I gave it six months. It didn’t even take five. The non-professional, non-trained, non-police TSA now wants armed TSA agents at checkpoints. In addition to the Stasi papers-please and prison patdowns, now we’ll have ill-trained guards armed with automatic weapons. Welcome to your third-world country. Like the TSA causes more crime than it prevents terrorism, […]
Who’s overseeing who? And now the spies are writing the legislation that affects them. Let’s see – the spies are spying on the legislative body that oversees them, and writing the legislation for that legislative body. If it wasn’t clear to you before, They have the goods on Congress. Now They’re not even trying to […]
Astrophysics takes a $63M cut, but there's $133M for the literally insane idea of bringing an asteroid back to earth.
There is basically nothing you can do if you’re not little people that will get you fired.
They replaced all the old POTS phone with VoIP phones, which are basically digital. Except they look pretty much just like the old phones. And sadly, have the same crappy user interface. Make a mistake dialling, and you have to hang up and start over. There's no delete button – why not? It's skeumorphism in […]
Unless you’re the head of national intelligence, or a major bank. Then you can commit perjury or launder billions in drug money with absolute impunity. God forbid you hit a few home runs or win a few TdFs or have more than a few thousand dollars in cash while driving through Texas or have a […]
So I’ve been catching up on my reading, which is to say, I might have picked up a bit of the breakbone fever down in Taxco. On one of the semi-regular trots to the back of the house, I managed to pluck one of the climbing rags from the stack [1]. The saddest thing is […]
to me anyway. I just got 45 minutes into a movie, paused it while I did something else for a bit, then came back and hit start. And it did. At the beginning. With the unskippable FBI warning not to pirate. Which obviously I did not, as if I had, I’d not be watching the […]
Putting more lie to the “shocked, shocked” meme. Collaboration with the spies is being marked to market. Chickens are coming home to roost. Pick your metaphor. I think it’s unlikely these will get very far in the courts, but it means I’m not the only one having these thoughts.
So Evil Megacorp bought a robotics company. Clearly I’m not a mega-evil-genius (though I’m open to offers), but it seems to me that scary robots are something that pretty much anyone with a few million dollars can build. Patents are expired, the field is open to anyone. Boston Dynamics built some cool tech, but people […]
I get an insane number of emails, texts, and phone calls every day. Toss in notifications from calendars, applications, WWF, etc., and the desktop, laptop, tablet, and both phones would be ringing constantly and simultaneously if I let them. I got tired of that on about day two of the iPhone 3G. And I'm an […]
Henry Ford realized this a long time ago, whatever his other faults. He both made the car cheap enough, and wages high enough, that his own employees could afford one. Those days are gone, however, and we’re not talking about cars, we’re talking about food. Walmart employees aren’t paid enough to afford food at their […]
Aside from the minor orbital mechanics impossibilities and the Spielbergian dead kid tear-jerking, why did she keep taking off her helmet? If you were entering a spacecraft you had never been inside in the middle of a debris storm that had caused every one else to abandon ship, would you take your helmet off? I […]
There are two competing pro-NSA and anti-whistleblower [1] narratives out there. The most obvious one is that Snowden is a traitorous flake (pole-stripper girlfriend! bad employee review!) who’s just waiting for the highest bidder (China! Russia!) to sell the NSAs secrets, worse than Manning’s data-dump [2]. The second is, secrets?!? What secrets? Everyone knows we […]
Tagged Deep State, NSA, Snowden
X of the year 2013
Climbing: El Chontacoatlan, Taxco del Alarcon, Guerrero, Mexico, Thanksgiving. I sent Mantis, the first pitch of Mala Fama, and Procopio, all third try. Great climbing, fun partners, one of the best trips ever. This is my favorite kind of climbing. Close second: Maple, May and September. Sent ZT and 49, several one-fall burns on Dry […]
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