MetaFilter

The one big institutional difference this time around seems to be
the role of the central banks, with the Federal reserve of the United
States playing a leading if not domineering role on the world stage.
But ever since the inception of central banks (back in 1694 in the
British case), their role has been to protect and bail out the bankers
and not to take care of the well-being of the people. The fact that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by three blind mice at 1:22 AM on April 9, 2014

I noticed that Splitsider has a few write-ups on 1980's Letterman episodes.

The Episode Where David Letterman Rotated the Screen 360°

The Episode When David Letterman Was Too Tired to Do a Show

The Episode Where David Letterman Had 13... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ericthegardener at 12:43 PM on April 7, 2014

Simpsons farewell couch gag
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 10:01 AM on April 7, 2014

Ah, I loved this when I first saw it the other day. This was my favorite bit:

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

posted to MetaFilter by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:35 PM on April 5, 2014

Is this really a startling new discovery? In my college medieval history class we learned there were 3 types of plague during the Black Death -- bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic -- and that was seven or eight years ago now (my class, not the plague). I remember it pretty clearly because my teacher told us the mortality rates for each one, and bubonic came out looking pretty good: it had something like a 60% fatality rate and took a couple weeks to die, pneumonic had something like a 90-95%... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lilac girl at 6:00 PM on March 31, 2014

This is a link to the best part, Get Lucky To The Limit, which has been in my iTunes rotation for quite some time (embarrassingly enough). But don't take my word for it that it's the best part. Ask your friend Joe. Ask your friend Jake. Go on, I'll wait to see what they say.
posted to MetaFilter by ilana at 4:57 PM on March 31, 2014

Antibiotics make plague much less of a threat than it was 666 years ago.

Also it seems like it was pretty difficult to get at the DNA -- it's not like the bodies were covered in lung sputum or something.

(OMG GUYS ITS BEEN 666 YEARS SINCE THE BLACK DEATH WHAT IF I'M WRONG ABOUT THIS)
posted to MetaFilter by Sara C. at 5:37 PM on March 31, 2014

That's good and all. And I give Chipotle credit for putting the 'human' in Human Resources. There's a lot to be said for treating staff with respect on several levels. BUT, in my experience there are two types of managers:

1) people who have the appropriate skills to deal with people professionally, trusting them to do their jobs, delegating, and fostering an environment for employee skills to grow. This type can come from either internal or external searches.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dry white toast at 8:13 AM on March 29, 2014

And they reserve a task slot for being smug about how they can multitask.
posted to MetaFilter by tonycpsu at 8:17 PM on March 25, 2014

teasing a future confrontation...that never happened.

It ends up happening in a DS9 book and the results are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted to MetaFilter by drezdn at 5:30 AM on March 25, 2014

WHERE DO I GO TO FIGHT THEM

Tanagra, of course.
posted to MetaFilter by ceribus peribus at 2:14 AM on March 25, 2014

I'm 35 and if I met myself at any point prior to the age of about 30 I would throw myself through a fucking window. In five years I will likely send myself back in time to kill me as I am typing this com
posted to MetaFilter by turbid dahlia at 5:08 PM on March 24, 2014

His implication that they were not actually adults is just garden-variety disrespectful assholery, not some piercing social insight.

No it's broader than that. The corporate perks, like the meals and laundry service and the haircuts and whatever go hand in hand with an infantilization of Generation Y, perhaps partially self imposed, but especially common in this industry.

I'm a twenty-something programmer in SF, and I'll... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zachlipton at 5:02 PM on March 24, 2014

The Origin of Feces was also a Type O Negative Album.
posted to MetaFilter by Renoroc at 6:31 AM on March 24, 2014

“Public health depends on soliciting feedback from all stakeholders.” (References to multiple “stakeholders” always mean: You to whom I am speaking will get screwed.)

Quoted for future reference.
posted to MetaFilter by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:10 AM on March 22, 2014

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
-- John Adams

posted to MetaFilter by nixt at 8:32 PM on March 20, 2014

With such amazing covert Signals Intelligence capabilities, how can we be such *crap* at foreign relations?

The obvious, overt and explicit contempt for that US leaders exhibit for other countries may have something to do with it.
posted to MetaFilter by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:27 PM on March 18, 2014

The extra r in the title is pretty much my favorite thing from 2002.
posted to MetaFilter by MCMikeNamara at 1:20 PM on March 16, 2014

But seriously, I didn't realize he had been acquired by Google.

