Gifted Slacker

It’s been quiet around here lately, and it doesn’t look like it will get any noisier anytime soon. I’m sorry about that. Hopefully you’ll all live without my linksterbation.

Anyway.

Two Saturdays ago I was walking back from grabbing food at Gregg’s (ew, I know) when I was approached by a teenage girl. She wanted to me to go into the newsagent and buy her a bottle of vodka. I declined with a smirk.

This would be a completely mundane story if I stopped here. However, that’s not where this story ends.

As I turned and started walking away, the girl offered me a blowjob to run her errand! Well, me being me, I crossed my eyes in shock and started walking faster, at which point she offered the whole shebang. I could barely keep myself from running!

Can’t these kids get some meth somewhere, or at least find a few liters of gasoline to huff. They obviously don’t have enough brain cells to worry about becoming any more retarded than they already are.

I’ll admit, they aren’t operated with exactly the same aims. However, Techcrunch tends more toward the baseless, incorrect, misleading, and ad hominem instead of clear, rational arguments and criticism. GigaOM, on the other hand, is almost scrupulously “good.”

This article highlights the difference you’ll see if you read virtually any Techcrunch post. I’m not saying the GigaOM post is groundbreaking or very thought provoking, but it is definitely the kind of criticism I can endorse: thoughtful, reasonable, clearly argued and written.

The UK government is hoping to start issuing a national id card by 2012. The Reg reports that two of the potential suppliers have pulled their bids for “commercial and political” reasons.

There is quite a lot of trepidation in the population about this card in light of the regular data loss by government agencies here. It’s kind of shocking that UK citizens are concerned with these privacy issues, but they welcome CCTV cameras.

The national id card program (or should I say “programme”?) has a lovely adoption strategy:

Documents leaked yesterday reveal the Home Office will target teenagers for early take-up of the cards. Anyone wanting to open a bank account, apply for student funding or buy alcohol or cigarettes will be forced to buy an ID card.

The reality is that privacy is increasingly a thing of the past. For better or worse, whether we want it to or not, it’s going to disappear for all intents and purposes. Fundamental cultural changes are inexorable like that.

Information wants to be free ,and technology is enabling it to be so. That’s a good thing. But it’s also what erodes privacy.

If I ever have kids I’m taking them to do stuff like this:

Yesterday tillyjane, the_child and I went missile silo hunting. I’d pulled some map references to the old silo complexes at the long-abandoned Larson Air Force Base in Adams County, WA, near the town of Moses Lake. These are Titan I silos from the early days of ballistic deterrence, long since decommisioned, and now on private land.

There are a bunch of old WWII bunkers scattered around the English countryside. Some of them are accessible, some aren’t. It’s the excitement of exploring non-tourist history that entices me.I can’t wait to finish school (again) and settle into a life where I can go do some of the odd things that fascinate me.

The UK is behind in revolutionary research:

It is sometimes asserted that UK science is thriving, at other times that it has declined. We suggest that both assertions are party true because the UK is thriving with respect to the volume of ‘normal’ science production but at the same time declining in the highest level of ‘revolutionary’ science.

That’s a good reason for not staying at Newcastle to pursue a PhD. The rest of the paper is here.

Tyler Cowen gives us a list of things that economists learned last year. The most interesting of which is:

Spells of extreme cold kill over 27,000 Americans each year, or about 700 people each very cold day. Heat waves may receive more publicity, but it turns out that cold periods — days with an average temperature below 30 degrees —have more significant and longer-lasting effects on human mortality. More people die in cold periods than in homicides.
[...]
When retired people move to a warmer state, their life expectancy rises dramatically. In fact, 8 to 15 percent of the increase in American life expectancy over the last 30 years comes from people moving to warmer climates, according to research done by two economics professors, Olivier Deschenes at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Enrico Moretti, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ugly first. Campuses of note: 20, College Park Maryland; 16, RIT; 8, SUNY Albany; 2, UMass - Amherst.

Of the pretty schools, I’ve only have experience of Princeton (#2 on the list).

The best sentence I read all week was written by Alex in this post at Marignal Revolution:

It is time to restore freedom of contract to marriage, Laissez-faire for all capitalist acts between consenting adults!

Apparently, state officiation of marriage in America became common in the early 20th century. The reasons were racial, not any sort of economic or practical reason. How sick is that?

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!