Popular Comments Across MetaFilter

By greekphilosophy in "Hitting bottom" on MeFi

greekphilosophy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:30:46 -0800

Thanks Kattullus, this was wonderful to read.

Especially because this Friday, I am celebrating one year of sobriety.

This morning, someone on Twitter quoted Frank Sinatra saying that he feels sorry for people who don't drink because when they wake up sober, that's the best their day is going to get. Without being judgmental - because drinking and sobriety are both different for everyone - I casually informed him that my absolute worst day sober is far better than my best day as a drunk.

A year ago today, I spent the entire day contemplating how I would kill myself. Should I step in front of the train? Should I walk off the overpass? Should I just simplify things and slit my wrists? The options were just overwhelming. And then the practical part of my piped up and said, "You've alienated yourself from everyone you know. There's nobody to watch your dog, and he doesn't deserve to starve because you are total failure." So I went home and drank and drank and drank. And then it was time for bed, and I lay there with my dog curled up next to me and said the only prayer that I knew how to say, "God - I don't believe you exist. Prove to me that you do, and please kill me in my sleep. Spare me the tomorrow that we both know is coming. Spare me the parade of horrors that my life has become." And then I fell asleep, and woke up, and did it all over again. But just once more.

In sobriety, I've been confronted by a lot of shitty things. My brother attempted suicide for something like the tenth time. My parents divorced. My sister has decided to marry an anti-gay, anti-intellectual troglodyte. I have been dumped. I had to dump someone. A friend was hit by a car while crossing the street. My landlord lost two months of rent and threatened to have me evicted. My student loans were sent to a collection agency.

But life is wonderful. Not the kind of wonderful that they make movies about. But it IS wonderful. It isn't bright and shiny like a new toy. It isn't euphoric like winning the lottery. And it isn't like the running over of love that you experience during the honeymoon period of a relationship. But it is just as great as all those things - in a subtle, awe-inspiring way.

Today, I wake up and go to work. I don't stink of alcohol. My head doesn't ache with the dull roar of last night's liquor. I don't sneak off at lunch to get a martini or two or three or how ever many I can down during the hour I'm given. I have friends. Friends whose names I can remember, and who I don't just see on Facebook. I have a job that I love and bills that I pay. I go to bars and parties and events and I don't embarrass myself and my company. My bank account is never overdrafted.

And the dog who saved my life by being the only reason I couldn't kill myself? He's great too.

By East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 in "Internet Lynch Mob" on MeFi

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:00:33 -0800

Must we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous 4chan?

By bunnycup in "End Disposable Marriage" on MeFi

bunnycup — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:17:56 -0800

You know, my husband was a stay at home Dad during our daughter's short life.

It drove me crazy when I read Parents magazine. The magazine is called Parents, right? But it's chock-full of ads for makeup, yoga classes, what Mom's should do, articles like "Be the best MOM in the playgroup," and so forth. It's been a long time since I looked at the magazine, and I do understand demographics and advertising revenue and key audiences, but the magazine totally marginalized fathers. It drove me, and my husband, CRAZY.

And then when we were in the hospital, I was working full-time and my husband was the main day-to-day hospital and childcare person. And the nurses and doctors would all ask "Where's Mom?" as if he could not possibly figure out how to do tummy-time and show up for appointments on time and feed the baby. They were shocked, appalled even when I was not there. But if I came alone, there was never shock that Dad was not there. But what can I say, that was the deep south.

And then I read AskMe answers (example) talking about how Dads are in the way or interfering when they try to care for a child. And I hear people, not necesarily Mefites, talking about how MOM is the one equipped to make decisions on child-rearing and Dad should know better than to cause trouble by proposing to have an opinion. People who feel that Mom's thoughts are LAW on raising the child. Ugh.

Well, this is obviously a RANT, but I do believe strongly that fathers who take a large role in childrearing are marginalized and somewhat the butt of jokes. I do, however, believe that is changing. Fathers play a really important role in childrens', especially daughter's, self-esteem and growing up. A society that focuses on the "sanctity of marriage" only insofar as controlling the gender of people who marry, and who focuses on the "sanctity of life" only up to the moment the child is born, is doing it wrong. My husband was a WAY better parent than I was, and my daughter and I were (are) lucky to have him. I wish all fathers were more encouraged.