I think the correct term is uploaded.

I think you mean "his biological and technological distinctiveness have been added to the collective."
posted to MetaFilter by blue_beetle at 10:17 AM on March 13, 2014

Anybody know what the theme song is?

symbioid, you talking to me?
posted to MetaFilter by Room 641-A at 11:34 AM on March 11, 2014

Lights, dressing gown, analgesic, screwdriver, junkmail, mud then died. It's been at least 20 years since I played this, but I still remember you need the junk mail for the babelfish.

BRB. Trying again, and probably wasting my evening/week.
posted to MetaFilter by Grimgrin at 4:48 PM on March 10, 2014

I remember an old BYTE (or was it SoftTalk?) article about a guy who hooked up a speech synth to announce when his cat was pooping. I thought it lame at the time. But I knew deep down inside I would one day be that guy.
posted to MetaFilter by RobotVoodooPower at 7:12 PM on March 10, 2014

Leader John Vasconcellos, a California assemblyman, dismissed doubters as people who “only live in their heads,” insisting that “we all know in our gut that it’s true.”

reminds me of this immortal Colbert bit:

That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by thelonius at 5:27 PM on March 9, 2014

Statistically, everything in that quote has actually happened. Since 1986, crime is down, violent crime is way down, educational attainment is up, welfare dependency is down, teen pregnancy is down, alcoholism and most drug abuse are both down (marijuana use is up, though). One can't simply point at "self esteem" as the cause for all this but it's interesting to think about.
posted to MetaFilter by BabeTheBlueOX at 4:04 PM on March 9, 2014

Just curious and a total derail, but why the hell did it take until 2011 for somebody to come up with the idea of cloning sith/jedi?

Timothy Zahn hit on it in the Thrawn trilogy, way back in the 90s, technically.
posted to MetaFilter by Atreides at 11:08 AM on March 6, 2014

Here's a random thought I just had: ST:TNG has now been off the air longer than the original Star Trek had been when TNG began.
posted to MetaFilter by bowline at 9:21 PM on March 4, 2014

Tuesday night on Metafilter is clearly where time becomes a loop.
posted to MetaFilter by asterix at 9:58 PM on March 4, 2014

It is believed that the colors on the flags have turned white due to sunlight and space radiation.

So after a mighty struggle, mankind reached the surface of the moon, planted six flags of surrender, and never returned.
posted to MetaFilter by straight at 1:06 PM on March 2, 2014

The other greatest logo designer.
posted to MetaFilter by Benny Andajetz at 6:38 AM on February 28, 2014

I think it's also worth recalling that, prior to the end of World War II, the notion was often that economics were the performative effect of political philosophy. The argument was more often framed as "dictatorship vs. liberal democracy," not as "communism or fascism vs. capitalism." This framing starts to shift with the postwar rise of folks like Hayek and really gets solidified in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of Thatcherite and Reaganite responses to national... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kewb at 6:11 AM on February 26, 2014

If it isn't brutally clear that policy issues are going to be won or lost at the local and regional level and in the primaries, I don't know what to tell you. Tuesday in November is too damn late to vote on issues that matter - at that point, your party has already settled on a policy platform, and are trying to keep the neo-feudalists from doing any more damage.

You vote for your positions in the primary, and you vote against... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Slap*Happy at 5:03 AM on February 26, 2014

"The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already."
posted to MetaFilter by Auden at 3:08 AM on February 26, 2014

QNX is perhaps the best embedded OS out there. Used in all sorts of fantastic hardware, especially where a hard realtime OS is required — medical devices, robot control systems, avionics, etc, where a guaranteed switch in X milliseconds (nanoseconds these days?) is a requirement. Tiny footprint. Solid device driver structure. Awesome graphics library, well-suited to device controller UIs. And its been around for eons. Built right, right from the start.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by five fresh fish at 10:03 PM on February 24, 2014

Racoon playing with sprinkler

They added harp music because for some reason they didn't think playing with a sprinkler was cute enough on its own.
posted to MetaFilter by Joey Michaels at 12:21 PM on February 24, 2014

*waves to kovacs* Not often I cross fellow consultants who have worked on airline systems.

