next, voting through TiVo?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Aha! Anecdotal support for my earlier missive on Fortune's oil article.

Also, Bush may not read newspapers (or online news, like the BBC), but maybe he watches The Simpsons. At any rate, I think I've discovered the secret of "cool".

Marge: I just don't understand what 'being cool' means. Kids, am I cool?
Bart and Lisa (look at each other, then simultaneously reply): No.
Marge: Well, I don't care. I don't care whether I'm cool or not ... and that makes me cool, right?
Bart and Lisa (bored, simultaneously): No.

You know what makes a nation cool? In how many ways it can subvert international treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as appears hell-bent on doing with India and Pakistan.

Actually, he probably never read the treaty because he used "new-cue-lar" in his Google search.

Download my new hit single!

this is the blog that no one reads
it is written by a guy named Steve
he, started writing it not knowing what it was
and he'll continue writing it forever just because

[repeat, with variations]

this is the blog that no one reads
it is written by a dork named Smeve
people started ignoring it, knowing what it was
and they'll continue ignoring forever just because ...

LOL!

Everything you need to know about why Bush was an abject failure at business:

"The president talked repeatedly about 'benchmarks' for progress in Iraq, using that word 13 times. But he did not discuss the consequences of the Iraqi government missing those targets. Such a question, he said, was 'hypothetical.'"

Logically equivalent to the exchange:

"But sir, what happens if people don't buy 15,000,000 widgets next quarter?"

...

"Aw, now that's just bollocks."

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
H. L. Mencken

Similar things could be said about the American political system. I just watched a piece on CNN where a conservative radio host accused Michael J. Fox of "exaggerating" his symptoms from Parkinson's Disease. I looked it up online when I got home from work, and who is responsible but that perennial imbecile, Rush Limbaugh.

I guess there really is nothing more American than shifting from a clear, logical discussion of the issues to baseless and absurd personal attacks.

But wait, there's more! That standard-bearer of professional journalism, MSNBC, had the following informal poll:


I think that each of those (approximately) 68,288 people should be indiscriminately injected with PD as retribution for their incomprehensible ignorance. What's next, ignoring the medical advice of "activist doctors"?

As a further lesson in coping with ignorance, Rush Limbaugh should be injected with the disease (what's another high for that druggie anyway?) and his degeneration should be filmed and put on YouTube.

Then again, maybe I should reconsider the severity of the punishment. I mean, since when has hypocritical intolerance not been a core American political and social value?

And of course: al-Qaeda bombs us because they envy our freedom.

On a humorous note, if this doesn't cheer you up a tiny bit and make you laugh, nothing will: How to Prank a Telemarketer

european attitudes toward sex, I

One of the women in HR had to leave our office's Friday night gathering at the pub because she had to go to a dildo party.

She told this to a group of 4 male co-workers, one of whom shied away from putting his dick onto a bar stool earlier in the conversation. At her challenge. After calling another one of the guys a pussy (all of this in jest of course).

I love it.

You don't have to be a prude to find this extremely disconcerting.

I do have to ask, however, why flaunting sexuality is still such a taboo, even in Europe (granted, it's Britain). Selling young children a variety of toy weapons is considered perfectly acceptable on the part of Tesco. If toys are so influential, then why are nations having such trouble recruiting volunteer armies? Certainly the children in the United States are exposed to more simulated violence than almost anywhere else on the planet, yet recruiting by all branches of the military is proving extremely difficult.

Let's follow that hypocrisy with a Catch-22. Consider for a moment that the toys are, in fact, extremely influential on future behavior. In the grand scheme of things, what's worse: having loose morals concerning whom you try to fuck or whom you try to kill?

Where do you want to demolish MSNBC today? How about this gem:

"The story of his journey to the political center sheds light on why control of the Senate and the shape of the final years of Bush's presidency may rest on a thousand or so votes tucked in the lush planes and hills between the mud of the Mississippi and the rise of the Great Smoky Ridge."

Are planes a cash crop for Tennesseeans? I don't recall ...

This is quite possibly the largest load of shit to come out of Iraq since we invaded.

Simply illogical.

"But what I can say is what the prime minister is aiming for is to have one voice reflecting accurate information about the statistics of those who are dying every day" - okay, who has it?

