choofnagle | November 13, 2009The Bitch is Back, by Andrew Corsello: "2009's most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault..."
choofnagle | November 8, 2009All this excitement about Levi Johnston in Playgirl Magazine is pretty interesting. We have the forthcoming tell-all book about Sarah Palin and fam, and the author posing naked.
And who reads Playgirl anyway? It occurred to me this morning that we could get some idea from looking at the magazine's datacard, which at least would tell us something about subscribers.
So, not that many subscribers. Not much of a surprise. And over 30% male...not much of a surprise. And only 230 from Canada! Could you imagine having a dinner party for the Canadian subscribers to Playgirl magazine? That…
choofnagle | October 31, 2009Consumers who have asked me whether they should give their zip code at the register have been getting bad advice! I was under the misimpression that zip-level data was only being collected for demographic research purposes (to determine where stores should be located, and advertising directed, on a mass scale) and thus said that no harm came from revealing the zip. No longer. Here's a summary of data practices at William Sonoma, according to a recent California case (Pineda v. Williams-Sonoma Stores Inc., Cal. Ct. App., 4th Dist., No. D054355). Giving the zip code allows the store to "…
choofnagle | October 21, 2009For some time, I've been trying to better understand Google's worldview on privacy issues. The culture of companies fosters different privacy values and sensitivities, and the signals sent by those at the top shape how the organization itself conceives of and addresses privacy issues. In wrestling with this, I read every article discussing Google and privacy in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, resulting in a paper titled, Beyond Google and Evil, How policy makers, journalists and consumers should talk differently about Google and privacy.
In last week's New Yorker, which is…
choofnagle | October 16, 2009Alex Pareene has given voice to what many longtime Post readers believe: Fred Hiatt needs to be axed.
Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different "interpretations" and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a "true" column by someone else as a counterpoint,…
choofnagle | October 6, 2009Bloggers, under new guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission, you must disclose gifts or payments for products that you review! Also your endorsements cannot be false or misleading!
The FTC's release advises:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that "material connections" (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers - connections that consumers would not expect - must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other "word-of-mouth"…
choofnagle | October 5, 2009I'm a fan of Jason Nelson's I made this. You play this. We are enemies. He's just released his newest game, Evidence of Everything Exploding, described as:
...Using documents, both historical and little-known from B. Gates, NASA, James Joyce, Dadaism, Neil Gaiman, Fidel Castro, the Pizza Box Patent and many others, the game explores those strange moments where history turns or doesn't, where unusual forces collide to create or topple storylines, possible futures. Complete with matchbook death rewards, strange marked up text and curious prophecies, The madness of the pages meets the madness…
choofnagle | October 3, 2009The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Dalton reports:
European scientific authorities Thursday rejected dozens of health claims made by food companies, in a sign of how tricky it will be for them to get some of their most popular claims past a European Union drive to bring scientific rigor to the health foods.
A panel of the European Food Safety Authority issued nearly a hundred opinions on health claims, about two-thirds of which were negative. The rejections included claims on special bacteria that are supposed to aid digestion and boost the immune system, beta carotene additives for sunscreen…
choofnagle | September 29, 2009I'm delighted to announce the results of our first national telephonic survey of US internet-using adults on consumer privacy! The Times has coverage and the full report (Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It is available here. Here's a summary:
This nationally representative telephone (wireline and cell phone) survey explores Americans' opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers, a controversial issue currently before government policymakers. Behavioral targeting involves two types of activities: following users' actions and then tailoring…
choofnagle | September 25, 2009Here's a fun article by the Chronicle's Mark Morford on how to talk with complete idiots. You ignore them, in Denialism blog fashion.
Morford points to this youtube video, which is divine:
choofnagle | September 16, 2009Thomas Frank's weekly column in the Journal is one of the few tolerable pieces in the paper's opinion section. This week, Frank writes, sensibly, in my opinion, that the left needs to recapture "freedom."
There are few things in politics more annoying than the right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word "freedom" that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest cause of them all.
He concludes:
Even such pits of statism as Britain and Canada…
choofnagle | September 13, 2009Update: looks like the picture expired from Tumblr. It was a picture of a teabagger in Washington DC holding a sign that said "We Are John Galt," which is pretty much retarded.
choofnagle | September 12, 2009Update: LaTFT!!1!
