Regulate this

Small things 25 June

• Happy people don’t have the best of everything. They make the best of everything.
• 14% of Americans polled by the NYT said they were undecided who they would vote for in November. Really? What more do you need to know exactly? "Does Trump put the toilet paper roll feed from above or feed from below? What about Biden?"
• How come media coverage of the protests (which continue unabated) have stopped now that the looting has subsided?
• Eskimo pie is next..........
• Shouldn't America be more concerned with black people being shot by police than the Aunt Jemima brand going away?
• I'm just glad Dr Kellogg invented corn flakes, otherwise, people would be out of control, in a manner of speaking.
• I wonder if maybe this Corona virus thing will finally shut up those old folks who brag about walking 5 miles to school. "Yeah, well we didn't even get to GO to school, we had to stay home and get our assignments via Zoom, eat lunch at home, play with our friends during breaks, which were long, and...." Uh, never mind.
• "If we stop testing right now, we'd have fewer cases, if any." ~Donald Trump
• Anti-vaxxers don't the the eventual Covid-19 vaccine either.
• No, buying Tim Hortons out of donuts is NOT an acceptable form of protest against the police......
• In two months my Facebook feed went from "let's learn to bake bread" to "let's dismantle the police". What the hell was in that bread?

What's going on here?

It would be fun to show someone from 1995 this picture and ask them "What's going on here?"

Police differences

How do you say doge?

There's a meme that started many years ago featuring a Shiba Inus dog spelled doge. Now, I had always pronounced that in the way that rhymes with vogue, but recently my grand-daughter Olivia said it was pronounced dohj.

Well, it turns out there is quite the debate over how it should be pronounced. Here's part of an article about it:

"If you ask Google, all you’ll get is the pronunciation of the word that means 'chief magistrate of Venice'. In the case of that historical term, it’s dohj.

Others claim that [it] is pronounced like ‘dodge’, with a soft G but a short O. Others claim that the G is hard, since the word is derived from dog, and so say the word rhymes with vogue. After some research, I found partisans, for example, of doggie, dog-eh, and dough-geh.

Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society, [said], "I have no idea at all." Adrian Chen, author of Gawker’s article on doge, [said] it like vogue, "mainly because it sounded funniest." He added, "I imagine a dog, if it could speak, would pronounce dog with an overemphasized vowel rather than somehow intuiting the cutesy doggie, or totally mangling it into dohj."

Perhaps it’s best to let the Internet decide. If another pronunciation proves more common in the poll perhaps I could be persuaded.

The results of the poll are as of 6 Dec 2013, at which point it was closed.

Things I learned lately 25 June

• 
  If you look at a zoomed-out Google Map (satellite view), you'll see what looks like a continental shelf to the east and northwest of New Zealand. That's the lost continent of Zealandia, that sank into the ocean 85 million years ago.
• Pink Floyd almost made an album, Household Objects, featuring music made from..... yes. Although it never got released, the track "Wine Glasses" was incorporated into the beginning synth-like sound that opens "Shine on your crazy diamond". Listen to that track again and tell me you aren't blown away that this is wine glasses....... 
• If a light bulb is close enough to people having a conversation, specialized equipment can convert its visible vibrations into sound representing that conversation. It's like using a light bulb as a remote mic. Fwiw, military technologists have known about this kind of eavesdropping for decades. And, now I have to kill you.
• The Segway is officially done. Selling that is.
• Malala Yousafzai, the woman who at age 15 was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating for the education of girls in Pakistan in 2012, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, has graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
• Trump and his people actually referring to Covid as Kung Flu.
• In Dublin OH, there's an art installation consisting of 109 upright 6 foot tall white concrete corn cob statues in a field.

What the funk just happened?

Do you know what I love about this performance? Besides the fact that it's Brittany Howard live?

I love how it starts off so sweet and softly. It gets going and I'm thinking, "This is the definitive modern representation of soul." This woman is oozing soul.

But then the song evolves and the next thing I know, we are being r.o.c.k.e.d. The song ends and I'm asking myself, this was ONE song? Tricky. For what it's worth, the album version pales in comparison to this scorcher.