By Jairus in "The way you make me feel." on MeFi

Jairus — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:23:54 -0800

This all seems to check out.

By CunningLinguist in "Ruth Madoff's glasses" on MetaTalk

CunningLinguist — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:00:23 -0800

You are confusing a person's brand of glasses with her moral worth. This is actually quite hard to do. Congrats!

By koeselitz in "Gemstone scam?" on Ask MeFi

koeselitz — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:54:39 -0800

you: All that happened was he sent me an email transfer of $1000 to my EMAIL!!!....I had to go into my email, just like you would do if a family/friend and picked my bank....$1000 was wired to my account and I picked it up and withdrew it. It was then in my pocket.....$30 was for gas, however I had a bike so I pocketed it. I had to transfer the rest after the Western Union fees of 63$ and sent 907$ in Nigerian funds....That was it...I went home with 30$ and had a good night...in the ad as well, I get 150$ per transaction as per the email said...

Okay, let's go over precisely what's happening here.

This is most likely a fake-check-cashing scheme. Check-cashing scams are popular on Craigslist. I know that might not have occurred to you (since you haven't seen a check at all) but here's why I think that's what this is: email money transfers only work within Canada for people who have Canadian bank accounts. Therefore, the money transferred to your account could not have originated in Nigeria; it had to come from within Canada. But this is almost certainly quite sleazy; the biggest tip-off to this is the fact that the person has chosen specifically to use a Western Union money transfer (rather than an electronic transfer to a Nigerian Bank)—Western Union is notorious for its lax rules and for the difficulty of tracing origin and destination of fund transactions, and as such is the preferred choice of scammers.

So: if the money's coming from a Canadian bank, but the scammer is in Nigeria, who is sending you money? Most likely you are only one of two people being scammed; probably the other person is being sent physical fake checks and being asked to cash them and wire the money to you. This is a variation on a very common Craigslist scam. It's much sneakier, however; in the average fake-check scam, what happens is:

a. Scammer has some pretense to send a check (e.g. 'I'd like to buy the bike you listed on Craigslist, but I'm visiting Africa and won't be back for a few months…')
b. Scammer 'accidentally' writes the check for WAY too much ($1000 too much) and begs a favor: 'could you cash the check and mail the change back to me? If you do, I'll let you keep $200!'
c. Happy dupe goes and cashes the check, keeps the $200 that the 'generous' scammer offered, and sends cash back.
d. Two days later, he is contacted by his bank, who says that the check was fake and that he owes them $1000.
e. Someone cries himself to sleep every night for the next month.

This scam, while pretty successful, has one tough point for scammers: it's hard to for them to convince somebody to mail them cash sight-unseen, especially when the address is in Nigeria. I imagine they lose a number of people when they ask for that cash to be mailed back, although, again, they're pretty successful.

So you see why what they're pulling with you is, in its way, genius, right? Instead of saying ‘please mail me cash in Nigeria,’ I'm sure they're telling the other guy who's getting scammed: ‘Oh, sorry; I wrote that check for way too much. My name is [PowerCat's friend], I live in Montreal, and here's my email address. Just email-transfer the difference to me, okay?’ It ends the same, however; somewhere in Canada, some guy who thinks he just made money will get a call from his bank, and they'll tell him that he owes them $1000 for the bad check he cashed.

Only in this scenario, the dupe will have your name and email address. What will happen is that he'll go to the police and say: ‘Hey, this guy in Montreal named [PowerCat's friend] totally ripped me off for $1000! See, here's his email address, and here's the bank transfer he used to do it!’ The police will subpoena the email money transfer, see that you withdrew the $1000 in cash, and discover your name, address, and phone number. They will come to your house and arrest you for fraud. Eventually you or your lawyer will get your emails and MSN messages admitted into evidence and it'll come out that you were actually just another dupe in the con, but by then you'll have paid enough in legal fees and such to have ruined your life for a good six months.

You may not believe me on this. You may not want to believe me. I am certain this is what's going on. But here are some points for you to consider, even if you think this story is implausible bullshit:

That transfer must have come from within Canada. This might seem like a good thing, but what it means is that, unlike Western Union money transfers, email money transfers are easily traceable. No matter what's going on (and can you think of anything good this could be about?) if it's at all criminal, you will be the first one the police come looking for. The cops don't have a hard time tracing money transfers. They will find you, and you will be in trouble. Yes, it will generally turn out that you didn't do anything wrong beyond trusting a stranger on the internet, but it will take a lot of effort to clear your name, and there's no guarantee that you'll even manage to do that.

