Aary, Kyle, and I have decided we hate our lives, so we’re going to take a spontaneous trip to Chicago to spend the night fooling around on foreign turf. You can watch us get lost here and text ideas for cool places for us to check out to 262.337.2421. Also, call us if you live in the area and would like to see us. We’ll be there probably until about 10am at the latest.
January 2010
113 posts
I finally got myself off of Facebook. I removed any/all valuable photos I uploaded there and made sure I had them somewhere on my hard drives, then deleted the account. It’ll take 14 days of deactivation before it will finally delete, but I can live with that.
“Actions have consequences. So do inactions.”
—Erich Friend
Okay, you had your easy jokes. Now everyone who got their MaxiPad jokes out of their systems can crawl back into the holes they crawled out of.
I’ll play the devil’s advocate. It’s not like it doesn’t do anything they said it would.
I don’t think it will end up with the market-share that the iPhone has, but I also remember how much distaste almost everyone had for the the iPhone release as well. Remember, when that came out it was a luxury product owned and endorsed solely by the people with a whole ton of cash to spare. Now, the iPhone is the most popular phone in the United States.
Just as the first iPhone release, I don’t encourage anyone go out and buy an iPad right away because there’s a good change that within the first 18-24 months from its release Apple will release an updated product that will disappoint all of the people who bought the first one. They won’t be disappointed because they think the second product is awful, they’ll be disappointed because the second version will be so many more times better.
Again, if this can run an app that I can use it to mix live audio when I’m working at concerts, the iPad actually will come in a lot cheaper than the purchase of a new tablet PC. It still has its limitations, but I imagine it will be spectacularly awesome by the time the second or third release is out. I’m not planning on buying one myself, but if I do, it’ll probably be the third release. I waited until the third iPhone release, and could not be happier with my iPhone 3G S, even if it’s with AT&T.
State of the Union Drinking Game →
drinkinggame.us
Make sure you swing by this site before today’s State of the Union Address.
Setting term limits for Congress.
Discuss.
Are you suggesting turning politics into something where the decision-makers have to be concerned about the future of mankind instead of their individual futures in cushy, government jobs, where they are now allowed to make vast sums of money by selling their decisions to the highest bidder?
Isn’t that blasphemy, or something else kind of awful? Whatever all that stuff is about, I bet it’s something I could be called anti-American for supporting!
“Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
—
-Kurt Vonnegut (via elpasajero:early-onset-of-night) (via lefan)
That’s the whole reason I use them; proof that I’ve been to college. Although, not a lot of engineering documentation needs them, sadly. I’ve managed to work them into a summary here or there. Ideally, I would have used only semicolons in this comment.
(via idontgetrunnershigh)
For a very long time I was very anti-semicolon. I viewed it as the most unnecessary punctuation mark in existence. I think I made it through all four years of college refusing to use it. Then one day while at work editing something or other I saw the light. It does make sense! I had my semicolepiphany and embraced it.
(via isworeidneverliveinwisconsin)
You just have to be careful that once you see the light, you don’t get too semi-colon happy and create entire paragraphs that are actually only one or two sentences with fifty-thousand clauses in between. I knew of semi-colons for a very long time before I started using them; they just never made sense. Then it dawned on me and I started feeling like it was appropriate to use them almost everywhere.
(via nicolaim)
No one more appreciates a message written with proper spelling, grammar, and FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING KIND AND DIGNIFIED, USE SOME GODDAMN PERIODS TO FORM ACTUAL SENTENCES.
Someone I know just got a lengthy message with no capital letters, periods, or respect for mankind.
[Hint: It was probably me.]
Changes
Keaton Simons
Today’s Music Monday track is brought to you by Keaton Simons. This is the song that I’m most likely to accidentally start singing while walking between classes.
In which certain conservatives are bad at math
Randy Haddock and NoMossHere posted a chunk of an IBD editorial by Sean Higgins titled, “Obama’s Green Jobs Program: $135,294 Per Job.” Here’s a chunk of it:
The White House announced Friday the awarding of $2.3 billion in tax credits — the money comes from last year’s stimulus bill — to companies to create “green jobs.”
[…]
Obama says the grants will create 17,000 cleantech jobs. Well, get out your calculator. $2.3 billion for 17,000 jobs equals $135,294 per job. (And that’s not including the eventual interest on this deficit spending). Those green jobs had better pay well over six figures to justify that expense.
Alright, kids, let’s play a game. Who can spot Higgins error? It’s pretty basic.
No, I’m not talking about Higgins disregard for cost savings due to decreased negative externalities. That’s a relatively forgivable mistake.
And no, I’m not talking about Higgins ignoring things like Keynesian multipliers. That’s a mistake, but Higgins probably doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.
Need a hint? If you can buy a car for $20,000 or lease it for $400 a month, which is a better deal? Most people would work out the math and figure out that the $20,000 is a much better deal if you can afford it. Higgins, however, would apparently decide that $400 is less than $20,000, so he must be getting an awesome deal.
It may cost $134,294 to create a job. And the job might only pay $50,000/year. But it doesn’t vanish at the end of the year. In fact, it pays off pretty quickly, even if you discount heavily for future uncertainty. In five years, the job has paid $500,000. In ten, it has paid $1,000,000. Basic multiplication, guys. Remember it from third grade?
I’ll admit I don’t know exactly how the tax credits work on the technical level, but I imagine it’s also a lot more complicated than just, “Here’s some money for that position you opened.” Often creating more jobs is synonymous with having more work to do. A company isn’t going to just create more jobs, and suddenly have more work to accommodate. More jobs means more offices, computers, resources, supplies, etc. It costs more for a company to have Employee X work for them than just that person’s salary. That person draws from that companies resources to get their work done. Those resources cost money too.
