Tag Archives: name

If You Don’t Click on This Classy Post, You Are a Loser and a Moron

by q1jurse Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Four days after mocking Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being captured in Vietnam, Donald Trump is at the top of the Republican presidential polls. Despite his history of political flip flops, Trump has gained traction with red-meat-loving conservatives by skewering and belittling establishment figures such as McCain and Karl Rove, questioning President Barack Obama’s legitimacy, and attacking undocumented immigrants. But he’s also been quick to fling insults at anyone who ever says anything bad about him—other celebrities, journalists, legislators, and this one poor guy from Bermuda. Donald Trump insults people.

And now you, too, can be insulted by the tirade-prone tycoon—with the Mother Jones Donald Trump Insult Generator™. Just enter your name (or your friend’s name, or the name of your favorite stupid clown political pundit with bad ratings) and give it a spin. Just don’t expect an apology:

var get_name = function()
var form = $(‘#name_form’);
form.hide();
var name = form.find(‘inputtype=”text”‘).val();
tabletop_callback = function(response)
data = process_data(response);
data’user_name’ = name;
register_templates();
init_headline_generator();
check_query();

start_random_sentence_maker(spreadsheet, proxy);
return false;
};

var spreadsheet = “1eTi1J0Fc_uC_ODlnpNgIQWvTw1h0kcI_3T2P-7sqSWU”;
var proxy = ”;
var fb_description = ‘Trump Insult Generator’
var fb_picture = ‘http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/themes/mobile/images/mobile_logo.png’;
var fb_app_id = ‘119572928091379’;
var templates =
‘subjectnametwice1 user_name subjectnametwice2 user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,

var shorturl = ”

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If You Don’t Click on This Classy Post, You Are a Loser and a Moron

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Why Do Americans Love Tech Startups More Than Europeans?

by DamianMoulds Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

Jim Pethokoukis muses again today about the relative success of tech startups in America vs. Europe. He notes that apparently Europe is getting better in this regard, but still lags the US, and offers a few conventional reasons for the US advantage (plenty of capital, lots of talent, risk-loving culture, etc.) and then adds a few other possibilities from comments. This one in particular struck me:

Startups need customers. My experiences is American businesses are generally more likely to take a chance on a new company’s product if they think it will be advantageous, even if that company might not be exactly stable. I say generally, because it is certainly not universal. I was in the past deeply involved with another startup in the U.S. that generated most of its revenue from the UK for its first several years because for this particular market the major players in the UK were more change-seeking than their counterparts in the US. Ironically, this was largely because we addressed some pain points related to labor and energy that were not as painful for similar companies in the U.S.

Back when I was in the tech biz, we introduced a new version of a product we’d been selling for several years. It was already reasonably successful in Europe, though still a bit of a tougher sell than in the US. But the new version was a problem. It worked well. It introduced new capabilities that were pretty useful. And it was basically just a plug-in to the original product. All of that was fine. The product itself was not the problem. Its name was the problem.

No, this is not a funny story about accidentally naming something “cow dung” in Croatian. It was all in English. The problem was this: our new product added the ability to support remote users via the internet, so we called it AC Internet Server (AC being the original product name). Our European distributors and sales force were aghast. They told us no one would buy it if it had “Internet” in the name.

We in marketing were nonplussed. This was 1999, not 1990. Everyone wanted internet versions of existing products. Hell, they wanted them even if internet connectivity didn’t make sense for a particular product. It was hot and new. When we were brainstorming names for the new product, we were willing to consider just about anything. The only rule was that “Internet” had to be in the name somewhere.

But in Europe—in 1999—they wanted no part of that. To them, the internet didn’t suggest hot and new. We were told in no uncertain terms that it suggested fragile and unreliable.

Now, in retrospect, you can certainly argue that Americans went overboard on all things internet in the late 90s. But even in retrospect, I’m still gobsmacked that a lot of large European companies were unwilling to get on the bandwagon at all. Not for anything mission critical, anyway. And this despite the fact that internet connections were roughly as good and as cheap in Europe at the time as they were in the US. This wasn’t a problem of outdated infrastructure.