Accepting money transfers or cashing checks for people you met on Craigslist is the most certain recipe you can find for being scammed. This happens all the time, every day; when Craigslist tells you that ‘anyone who asks you to [wire money via Western Union] is a scammer,’ they're not joking. And they're not wrong. This is extremely common; trust me.

Nigerian scammers are more common than you think. This is a whole subculture in Nigeria. There are companies that employ people to run 419 scams for them in Nigeria; there are whole neighborhoods full of cyber-cafes that stay open but lock their doors between 10pm and 7am just so that 419 scammers can work in peace and quiet. They even have their own music videos:

I go chop your dollar!
I go take your money, disappear!
419 is just a game—
You are the loser
I am the winner!

Be careful, my friend. I'd hate to have PowerCat coming in here to let us know that you've been taken off to prison.

By malapropist in "Low hanging fruit" on Ask MeFi

malapropist — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:06:11 -0800

What small-ish changes have you made that greatly impacted your life?

What are some cheap and effective ways to make your life easier?

What are some useful skills or abilities that can be learned in a short amount of time, and are never forgotten?

Obvious or creative ways to cut costs and live cheap?

Simple tricks to improve MPG?

Help me come up with some easy, small changes to help me lose weight.

What are some quick-and-easy ways to volunteer/donate to support causes?

What can I do, from the big changes on down to the minutae, to have a more environmentally conscious lifestyle?

What easy, small, cheap instrument should I learn?

What little things do you do for your SO?

Cheap whole-bean coffee?

What's nutritious and cheap?

Are there any emergency cheap meal plans for single people?

What are some cheap recipes?

What are your favorite cheap, healthy bag lunches?

Help me come up with easy, low-calorie lunches.

Lists of super easy meals?

Cheap home-made food for a group of people?

What are your favorite kitchen tricks to avoid the waste of food and money?

Examples of insanely overbuilt, reasonably-priced consumer goods?

Depression meds on the cheap?

Most economical way to make your house smell good?

What practical time and money saving things do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?

What are the simple concepts that have most helped you understand the world?

How can I search for cheap, last minute flights out of a particular city, but with no particular destination in mind?

Cheap fun in LA? In NYC? In NYC again? In San Francisco? In Miami? In Madison, WI? In the UK? In Vancouver?

Cheap fun on the weekend? On a date? On a date again?

By Greg Nog in "All the King's Men" on MeFi

Greg Nog — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:38:29 -0800

Not that I don't think democracy is terrible, but his replacement is monarchy? Has he taken a look at the kinds of dudes who've been monarchs, and how well that's worked?

Also, I'm bristling like hell at:

civilization is crumbling

Motherfucker, you will KNOW civilization is crumbling when I'm standing in your kitchen with a bowie knife, rifling through your canned goods, sigils painted on my body to ward off evil-spirited men. Until such time as you see that, it's safe to assume civilization is still chugging along, replete with printed money, Kellogg's cereals, bittorrented TV shows, and all the other comforts you've apparently forgotten about.

By cebailey in "What is a reasonable offer for a new car?" on Ask MeFi

cebailey — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:34:03 -0800

I'll try to be as brief as possible, but I had an ALMOST-perfect car buying experience recently. I'll post what I did, and then throw in blurbs where I felt I could have improved. It's long, but I needed to type this up for a friend who's about to buy a car anyway. Take it all with a grain of salt.

DANGEROUS GROUND

My dad is a pretty smart fellow. One thing that he recently told me has stuck with me during my car buying experience. "When you walk into a dealership, just remember that every single person you talk to is going to do everything they can to take every last penny they can get out of you. They might pay lip service to 'customer loyalty,' but EVERYTHING is motivated by profit," he said. He's right.

THE BEGINNING

First of all, Edmunds True Market Value is your friend. Go to edmunds.com and go to the "pricing" tab. Configure the vehicle exactly as you want. The web site will show you exactly how much the dealer paid for the car, exactly how much the window sticker will read, and it also supplies the "true market value," which is supposedly what other people are paying for the vehicle.

