Actual Working Phone Number Given in TV Show

The number, (323) 271-9162, is a an existing phone number in Los Angles. The screen capture is from The LA Complex S02E06. The last time I saw a TV show give a non 555 phone number was one of the early episodes of SCTV.

Taxes Versus Charity

I was listening to NPR coverage of the US Republican convention, while playing Civilization V. In a speech by Mike Huckabee he contrasted Obama's and Romney's charitable giving. In Huckabee's numbers Obama gave 2% versus Romney's 16%. Admittedly in the tax returns that Romney released showed he pay taxes at a rate of 15%. More of Obama's income is "earned" than Romney. However the idea to replace public sources of welfare with private sources of charity is a nonstarter. It has already been tried in the 18th and 19th century, read Dickens et al. 

"Here in North America"

"We are blessed with energy resources"

Condolezza Rice at the US Republican convention glossing over the fact that not all North America resources are American resources.

Misogynist Economist Joke

"I'm sorry you're so jealous of economists. Did they steal your wife?"

Yeah but they calculated that she was a Declining Value Asset and that the cost of entering into a long-term partnership with her held a strong negative correlation with their future growth aspiration graph, so they returned her. 

Truth in a discussion

 on Steve Sailer's blog about

this graph

Archives, Computers And The End of Histroy

Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archives of handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives if they dare.)

David Remnick,

 In the Archives: the Widow's Peak,

The New Yorker, June 18, 2012

Computers make it easy to duplicate, manipulate, search, relocate information. At the same time it makes it easier lose stuff down the memory hole either by action, inaction, error, or mechanical failure. But any simple filing cabinet has a solidity that makes it hard to chuck out the window. I have came across several different predictions about our future data storage needs from sci-fi witters and/or futurists.  There is the scenario that we must eventually need to go space so we can find new places to store our records. In Raj Whitehall's world everything was in computer databanks, when computers failed. So all records, history, knowledge is lost. I have read other futurists that suggest this is the likely outcome and that future history will note a "dark age" where there are scattered and fragmentary records in proprietary obsolete formats.

Computers are great for ephemera, but there needs to be hard copies for posterity.

Hedonismbot Gets Own LOL Cat Poster - "Oh, The Indulgence"

Posted/made by Rainbow Sparkler in the AH.com thread ASB/ISOT - "A War of Atonement" by von hitchofen.

Reduction Campaign Preparing to Drop

The Reduction Campaign for Alien Swarm will be available on September 4.

And don't forget to go out there and kill aliens.

Reality Undramatic

"Generally speaking", Lobsang  pronounced, "reality having little sense of narrative, ancient sites are not heavy with swinging blades that decapitate, or rock panels that fold back to fire darts."

Lobsang, after discovering the enigmatic ruins

 of  a dead civilization in

The Long Earth

Ad for Mayan trap merchants from luvthecubs

 posted at Crack's 16 Unseen Jobs That Must Exist in Movie Universes.

A Kind of Respect/Fear

...the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

How Joshua Valienté

is treated after joining a powerful mega-corporation

 In The Long Earth

God's Eye View of the Universe.

To move across the milky way would take light 40,000 years, and this video spans the distance of a galaxy in a millisecond or two. So, 40,000 years is 14,610,000 days, is 350,640,000 hours, is 21,038,400,000 minutes, is 1,262,304,000,000 seconds, is 1,262,304,000,000,000 milliseconds. If we say that that the "camera" in this video is spanning the distance of a milky-way sized galaxy in 1 millisecond, then it's travelling at 1,262,304,000,000,000 times the speed of light. VERY rough estimate.

Nic Foster, explaining
what we are seeing
in the comments section of this video
on YouTube.

Explanation of this video/simulation/animation from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, The First Public Data Release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey .  

This video seems to be part of the Total Perspective Vortex as makes galaxies appear as meaningless specks of light. That is the view of the egoist needing validation of the universe. This animation makes your sized galaxy feel small and weak.

At the Clippie Awards For Delivery Boys

You have to sign for your prize/statuette/award.