But there you have it. European companies do seem to be less willing to roll the dice and try something new that might not be fully ready for prime time. Americans, for better or worse, seem almost gleeful about it. Sometimes that spells disaster. But over the long run, it means that (a) our startups do indeed have a bigger pool of potential buyers and (b) new technology gets a quick trial by fire and then gets adopted rapidly if it works. Even when this produces lots of epic failures like pets.com, it probably works out better for everyone in the long run.

Is this still true of European companies? Are they generally less willing to adopt new technologies? Are they generally less willing to buy products from startups with an uncertain future? I don’t know. This all happened 15 years ago and I have no experience since then. Feel free to chime in via comments if you have something to add.

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Why Do Americans Love Tech Startups More Than Europeans?

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Move over, cotton. This smart fabric could change our lives

by WernerCordner Posted on June 1, 2015

DON’T GET HEATED

Move over, cotton. This smart fabric could change our lives

By on 1 Jun 2015commentsShare

World peace has always been an unachievable fantasy. Until now.

A group of researchers at UC San Diego just got $2.6 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to make clothing that could regulate body temperature and thus reduce the amount of energy we use for heating and cooling. Here’s more from a press release out of UCSD:

The smart fabric will be designed to regulate the temperature of the wearer’s skin — keeping it at 93° F — by adapting to temperature changes in the room. When the room gets cooler, the fabric will become thicker. When the room gets hotter, the fabric will become thinner. To accomplish this feat, the researchers will insert polymers that expand in the cold and shrink in the heat inside the smart fabric.

According to one of the researchers on the project, 93 degrees is a comfortable skin temperature for most people (who knew?). Clothes made from the fabric will also include “supplemental heating and cooling devices” in certain spots that tend to get particularly uncomfortable (parts of the back, bottoms of feet, etc.).

So what does this have to do with world peace? Think about it: all that passive aggression that builds when your roommate cranks up the thermostat, and then you (resident environmentalist) turn it back down to save energy? Or that crankiness that creeps over you when a public place has the A.C. on arctic chill, but you didn’t bring a jacket because it’s 80 freaking degrees outside? Or that thing about violent crimes going up in the summer? It could all go away! Or, at least, cool down.

Joseph Wang, lead researcher on the project and a professor of nanoengineering at UCSD, is envisioning a smart fabric revolution:

“We are aiming to make the smart clothing look and feel as much like the clothes that people regularly wear. It will be washable, stretchable, bendable and lightweight. We also hope to make it look attractive and fashionable to wear,” said Wang.

A word of advice, Wang: If you want to start a smart fabric revolution, you better do more than just hope on that last point. We — the vainest of all species — put ourselves through all manner of discomfort in the name of fashion. You better believe that we’ll continue to suffer if that smart clothing doesn’t look good, too.

Source:
Engineers win grant to make smart clothes for personalized cooling and heating

, UC San Diego.

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Move over, cotton. This smart fabric could change our lives

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Property Bubble, Tech Bubble, What’s Next For China?

by anunturiimobiliaretimisoara Posted on May 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve long been conflicted about China’s prospects for the future. On the one hand, their growth rate has been impressive over the past few decades, and their long-term growth seems to be reasonably well assured too. But there are clouds on the horizon. Demographics are one: China is getting older, and by 2030 nearly a quarter of the country will be elderly. There’s also a problem that’s inherent to growth: As China gets richer and more middle class, their labor costs will rise, eliminating one of their key attractions to Western manufacturers.

But what about the short term? That’s starting to look problematic too. China’s stock markets have been on a massive, bubblicious tear recently, none more so than the exchanges that specialize in tech companies. Matt O’Brien speculates about the underlying cause of this mania:

Why are China’s stock markets partying like it’s 1999? Well, part of it is that China’s housing bubble might be bursting—new home prices fell 5.1 percent in January—and the only other place people can put their money is in stocks. Another part is that China’s state-owned media companies have been saying for months that stocks look cheap, and people are listening. Especially people who haven’t graduated from high school. Indeed, 67 percent of China’s new stock investors don’t have a high school diploma. And now that China has cut interest rates so much—and looks like it will keep doing so—they can borrow money to buy as many stocks as they want. And that’s a lot. So-called margin accounts, which let people do this, more than doubled in 2014, and, even though brokerages have tightened their terms a bit, they’re still growing.

