Archive for May, 2022
9th May 2022
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YouTube get paid by the advertisers when they insert video ads. And they get paid even more when they let the advertisers insert longer video ads. On the other hand, YouTube needs to make sure their users are not too bothered by the long ads, so they created the “Skip Ad” button. However, the advertisers don’t have to pay YouTube when their ads are skipped too soon (via). This means YouTube can’t just let everyone click on the “Skip Ad” button all the time. After all, any additional click on the “Skip Ad” button is going to impact the revenue. Furthermore, if skipping ads was too easy, it would hurt the sales of YouTube’s ad-free subscription as well. So while YouTube offers the “Skip Ad” button, YouTube ultimately wants the users to stay away from clicking the “Skip Ad” button.
At present, if I go to a YouTube video and the initial image suggests that I’m going to have to wait through part of a video ad before I get to my desired content, I just leave.
Life is too short to spend even five second listening to how the American taxpayer can be forced to pay for you to install solar panels on your house with no up-front cost, or having some person who I would avoid on the street tell me about the great deal he got on life insurance.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
9th May 2022
Paul Graham.
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn’t seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Life Is Short
9th May 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
9th May 2022
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine and two Post reporters seem to have discovered the benefactor who has kept Hunter Biden rolling in the style to which he has become accustomed. He is a wealthy Hollywood figure named Kevin Morris. Morris has money to burn from sources other than the royalties on White Man’s Problems, his 2014 book of short stories.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on White Man’s Problems: The Sequel
9th May 2022
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On May 5th, the California State Assembly ‘gutted’ the contents of an unrelated bill (AB-1227) aimed at building energy efficiency, and amended it with language reviving a long-failed firearm and ammunition excise tax which, if passed, would be effective immediately as an “urgency statute.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on CA Lawmakers Use ‘Gut-And-Amend’ To Resurrect Failed Gun Tax
9th May 2022
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On April 22nd, the University of British Columbia released its Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force report, which contains 54 recommendations aimed at confronting “systemic racism against Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) within the UBC community.” Though it’s two years in the making, and almost 300 pages in length, the report contains surprisingly scant evidence that UBC is a racist institution. Instead, the authors mostly indict UBC on the basis of their own “reflections of lived experiences”—an “integrative” anti-racist fact-finding method described as “truthing.”
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on When Disagreement Becomes Trauma
8th May 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
8th May 2022
Biden’s new environmental justice chief faces a tough task (Washington Post) Leaving no proglodyte buzzword unexploited.
What to know about Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black and first openly gay White House press secretary (CNBC) She’s black, she’s female, and she’s gay — what else could you possibly need to know?
Former AG Bill Barr ‘appalled’ by White House response to Supreme Court doxxing Poor guy, still living in the past.
Biden disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz’s book says she won’t be ‘silenced’ by ‘harassment’ from men online She’s so oppressed she actually had to try to get a book deal.
From court packing to leaking to doxing: White House yields to a national rage addiction (The Hill)
Taliban Orders All Afghan Women To Cover Faces In Public, Taking Country Back To Pre-2001
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
8th May 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
8th May 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in War
8th May 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
8th May 2022
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People are fed up with the urban utopian socialist experiment in California. One business owner barricaded a public street in Sacramento to prevent a further spillover in crime from other areas.
“The game is over. We’re taking back our streets,” business owner Rich Eaton told FOX40. He barricaded part of Railroad Drive to prevent the commercial area from additional car burglaries, rampant building theft, prostitution, and homeless encampments.
…
Sacramento responded to Eaton’s barricade with an order to stop blocking the street.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘We’re Taking Back Our Street” – Sacramento Man Barricades Street to Stop Out-of-Control Crime
8th May 2022
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Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep around 9.5 hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep around 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though really, they’re hardly ever awake — they sleep for 17 hours a day.