Futurama S07E10

NPR News Host (Vacation Replacemnet) Doesn't Recognize Political Terms/Argot/Slang

RUDIN:...Eric Hovde and Mark Neumann backed by conservatives, Tea Party Express, Club for Growth, but they kind of split the anti-Thompson vote. Thompson's seen as kind of like a moderate, a squish - you know, squishy RINO, as some conservatives have called him. But he won the nomination narrowly, but he will be the Republican nominee against Tammy Baldwin, a very liberal congresswoman from Madison, Wisconsin.

DONVAN: Squishy RINO is - what's the allusion there?

RUDIN: Well, no, no, just the fact that he's not as strong. Like he backed some Obama stuff, he supported some...

DONVAN: He's not an elephant.

RUDIN: Well, he's a RINO not as in rhinoceros but RINO as in Republican in name only, not the rhinoceros.

How Ryan Will Shift Campaign Strategy In Florida

John Donavon is the summer replacement host at Talk of the Nation filling in for Neal Conan. Ken Rudin is a long term political editor at NPR.

Here is information on the Picard face palm meme from Know your Meme, part of the Cheez Burger Network.

The Perils of Auto-Transcribing

After looking at some puzzles at the Wall Street Journal I clicked on the discussion above, Why Buffett Is Betting Big on Housing. The man above is talking about the housing market and made reference to [the] Case-Schiller [index] instead that got transcribed into Kaye Scholer. Kaye Scholer seems like weird stretch of a personal name until wiki revealed that they are a high level law firm. The problem seems to be that incomplete references that are understood by humans can confuse programs by the lack of  small words like [the] and [index].

The History of GTA and Counter Strike

Watching these game retrospectives made me feel my age. The editor of these videos, blablue123, has also created similar videos examining the history of Max Payne, Doom and Hitman among others. But I never played those games so their history has little meaning for me.

The Midseason Replacement or Later

Here is the upcoming schedule for the sitcom Baby Daddy from a TV guide site, Not the official "TV Guide". Christmas in Ausust is the tip off that this wasn't originally made as a summer series.

Workforce Dumping - Update

There is a move by the Canadian government and business interests to admit 700,000 people in one year to clear the immigration backlog. In a move to support this action there have been a number stories sprinkled throughout the media about worthy small business that have trouble recruiting enough people. There was a story last night of a truck manufacturer and its trouble recruiting welders. Today in the Globe and Mail Jeffery Simpson had a snarky column about how Canadian employers have to recruit aboard because locals are unreliable. In this Simpson gave the example of Stanfield, Underwear makers, and how it has trouble recruiting locals (id est Canadians) because they (a) can't work (b) won't work (c) work badly.

My answer to these champions of free enterprise is pay more money. People are willing to do more for union wages (living) than for a few bucks above minimum. For the sake of saving $5 bucks a hour our champions of industry want more people in the country.

In Alberta there is an example of the difference over time between high quality, high wage, low turnover, jobs with low quality, low wage, high turnover, jobs. A couple decades ago when meat packing plants were primarily in cities there was a long strike at Gainers against Peter Pocklington. Pocklington wanted to reduce the wages at Gainers, a union shop, to a couple of dollars above minimum wage. Now the biggest Albertan packing plant is in Brooks. The wages there are $10/hr versus $20/hr twenty years ago at Gainers. After the plant was established it quickly ran out of people who would work at slaughterhouse for $10/hr. So the company turned to mass immigration.

In the NY Times there is a story of illegal immigrants that have been hired by contractors to clean up New Orleans. The locals are very angry with this development. The question is why would government contractors would feel they are free to hire illegals. Because in America immigration policy is aimed at maximizing are creating a large pool of insecure workers. Otherwise their illegal immigration problem would disappear if the crime of immigration violation would apply equally to employers as with the employees.

Mass immigration is crutch for bad employees. Productivity improvements occurs when more value added is created for each additional input. Attempting to get discounts on labour, raw material and energy is just way of getting productivity increases on the cheap. Technological improvements are more long lasting than any slight temporary saving. Also the business may be saving money through negative externalities as its costs are borne by the wider public.

Note

National contractors in New Orleans preferring to hire illegal immigrants over locals, In Louisiana, Worker Influx Causes Ill Will

I can't link to the Jeffery Simpson oped. The Globe and Mail's website has gotten worse. They have put more and more of their content behind a paid registration screen.

