Monthly Archives: July 2014

Lots of Oddities, Some Real Stupidity, A Bit of Humor, and the Blackest Black

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This entry is part 62 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Apparently, the push yesterday to let the FCC know how we think they should rule on Net Neutrality once again crashed their website. So much so that at least one of the groups that was facilitating the electronic submissions just up and printed out the messages that didn’t get through and hand delivered them so they’d be in by the comment deadline.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s enough volume of ordinary people and money from big organizations (like Google) to swing this the right way.

I’m not holding my breath. I’m not even all that optimistic. But at least I can see there’s a chance.

Guess we’ll see soon enough.

Everyone keep your fingers and things crossed.

Now, on with the feed…

Awesomecon Flashback, Modified Mario, Elegance, Ramone-less, and Various Other Bits of Stuff from the Weekend

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This entry is part 61 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The weekend wasn’t anywhere near as productive as it should have been.

Sure, I finished off another canceled series or two from my Hulu queue and finally got around to a couple of movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years. Even read things that weren’t being displayed on a screen (I think we call them “books”). But there was more I probably should have done.

There’s a big difference between “should” and “could”, though. I don’t think I legitimately could have been much more productive. I needed the break, as seems to be the case often. Life in the “regular” world by a “normal” schedule just grinds me down more now than it ever has before.

I know there are reasons for that. I’m working through them as best I can. But, well, it’s slow going.

So, instead of being as productive as I “should” be, I do what I can when I can and learn to live with that.

But, there were still a lot of fun links to be had over the past four days.

Here’s hoping you enjoy them.

 

Tesla Awesomeness, Classic American Musicals, Good Superhero News, and Homestar

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I was moderately successful in the music theme I wanted to have going today. I didn’t get to quite as many posts about it as I’d wanted, but that was mostly due to not having time to hunt through my feed for more interesting stuff to put between the clips.

I’d sure like to know what’s generating all the heat in this apartment. It’s near 80 degrees in here… it’s in the mid-60s outside… and the A/C (which was on because it was raining outside, which kind of precludes leaving the windows open) can’t even keep up. The oven’s off. Everything else generates negligible amounts of heat (definitely not enough to warm up the room this much–it wasn’t happening in the fall or winter).

Pretty sure that leaves the HVAC unit itself as what’s generating more heat than it can handle.

That’s just… problematic.

Guess I’ll have to put in a call about that sometime soon. Maybe next week when the summer weather plays hide-and-seek with us.

Anyway, there’s a bunch of music in the feed… go enjoy it.

Science, Aliens, Sexism, Stupid Application of the Law, and Buzz Aldrin

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This entry is part 60 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I’ve been fiddling with websites all day–first at the day job and then after I got home.

But, pretty much every site I have my fingers in is up to date now. So, that’s good.

Sadly, this is the only one of my own sites that gets regular content these days. (And, really, calling some of this intro text “content” is really a stretch… and the FB feed reposting doesn’t count at all.)

I have a plan for tomorrow’s feed… I should have pre-loaded everything, but I haven’t. So I’m just going to be winging it tomorrow between crunching through on projects. Y’know, just like normally do. But it’ll be more frustrating, because I do have a plan I’d like to carry out.

Ah, well, my own fault for not budgeting time better.

Onward with today’s (surprisingly short) feed… (I must have really been busy)…

Piercing the Corporate Veil, A Study in Bayhem, Bubbles, Box of Pox, and Suddenly Poor

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This entry is part 59 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case creep and speculation continue.

Now there’s some rumblings among some who are supposedly more law-savvy than I am about this close bond between a corporation’s “religion” and the religion of the people who run it may be an exploitable tear in the corporate veil that protects those who run a corporation from certain financial and legal issues.

If that’s true, then that may be a semi-good thing to come from all of this.

But I’m not sure how that would all play out. It very well may end up being worse all around for everyone.

Of course, it may not matter all that much if the economy as a whole–on a global scale–pops all at once.

There are apparently some rumblings (again, from people who know a lot more about the issue at hand than I do) about how over-valued a lot of things out there in the financial and investment world are. And how little corporations (and actual people with lots of money) are investing in things. Real estate, stocks, bonds, each other… few are seeing a chance for a good return on their investment so they’re just holding on to their money.

And while that’s going on, the various central banks of various nations are, in one way or another, pumping more money into the economy… which is, of course, trickling up into these stockpiles. Because (and the article in today’s stream doesn’t touch on this idea, but it’s a pretty glaring omission) the vast majority of people don’t have investments like what they’re talking about, so all that money can only trickle up to the businesses that own and produce what the people at street level are buying.

With that money “stuck” in the cycle, it seems it’s leaving a bit of a vacuum for those who need it most while, yet again, the rich get richer. But if and when this massive series of bubbles pop, everyone’s going to lose big as everything plummets in value–including those vast storehouses of money.

Kind of terrifying.

About as terrifying as hearing that the CDC misplaced a box of smallpox sometime in the 50s. It’s okay, though… they found it. Sitting in a store room in a lab that’s been used by the FDA for the past 40 or so years.

That just leaves me wondering what the heck else has been misplaced over the decades and never missed.

Then there’s the newest revelations from the Snowden files. Seems the U.S. government did, indeed, have a whole lot of personal communications on hand that they probably shouldn’t have. How do we know? Because Snowden handed a bunch of it over to the Washing Post. So now all the officials who’ve been swearing up and down that their organizations never took and retained anything like these newly revealed documents are saying, effectively, “Okay, yeah, we had those, but they’re different! It was only a minimal violation of those people’s privacy! What Snowden’s doing with them is worse than what we did!”

Yeah, not buying the blame shifting, guys. You’re still the ones who collected it–and have been lying about it. Sure Snowden’s in the wrong, that’s not news. You’re still in more wrong overall.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the feed…