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[Testimonial] -LJ Home- Update! [Calender] [Group View]
Below are a few recent journal entries
| Monday, 16-Nov-2009 | ||||
| 11/16/2009 12:39 | Gadhafi stikes again - LOL Oh wow, moar trolling! Looks like Libya's Quadhafi/Khaddafi/Gadhafi strikes again! ROME – Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has hosted a soiree in Rome for some 200 young Italian women, but instead of the party they expected the women were given a lecture on Islam and copies of the Quran, a news report said Monday. At least they got paid. A reporter for Italy's ANSA news agency went undercover with the women, who were hired for Those accepted were taken to a villa, where Gadhafi lectured them on women's rights and religion, and urged them to convert to Islam. "All the girls expected a party with a gala dinner," Lo Mele told her agency. Instead, "he made a 45-minute speech on Islam and women's role in Islam. It was a bit of an indoctrination session." from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091116/ap_ Ya know, maybe if they did hilarious stuff like this instead of blowing people up, the world would have a whole lot more tolerance for the presence of Islam... Gadhafi should issue one of those fatwa's that all future jihads must be lulz-based and not involve any death, dismemberment, explosions, or pain. Maybe somebody would listen?
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| Friday, 13-Nov-2009 | ||||
| 11/13/2009 12:17 | Russian Arms Depot... Explosions? ..Fireworks? Explosions of fireworks?  Explosions rip through an arms depot in Russia's city of Ulyanovsk in this video framegrab from footage by operator Alexander Fouralyov for the local REN TV channel on November 13, 2009.REUTERS/Alexander Fouralyov/REN TV Looks like they were storing a whole lot of pretty fireworks in that arms depot.
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| Friday, 06-Nov-2009 | ||||
| 11/06/2009 13:28 | Just one laptop per child? Whats the deal with this whole "one laptop per child" thing, anyways? I can't think of any good reason an older kid shouldn't have more than one. At the very least won't it make it so much simpler to separate school work from everything else if the kid has one laptop with next to no graphics acceleration but excellent battery life for school, and one built for gaming, movies, and internet that uses the power needed for that kind of goofing off? I took my almost two-year-old son's ancient orange Macbook away a couple months ago after he broke something else totally unrelated. Since it was an OS 9 generation unit with a Motorola-style main chip, it mostly just crashed anyways. He did like making it talk and also had renamed almost every single icon or file to something totally bizarre - I haven't seen so much of what looked like line noise on one screen since before they started putting MNP into 2.4kbit modems in the very early 1990s! Still, it wasn't one of his favorite toys, probably because it didn't have any wheels on it. Eventually I'm going to want to let him play with it again, and I'd hate to have someone suggest that ought to be the one he's stuck with because of a "one laptop per child" policy. Mood:  chipper
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| Wednesday, 07-Oct-2009 | ||||
| 10/07/2009 20:07 | Alcor More crap in the news about Alcor, the non-profit that freezes the dead. When you look at it from the standpoint of most people, its pretty fucking absurd. But, on the other hand, consider: The hope they offer - life after death in a more advanced society of some type - is no different than that of what most people covet most about their religion. Except that Alcor makes no absolute guarantee and offers hope based on a probably unfounded faith in technology. But hey, if Alcor can do work in cryonics that may actually someday benefit the living (example: should they discover a technique that can also extend the time a donated organ can remain outside the body, lives could actually be saved), so be it! I'm not seriously going to be upset if some overly wealthy person is conned out of a large chunk of money because they themselves were trying to scam death, when the net result is indirect funding of tissue research projects...
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| Friday, 02-Oct-2009 | ||||
| 10/02/2009 13:11 | UK "researcher" blames candy (instead of economics, parenting, etc) for crime statistics from http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091002/h ... While that chocolate-covered balm may be highly effective in the short term, say British scientists, it may be setting youngsters up for problem behavior later. According to a new study, kids who eat too many treats at a young age risk becoming violent in adulthood. The research was led by Simon Moore, a senior lecturer in Violence and Society Research at Cardiff University in the U.K., who specializes in the study of vulnerable youngsters. Moore had been investigating the factors that lead children to commit serious crimes, when, during the course of his work, he discovered that "kids with the worst problems tend to be impulsive risk takers, and that these kids had terrible diets - breakfast was a Coke and a bag of chips," he says. Gee, here's a thought: Maybe the kind of parents who spend time with their children raising them also spend enough time with their children to offer them a variety of breakfast foods, etc etc etc. This is nothing but garbage science for a variety of reasons, the least of which is the fact that a breakfast high in whole, uncooked fruit is also rather high in sugars, in terms of the types of calories provided, yet it is one of the healthier breakfasts available for most people. What this study really represents is another brutal slap in the face to the importance of parenting by a society that puts the pursuit of wealth above raising children. In other words, regardless of other environmental and lifestyle factors, like family-income level, parenting style or children's level of education, the data suggested it was only the frequency of confectionery consumption in childhood that strongly predicted adult violence. "The key message is that this study really raises more questions than answers," says Moore. Really? The first question I have is, how the hell are researchers accurately assessing "parenting style" in the first place? Check the BCS70 website yourself, and see... Since 1970 there have been six attempts to gather information from the whole cohort, as the chart below shows. With each successive attempt, the scope of enquiry has broadened from a strictly medical focus at birth, to encompass physical and educational development at the age of five, physical, educational and social development at the ages of ten and sixteen, and then to include economic development and other wider factors at 26, 29 and 34 years. Data have been collected from a number of different sources, and in a variety of ways. In the birth survey, information was collected by means of a questionnaire that was completed by the midwife present at the birth, and supplementary information was obtained from clinical records. The five-year and ten-year surveys were carried out by the Department of Child Health, Bristol University and the survey at these times was named the Child Health and Education Study (CHES) . In 1975 and 1980, parents of the cohort members were interviewed by Health Visitors, and information was gathered from head and class teachers (who completed questionnaires), the school health service (which carried out medical examinations on each child), and the subjects themselves (who undertook tests of ability). In both 1975 and 1980, the cohort was augmented by the addition of immigrants to Britain who were born in the target week in 1970. The 1986 survey was carried out by the International Centre for Child Studies and named Youthscan. In this sweep, sixteen separate survey instruments were employed, including parental questionnaires, school class and head teacher questionnaires and medical examinations (including measurement of height, weight and head circumference). The cohort members completed questionnaires, kept two four-day diaries (one for nutrition and one for general activity), and undertook some educational assessments. The 1996 follow-up was carried out by the Social Statistics Research Unit, City University. It was based on a postal survey of cohort members for whom a current address was available. The most recent follow-ups in 1999/2000 and 2004 were managed by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, and fieldwork was carried out by the National Centre for Social Research. Um, so.. they pretty much aren't assessing parenting style at all, in the first place. At best, they're just asking either parents or whatever educational staff is involved with the kid - and all of these people are going to form opinions is dramatically different ways. I have a better idea for what is really happening here: 1. The worst diets wouldn't be provided by any caring and attentive parent, simply because they are actually that bad. This alone makes the study very flawed if one merely accepts that parenting influences the behavior and learning of a child as he or she progresses to adulthood. 2. The children and parents who admit to inappropriate, irresponsible dietary choices are perhaps more likely to wind up admitting to something else, somewhere, sometime, perhaps in court, that eventually makes crime statistics out of them. Big surprise there, huh: among criminals, the best liars are more likely to walk free, especially if they learn at an early age. -- A similar situation happened in the US long ago, when researchers postulated that people with an extra Y chromosome were somehow "ultra male", aggressive, or violent after noticing that a higher percentage of them wound up in prison. A subsequent study found that the crimes they had committed did not fit this pattern at all, and that people with an extra Y chromosome had slightly lower IQs; this seemed to fit with the actual descriptions of many of the unlikely, but not ultra-violent, crimes that occurred.
