Gifted Slacker

There might not be a dot-com-style tech bubble, but some people are acting like rock star-wannabe morons.

Guess what, guys. Nobody cares about your so called news. Nobody cares about your brain dead analysis. Nobody cares about your petty squabbles and territorial pissing.

Most of the companies you guys are writing about with so much enthusiasm will soon be dead, fall into some acquisitor’s gaping maw, or fall into obscurity as everyone realizes they weren’t worth talking about in the first place.

Note: I don’t have any issue with Loren Feldman. He’s hilarious despite rarely saying anything that goes beyond entertaining.

Many times, when someone points to a truth that goes against common perception people see the person making the point as saying something negative, insulting, or just plain false. When in reality that person is just stating facts.

Is it really an insult to say that by definition Roger Ebert* is a movie reviewer and not a movie critic?

Public opinion definitely labels Ebert as a critic. The public consciousness perceives the work of critics to be a higher status pursuit reviewing. So people see calling him a reviewer as taking away his status as critic. I think this is where the perceived insult comes from.

Criticism is more abstract and more objectively useful. On the other hand, reviews are subjectively useful (they help me decide what to buy) and more economically impactful. This is similar to the perceptions surrounding psychologists that are doing research and those that are counseling sick people.

What’s the difference? One is theoretic and concerns the state of the art; it mostly concerns experts. And the other is concerned with helping people who aren’t experts. Thus our society sees the researcher as having higher status than the practitioner, even though both are working with the same ideas and materials.

Unthinking acceptance of the culturally endorsed group of thoughts bugs me a lot. I think people are slaves to their reality and the collective reality of their culture. I really wish more people could see their way to perceiving their world from multiple perspectives, so they can see reality more clearly than the reality that is fed to them.
Do me, and everyone else, a favor and call a reviewer a reviewer an attack an attack**.

* At least in the context most of us know of Roger Ebert in, he is very much a reviewer. He very well could be a known critic, but I don’t know much about the world of film criticism.

** “To divert by the way, it is an utterly unfair critique, and ignores Cooper’s manifold literary virtues; one may point out that in Samuel Clemens’s era, Cooper was widely considered America’s greatest novelist to date, a position Mark Twain later supplanted. The essay can also be read–as it rarely is–as a calculated, and highly effective, attack on a literary rival, and as such, should be treated with far less respect, and far more skepticism, than it normally is. There: In the space of a paragraph, I’ve written an effective critique of a work of criticism.” — costik

There’s this program at Google where they bring in interesting authors to give talks. This is so unfair (yes, whinge-whinge). My University doesn’t have anything of the sort. We get lectures from boring old fucks and guys that wrote tedious books about little ideas that nobody cares about.

To be fair, there was an interesting-sounding seminar-ish thing here two weeks ago, but it conflicted absolutely with exams! How about putting a business program on when a big portion of business students are not stuck in exams?

[snip] this film has not been made by native science fiction minds. If Central Park is no longer called Central Park, but is officially referred to as “the area formerly known as ‘Central Park’”, but the DoD still exists, we know that this is not a *far-future* evidence tag. So if Central Park is now known as “The Killing Fields”, or “The Ghastly Black Glass Ocean”, then *tell* us. Those quotes are extraordinarily clumsy (and the card itself is typographically unconvincing).

Now I just want to see this movie just to figure out what the hell he’s talking about.

I finally found a working site for the Tom Cruise video that recently got a lot of comment.

Go watch it.

Now watch something that is meant to be funny

I’m going to start filling my Facebook quote box again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is like George Bernard Shaw; a treasure trove of great quotes.

Here are some quotes that are soon to make an appearance in my Facebook quote box:

“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.“

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.”

“It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.“

“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”

“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

This next quote is related to a recent entry:

“Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.”

I apologize in advance if any of these quotes are mis-attributed to Fitzgerald. The internet is my source, and people don’t seem to feel the need to cite their quote sources.

As a bonus, here’s my absolute favorite Fitzgeraldian quote:

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.“

What was it Shaw said about fools and their fondness of quotes?

Susie Bright’s guest post on Scalzi’s Whatever blog explores the ridiculousness of tagging things NSFW:

That’s the odd case though. It’s usually about the money. If you reach a critical mass, or have the imprinteur of high society, you can run ANYTHING on your site, no matter how sensational or sexually bizarre— no matter how many religions it offends, or work hours it squanders. No one will dream of calling you names and sending you to the sidelines. No longer are you NSFW— you are Safe for Bank, baby.

I’ve always refused to label things NSFW in whatever forum I was participating in. My reason has always been “it doesn’t feel right”, but now I have another stack of reasons.

From an interview with Cory Doctorow on Kottke (via Marginal Revolution):

“What commercial users of a work do is industrial—that’s copyright; what non-commercial users of a work do is just culture, and culture and copyright have never had the same rules, although according to the law books they do. But the costs of enforcing them culturally—against the person who sings in the shower—those enforcement costs are so high that historically we’ve treated that activity as though it weren’t an infringement, when in some meaningful sense it is. “

I know a lot of the links and such that I’ve been posting are old news. I’m going through a bunch of my built up feeds in chronological order.

GiftedSlacker.com the stalest news that’s fit to post!

The New York Times has an article up that talks about why I don’t vote. I have never voted, and likely never will vote. I’m glad the rest of the world is catching on.

Why would an economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts a cost - in time, effort, lost productivity - with no discernible payoff except perhaps some vague sense of having done your “civic duty.” As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, “A rational individual should abstain from voting.”

I’m quite the sophisticated, rational individual as you all well know.