... I challenge you to provide me with a single location in the US that has ONLY Wal-Mart that offers music for sale.
I've got one. Whidbey Island, Washington. I spent two months there, earlier this year. Population ~ 40,000. Largest town on the island is Oak Harbor, home to the first-largest employer on the island (Naval Air Station Whidbey) and the second-largest (WalMart). WalMart is the only retail store on the island where new music can be purchased.
If you live on Whidbey Island, your only non-WalMart option for purchasing new music is to leave the island (either by ferry [at the south end of the island] or bridge [at the north]). Depending on where you live on the island, this will involve about two hours of travel.
I spent three months on the island earlier in the year. It was lovely and bucolic and charmingly rural, and by the end of my stay, I was nearly sucidal with boredom.
Ha ha, nope, you pretty much nailed it, there. The dissonance you've identified is the gap between disingenuous muddle-headed economic theorists and the bald-faced reality of human greed.
Disingenuous muddle-headed economic theorists say something along the lines of "Today, a South American farmer has to clear 100 acres of land a year to earn a dollar in agricultural profits. If prices rise by a factor of 10, that same farmer can make the same annual profit by clearing only 10 acres of land. This will halt the destruction of the rain forests!"
However, the bald-faced reality of human greed says something along the lines of "Today I make a dollar a year by clearing 100 acres of land. If prices rise by a factor of 10, then I'll make A HUNDRED DOLLARS by clearing 100 acres of land! Wait... fuck that... I'll clear THE ENTIRE GODDAMNED FOREST and make A BIZILLION DOLLARS and be THE RICHEST PERSON IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD!"
All of which wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if the rain forest had, you know, topsoil.
Although we provide a wide variety of ways in which you can torture your Sims, we do not endorse any of them. Please, please don't encourage a Sim without cooking skills to cook meal after meal until they accidentally set themselves on fire. Don't sell their toilet, laugh maniacally when they pee on the floor, then force them to clean it up. And for the love of all that's holy, we beg you to stop luring them into the swimming pool only to remove the ladder. It's just not right.
Too damn many people think they are being "productive" because they are on the phone all the time. No, you are not being "productive". You are being busy. There is a big difference.
I realize there's a difference. You realize there's a difference. But the question is, do your managers and coworkers realize there's a difference? Of course they don't, because they're tards.
It's a lot easier to be busy than to be productive, and you get paid the same either way. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some phone calls to make...
Yes, but you've overlooked the fact that none of that ever happens. Face it; in cubicle land, you're lucky if people can grasp Notes' email functionality, much less utilize its broader range of services. Mind you, these are the same people who are impressed by Powerpoint presentations.
I'll bet you a dollar that if you polled 1000 employees at a company that uses Lotus Notes, only 2 of them would even realize that Notes can do more than mail. Of those 2, only 1 would have actually done something other than mail, and then only by accident. ("Hey, what's this calendar thingie? Neat. But where did my inbox go?")
Oh, and it gives me a new mail message, but the new mail isn't listed until I manually refresh half the time.
That drives me INSANE. What possible purpose is served by the blue curly arrow? "I am visually telling you that you have new mail, but I will not show it to you until you click me!" Why not just show the new mail (which is visually distinguished from old mail by the red font used for the inbox listing)? Why? WHY?!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you glow-in-the-dark zebra fish fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an aquarium (a 40 gallon with 10 glow-in-the-dark zebra fish) for about 20 minutes now while the glow-in-the-dark zebra fish attempts to swim from one side of the aquarium to the other. 20 minutes. At home, in my 10 gallon aquarium with angelfish, which by all standards should be a lot slower than danios, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that. In addition, during this swim, the fish are not glowing. And all the other fish have ground to a halt. Even their gills are straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various glow-in-the-dark zebra fish, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is that I've never seen a glow-in-the-dark zebra fish that has swum faster than its non-glow-in-the-dark counterpart, despite the glow-in-the-dark zebra fish's flashier genetic architecture. My betta with its long, trailing fins swims faster than this glow-in-the-dark zebra fish at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that glow-in-the-dark danios are a "superior" fish.
