posted : Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

tags :

People rejecting free money

Cool article on people acting irrationally.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/irrational-markets-people-reject-free-money-out-of-anger.ars

Might be interesting to take a look back through all the things you’ve done “on principle” and see if there is any overlap with what they discuss in the article. Might be even more interesting to consider the emotional impact of not acting on principle - if you can cut through enough of the cognitive dissonance to, in this particular case, take the money and feel okay about it, since your actions don’t impact the transgressor, even though you think it’s a raw deal. How many important decisions in life involve rejecting material gain of some sort, because you don’t want to be “that sort of person”?

posted : Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

tags :

Real Quick: CNN Breaking Non-News

“— Michael Jackson’s mother files petition seeking legal guardianship of her son’s three children, CNN has confirmed.”

A) This is not news.

B) Something made me very sad about the death of MJ and I think this gets at it as well as anything else. The public obsession over MJ is at least partially to blame for his decline. We ruin the lives of perfectly decent people just because we feel, somehow, that we have a right to invade their private spaces: MJ, Britney Spears, Princess Diana, et al. In the case of Diana and Michael, they finally pass away and the feeding just continues.

posted : Monday, June 29th, 2009

tags :

I wonder what Bachmann was like in college.

A lot of stuff happened yesterday. Here’s something you may have missed…
http://minnesotaindependent.com/37810/bachmann-links-census-to-japanese-internment


Dear Michele,
You’re a Congressperson. If you don’t like the way the census is conducted or the information that is gathered, introduce legislation to change the census. That’s what Congress does. If a normal person doesn’t like something, they contact their Congressperson and then that person does something. You’re the person who is supposed to be doing something.

You don’t actually understand your job, do you?

Love,
Remedial.

posted : Friday, June 26th, 2009

tags :

Quickie on Iran/The Daily

On yesterday’s Daily there’s a clip of a young Iranian man impersonating Jon Stewart impersonating W.

Hehehe - I’m the decider.

Victory.

posted : Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

tags :

Father's Day It’s Father’s Day.  I’d forgotten this until I was at my local tea shoppe, wondering why I was seeing so many men walking around with kids.  It’s very sad that there is a noticeable increase of fathers with kids on Father’s Day.

posted : Sunday, June 21st, 2009

tags :