Tag Archives: jobs

Friday Cat Blogging – 3 January 2014

by LynwoodDaigle Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Domino is exhausted from an entire year of posing with quilts, so she’s upstairs taking a well-deserved nap. Instead, we have a guest cat to kick off the new year. This is a friend’s feline furball, cleverly named Grayson. Handsome little beast, isn’t he?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 3 January 2014

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

by BrandiNic Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Netflix has developed an awesomely sophisticated stockpile of data about what kind of movies people want to watch. This sounds like a huge advantage for them—and it is—but Felix Salmon argues that it’s also a sign of weakness. Netflix has to mine this information because its streaming service has such a paltry collection of titles:

If you give Netflix a list of all the movies you want to watch, the proportion available for streaming is going to be so embarrassingly low that the company decided not to even give you that option any more….So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.

I figure there are two basic kinds of customers here. The first has specific movies she wants to watch, and tries to find them. The second just wants to watch something decent, and will browse around looking for something that fits the bill. I gave up on Netflix streaming years ago because I’m the first kind of person, and I almost always came up blank when I searched for something specific. Netflix, as Salmon says, has pretty much gone all-in on the second type:

The original Netflix prediction algorithm — the one which guessed how much you’d like a movie based on your ratings of other movies — was an amazing piece of computer technology, precisely because it managed to find things you didn’t know that you’d love. More than once I would order a movie based on a high predicted rating, and despite the fact that I would never normally think to watch it — and every time it turned out to be great. The next generation of Netflix personalization, by contrast, ratchets the sophistication down a few dozen notches: at this point, it’s just saying “well, you watched one of these Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life, here’s a bunch more”.

Netflix, then, no longer wants to show me the things I want to watch, and it doesn’t even particularly want to show me the stuff I didn’t know I’d love. Instead, it just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows.

Yep. What I wonder is what happens when Netflix eventually drops the disc-by-mail service that gave it its start. That’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it happens, it will mean there’s really no place left to find a large selection of older movies to watch. The old brick-and-mortar stores will be gone, driven out of business by Netflix, and thanks to licensing wars, no streaming service will be available with a broad selection. People like me will actually be worse off than we were a decade ago.

Eventually that will change. I hope. But in the meantime, it’s slim pickings.

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks smoked marijuana in his youth, but then got bored with it and stopped. He says it never seemed like a very uplifting pastime, and this makes him nervous about about legalization:

I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

….I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Brooks’ column is getting a lot of mockery in my Twitter feed, but for once I guess I can’t really join in. It’s not that I agree with Brooks—and I’ll concede that his comparison of pot smoking with “higher pleasures” is kind of silly. But for the most part, all his column does is express a fairly modest sense of unease about the fact that legalization will almost certainly increase pot smoking a fair amount. There’s really nothing wrong with being a little nervous about that. These new laws will increase marijuana use.

But the big thing Brooks misses is the question of whether this will increase overall intoxication. It might. Alternatively, marijuana might largely displace alcohol use, producing little or no net increase in intoxication but producing a safer society overall since pot tends to be less damaging than alcohol. In the lingo, this is a question of whether marijuana and alcohol are economic substitutes or economic complements, and the research on this point is inconclusive. One of the great benefits of legalization in Washington and Colorado is that it will finally start to give us some decent data on this. For various reasons, it won’t settle the question definitively, but two or three years from now we’ll certainly have a much better idea than we do today about the net effect of marijuana legalization.

And if it turns out that legalizing pot reduces alcohol use? Then Brooks should be happy. There will still be plenty of idiots getting drunk and stoned, but there won’t be any more than there are now. We’ll have an increase in personal freedom; a reduction in drug war costs; and no significant change in the number of people pursuing higher pleasures. It’s well worth finding out if this will be the case.

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

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WATCH: George Zimmerman’s Girlfriend Reveals Disturbing New Details in Police Video

by RomeoPeakahbxr Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last November, after a heated domestic dispute and a frantic call to 911, George Zimmerman’s girlfriend told police that he had threatened her with a shotgun. The allegations were eerily similar to those lodged by Zimmerman’s ex-wife following his acquittal on charges of murdering unarmed teen Trayvon Martin, and they seemed to signal a pattern of uncontrolled violence.