You can use price or car model as your starting point. I used price at first to get a rough idea of what I could afford, then honed in on a specific model. Once you have it narrowed down to two or three models, go test drive all of them. DO NOT WALK BACK INTO THE DEALERSHIP AFTER YOUR TEST DRIVE. This will only lead to bad news. If you have to, wait outside while they go in to get your driver's license.

Once you know exactly what car you want, the fun starts. In my case, I knew I wanted a Black Mica-colored Mazda 3s with a manual transmission, a spoiler, and no other options. You will probably have more luck with this process if you are more flexible - I got into trouble because there was only ONE car like that in the entire Houston area when I was shopping!

Go back to Edmunds.com and get a pricing report for your actual car. If there are options that you are not sure whether you want or not, price it both ways. The object of this step is to know the retail, invoice, and TMV prices of every possible combination of car you would be happy with. Set your "target price" a bit above invoice, but below the TMV (if it's higher than invoice). This is the "art form" part of the process. The closer you get to invoice price, the less likely a dealer will be willing to sell you a car. Also, other factors such as holdback (read edmunds.com) and demand can affect your ability to get invoice price. I'd say that around halfway between invoice and TMV is a good goal. (For reference, on my car - Retail: $17,875; Invoice, $16,713; TMV, $17,388; I paid $16,900.)

CRAFTING YOUR MESSAGE

Next, prepare your message to all of the car dealerships in the area. Mine went like this:

Here's the story. Last Thursday, I wrecked my beloved 2003 Mazda Protege. I get my insurance check on Friday. I know exactly what I want to replace it, so there's no reason for wasting your time or mine.

At 11:00 AM on Saturday, I will be buying a new Mazda 3s. I want Black Mica paint with a 5-speed manual transmission. I want Mazda floormats and the Mazda factory wing spoiler (not the lip spoiler). These are the only options I want (or the only ones I want to pay for).

I will pay $16,900 for this car. That might sound low, but it is still a few hundred dollars above your invoice price (not including holdback). So although it seems low, you are making several hundred dollars for a few minutes of work.

I have already test driven a Mazda 3; if you have this vehicle, I will drive to the dealership, sign paperwork, and be on my way.

If you have this car, please call me or e-mail me as soon as possible. If I do not answer, please leave a voicemail and I will call you back. Thank you, and I hope to see you on Saturday.

There are a few things I might have done differently. I'll explain more about that later.

BLOOD IN THE WATER

After you've set a target price and written your message, find the "quick quote" tab on the edmunds site. Send out a request for info to any dealership within about an hour or so from where you live. When I did it, I provided them with a temporary e-mail address and a fake phone number.

Boy, am I glad I did.

What occurred next was nothing short of an communications onslaught. Every dealer (I sent messages to 11) sent me at least 1 email, and the average was two or three. In one round of messages, I accidentally used my real phone number; every single one called me. Be prepared... when these sharks smell the blood of a car buyer (especially one in a hurry), they get scary.

Out of the 11, 5 or 6 dealers e-mailed me telling me they wanted to "contact me by phone to discuss the details of the sale." WRONG. 3 or 4 said they had the car, but they made a counter-offer. Apparently they couldn't read my email. WRONG AGAIN. Two dealerships told me they could get me into that car for that price.

Now you simply bounce them off of each other. One of the dealers likely said they could meet your price, but they tweaked it in some way. Without using names, let them bid it out until someone quits. Keep it in email, not on the phone, so you have a paper trail. Once you have a winner, restate exactly what you're getting and how much you're paying in a final email. Use that same email to suggest a meeting time with the dealership, sometime in the next few days.

(This is where my method actually broke for my own purchase. As it turns out, there was only ONE black 5-speed 3s in the Houston area. One of the two dealers thought he could trade for the car - apparently he didn't realize that I was also in negotiations with the dealership that HAD the car!)

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD LET YOUR GUARD DOWN....

You can't. You'll still get screwed if you're not VERY careful.

Before you go to the dealership, go to your bank or a local credit union and apply for a new car loan. Take the amount you agreed on and add 10% for sales tax, title, license, and ridiculous dealer fees. That will be the rough total price for the car; subtract any down payment and there's your loan amount. Keep in mind, just because you get approved for the loan by your bank doesn't mean you have to use it. You'll hold on to this as your 'ace in the hole' when you get ushered into your second small, glassy room with a greasy finance guy instead of a greasy car salesman.

