Wildly unrelated, but a VP thread seems like as good a place to bring this up as any:

You know what the next vice-president could do that would be most beneficial to the country? Crusade tirelessly against executive power. Really. I would happily vote for any party whose VP candidate ran on the platform of 'I should not be able to do any of the crazy shit that Dick Cheney has been doing for the last 8 years.' Biden kind of brushed against this in the VP debate last... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:44 AM on October 6, 2008

I'm sure there's something living in my asshole right now that if magnified a couple thousand times would look like a raging six headed Godzilla on PCP so I just shrug, look the other way and keep on chuggin' down the road when it comes this sort of thing.

Christ, what an..

Wait, what?
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:32 AM on October 2, 2008

I have a good friend who argues that its all right that Sarah McCain is not intelligent in general because she is intelligent enough about the right issues - Iran, Israel, on taxes, on reform.

She's a country mile away from that, too--even with the bar at mid-ankle level, it's still apparently not low enough. Palin on Hamas
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:17 AM on October 2, 2008

Mayor West, it is true that she appears to be a firm supporter, at least, of a federally guaranteed right to privacy.

She seems to be in principle, yes, but I find it really disconcerting that her position is completely up for grabs the moment it interferes with one of her weird bits of morality. The hallmark of a competent leader is someone who understands nuance, and is willing to sacrifice a pet issue to support a broader ethos. Palin, on the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:45 AM on October 2, 2008

I just figured since anything goes the past several weeks, we need some balance. We're open-minded, right?

You do realize that the opposite of 'well-researched, reasonably-argued disapproval of GOP candidates' is not 'insipid, easily-debunked talking point drivel set to bad music on YouTube,' right? And that even if it were, FPPs are not a zero-sum game?

Also, while we're on it: the CRA. You continue to use this word. I do... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:15 AM on September 29, 2008

I could take in this information a lot faster if I was allowed to read it at my own pace.

Pfft, clearly you just failed to notice the disclaimer at the beginning:

USE THE PAUSE BUTTON IF IT GOES TOO FAST FOR YOU!

Typical liberal whinging. You think you can compress 200 slides of crazy into a mere three songs' worth of YouTube if you leave each one up long enough to read it?

GOOGLE THE PAUSE BUTTON.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:20 AM on September 29, 2008

The Patriots didn't just lose, they got crushed at home 38-13. Something that basically doesn't ever happen.

Right, which will happen exactly once to an opponent of the Miami Dolphins. I spent half of last week arguing about this over on the ESPN boards, so if the level of discourse is lower than you'd expect, bear with me.

The Single Wing attack that Miami loosed on New England was essentially a series of trick plays, which... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:02 AM on September 29, 2008

And yes, it has an ending.

I was willing to suspend disbelief about all the other traps he usually falls into, and was planning on buying Anathem anyway, because Cryptonomicon is 12 pounds of awesome in a ten-pound bag, and Snow Crash still prompts me to mentally capitalize the 'r' when someone intones 'they'll listen to reason,' but this aggression will not stand. The man is clearly as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 8:50 AM on September 26, 2008

PS if this was reversed you'd all be saying Obama was being a statesman.

And I would be agreeing with you.

No, we wouldn't, because there's a markedly smaller amount of pure partisan hackery on our side of the aisle, and we're usually the first to slam Democrats for any sleazy shit they try to pull, because we actually hold our leaders to some kind of standard, as opposed to the party who feels some sense of twisted pride... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 1:02 PM on September 24, 2008

More about God and Government
A thief steals something from a victim that is worth $5000. God's law says that that thief, when caught, is to be made the victim's slave until he has paid the victim back threefold. What that means is that if the thief still has the thing he stole from the victim, the victim gets it back and he must work for the victim until he has paid the victim back $10,000 more.

what

Quick... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 9:06 AM on September 22, 2008

I worksed at McDonaldsback in high school, and the best off-menu concoctions came at the crossover between breakfast and the rest of the menu. My personal favorite was an english muffin double cheeseburger with a fried egg, and hot fudge sundae pancakes. Mcdonalds has recently added the chicken biscuit to their breakfast menu, which was also a behind the scenes favorite back in the day.

Amen. That 11:00 AM crossover was the only time working back in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 4:53 AM on September 19, 2008

Gold and silver are very volatile. But I'm not suggesting them as an alternative to CDs. They are a hedge against inflation.

They're best, of course, when hoarded intravenously.

An investment in gold 6 months ago would now be worth 15% less than it was when you bought it; until a week ago, it would have been worth 25% less than what you paid for it. If you'd invested in it the early 80's, your investment now would still be... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 11:58 AM on September 18, 2008

So, it was worth a lot in the early 80's? I wonder what else was going on in the economy at that time.

