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I am feeling seriously punchy, like as in punchamotherfucker. I do not see it going away any time soon. I don't like that.
In brief:
Me: gee, I haven't been to this gym in forever and my contract period is up, time to cancel. Gym guy: sorry, we're out of cancellation forms. Me: here is a signed letter cancelling my membership. Discover: DERP DE DERP chargin you for de gym Me: I dispute this charge. Here is the cancellation letter I gave the gym months ago. Them: OK, we'll think about it. Me: Can you reject future charges from them? Them: Nah, you have to call us and dispute each one as it comes in. Me: ... Them: The gym says you are still a member and they never got the letter. We don't care what you gave them. Not Our Problem. Me: ...
So:
- Work Out World, Gold's Gym, and other places that farm out their billing to ABC Financial are fraudulent. Don't do business with them. See Yelp for confirmation.
- Discover, as in the Discover card, doesn't even pretend to give a shit about customers.
Apparently the only way to resolve this is to report my credit card "lost", change the number everywhere I used it, and send registered mail to ABC Financial.
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I get email from the American Family Association from time to time. Their current outrage is that the Speaker of the House spends too much money serving liquor to her guests when she flies: Bob Unruh of WND wrote, "It reads like a dream order for a wild frat party: Maker's Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Johnny Walker Red scotch ... E&J brandy, Bailey's Irish Creme, Bacardi Light rum ... Bombay Sapphire gin ... and Corona beer." Since (a) this is the kind of liquor Democrats blow their money on and (b) Republicans find it impressive and so presumably are worse off, I would like to invite you all to my house for the inaugural meeting of the Party Party. We will advocate drinking, hideously violent revolution, genocide of Democrats, Republicans, and MC1R SNP carriers, and more drinking afterward to celebrate. At the party we will drink Cambridge Amber, homebrews, Hendrick's, Laphroaig, and Irish coffee made with proper cream and single-malt Bushmill's. Someone else can bring the rum and brandy.
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Oh. (via vvalkyri) I know that blog entry is directed at someone else, but it drove something home that I've been stupidly missing for a while: The health-insurance industry is pure rent-seeking. In general, when the environment is such that in order to do business (say, by selling goods out of your store or by selling your skilled labor in exchange for a salary) you must have some of a limited asset (like, say, a storefront or health care), the class of people and corporations who control the limited asset will be able to manipulate the market to capture all the profit: i.e., what you take home will be just equal to the risk premium that people in your situation insist on, no more (and, if you are less than perfect at your job, less). So: every human being in the US jobs market: your health-insurance premiums are going to go up, not until you are perfectly healthy (liberal dogooder's dream) or everyone is as healthy as they think it's worthwhile to be (libertarian economist's dream), but until the health insurance industry is capturing 100% of the income you might otherwise be saving or spending on fun stuff. (And you still won't have good health care, because there are other people with more money than you, and the only way to capture all their money is to price discriminate.)
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I voted for the Crook over the Shitbag because I remembered that I am a single-issue voter on the issue of torture, and the Shitbag has openly endorsed torture. There is almost an hour left, so I do encourage those of you remaining to get out there and support the Crook. I feel vindicated in this decision by the fact that the Crook is already turning her pathetic excuse for a political career into the most hilarious train wreck since... [Wikipedia time] wow, actual train wrecks involve a terrific amount of human misery and are never funny. SO: the most hilarious train wreck ever. I was previously operating under the assumption that there would be some difficulty in generating a primary challenge against her if she did, in fact, win, but given her dramatastic little falling-out with, like, her entire party up to and including the President of the United States, uh, she's toast. Nasty dry white-bread toast with phenylthiocarbamide on top and a side of ass. May Scott Brown... I don't know, become a human being with a soul or something. Or spend 3 years in a coma, but win the lottery afterward to compensate him. Man, I can't even wish AIDS cancer on anybody anymore. Fucking milk of human kindness.
