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“Newcomers are often insecure, and a debt of gratitude can make anyone feel a bit awkward, so I try my best to be patient with some of the sillier things often said by those from the American “heartland” about supposed “East Coast elites” in general and New York in particular.
But that patience has its limits and I may have reached those limits listening to various non-New Yorkers bloviating about where and how New Yorkers ought to be allowed to worship. (I’m from the heartland of New Jersey, myself, where I was taught that real Americans don’t imagine it’s their business to tell someone where they can or cannot worship.)
So before I endure yet another silly speech about how the real-er real Americans from the real-er real America are so superior to the illegitimate pseudo-Americans of New York, I would ask that the speaker first respond to the following questions.”
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“The Federal Trade Commission estimates that about 9 million Americans are victims of identity theft every year, so it’s a safe bet that each of these AGs (or A’s G) has thousands of constituents whose credit histories are scarred by such theft and who are therefore being forced to pay premium rates for everything from mortgages to consumer loans to insurance and utilities. Some of these constituents may have been denied employment or promotion on the basis of these lucratively inaccurate and uncorrected credit scores.
These costs are real and therefore they can be measured and quantified and added up into a single Very Large Dollar Amount — the amount that constituents have been inaccurately and unfairly overcharged due to the negligence and irresponsibility of others. That VLDA is the basis for the class-action lawsuits that these attorneys general ought to be filing on behalf of their constituents.”
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“I’m not against sustainability – I’m for anything that saves resources, improves systems, and may save our planet before we fry it in its own petroleum-based oils. But driving your grid-produced pickup to get your grid-produced lumber at a big box store, driving on grid-paved highways to your mountain acres whose streams are protected by multiple layers of grid-powered government, and then using your grid-supplied plans to build a windmill to power your grid-produced computer as it gathers its information from grid-produced satellites? And then pointing at your windmill and your satellite dish and your septic tank and saying, “Look at me! I’m off the grid!”
I don’t buy it.”
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“The cover of Shel Silverstein’s famous Book of Futilities depicts two men in an obviously hopeless predicament. Thoroughly chained to both the floor and ceiling in an inescapable room, one prisoner exclaims to the other “now, here’s my plan.” I was reminded of the old cartoon the other week when the front page of the New York Times science section had an article (albeit very well written and worth reading) on a physicist who claimed gravity didn’t exist. Of course he had zero experimental evidence and few in his field even understood his theory, but it got me thinking: Has physics reached the point of futility? “
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“I was thinking about the part where Gondor sends a signal to Rohan asking them for military aid. Since this was before the invention of email, they had to do it with a signal fire. […]
How fast does this signal travel? There are three angles to this question. Symbolically, what is this speed? What is my estimate of the speed from the video clip? What would be the speed if someone really set this up – you never know, you might need to do this in the event of a zombie attack.” -
As usual, xkcd absolutely nails the typical college or university web site. Ours isn’t quite there yet, but is being extensively re-worked even as we speak, apparently to bring it more in line with the xkcd model.