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 | | | Subject: Wow! / Cool. / Hmmm, that's interesting...
Posted Sep 19, 2012 by  Baron Grim
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  | | For those who are familiar with XKCD, Randall occasionally does a comic that just astounds you with how much time and effort he puts in. The last one was created in such a way that you'd see alternate versions on subsequent visits, and also depending on global location, browser, time and who knows what else.
This time he's gone BIG.
http://xkcd.com/1110/
(For those who aren't that familiar with the comic, each one has an alternate text that will display when you hover your mouse pointer over the comic. In this instance it only echoes the title, but be sure to check it when you go look at other previous or future strips.)
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| | | Subject: Wow! / Cool. / Hmmm, that's interesting...
Posted Jan 4, 2013 by Baron Grim
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| | Hmmmm, that's interesting....
I just finished reading this article and it posits an interesting correlation. It relates environmental lead exposure to increased crime rates and does a pretty good job of it.
http://www.motherjones.com/environm...nt/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
If nothing else, this deserves more study. I know our current policies regarding crime are atrociously ineffective and generally destructive to our society. The US now imprisons more people per capita than any other nation in history. The main reasons for this that I see are the "war on drugs" and the privatization/corporatization of our penal system. For decades, conservatives especially but pretty much universally, our leaders have taken a "tough on crime" stance. It gets votes. Our culture of fear is both the cause and symptom of these policies. The US now has a significant prison labor industry... that should disgust us as a nation, yet I've yet to see any uproar about it.
But I digress. What if this correlation between lead exposure and crime is as significant as this article posits? What are the chances our government would act on it? Rockall chance I expect.
I won't bother going into how incompetent and corrupt our current government is here. I'll just say, when I was a kid, I expected better. I never expected a utopian society, but I thought that generally things would get better as our civilization progressed. I had some reason to expect so. For instance the removal of lead from our fuel; the Clean Air and Water Acts; Civil Rights legislation.
I'm no longer that hopeful.
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| | | Subject: Wow! / Cool. / Hmmm, that's interesting...
Posted Jan 4, 2013 by Who are you and what have you done with Gosho?
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| | In a word (two, actually): rampant capitalism.
Business, commerce and the economy have attained power that they haven't had since the onset of the industrial revolution, before the excesses of the early bosses were curbed by legislation, regulations and the unions and they were allowed to do almost anything they wanted with and to their workers, with the exception of a small handful of owners who treated their workers with dignity and as human beings rather than just a part of the machinery, paid them comparatively well and built communities to house them (I'm thinking about places such as Bournville and New Lanark). A bit of enlightened self interest there because a happy workforce is a more productive workforce.
Unfortunately they were usually tea-total and/or temperance, so no pubs 
In the past decade or two though we've seen the erosion of the unions (who, to be honest, had lost all sense of proportion in the 1970s, which backfired and resulted in 11 years of Thatcher and six more of Major). We've seen a rise in the profile of things such as sponsorship: much-loved sports stadia are either renamed as if they belonged to a corporation, or the corporation's name comes before that of the stadium, which might have been around before the corporation even existed and has a rich history going back decades, and when was the last time you saw a sports interview that wasn't held in front of one of those backdrops with all the sponsors' names and logos on it? Tacky.
The capitalists have developed an overblown sense of their own importance, which I suspect has always been the case, but now it's more visible: 'Don't tax us, we're the job-creators. We won't start businesses and hire new people if you take away any of our money." "If you don't give our business tax breaks we'll take it somewhere else." And in some cases: "We'll take our business where the wages are lower (outsourcing abroad) or where there's less regulation (outsourcing abroad or moving to right-to-work states)". The number of right-to-work states is slowly increasing.
As you pointed out in your Owners thread a few days ago, and as we've seen from the phone hacking scandal in the UK, they've lost all sense of reality and decency, and they're in collusion with governments to a scary degree, but again, this has probably been going on for years, it just dipped a bit between the war and the 1980s.
Corporate speak has infiltrated the language to a very unpleasant degree.
Anyone who wants more regulations is bad. Anything that's either perceived as or spun as being anti-business is a Bad Thing and anyone who wants to do anything that hurts the profit-making potential of any business must be a communist or a socialist. I'm tired of hearing or reading news stories where common sense, common decency and simple statistics point out that something plainly needs to be changed but the spokesman for a business or business group trots out the old line about how it'll hurt the business. No matter that the practice is already hurting people - profits are all important.
And now people are being turned down for jobs if they refuse to give their passwords for social media sites such as Facebook. Seriously? There's a reason why we have a password - it's a security measure to stop other people getting into your account. You don't give it to other people, but businesses now seem to think they have a right to get it from you. Neither the former Mrs Gosho nor myself ever knew any of each others' passwords for *any* online account of any kind. Why the  does a business think it can have something I wouldn't give to my spouse?
Sometimes I really wonder if I want to be part of this world any more.
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