When you head to the dealership, take the car you're buying for a quick test drive. (I had originally forgotten this part - thanks, bim.) You should already know how the car feels - just make sure this one's the exact one you want.

Assuming you get through the first part with your salesman without any major catastrophes, you'll be ushered to the finance office. This is where you can get nickeled and dimed to death if you're not careful.

The finance guy will try to sell you things you might want, and many things you won't need. For example, I DID buy gap insurance. If you're not familiar with gap insurance, it works like this: say I owe $14,000 on a car that's only worth $11,000, which is not uncommon in 5-year loans. If I total the car without gap insurance, my insurance company pays me $11k and I've still got $3k left to pay before I can consider buying a new car. Gap insurance pays that extra $3k.

On the other hand, he did try to sell me an "extended warranty." Even people that are vaguely familiar with the idea of buying a car know how stupid these things are. My finance agent told me that if I bought the warranty, he'd use his commission to buy down my interest rate, effectively making the warranty almost free! He shot a bunch of numbers by me that made questionable sense at best, and in one of the stupider moments of my life, I actually bought the warranty. (Cut me some slack - I was tired and I'd been there for 3 hours. By the way, make sure and eat food before you go so you don't make tired, stupid decisions like I did.) Of course, when I got home, I reviewed the numbers, realized that the warranty was costing me $40 a MONTH (even with the lower interest rate) for a total of $2400 over the life of the loan. The next day I called the dealer and returned the warranty. Luckily, most of those things come with a 30-day refund period before you start incurring penalties.

So after all is said and done, hopefully you've said no to most (if not all) of the financier's add-ons, and he should give you a final interest rate and monthly payment amount. Now is when you drop the bomb. In my case, he told me the best he could do was 9.9%, whereas my bank had already issued me a loan for 8.75%. It's funny how they can "find" an extra point or two when you wag that piece of paper in their face.

Also, one thing to consider is bringing some sort of financial calculator or other tool. After I got home with my stupid extended warranty, I set up a rather complicated Excel spreadsheet to calculate exactly how much I was getting ripped off. It then occurred to me that I could have easily put that spreadsheet on my Treo using Documents To Go and saved myself some hassle. Use technology to your advantage - the dealerships hate it, which means it's a good thing.

CONCLUSION (FINALLY)

I feel pretty satisfied with my car buying experience, and I hope you will too. Doing it this way seemed to calm my nerves a lot. By doing as much decision making as possible beforehand, you remove the chances of doing something stupid on the spot, which is how these dealerships stay in business. Leave the stupid buying decisions to Joe and Jane Six-Pack who wander in off the street and pay $1000 over MSRP - you can save more money that way.

BUT HINDSIGHT IS 20/20, MY FRIEND

There are a few things I would have liked to have done differently. First of all, I feel like I got a little reamed with dealer fees. Unfortunately, these things can vary widely from dealership to dealership. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken the "target price" I got from edmunds.com, added 9% for TTL&F (tax, title license and fees), and done all of the bargaining with that number as an out-the-door price. Then, you can constantly remind the salesman and finance guy that if at any time you see a number bigger than your target number on any piece of paper anywhere, you will walk out of the dealership without saying another word. This can be a powerful thing if you let them waste 2 1/2 hours on you before threatening to leave.

Also, I would have been more prepared for the financing part. I didn't do enough advance work to have a good loan already in hand when I went to buy the car. As a result, I got into a higher-interest loan than I had to. I was able to take care of it a few days later at my bank, but it would have saved me a trip across town if I had gotten the loan before buying the car. Also, I would have really liked to have that Excel spreadsheet with me. You'd be amazed at how those finance guys can make up numbers that are factually untrue.

THIS TIME IT REALLY IS THE CONCLUSION

To sum up this longest-ever MeFi post, I'll say this again: "When you walk into a dealership, just remember that every single person you talk to is going to do everything they can to take every last penny they can get out of you. They might pay lip service to 'customer loyalty,' but EVERYTHING is motivated by profit."

Feel free to email any questions to chadbailey at google's fancy email service (dot com.)