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| Tuesday, 29-Sep-2009 | ||||
| 09/29/2009 22:08 | Morons in a Lexus slaughter police officer with vehicle. In the August incident near San Diego, the fiery crash of a 2009 Lexus ES 350 killed California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor, 45, and three members of his family on State Route 125 in Santee. The runaway car was traveling at more than 120 mph when it hit a sport utility vehicle, launched off an embankment, rolled several times and burst into flames. One of the family members called police about a minute before the crash to report the vehicle had no brakes and the accelerator was stuck. The call ended with someone telling people in the car to hold on and pray, followed by a woman's scream. NHTSA investigators determined that a rubber all-weather floor mat found in the wreckage was slightly longer than the mat that belonged in the vehicle, something that could have snared or covered the accelerator pedal. ...Anyways, Toyota just recalled 3.8 million of these pieces of shit because they aren't safe to use with a floormat. Nobody thought to just turn the fucking thing off and let it coast to a halt? Also, the fools had brakes. But they weren't super-luxurious to press down on because the vacuum assist wasn't working due to the fact that the throttle was wide-open. That should have been another clue. This is what happens when people operate machinery they do not even begin to understand. More now than ever, people are completely ignorant as to how the world around them works. I think I was maybe 4 or 5 when my Dad showed me how to turn the ignition switch to "off". Obviously, there was no plan to learning "on" until way later, but I think the point was that "off" might come in handy in an unpredictable problem, especially during a long road trip. These people obviously never learned the importance of "off".
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| Friday, 25-Sep-2009 | ||||
| 09/25/2009 18:51 | Kentucky cops baffled by mysteries of tree in murder case Disclaimer: I say this because it seems funny not to know trees sag. Obviously if the guy was found 2 feet off the ground, this isn't what happened. But, they haven't released details yet, and the language used seems to indicate he was only in foot-contact with the ground (for example, they refuse to rule out suicide as a possibility.. which is bizarre given the rest of the details, but, whatever.) The census worker found hung has been in the news a lot. Everything about it I've read screams homicide, either by an anti-government nut lacking the courage to take on anyone with more power than a census worker, or made to look that way. But... According to a Kentucky State Police statement, the body was hanging from a tree with a noose around the neck, yet it was in contact with the ground. Sure, the body may have been hung up for display, as Weaver, one of the people who found it, suggested. But, regardless, it seems bizarre for cops to be so fixated on the ground contact. Trees sag. Especially over time. Even after just absorbing lots of water, a tree can sag under its own weight. I can't forget this after having walked directly into a limb one evening that simply hadn't been a problem before, at a shitty Mesa apartment complex I used to live in. The resulting head injury was quite painful. Anyways, given the nature of the murder, it seems logical that just maybe it took place the day before, on September 11. Enough time for some limb sagging to have taken place.
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| Wednesday, 23-Sep-2009 | ||||
| 09/23/2009 23:48 | In the 21st century, trolling has replaced terrorism as the way to get things done! For a mind-boggling 1 hour and 36 minutes, Libya's Quadhafi finally terrorized the right people - politicians, by simply refusing to shut up during his apparently rambling filibuster. Mood:  amused
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| Tuesday, 22-Sep-2009 | ||||
| 09/22/2009 22:12 | Google makes changes to its per-site results interface, how to change back? Google has recently done something weird with its site, they've hidden the option to show all results from a particular website (albeit temporarily) and replaced it with one that only shows a few more of them - which I often find to be quite useless. Even worse, center-clicking "Show more results from website.com" just opens up the same exact page I was on in a new tab. It is no more useful than hitting reload. So now, to view more results in a new tab, one has to click the option to show just a few more results, scroll a little, then middle click the option to show all results. Google has seriously made their search results a whole lot more of a pain in the ass to use! Is there any way to change it back? Failing that, has anyone developed a widget or tool that will edit the HTML they send on the fly to restore the site to its original functionality? Failing that, will someone please change the market for search such that there are realistic competitors to Google?
