You wish I wasn't here, you're scared because I think
In
the local news for the past few days, we have read about a truly
surreal case of a man whose home was fraudulently sold under him.
Assuming that I have understood the news articles such as "Homeowner horror"
correctly, the buyers own the house and the fraudulent seller, long ago
vanished, gets to laugh and spend the money. The letter's columns of
Toronto Star have offered suggestions of how to prevent this kind of
fraud from occurring, such as requiring a "For Sale" sign on every
property that is for sale. (A lot of good that does when the fraudsters
rent your place and then pose as owners.) I have a general suggestion
of my own that I made in the post "An easy way to decrease identity theft", which would kill not only this kind of identity theft, but pretty much most other kinds too.
For the case currently in news, every lawyer who has been in any way involved in it should be immediately disbarred for life. The surreal law that makes this sale legal should be immediately repealed. After that, it is time to stop mollycoddling identity thieves and giving them slaps on a wrist. The notion of personal identity is absolutely central for society being able to function, and therefore violations against it should be treated at least as harshly as counterfeiting money, with a minumum sentence of at least ten years. And while were are at it, I would like to see every teenager who uses forged I.D. to get in bar or buy alcohol getting a few years in a slammer. If it was up to me, identity theft would actually be a capital crime, since if you don't care about your own identity but pretend to be somebody else, I don't see what right you have to demand that that identity must be allowed to continue breathing.
But enough of that. In many places, arguing that everybody has the right to do what they want without having to fear that other people could discriminate against them can quickly lead to contradictions, as the post "But lesbian pork is not halal!" vividly illustrates. But I do find it ironic that people who are to be the noisiest about their right to do whatever they want also tend to be the most hostile towards the freedom of other people to do whatever they want.
The new-to-me webcomic "xkcd" shows that the pictures don't have to be complex when the text is in order. There are some funny parodies of other webcomics, though.
I remember watching one episode of the "Mole" animated cartoons from the Eastern Europe in which the forest in which Mole and his little friends played in was threatened by progress. The little animals went to see a Stalin pastiche to voice their concern, and the great leader solved this problem by building an artificial plastic forest for the animals to happily play in. For some reason, the post "Flat Daddies" at "Ace of Spades" reminded me of this particular episode. Ace also features a post "Cycle Sluts From Hell" that links to a YouTube video that I remember once laughing at when it was played on Beavis and Butt-Head. Speaking of which, whatever happened to those two fellas now that they have completely disappeared from the public eye?
The post "Morons are running NYC" at Half Sigma makes me glad that I live in get to live a free market society instead of under a central planner who dictates the prices to people. In the NYT article "110-Building Site in N.Y. Is Put Up for Sale" that this post links to, I just love it when they say that "New York has always attracted people who aren’t just interested in money", and then go on to explain why these noble people need their landlords to give them lots of money in form of rent control. I have noticed the same trend more generally in that leftists complain that conservatives "only care about money", even though leftists are the ones who are constantly demanding more money from others. In fact, once the say this you can count on the demand for money to soon to follow. I have also never been able to understand the strange moral principle that says that if you rent a place somewhere, you are entitled to live there for the rest of your life for essentially the same price, and to hell with what the owner of that place or some other person who would be willing to pay more to get to live in that place happen to think.
Housing prices have been in the news a lot recently, for some reason. When I read the local news article "Would-Be Homeowners Balk At Buying A "Haunted House"", I immediately thought of one cynical hypothesis why a guy who has been renovating an expensive house would like to convince other people not to want to live in that house or bid on it.
Speaking of people who demand money from others, just so that I would be fair and balanced and occasionally criticize conservatives a little bit too, I can't help but notice how completely different the right-wingers attitudes towards reparations for past injustices seem to be when it comes to European Jews ("Holocaust Victims' Families Demand $162M From France"), as opposed to, say, the American blacks. But I am certain that if we dug deeper into this issue, we would find a logical and reasonable explanation for this almost 180-degree asymmetry. Just like there must be a reason for the curious asymmetry between the leftist attitudes towards a gay couple adopting a child, which is always just great and if the other people don't accept this then it's to hell with them, compared to a white couple adopting a black child, which is ideologically highly problematic.
