Monthly Archives: March 2008
Get your monsters here! Factory-direct pricing! Step right… Read more
Homosexual researchers at the Pink Tiger Research Institute , working for years to determine what it is that makes people Christian, have isolated the gene which causes the ailment. They hope to use this finding to cure people of their… Read more
How morally advanced are you? Kohlberg’s stages behind the… Read more
Think of this website as an excellent tool for bringing some accountability to the “thin blue line” and their “code of… Read more
37Signals says you should fire the workaholics at your company. I think I might just… Read more
Finally, a content ripper for the… Read more
Precarity In America
While I was living in Europe I found myself involved in quite a few pub discussions about Precarity and its adjunct flexploitation. One thing that popped up in all of those conversations was the question of why there is no discussion of precarity in the United States. I said then, and still believe that there is a discussion in America of precarity, but that discussion is not taking place in the chattering classes, but amongst those who are already in positions of precarity. See MayDay 2006, when hundreds of thousands of Latin-American immigrants marched for visibility. Precarity in America, like in Europe, is divided along class lines, but in America class lines are more closely congruent with racial lines than they are in, for example, the UK. So no, white guys in pubs in the US don’t generally discuss precarity, so we, as white guys in pubs, are not privy to that discussion. The other big difference I see is that while Europeans tend to immediately glom on to the negative… Read more
The Interstate System
The simplest map of the United States… Read more
Beyond Food Miles – A Locavore Apologetics
The locavore movement has been misunderstood, perhaps willfully, by quite a few people. Newspapers characterize it as being simplistically, or militantly, focused on food-miles and ignoring the “fiendishly tricky business” of balancing your carbon emissions on your dinner plate. Never mind that many of the objections raised in the above Guardian article are canards. Environmentally-sound growing practices in Kenya for beans could easily be used in British bean growing, erasing the supposed advantage of the Kenyan produce in the carbon calculus. That isn’t exactly what I see as the point of being a locavore. Being a locavore is about more than just food-miles. It is about community. It’s about the quality of food you get, and who you get it from. When I buy tomatoes from a local farmer, not only do I interact directly with the person who coaxed them out of the ground (something of emotional value to me personally), but I am able to buy thin-skinned, juicy, flavorful tomatoes that… Read more
Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market
I have previously (here, here and here) talked about my aversion to the concept of mortgage debt (Old French “death pledge”). I was sort of grasping at the reasons behind it, the justifications for co-owning a home with a bank just rang hollow to me. Now the folks at eFinanceDirectory have addressed most of these myths head-on from an economics standpoint, and found much as I did intuitively, that buying a house is never, ever, a wise investment. Most interesting is the investigation of the real return on housing. Funniest is the link to Mortgage Lenders at the bottom of the article. Perhaps as people realize now that house values can go down just as easily as up, we can get back to talking about homes as what they are, shelter, and stop spewing misinformation about what they are not,… Read more