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| Saturday, 05-Sep-2009 | ||||
| 09/05/2009 00:09 | Mere thousands protest Hugo Chavez Opponents of Hugo Chavez, coordinated through Twitter and Facebook, marched against the Venezuelan president across Latin America on Friday, accusing him of everything from authoritarianism to international meddling. Oh yeah, there's a real democratic sampling of the population of Latin America right there; LOL. In Honduras, the average power usage is 544kwH ... PER YEAR. Thats about as much electricity as leaving a single 50 watt light bulb on all the time. Keep in mind, thats with *all* of the upper class and *all* of the industry counted in too. So it's pretty reasonable to conclude that bullshit like facebook and twitter (or any other website) probably isn't on the minds of the typical Honduran, and that this "protest" was deliberately constructed so as to exclude the lower and most of the middle classes entirely by default. (from: population & power use, https://www.cia.gov/library/publication In Venezuela, things are far better; there is at least half a dozen times as much electricity per person. Sure, I have absolutely no problem believing lots of people, as in thousands among millions, are pissed off at Chavez - nobody wants to be separated from their unearned wealth, right? When Hugo Chavez realized the appropriate way to take power in a country where poverty was rampant was simply to organize the poor and get them to, you know, actually bother to vote, things started to change. Gee, maybe if the people running the so-called "Capitalism system" hadn't let things get so fucked up so badly, people wouldn't have voted for Chavez's Socialism. Thats the really neat thing about democracy: it can go either way - and it should be able to! But seriously, I really hope people aren't going to side with the assholes in Honduras who organized this mini-protest. Roberto Micheletti used military power to overthrow Honduras. Hugo Chavez got a bunch of poor people to vote for him. I think any real American ought to know deep inside which one of the two supports the true principles of Democracy.
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| Saturday, 29-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/29/2009 18:15 | Short / Dump GOOG (Google) for honoring a child molestor Hey, if any of you reading this happen to hold any GOOG stock and have the luxury of being able to dump it for purely moral reasons, or are in a position to do so anyways, Monday would be a great day. It seems that while Google does not feel Christopher Columbus is a "notable individual" deserving of a holiday mention, they have absolutely no qualms about honoring Michael Jackson - a man who paid out millions to silence the parents of the children he abused. These aren't victims who lived and died several centuries ago - these are victims that are still alive today, who are still living with nightmares of what this extremely creepy man has done to them. Google cares not one whit for them or their suffering. Why not send a message, if you can?
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| Thursday, 27-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/27/2009 12:12 | Maxwells equation Found with Google Scholar...   Who would have guessed James Clerk Maxwell liked Mudkip?!? (No, this isn't a shop: here's the direct link) or copy and paste the search: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=brQyoMDvLE8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA38&dq=Maxwell%20equation&ots=WEVggQt8r6&sig=nE-vMY1XrW5hE4CBIh8lkPDWCGw#v=onepag Then click on a page of the book, and scroll way up ... Mood: amused
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| Wednesday, 26-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/26/2009 22:52 | Mexico toughens its stance on the drug war, unthinking reactionaries in USA disapprove. Mexico, clearly on the losing end of a long battle with drug cartels, has focused its battle strategy. Penalties for selling drugs have been toughened. At the same time, Mexico has given up prosecuting people who are merely in posession of under 4 "marijuana cigarettes", 4 lines of cocaine, 150 micrograms of LSD, 50 mg of heroin, or 40 mg of methamphetamine. For some reason, this has enraged US officials. Maybe these jackasses didn't happen to notice that Mexico, like any other country, only has so many cops to go around and if they are ever going to catch the people making a living dealing drugs, they are going to have to start focusing on actually busting drug dealers instead of just nabbing occasional or first-time users. Also not mentioned is that for a lot of drug users, these quantities represent under one dose, except for maybe the coke and pot - where the amount still isn't enough to fuel a drug abuse problem for even one day.. Nobody with an actual drug problem will be "getting away with" anything in the first place, so that's not even an issue that should be brought up. San Diego cops are the most vocally outraged about the new law. Probably mainly because its beyond the reach of their baton in the first place - I doubt any change would be met with enthusiasm - but I suppose some of them tried to think it out on their own, but either failed or thought of the wrong things. I imagine the law would also make it slightly more difficult for corrupt cops, or even groups of them, to set up tourists and take bribes without fellow officers not yet corrupted at least noticing, because they would have to do so with greater amounts of planted evidence. Retired DEA supervisor Don Thornhill, agrees that Mexico is focusing on "the bigger fish.", and thinks all the mexican drug-trade violence will deter US citizens from driving to Mexico only to get high and return to the US. Yes, perhaps that, but also having to wait for hours at the border isn't what most people want to do when they are high. Besides, what kind of asshole cop would want US citizens put in Mexican jails? The kind isn't doing his job as a cop on US soil, maybe? source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090826/ap_ | |||
| Saturday, 22-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/22/2009 21:56 | Guess who did WTC  WASHINGTON – Lawyers for a federal detainee will be allowed to question — in writing — accused Sept. 11 mastermind Ron Jeremy, a federal judge has ruled. The decision is a setback for government lawyers who had sought to limit the scope of detainee lawyers' challenges to the detention and prosecution of terror suspects.In a written ruling, Judge Ricardo Urbina says lawyers for detainee Abdul Raheem Ghulam Rabbi can submit written questions about their client to Ron. Prosecutors say he worked for Ron, but Rabbi's lawyers contend he was just a menial servant, not a part of any terror network. The ruling says prosecutors may review the answers before delivering them to Rabbi's lawyers to remove any national security information. Government lawyers had unsuccessfully sought to convince the judge that any questioning of Ron by Rabbi's lawyers would risk exposing details of sensitive intelligence programs. Urbina's 15-page decision says Ron may have information that could help Rabbi's case, and allows Rabbi's lawyers to submit "a list of narrowly tailored" questions for Ron. Ron has boasted of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, and he is the most high-profile detainee of the 229 terror suspects held at the detention facility at the U.S. military base in Chatsworth, California. After he was captured in 2002, Rabbi claims he was taken to a "Dark Prison" where he says that for a period of about seven months he was whipped, beaten, videotaped, deprived of food, chained to a wall, and threatened with hanging. The detainee claims he falsely confessed to knowing Osama bin Laden as a result of this treatment. Urbina's ruling comes in a civil court challenge to Rabbi's detention, but if it is upheld it could have broader implications as the government prepares to bring detainees to trial in federal criminal courts and military commissions. Urbina's ruling is dated July 22, and was made public earlier this week. Parts of it are redacted, including a section describing what work the government alleges he did for Ron.
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| Friday, 21-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/21/2009 16:35 | Under 1 month sentencing for Muder, 1st degree, in UK for Libyans. (~20 years since) / (270 murdered) = 27.0549777 days per murder. The UK's actions are disgusting. A month is not enough time to spend contemplating the wrongness of ending a human life, no matter how the issue is looked at.
