Waste and irrationality. I think many among the rich would be far more willing to pay a larger portion in taxes if they believed it would help. They don’t believe it would, and I don’t either. San Francisco and California in general are good examples of this. We pay top-end taxes yet San Francisco is riddled with potholes,…
Archives for 2010
Learning Without a Purpose: Building a Book
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about goals. We all know that spending hours a day reading reddit or whatever is a waste. But what about other types of reading? What about newspapers and books and such? Why are they any better? It seems to me that all input is a waste unless it is put to use…
Blogging: Categories vs. Tags
I recently attended a company blogging conference call where the topic was how to properly categorize and tag posts for company blog posts. Despite a significant effort being made during the call to differentiate categories and tags, no distinction was actually drawn. When the presenter asked if anyone had any questions, the only sound was crickets. My guess…
Beyond SSH Bookmarks
I tripped over an article this week on creating “SSH Bookmarks”, which are basically aliases for hostnames within your ~/.ssh/config file. I think this is pretty cool, but I’ve been doing something I think is superior for a while now: Bash aliases for the entire SSH command. So while the SSH Bookmark idea has us typing the following:…
Republicans Are Much Better at Politics Than Democrats
The amazing radio show This American Life recently had a segment about the political process and how Republicans are more skilled at it. One of the things they said in the show is that Republicans are just more organized and on-message. Apparently every morning, a talking points memo goes out to influential Republicans at all levels of government:…
Who Wants to Date the High-powered Female CEO?
Maybe the problem with women in high-power senior management positions is that they require a person to act “like a man”, and when people see women acting like a man they tend to distrust and/or dislike it. Another way to look at this is to imagine a powerful, respected “classical” CEO. The image of a man comes to…
Unhealthy Happiness
A post over on Hacker News reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, which is the concept of “bad habits” like excessive shopping or overeating really being happiness problems. The quote that triggered my thought was: Obesity is the result of finding your happiness in food. The reason I did my own…
Ubuntu: aptitude > apt-*
For those who use Ubuntu or Debian and still use apt-get and apt-cache search, you might want to start thinking about using aptitude instead. Two reasons include: It handles dependencies better. apt is pretty good with dependencies, but from my research it seems clear that aptitude is far superior You you can just just one command. aptitude is…
Parent to Child Propagation of False Meaning
I have many smart conservative friends who take pride in two things in their lives: Having a mainstream, corporate job, and raising their children well. When we have conversations about life’s meaning, however, where I commonly express my belief that literature and art and history are the true pursuits in life, and that the corporate life is empty1,…
A Brilliant Insight into Ownership
Coveting possessions is unhealthy. All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free. When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular…
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