Coincidentally, apropos of the first link, I picked up and skimmed the first half of this recently.
It's annoyingly shouty, but the premise is much like Brad's: the typical large-office worker spends as much or more time appearing to busily work as he or she spends actually working, and everyone (but management, perhaps) knows this. Facts and figures about the average amount of time spent surfing the net are rather stunning. Among the conclusions is that this is not only rendering us brain-dead and peculiarly dysfunctional, but has made of the notion of productivity a complete joke.
Very strange. It's very tempting to assume that this is all an exaggeration, but it seems it's really not.
Surfing the net makes us brain-dead? I think not.
The SXSW article was interesting. I didn't catch who he was or what band he's in, though.
CA is so madly in love with Fucked Up in the way only a 42yo former 80s hardcore kid can be. Seriously. It is adorable.
I am killing every thread with my request, but has anyone ever managed to buy the Pesach/Passover Coca Cola that's made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup? I want to get some. My first thought is Brookline, but websites from a few years ago said that it was available at the Stop and Shop in Malden.
I would think many supermarkets in a large metropolitan area like Boston would stock Passover Coke. As Passover foodstuffs go, it's not much of a niche product.
Indeed, calling the Stop and Shop in Malden sounds like an excellent first step. You know, since the website suggested it.
I like the way you've posted that comment in every single active thread, by the way.
I would just have homemade lemonade myself. But if it's got to be Coke, it's got to be. It is what it is.
Coca Cola will again be available with an OU-P for Pesach. Aside from the New York metropolitan area, Coke will be available in Boston, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Teo, she'll never learn if you keep giving her the answers.
Geez, who pissed in your Pesach Coca-Cola™, nosflow?
My local grocery has Passover Coke, and I'm not even in a particularly Jewful town.
Mountain Jew Throwback, for Passover.
8: It's not Passover Coke, but you can generally buy Mexican coke with real sugar just about any place foodies or hipsters hang out - small cafes, magazine shops, etc (though that's not ideal for buying in quantity). And, at least in CA, also at select Mexican restaurants, but I bet that doesn't apply so well in Boston.
One of my favorite flamewars on the late, lamented ba.food was started by a Jewish woman begging gentiles not to buy kosher l'Pesach Coke. Maybe nosflow's just upholding her legacy.
19: or, indeed, where Mexicans hang out.
I say "Jewful" because I was yesterday explaining to a non-native English speaker that his use of the word "charmful", while, um, charming, was not standard English usage. ("But I thought you could add '-ful' to anything!") So imagine my chagrin today when he proudly showed me a dictionary entry for "charmful".
22: I bet you were pretty chagrinful all right.
a Jewish woman begging gentiles not to buy kosher l'Pesach Coke
Why? Because supplies might run out?
The hipster cafe next to my office sells tiny bottles of coke in glass bottles, but it's made with high fructose corn syrup. I hate calling supermarkets, because the people never know anything.
I somewhat wish the SXSW piece had gotten into the insidiousness of marketing, rather than pointing out that bands themselves need to get in on the action. This:
You may have heard that the music industry is sort of falling apart. It isn't really a matter of there being less money in the pool - just that the money people have to spend on entertainment (which will always be somewhat of a constant) is just being diverted away from where it historically has gone (record labels and managers). The music industry is by definition an operation invented to divert money spent on music away from actual musicians - the problems that the music industry is currently facing have specifically to do with the fact that the money that would usually flow directly to the bigger economic actors is now going somewhere else.
This isn't news, but the (book) publishing industry is going through the same thing. I don't have any suggestions, except that absent a radical change, the only recourse for artists is, yeah, to leverage.
24: Precisely. And then she and her family wouldn't be able to have *any* Coke for all of Passover!
Sympathy was, um, not forthcoming.
It seems pretty implausible that any place where they sell Passover Coke (which, as per 14, really means just a few large cities with substantial Jewish populations) would run out of it entirely no matter how many gentiles bought it.
27: Somebody might have told her that surely Coca-Cola would take note of increased demand and up production, so that nobody would have to do without. Either that, or she might need to stockpile, in advance, like.
The RSS feed appears to be down. Maybe it was all that sugary Coke.
