Comments for Urk! Blaagh. Gaaack.

Comment on We are the New Bulgaria by mtraven

mtraven — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:30:09 +0000

Lets hear it for the magic of the market! It is self-correcting, after a fashion.

My theory (which is mine) is that market corrections are great if they happen slowly. If the price of gas goes up over ten years, people have a chance to change their living and working arrangements. If the price of gas goes up rapidly, chaos ensues. Same with cost of housing, or labor. For the US to change to a cheap-labor ecomony, major changes will ahve to happen (like turning all those office parks into factories)…it won’t be easy.

Comment on Ugababwa! by bibomedia

bibomedia — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:14:46 +0000

Comment on The Anti-Bush by mnuez

mnuez — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:12:32 +0000

If your last relationship didn’t last because your girlfriend was an ugly whore, you should be cautious about getting excited about your new relationship with the pretty whore. Yeah, I’ll vote Obama but to have “hope”? Hope of what? That we’ll really have universal healthcare within four years? that our streets will be as homeless free as Germany’s? That Mammon will cease to be worshipped at every altar? Hah!

On the other hand if all you need for a fulfilling relationship with your President is that he be black and able to read the lines that his able speechwriters pen for him, then be reckless and hope away!

mnuez

Comment on You Americans by mtraven

mtraven — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:10:20 +0000

Genetically American are mainly European, but with significant admixtures of African and Asian genes (the latter category includes Native Americans and Hispanics, those upstarts didn’t get here until 20,000 years ago or so). But culture mutates faster than genes, and when Europeans are picking at “you” Americans I think they are criticizing our culture more than our chromosomes.

It still feels a little wrong to hear “you Americans” characterized. I could be wrong, but my impression is that there is less of a common cultural core holding together Americans as opposed to Swedes or Spaniards. You can point to a Swedish national character, which will be a sterotype with some truth to it. Is there a corresponding American national character? Hell if I know, I’m first generation myself so my cultural roots here are pretty shallow.

Comment on Web 2.0! Exciting! by mtraven

mtraven — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:49:34 +0000

The nifty thing about Web 2.0 is that it is explicitly both a surge of new functionality and a bubble. The name was picked to exactly reflect that it is a minibubble.

Just like the first one brought some real advances along with the hype, there is some actual content to #2.

The interesting thing about web 2.0 is that it emphasizes collaboration sites and user-created content. Web 1.0 was mostly about shopping.

AJAX actually has a technical meaning which is loosely related.

The genius of Tim O’Reilly (who coined Web 2.0) is to wrap up the tech and application and business hype into a tidy slogan.

Comment on Stock SPAM by Don

Don — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:22:51 +0000

I’m getting hundreds of bouncebacks (backscatter) because the pump and dump jerks are using my web site for their forged return address.

For a list of the pumped stocks: http://www.donwright.com/stockfraud

Bleagh

Comment on Stock SPAM by Roy

Roy — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:07:09 +0000

I’m still getting a three-way split: “medicinals”, pump-n-dump scams and stuff in languages I can’t read (primarily Russian and Korean [I think... some UTF-16 character set, anyway]).

What I really don’t get, especially about the stock scammers, is why any thinking person would place any credibility at all in a scam message that comes in with an obviously forged return address, misleading subject line and the tortured prose of Bayes avoidance? Are there really enough people with so little common sense as to run right out and buy a stock based on that?

Comment on Of course, that’s how it works by MTraven

MTraven — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 02:25:30 +0000

See the work of David Cope and others…
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/

I have one of his books lieing around somewhere.