"So, the concern was that the Ministry of Health, which has had accurate figures to date, be the official source of the information." - okay, so the Ministry of Health has accurate information ... and you want whom to give the information? Oh, right, in order to avoid putting too much bureaucracy into the process, you've decided to add an extra, purely political layer onto the information:

"The leader of the Health Ministry in Iraq appealed to be allowed to continue supplying the figures to the United Nations but was turned down according to a subsequent letter from the prime minister’s office, Mr. Qazi’s cable said."

Hmmm ... and of course this has nothing AT ALL to do with the Republicans (because the vast majority of politicans who shaped the Iraqi government are Democrats, naturally) trying to minimize the damage that, gee, 3 years have gone by and we're still in Iraq and all these civilians seem to keep dying for no good reason.

Where logic fails, corruption fills the gaps.

I received this message earlier today:

"Blogger Problem

This server is currently experiencing a problem. An engineer has been notified and will investigate.

Status code: 1-500-3

Please visit the Blogger status page or the Blogger Knowledge Base for further assistance."

What if I don't want to notify an engineer? When have they ever fixed anything? :oP

I also found some excellent music on iTunes.

4 Strings - "Sunrise" & "Take Me Away (Into the Night)"
Mynt - "Still Not Sorry"
Ultra: iTrance 1 [entire album]

Sometimes life crystallizes into the briefest sliver of perfection. That was how I felt while eating and listening to "Satellite" earlier this afternoon.

Thought: the more certain you are about a particular theoretical stance, be it politics or physics, the lower the probability that it's true. Possibly. I'm not certain, but I think that could be the case.


... potentially.


I have no idea why I even bothered posting this.

Also, if you want insight into why the rest of the world thinks we are fucking stupid, take a gander at this impressively idiotic list of "fuel-efficient cars." High 20's to low 30's in the city? It's the twenty-first century! Numbers like that should be below, not even worth mentioning. The fucking Avalanche made the list!



The AVALANCHE!!!

omfg!!! YouTube like totally stabbed there own eyes out over this kid's video! it's just like that Edipus guy we lerned about in class 2day! I didnt think it was tru until Jon was all like "I red it on MSNBC!!"

(The story itself is quite hilarious, check here (their tag line is awesome).)

... and yes, those are nested parentheses, lol. Just like calc!

On an unrelated note, buying a new ball does wonders for your game (bowling, sicko). I went from bowling ~165/game to a 211, 233, 156 series. Well, actually the bowling is partially related (second cousin, thrice removed) to the above story: the weightlifting I did over the weekend caused me to tense up the final game and ruin my 600-series.

However, unlike unlucky Aleksey, I'll be back in top form next week :oP

Now for something totally different.

I subscribe to the philosophy of random acts of violence. Wherever Fortune senior writer Nelson D. Schwartz currently is, I sincerely hope he feels a tremor as I utterly demolished his half-assed article. Nelly, baby, this is for you!

No, I don't trust you, Fortune. Why? Well, for starters, you leave convenient gaps in your "explanation" - one which also contains unwarranted leaps of logic. In brief:

1) "...according to one Gallup poll, a lot of Wall Streeters wish they'd been in on the plot.

So what really drove prices down..."

Arguing from a hypothetical (brokers could've made money if they'd known!) anecdote is not justification (even though Fortune is not explicitly justifying, their syntax is such that it is dismissive of any real consideration for anything but the notion that conspiracy is silly). So if the government conspired to drop gas prices, it had to be to the benefit of brokers? Small fries in terms of political power for one, and for two - for any conspiracy to be believable, it can't be airtight. Brokers made money, Republicans elected, public duped, corporations keep from leaking info - it's too much. You can influence what you can influence, and although I'm certain nothing concrete was ever discussed, it doesn't need to have been when the energy sector time and again pours money into the elephant's coffers. Of course, since the current administration is keen on holding closed-door energy sessions, for all we know it could have been an explicit request from one old oil crony to another >wink< >nudge<.

2) Hurricane ... or not to cane.

