Reblogged from huh?
patcastaldo: Vetrans of Country Music dancing?!? I don’t like this company.  You can’t get off their email lists either.

patcastaldo:

Vetrans of Country Music dancing?!?

I don’t like this company.  You can’t get off their email lists either.

13
Reblogged from flow.halostatue
halostatue: chartier: Swine flu paranoia. Yup.  This is basically how the local clinic was last time I was in there.

halostatue:

chartier:

Swine flu paranoia.

Yup.  This is basically how the local clinic was last time I was in there.

Sigh. Ohio.

Let’s just say I’m a bit disappointed with you, Ohio.  After the past two elections I thought maybe you were getting the hang of things.  Vote down Casinos.  Vote in a Governor that isn’t obviously crooked.  Ban Smoking.  You even did a decent job not being racist in the presidential elections last year.  But what happened?  I thought we had an understanding here. Remember 2007?  We said no casinos, right? And here you go changing your constitution to let in casinos and you don’t even get a decent tax rate?!?  Did they really take you in by saying they’d give you 34,000 jobs? Do you actually believe for a minute that those are lasting permanent jobs instead of fluffy pink fairy-like jobs that soon go flitting off to the next state in need of casinos?  Well I guess the respite is over, I’ll go back to a cold ambivalence towards you, Ohio.  Please don’t take it personally, you just don’t know what’s good for you.

Reblogged from huh?
patcastaldo: Radio FTW. I’d like to see a comparison of current pricing for each media type and their typical conversion rates.

patcastaldo:

Radio FTW.

I’d like to see a comparison of current pricing for each media type and their typical conversion rates.

Grandfather Clock (via ben_lachman)

Grandfather Clock (via ben_lachman)

The Meaning of Information Technology
One generation of technology solves the problems of the previous but causes problems of its own. The next generation of technology repeats this story; a story as old as mankind itself. This is the dialectics of history.

Unfortunately a problem, most likely, will not solve itself.

I feel that what social information technology misses is that it is trying, at it’s core, to replace actual, real relationships with technological substitutes. Twitter & Facebook let us follow the minutiae of the lives of others while not actually spending meaningful time simply being with friends and family. In other words, we can consume enough that our relational appetites are sated without actually having to be intimate or honest with people to the point where our façade breaks down and we become human instead of persona.

There hasn’t been a widely adopted information technology† that has made it easier to pay attention to the person you are sitting with.  Or spend more time with a smaller set of people. Or get past the awkwardness of getting to be friends with our neighbors. Maybe there will be in the future, but I look at the past 30 years and see social technology doing the reverse.

†Other technologies, such as windmills, are a different story all together.

254

seoulbrother:

Sometimes @gruber is right.

The Public option.

Let’s take a quick step back here.  Does anyone here think that the insurance industry—medical insurance in particular—doesn’t really provide any real service other than to spread the cost of bad things across their subscriber base.  Yes?  Ok, well this is a fairly socialist concept to begin with (people paying for other’s expenses), but we’ll leave that for now.  Moving on, insurance companies make their money in two ways: 1) denying coverage to as many of their customers as possible (people who should probably get it); and 2) padding their premiums by as much as they can.  Does anyone think that either of these two ways are an honest way of making a profit, let alone risky enough—they take any risk out by having a sufficiently large coverage base—to be considered an investment and deserve a payoff (not that I really support the investment paradigm, but this is a capitalist nation).  No?  Ok, so we have an industry that isn’t taking really providing a value addition and is making it’s money by being as dishonest as possible. On top of that, insurance in general is an industry that takes advantage of peoples’ fears and that just kind of angers me.

This begs the question, if there were a part of a reform legislation that an exceedingly corrupt industry was really strongly against because it provides a competing service that wouldn’t have the same incentive to be corrupt like the rest of industry…

Am I missing something?

Walking home through the leaves.

Walking home through the leaves.

"Corruption and hypocrisy ought not to be inevitable products of democracy, as they undoubtedly are today."
- Mahatma Gandhi