Hmm, the feed validates. Must be my reader, dear reader.
21: Do they have carnicerias and the like in Boston? (I am ignorant regarding Mexican immigration patterns outside of the west.)
Mexican immigration into the Northeast in the past few years has been massive.
Good to know. Maybe in a few years, then, Mexican food in the Northeast will be tolerable and the eastern seaboard will move up a notch in livability.
My grocery store has a display of Passover stuff, including the Coke, and this is not a Jewful town. But is it the Passover Coke or merely the cane-sugar Coke BG is after? Which is it, BG?
It's not like the Northeast has seen uniform patterns of Mexican immigration. I think there's more immigrants in Reading, PA than there are in Pittsburgh.
Yeah, it's been very uneven, and I don't know much about the details in areas I'm not personally familiar with. I have no idea how much Mexican immigration Boston, for instance, has gotten. I do know that some parts of New Jersey (such as New Brunswick) have gotten an enormous influx.
I had the most appalling burrito in Michigan recently. It was a big tortilla containing beans. Solamente frijoles. It was placed on a small sprinkling of shredded lettuce and a single slice of tomato.
Yeah, Mexican food outside of the Southwest has traditionally been dire. This may be changing with increased Mexican immigration, but I'm skeptical. I still haven't tried any of the (many) Mexican restaurants in New Brunswick.
I had some pretty ridiculous "Mexican" food in Germany once.
I'm inordinately amused by the word "carnicería" at the moment, because I'm imagining a butcher shop calling itself a "meatery" in English.
I hate calling supermarkets, because the people never know anything.
Whereas we know all about what Boston supermarkets stock.
My fond hope is that when I wake up tomorrow, more than 2% of the comments in this thread will be on topic.
My fond hope is that when I wake up tomorrow, more than 2% of the comments in this thread will be on topic.
You must be new here.
My usual method of finding out what supermarkets stock is to go to the supermarkets and see what they have.
I don't mind if the ratio goes down after that.
Well, if it's on-topic comments you want: I'm not totally convinced by the argument in the first link. There's a definite advantage to productivity in having a place to go to work. Working at home can easily involve too many distractions. The extent to which this will counterbalance the admittedly soul- and productivity-destroying conditions of a typical white-collar office job will vary depending on the individual and the specific circumstances, of course.
Yeah, I wanted (though not very much) to express something like that in my comment. I personally simply do not work well at home. But I also found the inability frankly not to work when there simply wasn't much to be done at the moment soul-deadening when I was working in an office.
My fond hope is that when I wake up tomorrow, more than 2% of the comments in this thread will be on topic.
You want us to talk about work on the weekend?
That's absurd. I'll be too busy working tomorrow.
But isn't it more fun to talk about work than to do it?
Pesach/Passover Coca Cola that's made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup
Costco in southern Californian often stocks imported Coca Cola from Mexico. Real sugar, glass bottles, quite expensive. I tried it once - it's different in taste, plus has a different texture. I'm not clear that I'd prefer it, honestly, but I got more and more used to by the time I finished the case.
On topic, I've found that having - if not an official workplace workplace - a place where other people can see you work can greatly improve my productivity. I'm less likely to be pseudonymously writing stuff if someone can see it, even if no one has any reason to spy on my screen.
On the other hand, library carrels work for me only really when I'm reading off-screen (and if that part of the library is quiet enough). Otherwise, there's enough privacy that I do the same old messing around on the internet. Unfortunately, I do very little off-screen reading nowadays. Like tomorrow, if I even get myself to go into the library, I will probably be checking this thread, if it's still going.
I read the first link - I will stay on topic, just for nosflow, even though he's being even more of a little bitch than usual over the Coke thing.
I think his "ultimate hurdle" isn't actually a hurdle at all, and could turn out to be whatever the opposite of a hurdle might be. A springboard perhaps. One could easily argue that if a person is at home (or a cafe etc) then they won't be so tired from the normal commuting, having to be nice to people, and so on, and by the evening they will have more energy to go out and be sociable. Plus they'll be keen to get out and see people, having been secluded all day. And they can stay out later because they won't have to get up an hour early to dress/shave/commute. So their social life - assuming their friends are all living this enlightened WAH life too - will improve.
