The Iron Yuppie

Videogames Are In The News via Penny Arcade

Also, The Lead Singer of Judas Priest on Fresh Air

The lead singer of Judas Priest was an amazingly interesting interview! I had only be a fan to the degree that anyone who listened to popular music in the 80's was a fan, but it certainly made me much more interested in the band. But he had a great point which was only reinforced by today's Penny Arcade. Twenty years ago (scary how long ago it's been), rap music started to catch fire and people started to react negatively saying that kids would be destroyed by the horrible lyrics and society would be on a never ending spiral downward. And we are... having the lowest crime rate in ages. I think we can be fairly confident in saying that rap has no effect on crime. I was going to start this blog by saying "Why don't people take a position, then revisit the position later to see whether or not they were right", but it's absurd of me to ask. If they were right, then the speakers would be touting it all over the place. But people are remarkably bad at predicting the future.

Now people are up in arms about video games... give me a break. I promise... I PROMISE that whatever is predicted today will have very little (if any) correlation to what actually happens. Without fail, the outcomes are more moderate than anyone, on either side, ever predicts. Here's a hint... nothing we do when it comes to popular culture will be a dramatic change the world for positive or negative. Our societies are just not built that way.

D

Avalanche via bramcohen's Journal

I know I've said this already, but I LOVE it when the people who actually do stuff on a daily basis comment on public information. It's like that old saying... if you can tell the media (any media!) tends to be wrong or miss something when they cover a story you know, why do you think they'll be so much better when it's a story you don't know? Anyhow, I appreciate Bram's comments, and there's only one response for the Avalanche guys.. blog about it!

British Sit-Coms' Winning Formula via NPR

So I've delved a little into class, but one thing that really separates us from the Brits is how explicitly we claim that we are class-free, and how explicitly they react to class. Ultimately, this manifests itself in people in England who seem to be happier than equivalently "classed" people are in the US because, I speculate, they are aware of where society feels they should be and they know how what they should be aiming for. Of course, this also manifests itself in their style of comedy, as highlighted in the above story. The author of the study is "Dr. Helen Pilcher, a molecular neurobiologist and stand-up comedian who specializes in scientific jokes"... I'd like to find two of those in the world. Anyhow, one of the key points of British comedy, she finds, is the upper class person who ends up failing miserably. Only by explicitly recognizing class do they have the ability to take delight in their failings. In the US, we have a subtext of this, where the "working class" is noble and the backbone of society and the "upper class" are rich people who have had everything handed to them. But we don't have a great story for John Delorean, who had everything and died penniless, or Mark Cuban, who started with nothing, made a fantastic sum of money but is now kind of a dick. Our society does not really know how to handle these people well... do you pity them? Do you hold them up as examples?

Which leads me into my recent viewing of The Comeback. Which is brutal. And funny. Brutally funny. The entire show is only possible to exist as a comedy because you can never really feel that badly for Valerie Cherish. She may have had success, but now, in that she feels so deserving of more, your gut probably tells you it’s ok to stick it to her.

D

A Hamburger Today

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... burger-tastic. From the creators of Slice NY! (Subscribed!)

2006 Hummer H1 Alpha: In the Autoblog Garage Day 5 via Autoblog

I am terribly sorry to report this, but if you are driving a Hummer, you are ugly. You're driving an ugly car, you're ruining my roads and environment and you're more likely to die in an accident than me. Oh, and by the way, YOU DON'T NEED IT. I don't care if you off road every day for your entire life... you don't need it. There's a better car for you. It's so fucking arrogant to think that you deserve this thing. I'd say this about sums it up.

Apollo 13, We Have a Solution

Man, I feel absolutely dwarfed in engineering prowess when I read about these guys. I make an engineering choice and my code compiles or does not compile. These guys make a choice and someone lives or dies. This may be the only time in history where the real story was as good as the movie.

Google may offer an online wallet

Ever since I read Cryptonomicon, I've always been fascinated with the idea of having a currency which is entirely outside of a governmental control. In truth, I haven't really thought through exactly what this would do to the stability of the world, but I'm also not exactly sure how different it is today. If Visa decided to change their currency from dollars to sea shells, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me. 90% of what I buy anyway is electronically exchanged, and I do not make decisions based currency exchange rates (at least in the US... if I'm overseas, this might change things a bit).

Anyhow, with Google selling nothing (except ads), this seems like the first real step to having something like this happen. Actually, I'm surprised that Ebay hasn't done something like this already. If you do nothing but trade within the Ebay universe, you have no need for dollars. As far as Google's likelihood of success... it's an interesting play, but outside of ads, I'm not sure how big they could get without signing up some huge retailers.
D

When Tulips Were Out of Control [Fool.com: Motley Fool Take] June 15, 2005

My favorite part about this is the fact that no matter what time in history, there was always a desire to ride the bubble. People talk about the real estate bubble today, and my thoughts are the same as they've always been. There are countless localized bubbles all the time, whether or not it's real estate, or cabbage patch kids, beany babies, Internet stocks and so on. The only difference between them is the commodity they're trading and how much they will rise and fall when they peak and then burst. My advice is limit your downside and upside. If you're making 100% y/y, you don't deserve to be, and you're likely to get hit hard when the time comes.

This book sounds pretty good... Tulipomania : The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

Darwin's Natural Pet Food

Might as well give a free ad for these guys. They only serve about 500-600 dogs a week, but the food sounded so good, I felt like I would be happy to eat it. Apparently the dog food is designed based on the digestive system of the wolf, from which the dog is a descendent. What a good idea! I wish I knew exactly what our digestive system was designed for. Every week it's something new... but if I could eat exactly what we were DESIGNED to eat, that'd be so much easier! I wish there was a little thermometer on your stomach that just read "need meet now", "need water now" and so on. We need more direct measurement of your needs and much less figuring out what you want based on what you THINK you want, since that's influenced by all the crap around you. Let's face it, when it comes to our bodies, we have no idea what's going on.

D

Inside out: Inside Europower

This was a really interesting documentary on the differences between the U.S. and Europe, especially in the context of the EU failure to pass the EU constitution. But in the series of class system in America, one thing that jumped out at me was the phrase that in Europe they spend $8 in funding for programs for young people vs. $1 for funding for programs for adults. This is the kind of thing that is possible in Europe, which is much closer to socialism with enforced redistribution of weath, than in America, where you are basically given the freedom to succeed or fail, and no one is going to help you. But these are the kind of investments that really pay off in the long run. Yes, it's a ridiculously high tax rate, but that is exactly what you have to invest in in order to try and reduce crime and poverty in the long term. Well that's what I'd like to think. The problem with this logic is that if it's so true that investing in pre-schools and after school programs are so beneficial, then why are the crime rates virtually equivalent in the U.S.? It was an interesting theory...

D