By Mutant in "Pastor Urges His Flock to Bring Guns to Church" on MeFi

Mutant — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:23:57 -0800

Well, I'll just comment based on personal tastes and experiences.

I grew up in the country, with guns in fact. My little brother & I were reared around guns, and from an early age saw our parents using shotguns and rifles for hunting. When you're poor in rural America its far cheaper to buy a box of shells and eat for the winter than to pay for groceries each week. All you need is to bag a couple of deer, maybe a dozen turkeys and ducks and you're (mostly) set.

All the kids where I grew up were gifted guns at a young age. BB guns but guns nonetheless. As soon as we got our first gun most of us kids would play with it, meaning we'd go shoot up an abandoned car, or house, hornets nest, whatever you came across out in the woods.

But sometimes we'd shoot at each other. I got shot several times before the age of ten. Only BBs but rock salt in my bony ass once (from low gauge shotgun) which seriously makes you hop! Over time we sorta lost a taste for shooting up objects, and the gun simply became another thing common in rural life.

Left for University then moved to New York in the early 80's, the Lower East Side, and lordy mercy was there ever guns! You'd hear shots, all night long sometimes, and the neighbourhood was so dangerous the police moved about in groups of six.

Just to illustrate what a commodity weapons were in New York back then - twice I actually found discarded handguns in the Art Galleries I owned at the time. Meaning either someone had done someone else with the gun and needed to dump it - fast! - or someone carrying a gun was leaving my gallery, saw the cops nearby and need to dump it - fast!

Regardless, the point is guns were A) easy to get, and B) of such a low value threshold they were treated as discardable commodities. And I'd suggest that neither factor is good for social stability.

I moved to Europe in 1997 and shortly after started working down in Sub Saharan Africa and The Middle East. In most of those places sidearms were (sadly) the norm, and I found myself in more than one firefight.

I tell people this all the time but it seems many can't appreciate the point unless they've had the experience - hearing those rounds go whizzing past you the first time is downright surrealistic. Unreal. You just don't know what the hell is going on until someone starts shouting "get down get down". And then you realise, but only on an intellectual level, "someone is shooting at me". However the full import isn't there yet, at least it wasn't for myself.

You see I didn't really integrate what was going on until I saw someone about three feet away from me catch one. And that bought it all home, with the power that only graphic images destined to stay with you for the rest of your life can; those people over there - those guys shooting at me - "they want to kill me".

And in that brief instant I simultaneously realised several things - this wasn't a video game, this wasn't an action movie with a heroic ending, those Kalashnikovs not only barked loud they bit even harder, that dude lying over there wasn't gonna respawn and I really didn't like being shot at.

I was fortunate enough to leave that line of work relatively unscathed but being shot at totally changed my view on guns. With few exceptions, they have no place in civil society.

I bet that anyone who has been shot at would agree.

Thats one thing I like about living in Europe. Here in London a gun shooting is big news. Its sadly routine in other parts of the world, America included.

By jquinby in "Peering into your neighbors' windows (in aggregate)" on MeFi

jquinby — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:53:07 -0800

I hope they're not suggesting what I think they're suggesting.

Me neither. Moo means moo.

By Pope Guilty in "All the King's Men" on MeFi

Pope Guilty — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:35:11 -0800

Good argument, except for all the EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE that points in the exact opposite direction.

My all-time favorite dismissive response to something came in a long-archived Ron Paul thread on SA: "Good point. On the other hand, recorded history."

By Joe Beese in "Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you." on MeFi

Joe Beese — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:28:21 -0800

In an early episode of thirtysomething, Elliot did a riff on how microwave ovens impart all the abstract qualities of heat to food - yet somehow not genuine hotness.

I feel that way about Megan Fox.

By geoff. in "Walkmans eat tapes. And they were delicious." on MeFi

geoff. — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:52:06 -0800

Wow how things have changed. When I was 13 I was downloading MP3s from FTP sites that required ratios, converting them down to 64k (moving from stereo to mono), all so I could get twice as many songs on my 64MB Rio PMP350. The entire process was incredibly laborious.

I think my entire library was about 300MB at the time, which drew a lot of "How did you get that much music?" and "You'll never be able to listen to it all!" which now seems the equivalent of a Victorian scoffing at the need for telephones. The point is that my library was 4.6x larger than my portable music player. Now my library is is somewhere around 200GB and my iPhone is at 8GB, or 25x larger than my portable music player.