Samson calls this discrepancy the human sleep paradox. “How is this possible, that we’re sleeping the least out of any primate?” he says. Sleep is known to be important for our memory, immune function and other aspects of health. A predictive model of primate sleep based on factors such as body mass, brain size and diet concluded that humans ought to sleep about 9.5 hours out of every 24, not seven. “Something weird is going on,” Samson says.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Awake Ape: Why People Sleep Less Than Their Primate Relatives
8th May 2022
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There are fillers for jawlines and there is Botox for foreheads, but height — a major source of anxiety for men — seems unsolvable. The struggles for short men in the dating world are well documented. To improve their odds of matching with people, men have taken to lying about their height on dating apps. This happens so frequently that the dating app Tinder once rolled out an April Fools joke about verifying height, and men got very upset. Just last week, a TikTok went viral for devising a plan to “fact-check” guys who say they’re 6 feet tall. Height is even an advantage in the workplace, where taller men are more likely to end up CEOs and shorter men are less likely to get access to career opportunities. Short men are mocked on social media. Some research suggests shorter men are more likely to be depressed.
The male equivalent of fake boobs? Natural selection is really taking it in the shorts from modern technology.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on He Was 5’7″. After Surgery, He’ll Be 5’10”.
8th May 2022
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It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere – in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Economics of Seinfeld
8th May 2022
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Right now, tech companies who appreciate the effects Blue state policies have on their businesses and employees are oozing their way around such policies by tranferring activities to Red states with better attitudes toward business and taxes — Austin TX is a blatant beneficiary of this process; a Blue pustule on the rosy Red butt of Texas, proglodytes in Travis county try their best to turn Austin into a little bitty corner of California on the prairie, but are constrained by the sanity of the state as a whole so that their Wokeness can’t get out of hand (Texas taxes aren’t going to jump to California levels, and Texas social policies aren’t going to reach California levels of weird). So they can signal their virtue like fidget-spinners without any danger of having to suffer from the results.
But abortion is the keystone of the Woke edifice, and if that goes away, well, they’re between a rock and a hard place. AWFLs are going to shun Texas, and Wokerati already in Austin will probably decamp precipitously of Texas moves to restrict or ban abortion (as I expect it will). The squeeze will be on, and the Austin (and San Antonio, it’s little sister) economy could quite possibly crash into rubble. This next year will be very interesting.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Big Tech Faces Dilemma If Roe Is Overturned
8th May 2022
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Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?
We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Public Money – Public Code
8th May 2022
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Khan World School at ASU Prep will unleash the potential of a new generation of students that will change the world we live in for the better. We do this by maximizing opportunities for student mastery, agency, collaboration and passion. A LOT of the thought went into translating the vision from my book The One World Schoolhouse into a comprehensive and engaging high school model. I encourage you to explore this website and attend a virtual info session to decide whether you might be a fit.
I would refuse to let my children associate with any group friendly to girls with unnaturally-colored hair. Exposure to such a narcissistic ‘peer group’ is the very definition of a Bad Influence.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Khan World School at ASU Prep
8th May 2022
Joel Kotkin.
How we reverted to a feudalistic state is a complex and infuriating story. Critical to this change has been a planning theology that holds density itself as intrinsically good and that purposely seeks to block housing on the periphery for societal, and environmental reasons. Where implemented, this approach has driven up prices, as evident in places like Sydney, Vancouver, San Francisco, London, and Paris. This has been a boon to speculators and well-heeled developers, but makes middle-class housing unaffordable to the middle class and intensifies the poverty of poorer residents.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Serfing the Future?
8th May 2022
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A trans-identified male convicted of torturing and killing a 4 year-old boy has been quietly transferred to a women’s prison in New York state. Christopher “Kryzie” King was serving a sentence of 22 years to life in Clinton Correctional Facility until April 20, when he was relocated to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.
King pleaded guilty to abusing and murdering 4-year-old Myls Dobson in 2014. The child had been left in his care after his father, Okee Wade, was arrested.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Toddler-Killer Quietly Moved to New York Women’s Prison
8th May 2022
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Happy Mothers Day
8th May 2022
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Coming to your iPhone? Or maybe your Apple Watch.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on 5G Millimeter Wave Tech May Prevent Unnecessary Skin Biopsies
8th May 2022
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Every few days, Professor Kim Rich looks through new student registrations for the Los Angeles Community College District, including at Pierce College where she teaches criminal justice, and sees hundreds of newly created fake student enrollments.