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| Wednesday, 12-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/12/2009 22:41 |
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| Saturday, 01-Aug-2009 | ||||
| 08/01/2009 15:56 | How long should "Google" still be a trademark instead of a word? I was reading a story about Google's market dominance and that occurred to me.. how far to go before it becomes a Genericized_trademark? Several examples are listed in the linked wiki article. Apparently escalator used to be a trademark. I actually had no idea that was the case, I just figured that is what they were all called. Obviously Google isn't anywhere near that point, but how long until it reaches the category occupied by Kleenex and Band-Aid?
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| Sunday, 26-Jul-2009 | ||||
| 07/26/2009 16:40 | Backing up the movie "KING OF KONG" to hard disc The movie King of Kong, a fistful of quarters (you can buy it here) contains information in both the usual CD/DVD filesystem standard (iso 9660) as well as the UFS standard. Big clue: the disc claims to contain a whopping 12 gigs of content. On a regular dual-layer mass produced DVD. Uh, yeah, sure, and Steve Sanders got 3 million in Donkey Kong... Since DVD players read discs using ISO9660 but computers will pick UFS preferentially (to make those crappy updateable CDRs from the 1990s work), it would be possible to add a UFS record that more or less completely fucks up everything when a computer gets ahold of the disc. They did that, which is somewhat unique to this disc. A little added challenge, I guess? The result is that a computer can no longer find the files, because of the bad update. They also include the usual failure at around 1MB in the first file .. sigh. ... But, like every copy protection scheme I've seen since Billy Mitchell played his very first game of Pac-Man, it is also easily defeated. First, get the bulk of the movie done: Now, file repair. This disc also includes the usual deliberate errors in the first few megs. Fuckers - this type of copy protection is unlike the kind mentioned above, and results in discs that don't play on certain hardware. Time to fix that carnage: File size is almost exactly one meg instead of a gig.. Lets see just how far we can get in with a different method... File size is 1839104, should be 1073735680 ...makes it in only 4kb. OK. Blocks seem to be about 4K in size then, and we have 449 blocks in one file and the 450th block in the pt2 file. So start at block 451? This gives an empty file. OK, reproducible errors, good. Keep making the number bigger in increments of 4K until it works.. the best way to do this is to start with a big number and if it works, stop the copy and cut the number in half until it doesn't go, then go for the middle ... it's a lot faster to search out the number that way if it takes any amount of time to give up on the error zone. Its a 1004324864 byte chunk. Good. So, we're still missing 67567616 bytes of corrupt data. No problemo! Oh, wait. Yes problem: Mac OSX sucks; for some reason its "BSD" implementation of head doesn't include the byte count switch, regardless of the fact that its implementation of tail does. What the fuck? Anyways, that explains the temporary file, everyone else just use head -c ... Bring it together (part 3 was empty, remember?): Now check that the file is the same size as the one on the DVD, and then remove the excess pieces that made it. If space is a concern - shouldn't it be? - you may want to compress your backup copy of the movie with a program like FlasK & DeCSS. In order to prevent data loss in the event of a flood, fire, earthquake, or other catastrophe, it is a good idea to back your legally obtained copy up to as many locations as possible. :-)
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| Friday, 24-Jul-2009 | ||||
| 07/24/2009 14:31 | Baby perception of emotion in animals.. Well, I don't really think this is all that surprising - even with infants with little or no experience around dogs or puppies. What this study confirms to me is that two different species of omnivorous pack hunters (which have had at least thousands of years of symbiotic relationships - long enough for actual evolution to take place in the brains of both species anyways) have similar enough facial expressions that the baby can make a judgment about the dog's face and sound based on his or her experiences with human beings. Even late comedian George Carlin has made note of just how expressive dogs are. Carlin compared cats to dogs, and made note of the fact that dogs have eyebrows that are used expressively in a manner similar to people.. and that cats seem to lack the ability to emote with eyebrows in that manner. It's not clear whether the babies actually know that a dog baring its teeth is a sign of trouble, but they're showing a level of sophistication regarding how dogs reveal their emotions, said study author Ross Flom, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. "We think babies have a broad-based set of abilities and skills when they enter the world," he said. "And those become broadened and honed based on the individual experiences in their lives." from http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090724/hl
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| Tuesday, 21-Jul-2009 | ||||
| 07/21/2009 15:30 | Britney Spears a dozen times.  Another tip they had was: Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
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| Thursday, 16-Jul-2009 | ||||
| 07/16/2009 18:28 |
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| Saturday, 11-Jul-2009 | ||||
| 07/11/2009 14:59 | Blocking MACROVISION's so-called review sites You know the assholes who put that flashing box on the edges of the screen of videotapes back in the day, so that they played badly and supposedly couldn't be copied? Thats Macrovision. The same jerks behind the unskippable ads and other crap in DVDs. Apparently they've been trying to influence the market by running a "movie & music review" website lately, and some of the neighbors were using it. Macrovision-owned & operated websites with opinions on them? No, I can't be having that sort of thing under this roof. Anyone who *really* wants to see the Macrovision website can look up its IP manually on the web, then edit their own hosts file, and their site will resume functioning (changing DNS won't work, port 53 is blocked). Those who do not possess this level of technical expertise, can just use another set of tubes. I only found out about this in the first place because the site constantly calls home to Macrovision itself, which generated problems whenever the web page was accessed. UPDATE: But you probably shouldn't be able to expect to get away with doing this if you are running a company the size of AT&T instead of a single open wireless node.
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| Sunday, 21-Jun-2009 | ||||
| 06/21/2009 11:37 | "The young and the elderly" I'm so tired of seeing that crap in print. Its biased, and usually, it's a lie. Instead, they should say "formula-fed infants and the elderly". A whole lot of breastfed infants just don't easily get sick, don't catch colds, etc. You know, like healthy adults.
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| Wednesday, 17-Jun-2009 | ||||
| 06/17/2009 13:15 | Booze? In its review of homeopathy, the AP also found that: • Active homeopathic ingredients are typically diluted down to 1 part per million or less, but some are present in much higher concentrations. The active ingredient in Zicam is 2 parts per 100. • The FDA has set strict limits for alcohol in medicine, especially for small children, but they don't apply to homeopathic remedies. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said no medicine should carry more than 5 percent alcohol. The FDA has acknowledged that some homeopathic syrups far surpass 10 percent alcohol. - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090617/ap_ How has the market overlooked the opportunity to sell "grape extracts, diluted to 1 part in 100, in 10% ethanol" to those in the age group 18-20?