Glow-in-the-dark fish addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a glow-in-the-dark fish over other faster, cheaper, more stable fish.
A while back, I experimented with several CMS packages. PHPNuke and PostNuke weren't appropriate for my needs, so I ruled those out immediately. I tried Grey Matter, and was pleased with its simplicity and flexibility. However, at the time it didn't come with templates (it may now; I don't know), which meant it was really only appropriate for people who wanted to design their website's look and feel from scratch.
Movable Type was next. I liked MT's interface, which was very slick. However, it stored everything in binary files which, in my personal experience, became corrupted easily. Poof, no more blog. (I believe MT now has the ability to store posts in a MySQL database, which would make it easier to backup/restore website content.)
In the end, I (and my users) went with PHPbb. It struck me as the "middle road" choice between GreyMatter and Movable Type. It has a lightweight GUI interface which lets you get in there and work under the hood if you want, or ignore all the techie stuff and just post your stories. Since it's written in PHP, it's also a simple matter to get in there and hack up the code to your liking.
I haven't had any issues or complaints in about a year and a half of running five PHPbb sites. Caveat, though: from what I've heard, installation can be tricky if you don't have root access to your server.
Given these behaviors, why go through the effort of making a list?
Good question. If you're a teacher (present or past tense; pick whichever applies) then you already know the answer. Go through the effort for the 20% of the class that isn't rowdy and disrespectful, but genuinely interested in the subject. They may not be as noisy, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be ignored.
Shopping at their online store just won't be the same. Not unless their website has embedded MIDI files of screaming children, anyway.
I'm not sure how they could virtually recreate the "Every aisle crammed full of carts and slow people so you can't get past" experience. A good website design team should be able to help them with that, though.
Cow's milk [...] has a nutritional profile substantially different from human milk, and there is no reason to expect it to be good for humans of any age.
Good point! I happened to read your post just as I was halfway through a Cobb salad of lettuce topped with grated cheese, bits of deli meat, some hard-boiled egg, and tomato slices. Upon closer examination, I realized that ALL of these items have a nutritional profile which is substantially different from human milk. Therefore, there is no reason why I should expect any of it to be good for humans of any age.
I threw the salad right away, and I am now scouring the web for a reliable source of human milk. (Being female, I suppose I could arrange to manufacture my own, but I'm not in the mood to get pregnant just now.)
Hopefully I will be able to find a source that provides fast, local delivery of fresh human milk. I'm really getting hungry, and I'm afraid all I have in the kitchen is fruits, vegetables, bread, a chunk of Colby Jack cheese, and half a dozen eggs. I thought that it was okay to eat such things, but you're right - clearly, people were designed to consume people milk. Nothing more, nothing less.
On Friendster, you get to pick who your friends are. No interested in knowing fictional characters? Then don't let them be your friends. It's pretty simple.
Grant people the autonomy to choose their own friends? Are you MAD? Why, that sort of thinking could lead to a website designed to support a distributed network of human interaction. No, no, no, I'm afraid we simply can't have that sort of thing on the internet.
Jonathan Abrams is on the right track, here. I just wish he could come over to my house, dig through my kitchen cupboards, and throw away all the food which is less than 100% nutritious. It would certainly save me having to make that sort of judgement for myself!
Slashdot Mirror
I've got one. Whidbey Island, Washington. I spent two months there, earlier this year. Population ~ 40,000. Largest town on the island is Oak Harbor, home to the first-largest employer on the island (Naval Air Station Whidbey) and the second-largest (WalMart). WalMart is the only retail store on the island where new music can be purchased.
If you live on Whidbey Island, your only non-WalMart option for purchasing new music is to leave the island (either by ferry [at the south end of the island] or bridge [at the north]). Depending on where you live on the island, this will involve about two hours of travel.
I spent three months on the island earlier in the year. It was lovely and bucolic and charmingly rural, and by the end of my stay, I was nearly sucidal with boredom.
