For the love of Christ, can someone please teach Andrew House how to say "today"? Laughing at your main presenter when they are not trying to be funny isn't a good thing. Or people just need to grow up but whatever. Being compared to a lesser Don Mattrick isn't a good thing, and Mattrick only gets away with it because he has serious bona fides in gaming and the other option would probably be crazy Ballmer and no one wants that.

gaming below.... more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 08:51 AM | Comments (90)
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Flying Squid You Guys!

Good morning morons and moronettes to the creepy, weirdly unnatural yet humorous Sunday Morning Book Thread.

So I've heard that some of you read this thread on hand-held devices with really crappy browsers, and I say "really crappy" because apparently, when I do the photo caption using a small font, the really crappy browser somehow doesn't pick up the small font html closing tag, which results in all subsequent text being displayed in teeny tiny print, which renders the whole thing unreadable. If anyone knows of a workaround for this that will enable me to use the small font, please let me know. I use the html tag 'small' to display reduced-size font. In the meantime, I'll just not use the tiny font.

What I'm Reading

'Ette commenter Kathy from Kansas mentioned The Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the comments of last week's book thread. It's one of those books I've heard about for years, but have never gotten around to reading. So I splurged and plunked down $18.99 for the NOOK edition, which burned off the rest of my B&N gift card and then some. It's the story of the life of a medieval Norwegian woman from her 7th year until her death. Commenter notsothoreau says "it's a story about children that do what they want, making bad choices and marrying the wrong person." Yeah, it sounds like a "chick book", and it probably is, but I'm enjoying it, so there. The author, Sigrid Undset (1882-1949), won the Nobel Prize for Literature, partly for this and also for another work, The Master of Hestviken, a four-volume series published after the Lavransdatter books. And before you all start rolling your eyes, remember that this was in the 1920s, back when the Nobel prize was an honest achievement, before O'Sullivan's First Law had a chance to take effect, and thus before the Nobel selection process was hijacked and corrupted by lefty a*holes.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:53 AM | Comments (190)
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Whilst watching Trading Places, it occurred to me that we are all Louis Winthorpe III now: Our fortunes and our freedoms have been snatched from us in what seems to be no more than a cruel competition to drive us to the loony bin. A social experiment and we are the mice.

So, what's the name of this play in which we all star? What is the musical score? Who are the cast of characters? How will it all end?

My hope is that Obama ends up like the Duke brothers and we, the good guys, are toasting his demise from a warm, sunny place.

Sooner rather than later.

Update: Oh, and open thread!

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:14 PM | Comments (350)
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Selfish Children For Sequestration And Furloughs.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:41 AM | Comments (534)
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So what is the difference between a prepper and a survivalist? I think I can agree with this definition. Bottom line, every one of us should be at least a prepper. I know I wouldn't want to have to rely on outside help in case of a disaster, terror attack, etc.

So if it makes good practical sense to be prepared for contingencies, why all the Demonizing Of Preppers? more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:03 PM | Comments (616)
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Unemployment has been around 8% (officially, it's higher) for 4 years. While private sector workers lost their jobs the size of the federal civilian workforce has grown under Obama.

Now that the pain (relatively slight) is hitting the bureaucrats, hold on a minute, now we have a crisis!

Union leaders cannot stop the furloughs or determine who in each agency must take them. They say their best option is to soften the pain of unpaid days, which could slash federal pay by up to 20 percent this fiscal year. They are demanding that employees be able to choose when to take days off and volunteer for more to help financially strapped colleagues. They want guarantees that no one will be penalized when work does not get done and assurances that managers cannot choose favorites to spare.

“Many of you will be missing eight, 10, 20 days of work,” Alex Bastani, president of Local 12 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), told a standing-room-only crowd of 400 Labor Department employees Thursday at a lunchtime town hall on sequestration.

...

The cuts may not last for long if Congress reaches a spending agreement by the next fiscal deadline on March 27, when the stopgap budget funding government operations runs out. But what many civil servants and political appointees thought was unimaginable now seems inevitable.

“The imminence of it is what’s scaring me,” Louise Leonard Campbell, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said Thursday as she left the meeting. “I’m a single mom. My son has health issues. This is just snowballing.”

As they listened to Bastani on the stage of the auditorium of the Frances Perkins Building, employees were conscious of the irony that they are facing some of the same labor conditions they work to improve for the rest of the nationÂ’s workforce.

“We are just living from one paycheck to another, and this could be really bad for us,” said Jorge Figueroa of Silver Spring, who works in quality control for the unemployment insurance division. He has four children, two in college. “I am telling you, this is going to be very stressful.”

God only knows how America will survive without BLS economists and unemployment quality assurance workers on the job for a few less days a year. We all know it's jobs like that which make America great.

Yes these are personal tragedies for sure. They are also exactly what people who pay taxes to fund these positions have been facing for 4 long years. Well not exactly. It's not as if these people are losing their jobs or their insurance benefits. No, they are going to have to do without up to 22 days worth of pay. A hardship to be sure but nothing compared to losing a job that isn't coming back and trying to find a new one in the Obama economy.

The GOP shouldn't be running away from sequester and blaming Obama, they should be apologizing to the American people that this is the best they can do. They should be begging for forgiveness that when all is said and done, the federal workforce, which used to be known as, "a multitude of New Offices, and "swarms of Officers" who harassed "people, and eat out their substance" (Stuff Jefferson Actually Said, Vol I, Abridged), will still be as large as it was when this started.

Honestly, it's not right that these people have to take a pay cut. They should quit their job and get a job in the private sector. If they can find one in the Obama economy.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:47 AM | Comments (351)
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OS/2 refuses to die even though IBM abandoned it many years ago.

The code base is being maintained, and expanded, new stuff added all the time apparently. The good thing about orphan products like this? Nobody bothers putting in the effort to develop attacks for them. There's a lot more Window, Mac, Linux, Android, etc targets.

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فتح الموضوع!

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Ouvrez le fil!

打開的線程！
Open the thread. multilingual version.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:21 AM | Comments (175)
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More global warming on the way here in the NE, and I'll be shoveling it all morning tomorrow.

Speaking of which, via @BigJoeBastardi, Obama's real "green jobs plan" has been uncovered.

Study: Global Warming Can Be Slowed By Working Less

A new analysis suggests that a more 'European' schedule would reduce the effects of climate change

He's Saving The Planet You Guys!

Posted by: andy at 03:57 AM | Comments (359)
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Super.

And don't think we're any better: The American public continues clinging to the Debtor's Delusion that we can forever spend more than we have.

These are shamanistic times. Everything is magic, isn't it? The reasoning man tells the public the obvious truth and the charlatan tells the public an obvious lie, but a pleasing one; of course the public prefers to believe in Magical Lies.

Won't last. Shan't. Shouldn't.

So Sick You Guys. Open Thread You Guys.

Posted by: Ace at 03:26 PM | Comments (563)
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Don Henley's NY Minute. "If you find somebody to love in this world you better hang on tooth and nail...The wolf is always at the door" [dri]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:04 PM | Add Comment
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