I can't believe I've never tried this.....

What happens when you charge for garbage

When you have stuff to throw away that can't be recycled, you have to bring it to the dump. That costs $25 per load (less than 250 kg). A lot of people don't want to pay that much just to throw out a couple bags of extra garbage. So what do they do? They find other places to dump it. For example, at a four-plex construction site around the corner from our house, not only are the builders not doing a very good job of disposing of their waste, random people have been spotted dumping their garbage on the property. It has gotten so bad at one point there was garbage spilling over the sidewalk and into the street.

The City is considering restricting how much garbage we can throw out in our black bins (which they only let us throw out every other week). If we want to throw more out than will fit in a bin, we would have to buy tags to place on the extra bags. You know where I'm going with this, right? Rather than pay for extra garbage tags, people are just going to sneak-dump their extra garbage somewhere convenient.

Small things 19 June

• The folks at Fox News are trying to suggest that the 'defund the police' movement could result in the cancellation of Paw Patrol, which has no basis in fact, but makes for great drama. 
• Why is defunding the police radical, but not defunding education, or health care?
• At the
  
  end of every month in 2020, an oompa loompa should come out and sing us a song about a lesson we should have learned over the past 30 days - but didn't.
• It's true, I can answer any question. (Example of lack of context)
• Judging a demonstration by its most violent participants but NOT judging a police force by its most violent members is the language of an oppressor.

5G not causing COVID in NZ!

Things I learned lately 19 June

• Hackers pretended to be corporate recruiters on LinkedIn working for US defense contractors. They sent phony job offers to employees at European defense companies and managed to gain access to systems at two of those companies in late 2019. This was accomplished by sending documents that contained malicious code through LinkedIn’s private messaging feature.
• The Aunt Jemima brand will be retired, acknowledging its racist past. Uncle Ben's may be next.
• In the US, civil forfeiture laws basically enable law enforcement to declare any large sum of money you're carrying in your car to be "the proceeds of crime" and confiscate it, without charging you with anything. Also, the police can then do what they want with that money.
• Before airline pilots are allowed to fly into Quito airport, they have to attend two 4-hour simulator sessions to prepare them for the tricky, fast, high altitude approach.
• Alberta RCMP admit systemic racism in the force.
• The US Marines just banned the display of the Confederate flag.
• In some stores (especially in the US), products tailored to black customers are often locked away or have extra security placed on them.

Exactly

Best protest sign ever

Do you know why we pulled you over?

We use the hockey stick

This is how we get your drive thru payment in Canada while maintaining social distancing.

He finally has a crowd as big as Obama's inauguration

Small things 11 June

• 
  Vampires are pale because they're anemic.
• I won't be going to New York City because of COVID-19 this year. Normally I don't go to NYC because of how expensive it is.
• Whenever I teach a class about computers I amuse myself sometimes telling stories about how we used to remove the rubber ball from the computer mouse, clean the ball and scrape the gunk off the rollers inside the mouse.
• My mute button is unreliable.
• Why don't they make a dishwasher with a window so you can see your stuff getting cleaned like a clothes washer? [Update: never mind - they do]

Cyrille Aimee

I discovered this artist totally by accident. Cyrille Aimee is a jazz singer from France. She appeared in this David Sanborn studio video clip. The things she can do with her voice.

Make sure to stick with it, as she starts multi-tracking her voice using one of those fancy gadgets and it's sublime.

Too bad none of this is on an album......

Things I learned lately 11 June

• California's DMV only lets you get the number 69 (separated by a space from the rest of the characters) on your license plate if your car is a 1969 model year.
• Volkswagen makes an entry-level model called the Gol. It's not sold in Canada or the US, it's sold in 'emerging markets'. For people that don't give a 'f'. Get it? Golf without the 'f'.......
• Engineers designed wind resistant railings for the pedestrian sidewalks on the Golden Gate Bridge, but now when wind passes through it, it makes an eerie howling sound that can be heard for miles. They're basically calling it the David Lynch bridge now.
• Before he wrote Goosebumps, R.L. Stine wrote the jokes for Bazooka Joe gum wrappers.
• Blood donors in Sweden receive a thank you text when their blood is used.
• Bubble gum is pink because that was the only food dye available in the factory where it was made.
• Newborn elephants suck their trunks for comfort.

