Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics Blog writes:
Have You Ever Noticed that people who go around saying “I’m a perfectionist” never are, while people who actually are perfectionists never go around saying it?
I have.
From the Political Compass FAQ:
When are you guys gonna learn to spell ?
This grievance comes from pernikety people who have leapt into attack without checking the FAQs ..and without even the remotest realisation that British and American words are sometimes spelt differently. They should have travelled more! We’ve been at the centre of some rancour, but we’re not going to take offence or harbour any grievances. The catalogue of their ill-informed certainties won’t colour this organisation’s programme. It’s a grey area anyway. And we don’t want to labour the point. Except to add that most of these cavillous correspondents seem to feel that they have a licence or a blank cheque for a level of rudeness that more civilised souls wouldn’t have dreamt of. In response, we nevertheless practise polite dialogue, enabling them to recognise that the error is entirely their own. (We manoeuvre them towards the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, which is also an encyclopaedia.) This leaves them quite defenceless, which may account for the fact that these less than honourable individuals virtually never apologise.
(Firefox’s spell checker flagged 24 words as I posted this)
I don’t much like quoting myself, as it seems immodest — but in this particular case I like what I wrote on another site well enough that I’ll violate that principle.
Marco and I enjoy political discussion, and on occasions that we end up on opposite sides we generate some good debate. There’s lots of good stuff in this thread (and in many others on his blog; I recommend subscribing). Here’s part of what I just posted:
[Voters] are not so much Republicans/Democrats as voters who have a personal laundry list of issues, each with a position and a priority. Since your voting options are extremely limited (two viable options at best), you choose the one who you hope will serve your interests best.
…
Many (most?) people do not always consider current [political party] policies when placing their votes — they just see the party name, think “they’ve felt the way I do in the past; they probably still do”, and mark their ballot. The parties can exploit this by shifting their actual behavior one way or another to acquire additional voters / influence while still (undeservedly) retaining their core.
I’ll go on to add that this condition is far worse in a lot of other parts of the world than it is in the U.S. or Canada. Latin America seems to be particularly bad. Laura has described Costa Rican voters as voting strictly for their “chosen” party over multiple generations (i.e.: your family votes for party X so you do too). Paraguay just ended a 61-year reign; Mexico had the same party in power for over 70 years. These happen in the context of war, poverty, and famine. At least in the U.S. you can be sure that bad economic times mean a power shift.
As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane.
From Dilbert Blog.
I’m trying to think of counterexamples and thusfar can’t. Perhaps some of my more movie-centric friends can find an example.
Update: Haha, one of Adams’ posters points out that that should be directly correlated, not inversely correlated. -1 to Adams for writing it and -1 to me for posting it.
The story is interesting, but the real gold is in the Fark headline:
China surpasses the US as the world’s top carbon producer, making the problem real to conservatives and no longer interesting to liberals
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
Paraphrased from this Slashdot Quote in How Microsoft Plans To Get Its Groove Back With Win7.
This Slashdot post is very much in the same vein as my earlier blog post on the size of humanity relative to the size of the earth. Here’s the jist:
If you moved every single person in the world to the land area within Texas, we’d have less population density than New York City.
The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day
We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US
Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.
We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn’t need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.
The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.
(The poster provides links for all of these claims; see the post for URLs. They’re mostly raw factual/wikipedia links with one Vegan Society link to support the food production claim).
Text-based interfaces have proven that most users can’t read.
Graphic interfaces have proven that most users can’t understand abstractions.
Mind reading interfaces will prove that most users can’t think.
From A New Paradigm For Web Browsing on Slashdot. Still need an original source.
“Sometimes you just need to believe in the power of words: cheap, cheap words.”
Because the French have no word in their language for entrepreneur, they are not capable of understanding the American concept of laissez-faire.
By paiute on French Fine Amazon For Free Shipping on Slashdot.