C works at home one day out of most weeks, and apart from lunch and the occasional coffee, we don't see him for 9 hours. The whole thing may depend on temperament, but it might also have a lot to do with having plenty of engaging work to be getting on with.
One of my favorite commentaries on the soul-deadening aspects of work from Paul Neilan's Apathy and Other Small Victories (but note that 8' x 8' is relatively big for a cubicle):
Even something so seemingly right as Bring Your Daughter to Work Day in that environment was horribly, horribly wrong. Marching a sweet, innocent nine year old who likes ponies and dreaming into an 8' x 8' cubicle and telling her that if she's strong and independent she'll get to spend forty years in there slowly wasting away is an exercise in feminist mysogyny. It was like a fucking Scared Straight program, a right-wing Christian conspiracy to create more stay-at-home moms. You grab a little girl by the pigtails and say "Suzy, this is what hell looks like!" and obviously she's going to kick off her shoes and get pregnant at fifteen. And she'll keep on going for as long as the clock runs, anything to stay out of that cubicle.
54: we don't see him for 9 hours.
I enjoy working from home, but am hugely distractable there (i.e. marginally more so than when at work) and have suffered from never having had a setup where "disappearing" was possible. Where I work best is at work but when no one else is there.
||
I didn't want to say anything closer to the date, but am I the only person who thinks the following two things?
1. The Replacements are overrated, but their best song, "Alex Chilton", is about
2. Alex Chilton, who is even more overrated than the Replacements.
|>
57 is wrong in very many ways! One of the ways in which it is wrong is that "Alex Chilton" isn't even in the top 20 of Replacements songs. Sheesh.
I'm less committed to the claim that "Alex Chilton" is their best song than the other claims.
||
One tragedy of health care reform is that we'll no longer get heartwarming stories like this: a newborn with a birth defect is denied coverage because he has a preexisting condition.
|>
The sxsw post struck me as being an attempt at economic sophistication that was, nonetheless, hopelessly naive.
The author's solution to the problem of artists giving away their art? Other bands should stop doing it. The author fails to recognize the intractable collective action problem here.
57 seems not just wrong but badly wrong but I am, nevertheless, willing to believe that, in certain circles, the Replacements are overrated.
I am influenced in my thinking by just having read this.
Boston has a fair number of Latinos. More Puerto Rican than Mexican.
Brazilians too (but it was my understanding that they're not classified as Hispanics.)
II just want the sugar coke, and we don't get the Mexican stuff here. Passover seemed to be the easiest way to get some.
WILL NO ONE THINK OF MY CHILDREN?
63: Yes, that's goofy. (I say this as someone who, as a 15yo, when bled on by Paul W. at a show, dipped my finger in it and crossed myself.)
64: Well, if there isn't a substantial Mexican community then yeah, you won't find any Mexican Coke. It really shouldn't be hard to find Passover Coke, though, at least before Passover starts (Monday night). Check any supermarket; if they don't have it, check another.
I'm badly wrong that I'm the only one who thinks these two things? That's comforting.
67 generalizes to items other than Passover coke.
So, does anyone know where I can find tea matzo in san francisco????????
I don't know any sf-dwelling matzo-eating Jewesses, more's the pity, or else I certainly would.
Maybe you could find a sf-dwelling matzo-eating Jewess on Craig's List.
Oh for crying out loud. I just called the Star Market in Brookline, and the guy there said they might have a case left.
38: That sounds like the burrito I had in Chennai, except it was just beans and ground meat.
Actually, he offered to check for me, but he sounded busy, so I didn't want to put him to the trouble.
nosflow, I was asking, because there are other people on this blog who live in the Boston area in different neighborhoods. The supermarket down the street from me does not carry it, and since I don't have my own car, going all over town all day to find it would take a lot of time.
Your original topic is definitely worth talking about, but the weather is gorgeous right now, and I've got errands to run. I'm also being kept on task by someone who will shut off my computer if I spend to much time commenting here.
Quick, BG! Star Market might have some left. I almost asked him to set it aside for you, but I didn't know if you'd found it already.
A. Kafel: ""Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs' acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it.""