It was the 1980s - our email struggles were real

Their there they're

Yoda bookend

You got 59 out of 59, or as we call it - salsa

Why don't you play?

Things I learned lately 5 June

• The north star is the 49th brightest star in the night sky. It's definitely not the brightest.
• The original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, influenced by the website Hot or Not. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video.
• The Kerby Centre on 7th Ave in downtown Calgary was built as the original Mount Royal College (now University) in 1948

Closing the pay gap

Dan Price is the CEO of a Seattle company, Gravity Payments. He created the company while he was in his teens and had grown the company to a point where he was able to afford to pay himself just over a million dollar per year by age 31.

Dan was hiking with a friend who had served in the military and this friend revealed that she was having a rough time paying her bills. Her rent had been increased by $200 per month and the situation forced her to work 50 hours per week in two jobs. She was making around $40k per year, but as people who live in Seattle will tell you, that’s not really a lot to live on in that city.

Dan Price was angry having learned about the growing inequalities in the world. As he was becoming more aware of the problem, not only did he decide to become part of the solution, he vowed to become a crusader against wage inequality. He had become disgusted that our culture glorified greed and celebrated super rich people. We have gone from an economy where in the 1960s, CEOs earned roughly 20 times more than the average worker to a modern reality where it’s now 300 times the average worker’s salary.

Dan soon became aware of a financial pressure situation developing in his own company. One worker was experiencing financial problems, and secretly working a second job at McDonald's. She accidentally left a training manual on her desk at Gravity, and someone spotted it.

Her bosses called her in for a meeting. She cried, thinking she was about to be fired. Instead raised her salary to $40,000. It took Dan a while to grasp the scale of the problem among his staff. Because of course, workers don’t normally go to their bosses to tell them how much they’re struggling financially. The hike on the mountain with his friend was the final wakeup call.

Dan looked at studies by Nobel prize-winning economists on how much workers need to be happy and after looking at the numbers he planned what he was going to do at Gravity Payments. In 2015, Dan introduced a $70,000 minimum annual salary for all staff. This meant that around a third of them would be getting an immediate doubling of their salary. He cut his own salary to the same amount and made many other financial sacrifices to make it work.

Needless to say, this has been trans-formative. More staff started having children. More people were able to purchase homes. People started saving more. Financial pressure evaporated. Some people moved closer to the office. People started taking their vacations. The company grew too, both in headcount and value.

Critics predicted that people would squander the extra money. They didn’t. A couple senior employees resigned and felt the new salary would make workers lazy. It didn’t. They worked harder. Dan was labelled a communist by right wing pundits and they predicted absolute failure. They criticized him for making the whole thing political, when all he was trying to do was make people comfortable and reward their hard work.

Dan is walking the walk too. He still lives on that minimum salary. He no longer lives the life of your typical young tech millionaire. In fact, his colleagues at work became sick of watching him turn up at work in a 12-year-old Audi and secretly clubbed together to buy him a Tesla.

Dan Price had hoped that other companies would follow his lead. But aside from a small handful, it hasn’t happened.

Seriously, if crows figure out how to start chainsaws, I'm moving to Mars

Small things 5 June

• 
  Best Stephen Colbert quote heard this week: "I didn't poop my pants. I just ran diagnostics on my boxers to see if they are load-bearing. They are."
• When you wait for the waiter, you become a waiter......
• If you own a Tesla and it gets stolen, is it now an Edison?
• Achy? Tired? Headache? Foggy brain? You may not have COVID. You may have been drinking decaf.
• The best way to introduce yourself at a party is NOT "I want you to know that I personally have no problem with you being here...."
• Bars are going to want their patrons to drink 2-3 times as much to make up for the limited capacity due to social distancing. Amateurs need not apply.
• We live in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.
• Better to be 6 feet apart than 6 feet under....