You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.
Saturday, July 30
Hidden (Urrrrk) Talents
| Your Hidden Talent |
 You have the power to persuade and influence others.
You're the type of person who can turn a whole room around.
The potential for great leadership is there, as long as you don't abuse it.
Always remember, you have a lot more power over people than you might think! |
Yup, and as soon as I finish barfing, I'm going to take over the world!
(via the Llamas)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:45 AM
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Mine is driving moonbats crazy by pointing out what fascist apologists they are.
Funny that doesn't show up on the test....
Posted by: Dean Esmay at Tuesday, August 02 2005 09:47 PM (Fs6IG)
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Pixy, I hate to wipe my feet on your carpet in your house, but I am getting spammed REALLY bad. Like three a minute from aaa@aaa.com. To ALL my posts. I am not at my home computer, so I don't know what to do. Sorry. I hate to bother you like this.
Posted by: Alex at Wednesday, August 03 2005 12:49 AM (8N2FJ)
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The Salmon Mousse!
Or in my case, the Chicken with Cashew Nuts.
Bleargh.
'Scuse me.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:20 AM
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It was probably the rice, rather than the chicken...
Posted by: Susie at Monday, August 01 2005 12:14 PM (PWYyH)
2
ya pidoras, pizu chujie doors, zaabuzte moi url - http://greatpharmacies.com/ a suda pishite pisma i spamte - admass@pisem.net
Posted by: ya pidoras at Wednesday, July 26 2006 06:00 PM (tIsMN)
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Wednesday, July 27
Tuesday, July 26
Complaints?
No, that's next door. This is
getting shot in the head lessons:
Heavily armed police swarmed a double-decker bus packed with tourists in Times Square today and later shut down Penn railway station after an irate passenger said he had a bomb.
In a dramatic sign of the city's edginess since the London bombings, police evacuated buildings, shut Midtown Manhattan streets and forced about 60 terrified tourists to march off the double-decker bus, with their hands up, in the heart of Broadway.
Officers in riot gear handcuffed a group of apparently harmless South Asian-looking men with British accents because a jittery tour bus worker thought they were suspicious.
...
A Gray Line dispatcher called police saying the men had backpacks and their pockets "stuffed" - a possible warning sign of suicide bombers, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Well, that one we can chalk up to nerves following the attacks in London, but the second case is something special:
Later Penn Station was paralysed when a disgruntled passenger walked up to a ticket counter, put his suitcase on the counter and declared he had a bomb, authorities said.
Not too bright, as Best of the Web would say.
Meanwhile, what the hell is this?
By the time the bus neared Times Square, cops carrying heavy weapons decided to cordon off Broadway and stop the vehicle, a decision police officials defended as appropriate.
I know that you try not to repeat particular words too frequently, but I don't think that "cops" has any place in a serious news article outside of a direct quote.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:31 AM
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Personally I hate the fact that these double decker buses line up, sometimes 5 or 6 at a time, to load up passengers 8 flights below from my work station.
I still remember a few IRA bombings I narrowly escaped in London, so I'm a bit bomb shy myself.
Posted by: michele at Saturday, July 30 2005 12:13 PM (ht2RK)
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Sunday, July 24
My Name Is Pixy And I Dance The Dance Of High-Speed Internet Access
Happy days are here again,
The sky is (checks outside) bright and clear again,
I've got ADSL again
Throw that modem in the bin!
P.S. Ten pengos to anyone who can place the reference in the title.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:24 PM
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When did you join the
Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, July 25 2005 02:31 AM (G2sf8)
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Well, that was quick! Ten pengos to Wonderduck!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 25 2005 03:24 AM (4N+SC)
3
Heh. He got there first. I suspect you've got more than one fan of Laumer's Retief books among your readers.
Posted by: Kathy K at Monday, July 25 2005 11:29 AM (+7TVA)
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:-) I actually prefer his Bolo stories, but the Retief books were a fun read.
Yayyyyyyy, I've got 10 Pengos! I've got 10 Pengos! Woohoooooo!
Um.
What does one do with a pengo?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, July 25 2005 12:54 PM (G2sf8)
5
My name is Dominic, and I dance the Dance of Regret for Not Reading Ambient Irony on Sunday...
Posted by: Dominic at Tuesday, July 26 2005 09:08 AM (uyRJS)
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Friday, July 22
It Never Shines But It... Something
It seems that I have broadband again. In stereo. I decided to get
two ADSL connections at Pixy Central Mk II (via two different ISPs), because what with MuNu and everything, I'm online about 28 hours a day and just can't have outages.
Problem: I only have one working ADSL modem right now. Darn. I guess I'll just have to make do.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:37 AM
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Thursday, July 21
On Being The Wrong Size
And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of demoÂÂcracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citiÂÂzen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.
To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.
J. B. S. Haldane,
On Being The Right Size
Haldane was a biologist, and the problem with socialism is really one of information, but nonetheless he nailed it. Socialism suffers dreadfully from scaling problems. It works fine for small, close-knit groups (families), and inevitably collapses into ruin for large heterogenous groups (the Soviet Union).
Haldane - a socialist himself - pointed this out in 1928. It took several more decades for others to realise just how right he was. Some still haven't grasped this fact.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:00 PM
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Eh. There's more than a scaling difference between the Ford Motor Company and Luxembourg. A small country is in some senses a closed system - a holistic, total entity with all of its constituent parts intact, but scaled to size. A company, no matter how huge and oversize, on the other hand, is no more than a component of some greater whole. An organ, rather than an animal.
Even Ford's behemoth, which had such cradle-to-grave pretensions of company socialism, wasn't a beast in and of itself, but rather a massively swollen organ in an unbalanced beast called Detroit, which would eventually die of its imbalances. Cities and towns in which one big company owns too much, does too much, almost always come to grief sooner or later. Ask anyone who lives in, or has lived in, a company town.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 22 2005 09:58 AM (iTVQj)
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Well, yes, Haldane glosses over the problems associated with efficiently socialising a country rather too quickly. But the point remains that an efficiently-run socialist Andorra (pop. 70,549) is at least plausible, and probably feasible - if you can find capable and honest administrators. Admittedly, 80% of Andorra's GDP is related to tourism, so it's hardly a closed system. And of course, capable and honest administrators aren't easy to come by.
Scale the population up by a factor of 1000 or so (Britan or the Soviet Union) and you're on the fast track to disaster. It doesn't work
at all, not even on the surface, not even temporarily.
I'm not sure exactly what the scaling factors are for maintaining various forms of social structures are, but it seems clear that capitalism is sub-linear (a large capitalist society is
more efficient than a small one), representative democracy isn't much worse than linear (small representative democracies suffer significant waste and corruption too), and socialism is dramatically worse than liner, possibly geometric.
It's simply impossible to run a country the size of the Soviet Union on a purely socialist system with an efficiency that approaches that of capitalism. The costs involved in the information processing required to achieve that efficiency would be greater than the entire nation's GDP.
Capitalism works by breaking the problem down and seeking local rather than global optimums - and by allowing sub-units of the society to fail without propagating that failure. Corporations often run on socialist principles; they've been called "the last refuge of the command economy". But if a company fails, even one the size of Ford, it doesn't bring down society.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 23 2005 12:09 AM (AIaDY)
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I didn't mention Andorra because it's a dubious example of a country - for most of its existence it was essentially a smugglers' route with a flag. Luxembourg at least has most of the salient characteristics of an authentic country. But my point about Ford Motor Company and Detroit was that the city died before the company did. Corporations are not governments, because corporations are not altruistic entities. They're profit-making enterprises. Ford saw his interest in a vast sort of convenant with his workers, and so a lot of people confused this economic-social arrangement with government. But his covenant wasn't with the people, but with a significant sub-set of the people, a literal proletariat. The city ended up with the balance of "the people". It was a social distortion that resulted in social violence in the late Sixties.
