Tag: stupid

Just roll a dice instead

Of course, a lot of Wall Street traders, and others, don’t want it to be known that they’re relying on anything other than their own talent. Arch Crawford, a financial astrologer who actually got his start on Wall Street as a stock analyst at Merrill Lynch, recalls one subscriber asking for his newsletter in “brown paper wrappers.”

in other words, retarded children playing with other people’s money who can’t get a real job.

Club Applebee’s?

hard to better define the existential ennui of suburbia.

In July, Nick Pirrone and 3 friends were driving home from a St. Louis Cardinals game when they stopped at an Applebee’s in St. Charles, Mo., for dinner. It was after 22:00, and when the teenagers walked into the casual dining restaurant, they didn’t find the traditional family-friendly atmosphere they’d grown up with. Instead, they found a karaoke bar. “There were a lot of people drinking and singing Backstreet Boys,. The place was packed. There was even a DJ.” The 4 ate half-price appetizers and were so amused by the revelry that they returned a few weeks later with a group of 14. “It was actually kind of fun. I mean, there’s not much else to do around here. It’s the suburbs.”

Science Left Behind

if you thought the right wing has a monopoly on it’s attack on science, i have news for you. the vaccination causes autism assholes are a good example.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning—and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Yet those on the left have numerous fallacies of their own. Aversion to clean energy programs, basic biological research, and even life-saving vaccines come naturally to many progressives. These are positions supported by little more than junk-science and paranoid thinking.

Elections farce

The actual share of voters nationally who are up for grabs is probably 3-5% in this election. The Obama and Romney campaigns are expected to spend on the order of $2B to sway this tiny share of the electorate.

an expensive circus for an outcome that is entirely irrelevant. no party, including the fringe ones, has any clue about our nonlinear world and their recipes stopped being effective decades ago.

Body armor for everyone

Defense, not offense, is the next stage of the gun-violence arms race. Equipping citizens with concealed weapons doesn’t stop bad guys. It just pushes them to the next level. The next level is body armor. And unlike missile defense, which has proved to be complicated and disappointing, body armor is relatively simple.

Most new gun laws since Sandy Hook relax ownership restrictions. the solution is clearly for everyone to arm up: body armor, personal drones, etc. i think i figured out the NRA end game.

OWS is self-parodying

OWS focused more energy on the mundane logistics of camp life than on organizing for social change. Petty decisions such as how to manage laundry (a multi-day debate), what kind of storage bins to buy (they had to be fair trade and procured through Craigslist), and how to put limits on the drumming circles without alienating them (some considered this a civil rights issue) often sucked up hours of valuable time when put to consensus-based discussion in General Assemblies.

this all reads like a camp organized by the park slope coop.