In our conversations with Rich, she told us that It’s been going on for months.
Hackers enroll the fake students and collect up to $900 million in financial aid and Covid-19 aid each semester. However, no one seems to know for sure the sheer scale of the fraud.
These fake students, usually created by bots, open new accounts using easy-to-spot fake names like Barack Obama, Donald Trump or duplicate first names — Clifford Clifford, Jordan Jordan, Sidney Sidney, Kamara All of the above and fivethousandonehundredseven — names with questions marks or names with numbers.
New fake accounts are created, the fake students enroll in classes, taking seats away from actual students hoping to enroll in those classes. The fake accounts also “qualify” for financial aid.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on 65,000+ Fake Students Enrolled in the California Junior College System
8th May 2022
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The number of wealthy Americans buying “golden passports” has skyrocketed over the past three years.
The top programs grant citizenship to foreigners who invest millions of dollars in the country.
US applicants are citing COVID, climate change, and political division, multiple firms told Insider.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Wealthy Americans Are Buying Second Passports as a ‘Plan B’
8th May 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
7th May 2022
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
7th May 2022
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
7th May 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in War
7th May 2022
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
7th May 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
7th May 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
7th May 2022
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Take this as yet another sign of Democratic paranoia. It’s a memo to Gavin Newsom: have someone ready to go at a moment’s notice, because the Senate calendar is counting down, and Democrats need every vote—if they can even get things to the floor. Also, California already has one appointed Senator (quick—can you name him?), and going into the 2024 it would be best to have another appointed Senator with time to build up political capital. The longer Feinstein waits to leave the scene, the more vulnerable the seat becomes, even in deep blue California.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Latest from the Dump Feinstein Campaign
7th May 2022
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Why, you might ask, disrupt Catholic church services, and not Baptists or other pro-life Protestant denominations? Because hatred of the Catholic Church has become a core principle of the left, full stop. The reasons for this go beyond the coincidence that that the five Supreme Court justices who (may) form the majority to overturn Roe are Catholics. To quote Whittaker Chambers (a Quaker), “the Catholic Church is the only fully consistent conservative position.” That’s why.
I can think of few things that will alienate moderate voters than shrieking leftists disrupting church services. Though it is fitting that they might do so on Birthing Person’s Day Mother’s Day.
It says something about the Left that their mob actions aren’t intended to persuade anybody but just to inconvenience the targets of the current Two Minute Hate. I believe that the technical term for that is ‘tantrum’.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on The Left’s Mother’s Day Spectacle
7th May 2022
“A big part of the incentive problem is that future people don’t have the vote. Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
“We could solve many more of our problem if both sides stowed some of their cultural agendas to focus on areas of agreement. I think, for example, that we could solve the climate change problem with a combination of a revenue neutral carbon tax and American ingenuity. Nuclear, geo-thermal, hydrogen–these aren’t just clean fuels they are better fuels! Unfortunately, instead of focusing on innovation we get a lot of nonsense about paper straws and low-flow showers. I hate paper straws and low-flow showers! There is a wing of the environmental movement that wants to punish consumerism, individualism, and America more than they want to solve environmental problems so they see an innovation agenda as a kind of cheating. Retribution is the goal of their practice.”
— Alex Tabarrok
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Quotation of the Day
7th May 2022
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The New York Post debuts an excerpt of John Paul Mac Isaac’s memoir American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth. The Post has published the excerpt under the headline “The night I met Hunter Biden: Mac Shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac recounts fateful encounter in exclusive excerpt.” It is the story the Post reported before the 2020 presidential election, but it is the story that could not be told. It has to be suppressed. Isaac had to be defamed. The story had to be trashed. President Biden himself reiterated the blatant propaganda of retired intelligence officials asserting that it was Russian misinformation.
