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{ Category Archives } Rant

lawd amighty, I feel my temperature risin’

Our corporate masters reassure us

A plane crashes. Our corporate masters have the story ready, waiting to go. Do you think that NPR wrote that story this morning? No, they had it in the can. Suggested and aided by someone at Boeing. Nothing at all to do with a pledge drive. Message to the plebes: keep flying! Else our stock […]

Laws for thee, not for me

One of the most frequent comments one sees anytime there's a news article about cyclists, cycling, or the death thereof, is how cyclists are scofflaws. We don't obey the rules. We weave about, we ride on the sidewalk (or we don't ride on the sidewalk), we ride on the right, we don't ride on the […]

TIL

That even a blind pig finds an acorn now and again. A good article in Forbes, of all places. Is the money the stockholders’, the customers’ or the employees’? Apparently, it can be any of those possibilities, depending on which argument the article is trying to make. In Professor Friedman’s wondrous world, the money is […]

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CC TDS

So I watch The Daily Show from the Comedy Central website. First, their streaming sucks ass. Second, when a TDS finishes, the website auto-starts the most recent Colbert Report. While I think SC is pretty funny, the schtick has worn thin for me, so I generally don’t want to watch it. But you’d think that […]

How the American higher education system was destroyed

In five easy steps. I’d say this is utter paranoia, that the Cabal that runs our country is not that cohesive and controlling, that it just happened by accident, but they have done it to the healthcare system, the secondary school system, the public unions, the networks, and the great research labs. And I read […]

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Periodicity: two weeks

Dilbert once again is skulking through the halls where I work:

And now this

I'm gone for a week, and I come back to this. There are a million things one could say, a million words one could write, but in end, it comes down to this: Defund the NSA. And all its unknown counterparts. Raze the buildings, salt the earth of Ft. Meade, and send the unethical masses […]

Too big to nail

That’s the trick. HSBC launders money for the bad guys in the War on Some Drugs and Some People, and some members of the Axis of Evil, and pays a small fine relative to their profits, and the people in charge defer their bonuses for a short time. Not go to jail, not pay a […]

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TumblrHu

Wait.  Tumblr, which has no path to monetization other than clickthru ads, which were worth about a quarter per thousand last I heard, is worth $1.1B.  Hulu, which has paying subscribers, ad revenue from major corporations, and the most important thing of all, access to content that people might want to pay for, is worth […]

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It’s either Dilbert or Office Space

But currently it’s both.  Art imitates life imitates art.  I used to work at Initech, and I went to grad school to get away from it.  But it’s universal.  Apparently inescapable.  Even managers who used to be techies who have watched the movie will still become Lumbergh because they can’t fucking think of anything better […]

Nailed it again

If you didn’t read anything else, the first two paragraphs should put to rest any inkling you might ever have that nations are like families, and budgets must be balanced. Krgthulu: [T]he economy is not like an individual family. Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning […]

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Two A things

Archer makes me laugh uncontrollably. Every episode. Atrios hits the nail on the head. Almost every time.

Timing

The US is deploying a $1B missile defense system, primarily to Alaska, which has at best a 50% success record (bad news if you’re missile with a huge radar generator attached heading from a known direction at a known time), to shoot down missiles from North Korea, which can’t reach the US and can’t possibly […]

Sweep

You think this guy's even going to notice when he sweeps me with his sprinkler pipe sticking out three feet on the right? Be awesome if we had a three foot rule, so thanks, Jerry and Arnold for vetoing that.  

Sun rises in the east again

Though you’d never know it this time of year around here. As it turns out, there are about 10% more people on disability in 2013 after the greatest recession since the 30s than there were in 1995. And most of that is due to simple demographics – it’s the boomers. Big shock. But by all […]

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