The first time I saw The Sound of Music I was about six or seven ( Read more... )

My friend Jenna is quitting smoking, on which I congratulate her unreservedly. Nicotine is a devilishly hard drug to kick; I managed, after countless false starts, to quit smoking, but I will probably leach nicotine into the soil long after I am dead. Note that I said I quit smoking but not nicotine; quitting smoking was, in the end, a matter of ( Read more... )

I've honestly never found much to get worked up over about neoreaction, one way or another. To some of my more rightish acquaintances, it's a breath of fresh air, while some of my more leftish acquaintances think it's the next great bogeyman (one wonders if the spectre of a Koch brother stumbling across Moldbug keeps them up at night). I just ( Read more... )

You should probably read this before going any further.

I am the someone who read the Parable of the Gronkulated Fleebwanger. I want to say it was palecur who sent it my way but it might have just been Facebook or something. I believe we were at my girlfriend in the Bay Area's place last summer when I found it, and I handed it to thequux, who remembers binging ( Read more... )

I've seen some criticism that the punchline of this:


( Read more... )

It is pretty important to read this Atlantic piece on synthetic biology in light of the research of Ester Boserup. (The Conditions of Agricultural Growth is not all that long and the clarity of her writing is up there with Bertrand Russell.)

When cultivable land is "squeezed," as the Atlantic puts it, that is a constraint on agricultural ( Read more... )

Everyone I know dislikes having to get in touch with their bank, except for people who bank with USAA.

The United Services Automobile Association is a financial services group with its origins in insurance. It has a membership base of about 10 million; members must have served in the military or be in the family of another member1. Wikipedia ( Read more... )

The other day my coworker and I were comparing the relative merits of our company's vacation and sick leave policies in the US and Belgium, respectively. That part was mostly minutiae, but it also got us talking about the trend in the US, in my lifetime, toward a single pool of "personal time off" rather than discrete sick time and vacation time ( Read more... )

Incidents of "Shanley Kane verbally attacks some friend of mine in some way that is obviously counter to her stated goals" keep rolling in at the rate of about one every two weeks. Last time, it was bashing a friend who started slinging C professionally around the time I was born because "her generation" didn't create the workers' utopia (by ( Read more... )

I need to start keeping a timeline or something (UPDATE, 19/12/2014: Slate did it for me! Thank you, Slate), because I figured at some point the cogs in the 24-hour outrage cycle would notice that some of us have cottoned on to their business model, and now Jessica Valenti has. Obviously the Grauniad, bastion of even-temperedness that it has ever ( Read more... )