Linky Friday #33

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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39 Responses

  1. Kim says:

    My experience with psychopaths is that they are not often heroes as we’d define such.
    Paying someone to kill a competitor, or using a knife to do it yourself…
    ‘sides, I can’t imagine Lieberman (or Nixon) doing anything meritorious in warfare.

    I think there may be a statistical confound, in that the “acts of heroism” noted may be
    less likely to get someone harmed if they’re more psychopathic.
    [aka if Andre the giant jumps in to stop a fight between two shorter-than-average folks, he’s not really being as much of a hero as the 5 foot guy who jumps between two pro football players.]Report

  2. Kim says:

    Net. Creator. Of. Tax. Dollars.

    Who writes this crap? We ain’t taxing shit. You wonder why there’s so much drilling? Cause it’s free. Below Market, too.
    Yeah, sure, the jobs are good. The jobs are also temporary.
    We have our share of ghost towns in PA. These’ll be just new ones — give ’em a couple of years.Report

  3. Brandon Berg says:

    Fortunately, the Canadians can just leach off America.

    It’s not leaching if they’re paying for it.Report

  4. Kazzy says:

    I find the “analysis” in P2 to be pretty lacking. Given that the typical child was adopted before her second birthday, it is highly likely that the children still spent most of their early years in a healthy environment. It is rare that something is set in stone during those early years, but paths can be laid and, if they are not departed from, can soon become deterministic.Report

  5. j@m3z Aitch. says:

    H3:

    The father who didn’t vaccinate his child is a bit infuriating. He (1) ignored the scientific evidence on vaccination, relying on his own (2) “research” via Google, but now is convinced of vaccination’s value by (3) a single example. And yet he claims to have a science degree?Report

    • Trumwill in reply to Kim says:

      I look forward to their follow-up on the awesome income mobility power of ruralia.Report

      • Kim in reply to Trumwill says:

        Only some ruralia. Certainly not PA, and a good deal of it is very heavily rural.
        What’s so different about the Great American Desert? ;-PReport

      • Well, that’s why we choose a handful of cities and make sweeping statements on the basis of an inadequate sample set. Like they did.

        (Actually, a quick glance of Pennsylvania’s numbers and it doesn’t look that bad either.)Report

      • Kim in reply to Trumwill says:

        Will,
        http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
        Ok, so the article I quoted may be doing itself a disservice by only look at 10.
        http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/index.php/city-rankings/city-rankings-allReport

      • Kim in reply to Trumwill says:

        Will,
        there may be considerable reason to be skeptical about pittsburgh’s #8 ranking, due to the large emigration. Scranton too.

        I’ll believe SLC (but that might have seen a ton of immigration, so…)Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Trumwill says:

        There are a lot of confounding factors involved. West Dakota isn’t just that awesome. There are actually a lot of reasons that places turn out well or not-well according to these rankings. I don’t have difficulty believing the thesis is true on some level, but I think this is clearly a case of jumping on data that supports (and overstates) that conclusion. They saw what they wanted to see, and not Montana.Report

      • Kim in reply to Trumwill says:

        will,
        what’s so different about montana?
        I will say that pittsburgh supports the notion that “well integrated suburbs” fuel better mobility.
        All the other rust belt cities have dramatically less daily inflow/outflow from the city itself — and they also have very much less mobility (Cleveland is at half of pittsburgh’s bottom to top percent).
        [citing the cleveland fed on that one.]Report

      • Will Truman in reply to Trumwill says:

        Nearly every area shown in Montana and Idaho demonstrates more social mobility than New York City. More than not show more than San Fransisco.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Trumwill says:

        What’s so different about the Great American Desert?

        Three things: large amounts of energy resources that have become profitable to extract in the last couple of decades, very large individual land holdings, and state laws that have always kept ownership of the surface land and subsurface resources tied together. The Bakken Shale sticks out like a sore thumb: an individual rancher may own 10,000 acres, they own the rights to the oil under that land, and oil prices have remained high enough for long enough have made extraction profitable. Much different than an Ohio or Pennsylvania farmer who holds 300 acres and discovers that Grandpa sold off the mineral rights a hundred years ago, so the farmer only gets lease money for the space for the drilling rig and production equipment, not royalties on the production. Since it’s all horizontal drilling, that might amount to lease for a single small pad on the corner of the property.

        Oil, gas, wind, and ethanol are the obvious “new” energy resources. Less obvious is western coal, which became significantly more valuable in the 1990s after the Clean Air Act Amendments put limits on sulfur emissions. We now have places like the Scherer power plant in Georgia, fueled exclusively with 10-12 million tons of Wyoming low-sulfur coal each year, every bit of it shipped over 1700 miles.Report

      • Kim in reply to Trumwill says:

        Mike,
        Early PA landownership kept rights to minerals too.
        (Know some folks that have it).
        But it’s the big tracts of land that keep the companies from setting up on your neighbors’ land and stealing your gas.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Trumwill says:

        Kim,
        Entertaining sentences from one of Pennsylvania’s state guidelines about oil and gas ownership: “An older mineral deed may or may not be recorded in any government office…. A thorough title search may discover different ownership rights to the mineral property. If you can’t be sure from current documents, searching your property’s historical deeds back to the 1860s might reveal that oil and gas has been separated from the surface estate. A phrase in an old deed such as ‘oil and gas excepted and reserved’ means that the surface was sold separately from the oil and gas property at that time. If you find such a statement in an old deed, the oil and gas would now probably not be yours to lease or develop.”Report

  6. BlaiseP says:

    [B1] Linux on the desktop? Every time I see something on this subject, my eyes roll to heaven. The desktop is not a battle worth fighting. Computing has moved on. But Android is also Linux, after a fashion. Linux is just a kernel.. People sorta get confused on this subject: you can’t compare Linux to Windows.