Preying on the ignorance of the masses. If you truly take seriously the following supposition, that brokers en masse and against all common sense believed in a repeat of the 2005 hurricane season (which is given twice the article space as the other two reasons), then you are just the type to read MSNBC as an authoritative news source. You and I may be stupid enough to invest on such whims (and I've actually done quite well for myself investing on whims so far, lol), but a brokerage deals with these pesky things called probabilities. Yes, once a trend gets started its difficult to stop (as the article does mention), but to essentially lay the bulk of the blame on a dark horse instead of sound economics is yet another ploy to lull people into thinking the world really is a lot simpler (and a lot less subtle in its manipulations) than it really is. It's like a bad sitcom. "Oh, honey, the silly brokers across from me at work today were so trigger-happy they invested in gas because I farted. Guess your chili is really bringing home the bacon after all! Ha ha!"

Seriously, everyone, take a step back and think of how you behave at a basic level. Say you have a friend, Sally, who like roses. You know she likes roses because she has a rose for an icon on AIM, she sends e-mails with rose patterns, and you've seen her get excited about receiving roses in the past. Does she need to specifically e-mail or IM you to tell you that she would like roses on her birthday? If she does, then by god you really are that stupid, but my guess is that no matter how well you know probability you could surmise that roses would, at the very least, not be a bad option.

I'm a giant multinational oil conglomerate with interests around the world, but I'm based in the U.S. due to historical reasons and, because the PR fallout would be too bad, I cannot overtly relocate to a lower-tax environment (but you can bet your ass what assets I can put there are in tax-free offshore accounts). Now, I know Americans are largely sheep with ADD. I'm pulling in so much profit I can't buy jets for executives quickly enough to spend it all before the market turns down again. All this cash, where to invest. Well, I already contribute to Republican campaigns because they're oh-so-kind to me come tax season. What if instead of an outright contribution that would get a lot of negative press we just ease our prices a little? People broadly associate Republicans with energy, so lower energy prices would be an issue most probably positively associated with Republicans. The money we lose in profits, which we already have so much of we're lighting $1000 cigars in the mouths of $1000/hour hookers with $100 bills, is just like the money we set aside to contribute. Also, if we time it juust right, we can a) do it long enough beforehand to make it look like it was purely market forces and we had nothing to do with it and b) ensure there is enough time between the drop in prices and the election so that people remember the decline but don't stop to consider its convenient timing.

Now, the above has a lot of conditionals in it, but it's all predicated on a simple thing: recognizing a trend and hedging your bets on a likely outcome. I've heard in more than one source that "easing tensions around the world" have contributed to lower prices. LOL. Not only are there the same amount of reports coming from Iraq, more from Afghanistan, and renewed violence with Palestine, but NORTH KOREA NOW CLAIMS TO HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really easier to swallow the media's enormous pile of bullshit than to believe that there may possibly be collusion between the oil-drenched members of this administration (and it's "no-holds-barred" sleazeball architect, Karl Rove) and the energy sector in the United States? Anywhere else in the world you would get a reasoned debate considering both sides of the issue, but in the good ol' U.S. it's "aw, shucks, whoduvthunkit?" Or, even if it were ever exposed, would people change their view so that the default would be that the corporation should be assumed to be a giant, guilty ball of sleaze (ahem - Enron, WorldCom, stock back-dating, HP, etc.) as a basic premise on which all debate is predicated?

3) Innumeracy + smoke and mirrors = THE FLEECING OF AMERICA (redux)

"The switch in Goldman's basket of commodities had been previously announced by the firm, but that didn't stop the conspiracy theorists. "Hmm, what a coincidence, luring Goldman's top dog to take a HUGE pay cut by becoming Treasury's top dog, and then Goldman Sachs makes this unexpected decision, serving to dramatically drive down gas prices," said the Grey Matter, a liberal blog. But the grassy-knoll crowd didn't bother to crunch the numbers."

Okay, I hope you see where I'm going with this one. "The switch ... was previously announced ..." - would it really have killed the article to state when? No, but it may have provided more fodder for conspiracy if you knew it was March instead of August, for instance. [I will try to find out]. Why does the date matter? If it was early in the year, then it would've already had time to pan out in the marketplace well ahead of the decrease in gas (late summer). If it was announced in, say, July, then Fortune's argument is more valid.

"But the grassy-knoll crowd didn't bother to crunch the numbers."