So whether you want to call this a boom, a bull market, or a mania doesn’t really matter. A bubble by any other name will pop just as much.

The best-case scenario is probably that China’s central bank manages to engineer a fairly normal cyclical recession, which will be mild and short-lived. The worst-case scenario is that borrowing is fueling more of this boom than we think, and China will shortly experience a bursting property and stock bubble that will look an awful lot like the one we went through in 2008.

Still, I will say one thing in China’s favor: a lot of analysts have been predicting a crash for a long time, and somehow China’s economy just keeps rolling along. On the other hand, to paraphrase Keynes, bubbles can last a helluva lot longer than you’d think. But eventually they all burst anyway.

So color me nervous about China. At the same time, keep in mind that all I know is what I read in the papers. I might be totally off base with my concerns.

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Property Bubble, Tech Bubble, What’s Next For China?

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People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

by RondaMoonlight Posted on May 8, 2015

People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

By on 8 May 2015commentsShare

World’s chillest billionaire Elon Musk announced this week that demand for his new energy storage devices is “crazy off-the-hook.”

According to Bloomberg Business, Musk’s new home- and utility-scale battery business, Tesla Energy, has already received about $800 million in reservations — an impressive number, given that Musk just unveiled Tesla Energy a week ago. But Bloomberg warns that, for now, it’s just a number:

Before anyone gets too excited, it’s important to note the biggest caveat: reservations don’t necessarily convert to sales. That’s especially true for the home storage batteries sold under the name Powerwall. Anyone can go online and place a reservation, years in advance, with no money down and no commitment to buy. To reserve a Tesla Model X vehicle, by contrast, requires $5,000 up front. Tesla declined to clarify what constitutes a “reservation” for a business or utility-scale project.

Still, the buzz is encouraging. Since the whole point of Tesla Energy is, essentially, to hurry us to the day we can all live in a solar-powered utopia, it’s good to know that the demand for said utopia is high enough to sell out these new batteries through mid-2016. (To their credit, utility companies have also been working on better batteries; they just haven’t had much success — they also lack the charisma of Musk, a.k.a. the real life Iron Man.)

Here’s a taste of what that $800 million number includes:

The Powerwall home batteries designed to be paired with rooftop solar systems received 38,000 reservations, according to Musk’s comments during Wednesday’s earnings call.
Some customers order more than one battery, with an average reservation amounting to somewhere from 1.5 to two batteries. Musk described the total demand as “more like 50,000 or 60,000” batteries in early reservations. Let’s call it 55,000 batteries.
The Powerwall comes in two designs sold at different prices: $3,000 and $3,500 each. Let’s split the difference: $3,250 apiece.
Total Powerwall Orders So Far: $178.8 million.

[…]

Musk said the company has received 2,500 reservations for the commercial-scale batteries and that the typical installation comes with “at least 10 Powerpacks.” So that’s 25,000 units totaling 2.5 million kilowatt hours.
Musk used Twitter last week to disclose pricing for the Powerpack at $250 per kilowatt hour.
Total Powerpack Orders So Far: $625 million.

So most of the money has actually come from the commercial market. According to Bloomberg, Tesla has so far been working with Target, Amazon, Southern California Electrdic, and the Texas-based utility OnCor.

With such high demand, Musk said, Tesla could easily devote its entire Gigafactory — slated to open sometime next year, ahead of its original 2017 goal — to the storage devices. Unfortunately, he said, the company already promised two-thirds of the facility to electric vehicle batteries.

“We should try to make the factory bigger,” he added — probably with a wry smile and nonchalant shrug.

A bigger factory sounds great, Elon, but maybe keep the name Gigafactory — Yottafactory just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Source:
Tesla’s Battery Grabbed $800 Million in Its First Week

, Bloomberg Business.