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| 06/17/2009 12:42 | A mistake in the length of state-permitted short days means students at two elementary schools must stay in school till July 31, or the district will lose $7 million in state funds. LOL, yeah fucking right. Frankly, I'd be surprised if *anyone* showed up except the kids who's neglectful parents were just looking for free daycare. Is that even legal, to spontaneously extend the length of the grade-school year out to July 31st? What about the nerds who already planned expensive advanced studies in summer? and just how the hell to they plan to con the JD's into sitting in a typical non-air-conditioned California classroom in the middle of July? I think the simply summary is the district will lose $7 million in undeserved state funds because they decided to cut costs by letting kids go home early. Clerical error? Yeah right - as if its even possible. Sure, its easy to overlook a number on a page - but its not so easy to overlook a bunch of children going home far too early far too often. What happened here was that a bunch of typical California grade-school teachers just decided to "let sleeping dogs lie" because it made their lives easier. Then, it caught up to them. They can try all they want, I used to live in California as a kid; there's no way in hell I would spend the majority of the only months the weather approaches half-decent indoors.
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| Tuesday, 16-Jun-2009 | ||||
| 06/16/2009 13:26 | Mass Transit Sucks - even in New York! New York drivers named most aggressive, angry in U.S. You know why? Because in New York, the roads suck. They blow all their infrastructure money on mass transit systems that are known worldwide for crime and loitering. That would piss me off too. What New York really needs is a decent freeway system. That would go a long way towards making New York drivers much happier.
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| Sunday, 14-Jun-2009 | ||||
| 06/14/2009 14:46 | Electrion Fraud - and massive violent protest - in Iran Wow - sure is a stark contrast to what went down with the theft of the election in here 2004, where everyone was pretty much complacent and the Bush Crime Family ruled the US for another undeserved 4 years, just about (we aren't sure yet) bankrupting the country in the process. The ironic implication is that Iranians - tho they may seem fucking nuts in many other areas - apparently have a much greater passion for democracy than Americans these days. Of course, democracy without a bill of rights ends as tyranny of the masses anyways. Weird.
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| Monday, 08-Jun-2009 | ||||
| 06/08/2009 18:10 | .docx - not just incompatible, also, a total waste of space I had no idea it was this bad:  The worst part is that these are text-only files of a SINGLE PAGE with no special formatting. Just one font, only modifications to the type are bold, and underline, only formatting in the document is centering the title, and setting up the tabs. 36k is an atrocity for a single page of text with no images, but 144k is outright rape. Just to give an idea how INSANELY STUPID WASTEFUL this is, I printed the page to a 300 DPI file, cropped it to 7.5 by 10 inches to eliminate the margins, and saved the resulting file as a black and white .GIF image. Guess what? 146,470 bytes Word Documents created in Microsoft Office 2008 waste as much space as they would if they'd just been saved as pictures!
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| Sunday, 31-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/31/2009 14:18 | Burning sugar in rocks If one dissolves a maximum of sugar in water then let it soak into rocks, the color of the decomposition product of the sugar is different depending upon what rock the sugar was allowed to soak into. I've gotten oranges, purples, and reds of this maybe-toxic-caramel so far with various rocks that I've tried. I don't know what types of rocks I'm using, LOL, just whatever is laying around, I am not eating this stuff heh, so its alright to just try this using typical placed yard rocks for a central Arizona residential complex. I may have to try some simplified column chromatography and see just how many pigments are being made. -- Also, I took a chance on a white chalky looking rock and coated it with DOTS candy that had been disolved in a minimum of hot water, then microwaved them until boil, and let sit. Then I let the rock and the mix sit in the fridge overnight. In the morning I took the rock out and noticed a bunch of stuff around it sluff off, so I added a small amount of alcohol and put the mix (without the rock) in the freezer. By afternoon, I had two layers, a white layer on bottom, and a colored layer on top, which I scraped off and threw away. I took the white layer out (in pieces that formed back into icy ball clumps) and squeezed them, discarding the liquid that came out, presumably more color and anything at the edges my hands thawed out. (hey its just rocks, dots, and alcohol, at 0C, so I stuck my hands in it briefly. Probably not a bright idea but what the hell..) then whatever the hell that was, I stuck it back in the jar alone, put them in the microwave and boiled. Here's where it gets weird - whatever that stuff is, when it boils it smells a little like popcorn butter, the fake crap made of acetoin or diacetyl. I guess thats not a totally bad guess considering the reason I wanted to stick the dots in there in the first place is that I wanted to see what would happen when the malic acid in them reacted with the rock ... but I wouldn't figure that this little rock would have been capable of reducing the malic acid, so who knows. Maybe the presence of some decomposing sweeteners that remained enabled it?
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| Sunday, 17-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/17/2009 18:57 | You know that old joke about NASA developing a million-dollar ink pen that even works in zero-gravity, and then at the end of the joke, some cosmonaut says "In Russia we use pencil!" I was kind of reminded of that by this: When several tries with different expensive tools couldn't remove the stripped-out bolt, Mission Control in Houston told Massimino to go for the less precise yank. At Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, engineers twice tested that pull on a mock-up before Massimino was told to use his muscles. "You hope you don't get to the point where you just close your eyes and pull and hope nothing (bad) happens," said James Cooper, the Goddard mechanical systems manager for the repair mission. "But we had run out of other options." I wish I had a better picture of what happened here; it sounds like finally gave up on the electric socket set and used a breaker bar of some sort. you know, the way you'd start in the first place on the ground, when dealing with a bolt that hadn't been moved in several years, even tho down here metal ages the way we expect it to and oil doesn't spontaneously evaporate.. Astronauts were careful to tape pieces so they wouldn't fly away and become potential missiles. "This is like tying branches together in Boy Scouts," Good said. [...or like tying a support onto a brake caliper and pads before removing the brake rotor...] Massimino's run of bad luck continued. While trying to install a special plate to remove 111 tiny screws that held the instrument cover in place, a tool's battery died. It took more than half an hour for him to go back to the shuttle, swap out batteries and recharge his oxygen supply. By the time Massimino replaced the internal electronics power supply card in the spectrograph, it was just about the originally scheduled time for the end of the spacewalk. And more than 90 minutes of clean-up and close-out work remained. So spacewalk coordinators on the ground decided that the second part of Sunday's task, the insulation, had to be put off ... Its cool guys, I'm sure Americans on the ground understand. Lots of shade-tree mechanics don't bother to put the underbody back on until the next day either - shit might still happen, and then you'd just have to take it back off again. It must take an amazing amount of patience to resist the urge to just unscrew the damn bolt by hand for two hours while trapped in an EVA spacesuit. The coolest thing about astronauts is that they have to know a vast amount of highly technical knowledge, yet at the same time, they have to do the actual work in the field too.