So corn syrup Coke's cool after all.
Israel is a stubborn people
Israel is people? IT'S PEOPLE! SOYLENT ISRAEL! SOYLENT ISRAEL!
You don't need 70 years of digging in Israel to see that the Jews never sojourned in Egypt. The Egyptians were good imperial record keepers, and they never mention any weird monotheist slave people, let alone having their army swept up by the Red Sea.
I thought the rule with the Bible is that anything before the rule of David is just made up whole cloth.
I thought the rule with the Bible is that anything before the rule of David is just made up whole cloth.
But much later stuff like Revelation is a totally legit factual reference, right?
My uncle once tried to argue that the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus somehow demonstrates that it really did happen. I forget his exact arguments, but they were just as specious and unconvincing as you would expect.
But much later stuff like Revelation is a totally legit factual reference, right?
That's not part of the Bible.
The Egyptians were good imperial record keepers, and they never mention any weird monotheist slave people
I had no idea this was made up.
This is the type of fact where I end up quoting Unfogged and feeling more and more incompetent as the conversation reveals that I don't have the credibility nor back-up information to make my point.
No! Really smart people on the internet said so!
The issue of the historicity of the Exodus, and of the Bible in general, is of course an issue of central importance in Biblical archaeology. Rob's comment basically reflects one side of a long-running debate over whether the Israelites are described in Egyptian records or not. There's no clear-cut reference to anything resembling the version in Exodus, but there are some vague mentions of various "Asiatic" people in some Egyptian sources that the other side has seized upon, the most prominent example being the "Apiru" who have been equated with the "Hebrews" (although I believe this particular theory has been largely discredited).
I thought there was pretty good evidence that the Exodus occured by kayak in California.
I should note that, as Sifu's link shows, the mythical-Exodus side of this debate has been largely vindicated by increasing data, but there are still a lot of people who argue for some version of an historical Exodus, and not just hard-core fundamentalist types.
Actual argument from longago schooldays of TdL:
teacher: so what did you notice about the gospel accounts of the event?
us: THEY'RE DIFFERENT!
teacher: and what do you conclude?
us: IT'S ALL MADE UP!
teacher: Wrong! If it was made up they'd all agree! So hence it must be true QED
us: HUH???!!
(The name of these lessons in this school was "Divinity", which at the time none of us thought twice about because you take so much in school for granted, but now seems PECULIAR.)
Enough about Exodus, anyway. The real question is where's all the loot?
95 -- I thought the Count of Monte Cristo dug it up and used it for his revenge.
Hell, I believe that Perseus and Andromeda were real.
Get outahere with your "no King David"
Coatlicue seems more your type, Bob. Living where you do, maybe Pia Mupitsi.
If x is related to y, y either exists or existed.
I am related to King David.
King David does not exist.
∴ King David existed.
Living where you do, maybe Pia Mupitsi.
That's a bit further west than bob. Something Caddo or Wichita is more plausible, I think, but I know nothing of Caddo or Wichita traditions and Wikipedia isn't very helpful.
My favorite Replacements song is from their uncharacteristically polite and sweet 1990 really-just-the-main-dude album All Shook Down. It's called The Last. I made a girl cry by putting it on a mix for her, because it's the sort of song that by putting it on a mix you say, "I'm it, baby, I'm sticking around," and I so clearly wasn't.
Interestingly, we're going to the same seder Monday. She doesn't like running into me in the farmer's market, so this is could be awkward. Also, she's apparently going out with the son of the man I hate most in Los Angeles, but from the few times I've met him, he seems to have a good sense of humor about these things.
This by hated limb-jouncer Stephen Metcalf is, I think, a great case for the Replacements, and a really well-written piece of band biography overall.
94: Wrong! If it was made up they'd all agree! So hence it must be true
I think I implicitly used this reasoning when I believed the maps at the back of my Bible growing up. For instance, parts of the Exodus were shown with dotted alternate routes. "So reasonable and skeptical, not like those knee-jerk literalists". I suspect the maps (and the whole take of my church on biblical history) were William F. Albright-influenced--scholarship constrained by faith.
Albright's something of a towering figure in Biblical archaeology, which is hardly a surprise but I think explains a lot of its oddities as a subdiscipline.