Update: November 6, 2005
Here is a recent story, link in cutout limbo, from the wire service AP about the abuse of illegal workers. A number were employed by subcontractors of a subsidiary of Haliburton. The entire crew were stiffed out of their pay. These "white collar" crimes are fraud, theft, and conspiracy. The local authorities should lay these and RICO charges all the way up the chain from subcontractor to Haliburton. The local law enforcement should actually lay charges and enforce laws but the practice of condoning immigration offenses by employers in the US has become traditional. 

Update 08/04/2012: For greater visibility.

Not Much of Difference Between Nazis and Commiess

(mugshot of Witold Pilecki taken in Auschwitz [1943])

(mugshot of Witold Plecki as taken in from Mokotów prison [1947])

While ambling around in Wikipedia I come across the story of Witold Pilecki, pictured in both sets of mugshots, before from his wiki page. A Polish career officer, he volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, then escaped. After WWII he was killed in Soviet occupied Poland by the Soviets after being "convicted" by Polish Commies.

The reason I see them as the same is because they killed/kill and jailed/jail in similar ways. They had/have the same enemies. They made/make the same enemies. In this case they jailed the same man.

Nazism is totally discredited today. Its only adherents the twisted stupid and the dumb violent. Communism in all its doctrinal and regional varieties is able to attract some good, intelligent, sincere, people who believe in the virtues of Communism. It is the some individual commies personal virtues that blinds us to the sickness of their political philosophy.

It is time that people treat communists with the same mixture of disgust and pity that neo-nazis are treated.

And communists, communist movements, communist terrorist groups, and communist governments  are still killing people today.

"I HATE the Internet" - Hitler

"The nerds have won. We live in their world now. This is reality, so must accept it."

Adolf Hitler,
after the failure of his kick starter project.

Mash up created by Ted Rall
after his kick starter project fails

Here is a another Downfall mashup, an early one apparently, that makes Hitler seem aphasic as random hipsters keep adding nonsensical subtitles.

"I believe someone may have altered your subtitles in an attempt to make you look silly"

General in the Bunker.

I Got Young Ears

Created by Oatmeal

Maybe this why I can't stand the music liked by young people.

Vegan Altrenative History

Here is a new TV ad from IKEA that postulates a world without textiles. The invention of textiles was a momentous one for world history but people were able to live out textiles. What people been unable to live without, especially in the higher latitudes, is leather and fur. As not far back as living memory the Inuit were without fabrics but of course had leather and fur. You could even do a similar video about only using leather and fur except it wouldn't all that weird at all.

For a normal some of the fur/leather non textile replacements are less practicable and expensive. On the other hand many "make works" are actually the default in our world with textiles. I have heard that some committed vegans actually try to live their lives without leather shoes and other animal byproducts. One begin to think that this ad pushes such a vegan agenda.

Recruiting Poster for Dogs

If you ever trapped under a

ton of rubble, I promise to sniff you out.

I promise to be worth ever cent of the $10,00

that it took to train me. 

I promise to ignore all other more fascinating smells

and concentrate on the scent of live humans.

I promise to go about my work with a wagging tail, 

even if my paws get sore.

promise to never five up.

Text from ad above tramscribed because

 it is hard to make out even in larger image. 

From the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation
which did not a copy of their print ad on their website.

In the comic Get Fuzzy Satchel Pooch reveals that his father was a sheep dog. As Satchel, a not very bright dog, explains a sheep dog is a smart dog with an intellectually demanding job. Satchel would probably consider search and rescue dogs in similar high regard. Curiously search and rescue is now the most prestigious job in many modern militaries. It is not a coincidence that Prince William is a search and rescue helicopter pilot. 

Weird Screw Drive Russian Tank

From a link provided by BELFAST 

in the thread United American Flight 817 2.0.

Technobabble - A Definition

At least you are avoiding Technobabble. To me technobabble is like saying "Gretzky has the ball, he shoots, touchdown!"

Coalition in the thread  

Darkest Before Dawn 

(an alt. ST:Voyager series with Riker in command).