polar bears
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 reimbursed – the corporation treats every employee equally in assuming no personal life outside of work), be treated like a criminal suspect should you decide to take any personal time whilst on the company dime, then beg to get your expenses reimbursed, months later, all the while the vig is ticking.
REIMBURSED! You floated a loan of many thousands of dollars, probably at usurious vig, to a entity which deals with billions of dollars every year, yet can find no way to pay such expenses out of its own pocket. Yet is penurious about tens of dollars in reimbursements when it comes to giving your back your own money. And obsequious and unresponsive to boot. Heaven forfend you should misinterpret some arcane rule, written with the worst components of legal precision and human resources intelligence. That is to say, not precise, and able to be arbitrarily interpreted in a manner not to your favor.
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 without paying, you tied the activation code to a specific MAC address. Given what I see when I search, there’s no shortage of cracked software, but your paying customers are SOL.
There’s the story of DRM in a nutshell: paying customers – screwed. Thieves – still running just fine.
As when I train my dogs, maybe you should ask yourself: what incentives am I reinforcing with this?
The package that was supposed to arrive 18 July, and then be delivered by Fedex 6 July, was shipped from Shanghai 30 June, and arrived at my doorstep at 0908 2 July. Now it appears that Apple has invented a time machine (as opposed to Time Machine).
Or they’re gaming their inventory. But the Fedex trick was a new one, showing up five days before the tracking said it would.
Good thing I was so blown by the weekend climbing and post-climb work out (and two G&Ts) that I couldn’t get my lazy butt off to work sooner.
But now I’m surprised that I’m at work and not at home playing with the new toy.
And so, off to the pixel mines.
Three more summer runs for the dogs. Temps in the low 50s, and it’s almost July.
6/10
I don’t mind plot holes, but you better be moving fast enough that I don’t have time to dwell on them while I’m waiting for the next thing to happen.
For comparison – Alien 9.875/10. Aliens 9/10. Even the one that execrably had Winona Ryder in it gets a 7.5/10. Played by its rules and who doesn’t love some Hedaya?
Click here for spoilers. These are just the ones I thought of sitting in the movie waiting for something to happen that I didn’t already expect.
Just go watch The Avengers again (8/10 with a summer action movie level up +1 bonus). At least Cobie Smulders is way hot. And all the characters get to be intelligent, esp. Stark and Banner. Yeah, I’ll buy your levitating aircraft carrier and humans fighting (literally!) gods, if you keep it moving at Mach 3.5. Consistent within its own universe buys a lot.
Update: This guy does it better than me. Yeah. What he said.
The more I think about it, the more insulted I am. RS can make an image but he’s well and truly out of ideas.
Late of an evening, one of the last runs of the summer for the dogs, though not for me. I like summer evenings. Cool, but I’m warm from the day, and old injuries stay old.
Fading light, heading down into the arroyo, no one else to be seen for the entire distance. A coyote stands across the middle of the trail. Milo pulls, not like he would if it was a dog. Hunting; not greeting. The coyote looks at us, steps off the trail. Calm. We run past, without breaking stride. I look back. Coyote is in the middle of the trail, watching us go.
Half an hour later, almost dark, he’s nowhere to be seen. Milo casts, tracking scent.
Mornings are still cool now, but it’s too warm for snow dogs to pull long distances. Next run for Alex will be in the fall. Milo is young, he’ll get to start again sooner.
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 refined gold, to paint the lilly, to throw perfume on the violet, is just fucking silly.”
Or at least not looking too good.
And there’s such a retreat to steampunk (which I despise):
Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored?
I’d put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the “eyeball kick” as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don’t need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse “New Scientist”. We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We’re carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn’t a 1980s cyberpunk vision that’s imploded into the present, warts and all, I don’t know what is.
[…]
We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins[…]
That’s why so much modern mainstream literary fiction (from Vonnegut on to DFW, Chabon, Lethem, etc.) is essentially what would have been SF earlier. And no one even blinks. Is it just a phase, and will it fade out as the technological future changes in ways we can’t imagine? Or have we imagined them all?
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, the guy behind me still rolled down his window to tell me to get out of the way. He was angry, even though I didn’t slow him down for even one second.
Best part? The worst thing he could think to call me was “fucking liberal, go vote for Obama.”
Sad thing is, I’ll probably have to.
Video TK. How do I go about starting a Vimeo channel for this?
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 the Bush administration[…]
“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”
If you, at some point in your past, had not only known of, but been in charge of, black prisons in remote counties unfettered by any law or moral, torture, rendition (a nice word for kidnapping), and murder, it’s hard for me to credit “genuine moral rectitude.” But then I was always suspicious of that Saul character and late Damascan conversions.
ObXKCD (a meme I’d like to revive). Hover for the punchline.
TIL that if I take a car called a ‘service’ to the airport for a work trip, it’s not fully covered, but if I take a car called a ‘taxi’, it is, even though the ‘taxi’ costs more and is less reliable and it doesn’t say anything like that in the rules.
The price of this lesson? $30.
“If you were a frequent traveler, you’d know this.” Unspoken subtext: you’re not, so eat it.
Yay, work travel, where the employee loans the employer thousands of dollars, interest-free, for months at a time, and has to jump through hoops to get part of it back.
Tagged TIL
Notes of the day, 12 July 2012
Yes. Yes it would.