The Replacement's Let It Be feels like I would think alienation felt like in the eighties to someone a little older and more aware than I was.
Fuck you all.
Yes, I did get some.
One place only had the Passover diet coke. I'm not quite sure how that differs from the kind they sell all tear. They were very confused at one store, so I did make the trek to Staples and then to Stop and Shop in Brookline to pick up some 2 litre bottles.
I did call, and, luckily they had it, though there were no signs up. Round-trip the two errands took 4 hours. Sometimes I hate relying on public transit.
I think I just realized for the first time that tierce de lollardie and teraz kurwa my are different commenters. No offense, of course; keeping track of personae is something I suck at.
BG! I just came back from this place. Holy smokes, I spent like fifty dollars on soda! It's for a gift though, and I also bought some candy cigarettes, hooray! I think most of their sodas are cane sugar based, and they have a mail order service. I am very excited to try the burdock root soda, as I love to eat burdock root.
It's amazing. I also am realizing I need to go back, because I was so charmed by the owner's recitation of his favorite ginger ales that I ended up buying too many ginger ales and not enough strawberry or cherry soda. I bought twenty-four bottles. I'm thinking about making it a balanced thirty-six.
that place is awesome.
Quite a selection, which I see includes the horrifying Moxie.
Also, just to pile on, 57 is near-Kristolian in its wrongness.
Moxie is delicious. And there are far, far stranger sodas than Moxie in the world (and at that store).
90: Presumably the Egyptians were humans. If so I doubt they spent much time documenting anything that went wrong.
I just got some Fentiman's the other night -- the ginger beer and some orange/mandarin type.
Moxie is gross. Cherry Moxie is surprisingly okay.
114: Indeed, which is why the question still remains somewhat open. (This is, of course, an inherent issue in interpreting historical records of any kind.) It was Albright himself who said "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and while the ideological appeal of that argument in this specific case is obvious, it is nevertheless true as a general matter.
I was contemplating the Moxie, but ultimately decided against it. I mostly didn't get any strange sodas -- just small makers of fairly standard flavors, except that I did buy the dandelion/burdock, along with rose, cucumber and an unknown pink herbal beverage, which the owner warned me against, but in a curiosity-stirring way. But now I see they have rhubarb! And how did I not see the celery, I was looking for that. Okay, I'm definitely going back tomorrow.
I too was puzzled by what is different Passover diet coke, after just having learned the reason for Passover coke; it seems the difference is only in kosherly sanitized equipment, not ingredients.
Ancient Egyptians are uniquely famous among humans for their ability to not document things that went wrong.
117: I drink about one Cel-Ray soda a year. I don't want it more often than that, but I don't want it less often than that either.
There is Egyptian documentation about problems with various enemies and groups such as the Sea Peoples, however. But those were big problems.
121: That's my policy with Shamrock Shakes.
I too was puzzled by what is different Passover diet coke, after just having learned the reason for Passover coke; it seems the difference is only in kosherly sanitized equipment, not ingredients.
The way Passover Coke works is that four times a year Coke does regular cleanings and inspections of its bottling plants, and during one of them in the late winter or early spring they clean up some of the plants so that they meet Passover standards and get the rabbis to certify them so that everything coming out of them gets the Passover certification. In terms of production processes, this basically just means substituting sugar for corn syrup for the regular Coke, but because it's all been inspected by the rabbis they can put the certification on anything that comes from the same equipment, including Diet Coke.
That website is expensive. There is no reason why it should have prices some 25%-50% higher than what you pay retail in a NYC supermarket.
They sell the Yerba Mate one up the street.
Tweety, Carwin just TKO'd Frank Mir at 3:48 of Round 1.
Crazy. Go fightin' mine engineers!
100 -- You're right of course. I think of the cross-timbers country as being the eastern edge for the plains indians, and I guess it shows how long I've been away that I've stopped thinking of Dallas as an eastern city, and have mentally moved it west. That said, it still seems more than a little west for Caddo.
That said, it still seems more than a little west for Caddo.
Yeah, it definitely is. I think it would have been Wichita territory during the contact period, although I can't find much information about tribal distributions for that area in cursory web searching.