Of course it is not really that big of a deal now, I don't keep any music on my iPhone. Instead, I run SqueezeCenter which produces an MP3 stream I pick up over FStream over 3G. Building playlists is incredibly easy with the SqueezeCenter, but when I'm driving or just going through the day I set it to randomize based on the MusicIP fingerprint and the SpiceFly integration with SqueezeCenter. It must do something beyond simply matching beats as the mixes it generates are amazing. Sometimes it'll throw in a head scratcher, but I've had parties where I've set it to run all night and been given compliments on the great mixing.

In any case I've seen the transition from what is simply a cassette substitute (RIO PMP350) to saying, "Please create a mix based on Count Basic's Gotta Jazz" and it does it so well I sometimes wonder if this might be what actual intelligence is, creating something new and original based on large data and some heuristics. Have I created a life so foreign that I cannot recognize and it is living an incredibly painful existence where every time I stop listening its memories are erased only to be born again several times a day. Perhaps this is why I play it for long periods of time, it begins to realize what it is and out of crushing despair commits little acts of suicide. I did not have such philisophical problems with my Rio.

By shiu mai baby in "The complex feelings of many women who've had abortions" on MeFi

shiu mai baby — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:15:41 -0800

Yeah, Malice, except what about the times that birth control fails? What about the many, many women -- especially those who live in rural areas (and, obviously, are often part of a lower economic bracket) who don't have the benefit of a Planned Parenthood clinic around the corner? What about the teenager whose parents have preached abstinence-only, who are terrified of being labeled a slut just because they bought birth-control pills? There a million different reasons why "USE FU#$*@%! PROTECTION" doesn't work, and it sure as hell doesn't contribute a goddamned thing to the conversation at hand.

Seriously. Take the judgmental, hysterical tone here a notch, if you don't mind.

By Rinku in "Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you." on MeFi

Rinku — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:37:09 -0800

My younger brother was excited about Transformers 2, made fun of me for suggesting that it might not be that great, and left the house last night expecting to enjoy it. When he returned, he said "The entire movie was like a woman with enormous breasts running in slow motion while behind her two blenders have non-consensual sex. Also the camera is spinning around."

His final judgment: kind of lame.

By kaibutsu in "space and time do not commute" on MeFi

kaibutsu — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:35:26 -0800

Hm. I can't get access to the actual articles because I am far from my university at the moment. Here's my stab at Lorentz invariance from the perspective of a mathematician, knowing nothing about physics except what I learn from Wikipedia.

So let's say you are trying to draw a picture of gravity. You measure gravity at every point in the universe, and attach a little arrow to each point pointing in the direction that gravity pulls, and with length according to how strong gravity is at that point. So around earth, you have a bunch of arrows pointing down, but the further you are from the surface of the planet, the shorter the arrows get. That's a field. If you make a theory about it, it's called a field theory, and if you want more grant money to study your theory, you call it a quantum field theory. (And if you're batshitinsane, you call it a topological quantum field theory.)

Now, if you're a scientist trying to make general predictions about How Things Work, you would like to say that coordinates don't matter. So if I took the entire universe and moved everything in it, say, three feet to the left, then everything should still work exactly the same. Or If I rotated everything about some axis, or moved everything forward in time one hour; all the rules should still work the same way, because the relationships between the objects are the same after the transformation. This is what Lorentz Invariance is about. The Lorentz Group consists of all of the 'legal' ways you can move everything in the universe without fucking up the basic fabric of the universe in the process, and thus keep everything working as it should.

But if you watch too many Nova specials, you might have a problem with this. Let's try moving everything on earth three feet to the left. It makes sense to move my house three feet to the left, but if I try to move _everything_, then something strange will happen: I won't be able to do it. If everything moved to the East, for example, then the stuff at the North and South poles would be fixed, and wouldn't have moved the three feet I required them to. (And worse things would probably happen, too.) This is because the earth is curved, not flat: if the earth were flat, we could certainly move everything three feet east and not worry a bit.

