Without Much Strain?

This story contains a number of jaw-dropping assertions.  I was hoping it was an ironic parody, but the New York Times doesn't really have enough self-confidence to be ironic.  It's just painfully earnest, shading over into earnestly painful.

Excerpt:

When city leaders and state legislators agreed last year to fund roughly half the $1 billion cost of a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings, they attached the usual strings for such projects: It had to be architecturally iconic, employ steel made from Minnesota iron ore and offer at least a few cheap seats. 

So... Minnesota has a total population of 5.4 million souls.  Minneapolis has a population of just under 500,000, if you count the surrounding cities like St. Paul.  They need a $1 billion football stadium?  Really?  And taxpayers need to pay for half of it?  That's $2,000 per resident of the Minneapolis metroplex.  For a sports stadium that will be used, at most, 30 times per year, even counting monster truck shows.  The state is going to hit up taxpayers $1,000 per resident of the city to pay for a football stadium.  That's not $1,000 per fan, that's $1,000 per resident, in tax money.

That's the NYTimes' idea of "saving"?  Well, at least they have cheap seats.  Which will be scalped to rich people anyway.  Because the poor folks would prefer to have the money than the cheap/expensive seat.

I guess it's okay, though.  Knowing that they are using locally-mined, free-range artisanal iron gives folks a warm glow.  Because you should make sure and create giant, dirty mines as near as possible to where you live.  Oh, and the bathrooms will all be lit with $25 LED bulbs, too.  So that's something.

I guess Nick Gillespie just isn't a football fan.  Because he doesn't get it.

Seriously, the NYTimes is demonstrating a pretty remarkable support for crony capitalism here.  There is no conceivable "stimulus" justification, and the environmental justification is nonsense.  This is a giant waste of money, a giveaway from taxpayers to highly profitable large corporations.  And a perfect description of the program of the Democratic Party in the U.S.  Also the Republican Party in the U.S.

Nod to MK, who notes:  "I'm in the wrong business.  If a small amount of carbon is worth $500 million, I should set my hair on fire and sell the right to put it out on Ebay!"

Breaking up is hard to do...

...but it's not as hard as cancelling your cable service.

Here is the story.

Here is the recording.

It's disturbing that the corporate mouthpiece for Comcast just blatantly lied when confronted.  Clearly the employees are trained to harrass and browbeat customers who try to cancel.

I tried for nearly a month to get a customer service rep at Time-Warner here in NC to talk to me about ways to change the service into a bundle, three years ago.  Never could even get anyone to talk to me.

But when I called to cancel, after I gave up and switched to ATT, I was immediately connected to an extremely aggressive and abusive guy who demanded to know what was wrong, and how they could fix it.  At least he did back off when I told him I was a consultant, and would be happy to discuss the many ways that Time-Warner sucked.  All that was required was a signed contract, $175/hour, 4 hour minimum, payable in advance.

In the meantime, though, cancel my service.  That didn't work for the guy above, though.  Amazing.

I should have said that I would be willing to talk to him sometime between 8 am and 2 pm, and I couldn't be more specific than that....

Bold Strategy

In the fantastic movie "Dodgeball," the announcers on ESPN 8 ("The Ocho!") react to the forfeit by Average Joe's Gym:





Archie comics seems to be heading that same way, toward a bold strategy.  What time is it if the character named "Archie" in a comic series called "Archie" is killed, what time is it?  Time to get a new comic series!

(You may want more Dodgeball...here)

Here's one of those great service sector jobs Tyler's been selling us!

Co-Authorship? Does This Extend to Academic Works?

When Multiple Creators Are Worse Than One: The Bias Toward Single Authors in the Evaluation of Art

Rosanna Smith & George Newman
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming

Abstract: The present studies investigate whether people perceive the same work of art to be of lower quality if they learn that it was a collaborative work (resulting from the efforts of multiple artists) versus the work of a single artist. Study 1 finds that indeed, as the number of authors increases, the perceived quality of an artwork decreases. Study 2 finds that this effect occurs because people tend to assess quality in terms of the effort put forth by each author, rather than the total amount of effort required to create the work. Study 3 further demonstrates that this bias toward single authors appears to be driven by people’s beliefs, rather than by any inherent differences between individual versus collaborative work. These results broaden our understanding of how perceptions of effort drive evaluative judgments, and are consistent with a more general notion that art is not evaluated as a static entity, but rather as an endpoint in a “creative performance.

Monday's Child

1. If people were held responsible for the content of comments on their web sites...wow.  This kid is suing pretty much everybody because of some comments other people made.  If you fall asleep at a ball game....sorry, you are fair game.  And the commentators didn't even say much, though later the commenters did.  I'd fall back on this, which is informative and useful.  I read it about once every six months, just for the giggles.  Mr. Ken, he's a great American.

2.  Shirley's neighbor, Taylor Swift, has not thought very much about the music industry.

3.  Fish friends lost.

4.  The Duke's heirs sue the heirs of the Dukes.

5.  Against the grain....and back, from Japan.

moremoremore!