Category: Things

Peter: You know, PHP is quite forgiving.

Aidan: Yes. To the extent of being morally loose.

When you’re looking to rent, remember these things:

Your landlord may run a background check that makes a cavity search feel like a handshake.

Your landlord paid a lot for that building and needs to make it back. Needs to make a lot just to pay for upkeep and mortgage payments.

You have rights. Plenty, in fact. Enough to validate the entire history of tenant-vs-landlord antagonism. Enough to make you wonder how landlords ever make any money at all.

People keep agitating for rent control around here and I think it’s a bad idea– cut regulation, cut the cost of providing rentals, cut barriers to apartment creation, and the price of rentals will come down. I want to see more apartments, not rent-controlled apartments.

The Epiphany browser is the result of weird political infighting, but I have switched to it and I like it, after a bit of setup and bookmark-import hassle.

Accusing Dean of liking the Yankees is something like accusing Kerry of “looking French” or having over-styled hair. Weird political lines being drawn here.

OK, so, my stylesheet-foo is not up to par. I managed to get the search bar not to break through the sidebar, but Internet Explorer users are still going to have to scroll horizontally in order to read this. But nobody who reads this uses IE– the top browsesr are Safari, Galeon, and various RSS aggregators. Yes, Soup, from the Evolution summary, is in the top five.

Is bioengineering the greatest thing to happen to our environment, or the worst? A very well-written article that really looks at the issue from a number of angles, including several I hadn’t thought of before.

I read “The Botany of Desire” recently and that, along with this article, makes me wonder seriously about the way that we treat our earth. A few small changes in agricultural policy in the US and Europe would really go a long way toward improving things. For example, if you offered tax breaks for organic certification, not tax breaks to buy extra fertilizer and pesticide. If you quit subsidising the agricultural-chemical makers and started helping the smaller farmers. Big farmers would still exist, of course, but it’s the small ones need help anyway. It’d be good for the third world too.

It makes sense, it’d be less expensive, it’d be better for the environment, and it’d be better for the economy. It’ll never happen.

Spoiled kids and trashy funerals. This trumps the ghetto prom and the ghetto wedding that people sent to me.

The baby stuff especially is egregious– it’s one thing to have a particular style, like the ‘ghetto’ images or like an import-car tuner. That, people make fun of because they look down on your culture or sub-culture at least as much as because it’s in actual poor taste. But the kid’s toys just scream “I don’t spend any time with my children and I spoil them to compensate,” as well as “I have no taste.”

Life is, indeed, a crapshoot.

Plus. Size. Coffins.

TMF picks up the earlier NYT story on happiness, noting that it has been scientifically proven that money will not make you (permanently) happier (unless you’re really actually poor). Nonetheless, people keep thinking about exciting new ways to make money, like micropayments, and of course, they go on Bravo! to have people buy them cool new furniture for their cool urban lifestyle.

Note that New American City covers an old favorite subject of mine: the LA River.

According to the Motley Fool Calculators, I can buy a typical Boston-area one-bedroom condo by increasing my savings to well above my income and making a down payment significantly larger than my net worth.

Sounds like I should get involved in gun-running for Halliburton.

Also, financial advice for you youngsters out there: never breed. Single most significant correlating factor for personal bankruptcy is child-rearing.

Woah. They tore down the Liberty Book Bin Adult Entertainment Center and Book Store that’s been one of the fading outposts of the ‘Combat Zone’ in what is now the upscalifying Chinatown and Washington Street Corridor. Amazing, and a big step for Chinatown, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and so forth.