    This box is running over Linux. Here’s the kernel specification:

    3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

    But I have several other Linux kernels on this machine. I can decide which one I want to use when I boot. I can also decide which desktop environment I want to use: KDE workspaces, Gnome, XFCE. It’s a matter of preference. Linux will never become a corporate standard at Initech or the Wernham Hogg Paper Company or Dunder Mifflin. And while the David Brents of this world are making the decisions, it never will be.Report

  7. NewDealer says:

    http://www.esquire.com/features/finances/success-money-america-0813

    Here is a survey of people from 24 very different American cities and what residents think it takes to be successful.
    There are some interesting factoids about regional status symbols and odd costs. I was a bit surprised that Debutante Balls are still a thing in the South. Though someone in San Francisco told me that they were a member of the Junior League and that also surprised me. Is the Junior League still around? It seems so antiquated?Report

  8. greginak says:

    B1 Windows 8 is is solidly terrible and yes they have made it harder to run linux. However it is possible to do so. I just got a new desktop that has window 8 and i’ve never had to fuss as much to get linux installed. I ended up having to download a separate utility in my live usb, bootrepair, just to get a working grub menu. A pain in the butt but still worth it to not have to use windows at home.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to greginak says:

      IE running in Metro mode is a crime against humanity, but I really like the way I can launch a program by pushing the Windows key and typing in just enough of the program’s name to uniquely identify it.Report

      • Just Me in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        In Win 7 you can push the windows key and type the name of a program to launch, is it the same in 8?Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        You can? For me, in Windows 7, the windows key always brought up the start menu. Though I’m not sure I ever tried just tying in the name of a program. It definitely works that way in 8, though.Report

      • Just Me in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        When the start comes up on Win 7 (by pushing the windows key) your cursor is in a search box. You type the program you want and voila there you go. They must have made it more obvious in Win 8.Report

  9. greginak says:

    C4 a few years ago there was another referendum up here to relax pot laws. The dopes were pushing some guff about legalizing pot so people could start using hemp for all sorts of commercial purposes which would be good for business. double oy. I don’t know who they thought would believe that. I made the movement look like they get all their ideas when really really stoned. Pot should be completely legal but the proponents of it are often less then helpful.

    Then again given the problems some big pot growers are causing in NoCal doesn’t lead to thinking much good about them. They aren’t helping their cause and don’t really seem to give a crap about anybody but themselves.Report

    • dexter in reply to greginak says:

      Greg, What was the guff that the pro-legalization people were pushing. I have heard of some uses for hemp and wonder what they said that was ridiculous. Between 69 and 79 I spent a great deal of time in Fairbanks. In the late 70’s there was this weird law that said you could not possess weed, but the police couldn’t take it from you. I know this sounds strange, but I knew several people that had large green houses. Their only problems were thieves and figuring out how to get it to bud before the first hard freeze. It was not unusual to be driving down the road in a subdivision and see an 8 foot tall plant in the front yard. So I know one can grow it up way up there.Report

      • greginak in reply to dexter says:

        The guff was about all the great uses for hemp and how it would start all sorts of cottage industries and such. Maybe hemp is useful for things but it was disingenuous and nobody believed that was the purpose for loosening pot laws. We have plenty of fabrics, we’re not exactly going naked in the world without hemp clothing.

        The laws are still weird since people get arrested for possession but it is also legal somehow to possess. I’ve asked judges and cops and nobody really gives the exact same answer. Large grow ops get raided and the owners sent to jail. We do have one medical mari place that is sort of flaky but that is where people get their prescriptions from.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to dexter says:

        The US does in fact import hemp products due to the fact that it’s illegal to grow here but can be imported if it contains no THC. Not enough to support the hemp boosters’ wildly optimistic claims, but some. Hippies like hemp clothing, and health food stores sell hempseed oil and hempseed butter.

        It’s not clear how much of the latter is due to people thinking that it will get them high legally.Report

    • Mad Rocket Scientist in reply to greginak says:

      Hemp does have a lot of solid uses, but you are right, freeing up that market is a side effect of legalizing pot for recreational uses.Report

  10. Mad Rocket Scientist says:

    [P3] I can already see that the Bug (at 14 months) is going to be a high energy boy. I spent 2 weeks in NY recently (just got back last weekend) & this week my wife was out of the house early & home late for 3 days, so we both got a taste of taking care of the Bug alone.

    In a word, he is a handful. Keeping him busy & engaged is a constant effort. I have a feeling I’ll be keeping his teachers supplied with their alcohol of choice for many years to come.Report