You're right, of course: that bubble did correlate with some crazy inflation happening in the early 80's. The thing is, investment in precious metals only makes sense if you're looking at what (for most people) is a weird investment time-table: you have to be thinking short-term, you need your assets to be totally liquidatable, and you have to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 4:16 AM on September 19, 2008

If you need them, I can post instructions on how to make thermite.

Ohmygod, please do this. I can see the headlines now when some enterprising Fox News flak discovers this thread, reads the comments, completely fails to grok Anonymous, and then somehow gets linked back to some of our other how-to's. If I hear the words "MetaFilter" and "terrorist training ground" in the same sentence, my quest will be over.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 1:14 PM on September 17, 2008

By the way, Obama is not looking to expand government, but actually to cut programs using a line-item review. Bush (with help from senators like McCain) has led the federal government through an unpredecedented expansion - actually, a ballooining - which is drawing more heavily on the tax base than we can sustain. McCain's continued work in this direction sounds like it would be exactly antithetical to what you wish to see.

Right you are, Miko. I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 7:01 AM on September 16, 2008

Mark me down as another first-time donor. I didn't think I'd see another candidate in my lifetime who would excite me as much as Dean did five years ago (when I was, sadly, a totally broke-ass college student who could only contribute time), but I stand happily corrected. Now I'm mulling over the logistics of setting up a pledge-drive-style donation promise, wherein I promise to donate $1 for every thinly-veiled racist jab, reductio ad absurdum of a tenet of the Democratic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 8:13 AM on September 5, 2008

Trying to reinstate the property requirement (which our Founding Fathers implemented) for voting is actually about the first truly conservative thing the current crop of Republicans have tried in years.

You'll also notice that those property requirements largely went the way of the dodo by the middle of the 19th century, because they're extraordinarily undemocratic.

I don't even know why I'm surprised... Republicans finally... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:59 AM on September 12, 2008

In response to Mr. Horn's apology she sent 30 angry letters to Warner Bros. in bright red envelopes -- an allusion to "howlers," a magical kind of hate mail in the Potter world that screams loudly at the recipient and explodes violently if left unopened.

Congratulations! Not only are you the laughingstock of that particular mail room (which, I'm sure, holds total executive sway over the studio's release schedule), but you've also just just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:08 AM on September 11, 2008

Can someone concisely explain the logical reason (if any) for opposition to gay marriage? I don't understand the alleged "threat" it poses.

I'll never forget the day gay marriage was legalized here in British Columbia.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 1:37 PM on September 9, 2008

Most web developers are doing it wrong

Sigh... count me among their ranks, from time to time. I mean, you can't have it both ways--either you're supposed to do all your page layout in CSS, or you're not, and either every rendering engine behaves the same way when given the same markup using position:relative; directives, or it doesn't. But yes, every '* html body {' I write makes me a worse person.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:22 PM on September 9, 2008

Also, it occurrs to me--most of the weirdness in user-agent strings comes from the fact that every competing browser assumed that web servers were serving up content based on a partial string match, and the arms race was over the idea that someone else might be getting something extra that your users weren't. Thus, I'm amazed that some brash young upstart on the MSIE team didn't decide to implement the Final Solution:

Mozilla/5.0... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 1:33 PM on September 9, 2008

I hear you on the irk, but it's also ridiculous that they're being put in the position of having to jump through that hoop. This is 80s bullshit. This is the fold-out poster of thousands of rows of black symbols on dark red paper that you had to search through to unlock the door to the upstairs in Maniac Mansion. It's silly bullshit that throws out the baby with the bathwater in a futile bid to deter people who will not, in fact, be deterred.

It's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:58 PM on September 8, 2008

...like the supposed media bias of anchors like Peter Jennings, who was accused of being a hidden liberal for 20 years

I also enjoy (c.f. 'am physically sickened by') the fact that phrases like 'hidden liberal' don't cause everyone in the conversation to burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of the whole conversation. The burden of proof has shifted to the point where common parlance accepts the notion that the MSM is pointedly left-of-center,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:06 AM on September 8, 2008

I don't really think the comparison's correct. That requires you to change channels, and advertisers count on yo lazy ass being too slotherous to reach for the remote.

Right. And 5, maybe 10% of the viewing audience isn't that slotherous, and flips over to Animal Planet during the commercial break. In much the same way that 5, maybe 10% (and I'll bet the numbers are even lower than that, since Mozilla is still less than 20% of browser traffic, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:42 PM on September 2, 2008

I'm a Democrat and a strong Obama supporter, but on this I agree with the republicans. I find gay culture extremely disgusting and offensive.