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Few know that, after a chance meeting in Düsseldorf a hundred years ago today, J. R. R. Tolkien enjoyed a long and fruitful private correspondence with the great mathematician David Hilbert. Tolkien, like Lewis Carroll before him, was a lover of mathematical and linguistic games, but was also (in the great English tradition of arrant pedantry up with few may put) intensely devoted to semantic correctness in all things; and so one of his great concerns, as he developed his seminal Silmarilion, was with the technicality of whether the animate trees known as Ents were, in fact, nude. Does bark constitute clothing? Can ambulatory trees truly be covered with something that is, in fact, bark, or is it rather a bark-like skin, which necessarily itself be bare?
Ultimately, of course, Tolkien's constructed languages Entish, Quenya, and Sindarin must be used as the source of semantic distinctions here: it would hardly be appropriate in context to rely upon English-language definitions, after all. Fortunately, Hilbert had introduced Tolkien to the works of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, inspiring him to construct each language with precise logical foundations about which it was possible to prove meaningful theorems, and hope was held out that every statement about the language (e.g., "Enydi ier helda'") could be proven true or false by a formal process which would then be automated.
Further, in Tolkien's lifetime, Kurt Gödel showed that the provability of statements in any formal language of interest to be sharply limited. This work naturally inspired Alan Turing, a passionate lover of Elves and Men alike, to develop his own followup paper in the field now known as computer science, of which he is well known as a founder. Less well-known is Turing's post-war monograph inspired by the Hilbert-Tolkien correspondence, in which he applies a similar diagonalization argument to the languages discussed above and shows the aforementioned question of nudity to be ultimately unresolvable; it is titled
"On decidable languages, with an application to the Entkleidungsproblem".
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"To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.
"The Curse of Greyface included the division of life into order/disorder as the essential positive/negative polarity, instead of building a game foundation with creative/destructive as the essential positive/negative. He has thereby caused man to endure the destructive aspects of order and has prevented man from effectively participating in the creative uses of disorder. Civilization reflects this unfortunate division."
—Malaclypse the Younger, (b. 1941-05-21, d. 2000-07-20) Principia Discordia, ca. 1958 via dglenn QotD
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If you follow the local media at all, you're probably aware that Boston police object so much to their actions being filmed that they often arrest people on false charges in order to prevent it. I will be impressed if anyone can come up with a plausible reason they would do this (and their superiors would support them), other than the following: Boston police routinely lie in court and are afraid their testimony will be contradicted by video evidence.The US Department of Justice is responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases of police corruption nationwide. If you are concerned about police corruption in your town, you can write to askdoj@usdoj.gov for help. Massachusetts' own attorney general is, unfortunately, Martha Coakley, who consistently shows herself to be an opponent of transparency in government. She supports police and DAs even when they are dishonest and corrupt, rather than standing up for the rights of the citizens of the commonwealth as her duty requires. On Tuesday, January 19th, she will be standing for election as a Democrat for the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. The election is fairly close, and the Senate seat is important to the health care fight, but I cannot stomach voting for Ms. Coakley.
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I was a bit curious, so I went looking for calls for submissions in the short-form erotica market—i.e., the terms under which one can sell smutty stories.
The top of the market appears to be Penthouse Variations, which pays a maximum of $400 for a ~3000-word story: i.e., if you got published in every issue, you would just cover the rent on a single room in a shared apartment in a bad neighborhood within commuting distance of Boston, with nothing left over for trivialities like food, heat, and the like.
I was under the impression that multiple people lived lower-middle-class or better lifestyles off this stuff, but at per-word rates like this, the only people who reasonably could would have to (a) be producing about six novels a year while (b) producing in the top few percentile of quality. Am I missing something, or is it really that bad?