I worked for the IT department of an airline whose name is Air Country, where "country" is the one I live in currently, abbreviation AF. (I don't type it out because I know AskMe turns up in search results.) My job was to test their migration from their own internal system, to a very similar one managed by Amadeus. In matter of fact, AF's flight reservation system is the... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by fraula at 3:19 AM on February 20, 2014 marked best answer

I knew I was getting old when everybody online stopped obsessing about crappy shows of my youth like Knight Rider and Three's Company and a new crowd showed up and started obessing over crappy stuff I was just a bit too old for, when it was new. You pups just wait: any day now, you'll find yourself surrounded by adults who are obsessed with "classic" stuff like Space Chimps and Justin Beiber. (The Buzzfeed folks seem halfway there already.)
posted to MetaFilter by Ursula Hitler at 6:12 PM on February 18, 2014

I'd actually watch sitcoms with laugh-tracks if they all had imaginary, invisible, inaudible characters which the rest of the cast and the "audience" all respond to as if they were there, transforming the sitcom into its true self, a desperate scream of agony in a world of lies.
posted to MetaFilter by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:07 PM on February 18, 2014

Stephen Spender told our poetry class in college that getting old is like driving the same car for a very long time. You, the driver, seem to be the same, but the thing just starts falling apart around you.
posted to MetaFilter by thelonius at 11:18 AM on February 17, 2014

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love.

This is worth remembering.
posted to MetaFilter by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:24 AM on February 17, 2014

I didn't read it, but the sooner you get over the silly-ass romanticizing of writing and all that horseshit about "muses" and "inspiration" and accept that it's work exactly like any other work, the sooner you'll be a real writer.
posted to MetaFilter by drjimmy11 at 3:28 PM on February 16, 2014

If you were a Republican political operative why on earth would you want to work for Chris Christie right now? He might get indicted. If you were a Republican political donor why would you want to give him money?

That's what's going to kill him. He needs to start running for President now and instead of looking like a golden boy with unlimited potential he looks like a crook who is being investigated.
posted to MetaFilter by leopard at 9:24 AM on February 13, 2014

Dude, you're making comments on a weblog on the internet. Maybe you can back the fuck off of the condescension about which nerd pursuits are unworthy of feminist critique?

I don't like that large parts of my generation have become consumed with infantalized, commercial bullshit and are proud of it.

Not sure how commenting on a website would be comparable to spending large sums of time and/or money dressing up like a media... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lattiboy at 6:25 PM on February 10, 2014

stenseng, this is a Fallon thread, which by definition is a celebration of milquetoast, inoffensive comedy preferred by a generation of children brought up on Facebook shaming so I'm not surprised that you'd find the mean-spirited pre-Stewart Daily Show boring. But you cannot deny the show its popularity.
posted to MetaFilter by any major dude at 12:01 PM on February 10, 2014

You can't spell A-hole without Aol.
posted to MetaFilter by Thorzdad at 10:20 AM on February 9, 2014

Sometime back in the 1980's, I was walking through ArborLand mall in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and come across a table set up, displaying books, with an older gentleman sitting behind the table. The books on display were copies of "Flight of the Enola Gay" by Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The gentleman sitting behind the table was Paul Tibbets.

It took me a few moments to put all the pieces together, here I was, over 40 years after... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by HuronBob at 10:18 PM on February 6, 2014

I worked for a time in Hemphill, Texas. The memories of the shuttle response are still quite raw - all of my coworkers worked on nothing BUT shuttle recovery for the first 3 months of the response, and many of my coworkers continued to work on the response for years later (I work for a federal response agency).

The response of the communities of deep east Texas, an area of the country with some very problematic and sad history is nothing short of phenomenal. Though the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by arnicae at 11:58 AM on February 1, 2014

George and I shared a birthday. I still give him a nod every year. And this also means that I grew up with radio stations everywhere playing "here Comes The Sun" on my birthday, and Beatles songs are a fine gift.
posted to MetaFilter by EmpressCallipygos at 5:18 AM on February 1, 2014

I've got some Gmail invites I can send him, if that would help
posted to MetaFilter by thelonius at 12:16 PM on January 30, 2014

Why is this even news? All children are possessed by demons. That's the origin of the word children. CHILD = young. REN = demon.
posted to MetaFilter by perhapses at 1:42 PM on January 28, 2014

Hey, if you want real CGA/EGA quality graphics in your sci-fi movie, give Star Trek III a try.
posted to MetaFilter by zsazsa at 12:16 AM on January 26, 2014