Friday, March 12th, 2010
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Some American (I think?) living in Japan, working for a video game company(ies), going completely insane from having had to live there for so long. It’s long, wordy, dense, interminable and I just can’t stop reading it. It’s fascinating getting an outsider’s insider’s look at a culture.
At first, Japan’s quirkiness amused him, but the longer he’s studied it, the madder it’s driven him.
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Is fucked.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I want to end this post with no less than 2000 words.
Now think about how you haven’t heard anyone sounding any alarm bells about this. Think back to the residential mortgage crises. Note that where the chart says 160,000,000 – that’s in thousands, so it’s really 160 billion. Notice how much of the second chart is in “nonaccrual status” – i.e. they’s stopped payin that shit. A good $100 billion of the $140 billion total. And this is before anyone’s heard about it. Do you remember when hearing about the subprime implosion, how big those numbers started out when they were first reported.
These charts are the business equivalent of a bucket of shit heading straight for an industrial 10,000 RPM turbofan. And remember, when they get on TV and assure us that the mess is “contained,” the last mess that they assured us was contained.
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
The excellent article on infranetlab linked above is mainly about garbage islands created to solve inhabited islands’ garbage problems, but it has a little section on the Pacific Garbage Gyres. That’s right, there’s now two, they’re growing at a pace of 10x every decade, and combined they have a greater area than the continental United States now.
Holy. Fuck.
That’s a big ball of garbage.
So: a factory ship that collects, recycles and builds new objects out of the junk it scoops up from the ocean? Solar power, pescatarian crew, maybe some solar stills to collect water to run greenhouses? Or maybe totally remote operated, crewed by robots.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know one thing: if we turn the entire planetary ocean into a big wash of garbage, we will probably not long survive it.
edit: here’s my first story and second on the gyre, which includes a bunch of links and a TED talk.
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
In this NYT article, there is a photo, and then this caption:
A memorial for the 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November. It was the deadliest domestic terrorism attack of the year.
This article is actually about how, for the most part, “terrorist” activity in the US last year was disorganized, and, in part, armed by dud weaponry supplied by FBI informants. Later in the article, there’s this:
Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June.
So why the scary caption on the photo? It was the deadliest attack by 90+%.
The Internet continues to prove a powerful tool for radicalization, as long-distance propagandists stir the ire of young Muslims about American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, but for the most part, these retards on the internet are just retards on the internet, and nothing but bitching will come of it as they sip their lattes. Just remember they are young, and young people are dumb. They will make mistakes (one of them becoming the terrorist in the first place, i suppose) but I bet your chances of dying from non-al qaeda associated violence in your own home is higher than dying from al qaeda related violence anywhere in the world.