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| Thursday, 14-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/14/2009 14:38 | Contamination is Asia brandname!  http://pics.livejournal.com/acpizza/p
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| Monday, 11-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/11/2009 22:41 | Former Catholic head of Milwaukee admits he likes older men too NEW YORK – A Roman Catholic archbishop who resigned in 2002 over a financial scandal describes his struggles with also being attracted to males of legal age in an upcoming memoir about his decades serving the church. Archbishop Rembert Weakland, former head of the Milwaukee archdiocese, said in an interview Monday that he wrote about his sexual attraction to ''older'' males because he wanted to be candid about "how this came to life in my own self, how I suppressed it, how it resurfaced again anyways." Called "A Pervert in a Pervert's church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop," the book is set to be released in June. "I was very careful and concerned that the book not degenerate into a lurid tale to satisfy people's prurient curiosity or anything of this sort," Weakland told The Associated Press. "At the same time, I tried to be as honest as I can." Weakland stepped down soon after Paul Marcoux, a former Marquette University theology student, revealed in May 2002 that he was paid $450,000 to settle a sexual assault claim he made against the archbishop more than two decades earlier. The money came from the archdiocese, who did not learn until later that the student was quite a bit older than the so-called 'age of reason'. "We were so caught up at the time just paying over and over to cover up the usual shenanigans, we just didn't think to even question the legitimacy of the payout", his successor said. Marcoux went public at the height of anger over the clergy sex abuse crisis, when Catholics and others were demanding that dioceses reveal the extent of molestation by clergy and how much had been confidentially spent to settle claims. The archbishop, now 82, said he seriously considered the potential pain for the archdiocese of renewing attention to the scandal and thought about waiting "until I was dead" to have it published. But he decided to move ahead with the project at the urging of his partner, whom he hopes to wed in a Massachusetts church later this year, for the purpose of sharing health insurance. "I try to deal with this, I hope in an honest way, admitting my weaknesses in not being able to see this earlier, but at the same time doing what I could confront it. There just isn't a lot of understanding in the church for clergy who are attracted to adults of the same sex." Advocates for child abuse victims said that Weakland's cover-up of his own sexual activity wild older males was part of a pattern of secrecy that included concealing the criminal behavior of child molesters. "They might have a point; I'm not sure. All of us were just so used to hiding everything we did, I never even stopped to consider that the activities I was engaged in are even legal in many states." Weakland said he wrote in the memoir that he was unprepared for "how lonely it is" to be a bishop and how difficult it can be to get the "feedback and support you need, when all your fellow clergy are distracted by a bunch of little rug rats."
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| Saturday, 09-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/09/2009 15:51 | Chinese Drywall (ASIA CALCIUM SULFATE = CALCIUM SULFITE. Yes, Literally!) Then China decided they'd make it out of gunk extracted from coal flue gases by scrubbers instead of mined gypsum - now, "Chinese drywall" is in people's homes and it rots everything cause they made CALCIUM SULFITE instead. Reason Why? The words for CaSO4 (硫酸鈣) and CaSO3(亞硫酸鈣) differ only by one symbol (亞), which translates as "ASIA" (source: translate.google.com) Since it was for export, screwing it up was inevitable... The Chinese should just learn to use letters like everyone else, that way they can avoid fuckups like this in the future. "Desulfurization process, calcium hydroxide and sulphur dioxide generated Asia calcium sulfate" Source: http://www.tonke.cn/company-en-hhxixo.h LOL, I think I just discovered the cause of Chinese Drywall... (P.S. If anyone gets respiratory irritation from living in a home with Chinese Drywall, the condition ought to be called "Chinese Flue")
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| Friday, 08-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/08/2009 14:56 | Have you been receiving harassing phone calls about a car warranty? Guess who runs this Car Warranty scam from the top? Lucre "Innovations in Telecommunications". These are the pricks behind the whole thing. Their website says "Lucre's goal is to provide the products and solutions that will increase the value of our customer's products and services, control costs, and support the growing need of diverse products in the telecommunication industry with the newest in technologies." In plain English, this means SPAM-DIAL THE LIVING HELL OUT OF EVERYONE'S PHONE AT ALL HOURS. Guess what? I just got done bitching out a human being at this sleazebag corporation. Seems they need to answer the phone when a client wants them to harass the general public for pay, right? So... to reach a human being at Lucre, just dial 616-361-0128 - and give those pricks a piece of your mind! Also, while your at it, if you have a fax machine feel free to send a roll of toilet paper to 616-361-5717 More information (from other people looking into this) ( I think its about time we harass everyone this shithead knows in real life, too! ) Also, I'm posting this to /b/ for the lulz
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| Tuesday, 05-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/05/2009 23:27 | Heywood Jablome Listing distribution for "Heywood Jablome":  http://names.whitepages.com/map/Hey So the system definitely picks up fake listings, it would seem...
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| Monday, 04-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/04/2009 08:00 | Yesterday - Happy and Sad Yesterday David and I went for another walk in the evening, we've been doing that a lot lately cause he really enjoys walking around outside. He stopped in the middle of a dirt alley we were walking down (because of where it was, it was away from cars, unlike a sidewalk). He'd found a rock that he decided to keep, one he offered me to hold. It had a lot of green spots on it, it's really pretty looking round rock, about an inch and a half across. Not like a show rock or anything, but probably just about as good looking as a rock can get without having any transparent or translucent spots or being a crystal of a single structure. It just has a lot of really tiny details in it. We took it home together. Also, last night I found out that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} touched_by_fire killed herself a few nights ago, which is sad.