The following explanation about long and short positions is irrelevant for two reasons. Most importantly, it still assumes that for the conspiracy idea to have validity the brokers must somehow profit. Look, these companies (energy sector) dump millions into campaigns every year. If their partners at some brokerage make a 3.9% return on their investment instead of 4.2%, in exchange for another two solid years in which to lobby friendly Republicans into screwing you and me a little harder, that's a sound fucking investment. There is no practical upper limit on the value of political capital of that magnitude (Republican trifuckta of Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branch).

Furthermore, the article again plays on the layperson's ignorance. There is no "number crunching" required for collusions of the nature conspiracy theorists are describing. The issue is itself collusion, which is often done person-to-person and not in Excel spreadsheets. Also, the numbers are irrelevant for a third reason - the guy who stood to benefit from this (Goldman's top dog) had left the industry. Who cares if the people he left behind get slightly screwed? Also, why would someone in a brokerage take a government job for less pay? Have you ever heard of anyone getting into investment banking for altruistic motives? "I'm only going to make money for good capitalists!" It's not law, people don't begin with unattainable ideals of righting the system. Investment bankers get into it for one reason and one reason only - they love the high of making fast-paced deals and getting exoirbant compensation. They don't get into the system with grandiose ideas of changing it, they get into it with grandiose ideas of what it can do for them as individual and, hopefully, absurdly wealthy capitalists. Again, there is no need for crunching any numbers, this is a human attribute for reasoning known simply as "common fucking sense".

4) Discrepancy

Now, I'm not arguing that this guy should not have made money, but consider:

"[Barrowcliffe] has managed to eke out an 8 percent gain for the year by avoiding bets on which way crude would go, instead playing off the spreads between different products, betting on how, say, heating oil would move if gasoline prices went down." (emphasis added)

Okay, he (Barrowcliffe) then goes on to say how he wasn't "tipped off", which is again relying on the absolutely idiotic notion that for the conspiracy theorists to have a case (not a true one, just one which merits further discussion) the brokers had to benefit. If you can believe that one businessman would willingly screw another (or a whole host of others, including some of his buddies, but a whole lot of his competitors and enemies), then you have just refuted Fortune's argument in this article in its entireity. That's pathetic journalism and even more pathetic that most people aren't even going to give more than a cursory glance at the headline and sub-headline (which, gee, make a pretty convincing case in lieu of the lack of logic underpinning the article).

Now the discrepency is this: Fortune insinuates that heating oil is being pegged by investors as a steady investment, as below,

"Right now, the latest bet by traders is for a normal winter - if there's a sudden cold snap before Thanksgiving, expect a bump in crude."

Now, given the nature of the markets, it's best to pad any type of forecasts with a lot of ... well, there are technical terms for it, but it's all bullshit. Phrases like "right now", "latest bet", etc. serve as a safety net if Fortune wants to go back and say "we didn't predict anything, we just reported where people thought the market would move." Fair enough. But if you want to accept Fortune's authority on the lack of any conspiracy theory, as well as the subversive way in which they insult your intelligence, follow the second link below the article: Big drop seen in winter heating bills. Fortune just sorta kinda told you something in a tiny blurb about the market, to justify its case against a conspiracy, yet it then writes an extensive article for the opposite view.

5) It's the fina-al insu-ult!

"Ironically, the current price for crude - $59 a barrel - is roughly where oil insiders have been predicting it would be if it weren't for all that hot money flowing into commodities."

This one almost seems like it could be completely true, no bullshit (except for the abuse of the word "irony"), but again your feeble intellect is being demolished by a logical fallacy (in this case, arguing from the antecedent clause). To put it simply, it hinges on your understanding of a simple vocab word: therefore. Logically, "If A, then B. A, therefore B."

What that means can be illustrated in countless examples. Say I am hungry (pre-existing condition, but necessary for purposes of illustration). I tell you "If you have an apple, I will eat it." You pull an apple from your pocket, and I eat it. If A (if you have an apple), then B (I will eat it). A (you have an apple). Therefore B (I eat it). Simple, eh? (not 'A', lol).

Now, arguing from the antecedent is a fallacy as follows. "If A, then B. B, therefore A." You have to understand that just because B depends on A, A is NOT the only thing that can cause B. If B happens, it does not have to have any bearing on A. It can, but does not have to.

