That burning refinery stench? Smells like an Enronning to me. Retail prices began to skyrocket after Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s 150,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Torrance, near Los Angeles, reduced production Oct. 1 after a power failure. That followed a fire that knocked out a crude-processing unit at Chevron Corp. (CVX)’s plant in Richmond, near San Francisco, […]
Once again, the Onion makes me both laugh and wonder why I'm laughing. The biz starts at 1:35.
My computer and operating system have this wonderful process that connects email to address books and calendars. Recognizing that addresses and dates are often sent in email, the developers were smart enough to remove the friction of cutting and pasting these things into other applications. If there's an address, the email program recognizes it, and […]
Another website that requires you to create a forever non-deletable account to purchase anything. An account which contains your personal information and credit card number [1] and makes you come up with some bogus password with more than six characters, capital letter, and non-alphanumeric character, then, when you forget it, sends it to you in […]
So Andrea Seabrook is unhappy with her experience in DC. Tired of being bald-faced lied-to by politicians. So she's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Except the whole time she was there at NPR, putting their lies on the air, she could have stood up and called them on it. Could […]
The place where I work has an increasingly restrictive network policy. It went from almost anything goes – personal devices OK, and the honor system [1], to no personal devices on the network, monitoring software on every machine, full disk encryption [2], and now a net nanny which restricts innocuous web sites (climbing sites, art […]
The new copier requires three button presses and four steps to make a copy. Start, (scan), finish, start. Yay?
If we hadn’t cancelled the SSC, we’d have found it 20 years ago. And many other things besides, given that the SSC had several times the energy and luminosity of the LHC. Congratulations, CERN.
Debtors prison is alive and well.
I spent $129 on your software. Now I have a new computer, and apparently you’ve gone out of business. Website can’t be found. Emails are not replied to. The software still runs, but it asks me for an activation, which I can’t get. Cause in your infinite wisdom and fear of someone using your software […]
I just discovered Tim Minchin: “Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this? Beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap manmade myths and monsters? If you’re so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear: to gild […]
I got yelled at this morning for not getting out of the way on my bike. Never mind that it was a one-lane construction zone with workers everywhere, speed limit 15 MPH signs, and that I was right on the tail of the car in front of me, when we got to the red light, […]
Hard to believe you could write for the NYT and write this uncritically without thinking of Judy Miller. Though I guess she’s turned that into a good gig on Fox. Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. […] a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of […]
Your corporate masters
Send you on a trip, to an uninteresting place, for unrelenting work. For this, you are expected to arrange your own travel, price compare to save the corporation’s money, pay for it out of your own pocket, bear the ancillary expenses of rearranging your life for weeks or months at a time (which won’t be […]