Read it. Or don’t.

As an author, and one that is currently living on unemployment insurance payments, DRM-free scares the shit out of me. Every book I’ve ever published has been pirated. Some I have even found in the “/tmp” directory of open HTTP servers. Every time I see my books pirated I die a little inside.

So get a real job. There’s no law that says you have to be a writer.

Writing is very difficult for me. People don’t realize how hard it is. How do I stop procrastinating and sit down to write? I eliminate everything else “tempting” from my life for a year or two until the book is done. Do you know what’s more tempting to do than writing? Everything. This basically means anything fun… eliminated. It kills my nights and weekends. It kills my social life. I say “no” to every invitation, movie night, gaming night, etc. When the book is done I always hold a big party to celebrate but also to re-introduce myself to my friends and loved ones that I’ve haven’t seen in so long.

If you hate it so much, why do it? There’s no law that says you have to be a writer. I’d advise you to get into an un’piratable’ line of work. Plumbing, say. Or maybe carpentry.

So what if you really really really want to be a writer? Write! Doesn’t mean you are somehow entitled to make a living at it. I’d dearly love to be able to make a living as a teacher, too, but it doesn’t pay shit, so I don’t do that as my day job. I’m sure the guy who quit working in order to get a degree in Puppetry, for which there is no apparent commercial demand, feels just as pregnant as you do. But you’ll both have to get over it, or starve.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.

Even bureaucrats get the Obamassiah blues….

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Much to the consternation of scientists, the cylindrical platinum-iridium artifacts that represent the kilogram (see image above) have been gradually packing on extra weight due to surface contamination. Since that unit of measure is the last to be based on an artifact and not a physical constant of nature — for instance, a meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second — it means that scientists no longer know exactly how much a kilogram is. That makes experiments requiring extreme precision more difficult, so researchers from Mettler Toledo, CERN and the EPFL have been working for the last 15 years on a so-called Watt balance, which works on the principle of electromagnetic force restoration. The team managed to created a “load cell” that’s accurate to a 0.3 µg resolution for a 2kg weight, well below the desired level of 1 µg — meaning the goal of replacing a hunk of metal from 1878 with something more, ahem, solid is within reach by the 2015 target date.

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Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson is to retire after 37 years at the famous reference work. Here he writes of a life hunting for the evidence behind the birth of words.

Read it.

My favorite is National Lost Sock Memorial Day.

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Essential knowledge for all true reactionaries.

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After years of persistently high unemployment, states have drained their unemployment trust fund accounts.

The result is that states collectively owe the federal government $30 billion — money that they are now having to pay back with interest.

“States are forced to come up with all sorts of strategies to pay the money back, but they are also rejiggering their entire systems,” says Sujit CanagaRetna, a senior fiscal analyst with the Council of State Governments.

Funny how that works.

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The operation represents a crucial milestone for Geodynamics, which has spent ten years working to get geothermal power a seat at the table in Australia’s renewable energy debate. Its original Habanero 1 heat exchanger in 2003 first demonstrated the potential of the site, and the power plant construction was completed in 2009, but the project has suffered setbacks and some drilling disappointments.

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A North Carolina Eagle Scout who was expelled and arrested for accidentally leaving a shotgun in his pickup truck in the school parking lot has been offered a scholarship to attend Liberty University.

Cole Withrow was just a few weeks from graduating with honors from Princeton High School when he was arrested on Monday and slapped with a felony weapons charge. Withrow had been skeet shooting with friends a day before and had only noticed he had left his shotgun in his truck as he reached to grab his book bag.

When he realized his mistake, he went to the front office and called his mother. An administrator overheard the conversation and called police.

That administrator needs to be taken out back and have the snot beaten out of him.

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When you shoot a gun in BioShock or Far Cry, you don’t have to think much about how that gun works — you press a button to fire, a button to reload, and that’s about it. Receiver, on the other hand, is a first person shooter that’s almost entirely about mastering your weapon. And it all started with The X-Files. When David Rosen from developer Wolfire Games picked up a replica SIG Sauer P226 as part of a Fox Mulder halloween costume, he says he “had a lot of fun just playing around with the slide and ejecting and inserting the magazine. It seemed crazy that there were so many games about guns, but none that let you actually play around with them and see how they work.”

Receiver was originally developed over the course of nine days as part of the “7 Day FPS Challenge,” and just this week was released on Steam. In it, you play as a sort of disembodied handgun, infiltrating a virtually empty building in search of 11 different cassette tapes. The only things stopping you are are the drones and automated turrets littered through the hallways, as well as your ability to handle a gun. What makes this so challenging is just how many actions are required. If you’re using a revolver, for instance, you’ll need to dump out all of your shells in order to reload, and then put in each new bullet individually. Each of these actions requires a different combination of button presses, and you’ll need to memorize these sequences to be successful. (This concept could also be ideal for the next generation of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor.)

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The which I encourage you to buy, as I have. And also I urge you to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE (look on the sidebar, to the right, at the top, for the link).

Read it.

The Stack Overflow data showed that, contrary to received wisdom, veteran coders are just as able as young pups to adopt new programming languages, and in some cases they enjoy an advantage. Knowledge of C gives them a statistically relevant advantage when it comes to iOS and Windows Phone programming, for example.

Programmers in their 50s and 60s did as well if not better than their younger counterparts in some skill ranges, and Dr. Murphy-Hill cited research in Finland showing older coders were adept at picking up new skills.

Yeah, well, tell that to the hiring managers.

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This is huge, and stunning, even for critics of Medicaid: A randomized-controlled study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a group of the nation’s top health policy scholars has found that Medicaid has no measurable effect on any of the objectively measured physical health outcomes the study examined.