It seems that in the blogosphere we mostly get to hear the disgruntled voices of the angry individuals. In this light, it is always interesting and educational to get to hear from the other side and learn how these people experience the world. The post "Divers…ity! Your boy is back" illustrates how very hard it can be to be an apparatchik or a komissar who is responsible for the ideological correctness when the unenlightened masses just don't appreciate his valiant efforts to better them. For all the hard work and training that this unselfish man undergoes so that he would learn to think in a more correct fashion and serve as a beacon for others, he just doesn't seem to get any gratitude. I can certainly imagine how that might be depressing. Let's hope that our hero can somehow summon the strength to continue his important work. In a way, I guess that this post also indirectly answers the question posed in the NYT article "There Is Silence in the Streets; Where Have All the Protesters Gone?"
It could happen to you: "Bartender gets $10,000 tip on $26 tab". Being an European spirit, my general attitude towards tipping used to be very similar to that of Mr. Pink, although I am accustomed to tipping now and tip the expected 15% that is expected, even when I have no plans of ever returning. When I visited Canada for the first time, I remember being a bit annoyed about all the money that my future wife left for the maid at the motel we were staying. Even so, I believe that there is a great wisdom in Mr. Pink's famous lament about which professions deserve a tip and which do not. The post "Tip Jar Hitting" at "Two Blowhards" wonders why the Starbucks baristas should be tipped. If McDonald's started referring to its workers by some fancy foreign-sounding job title, would they then deserve a tip too?
Since I have written five computer science textbooks (I was going to start writing the sixth this summer, but just couldn't find the motivation), I have a vested interested in the workings of the publishing industry. The posts "Books and Sales" and "Books and Sales Redux" remind us that no matter how dear the book is to its author, the publishing industry is a competitive industry with an extremely long tail (just like the blogosphere), with the important lesson that they don't publish books because they love them but because they want to make a profit, and the authors must ultimately play along with this goal.
You'd think that gambling over the Internet would be a sucker's bet, since the house gets to say how much you rolled or what card you got. The famous old professor at The Becker-Posner blog discusses the topic in the post "Internet Gambling".
Agoraphilia offers a post "On Noble Lies and Intentional Self-Deception" that explains quite a lot about the lofty rhetoric employed by several groups of people, both left and right.
Since I have been translating posts of Finnish bloggers for the worldwide audience (for all practical purposes, the Anglosphere is the whole world), I should perhaps start translating Jari Vaarma's excellent posts. As a sample, consider the following brief observation of his:
For the case currently in news, every lawyer who has been in any way involved in it should be immediately disbarred for life. The surreal law that makes this sale legal should be immediately repealed. After that, it is time to stop mollycoddling identity thieves and giving them slaps on a wrist. The notion of personal identity is absolutely central for society being able to function, and therefore violations against it should be treated at least as harshly as counterfeiting money, with a minumum sentence of at least ten years. And while were are at it, I would like to see every teenager who uses forged I.D. to get in bar or buy alcohol getting a few years in a slammer. If it was up to me, identity theft would actually be a capital crime, since if you don't care about your own identity but pretend to be somebody else, I don't see what right you have to demand that that identity must be allowed to continue breathing.
But enough of that. In many places, arguing that everybody has the right to do what they want without having to fear that other people could discriminate against them can quickly lead to contradictions, as the post "But lesbian pork is not halal!" vividly illustrates. But I do find it ironic that people who are to be the noisiest about their right to do whatever they want also tend to be the most hostile towards the freedom of other people to do whatever they want.
The new-to-me webcomic "xkcd" shows that the pictures don't have to be complex when the text is in order. There are some funny parodies of other webcomics, though.
I remember watching one episode of the "Mole" animated cartoons from the Eastern Europe in which the forest in which Mole and his little friends played in was threatened by progress. The little animals went to see a Stalin pastiche to voice their concern, and the great leader solved this problem by building an artificial plastic forest for the animals to happily play in. For some reason, the post "Flat Daddies" at "Ace of Spades" reminded me of this particular episode. Ace also features a post "Cycle Sluts From Hell" that links to a YouTube video that I remember once laughing at when it was played on Beavis and Butt-Head. Speaking of which, whatever happened to those two fellas now that they have completely disappeared from the public eye?