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People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

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Here’s What Happened When I Asked Rand Paul an Inconvenient Question

by IslaBeattie Posted on April 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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I haven’t been surprised by Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential campaign launch, with the GOP senator from Kentucky winning more attention for his testy interactions with reporters than for his libertarian theology. These past few days, Paul had a tough time when journalists posed him the most predictable of questions: Can you explain your position on abortions? Why did you flip from opposing all US foreign aid to Israel and other nations to supporting such assistance? Do white Republican voters support criminal justice reform? He talked over one interviewer—and then accused her of talking over him—and he walked out of another interview.

This all reminded me of the time I tried to engage Paul about an important matter: what his father Ron Paul knew about a newsletter published under his name that included racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic commentary. It was 2012, and Ron Paul was campaigning for president in the GOP primary in New Hampshire. Rand Paul, already a senator, was helping his old man and spinning for him after the debates. But Rand Paul had no spin for my questions about this newsletter. Nor did he have any answers. When I asked about the publication, he turned his back to me and refused to answer. It was a curious response. I’ve had politicians walk away without replying to a query. But I’ve never seen one pivot away and pretend I was invisible. It seemed a bit immature: I can’t seeeee you.

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Here’s What Happened When I Asked Rand Paul an Inconvenient Question

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Pennsylvania Teenager Simulates Oral Sex With Jesus Statue, Faces 2 Years in Prison

by ErlindaSpalding Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Teenagers are prone to dumb, tasteless pranks, but one 14-year-old is facing prison time for his latest stunt. The teen, from Everett, Pennsylvania, hopped on top of a statue of a kneeling Jesus—in front of an organization called “Love in the Name of Christ”—and simulated oral sex with the statue’s face. Naturally, he posted the pictures to Facebook, which made their way to authorities.

Officials in Bedford County charged the teen (whose name hasn’t been released) with desecration of a venerated object, invoking a 1972 Pennsylvania statute that criminalizes “defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise physically mistreating in a way that the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of persons likely to observe or discover the action.” You’d think an appropriate punishment for a kid violating this seldom-invoked law might be picking up trash or, at worst, paying a fine. If convicted, he faces much worse: two years in juvenile detention.

Truth Wins Out, a LGBT advocacy nonprofit, has argued that the law is unconstitutional because it violates the establishment clause—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—and free speech rights—”Congress shall make no law abridging the right to hump a statue of Jesus.”

Pennsylvania is not the only state with a “venerated objects” law—many states have some version of it, but most define “desecration” as vandalizing or otherwise physically harming an object of civic or religious significance. Alabama, Tennessee, and Oregon have laws like Pennsylvania’s, which can be interpreted to punish individuals—like this bold, dumb teenager—who simply decide to do something offensive.

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Pennsylvania Teenager Simulates Oral Sex With Jesus Statue, Faces 2 Years in Prison

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

by WillUHJbrl Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Brad DeLong notes that Mario Draghi, the head of Europe’s central bank, went off text in his speech at Jackson Hole. Here’s his summary of Draghi’s extended ad-lib:

The speech text says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. The decline in inflation has not led to any decline in expectations of inflation.
  3. THE ECB will, if necessary, within its mandate, use QE and other policies to keep expectations of inflation from declining.

The speech as delivered says:

  1. The ECB knows that inflation has declined.
  2. My usual line is that the decline in inflation is due to temporary factors that will be reversed.
  3. That explanation is now long in the tooth: the longer “temporary” lasts the greater the danger.
  4. In fact, it is too late to “safeguard the firm anchoring of inflation expectations”.
  5. Inflationary expectations have already declined.
  6. We will use all the tools we have to reverse this.

Is this deviation a mere line wobble….Is this deviation an audience effect….Or does it signal a recognition on Draghi’s part that the Eurozone is heading for a triple dip, and that if he doesn’t assemble a coalition to do much more very quickly to boost aggregate demand we will have to change the name “The Great Recession” to something including the D-word, and he will go down in history as the worst central banker since the 1930s?

I would like to know…

I suppose we’d all like to know. The Germans better start taking this stuff seriously pretty soon. They can’t stick their heads in the sand and live in the past forever.

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Is Europe’s Central Bank Finally Getting Worried About Deflation?

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

by Jaqueline2060 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Update (4:12 p.m. ET): Anonymous has obtained and posted St. Louis police dispatch tapes from the day of the shooting.

