Cliff & I are planning to throw a gadget tag sale at my house next weekend.
We have lots of stuff that's in perfectly usable condition, but not worth enough to deal with the hassle of selling on eBay. It'll be everything from older iPods to weird, nerdly hardware adapters. We're planning to advertise it on Craigslist and maybe put up a few flyers.
Does anybody else have a closet full of gadgets who'd like to join us?

The urban fixies must be mocked relentlessly, for great justice.

Am I the only person in San Francisco (who's not a developer) who wants to see the population of this town grow? Everyone clucks about urban sprawl, but nobody wants a new condo or apartment building on their block.
We need to roll back some of the NIMBY zoning laws, like the minimum parking requirement and the ones that make razing houses to build larger housing complexes nigh impossible.
Housing isn't going to become more affordable until we build a whole lot more of it. I think this city would be perfectly livable with twice the population. Maybe with that kind of tax base we could afford a first class transit system and decent schools. You know, a real city that can support a person's needs from cradle to grave, rather being fit for only toddlers, hipsters, yuppies, and Robin Williams.

This is no endorsement for Prop. 98. I'm voting against it because it strips away too many renter rights, and it goes too far with respect to zoning. The pro-infillers should work with the developers to create a weaker version of this proposition for the next voting cycle. The renter rights people should stop sleeping with the NIMBYists and start sleeping with the infillers.

Anti-housing development laws combined with rent control is choking this city.

Is anyone with me on this, or should I just move back to Barcelona?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/05/01/pne.teacher.fired.cnn

I just made a donation to Obama's campaign online, and three minutes later an Obama campaigner showed up at my door.
Amazing! Go ahead: try it yourself!

Thanks for the show of force :D :D :D

Now you can specify the precise type of your number two.
Thanks Wikipedia! Click the image for more info.



May you be blessed with Type 3 Number 2s.

I just read this article: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, and I got so much more than advertised: I got an explanation of how racial disparity has really worked in America since the late 60s. I'm ordering the author's book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, right now.

This could work out nicely, since the Gaza strip is far from Israeli population centers and can fairly easily be ignored by them. And the Gaza strip population tends to be more radical & religious than the West Bank. Maybe radicals in the West Bank will gravitate towards Gaza, and the moderates in Gaza will hightail it for to the West Bank even more than they already have. Maybe then Israel and a de-radicalized West Bank can get on with their lives.

The sooner I don't have to care, the better, to be honest. It's the swollen appendix of the world over there.

Eight minute video — the first part shows that the entire internet could one day be navigated as if it were a fractal image, the second part shows what it looks like if you Web 2.0-ify Google Street View with scary-smart image matching algorithms.

Update - no sooner do I post this that it shows up on Metafilter, making it old news!

I can't believe how much truth about their relationship is crammed into 48 seconds of Scooby Doo.



Also, why the hell do I know anything about Sonny & Cher's relationship? I can't remember how to factor polynomials, but this crap I retain??

After the beating the world has taken under the Neocons the last six years, I'd be happy to hand the federal government over to the libertarians and save my fiscally liberal leanings for local politics. I've learned that a risk of creating a big supertanker of a government is that if the bad guys ever get hold of the wheel, we're all well and truly fucked. Maybe a schooner is best.

(Warning: 51 minutes of Neocon pantsing)

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=lolcat&m=tags&z=t&s=int

Well, besides icanhascheezburger.com of course — goes without saying.

"No pun intended" does not mean "please note my witty, witty pun, of which I am disavowing all responsibility".
Your weasel words are only compounding your language crimes.

Sense of entitlement, sense of honor (that needs defending from insults), and self-righteousness seem to be closely related. It has something to do with feeling special, or better than others. All I know is people with these traits piss me off regularly.
Does anyone understand what that's all about? Go ahead: take a crack at it.

I just saw 300:

• Racism
• Xenophobia
• Anti-intellectualism
• Pro-autocratic
• Homophobia
• Glorifying/eroticizing warfare
• Eugenics

Where's my plug-in hybrid diesel Subaru already?

I'm at Ritual, and the guys next to me just had an long, intense non-conversation. A 90 minute simulation of exchanging ideas. They're members of one of those subcultures that are based completely on bullshit. I couldn't tell you which bullshit island they're from though. New Age? Some Christian sect? Landmark Forum?
They sat there and bantered in buzzwords and catch-phrases, and since none of the buzzwords actually means anything, they're pretty much interchangeable. They had a really large vocabulary of them though, so they didn't repeat themselves.
I was shocked and awed.

How do you improve your social standing in such a circle, a circle where competence can't be measured in any rational manner? I have a theory that in these communities, all disagreements are raw power plays. Agreement and disagreement have no meaning when nothing has any meaning. And, all things being equal(!), it's more pleasant to agree than disagree. When one of them does challenge the words of another, it's an assertion of dominance. Imagine a flock of talking birds establishing its pecking order.

I want to confiscate their opposable thumbs.

Can you name some groups like this? I'd like develop a taxonomy.

Okay, I picked up a Subaru and a GPS.
Now what?