Tag: stupid

Trolling confederates

It turns out that people on Confederate Facebook are not very good at the internet. Our friend Lowen dialed Chris to investigate. He claimed to be a guy named Roger who’d heard Chris was a Northerner who’d joined the group to troll. Understandably, Chris was upset about this, and claimed to have never left the state of Texas. “Roger” told Chris he’d heard that he had the state flag of “Maine or New York” on his truck, that he worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, and that he’d voted for Obama “both times from a polling station in Brooklyn, New York.” Chris was very upset that people were spreading these vicious rumors about him, and told “Roger” that his “friends in high places” would slap the trolls with prison time for their actions.

Once I was in charge of the group I decided to take it in a new direction. The Confederate flag, I felt, had become a toxic brand. And all this South-rising-again business was a sure loser with swing voters. A top-down rebranding was in order. After rigorous focus-group testing, I decided to align the group with LGBT rights, Michelle Obama, Judaism, miscegenation, and the victorious Juche ideology. And that is how “confederate pride, heritage not hate” became “LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama and Judaism.”

trolling for a good cause, the best kind of trolling.

Stockholm Rent Control

Dear Seattle, I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control. Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years? I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs.

$5.3T Energy Subsidy waste

Subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas were $5.3T worldwide in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP). Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%. China was the biggest subsidizer ($1.8T), followed by the United States ($0.6T), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3T). Eliminating subsidies would have reduced global CO2 emissions by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2% of global GDP. The figure likely exceeds government health spending across the world, estimated by the World Health Organization at 6% of global GDP, but for the different year of 2013. They correspond to one of the largest negative externality ever estimated.

CSI Cyber

cop shows are some of the dumbest material tv has to offer, and this one is among the worst.

I only 2 short months, CSI: Cyber has quickly become one of the most magnificently absurd police procedurals being aired by a major television network. To be fair, its problems are mostly a matter of circumstance: It’s actually just about as brain-dead as any other CSI series, but this go-round comes off especially bad since it was ostensibly designed specifically to follow technology-related fictional crimes. As a result, the gap between the content of the show and the knowledge it is supposedly built upon is much more dramatic than any other major Jerry Bruckheimer undertaking of the past few decades.