Robots Read News of Utah Firing Squads

[Updated 3/26/15 with result] Today I bring you a Robots Read News episode engineered to get a healthy number of “favorites” on Twitter but relatively few retweets. The hypothesis is that people enjoy dark humor but they are cautious about associating with it, and wisely so. If your corporate firewall is blocking this,…

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My Verdict on Gender Bias in the Workplace

Background: In a recent post I expressed confusion and ignorance about gender bias in the workplace. I asked how it could be true that studies consistently show bias against woman while studies on pay gap do not reflect that bias (according to strangers on the the Internet). Clearly someone is wrong….

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Are You a Fiction-Thinker?

If every new idea you encounter reminds you of a movie, song, or novel that you have consumed in the past, it might be holding you back. Movies and books form a mental structure in your head of what is possible and what is not. But these are artificial structures…

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The Best Lifestyle Might be the Cheapest Too

If you were to build a city from scratch, using current technology, what would it cost to live there? I think it would be nearly free if you did it right. This is a big deal because people aren’t saving enough for retirement, and many folks are underemployed. If the…

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What is the Right Percentage of Women in Technical Careers?

I think everyone agrees there are not enough women in technical careers. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started having meetings with other start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. In the past year I’ve met perhaps a hundred male entrepreneurs with impressive technical experience who are…

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Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters – update

Regular readers know about my law of slow-moving disasters. The idea is that society always avoids global disasters that are slow-moving because we rise to the challenge even when it seems impossible. Peak oil didn’t happen Y2K was a big nothing Malthus was wrong that we would run out of…

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When Ideas Win

I love watching a good idea kill a bad idea. It doesn’t happen often. The more typical situation is that people have opinions, those opinions are resistant to data, and everything stays the same until you die. But sometimes a new idea is just so obviously better than competing ideas…

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Boring Little Story About My Windows Computer

I wouldn’t bother reading this if I were you.  I’m just venting. The story goes like this… Bought a Gateway computer from Best Buy It breaks, as electronics do when near me. Independent computer repair guy replaces a bad board. Windows thinks I have a new machine because it doesn’t…

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My Stalker Returns

My stalker is back. Regular readers know that a Canadian woman named Christina Lane goes off her meds every few years and fills the Internet with stories of how I secretly travel to Canada to ransack her apartment and sexually abuse everyone I meet along the way. She also believes…

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Right to Die – Question

[Update: Answered. Thank you. http://www.deathwithdignity.org/advocates/national] And now I am seriously pissed off that there are so few pending bills. Where is California? Let me bang out a few comics this morning and circle back to this. You won’t want to miss it because I just chewed through my leash. —- old…

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Loser Choices

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or…

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Is Feminism Sexist?

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or…

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ISIS Strategies

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or…

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Information is the Cure for Privacy

There are only two reasons to have privacy and both of them involve dysfunction. You might want privacy because… 1.       you plan to do something illegal or unethical. or 2.       to protect you from a dysfunctional world. I think we can agree that if the ONLY reason for privacy were…

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The Illusion of Intelligence

[Update: I haven’t seen in the comments an example of intelligent behavior that a human has and a computer does not (or can not have) with today’s technology. I see examples of things that GROUPS of humans can do (design a better computer) and I see examples where the missing…

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