Same example, except reverse the order. Instead of saying "If you have an apple, I will eat it." I say nothing to you (there is no A yet). We are both standing next to each other in silence, and you pull out an apple (condition B, possession of apple satisfied). Am I going to eat it? I haven't said anything, therefore I'm not bound to A. Maybe I am am hungry and have thought of eating it, but if I have yet to specify condition A, then there is no way that your action is directly tied to condition A.

So, going back to this example, Fortune is using this type of logical fallacy to make their argument. To refresh your memory, Fortune is saying that because some "oil insiders" thought the price should be where it is today, that nullifies any conspiracy theory. Not a bad supposition on the surface, except that Fortune (the sticklers about crunching numbers, remember?) doesn't offer any indication as to how many of these "insiders" are being referenced. Is it even a majority? I would bet not, considering that for every report I read about oil "peaking" I could find another that was going ga-ga over the prospect of $100/barrel oil prices [will reference this, because of course you ADD sheep forget things within a week of their published date].

So, Fortune is playing the stupid game of "Well, there were some people who said that condition B would occur, and now it has! This, like, totally proves our point!". If you're digging back through past data looking for support, chances are you will find someone, somewhere who "forecast" today's situation (hence why some people get lucky, like Barrowcliffe, and others lose a fortune, even though they are participating in the same market). Different forecasts, different investment choices, different outcomes. If you go back, then it's child's play to find support for *any* investment choice. Look also at what Fortune did with how it worded the stuff about the heating gas markets - it has readily available quotes to show that no matter which way the market goes, up or down, they were able to "predict" where the market would go.

This is why real, good traders aren't reading the freebie bullshit that gets passed off as news and/or critical analysis to all of you.

BAA! BA - wait, I forgot where I was going with that ... oh, Madonna adopted a negro child! Mobilize the national guard, the hard-working Africans are going to steal the Latino's jobs!

(On a side note, this move towards the "second-generation web/internet", exemplified by streaming media, is going to make it harder and harder to specify, much less locate precisely, sources of news. I had to search extensively to actually find a link to the video and not a list of videos which you had to then search to find this particular piece. Luckily, and this is where being a pack-rat comes in handy, I have my own archived copy, but I believe it's too large to host directly on the blog and I don't have anywhere else to put it right now.)

As Stephen Colbert had with "truthiness", I thought I had the market cornered on "pointlessnissity." Perhaps the term, but not the idea behind it. Damn.

In a related development, dead rats now mean that climate change is bunk, according to the Discovery Channel. Oh, and who owns Discovery Channel? Disney. Disney is a completely apolitical entity who freezes hiring based on Republican election victories because that makes good business sense.

Convincing people climate change is a myth also makes good business sense, if you trade in Republican political capital. And yes, one tiny article on the Canadian Discovery Channel website is hardly going to convince a lot of people, but when someone argues that climate change is debatable they have a well-known source (for the layperson that is).

Really, people, if you can't think at least do yourself a favor and read Manufacturing Consent.

in a word ... baa!
In most of Europe, "calories" are listed as "energie" on most food items. Sounds like a lot more positive, yet Europeans aren't nearly as rotund as most Americans. Guess that shows the failure of negative reinforcement, assuming that 'calories' carries with it a negative connotation. Doesn't quite sound as good to say "I'm counting energies" either.

he worked hard for no money
Something that's been rattling around in my mind for a while - most people today deride communism as a derelict means of societal or economical management. Yet few people, I think, realize that the acknowledged founder of the communist ideal, Karl Marx, literally 'wrote the book' on capitalism, Das Kapital (still studied today for its insights), before rejecting your reality and substituting his own. So it wasn't like there was this crackpot with a half-assed system for wealth distribution - he (and Engels) knew what they were talking about inside and out (arguably as well or better than many of today's capitalist economists).

What is amusing is that the very income disparity we're seeing today become ever broader was exactly the mechanism by which Marx predicted capitalism would basically self-destruct. I guess it remains to be seen how much further we can push the system. I wonder if the ueber-liberal non-discriminatory hiring practices make it okay for one to hire communists into capitalist workplaces (though I guess that falls under 'political views').

