Coordinating resources in real time for a likely case of human trafficking. At this time results are not exactly awesome so if you don’t want to read a possibly crappy ending, don’t bother following the link.
Midweek NPR Meme
April 15th, 2009
Ever notice NPR seems to have cornered the market on interesting names for presenters and reporters? Well, someone else has. The short of it being your NPR name is your first name with your middle initial stuck in it somewhere and the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
‘Nick’ doesn’t lend itself well to adding a ‘B’ so I’ve used my given name to get Nichoblas. Having gotten up close and personal with the German countryside I’ve got my pick of towns to choose from. Going for sonorous over accuracy (who really knows which is smaller of all the tiny villages surrounding Baumholder) I chose Wickenrodt.
Reporting from the Palatinate, I’m Nichoblas Wickenrodt for Public Radio International.
Don’t stop ’til you get enough
November 12th, 2008
Because sometimes all you really want is to watch the squirrels dance to Michael Jackson…
As seen on Metafilter
Jokes
May 13th, 2008
I took a great deal more satisfaction from this thread on MeFi than I probably should have. High comedy is found in the lowest places.
Awesome New Game!
April 30th, 2008
I cannot wait until I get my hands on Outside. MeFi rates it 7/10 but I think it sounds way better than that.
Nitroeconomics Explains Derivatives Crash
January 17th, 2008
This essay dovetails quite nicely with what I’ve been thinking w/r/t the current economic climate. The bizarre discounting of risk, the flood of money without anything concrete behind it. I got seriously interested in growth investment in the early/middle 90s but all the historical measures indicators like P/E ratio no longer seemed to apply. The algorithm I was learning could not effectively separate speculative from organic stock value. I stopped playing because I didn’t understand the rules. Since then I’ve watched the bubble shift across the economy into real estate and now in to commodities. There’s all this extra paper wealth and no extra physical wealth to back it up.
I don’t know if this is indicative of my own social climbing or of a broader societal trend, but when I was a wee lad only my crazy aunt and uncle had anything to do with any kind of securities investment. Saving for retirement meant socking away in a savings account and working for a pension. Seems that now everyone around me has some kind of 401(k)/IRA/blahblahblah with significant amounts of money introduced into the market. Myself included. Like there’s so much money available these days that businesses don’t know what to do with it. Instead of R&D or creating capital assets it seems all this money is tied up in illusory logic puzzles. I can see how it would be easier to juggle money than come up with and commit to a good use to put it behind.
I know the financial world has passed me by—it was never more than an interesting diversion, but what I do know leads me to believe that maybe the financial world shouldn’t have passed so far beyond me so rapidly after all.
Anyway, IANAE…just an ex-accounting student who ended up graduating with a degree in philosophy.
Nattering on a bit further. I originally wrote this as a post to Metafilter on this thread. In another instance of what is becoming a trend, I decided not to post it there. It is kind of speculative. It is light on facts. It is narrative. And these things are increasingly not appreciated there. Instead of introducing the idea and suffering the snark from the masses I just spend fifteen minutes crafting the damn thing and then hit the preview button. I read it a few times and then just close the browser tab. Mefi really is a lot less like the kaffeeklatsch it used to be.
Metafilter Does Economics
December 14th, 2007
MeFi does some things poorly. It does other topics quite well. This he-said she-said over the possible US economic collapse is insightful even if the FPP contains some dubious linkage.
A Look Inside Spam
December 6th, 2007
Here’s an interesting investigation into the source of the Ron Paul spam spasm from the end of October.
Yes, it’s ripped from the pages of Metafilter. The discussion that ensues in the thread is by turns snarky, interesting, and partisan. Go for the snark, stay for the bits of on-topic discussion.
New and Improved Stereotypes
November 15th, 2007
New and Improved Stereotypes is funnier than one might assume. I imagine it is due to the illustrations.
Black poverty in Omaha, Nebraska. | MetaFilter
November 6th, 2007
Black poverty in Omaha, Nebraska. | MetaFilter is a nice roundup of links coming from an intermittent series put out by the Omaha World Herald. By nice I mean convenient. The poverty itself and the problems it generates are not nice in the least.