Zimmerman’s girlfriend, 27-year-old Samantha Scheibe, later recanted the accusations, saying in a sworn statement that she was “intimidated” during police questioning and believed investigators had “misinterpreted” her words. But a recently released video of Scheibe’s police interview casts doubt on her disavowal. It also adds credibility and violent new detail to Scheibe’s original account.

Far from intimidating, the officer who questioned Scheibe, Stephen LaGuardia of the Seminole County Sheriff’s office, is a mild-mannered civil servant. And Scheibe’s description of events was detailed and vivid—not exactly the kind of thing most people concoct on the fly. Having broken off the relationship, Scheibe said she told Zimmerman to leave her house. He began packing his belongings, including his AR-15 assault rifle. As he removed the clip and shoved it in his rifle bag, a bullet fell on the floor. Zimmerman then grabbed and cocked his shotgun, apparently so that there was a shell in the chamber, and stuffed it in the rifle bag, too.

Scheibe began carrying Zimmerman’s belongings outside “to get him out faster,” at which point Zimmerman grew agitated and retrieved the shotgun. “The bag was right there, let’s just say this is the couch, he grabbed it, unlocked it, opened it,” she explained, acting out Zimmerman’s gestures. Initially, she suspected Zimmerman might commit suicide. “I was trying to figure out, honestly, whether or not he intended to hurt me or himself.” But then, Scheibe said, he pointed the gun at her.

Scheibe also described Zimmerman smashing her table and and her eyeglasses with the butt of the shotgun. Later, she revealed that she had “threatened to call the cops on him before” because “he has episodes.” During one such episode she claimed that Zimmerman—who was jealous that she had been texting her former boyfriend—choked her so violently that it bruised her throat. When asked her why she hadn’t called the police then, Scheibe replied, “Because I feel like he always gets off.” These words turned out to be prescient: Last month, after Scheibe recanted her allegations, prosecutors dropped the domestic violence and assault charges against Zimmerman.

The entire video is worth a look.

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WATCH: George Zimmerman’s Girlfriend Reveals Disturbing New Details in Police Video

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The Top 10 MoJo Longreads of 2013

by o99hjkd Posted on December 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Conventional wisdom says that people won’t read lengthy magazine stories online, but MoJo readers regularly prove otherwise. Many of our top traffic-generating stories have been deeply researched investigations and reported narratives—and we find that plenty of readers stick with them to the bitter end. Our readers also comment, Tweet, Facebook, and Tumble enthusiastically, citing details found deep within these stories. So here, for your New Year’s pleasure, is a selection of 10 of our best-loved longreads from 2013. (Click here for last year’s list and here for our 2011 list, or, for something totally different, check out our hate-reads list for the stories that made us pull out our hair in 2013.)

Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business
With big profits on the line, the drug industry is pulling out campaign-style dirty tricks to keep selling the meds that cooks turn into crank.
By Jonah Engle

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead
New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.
By Kevin Drum

Gagged by Big Ag
Horrific abuse. Rampant contamination. And the crime is…exposing it?
By Ted Genoways

Schizophrenic. Killer. My Cousin.
It’s insanity to kill your father with a kitchen knife. It’s also insanity to close hospitals, fire therapists, and leave families to face mental illness on their own.
By Mac McClelland

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don’t Fire Us?
Smart machines probably won’t kill us all—but they’ll definitely take our jobs, and sooner than you think.
By Kevin Drum

My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy’s Great Green Fleet
With Washington frozen solid on climate, the Navy is breaking the ice.
By Julia Whitty

Is PTSD Contagious?
It’s rampant among returning vets—and now their spouses and kids are starting to show the same symptoms.
By Mac McClelland

Why Your Supermarket Sells Only 5 Kinds of Apples
And one man’s quest to bring hundreds more back.
By Rowan Jacobsen

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?
Imbalances in the microbial community in your intestines may lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes. What does science say about how to reset our bodies?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

What’s It Like to Wake Up From a Tea Party Binge? Just Ask Florida!
Kids locked up in nursing homes. Leaky sewers. Mosquitoes unleashed. The Sunshine State has buyer’s remorse.
By Stephanie Mencimer

Click here to browse more great longreads from Mother Jones.

