The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Bruce Cohen, SpeakerToManagers:

Jacob Davies @ 19 & 22:

Not yes, but Hell Yes! After coring out hundreds of small towns, so that they have no viable economy left to them, the inhabitants get offered crap jobs with lousy pay and benefits, and are then discriminated against if they're women or blacks (and if Walmart get's taken to court it just pays the fines out of petty cash if it can't smother the case with lawyers).

Walmart's low prices are possible because they put much of the real cost of goods on their customers: the inferior products need to be replaced more often, the inferior wages they pay locally reduce the ability of their employees to buy anywhere else, and the minuscule wages they pay for outsourced manufacturing sucks the jobs out of the country they supposedly are a part of.

Oh, and just in case you think they treat their business "partners", like their suppliers, any better, ask one who has to pay for the inventory control technology that Warmart has mandated for all products they buy. Hint: it's not Waremart.

Erik Nelson @ 77:
Is restoration hardware like restoration comedy?

TSA security theater reminds me of a Jacobin revenge play.

Clifton and Lila:

Word. We've done all the food shopping for the weekend, and shouldn't need to go out again until Monday at the earliest. As for WalMart, I've been in one of their stores exactly once, years ago, and never will again. There are so many reasons, from their employee policies to their treatment of suppliers, with stops at Black Friday crowd generation and deceptive advertising.

Walmart is one of the best examples I know of the psychopathic corporation, with no concern for anything but profit.

One of the biggest problems with TSA screening is that they enforce different rules at every airport. This makes it difficult for passengers to know in advance what's verboten, and also makes it difficult for anyone to claim incompetence when something obviously dangerous gets through ("We were never told that wasn't allowed!"). A win-win for entrenched bureaucracy.

We interrupt the rumbling of my stomach as I read all the food-related comments for a science news bulletin: yesterday the Large Hadron Collider achieved collision of two counter-rotating proton beams for the first time. Collision energy was 450 giga electron volts, well below the full design energy, but high enough to generate debris detectable by all four of the detector systems.

Note that these collisions did not result in the Earth being eaten by a black hole.

Jacque @ 318:

And you can control the kaleidoscope by moving your mouse over it. Really neat!

#255 ::: John A Arkansawyer
How did the proofreaders correct the fnords in Illuminatus!, anyway?

Blindly.

serge @ 52:

It has been truly said: "You can't say it jumped the shark if it never comes down".

miriam beetle @ 44:

If Wiley Coyote plays van Helsing, Dracula will live forever (though hearing him go "beep beep" wouldn't exactly make people quake in fear, now would it?).

James Macdonald @ 39:

"Quatermass and the Pit" wherein millions of screaming humans are psychically taken over and caused to work for a bunch of dead green guys? Sounds right, except for the color.

Serge @ 236:

You sure he's not just a simulation? After all, "Reality is a special case."

joann @ 75:

I saw a Toyota Land Cruiser (jeep knockoff) that had the letters modified to "TONKA" and had been painted primer yellow to look just like one of the toys. This was in Davis, CA, circa 1974.

Annnnnd ... Google has admitted the home page problem is theirs, and that they are working on it. FYI: the home page data apparently gets erased when you visit your customized (iGoogle) page from a mobile device such as a smartphone, so if it hasn't happened to you yet, you know what not to do.

Thank you for your support.

Update on the Google Home page problem: I found a help forum where numerous users have posted that they have the same problem; it seems to have occurred at different times to different users. Moreover, most of us can't use the restore backup solution that Google provides, because the backup occurred after the data disappeared. Google has not issued any sort of statement about the problem, which is clearly not a single localized incident.

Because All First- and Second-Level Tech Support Knowledge is Contained in Making Light:

Has anyone else been having trouble with a customized Google Home page? All my customizations (including the reader gadgets for about 50 RSS feeds) disappeared sometime yesterday;. On my laptop I just see a generic home page; on my phone I see an "External Modules" gadget, where the customizations are supposed to be, and get a "customization data not accessible" or some such when I click on the gadget.

I have not found a way yet to communicate this problem to Google as their support communication only allows for loss of password and similar problems. And if they don't bring the data back I'm going to have to spend quite a bit of time re-subscribing to all those feeds.

Avram @ 125:

Yeah, American capitalist society has become very good at co-opting almost any reform personality or movement. Example: Amazon makes money off this classic bit of Yippie anarchism.

Metropolis in New Jersey. That would explain so much.

Jacque @ OpenThread 131/945:

Bruce Cohen (Scanning Tunneling Microscope*) @131/835:

"it goes on forever — and — oh my God — it's full of atoms!"

I lived in Philly for many years during some of which I read Batman comics regularly, and I don't buy Gotham City as Philadelphia. A different borough of NYC from Metropolis makes sense to me.

Watching the first few seasons of "Smallville", it looked to me like they were saying Metropolis was Chicago; people from Smallville, Kansas were driving there on day trips. Of course it's possible that one of Zod's little pranks left a wormhole to Kansas at the distal end of the Holland Tunnel.

Jacque @ 52:

Was there something you wanted to say about my #835?

SylvieG:

My condolences. Up until now we've had single dogs, and had 3 of them through their entire lives, from 8 weeks on (and a fourth we had to place on a farm after 1½ years because she just couldn't keep from chasing cars and people). Losing the only pet you have is hard and after the last one we (well, I) waited almost 4 years before getting another. Now we have 2 dogs we got from the shelter, and we love them as much as we loved the ones we raised. I'm concerned that when we lose one of them, aside from our own pain we'll also have to help the survivor deal with theirs, but that's also part of the package.

As several people have pointed out, you don't get the love and friendship without ultimately having to deal with the loss. That's not consolation, just the hard facts. But having to deal is still preferable to not having known and loved our friends, and the pain becomes tolerable over time.

I wish you and your future friends well.

Erik Nelson @ 934:

I typed it that way at first. It might be interesting to find out what kind of health care they had on Gallifrey.

Open thread linkery:

Now that's one hell of a light show. (via linesandcolors.com)

Michael Moorcock is writing a Doctor Who novel?

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