In its second-year results, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly selected 10,000 people in Oregon to get Medicaid (only about 6,300 actually got the benefit), and then compared them with a randomly selected control group, found that those who got Medicaid did not on average have healthier blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or diabetic blood pressure control than those who did not get Medicaid. Those with Medicaid did see some reduction in out of pocket health expenses. They were also less likely to be diagnosed with depression.

The Medicaid recipients also ended up utilizing a lot more health care—care that has to be paid for—than those who didn’t get coverage. But they didn’t use the emergency room any less than the control group.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

f you make it more expensive to employ people, say by mandating health coverage and also hiking the cost of that coverage with a giant government program we’ll call “Obamacare,” employers have a limited set of options: They can eat the cost, if they’re lucky enough to have a healthy profit margin that can be partially sacrificed; they can find a way to employ fewer workers; or they can reduce the cost of the workers they have. All of the approaches are likely to be used to one extent or another. We already know that many companies are reducing workers’ hours and turning to temp workers. And there’s evidence of firms eliminating health coverage that’s not required by law or else self-insuring if they employ disproportionately young and healthy workers. Now comes word that many firms are cutting the overall cost of worker benefits so that they can better shoulder the costs of Obamacare.

Everything the government touches turns to shit, and winds up costing ten times what it ought. You can carve that in stone.

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Problems bedevil the white elephant project. The High-Speed Rail Authority needs to buy land in order to build the railroad, but it has received no contractual authority to build from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company, which owns a freight line that occupies the space for the new bullet train. Federal grants are contingent on the project having contracts that guarantee the possibility of building. At the same time, the feds are trying to assert authority over the project via the Surface Transportation Board.

Meanwhile, it now turns out that the California Senate Transportation Committee is investigating the bidding process behind the first segment of the railroad. The review process for bidding was changed to allow bidders who had not met technical specs. The winning bid came from a firm with the lowest technical score in the field. The company that won the bid, Tutor Perini Corp., has done work with the state for years. The losers, it has been suggested, will be forced to keep quiet in order to receive reimbursement for their bidding costs.

That’s not the only problem with the bidding process. The High-Speed Rail Authority, behind closed doors, authorized a process that would require bidders to consent to a massive union giveaway in order to be considered. The board did not vote on the relevant Project Labor Agreement, and the Federal Railroad Administration may not have approved it. As the Modesto Bee points out, “A cynic would suggest that the presence of the head of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California on the HSR board might have encouraged the project labor agreement. Nevertheless, state union leaders knew how the bread was buttered. Union-affiliated organizations comprised seven of the top 10 donors, including the top five, to pass Proposition 1A in 2008.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The New Hampshire Union Leader has an editorial pointing out that the Boston Marathon bombing victims who lost limbs and who will be fitted with prosthetic or artificial legs will be stuck paying the ObamaCare medical device tax.

Soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise….

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The only thing missing is somebody playing the race card. Wait for it….

William A. Jacobson takes a look at ‘high speed’ rail.

Look at the travel time scale.  First it assumes the train will move at 220 mph — quite a feat.  If you ever have taken the Acela train in the Northeast Corridor you know that this is pie in the sky.  Plus, even at that unobtainable speed, the trip from New York to L.A. would take almost a day of actual travel time — as opposed to a few hours on a plane.  Good luck selling those tickets.

And cost?  We have covered the massive cost overruns and time delays just to build a high speed rail from L.A. to San Francisco.  Imagine that on a national scale.

It’s easy to poke fun at low information voters.  Until you realize how much they cost.

Read it.

Read it.

Nothing to see here. Move along, move along….

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New York-based startup HealthyOut already has a popular iPhone and Android app for quickly finding nearby restaurants and dishes that users can order and have delivered. Today at Disrupt NY 2013, HealthyOut is unveiling a new service, which will provide users with personalized menus of food delivered to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

Launching first in New York City, HealthyOut’s delivery service is designed to provide users with healthy options two times a day, five days a week. By combing through the menus of restaurants around the city that deliver, HealthyOut will come up with 10 meals a week that can automatically be sent to a customer’s home or office.

This sort of service depends on close physical proximity of a sufficient number of food snobs in order to be viable. In the old days, when transportation was inefficient and slow, everybody operated this way. Fortunately for us, things have gotten better. Unfortunately for us, the ‘progressives’ who constitute our ruling class don’t seem to have gotten the message.

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After its stock price fell to dismal lows of sub-$400 last week, Apple promised to return up to $100bn to shareholders by starting up a share-buyback programme and paying out increased dividends.

Reports have suggested the total size of the bond issue could soar up to $16bn, which has never been matched by any other non-bank bond sale in America.

The move is surprising because Cupertino has no debt and is currently riding high on cash reserves thought to be worth around $145bn.

However, as an estimated $100bn of these reserves is locked up overseas, Apple would have to pay 35 per cent tax to repatriate it. It is cheaper for Cupertino to borrow the cash from the markets and pay interest on it, than to repatriate its cash from overseas and pay the resultant swingeing taxes.

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What does he know that you don’t? (Well, aside from the fact that he’s got a yacht longer than the street you live on….)

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California is moving to join Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia on the list of places where health insurance companies are not allowed to charge higher premiums to smokers, NPR reports. The proposed law in California “has so far encountered no formal opposition from anti-smoking groups, cigarette companies, insurance companies or the American Lung Association,” NPR says.

I guess they figure that, if they had their way, there wouldn’t be any smokers, so it’s a moot point.

Another example of how government refuses to allow private parties to shit on groups that government spends it’s time shitting on. Chalk it up as an example of ‘pre-emption’.

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Hundreds of mysterious spheres lie beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, an ancient six-level step pyramid just 30 miles from Mexico City.

The enigmatic spheres were found during an archaeological dig using a camera-equipped robot at one of the most important buildings in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan.