Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to ( Read more... )

I have, it may have come to your notice, a pretty surly outlook about the state of modern consumer capitalism, especially its flagship entity, the Joint Stock Limited Liability Corporation. What I try to do, and often fail to do, is communicate that my displeasure focuses on the current state of affairs: the setup that we have going right now is ( Read more... )

Livejournal apparently has begun redirecting a subset of outgoing links through an affiliate-revenue-generating alteration site. This is not necessarily bad, but if you think that LJ can be trusted unconditionally, given its track record, I have some sub-prime mortgage-backed securities to sell you. See posts by shatterstripes(link), ysengrin(link), and caffeinepuppy(link) for ( Read more... )

By the way, if you feel like your community is tiny, navel-gazing, and obsessed with petty bickering - remember that you're not alone. I was reminded of this by an SF Chronicle article about wine bloggers. The main subject of the article runs a blog called "Hosemaster of Wine," which is a great title.

The takeaway point for me: "Hecklers don't ( Read more... )

I am, in fact, the kind of person who despises professional sports in their current form, and the Super Bowl in particular. However, most of the time I keep a lid on it in order to be civil. Yesterday was reasonably nice, and I was blissfully working on other things without being forced to think about overpaid 'roid-head modern gladiators ( Read more... )

So now we've got Na'vi Otherkin - and the obligatory bashing. Unoriginal. Pathetic. Insane ( Read more... )

So I hear that there was a setback for the Democratic party lately. I barely know the big picture, and I really don't care about the details at this point. What happened was, my current standpoint got vindicated again. That standpoint is that I am actively not paying attention to micro-level political maneuvering because the big-picture ( Read more... )

Michael Lewis has been back in the news - around this time last year, he had an excellent article in Portfolio called "The End,", which spawned a solid discussion on bradhicks's journal, and in a few months we'll be looking at "The Big Short," his examination of the current depression. When I saw Liar's Poker, his excellent 1989 account of his time as a ( Read more... )

Let me tell you about a terrible habit of mine. I think less of my money-starved friends when, for instance, they make serial videogame purchases, they go see movies, they eat out. I shout in my head - no! what are you thinking, those are luxuries, save your money and fight the poverty ( Read more... )

I am very unhappy that this appears in one of my textbooks:The column headings in the table are not as clear as they need to be, but I've written them as they are written in the motherboard documentation so you can learn to understand this kind of cryptic documentation.

Dear Jean Andrews: You are so very much Doing It Wrong. I hate your textbook ( Read more... )