The post "Morons are running NYC" at Half Sigma makes me glad that I live in get to live a free market society instead of under a central planner who dictates the prices to people. In the NYT article "110-Building Site in N.Y. Is Put Up for Sale" that this post links to, I just love it when they say that "New York has always attracted people who aren’t just interested in money", and then go on to explain why these noble people need their landlords to give them lots of money in form of rent control. I have noticed the same trend more generally in that leftists complain that conservatives "only care about money", even though leftists are the ones who are constantly demanding more money from others. In fact, once the say this you can count on the demand for money to soon to follow. I have also never been able to understand the strange moral principle that says that if you rent a place somewhere, you are entitled to live there for the rest of your life for essentially the same price, and to hell with what the owner of that place or some other person who would be willing to pay more to get to live in that place happen to think.
Housing prices have been in the news a lot recently, for some reason. When I read the local news article "Would-Be Homeowners Balk At Buying A "Haunted House"", I immediately thought of one cynical hypothesis why a guy who has been renovating an expensive house would like to convince other people not to want to live in that house or bid on it.
Speaking of people who demand money from others, just so that I would be fair and balanced and occasionally criticize conservatives a little bit too, I can't help but notice how completely different the right-wingers attitudes towards reparations for past injustices seem to be when it comes to European Jews ("Holocaust Victims' Families Demand $162M From France"), as opposed to, say, the American blacks. But I am certain that if we dug deeper into this issue, we would find a logical and reasonable explanation for this almost 180-degree asymmetry. Just like there must be a reason for the curious asymmetry between the leftist attitudes towards a gay couple adopting a child, which is always just great and if the other people don't accept this then it's to hell with them, compared to a white couple adopting a black child, which is ideologically highly problematic.
It seems that in the blogosphere we mostly get to hear the disgruntled voices of the angry individuals. In this light, it is always interesting and educational to get to hear from the other side and learn how these people experience the world. The post "Divers…ity! Your boy is back" illustrates how very hard it can be to be an apparatchik or a komissar who is responsible for the ideological correctness when the unenlightened masses just don't appreciate his valiant efforts to better them. For all the hard work and training that this unselfish man undergoes so that he would learn to think in a more correct fashion and serve as a beacon for others, he just doesn't seem to get any gratitude. I can certainly imagine how that might be depressing. Let's hope that our hero can somehow summon the strength to continue his important work. In a way, I guess that this post also indirectly answers the question posed in the NYT article "There Is Silence in the Streets; Where Have All the Protesters Gone?"
It could happen to you: "Bartender gets $10,000 tip on $26 tab". Being an European spirit, my general attitude towards tipping used to be very similar to that of Mr. Pink, although I am accustomed to tipping now and tip the expected 15% that is expected, even when I have no plans of ever returning. When I visited Canada for the first time, I remember being a bit annoyed about all the money that my future wife left for the maid at the motel we were staying. Even so, I believe that there is a great wisdom in Mr. Pink's famous lament about which professions deserve a tip and which do not. The post "Tip Jar Hitting" at "Two Blowhards" wonders why the Starbucks baristas should be tipped. If McDonald's started referring to its workers by some fancy foreign-sounding job title, would they then deserve a tip too?
Since I have written five computer science textbooks (I was going to start writing the sixth this summer, but just couldn't find the motivation), I have a vested interested in the workings of the publishing industry. The posts "Books and Sales" and "Books and Sales Redux" remind us that no matter how dear the book is to its author, the publishing industry is a competitive industry with an extremely long tail (just like the blogosphere), with the important lesson that they don't publish books because they love them but because they want to make a profit, and the authors must ultimately play along with this goal.
You'd think that gambling over the Internet would be a sucker's bet, since the house gets to say how much you rolled or what card you got. The famous old professor at The Becker-Posner blog discusses the topic in the post "Internet Gambling".
Agoraphilia offers a post "On Noble Lies and Intentional Self-Deception" that explains quite a lot about the lofty rhetoric employed by several groups of people, both left and right.
Since I have been translating posts of Finnish bloggers for the worldwide audience (for all practical purposes, the Anglosphere is the whole world), I should perhaps start translating Jari Vaarma's excellent posts. As a sample, consider the following brief observation of his:
Everybody wishes that other people were less calculating and cynical. The non-calculating people wish for this so that they would lose less, and the calculating people wish for this so that would win more.
'As the show's co-creator, Matt Stone, sums it up: "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."'
South Park Republicans
- vince
Posted by Anonymous | 4:25 PM