Ha ha, nope, you pretty much nailed it, there. The dissonance you've identified is the gap between disingenuous muddle-headed economic theorists and the bald-faced reality of human greed.
Disingenuous muddle-headed economic theorists say something along the lines of "Today, a South American farmer has to clear 100 acres of land a year to earn a dollar in agricultural profits. If prices rise by a factor of 10, that same farmer can make the same annual profit by clearing only 10 acres of land. This will halt the destruction of the rain forests!"
However, the bald-faced reality of human greed says something along the lines of "Today I make a dollar a year by clearing 100 acres of land. If prices rise by a factor of 10, then I'll make A HUNDRED DOLLARS by clearing 100 acres of land! Wait... fuck that... I'll clear THE ENTIRE GODDAMNED FOREST and make A BIZILLION DOLLARS and be THE RICHEST PERSON IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD!"
All of which wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if the rain forest had, you know, topsoil.
(Someone else posted the first one. I just couldn't resist tagging on a P.S.)
P.S.
Although we provide a wide variety of ways in which you can torture your Sims, we do not endorse any of them. Please, please don't encourage a Sim without cooking skills to cook meal after meal until they accidentally set themselves on fire. Don't sell their toilet, laugh maniacally when they pee on the floor, then force them to clean it up. And for the love of all that's holy, we beg you to stop luring them into the swimming pool only to remove the ladder. It's just not right.
Regards,
-- Maxis
Wow, they really fell for the old "Yours is the biggest I've ever seen!" line, huh?
"That's easy. Antiseptics."
Too damn many people think they are being "productive" because they are on the phone all the time. No, you are not being "productive". You are being busy. There is a big difference.
I realize there's a difference. You realize there's a difference. But the question is, do your managers and coworkers realize there's a difference? Of course they don't, because they're tards.
It's a lot easier to be busy than to be productive, and you get paid the same either way. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some phone calls to make...
Yes, but you've overlooked the fact that none of that ever happens. Face it; in cubicle land, you're lucky if people can grasp Notes' email functionality, much less utilize its broader range of services. Mind you, these are the same people who are impressed by Powerpoint presentations.
I'll bet you a dollar that if you polled 1000 employees at a company that uses Lotus Notes, only 2 of them would even realize that Notes can do more than mail. Of those 2, only 1 would have actually done something other than mail, and then only by accident. ("Hey, what's this calendar thingie? Neat. But where did my inbox go?")
Oh, and it gives me a new mail message, but the new mail isn't listed until I manually refresh half the time.
That drives me INSANE. What possible purpose is served by the blue curly arrow? "I am visually telling you that you have new mail, but I will not show it to you until you click me!" Why not just show the new mail (which is visually distinguished from old mail by the red font used for the inbox listing)? Why? WHY?!
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you glow-in-the-dark zebra fish fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an aquarium (a 40 gallon with 10 glow-in-the-dark zebra fish) for about 20 minutes now while the glow-in-the-dark zebra fish attempts to swim from one side of the aquarium to the other. 20 minutes. At home, in my 10 gallon aquarium with angelfish, which by all standards should be a lot slower than danios, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that. In addition, during this swim, the fish are not glowing. And all the other fish have ground to a halt. Even their gills are straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various glow-in-the-dark zebra fish, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is that I've never seen a glow-in-the-dark zebra fish that has swum faster than its non-glow-in-the-dark counterpart, despite the glow-in-the-dark zebra fish's flashier genetic architecture. My betta with its long, trailing fins swims faster than this glow-in-the-dark zebra fish at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that glow-in-the-dark danios are a "superior" fish.
Glow-in-the-dark fish addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a glow-in-the-dark fish over other faster, cheaper, more stable fish.
A while back, I experimented with several CMS packages. PHPNuke and PostNuke weren't appropriate for my needs, so I ruled those out immediately. I tried Grey Matter, and was pleased with its simplicity and flexibility. However, at the time it didn't come with templates (it may now; I don't know), which meant it was really only appropriate for people who wanted to design their website's look and feel from scratch.
