I don’t read his blog all that regularly, but perhaps I should… a good post on the impact of our national debt on the China-Taiwan situation today.
Sadly, his post “Gaming Cons” had nothing to do with things like GenCon.
Gas price watch…
(This was a comment I placed on Eschaton, responding to a question about how much people spend on gasoline… thought it would be of interest here, if nothing else for me to get a laugh at in a few years)
My round trip commute is around 90 miles (SF – Cupertino for those who know the Bay Area), and at 30 actual miles per gallon that means I’m paying almost $7 per working day on gas at Bay Area prices ($2.21-$2.39/gallon for regular 87-octane this morning)
I plan to be looking for jobs closer to home at some point.
I’ve got a relatively fuel-efficient small car (Acura RSX), which gets about twice the actual MPG of my old SUV (it got only 15mpg, and it was non-4WD with the smaller V8) and about a 20% improvement over both of my prior small cars (a Chevy Cavalier and a Pontiac Fiero, both 4-cylinder models, both of which got around 25mpg in practice.)
More on Social Security…
The Washington Post on Social Security:
Social Security’s original mission was to protect society’s most vulnerable from poverty. Figuring out who needs protection and how much of it, however, is not so simple.
Via DailyKOS
The big name blogs are just FUNNY today…
From DailyKOS – Friday Night Snark: Focus on Your Own Damn Family
Through his parents, I have been granted access to the following excerpts from a log prepared by an individual I will identify only as “Todd”. Todd’s diary entries consist in large part of a series of reports intended for Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and tells the tragic story of… well, you shall see. I print this here so that others may be warned from Todd’s tragic fate. — Hunter
Go. Read it. Now.
Continue reading “The big name blogs are just FUNNY today…”
Next stop, Judgement Day…
Humanoids With Attitude: Japan Embraces New Generation of Robots
TOKYO — Ms. Saya, a perky receptionist in a smart canary-yellow suit, beamed a smile from behind the “May I Help You?” sign on her desk, offering greetings and answering questions posed by visitors at a local university. But when she failed to welcome a workman who had just walked by, a professor stormed up to Saya and dished out a harsh reprimand.
“You’re so stupid!” said the professor, Hiroshi Kobayashi, towering over her desk.
Cyber-receptionist Ms. Saya greets Hiroshi Kobayashi, her inventor, at the Tokyo University of Science. “She has a temper,” the professor cautions.
“Eh?” she responded, her face wrinkling into a scowl. “I tell you, I am not stupid!”
There are still some good guys left in Washington…
OK, I realize this is not his main point in the piece, but I this bit from a new diary of Senator Feingold’s on MyDD really impresed me:
At a time in the country when we need free and open discourse, when the Senate is rubber stamping a bankruptcy bill which hurts those who have no power, when the country is involved in a war with no timetable for an exit strategy, we must be able to speak our minds without fear of recrimination from the government.
The main point, on the relationship of the blogosphere to the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance act (BCRA) is worth reading too.
Link via the MyDD front page
As if we needed more reason to believe Wal-Mart was evil…
How does the number-one retailer maintain an image of low prices? First, by actually making sure its prices are lower than its competitors, at least on key items. These items are called “price-sensitive” items in the industry, and it is commonly believed that the average consumer knows the “going price” of fewer than 100 items. These tend to be commodities that are purchased frequently.
A mid-size Wal-Mart supercenter may offer for sale 100,000 separate items, or stock-keeping units (skus). Wal-Mart and other major retailers believe that the general public knows the going price of only 1 to 2 percent of these items. Therefore, each Wal-Mart store shops for the prices of only about 1,500 items in their competitors’ stores. If it is ever found that a competitor has a lower price on one of these items than Wal-Mart, the store manager will immediately lower his or her price to be the lowest in the area.Price-sensitive merchandise is displayed in prominent places such as the kiosk at the entrance to the store, as well as on end caps, in dump bins, and in gondolas down the main aisles. Consequently, when Wal-Mart customers see the items of which they know the price, the ones always priced lower in Wal-Mart, they start assuming that everything else is also priced lower than at competing stores. This assumption is simply not true.
My barber has offered me a simple example. He sells a nonbreakable pocket comb for 25 cents that he procures from his vendor for eight cents. Wal-Mart sells a lower-quality comb for 98 cents, and one would assume that Wal-Mart pays less for it than the barber does. People keep buying Wal-Mart combs, however, because the average person does not know the going price of a pocket comb, and it is automatically assumed that the Wal-Mart price is the lowest.
Via MyDD
Who said politics isn’t sexy?
The gorgeous ladies of lebanon,” at “Stop the Bleating”.
Via a DBA email message, of course.
Downtime and administrivia…
Web server was down from 10PM last night to 5PM or so today. Mea cupla, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.
Also, in case regular readers may not have noticed, SFChat.org no longer points directly here, and instead has a brief directory and the note:
If you’ve come looking for Nate’s Blog, the correct address is https://www.cubiclehermit.com/.
Feel free to click on either of these links to go there now. There are some hacks to enable permalinks to continue working, but these (and this message) will be going away. The old “official” address (http://www.sfchat.org/wordpress/) is now being redirected to the correct one, and while this redirection is permanent you are encouraged to update any links or bookmarks.
I’ll maintain the links as long as it’s practical to do so, but please update your bookmarks/favorites. If and when I ever get enough readers that it gets impractical to keep hosting this on a DSL line, I’ll probably have to make some compromises and the links may not remain practical.
“Cheese it, the fuzz!”
Whatever happened to Joe Berger? OK, that question won’t mean much to those who aren’t familiar with my fraternity, but this week the Weekly World News brings you “HOW TO TELL IF YOUR PROSTITUTE IS AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL (all caps theirs.)
A sample, out of their list of ten:
2. Out-of-date lingo — Alien prostitutes try to fit in by using streetwalker slang — but often use outdated terms. A hooker who sees a police car and whispers, “Cheese it, the fuzz!” likely hails from deep space.
Funky six-degrees thing
The alumni association at Dartmouth College, where I attended as an undergrad, has set up a web application called “incircle” which lets alumni list their friends and then look up profiles, and see who their friends’ friends are. It’s interesting, as is the fact that it uses full middle names – it’s sort of odd seeing them for a lot of people who I knew in college but didn’t know their middle names.
In any case, if you’ve found my blog via the Dartmouth listings, hello and welcome and sorry that posts are so sporadic – we’re in a big deadline at work, and I just have not had the time to procrastinate that I usually do.
Right wing loons at it again…
First Spongebob, now Shrek?
Instead of Communists under every bed, it’s some “secret queer agenda” that’s frightening these guys. Fortunately, the country is not so easily frightened as it once was.