Eh, I'm mostly talking out of my ass, here. But I still think that there's more than a scaling issue here. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, A is A, but it certainly isn't B. A family is a family, a company is a company, a government is a government, and an army is an army. This is what freaks me out about true anarchist libertarians. Just as governments shouldn't be run as if they're corporations, corporations oughtn't be subcontracted true government functions. Which would follow that corporations oughtn't be subcontracted true military functions, either, I suppose...
Sigh.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 23 2005 09:06 AM (iTVQj)
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Eh, I'm mostly talking out of my ass, here.
No, you're right. There is more than a scaling issue here. Socialism is fundamentally based on woolly thinking (basically, expecting arbitrary groups of people to act as if they have a common interest). The fact that it
can work for small enough groups doesn't mean it's a good idea.
What's important about Haldane's observation is that even if socialism can be made to work on a small scale, it
inevitably fails on a larger scale. Even with honest and competent leaders (which they weren't) the economic collapse of the Soviet Union was guaranteed.
And yeah, the extreme libertarians are as crazy as the hard-line communists.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 23 2005 12:21 PM (uEuNd)
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Wednesday, July 20
Too Tired To Blog
Good: Found the controller for my sound system.
Not so good: It was in bag number 15.
Not good at all: Fell down the stairs while carrying a box of books and landed on my head. Good thing I don't keep anything important in there...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:50 AM
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Most unfortunate. You know, it's not a bad idea to have a drawer or box or something that you put all those old cables and what not in. I can't count the times I've discovered I needed an old cable or splitter I had long ago dismissed as useless and lost.
Posted by: Patriot Xeno at Wednesday, July 20 2005 03:42 PM (42NYf)
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If it makes you feel any better, I still haven't unpacked some boxes from three moves ago.
Posted by: TallDave at Wednesday, July 20 2005 04:11 PM (9XE6n)
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I was WONDERING what that loud thud was...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, July 21 2005 01:04 AM (86QII)
Posted by: Susie at Thursday, July 21 2005 12:05 PM (PWYyH)
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Tuesday, July 19
Crapdoodles
You know that rat's nest of useless old cables you threw away because you didn't have the time to untangle and pack them? Recall that odd-looking black thingy caught up in the middle of it all? Well, that's the controller for your 4.1 channel speaker system. Yes, the good one, the one you carefully packed and moved all the other parts for, the one that won't work at all without that controller.
Where is it? Well, it's in a white plastic bag. Which is in a black plastic bag. Which is in the garage, along with 17 other identical black plastic bags. Which the nice men are going to take away tomorrow afternoon.
Oh. Oops.
That will make for a fun start to your day, won't it?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:31 AM
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Bummer. Hope it's in the first bag you look in.
Posted by: owlish at Tuesday, July 19 2005 12:40 PM (fAJnA)
Posted by: Susie at Wednesday, July 20 2005 02:31 AM (PWYyH)
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Monday, July 18
Now Blogging From An All-New Undisclosed Location
The move was a mitigated disaster (the movers did a very good job, but I wasn't ready in time), but at least it happened, and I am now up and running - ish - from Pixy Central Mk II.
I'll be busy for the next few days (now I have to go back to the old place to clean it...) but after that it's all MuNu all the time, excepting short breaks for my day job and sleep.
P.S. I'm still on dialup. Dialup, Pixy says, is slow, really slow. You won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindboggling slow it is. You may think it's slow when you've gone over your monthly download limit, but that's just peanuts to dialup.
P.P.S. Multi-purpose appliances are great until they break. If you have, just by way of an example, a combined washer/dryer, it's really good because you can put dirty clothes in, turn it on, and come back later to find them clean and dry. But if it breaks down, you end up hand-washing everything and then hanging it up to dry in the bathroom.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:08 AM
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So where do I send the house-warming present? ;)
Posted by: Susie at Monday, July 18 2005 11:41 AM (PWYyH)
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Yay!! & Boo!!
Glad the move is finished.
Sad the washer & dryer broke. I'd loan you my clothes washer, but the wife gets mad when I send her on unplanned trips.
Posted by: phin at Monday, July 18 2005 10:27 PM (DGPlf)
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