I'm not advocating communism per se (certainly not in its currently practiced form of Communism), only suggesting that people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss its core tenets. Capitalism, as a worldwide phenomenon, is often justified with the analogy that "a rising tide lifts all ships" (implicit support of global warming?), but the problem is that it also floods the low-lying seaside communities. That tide could also swamp your dinghy but leave, say, a multi-million dollar yacht unaffected.

working out ... in a gym (part II)
So this is another aspect of European culture not found in America: sexual attitudes. I was watching a commercial for some magazine while running on a Precor machine, and what was the commercial about? Women's nipples randomly popping out in all sorts of social settings (restaurant, the gym, in the park, etc.). I mean, full nipple, not that Janet Jackson half-covered with a piercing shit, lol.

Also, I took a walk around the men's locker room. There are 2 sauna rooms ... and they are accessible to both men and women. In fact, there are "instructions" for cleaning each other before going into the sauna (I'm going to take my camera next time because the illustration cannot be done justice in mere words) and also instructions that the man would do well to give the woman a massage. This is, by the way, fully in the nude for both sexes (the illustrations are quite clear about that). Imagine a world where two nude members of the opposite sex can interact without sex/rape/violence/etc. I mean, Dubya would be flabbergasted.

Also, on a random aside, there is a petting zoo a few hundred metres from my house. No real purpose, someone just augmented the park with a cow, some goats, etc. Completely fucking random.

Some observations about Holland:

lowlands
The Dutch are once again the tallest people in the world (on average). My Dutch buddies joke that it's because nearly the entire country is below sea level, so by natural selection the tallest tend to be able to breath when the country floods.

working out ... in a gym
The fitness club I joined not only allows payment exclusively via bank account (no checks, credit cards, or even cash), it also requires 3 visits before you are allowed to use the facility on your own: an 'introduction' about how the machines work and what is available, a fitness test (I have 11.5% body fat, which is pretty good), and a 'first training' where the specific workout plan devised for you at the fitness test is codified (they suggest optimum weights for machines, reps, etc, depending on your level and goals). I find it both a bit of a hassle, as a lot of this I already know, but it is pretty cool to have a personal workout guide developed specifically for you. It is also a lot more expensive than the U.S. - 40-50 euros/month is typical (40 is actually a discounted rate).

hospitality
The first week I was in my house, this guy knocks on my door around 2300 and asks if he can "use the SIM card from an old mobile." I'm like "umm ... I don't have an old mobile, sorry."

Yesterday a guy rings my doorbell and asks if I have any coffee or "some caffeine." When I tell him I don't drink coffee, he looks at me like I'm putting him on.

I have nothing against being open and all with your neighbors, but I do not think I need to have an American worldview to find some of that behavior more than a bit odd. Bringing someone a pastry because they just moved in is a nice gesture; mooching off someone after they've been here less than a month is just strange.

Extensive piece in New York Magazine on Stephen Colbert.

(If you're wondering, I nailed the Coulter/Colbert comparison. It isn't hard to discern, especially if you actually watch his show.)

I've come to the following conclusion: people tend to take excessive photographs of themselves in social situations to convince themselves they are having a 'blast.'

So the other night my washer/dryer combo goes a little haywire. Not knowing what to do, or how to interpret the code "E10" flashing where the time normally displays, I just shut it down and restart the cycle. Twice. It finally washes. Once done, I check this little square of metal that appears to be a door and viola! - one very full and very wet lint trap (in this photo it's already been cleaned):


However, if you look closely, you may notice something peculiar ...


Apparently this lint trap moonlights in Amsterdam's RedLight district. ZING!

Well, now we know: soon means just under 2 years.

I'll re-post my old mblog entries here. Also, feel free to browse some of my posts on DeviantArt. It's been a while since I've uploaded anything new, but I'm sure I will soon.

Random thought for today: I went to Pizza Hut in Scheveningen (near the beach). They have a salad bar and whatnot, but you can only go once. No free refills (of course). The waiter saw me walking up to the salad bar and said "only 1 plate." I told him in the U.S. you can get all-you-can-eat, and he responds "yes, but then for 2 euros you could eat the whole thing."

Now, you could actually eat the whole bar, as it is quite small (though the glass would be impossible to digest), but what I don't understand is the lack of customer trust. You say you're afraid the customer will eat too much, but then you have open-air restaurants where you are just expected to go up and pay after you eat. Sometimes the servers don't even remember what you've ordered and you have to tell them. Hell, you could just walk away.

How is that not worse than someone possibly eating too much of your food?