Gay guys trawl online hookup sites like this but straight guys trawl online hookup sites like this, amirite?
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 7:29 AM on August 29, 2008

As in American football, cameras are placed in different places and at differnet angles depending on the stadium. You also have to rely on a deft cameraman and director to make sure you get the perfect shot- which rarely happens in American football.

Wha? Football actually got it exactly right, by throwing an ungodly number of resources at the problem. On any given replay (which I love, and you should too, because it means at least another three... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 7:28 AM on August 28, 2008

30) An atom is just like a tiny solar system in which the nucleus is like the Sun and electrons are like tiny planets orbiting the nucleus in elliptical paths.

Oh for chrissake... no, of course it's not completely analogous, and there are discrete quanta of energy that determine orbital paths, and countless other deviations, but if you had to explain to someone on a whiteboard how the damn thing works, you would draw a l'il mini-solar-system.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:32 AM on August 25, 2008

Just out of curiosity, if I cherry-pick some statistics, completely ignoring sample size and every other measure of validity and significance, can I get Yahoo to report on my findings? Or do I have to theme it around a pseudo-science that an alarming percentage of the population puts irrational credence into, also? Because let me tell you, you guys aren't going to believe the effect that ion bracelets have on reaction times in chiropractic patients.

Now, don't anybody... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:10 AM on August 20, 2008

Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America: The complaint is actually kind of awesome. I wasn't expecting much, and I'm not convinced (and he launches with his worst argument), but he clearly put some thought into it.

Holy crap, that is awesome... the article didn't even mention that he was going after them under the Establishment clause. He even brings it up before the 5th and 14th Amendment violation bit! On the vanishingly small chance this ever... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:02 AM on August 20, 2008

MetaFilter: No one welds with a welding machine unless he knows what he is doing.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:38 PM on August 13, 2008

never used baby shoes writes: Full text of the ACLU letter

Holy Christmas, that's some kind of cease-and-desist order. I can't wait for the smackdown these sons of bitches are going to get in federal court...
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:54 AM on August 13, 2008

You're saying Joe Sixpack can't decide who does and doesn't sleep in his home? Yeah, right.

Joe SixPack absolutely can. Until he puts out his shingle and advertises as a hotel, which is what this service makes him into--then he's bound by federal anti-discrimination statutes. Not that it really matters, since it'll never get to that point... it's probably just a matter of weeks before someone tries this and gets crucified by local zoning/hotelier/tax statutes.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:31 AM on August 12, 2008

More to the point, perhaps, I don't actually see myself that selling goods to POWs implies that you're betting on either side to win: though sending watches to British POWs on very easy terms implies a friendly attitude.

Exactly. I read that note to mean "given your current condition and the hardships entailed therein, we're happy to accommodate you as soon as we can, with the friendly understanding that you'll compensate us as soon as you're... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:14 AM on August 1, 2008

Wow, this is some kind of nerdgasm... I'd heard about the PacMan kill screen before, but never the DK one. It's almost unthinkable that there were no testing practices that made sure the game was playable to a reasonable level before the cartridges shipped, but 8-bit arithmetic makes monsters of us all, I guess.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:08 PM on July 30, 2008

There's the question here of whether 256 levels of Pacman is actually "reasonable".

Hmm, that's true... there's a pretty big schism between games you play in the arcade and games you play on the XBox... nowadays, the expectation is that a user might very well spend a thousand hours playing your game, and if 50,000 people buy copies, you'd damned well better believe they're going to find your weird corner-case integer-overflow bug. Hell,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 12:46 PM on July 30, 2008

Yeah, we've discussed DadHacker before... I love his stuff, and every time I read about his work at Atari, I get this weird sense of nostalgia for events of the distant past, when we're actually talking 20 years or so. The length of an epoch is ever-decreasing, especially in game programming.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 7:40 AM on July 31, 2008

However, when it comes to... purposefully disseminating misinformation to demonize Jews and to delegitimize Israel, there is a moral obligation to remove the platform of such repugnant hate-mongers.

This from a group whose linked homepage contains a counter reading "Islamic terrorists have carried out more than xx deadly terror attacks since 9/11." Way to own that double standard, guys. And, uh, death to the Facebook oppressors? Keep on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 11:39 AM on July 30, 2008

Say what you will, but the longer we allow the court system to simply strike down laws enacted by a democratic majority purely on the basis of those laws being unconstitutional, the more people are going to think that's exactly what the court system is supposed to do.

That's actually a much more interesting topic than the pathetic ramblings of a closet case who wants to dress up his homophobia as a nuanced discussion of constitutional law. I've... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:26 AM on July 30, 2008

Though there was quite a bit of homophobia in 'Stranger in a Strange Land' so don't forget that in your summary.