Among the laptops turned over to him by Hunter Biden, Isaac found the revelations with which we have become familiar, no thanks to the Democrats’ media adjunct. It is an incredible story. Isaac himself was a walk-on whose role was to serve as roadkill.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Night of the Hunter
7th May 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
7th May 2022
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The IRS may have the ability to automate nearly half of tax returns, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The agency could correctly auto-fill an estimated 62 million to 73 million returns with information it already has, covering 41% to 48% of taxpayers, researchers from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and Dartmouth College found.
“Our results suggest that pre-populated returns would be accurate for a substantial share of U.S. taxpayers,” the authors wrote.
Can you spell T-U-R-B-O-T-A-X? Can you spell H-&-R-B-L-O-C-K? I’m sure you can….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Over 60 Million Tax Returns Could Be Completed Automatically, Study Shows
7th May 2022
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But, of course, as we all know, there was no vote fraud in the 2020 election. Perish the thought!
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Michigan State Police Seize Voting Machine as It Expands Investigation Into Potential Breaches Tied to 2020 Election
6th May 2022
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The emergency request includes $1.2 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services with a nod to the Department of Homeland Security’s Uniting for Ukraine program. This portion of the funding request includes robust and increased blanket immigration provisions for Ukrainians, Afghans, and Russians in the science, technology, engineering, and math—or STEM—fields.
One of the most curious categories mentioned is the Russian STEM professionals. With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it is surprising that the administration believes it will “benefit” U.S. national security interests to peel back employer-sponsor requirements and expedite an unlimited number of applications from this foreign adversary.
Normally, these Russian nationals would be subject to visa caps that would limit the number allowed to enter the U.S. each year. This certainly seems like the Biden administration’s latest radical, opportunistic attempt to get around those caps one country at a time. And to start with Russia is just national security incompetence.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Biden Administration Sneaks Unlawful Immigration Benefits Into Ukraine Aid Request
6th May 2022
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The Biden administration’s nuclear policies and budget are too ambiguous or otherwise wide reaching to provide the type of conflict deterrence that is expected of them, according to several experts.
“How are you going to contain Russia and China?” said Harlan Ullman, a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. “The policy statements don’t tell you. They’re aspirational.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Biden Strategy Pushing US Nuclear Deterrence ‘Beyond Its Usefulness’: Experts
6th May 2022
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You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that, because this happened in George Gascón’s district, the attacker will not be charged with a felony. Basically nothing is a felony in L.A. anymore, except voting Republican.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Aspiring Rapper Update: Misdemeanor Charges for Homeless Lunatic in L.A.
6th May 2022
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A gang of young juveniles led by an 11-year-old girl is terrorizing random people throughout the popular downtown area of Boston.
According to incident reports released by police, all the children are black and under the age of 14.
Raised in the ‘hood, up to no good,
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Child-Gang’s Violent Spree Shakes-Up Downtown Boston
6th May 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
6th May 2022

BLM co-founder’s nonprofit flooded with secret cash from tech titan fund
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
6th May 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
6th May 2022
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
6th May 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
6th May 2022
Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, does the necessary.
The primitive communism of hunter-gatherers is no different in principle from the primitive communism of the wifi service at Starbucks, the modern day police and fire departments, or the use of Shakespeare’s works. As Barzel put it, “New rights are created in response to new economic forces that increase the value of the rights.” Thus, in this respect, there are no major differences among peoples, only differences in transaction costs, externalities, and technologies of inclusion and exclusion.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Myth of Primitive Communism
6th May 2022
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Yeah, that sure keeps me awake at night. (Not.).
Do an Internet search for “Make Your Own Baby Formula” and see what you find.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | 3 Comments »
6th May 2022
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Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration Thursday for allegedly colluding with Big Tech companies.
Fox News reported that the lawsuit claimed that the Biden administration “pressured and colluded” with companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The plaintiffs also alleged that stories that discussed the origins of COVID-19 and potential fraud in mail-in votes were also censored.
The suit named the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowicz in her official capacity as director of the “Disinformation Governance Board,” and others as defendants.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry alleged that the censorship occurred “‘under the guise of combating misinformation’ in order to achieve greater censorship,” Fox reported. Schmitt and Landry issued a press release that further explained their complaint.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on NEW: Biden Admin Sued for Allegedly ‘Colluding’ with Big Tech