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WTF is with the ever-increasing minimum username length limits on web services? For the record: I would like my initials, please, if they are available. This is my username everywhere I have root and many places I don't. It is 3 letters long. It is the only username I have identified with for about 12 years. The only reason I don't have to type it 100 times a day any more is that most of the tools I use automatically fill in the username. Since there are a couple other dudes with the same idea, I have a username that is not my initials and is, in fact, almost never used by anyone else. I used this for Twitter, because about the time Twitter came out, most places started wanting you to use a four-letter username. Since then I've used it a bunch of times, and I have the US domains for it, too, and, after a couple of years, I've even started to identify with it a little bit. A little bit. And hey, there are now Twitter- derived services like whatsitsname the twitpodcast thing and mtile the whosywhatsit, and they require a five-letter username. I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE. Seriously, whatever dick has decided that it's good policy to keep me from taking my username of choice: I hope a candiru lodges in your urethra. Current Location: pissyland Current Mood: pettily vindictive
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When you're a novice in a field and you're coming to enjoy the field and acquire its core skills, you may encounter a problem, precisely analogous in its formulation to something you find trivial in another field, that here seems impossible—or just unreasonably difficult, or solvable but only by doing violence to the idiom of the field. You're frustrated, of course, but, recalling that you're a novice, you decide to ask for help from the wiser and more experienced, or maybe just bitch that it can't be done in the hope that someone will show you up. They scoff: "of course it's possible; you just..." and it's something you've tried, and you show them why it doesn't work. They laugh it off: "well then you just..." and again. Perhaps a few more times. And ultimately they concede that you're right, there just isn't a way to do it. You are disappointed, of course, that there isn't a good solution; and you're satisfied, of course, that you weren't mistaken, and that the people who were telling you you were were wrong. Even upon reflection, you can't tell which predominates. I am naming this feeling "haskell". Current Mood: haskell
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 Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are...
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One of my minor life goals is to replace all 150 of my Livejournal interests with interesting numbers. Got 7 so far. Ones I share with other people: ∞ is infinity 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 is a number that is illegal to possess in the US 28:06:42:12 is Darko's Constant 4:8:15:16:23:42 was a fun half-season show that I think is in its, what, 8th season? Ones nobody else has gotten into yet: 4726340 is the Sun bug ID requesting Tail Call Optimization in the JVM 567-68-0515 is Richard Nixon's social security number, which is what you should give when anyone asks you for a social security number when it's none of their damn business and 8080174247945128758864599049617107570057 54368e9 ("e9", meaning "x10^9", is because the limit on the length of interests prevents me from putting all nine zeroes on the end) is the size of the Monster Group, which is the largest finite simple group outside of the infinite families of simple groups ( sporadic group). (By the way, the complete classification of simple groups is one of the more astonishing results in mathematics. Everyone should learn enough mathematics to learn (a) how astonishing it is and (b) how it was done; then nobody could ever be unhappy for long.) The lack of interest in Nixon's Constant surprises me: that one's been going around since he was President, if not before. The next couple of numbers I want to add have been problematic: I'd like to add Chaitin's Constant Ω and the 5th Busy Beaver number Σ(5), but since the former is impossible to compute numerically and the latter would take an absurdly long time, I would have to represent them by their symbols, and you can't put uppercase Greek letters in your interests. Anyway, if you've got any interesting numbers, feel free to share them.
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OK, guys. The liberal/skeptic/humanist/atheist thought cluster is one I generally endorse. At the liberal end, there's a lot of good art to be had. But, setting aside the Symphony of Science (which is, in any case, a novelty act), if I look at PZ Myers or show up to Skeptics in the Pub, the music SUCKS. It shames us all.
I'm going to mention a couple of names. I'm not giving them links, but you can Google as well as I can:
Roy Zimmerman. What the fuck? George Hrab, knockoff of Roy Zimmerman. What the FUCK to the power of WHAT the fuck?
Look, I like being pandered to as much as the next guy, but seriously, in public: if you can't sing, don't. If you can't write lyrics, don't. If you can't play the guitar, PLEASE GOD do not.
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