The Dallas article says Caddo, but without a citation.
Handbook of Texas says "the Anadarkos, a Caddoan group."
Basically it looks like no one really knows who lived in the Dallas area before European settlement, but there are plenty of guesses. It's sort of on the fringe of known Caddoan areas, so most guesses seem to posit some sort of Caddoan connection.
Huh. So I checked the page for Tarrant (immeddiately to the west), and it's a little different:
Groups thought to have been in the area were the Tonkawas and the Hasinai Caddos. By the late 1700s the Comanches, Kiowas, and Wichitas had also moved into the region. When white settlers came they clashed with the native population. The battle of Village Creek occurred in 1841. A seventy-man force, led by Gen. Edward H. Tarrant, seized and destroyed three Indian villages. Although this expedition and others like it cleared permanent Indian settlements from the area, trouble with the Comanches and Kiowas continued into the 1870s.
I'd guess that Parker and Palo Pinto, the next counties going west, respectively, will be unambiguously within the Comancheria. These are not large geographical units either. We used to drive from west central Tarrant to northwestern Palo Pinto in 90 minutes, and that's before the interstate was built.
I suspect what's going on is that the area was both poorly documented and subject to considerable population movement in the early post-contact period, so there's a lot of confusion over who was where when.
Too bad the Egyptians weren't there to record everything.
Read the Palo Pinto county entry. They herded eastern Indians out onto the plains, over on the Brazos, and then blamed them for raids on nearby ranches by Kiowa and Comanche groups. An ugly story.
Not very well covered in Ft. Worth schools in the 1960s.
There's no evidence, biblical or otherwise, that the Israelites, if they existed, wold have been monotheists at the time they were in Egypt. Some of them might have favoured a particular tribal god, but even that's not cut and dried.
|| I don't know if folks have seen this yet, but it's worth .65 chuckles.|>
144: That just raised my blood pressure significantly. No chuckles.
A group of FB acquaintances are discussing how the "liberal Jews in the media are destroying this country." Each member of the group discussing this is Jewish. (It's my own fault for looking. I had hidden them, but then couldn't resist checking in on their batshittery.)
143: I hesitated before calling the Hebrews in Egypt weird monotheists, but I went ahead with it, because I figured once you realize that any Hebrews in Egypt probably weren't monotheists, you've already abandoned the idea that there is any historical accuracy to Exodus.
And, look, sometimes a lack of evidence is evidence for a lack. There is a lack of evidence for an elephant in this room. No visual evidence, no auditory evidence, etc. From this, I conclude that there is no elephant in the room.
In general, if a search has gone on long enough, and it yields nothing, there comes a time to give up.
146: Maybe you should ask them if they're going to join the Tea Party. (I sometimes wonder if it's not coming time for a little semi-public shaming when people begin to carry on glibly, cluelessly, or irresponsibly, under the impression that nobody can actually hear them.)
There is a lack of a useful analogy in 147.2. To wit: we would expect the evidence of an elephant in the room to be complete and immediately convincing. We do not expect the archaeological evidence for events that may or may not have occured millenia ago to be complete and immediately convincing.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but the FBI appears to be carrying out an operation against a Michigan militia group this weekend. I expect teh crazy is about to intensify.
150: Wow, that is crazy. Also, that may be the ugliest website I have ever seen (since 1998).
148: They are proud and open Teabaggers, already!
Here's a TV news report on it. Nobody seems to know who's being targeted yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyak-E5gTAY
More recent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJk3TcMRg5E
Looks like it's the Michigan Militia proper.
150: Huh.
Out of curiosity, where did you find mention of that (or are you really reading the Tol/edo B/lade regularly)? Mostly curious who is tracking this kind of news -- besides you -- and whether other militia types are on the alert about it.
Hmm, the Ann Arbor newsite I found mentioned it was the Hutaree.
Who say this about themselves:
HUTAREE; Christian Warrior
As christians we all are a part of the Souls of the Body of Christ, the one true church of Christ. Not any specific man made building or any man controlled organization. This is the belief of the Hutaree soldier, as should the belief of all followers in Christ be. We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded.