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The Top 10 MoJo Longreads of 2013

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

by JeffreyCole Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Well, my switch to Chrome didn’t go well after all. It turned out that the MoJo tech team had an excellent reason for not supporting it: For some reason, when you paste text into our blog software, Chrome copies over every last bit of HTML formatting from the source document. Why? Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter, because Chrome lacked so many handy features that I’ve gotten used to in Opera that I would have given up on it anyway. So I tried Firefox again, and so far it’s been great. It had most of the features Chrome didn’t, and the few it lacked could be easily added via extensions. Performance is fine, and it mostly works well with the MoJo web software.

It doesn’t have a built-in email client, which is one of the Opera features I like best, but that was eliminated in the most recent Opera update anyway. Given all this, there’s really not much reason to stick with a browser that’s supported by nobody and that merely produces shrugs (or worse) when you complain about their site not rendering properly.

But before I make the switch permanently, I have a question for the hive mind. I don’t really recall why I gave up on Firefox a couple of years ago, but my recollection is that it had gotten slow and crash-prone. Anyone have any comments on that? Has it gotten better? Or does it still tend to crash at inopportune moments?

Also: Are there any add-ons that are so fabulous I should check them out immediately?

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 December 2013

by ClemmieSwenson Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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This is the second of Marian’s watercolor heart quilts. (You saw the other one in August, and yet another heart-themed quilt on Valentine’s Day.) It’s machine pieced and machine quilted. It’s also nearly our last quilt of the year. There’s one more to go next Friday, which will make for a grand total of 23 quilts if I’ve counted correctly, and then in 2014 we’ll return to garden-variety catblogging. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend and watch out for the shopping mobs.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 20 December 2013

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The 10 Most Glorious Movies of 2013—and the 4 Most Unspeakably Awful

by saadsdecd Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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I have long believed that film criticism is a pointless, wildly unnecessary profession. The longer your review of a movie, the truer this becomes.

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The 10 Most Glorious Movies of 2013—and the 4 Most Unspeakably Awful

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Quote of the Day: In Shocking Development, Media Org Gets Suckered By Darrell Issa Once Again

by JohnetteMcKinla Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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From ABC News:

This post has been updated to include an expanded response from CMS and a statement from the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.

OK, I admit that doesn’t seem like much of a quote. But Steve Benen provides the backstory: ABC ran a story today about “two high findings of risk” in the Obamacare website. This came via a leak from Darrell Issa, who is practically infamous for leaking partial transcripts of hearings that are wildly misleading. But ABC ran with it anyway. So here’s what CMS said when they got a chance to respond:

In one case, what was initially flagged as a high finding was proven to be false,” the agency said in a statement. “In the other case, we identified a piece of software code that needed to be fixed and that fix is now in place. Since that time, the feature has been fully mitigated and verified by an independent security assessment, per standard practice.”

The administration maintains that no components of the website were allowed to go live after Oct. 1 with “open unresolved high findings.”

….The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., has accused Issa of a “reckless pattern of leaking partial and misleading information” about the website operations.

“The very same witness interviewed by the Committee also said there have been absolutely no security breaches of the website and that she is satisfied with the current security testing,” Cummings said in a statement responding to the release of Fryer’s testimony. “This effort to leak cherry-picked information is part of a deliberate campaign to scare the American people and deny them the quality affordable health insurance to which they are entitled under the law.”

Naturally, Cummings’ statement was relegated to the very last paragraph of the piece. But that’s basically the whole story. One bug turned out to be trivial and the other has been fixed and never caused any problems. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen with bugs. For all practical purposes, the update undermines the entire story.

When will reporters learn not to trust Issa? Judging by current practice, never.

UPDATE: It turns out this is even worse than I thought. Michael Hiltzik has the full story here.

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Quote of the Day: In Shocking Development, Media Org Gets Suckered By Darrell Issa Once Again

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 20, 2013

by Stephanj0r Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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An M1A2SEP Abrams Tank from Company C, 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment ‘Desert Rogues’, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, sits ready while others complete the night portion of the Gunnery Table VI in the background at Red Cloud Range, Dec. 12. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Richard Wrigley, 2nd ABCT, 3rd ID, Public Affairs NCO)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for December 20, 2013

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