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| Friday, 01-May-2009 | ||||
| 05/01/2009 23:09 | Hancock I think the first half of the movie "Hancock" is probably the closest thing I have ever seen to a "contemporary Christian film". Immortal dude with a good heart, saving lives and drinking wine, not too popular with the locals or authority figures. Sounds a lot like Jesus to me.
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| 05/01/2009 12:07 |
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| Wednesday, 15-Apr-2009 | ||||
| 04/15/2009 19:46 | Delorazepam Delorazepam. A benzodiazepine analogue ... Likely Side Effects: Dreams about traveling back in time to meet your parents before they got old. ...
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| 04/15/2009 16:47 | Tea Parties? Wow, just because we got the moron Bush out of the White House doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of complete idiots in the "good ole USA". Its not true revolutionaries of any type however. Its more of a bunch of spoiled, entitled adult brats who don't want to pay any taxes. They drive home on state and federally funded roads and highways (or worse, use mass transit), then blog on a networking system originated with federal funding about how they shouldn't have to pay any more income tax than someone who makes minimum wage. They just want a free ride, thats all, but are incapable of realizing that this simply cannot be. There used to be a saying that went something like "If you think its bad now, wait until government is in charge." That is probably true for comparisons between family owned businesses dealing on friendly terms with people, and the DMV. But I think there is an even better variant "If you think its bad now, wait until a government sized corporation is in control". I get a real kick of out asking the conservaswine making noise on campus how much stock they've ever owned. Most haven't ever owned any. You know, if they think capitalism is such a great idea, shouldn't they be investing in it?
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| Monday, 06-Apr-2009 | ||||
| 04/06/2009 21:40 | HOLY SHIT: 1 in 5 4 year olds is obese?!? A striking new study says almost 1 in 5 American 4-year-olds is obese source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_ Wait - How the fuck is that even possible? Its not like 4 year olds have charge cards and driver's licenses, ya know. Kindergarten doesn't even start until age 5, where the fuck are they getting all the food? Abusive, neglectful parents, maybe? Probably the same assholes who "bottle-prop" their infants just hand them a doughnut whenever they have a problem in later in life. Its disgusting. Obesity as an eventual cause of death ranks right behind cigarettes. I wouldn't let a 4 year old smoke, either. The stigma to the parents of an obese 4 year old should be the same as a 4 year old who smokes.
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| Sunday, 05-Apr-2009 | ||||
| 04/05/2009 10:33 | TWO! David has gotten ahold of the idea of "Two". He's not so much interested in the numbers one or three, but he also repeats those for the matching finger expression after a while of counting together, without being told first every time. He will hold onto two similar items and say "two!" out of nowhere tho, for a variety of items, completely on his own. He doesn't do this when he's holding onto one item or three or more items either. I'm pretty sure he's not using "two" as a way of saying "same" because he will hold two obviously different items, like a pencil and a pen, and still say "two". He was sitting in my lap and we were working on counting, and he was holding a blue eraser stick in one hand and two black ones in his other hand. I said "You have two black erasers in one hand and a blue eraser in the other hand... ... how many erasers do you have total?" He thought about it for a while and said finally "Lots" (it came out as "loss"), which I thought was pretty hilarious cause really, he did. Mood: cheerful
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| Tuesday, 24-Mar-2009 | ||||
| 03/24/2009 07:09 | $20 gets you six months worth of what? Tuberculosis is treatable with a 6-month course of antibiotics that costs roughly 20 U.S. dollars. Incomplete or improper treatment can create drug-resistant strains, such as extensively-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), a virtually untreatable form of the disease that has been confirmed in all regions of the world. text from http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/s (by the way, please visit and support this cause anyways, tho perhaps not thru Google?) Where the hell are they getting those facts from? You can't get 6 months worth of anything prescription for $20USD in the United States anymore, with or without a prescription. Either they've added up six months worth of copays, or they're giving the bulk cost data - you know, the actual cost of the stuff before Corporate America adds an arm and a leg worth of overhead ...
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| Monday, 23-Mar-2009 | ||||
| 03/23/2009 11:25 | Wow, McAfee Antivirus *really* sucks! In September of 2008, I found the following code on a computer, and reported it to various companies who do antivirus shit: Ironically enough, it doesn't run properly. It crashes if you insert a USB drive with a non-writable partition. ( nobody wants to read source-code on their friends page ) I saved it into a text file, along with the other relevant information (nar.vbs) in a format that COULD NOT BE EXECUTED. Today, the McAfee installation in the campus computers *finally* noticed it. Not that it ever should have, mind you. But, it did - and it deleted it without any warning or option to not do so. Basically, it just raped it (I think I have it backed up) without my permission. First of all, that's just plain fucking rude. I hope someday McAfee accidentally erases their entire fucking corporate network, because their antivirus system found viruses in the lab department. Hell, I bet they have some unreleased ones, the founder of that vile company used to write the damn things himself. Second of all, its been... about half a year since the incident was reported. What the fuck are these jackoffs doing at McAfee, anyways? I'd wager that the major antivirus vendors have a waiting period ... Waiting for the problem to stay serious enough that their extremely bloated, overpriced software continues to have a market among users who aren't able to properly operate their own computers without a digital hand-holder double checking their every move. Oh well. UPDATE: Found this: 11/24/2008: Pentagon Bans Use of Flash Drives External computer flash drives have been banned, at least temporarily, at the Pentagon. The ban comes after officials detected a threat, described by Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman as being a "global virus" on the Defense Department networks. Whitman gave no details of the virus but described the situation, saying "this is not solely a department problem, this is not solely a government problem." Defense officials wouldn't publicly confirm the ban but department workers were notified. One message distributed to employees said that all flash drives, whether purchased or provided by the department to workers, would be confiscated. It is currently unknown if workers will get the flash devices back or when the ban will end. Man, those jackoffs at McAfee are really slow to defend their customers from this threat. Probably mostly because they are absolutely in love with the idea that the threat still exists in the first place. I mean seriously, there *is* a reason that the anti-virus vendors actually threatened legal action in order to make it possible to disable the security features of Windows Vista, and it was most definitely *not* with the good of the user in mind!
