I have a new policy. Every time I read another article like this, I drop $10 in my Buy CDs From Independent Artists fund. When I get enough in there so shipping would be a small enough fraction of the price, I buy the CDs.

I think I'm up to $30, with Leslie Fish or Kenny Klein next in line.

(Klein just gave me permission to noncommercially circulate a filk of one of his songs, so he gets extra bonus points).

The fact that the ANC hasn't gotten off the terrorist watch list is not surprising or even particularly egregious, considering other government inefficiencies. The injustice is that they were on it to begin with.

My favorite was the steering wheel on the sandbox. "Lots of imagination required," it was subtitled, but that's the point. As a kid I created whole landscapes out of sand and grass, and explored them with all the excitement of Dr. Livingstone. I pity those who never had to exercise their imaginations by playing with nothing in particular.

Oregon is bad
Stop if it you can
Here it comes
Here it comes
Now it's after you
Flee to someplace new...

Xopher,
The designer can donate that money, once he's relieved the buyers of it, just as well as the buyers could. Buying this sort of thing does not constitute wealth destruction.

Could it not also be argued that the Oregon government is composed of employees of the People, and copyright is vested in the employer as it would for a private company? It seems to me that this is like someone telling his boss that the quarterly sales report is copyrighted and the boss can't see it.

I like Billy, Don't Be a Hero.

It's part of a totally overdone genre (the teenage/young person death song), but c'mon, it's way better than "Tell Laura I Love Her." At least on the same level as "Teen Angel."

Lure of the forbidden. The more feminists, and society, vilify this game, the more it will become an escapist fantasy and thus popular.

I've seen a picture of the sign. All it said was "Mike's Lemonade."

This time, I have no sympathy. Calling the cops on a masked man with a running chainsaw is not paranoia. Going around with a mask and running chainsaw is being a dumbass.

I'm just surprised the authorities came. It's not like he had a camera or anything.

The appropriate response is for every citizen to call in 10-100 times a day reporting someone with a camera, or loitering, or with a cell phone (which might have a camera), or...you get the idea.

WTF is with the trolls on this piece? It doesn't even have an ideological bent that could attract members of the detracted party.

Jack,
AFAIK the cigarettes wouldn't be kosher, but there's nothing wrong with pig-derived non-food products. Strict orthodox people wouldn't carry food in pig-derived plastic bags, or store it in pig-derived containers, though, I'd imagine.

Yeah, I think the working girls are likely to be fairly unrepresentative of the overall population.

Xopher,
People don't have just one moral objection to these things. One can object to cruel treatment of animals, cannibalism, and environmental degredation all at once.

Obama supporters don't mind tough questions about policy. Rip into him about how he'll pay for health care, about details on getting out of Iraq, about his plans for China, about how he'll fix the subprime crisis...but not about bullsh*t like Ayers.

If you can't tell the difference between a meaningless gotcha question and a tough policy question, you're a fool.

For the record, the Tuzla question to Hillary was unfair too.

Also, he doesn't understand the concept of variance.

Men may very well be, on average, 5 IQ points higher (or lower) than women, but he's definitely a standard deviation or two below either average.

What Takuan said.

Also, because actually nuking countries we dislike would bring us below whatever level we (rightly or not) claim that they're on.

The government is the representatives of the people. They are our employees. This is like the regional manager asking his sales staff for a copy of the annual report, and being told they've copyrighted it and he has to pay to see it.

We, the people, have the copyright, as legislators are not elected on a work-for-hire basis.

When I heard about it, I thought it sounded too good to be true.

Glad to be confirmed.

#6,
Everyone knows it, but I didn't think it would be terribly resonant with the population of another country. I'd think they would see it as an American thing, or a reference to the USA, or something.

I think it's interesting that a British graffitti artist, looking for a resonant phrase, riffed off of an American saying.

Or is "One Nation, Under X" also commonly used in Britain?

And yet, this is not /b/, and I for one have not seen this video, and it amuses me.

Tommy,
Eggplant. It cooks like meat. Grill it, fry it, broil it.

I'm no vegan, but I do love me eggplant/potato/onion/pepper, all vegetables that can be cooked like meat.