Movable Type was next. I liked MT's interface, which was very slick. However, it stored everything in binary files which, in my personal experience, became corrupted easily. Poof, no more blog. (I believe MT now has the ability to store posts in a MySQL database, which would make it easier to backup/restore website content.)
In the end, I (and my users) went with PHPbb. It struck me as the "middle road" choice between GreyMatter and Movable Type. It has a lightweight GUI interface which lets you get in there and work under the hood if you want, or ignore all the techie stuff and just post your stories. Since it's written in PHP, it's also a simple matter to get in there and hack up the code to your liking.
I haven't had any issues or complaints in about a year and a half of running five PHPbb sites. Caveat, though: from what I've heard, installation can be tricky if you don't have root access to your server.
Peter [...] is trying not to pee in his big boy underpants but at lunch he failed his mission. He is wearing his Pull-ups once again.
Folks, I think we can all sympathize with Peter. (I'm trying not to pee in my big boy underpants, too!)
Given these behaviors, why go through the effort of making a list?
Good question. If you're a teacher (present or past tense; pick whichever applies) then you already know the answer. Go through the effort for the 20% of the class that isn't rowdy and disrespectful, but genuinely interested in the subject. They may not be as noisy, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be ignored.
Ohhhh, he came so close
She, actually. There are SOME girls on Slashdot, you know. ;)
Actually, that's the second rule of sendmail. The first rule of sendmail is: DON'T TALK ABOUT SENDMAIL.
Shopping at their online store just won't be the same. Not unless their website has embedded MIDI files of screaming children, anyway.
I'm not sure how they could virtually recreate the "Every aisle crammed full of carts and slow people so you can't get past" experience. A good website design team should be able to help them with that, though.
Cow's milk [...] has a nutritional profile substantially different from human milk, and there is no reason to expect it to be good for humans of any age.
Good point! I happened to read your post just as I was halfway through a Cobb salad of lettuce topped with grated cheese, bits of deli meat, some hard-boiled egg, and tomato slices. Upon closer examination, I realized that ALL of these items have a nutritional profile which is substantially different from human milk. Therefore, there is no reason why I should expect any of it to be good for humans of any age.
I threw the salad right away, and I am now scouring the web for a reliable source of human milk. (Being female, I suppose I could arrange to manufacture my own, but I'm not in the mood to get pregnant just now.)
Hopefully I will be able to find a source that provides fast, local delivery of fresh human milk. I'm really getting hungry, and I'm afraid all I have in the kitchen is fruits, vegetables, bread, a chunk of Colby Jack cheese, and half a dozen eggs. I thought that it was okay to eat such things, but you're right - clearly, people were designed to consume people milk. Nothing more, nothing less.
Thank you for showing me the error of my ways!
Peanut butter and hockey puck, definitely!
You're right! Any NSFW link in an AC post should be clearly labelled as such.
Because THAT'LL really happen.
Okay, you caught me. I snuck the iPod out of Google's pants while Google was asleep.
Cell phone? Pfft, Google bought ME a shiny new iPod! You really should... renegotiate your... contract!
Hmm, getting dry-humped by a search engine on a long-term basis. Interesting idea.
I've had worse, that's for sure.
I fucking love you, Google If you tell Google how you feel, its first response is something about dry-humping. Make of that what you will.
On Friendster, you get to pick who your friends are. No interested in knowing fictional characters? Then don't let them be your friends. It's pretty simple.
Grant people the autonomy to choose their own friends? Are you MAD? Why, that sort of thinking could lead to a website designed to support a distributed network of human interaction. No, no, no, I'm afraid we simply can't have that sort of thing on the internet.
Jonathan Abrams is on the right track, here. I just wish he could come over to my house, dig through my kitchen cupboards, and throw away all the food which is less than 100% nutritious. It would certainly save me having to make that sort of judgement for myself!
Hell, I still have nightmares about Frank!