There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Weekend Linkee-poo shakes its puny fists at an uncaring sky

Yea, this won't keep you up late at night. Now for an even worse thought, image this posted in the various ethnic communities.

Jim Hines with depression, anxiety and creativity. Yea, that also pretty well tracks to my own experience.

What would happen if you dropped a tungsten countertop into the sun? Because SCIENCE! Anyway, at the end of that XKCD what if piece he mentions that for health safety you should get normal granite countertops. I would recommend a different material than granite. (Pointed to by Dan)

Skydiver nearly hit by meteor gets what is possibly the first ever images of a meteor in its dark flight phase. (Grokked from Dan)

Steven Seagal thinks Putin is a great leader and may consider moving to Russia. The friends you keep. This really isn't news, except many conservatives have been spinning the same line. There is a population that reacts strongly to a strong handed "leader". There are many people who would rather have kings than democracy. And then there are people who want to be submissive in the face of domination. And those people seem to be inordinately clustered on the conservative spectrum. (Grokked from Matt Staggs)

The Good Judgement Project. Taking citizens and seeing if they can be better predictors than our "experts" staffing the country's intelligence agencies. If you want to know what "spooks" really do, it's just as humdrum as this is. "First, if you want people to get better at making predictions, you need to keep score of how accurate their predictions turn out to be, so they have concrete feedback." There's so much in there I could discuss (coughFoxNewscough). Also a little on "the wisdom of crowds" which is always an interesting subject. "What's so challenging about all of this is the idea that you can get very accurate predictions about geopolitical events without access to secret information. In addition, access to classified information doesn't automatically and necessarily give you an edge over a smart group of average citizens doing Google searches from their kitchen tables."

How the 1 percent has it's own 10 percent. While the article likes to say that we shouldn't vilify all of the 1%, because it's only 10% of that 1% that is really seeing their wealth grow, I'd point out that the 10% keeps cycling through the 1% and even the laggardly 1% still have gathered more wealth to themselves (and fought to keep it there) than most of the rest of the country. So, no. I don't buy it. What this shows, as I've stated before, is that there is always someone with more money. (Grokked from Matt Staggs)

And with more attention to the nuances of the top, we're also getting a more nuanced picture of the bottom. As many of us have know, being poor doesn't always mean living below the poverty line (that line is set artificially low, BTW).

Why we hate corporations (a pie chart). (Grokked from Jay Lake)

The career reboot. Apparently being older and working as unpaid interns isn't all that unusual anymore. Pretty much what I've been doing. It beats being long term unemployed.

The basic human impulses that lead us astray when it comes to our nest eggs. A little on retirement strategy.

Hobby Lobby, after arguing before the Supreme Court about how as a corporation they should be allowed the religious exemption to not cover birth control in their corporate healthcare policies now finds out their retirement plans including investing in those same companies that make birth control. While a lot of people are pointing fingers and saying "hypocrisy", I don't think so. What I think is this shows how incredibly hard it will be for these companies to claim and enforces their religious decrees. After all, who reads the full prospectus? Of course there are investment companies that screen those out. This is just egg on their faces which I'm sure they will now quickly change the company that handles their 401(k) plans. This isn't like the Catholic companies that screamed bloody murder only to discover the diocese office workers health plans that they've had for year already covered birth control. (Grokked from John Scalzi)

Remember that whole, "don't let the government get between your doctor and you" thing? Well, not only do insurance companies get between your doctor and you already, so do the large health care conglomerates. Yep, business directives will drive your doctor's decisions interfering with their judgement and practice. And this has been going on for a long time. (Grokked from Matt Staggs)

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