This is why I love New York. You can do that. I was 10 when I started going around by myself.

They're paying for cachet as well as water, which makes them less moronic than the buyers of Evian et al, who are just buying water.

MMBB,
Good point. Better if he sank all the balls without knocking over any of the dominos.

Would be nice for them to put it on a CD and mail it to him, in case of further system changes.

Shameless self-promotion"

This may be a stupid question, but aren't algae blooms a huge problem in parts of the world? Is that the same kind of algae that this uses? And can it be harvested and thus removed from where it's a problem, and used for this beneficial purpose?

The Olympics are an utter farce, corrupt through and through, from the lowliest doping athlete to the highest bribe-taking official. They don't benefit the host country or showcase true athletics, and are merely political grandstanding and profitmaking.

The Chinese government deserves them. They should be held every 4 years in Beijing.

CSBMonkey,
The phenomenon you describe is what's known as "Disapproval lawmaking." It actually has nothing to do with preventing the act. It comes from the view that the laws should reflect morality--if it's bad, it should be banned. Whether the laws happen to reduce the incidence of the bad act is immaterial, and any evidence that it they don't is discarded by the law's proponents as irrelevant.

See the War on Drugs, where even those who recognize that it hasn't stemmed drug use defend the current policies because drugs are baaad, m'kay?

Put it on the outside of your door. Only smart people can visit you:)

That doesn't change the fact that fingerprints and biometrics are useless as secure identification devices.

Basilizk,
Imagine if your bank PIN and debit card # could never be changed. If it was compromised, for the rest of your life anyone who wanted to could withdraw money from your account, and could not be stopped by any means at all.

That's what fingerprint identification would do. The great thing about passwords is they can be changed if compromised. Biometrics can't.

This is more about practical security than civil liberties--biometric-based security will be impossible to fix once compromised, and is thus utterly useless.

Cory,
You're right. This is what I call "benefit-benefit analyis," looking at what's to be gained without taking note of reaction effects and opportunity cost.

"If we foil just one terrorist attack through this, then it will have been worth it." Well, if the only bad thing that could ever happen is the destruction of this one spot, yes.

Where did the idea that it was Anonymous come from? This looks to me like the work of anonymous instead--that is, a few bored asshats rather than a repeat-action flash mob.

What do the birthdays signify? Are they dates of independence?

Takuan,
I agree with you on -how- I'd like to go, but I would like to delay going in any event.

This is the relevant webcomic, anyhow.

#52: If there's nothing that can be done about that, this country is done.

Seriously absurd. I have no words.

Does anyone have theories as to why "m" and "n" are the most worn? Is there something about medicine that makes them more common than in ordinary English?

Antinous,
I was going to post what you did in #19. I don't think he would have lathed the pennies down--for that amount of effort, stealing $4.50 wouldn't be worth it at all. So this case is odd to say the least.

This is another instance where the perfect is the enemy of the good. Because this strip club exists, more people will be vegans than if it didn't exist. Vegan feminists must decide which movement they favor more, but it's perfectly legitimate for Johnny Diablo to have the priorities he does.

#19,
I forget where I heard the term. It's used by some parts of the LGBT community and/or other communities that engage in nontraditional sex in one way or another. I picked it up from some interaction I had with them somewhere. I'm sorry I can't give more details.

I still don't understand why squids would reproduce this way.

#5,
Your personal animus toward liquor stores is not universal. This particular store sounds fairly local, and interested--it entered into competitive bidding with other businesses for this.

The perfect is the enemy of the good--as a result of this, SF will use slightly less electricity. That's good. You can't demand that a bunch of people you don't know change their priorities to solve a problem that you, and not they, see more crucial than the problem they've set out to solve.

It would have been nice to get more information from the article: Why do squids reproduce by the male sticking his penis into the female's arms? What possible evolutionary advantage could that have over PIV or eggs?

I'm not surprised that Israel gets more attention than India, nor, were I Indian, would I be jealous. News media attention to foreign countries is based on crises, not population, and the only way India could reasonably catch up would be in, say, another Pakistan crisis over Kashmir.

Happy, and bored, be they who don't live in interesting times.