It's been all over the place, parsimon. I've seen it on several blogs.
In general, if a search has gone on long enough, and it yields nothing, there comes a time to give up.
Yes, if it's gone on long enough.
These more well-known guys say they are not involved, but I bet there is a lot of overlap. The accompanying picture shows a member of the MM with members of Hutaree helping the search.
The Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia has not been targeted in any raids, spokesman Mike Lackomar said. The group posted a message on its website today saying, "Neither michiganmilitia.com nor the SMVM have been 'raided' by the FBI. We do nothing illegal."
151: They are proud and open Teabaggers, already!
You should send them this open letter to conservatives.
What do you all think of the coffee party people? I don't think that they have anything like the same amount of money as the teaparty ones, since they're not as astroturfy.
I looked at their website, and it talked a lot about bringing back civility to politics in a non-partisan way, so it's not something that would get me out to work.
Everybody who's nobody read unfogged.
Coffee party people? I guess I should google that, but I won't.
fe, It was a bunch of people who were pissed off about the tea party activists who got together in a coffee shop. They don't really have a coherent policy agenda. They just are against the tea partiers and support health care insurance reform.
I signed up for the cocktail party on facebook, which calls itself a "A barstool-roots movement for left wing urban homosexuals and those who love us." Since one of its explicit aims is to piss off Tea Party people, I figure this disqualifies me from joining the Coffee Party.
As for myself, I'm riding on that Farmer-Labor train.
The coffee party has a kind of "they bring a knife, we bring a book" ethos.
COFFEE: The Story of a Small, Golden Fish and how it Changed Modern Warfare
171: hah! I had no idea anybody but me read that blog. Awesome!
172: I see you've played knifey-bookey before!
Very interesting, k-sky, but what about the *speech*?
Bostoniangirl should start the Passover Coke Party.
Which will eventually split along the ideological fault line between the Malden Stop and Shop/Brookline Star Market factions.
To get back on topic, the main problem I have with the idea of working from home is that well, it's an intrusion of work on your home life. Much easier to get somebody to do some work after hours when they're already at home working, much easier to get them to work odd hours and so on. For a lot of people this may not seem a problem, horrid little workaholics that they are, but at least the seperation of home and work protects them a little bit against themselves.
I don't know what other people's experiences are, but as an IT gun for hire, every company I worked for already wanted me not just to work a full week for their customers (need to be billable!) but also expected me to follow courses, attend practise meetings, go to business presentations and all that stuff, in my own time, unpaid. The more we blur the boundaries between work and life, the more this happens.
That elderly workers article also annoyed me btw. I hate those "how unfair that people are forced to retire at 65" articles -- the people featured are always either from the professional classes (doctors or lawyers or whatever) with not too demanding jobs who get off on the status or people with literally no other interest in life, who would die if retired largely because they're not quite there.
These stories are always, always propaganda for the idea that we not only NEED to work longer but should be glad to do so and I resent that.
Yeah, I despise the "Oh, but I love my work, it's so rewarding" chorus. Any how many other people do they think have to spend their lives in mindless drudgery to free them up to do all that lovely and rewarding stuff? I actually don't mind my job at all, but I'd quit in a heartbeat to spend my time doing something a little less alienated, as would everybody I know.
re: 184
Ditto. I like the people I work with, and my work is sometimes interesting, but I'd find something more interesting to do in a shot if I had the money to pursue what ever I wanted.
I didn't read any of the links, but I do know of retired people who open up a Bed and breakfast (not not working). And there's some guy in the town my parents live in on the Maine coast who opened up a used book store. He's originally from Texas or somewhere South, so he goes down there for the winter, and the shop closes. I think he likes it, because he enjoys meeting and talking to his customers. He probably makes some money but not a whole lot. It wasn't what he did for his whole life, and it's probably more like a hobby that pays for itself, but it's still a job.
I don't think of that as glamorous high-end work or anything.
My co-worker has a friend with about 10-15 million dollars who doesn't have to work but chooses to work as a lobbyist on progressive causes.
186. Well, yeah. If I was independently wealthy I might do that too. Or I might open a B&B. Everybody needs to do something. But really not what I'm doing now. Outsourcing companies aren't evil by definition, and business analysis has its moments, though it gets old. But it doesn't advance any causes.
