The past week or so at the day job has been ridiculous. Huge deadlines on a huge project that’s really too huge for the timeline it was scheduled for.
Of course, it does look like we’ll be close enough.
It also looks like it’s driving me utterly mad with stress.
So, the feed is a bit… odd. Because that’s how my brain is working (when my brain is working).
I’ll let you see for yourself.
Here’s the feed…
Why, yes, you continue to get a proliferation of fluff in the feed. But it’s good fluff!
At least I think it is.
Creative. Witty. So wrong it’s awesome.
It’s the stuff that helps alleviate the stress that my life has been lately.
But have no fear! There are also some gems of real content in there.
Interesting bits of science. Some very insightful comments on items. Actual world happenings that we should all be aware of.
Check it out, enjoy what you can, maybe jump in and participate in a conversation (even if you’re coming across this months later… don’t hesitate to comment, I’ll see it and it may get things moving on that post again).
Here’s the feed.
This past weekend, a whole lot of people I know were down in Atlanta for DragonCon. It’s an event I’ve been numerous times before and is always an amazing adventure.
I haven’t been there in four years now.
Finances and schedules have kept me from being able to make it back.
This year a bunch of people I know went for the first time.
I’m amazingly sad that I couldn’t be part of that.
Bringing new people along was always a huge joy. Watching them acclimate to the distinct atmosphere of a major gathering of nerds, geeks, freaks, and general fandom weirdness rekindles all sorts of memories and feelings of my own first time.
A lot of other people I know were off on other holiday-weekend-related adventures. End of summer trips, weddings, that one last excursion to the beach, the renaissance fair. I don’t really have a vacation. I have a day off I don’t get paid for. I haven’t had a real vacation… since DragonCon 2010.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to say differently some time before the next decade is over.
Hopefully.
Until then, I just keep pushing onward.
Since that’s the most sensible thing to do.
Lots of feed items spanning a wide variety of entertainment and interest. (Not quite as wide as, say DragonCon, but still a nice collection of stuff, if I do say so myself.)
Here’s the feed.
Yeah, apparently I’m skipping Friday updates more often than not. I should stop that. Actually stick to my own schedule.
One of the big topics that ended up being discussed today in the stream was the whole rich/poor divide and the idea of affordable housing… spawned by an article about a new building in NYC that’s going to have a separate entrance for it’s less privileged residents (who they agreed to take in so they could get a tax break, mind you).
The topic of “affordable housing” comes up frequently here in Maryland. Particular in Silver Spring. The issue is a little different than it is in places like NYC.
Here we have the problem of people building a lot of expensive housing that is then bought/rented by people who mostly work and play in DC. This leaves people who work in Silver Spring (which has a wide diversity of jobs and pay rates) unable to afford to live there (in some cases), pushing them farther out where public transportation is less viable, leading to a bit of a traffic problem and a bit of a parking problem (which leads to all sorts of other problems… like local businesses being able to do solid business because people can’t get to/part at them easily or actual residents not being able to find parking/get around easily during the day).
A number of members of the community here are very interested in trying to build and maintain an actual community. One that’s vibrant at all times during the day…. not just during rush hour. What’s been in place has been slowly slipping away as development has boomed and busted a few times. (Most of what’s being built are one or two bedroom apartments/condos… not conducive to people with families, encouraging more transient people who go elsewhere to put down actual roots.)
It’s an interesting situation. A problematic one. And one I know I haven’t come up with a good solution to (mainly because I’ve got some very mixed feelings about all the affordable housing solutions I have seen–some of which were laid out in the article that Nancy shared–but some of those concerns are at odds with my desire to have poor people actually treated as people, since I’ve seen that be one of the best ways to help someone get back on their feet).
Needless to say, a number of people disagree with me on a lot of those points.
I’m okay with that.
Like I said, I don’t have an answer, so the discussion obviously needs to keep going on somewhere.
Here’s the extra long feed (which contains a few interesting discussions or starting points, so you should check it out)…
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…