Maybe the teabaggers just need ridicule, Morans-style, says Gawker:
"Check out that fucking teabagger," writes in tipster Stefan, referencing "Look At This Fucking Hipster," the blog chronicling hipsters looking ridiculous. Unfortunately, while hipsters have to be sought out within the pseudo-bohemian enclaves of their respective parishes, people who can't have any kind of normal, rational discussion about politics--or even a rational, agenda-based protest--are easily found at protests like the one going on today in Washington D.C.
Best pic comes from DirtyPerz:
Ouch!
choofnagle | August 24, 2009My civil libertarian friends are "worried" about the precedent set in the recent Liskula Cohen case. In the case, a formerly anonymous blogger said some nasty things about Cohen. So nasty that Cohen sued to unmask the blogger's identity and was successful in doing so. The blogger is now suing Google alleging that the company owed her a fiduciary duty and should not have revealed her identity.
Critics of the Cohen case tend to focus on the fact that the blogger called Cohen a "skank." They argue that the word is mere hyperbole and not an objective fact. But the blogger said and did much…
denialism | August 24, 2009You might have noticed I've been busy for the last couple of months. This is because I've started my surgical internship, and when not working, am usually either sleeping or eating. I'm going to endeavor to write more though, because I think important things are going on in the world, and because it's somewhat therapeutic.
I'll tell you first about a day in the life. What does a surgical intern do? Well, pretty much what most interns do in medicine. We are the ones who run the floor, who do the day-to-day stuff that keeps a medical or surgical service running. The work isn't that…
denialism | August 22, 2009Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead. Instead I've been working hard as a new surgical intern and sadly not finding the time to write for the denialism blog. However, now more than ever, it seems that we need to talk about the problem of denialism.
Two major new issues for denialism have cropped up, and both are major new forms of political denialism. The first, I'll broadly describe as Obama-denialism. Obama is a muslim, Obama was not born in the US, there is a giant conspiracy involving the Hawaii Secretary of State, the Democratic Party and muslims worldwide to take over the…
choofnagle | July 21, 2009Oh noes, some morons are planning to create a Atlas Shrugged miniseries!
Gawker does a nice job summing up the story:
Charlize Theron would like to star as ... Dagny Taggart, the lady who runs her brother's railroad and enjoys violent sex with secretive entrepreneurial geniuses. But there is a problem: the book has not ever been filmed because it is terrible and involves a climactic 70-page monologue about radical libertarianism!
I've really dropped the ball on the development of the Ayn Rand Deprogrammer.
choofnagle | July 21, 2009Wow! In a strange turn of events, Chris Anderson got it all wrong, while Malcolm Gladwell got it right. What's that? Free. Chris Anderson thinks it is the future of price; that companies should give their products away free and find other, magical ways to generate revenue. Gladwell roundly criticizes this idea; it's worth reading his review because his critique is effective on several levels.
Moving on...I want to make some crazy predictions here. Free is dead. It's a Ponzi scheme, and we're all invested in it. We all love free, but it has a price. We all think advertising will pay…
choofnagle | July 14, 2009Stephanie Rodgers of the Mother Nature Network reports on a recent study of lead content in popular multivitamins by Consumer Labs. According to the news summary (the report is subscription only):
Of the 300-plus children's vitamins and prenatal vitamins tested for lead, only four were found to be lead-free. Those include TwinLab Infant Care, Natrol Liquid Kid's Companion, NF Formulas Liquid Pediatric and After Baby Boost 2 (for lactating women). No multivitamins for adult women tested negative for lead, but the ones with the lowest concentrations include FemOne, Viactiv Multivitamin Milk…
choofnagle | July 14, 2009You've probably heard that California is in trouble financially. No one wants to cut services and at the same time, no one wants to pay taxes. So what do you do? Ticket ticket ticket! And raise the fines for those tickets.
In the years I've lived in California, I've never seen so much traffic enforcement. They're radaring all over the highways. And check this out--those fancy new parking meters are capable of neat tricks. For instance, it's pretty easy to change the hours to 8 PM. 8 PM! In Oakland. Some ticket fines have more than doubled! The linkage to the financial crisis is…