December 2011
40 posts
“The tautological emptiness of a Master’s Wisdom is exemplified in the...”
– weird to see Zizek quoted on Less Wrong!
not a typo
losel (n.): a worthless person
“A Florida animal sanctuary said Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick in the Tarzan...”
– ?!?!?!?
everyone is a groupuscule: Ineffectively Corrupt →
I see this in lobbying all the time. Because, I am a soulless technician who will faithfully advise anyone and everyone who asks I see the back rooms of opposing lobbyists all the time.
Here at the state level I can safely say that virtually no one has any idea what they are doing. That is, for…
Goddammit, I was going to post this. Fucking Christmas. I’m off my game.
it's a talent
me: it sucks to be able to experience stress and boredom at the same time
me: you'd think they'd kind of be mutually exclusive
cashflowz: god you are so right
cashflowz: can you write a book?
cashflowz: I feel like you are very good at expressing all these negative things
Wife: Let's get some tea.
Me: But I want to stop having caffeine. And stop eating sugar and wheat again. And not have alcohol anymore. I'll just be my real self all the time!
Wife: Uggghhhhhhhh.
so bored
cashflowz: I am literally looking up amazon SKUs and comparing them to lowe's SKUs and seeing which products are cheaper
cashflowz: I AM SO BORED I WANT TO DIE
me: that's kind of cool, though!
me: "granular"
me: think of how bored i must be
cashflowz: robots should do this
me: if that sounds cool to me
cashflowz: you must be SO bored
“Instead of housing precocious well-to-do children with names like Finnegan and...”
– Curbed
“Peter Damian [1000-1072 A.D.] justified his letter to the pope attacking...”
– Eugene Rice in an GLBTQ encylopedia article article about homosexuality in the Middle Ages. You have to admit — those priests were pretty clever! See also munchkining.
soon almost everyone will feel this way
lol, this dude sucks — I’ve achieved pretty much the same results but with like 25% less time spent!
I’ve spent the last two years working nearly 80 hours per week in graduate school. My work time is split between writing computer code, compiling results into summaries, charts, and papers, and doing lots of reading for research and for software development skill building.
I can give...
How is Kay Jewelers allowed to have a commercial touting its “Leo” diamond (I hate that I even know the name) as “the first diamond ever certified to be visibly brighter,” full stop? “The first diamond ever certified to be visibly brighter.” End of sentence. Brighter than what?! The words are meaningless!
That’s not even false advertising —...
I was explaining the term “pons asinorum” to the wife. The relevant Wikipedia page has some crazily off-style-guide prose!
Whatever its origin, the term is also used as a metaphor for a problem or challenge which will separate the sure of mind from the simple, the fleet thinker from the slow, the determined from the dallier…
“So as you all know, I was in New York last week, and it was a really interesting...”
– Jared Dillian, The Daily Dirtnap
“This prologue miniseries is by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness. And let’s be blunt...”
– Paul O’Brien. It’s probably not accurate to say that his reviews are enjoyable enough to read even if you don’t care about the X-Men, but…wouldn’t it be nice if that were true?
“I understand that debates are not conducted in front of perfectly rational...”
– EY
seedz:
keyholez:
seedz reblogged a post from The Economist that began:
GENE MARKS’S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined “If I Was a Poor Black Kid”, didn’t actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who’ve pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes’s Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the title. The post...
“Glass-Steagall is a divine right for investment bankers to make a lot of profit....”
– Charles Sanford, via some guy.
SOCIAL NETWORKING!
gothamspoilers:
seedz reblogged a post from The Economist that began:
GENE MARKS’S blog post on Forbes.com, ostentatiously headlined “If I Was a Poor Black Kid”, didn’t actually offend me as much as it did many of the plethora of bloggers who’ve pilloried it over the past few days. As Forbes’s Kashmir Hill later posted, most of the vitriol seemed to be responding to the...
“If your body’s worth anything when you’re done with it, you should...”
– Louis C.K. (well worth your $5!)
Judy gets around
“Judy Is a Punk” (the Ramones)
“Judy Is a Dick Slap” (Belle & Sebastian)
“Judy Is Your Viet Nam” (They Might Be Giants”
shouldn't someone be out there claiming victory?
Bank of America: cutting 40,000 jobs
Morgan Stanley: cutting 1,600 jobs
Citigroup: cutting 4,500 jobs
Credit Suisse: cutting 1,500 jobs
Goldman Sachs: cutting 1,000 jobs
You can add UBS, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, and everyone else to the list too, but I got bored of googling the numbers. And note that, with the exception of Bank of America, these are mainly trader/investment-banker jobs, not...
Read this beautiful vintage Eliezer piece from... →
My little brother, Yehuda Nattan Yudkowsky, is dead.
He died November 1st. His body was found without identification. The family found out on November 4th. I spent a week and a half with my family in Chicago, and am now back in Atlanta. I’ve been putting off telling my friends, because it’s such a hard thing to say.
I used to say: “I have four living grandparents and I intend...
“Mr Carey, who until September was head of PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America...”
– FT
“I don’t believe in nuance. It’s for pussies.”
– my wife, the English teacher
“It seems to me that modern humanity manages to put forth very little in the way...”
– EY
“An “American tradition” is anything that happened to a baby boomer...”
– Randall Munroe
this combines a lot of my interests
Via Seth Roberts:
The soaring popularity of a fat-rich fad diet has depleted stocks of butter in Norway creating a looming Christmas culinary crisis.
Norwegians have eaten up the country’s entire stockpile of butter, partly as the result of a “low-carb” diet sweeping the Nordic nation which emphasizes a higher intake of fats.
“Sales all of a sudden just soared, 20...
somehow, although much later
From Wikipedia’s summary of the Aimee Mann album The Forgotten Arm:
The album details, in a series of vignettes, the story of John, a Vietnam vet and boxer, and his “kind of white trash” girlfriend Caroline, who meet at the Virginia state fair in the 1970s, where John is boxing an exhibition round. They get the idea that they can escape their problems by running off together...
great minds
me: i think i'm going to kill myself later tonight
me: that would be sweet
cashflowz: OH MY GOD I WAS THINKING THAT TOO
I call dibs on the name
Gowanus Capital Partners.
weird (?) how common this sentiment is
cashflowz: I want the market to collapse
cashflowz: is that bad?
me: ha
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive
me: everyone wants that
cashflowz: yeah I want everything to blow up x100000
The Way We Live Now, internet/finance edition
Today S&P threatened to downgrade all the eurozone countries (even Finland!) because, you know, there are problems there and stuff (thanks for the “heads up,” guys!). For maximum shadiness, this news was leaked to the media like a zillion times before the actual announcement came out, so circa 4 pm today everyone was waiting irritably for the expected press release/rationale...
“And still you will be all the world to me,” he continued, with his arm...”
– Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now. Even stranger — she’s actually his cousin!
“He was a fat, greasy man, good-looking in a certain degree, about fifty, with...”
– Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now. This description took a lot of unexpected turns.
“It may be well doubted whether upon the whole the telegraph has not added more...”
– Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
my better half has not gotten onto the...
Wife: Is Barack gonna lose?
Me: Probably.
Wife: Really?
Me: I don't know, maybe not. But it can't be much better than a coin flip.
Wife: But...
Me: Everyone will tell you the same.
Wife: [Pause.] Who will tell me different?