There was a good bit of maneuvering to avoid hot guy-on-guy action in that book, but I never really read it as rampant homophobia. It was more like Heinlein was vaguely squicked out by the notion of two dudes gettin' it on, but he'd already built an ethos about it being totally OK to just making out with whoever was in arms' reach, and he... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 10:42 AM on July 30, 2008

It's probably worth saying that they may cause much more harm to Muslims (or anyone perceived as Muslim) than equivalent anti-Christian cartoons would, which one might take into account.

I've seen this opinion put forward in a few places, Dee Xtrovert, and I'm curious as to the justification behind it. Satire paints with a pretty broad brush, but it does so with everything: how is Mohammad-with-a-bomb-for-a-turban any different from, say, casting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:09 AM on July 25, 2008

If you're having trouble with Salon blocking access to articles linked from MeFi:

1. type "about:config" in the URL bar in FireFox
2. scroll down the row with the first column "network.http.referrerHeader"
3. right-click, choose "Modify"
4. set value to zero
5. presto! Salon (and indeed everyplace else on the Interwebs) doesn't know where you're coming from... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:30 AM on July 24, 2008

Ah, Lifetime. Named for the two things its viewers waste. But that title generator is pure gold.

Jane's Story: My Husband Won't Stop Seducing Me

Magnificent.
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:16 AM on July 23, 2008

Am I the only one who thought the plastic slides were MORE dangerous? I mean, sure, metal gets hot, but any idiot knows that's easy to check for and avoid. Plastic, on the other hand, would SHOCK you. That is, when it wasn't busy skinning your knees or gouging your skin off from rough edges or something. I don't know if the plastics have gotten a lot better now or something, but those things seemed designed to double as kiddie torture chambers.

No,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:23 AM on July 22, 2008

Passenger Scott Tarwater was ejected into the Trinity River, whose rapids carried him so far away his body wasn't found for three weeks. But a timely burial wasn't a problem for Mahathy's family, because she was right there in the passenger seat. Crushed to death.

Magnifique.

Since most of the coverage of the industry is so breathless (drugs! fast driving! your darling child might be recruited by these madmen!), I can't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 8:16 AM on July 18, 2008

Oh, hey, it's MetaMan! I wonder what this thread is about.

Proposed: every person to use the term "flip-flop" in reference to anything but footwear for the remainder of the election season gets dragged out behind the shed and beaten mercilessly. If you are so deeply entrenched in party politics and voting in lockstep that you think it's an indicator of malfeasance or unfitness to govern to change your stance on a subject when the facts surrounding the issue... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:46 AM on July 15, 2008

The Slashdot story I saw about this pegged the cost of starting a new TLD at around $500K... that's a pretty substantial barrier to entry, and a major company thinking of opening one up would probably have to think long and hard about how they were going to police it once it's open. I would assume that Disney could open the floodgates on .disney, and get first dibs on any domains within it... do they then have the ability to prevent someone from registering inappropriate... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 4:58 AM on June 27, 2008

klangklangston writes: The moronic maxim of "If guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns," which has been paraphrased above, misses the point of the legislation—that FEWER criminals will have guns. Whether this is effective in reducing gun violence is an epidemiology question, not one that can be argued by pure deduction from principle.

There's an equal amount of handwaving behind that argument, Klang. If police started... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 11:39 AM on June 26, 2008

California has held energy use constant per capita since about 1974 through high prices and regulations to force conservation

Which is all fine and well (and I really do applaud some of the measures CA has taken), but you're speaking of a region that's politically much further left than almost anywhere else in the country, and which never dips below freezing. That's quite a combination--you can legislate for that kind of progress when the electorate... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 5:54 AM on June 26, 2008

I'm not afraid of John McCain; nor am I afraid of George W. Bush. I *am* afraid of Barack Obama, who by his very actions has shown that he is little better than the reverse mirror image of George W. Bush.

What the hell does this even mean?

I sat by and watched Barack Obama let the MSM accuse bona fide liberals who have a sterling record of civil rights engagement, racists.

I sat by and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:57 AM on June 23, 2008

And if the tax is proportionate to the risk, then put the tax on each bullet at around $50 a pop.

This idea is ironclad, since there exist no privately-held mechanisms for forming lead into pointed shapes, and there are no enthusiasts that would turn what would otherwise be their weekend pastime into a (highly lucrative even at 1% of that price) black market literally overnight. Similarly, the $50 price-point is clearly well-researched, and is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mayor West at 6:10 AM on June 23, 2008