On New Study Proves Everyone On Twitter Is Terrible
@Smedley T #nabobs
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On William Shatner, Reddit, And The Complications Of "Free Speech" On The Internet
I LOVE THIS SERIES SO MUCH. Thank you.
I think the tension between the internet being a place where anyone could potentially be exposed to anything vs the internet being a place where everyone is free to self-select their own experiences (see, e.g., Respectful Microsoft Employee's comment above) is really interesting (& maybe worth exploring further? #hinthint?)
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On Blancmange: A Tale of Failure and Delight
@Alex Rosenthal@facebook THANK YOU. "Through a book"? Pfffft.
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On The Coming Coffee Apocalypse
Somewhere, the Mio Energy people are cackling to themselves in their garishly fluorescent lair.
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On Trolling v. Trawling
@vanick@twitter Is that how it's pronounced? Or is it 'I Douthat anyone is capable of sustaining a conversation for more than 2 minutes with such a b-hole'?
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On Terror Will Be A Surprise, For The Nation's Terror Detectors Do Not Work At All
@deepomega exactly! What'd be better is if we could spend a billion dollars paying wildly unqualified H.S. drop-outs tons of money to obtrusively lean over and pointedly sniff everybody on the subway. Especially if we get the money by cutting funding to actually worthwhile social programs and arbitrarily increase its funding every single year regardless of how effective it actually is.
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On 'Atlas Shrugged': Who Is John Galt's Chiropractor?
I've never read any Ayn Rand, and have 0 intention to ever do so. I interned at the Cato Institute (go Running Dogs!) one summer in college. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people had a LOT of opinions about ol' Ayn--one guy was apparently excommunicated by the Ayn Rand foundation (or whatever) for making art out of grass & glue, which apparently, somewhere in the interminable Randian corpus, she claims is impossible.
All I know is, Objectivists make me uncomfortable, and are second only to Eric "Libertarian Republican" Dondero on the list of reasons why We Can't Have Nice Things.
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On Fake Candidate Gary Johnson Has Wingnuts Ready for 2016 Already!
@CTD Yeah, dude, why so snarky? GJ's the only candidate who wants to legalize drugs, stop indiscriminately blowing up brown people with flying death robots, and legalize gay marriage at the federal level. I'd also add that calling him "Koch Brothers-associated" is no fairer a dig than calling Obama "Goldman Sachs-associated."
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On Jonathan Franzen Will Save Us From The Computers
The claims this article makes:
1)Computers can predict which songs will be played on huge, mass-market pop stations with tightly-controlled playlists and which movies will be approved by the intellectually-bankrupt, intentionally-hackneyed Hollywood studio cabal.
2)Computers can mimic the grading standards of harried, apathetic essay-scorers reading hurriedly-written, amateurish essays composed by children trying to meet very specific (not terribly complex!) grading criteria.
3)Computers might be able to tell if you're inclined to yell at customer service people.
4)Computers might be able to sift through absolutely massive amounts of data gleaned through the 4th-amendment-shredding efforts of the modern panopticon more effectively than tired, underpaid government bureaucrats.
Conclusion: OMG COMPUTERS ARE GOING TO TAKE OVER ART! MFA PROGRAMS WILL BE SHUT DOWN AND THEIR APPLICANTS PLUGGED IN TO MATRIX-STYLE BATTERIES TO POWER REALITY SHOWS AND THE KINKADE-BOT 5000!!
Sorry, but...I'm not seeing it...
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On New York City to Ban Awls
The City Council is clearly in the pocket of Big Belt.