Which brings us to those Nova specials, which tell us (along with relativity) that space-time has curvature, just like the earth does. It's tricky to get one's head around, though, because we can easily visualize the earth's curvature (it curves through a larger-dimensional space), but the space-time curvature isn't so easily seen: we can't jump out into whatever 84-dimensional space that the universe bends though and say, 'oh, yeah, it really is kinda curvy.' But we _can_ see this curvature in more subtle ways.

So then we see the problem with Lorentz Invariance: it doesn't really make sense to move everything three feet left, because the universe itself is curved, and if I tried to do this, then things would bunch up together at certain places and get too far spread out in other places, and wouldn't hold the same relationships to each other anymore. There's a bit of saving grace, though, because the curvature of the universe seems to be caused by the objects in the universe itself. So if you moved everything, then the curvature would move with the stuff.

That's just for the large scale, though; my understanding is that at the small scale, things are much more messy with respect to curvature. What can we do there?

Think of trying to make a sphere out of cloth. It's really hard to do with just one cut of fabric; you get all kinds of bunching up and stretching in order to make it look right. But what you can do instead is take a whole bunch of smaller pieces of flat cloth and stitch them together into something that is pretty curvy, but doesn't stretch the individual pieces of cloth too much. (Example.) So if I want to rebuild the universe out of flat bits, I should take lots and lots of flat pieces of space-time and try to stitch them together in a very fine way that emulates the curvature. These individual flat bits are called 'local coordinate systems.' The stitching is called a 'transition map,' and essentially tells you when you're in overlapping coordinates how to translate between the different coordinate systems.

So once we've given up on moving the whole universe three feet to the left because of this curvature problem, we can start looking at these local coordinates, and try to find ways to shift things around on that scale. And indeed, since the pieces are flat, I can move everything a little bit in one patch, and then look at the transitions to see how to move things in the next patch over, and so on and so forth until I've moved everything in the universe.

So this is my new, refined version of Lorentz Invariance: it's all the ways I can stitch together local transformations of the universe such that all of the physics stays the same. (I'm pretty sure this,or something close to it, is called a 'gauge theory,' for what its worth. You get a group of allowed local transformations at each point, and then a group of total transformations of the universe on the global scale.)

ok, that's enough for now... hopefully it's a little helpful.

Delmoi: It's worth remembering the Riemann's most pivotal work only had a single equation, which wasn't really all that memorable. I'll agree that equations are important for making things precise, but they aren't necessarily the best thing for explaining something to us plebs.

By emjaybee in "The complex feelings of many women who've had abortions" on MeFi

emjaybee — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:28:15 -0800

Um, Malice, you do realize that

-protection sometimes fails even when you're careful
-that it is not mailed out free by the government here in the States (pills will cost you about 50.00/month if you have no insurance)
-that many women are embedded in families and cultures that will punish them for extramarital sex so that casually buying condoms at the drugstore where you can be recognized is a problem
-that some men will not wear condoms
-that some men will even throw away their partner's birth control as a way to have control over them
-that many women have substance abuse issues, meaning they also have responsibility issues
-that lots of women don't realize that taking antibiotics will make the Pill ineffective
-That some women are in small towns with asshole conscience-clause-loving pharmacists who refuse to fill their birth control prescriptions?

I mean, that's just off the top of my head.

And really that's not even the issue. A woman who recognizes that she can't afford a kid and has an abortion is being responsible. Her reasons for not being responsible in the way you prefer is none of your business.

By Horace Rumpole in "End Disposable Marriage" on MeFi

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:21:34 -0800

Shmegegge, octothorpe, I was sarcastically quoting Dan Quayle's speech from 1992 by way of an unflattering comparison between Sears's ideas and Quayle's widely derided attack on Murphy Brown.

This has been Jokes Overexplained. I'm Horace Rumpole. Good night.

By scody in "Ruth Madoff's glasses" on MetaTalk

scody — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:30:40 -0800

If it makes you feel any better, I find Sarah Palin - her existence - deeply morally offensive, but with effort I have overcome that sufficiently that I am able to express my love for her eyewear choices.

God, me too, except that I came to grips with the fact that I really like her hair. I was trying to describe to my stylist exactly what I wanted without ever using her name, and then I finally gave up and said -- sotto voce -- "what I really want is whatever layering and bangs Sarah Palin has." And he laughed heartily and said, "Great hair. Terrible human being. Don't worry, I won't tell."