187: I guess you could call him independently wealthy, but he's about 68 or 70, so he's "retired" but has a job.
Soul-crushing jobs obviously suck.
I guess you could call him independently wealthy
I guess I could. $10M invested at 5%, which is extremely conservative, would bring in an income of $500,000, which is nearly 6 times the median income for Massachusetts at the last census. I'd take it.
6 times the median income for Massachusetts for a family of 4, to be clear.
190: Sorry, I wasn't clear at all. The guy with 10-15 million is, of course, independently wealthy.
I meant to refer to the older man who opened the bookstore in Maine. He's retired, probably rents a small place in Maine and goes to the warm bits of Texas for the winter.
The shop probably pays for him to keep a small place in Maine and a place in Texas. He doesn't have to worry about his healthcare, because he's on Medicare. He gets Social Security and some kind of pension.
But I've heard of retirees working at restaurants part-time. They need the money, but it also gives them a chance to feel useful and interact with people. Not my idea of fun, of course.
But I've heard of retirees working at restaurants part-time. They need the money, but it also gives them a chance to feel useful and interact with people.
And that's why the US is a third world country, in that it even cannot provide its people with good enough pensions to not have to do that...
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Hooray! Time for everybody to stop talking about the "Overton Window"!
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Actually, I rather like the Overton Window.
You like Glenn Beck's book? I wouldn't have guessed.
Are the words in question rendered in parentheses in my comment?
rendered in parentheses
Um, no. Is that some kind of tell?
Rendered in parentheses? The ( )vert( )n W(nd( )w?
Don't listen to them, Stormcrow. You're being perfectly clear. You love Glenn Beck and want to have his babies.
198, 199: Are you two a Neb Nosflow tribute band?
Are you two a Neb Nosflow tribute band?
Cleveland, Ohio, put your hands together for Ñözflöw!
The nozflow is the total area of all of the nozzles at their outlet ends divided by the total surface area of the sheet W to which air application is made.
It's good that we abandon useful analytical concepts as soon as they become boring.
I submit, Some Mr. Guy, that the Overton Window (not the book) stopped being a useful analytical concept some time ago, and instead became a fairly lazy shorthand for a set of assumptions about how the political process works that can be used to justify a vast range of oft-contradictory assertions.
I propose that Glenn Beck's next book be called "The Uncanny Valley", so we can also put that one to bed.
I vote for "Computational Theory of the Mind".
If the title of his next book is "Apostropher", then Tweety and Walt can put me to bed.
208: I liked Overton Window (not the book nor the political "theory") merely as a nice shorthand for "universe of acceptable discourse" as practiced on the Sunday Morning Talks Shows, for instance. If we had abandoned it then the lazy shorthanders would have won. And now Beck gets to win.
Glenn Beck is to "Overton Window" as Jethro Tull was to "Dot com"?
Speaking of the original definition of the Overton Window, I'm almost incoherent with anger at the way George Will has singlehandedly mainstreamed hatefulness:
To end the practice of "birthright citizenship," all that is required is to correct the misinterpretation of that amendment's first sentence: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." From these words has flowed the practice of conferring citizenship on children born here to illegal immigrants.
I can't believe a year ago I was getting head-patted by people who told me that I was irrational for worrying that 14th Amendment revisionism was creeping into the mainstream.
Creep, my foot. It just pole-vaulted into dinner table conversation. Thank you not at all, Mr. George "I couldn't care less about the human, financial, and policy havoc this insane idea would cause" F. Will.
The sheer level of ignorance is just stunning.
Maybe he is being liberal by only requiring a Kleiner Ariernachweis.
CJ Burger, joined by White, Rehnquist, and O'Connor, gave the critical point away in their dissent in Phyler v. Doe:
I have no quarrel with the conclusion that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to aliens who, after their illegal entry into this country, are indeed physically "within the jurisdiction" of a state.
On that subject, Chief Justice Fuller's dissent in US v. Wong Kim Ark is a pretty good read. I think he's wrong, but he's not insane. Unlike George Will, who thinks he wants to re-open the question settled in that case.