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| Tuesday, 10-Mar-2009 | ||||
| 03/10/2009 17:00 | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughOb_fo When exposed to certain chemicals or a temperature greater than 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius)—about the temperature of a human with a moderate-to-high fever—a polymer in the joints softens and makes the fingers spring shut. .. Now the "ultimate vision [is] a small machine that can be swallowed or injected that can perform the same function and reduce the invasiveness, so you don't have to cut," said study author David Gracias, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But Gracias and others caution that such medical advances are still many years down the road. -from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n (Note: The national geographic page hosts its video on a spam-server "edgeboss.net" (I have absolutely no idea why - I've already blocked it, but they're probably trying to screw people into viewing ads... so don't bother hitting play. Just play the YouTube directly.) ... This material could be used directly fairly soon not as a grabber, but as a releasing tool. With a little reshaping, the same polymer action could trigger a different "tiny dust size" to cause a contained area to open. With a little reworking, the non-polymer portions could be made into something that could be eventually eliminated as bodily waste. What could this other idea be used for? Delivery of chemotherapy agents to the site of a tumor.. released by localized microwave-based warming.
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| Sunday, 01-Mar-2009 | ||||
| 03/01/2009 20:20 | Electrolysed salt water makes LA Times.. scam, or bad article? Wow, I know times have been rough for newspapers but can't they afford to pay anyone to screen what they allow to be published under their name? The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid. That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment. Wait, hold on... exactly who says its any safer than super-diluted bleach in salt water, and do they say why, and how that was tested? Why doesn't the LA times put any of this type of stuff in the article? Management figures the payback time for the $10,000 electrolysis machine will be less than a year. Whoa, that's a pretty hefty markup on that machine. Is management going to be kicking themselves in the ass once they find out what they actually bought, or is there something more in there than some membranes and a couple electrodes? Say, I wonder what sort of contaminants the electrodes introduce into the water as they break down? Not to mention the fact that the stuff is going to change the nature of any existing pollution in the tap water, perhaps to make it safer, perhaps to make it more dangerous, depending entirely on what the water where its used has in it. The LA times article does make it seem like a ripoff scheme when read with any degree of skepticism at all. Unless they were prevented by trade secret law, they really should have tried to explain why this thing is actually worth $10,000... If its a real deal to make hypochlorous acid on site, maybe part of the $10,000 includes a nice RO system for the incoming tap water in addition to, say, some really expensive gold electrodes or something? Probably need a pretty secure case to hold the damn things too, to prevent some rouge plumber from ripping them off in 15 minutes, right? Article needs more details!
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| 03/01/2009 10:11 |
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| Tuesday, 24-Feb-2009 | ||||
| 02/24/2009 12:30 | TROLLED!! Say, I wonder if any of the parka-clad band of environment ministers from more than a dozen nations visiting the Troll Research Station in Antarctica got to watch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory monitoring atmospheric CO2 levels burn and crash* into the ocean nearby. * Burn and crash seems so wrong-worded, even tho thats exactly what happens if it falls from high enough, into enough water. ...by the way, H2O is the leading greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. CO2 comes in 2nd place. Besides ... isn't the fact that tuna fish is typically now so poisoned with mercury that pregnant women and small children must seriously limit their intake of it a much, much better reason to seriously curb the use of coal-fired generating stations than a few degrees celsius, let alone a fraction of a degree, that might be a problem in the distant future? All this talk about global warming someday is just causing people to ignore the real environmental problems that are hurting people right now.
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| Tuesday, 17-Feb-2009 | ||||
| 02/17/2009 07:33 | Huge chimp shot dead after mauling woman in Conn. "There was no provocation that we know of. One thing that we're looking into is that we understand the chimpanzee has Lyme disease and has been ill from that, so maybe from the medications he was out of sorts. We really don't know," Conklin said. ... Conklin told reporters the chimp was acting so agitated earlier that afternoon that Herold gave him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Conklin also suggested the animal may have attacked Nash because she was wearing her hair differently and perhaps wasn't recognized. -http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090217/ap Stupid, stupid, stupid... removing the natural inhibitions (aka 'anxiety') of an animal that has only just barely acclimated itself to the limitations of human society, when it's already sick and feeling it. What the hell did they think was going to happen?
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| Thursday, 29-Jan-2009 | ||||
| 01/29/2009 17:18 | Housing vs. Stocks "This all began as a housing crisis, and clearly, the housing crisis continues," said Nathan Rowader, director of investments at Forward Management. "Bad housing numbers are not going to encourage anyone to be buying stock." The first part of what he said is mostly right - although the truth is that it began as a banking crisis directly related to hideous loan practices, like encouraging people to take loans they had absolutely no hope of ever, ever paying off just because they happened to have had a good credit rating so far, on the stupid assumption that real estate would somehow magically *always* go up in value. Thats a bad idea even in a time when real estate is legitimately going up. Consider: all it takes is a little toxic waste, or some other local problem, and suddenly the entire value of the so-called "collateral" is totally wiped out. Anyways, considering the real estate market is almost universally shit right now, it stands to reason that someone with a little extra capital might want to invest it in a company they thought had a chance of doing well, or at least better than it had in the past. The real reason that isn't actually happening is that these days, there aren't nearly as many people who have a little extra capital around that they feel like investing in something, regardless of if its real estate, stocks, bonds, or anything else. But if the so-called "housing crisis" were "fixed" and prices were once again skyrocketing, capitalists would be investing their money in property that in all likelyhood would simply sit empty while it "gained value". Thats a bullshit way to run a country, because nothing gets done on land of no use, and it discourages investment in companies that actually make a product, build factories, etc etc etc... Lastly, as a person who doesn't yet own a home of my own, I think its absolutely fantastic that real-estate prices continue to slide, since I've long thought they were outrageously high and will eventually become a homeowner. Since I intend to someday buy a house to live in, not to sell, it doesn't matter at all if home prices keep on sliding for the rest of my life - even if mine devalues and I have to move, theoretically all the rest of them devalue too, hopefully about the same amount. There can't be an answer to the "housing crisis" anyways, because there is, and is going to be a trickle of used homes into the market for a long, long time as aging baby boomers attempt to sell their now mostly-empty large family homes in exchange for smaller ones.... or even retirement villages, nursing homes, and graveyards. This will last for a very long time... This problem is typically studied as the number of workers to support an aging Social Security population, but we're seeing it right now as "the number of established families around to buy the homes of elderly couples who don't need them anymore.":  Long story short: Fuck getting rich off of the housing market, its a lost cause for anyone wanting a quick buck, for a very long time.
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