62,
It's not that gender makes no difference. It's that, even if mother+father, traditional-gender households are -better-, other household arrangements are -good- and the transaction costs of forcing everyone into the -better- arrangements are higher than the benefits derived thereof.

Too many people ignore transaction costs in their social planning. Don't be one of them.

Is there some reason why adoption wasn't considered? I don't understand people's insistence on reproducing their own DNA, even in the face of hundreds of good reasons not to, when we're all virtually identical anyway.

Because the fact that you don't understand it puts you in a very small minority. Even most people who don't want their own genetic kids understand why the large majority does.

I think this says a lot more about zero-tolerance policies, mandatory sentences, and other laws that remove agency from their human enforcers than it does about techno-robots.

"I can't do anything about it, it's regulations" ultimately will produce that kind of future without any technology at all.

I'm reminded of The Proteus Operation, by James T. Hogan. Not the best time travel story, but has some real neat ideas.

Without giving too much away, it's the story of one side of a war between two alternate futures, fought during World War II, to decide which one will be the real future. The points of departure all relate to different things happening with the Nazis.

Something tells me that I wouldn't like to stand in front of pukebazooka when (s)he fires.

Also, a knowledge economy is great, if you have a uniformly well-educated populace. We have a lot of people who aren't educated to the point of being able to take advantage of that. Rather than condemn them to a life of menial work, we can have an economy that produces honorable jobs for people who work with their hands.

Zuzu,
We have to get a positive trade balance. That means exporting more stuff, or cutting back on imports. The latter would involve a massive reduction in standard of living, or making more stuff that we use within our borders. The former also involves making more stuff within our borders.

It goes without saying that the more you rely on imports, the more you're hurt by a weak currency, so relying less on imports is the way to mitigate the harm of the dollar's fall. Since most of what we buy and use, and could least easily do without, are manufactured products, that's a good place to start.

No wind blows everyone ill--someone somewhere will benefit from a weak currency. We have to make sure that someone is in the USA, so the benefits accrue to US citizens. Our current economic structure is entirely misallocated to take advantage of a weak currency, and I say that needs to change. When life hands you lemons, you can't make lemonade without sugar and a pitcher, and we've spent years ensuring we have neither.

On a less economic level, the world will benefit from cleaner manufacturing practices, which will not happen as long as stuff is being made in countries with abysmal environmental records like China. If we make stuff here, we'll figure out how to make stuff cleaner, and the whole world will benefit.

The weak dollar is great for US exports...which would be nice if we, you know, still had any. Also, if we were still making things within our borders, the weak dollar would do less to hurt our purchasing power.

The only good result of this crisis will be the return of the manufacturing economy, which, if it was still there, would have prevented the crisis in the first place.

First thing I thought of was This

(Randy Johnson hits a seagull with a pitch)

Oh bah! The debate about alternative energy should not be so closely focused on global warming/climate change.

There are three sufficient reasons to advocate renewable, carbon-neutral tech.

1) Global climate change. If that's not convincing for whatever reason,
2) Energy security. I'd rather trust my apartment's heating and computer power to the Texans, North Dakotans, and Arizonans than the Saudis, Iranians, and Sudanese. If that's not convincing,
3) Renewability. We're running out of the fossil fuels. Even if we don't completely run out, prices will go up, which will suck for the economy unless we decouple ourselves.

There's also (4), the fact that fossil fuels produce nasty-smelling byproducts. Even if 1-3 were not true, there's still smog, acid rain, and all the pre-1973 factors.

Even if I was a global warming skeptic, I'd still support alternative energy.

It's an HK-47!

Heh...asian shit ant.

Personally, I'd go for dishwater. There's -something- in it, it's clearly -not- water, whatever's in it -doesn't- taste good, but it's unclear exactly -what- it is.

Tankdoc,
Blame the people who divided the former Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. It's a nice thought that national borders might be drawn in a way that encompasses everyone of that nation, but politics just doesn't work that way. I'm not up on the detailed history of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1918, but Albania probably rebelled too early or too late, while Serbia rebelled at the right time and had better allies. (For a while the whole area was going to be part of Bulgaria or Greece, depending on which Great Power you talked to, as the heart of a new Byzantine Empire).