The police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, says he is withholding the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, out of concern for the safety of the officer and his family. But that might be easier said than done. Just a few hours later, the hacktivist group Anonymous announced on Twitter that it was now “making a final confirmation on the name of Mike Brown’s murderer,” adding: “It will be released the moment we receive it.”

I traded emails last night with one of the half-dozen core Anonymous members working on Operation Ferguson, as the group’s effort to pressure and shame the local police department is known. They were still working to verify the identity of the shooter. “I can only tell you that our source is very close personally to the officer who killed Mike Brown, and that this person is terrified to be our source,” said the anon, whom I will call Fawkes. He added that the source “reached out to us, we did not seek out this person.”

The claim to have outed the Ferguson shooter comes only two days after Anonymous announced the launch of Operation Ferguson in this video:

The computer-generated voice, graphics, and hacking threats are trademark Anonymous, but one aspect is unusual: a demand for federal legislation “that will set strict national standards for police misconduct and misbehavior.” Though Anonymous has a strong anarchist strain that disdains politics, Fawkes told me that the idea wasn’t controversial within the group. “We have done a few of these ‘justice ops’ and it seems there needs to be a larger solution to the problem on a nationwide level,” he told me. “There was no debate—everyone on the team embraced the idea.”

Ferguson is 60 percent black. Virtually all its cops are white. Read more stats ››

It has been a busy few days for Operation Ferguson. The hackers shut down the city’s website for a few hours on Sunday night and Tuesday morning, posted the home address and number of St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, and dropped an email bomb that crammed city and police inboxes with junk messages. The goal was “to get journalists like you to do interviews with us, and incidentally maybe talk about the issue at hand in the process,” Fawkes told me. “Looks like it worked.”

In previous “justice ops,” Anonymous hackers have targeted the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to protest the Charles Hill and Oscar Grant shootings and the transit system’s attempt to dampen protests by shutting down cellphone signals. Other Anonymous ops have uncovered criminal evidence or the names of suspects. “It’s actually back to the classics,” said McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, author of the forthcoming book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, whom I met last night in a chatroom where hackers were plotting their next moves. She added that “a lot of old-school folks came back for this,” though they’ve been careful to avoid the attention of law enforcement and other anons by using fresh pseudonyms.

But the veterans’ participation hasn’t stopped Op Ferguson from seeming unhinged at times. On Tuesday afternoon, one Anonymous Twitter account threatened to release information about the police chief’s daughter unless he disclosed the name of the officer who’d killed Brown. (The threat was later withdrawn.) And the op’s Twitter account repeated a bogus internet rumor attributing a screenshot of a racist Facebook tirade to Belmar’s wife—the tweet has since been deleted.

“We are not exactly known for being ‘responsible,’ nor for worrying overly much about the safety of cops,” Fawkes told me. “After all, they have vests and assault weapons. I think they can look after themselves. This is psychological and information warfare, not a love fest.”

Half outlaw, half idealist, Anonymous has always operated at the margins of legitimacy, its tactics ranging from gumshoe detective work to illegal hacking and shameless PR stunts. It’s hard to know whether its current claim to have ID’d Brown’s killer will be borne out. “I don’t think they have it,” Coleman told me. But, she added: “I would not be surprised if they do soon.”

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

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Doctors Aren’t Really Very Smart About Buying Generics

by MapleValle Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sarah Kliff takes a look today at our use of generic drugs. Long story short, it’s surprising how few of us save money by buying generic pain medicine instead of name brands (Advil, Tylenol, Bayer, etc.). Why? In most cases, I suppose it’s just ignorance: people don’t realize that the “store brand” is genuinely identical to the name brand. In other cases it might be something else. I buy generic ibuprofen, and it usually comes in the form of small brown pills. One day, however, I went to to a different drug store to stock up, and it turned out that their generic ibuprofen came in the form of small orange pills. Marian used these for a while, but really hated them. Eventually she cracked, and insisted on buying a new bottle from our usual drug store. Sometimes little things can make all the difference.

Anyway. The main point of Kliff’s post is that generics are good, and as evidence of this she puts up a chart showing what doctors themselves buy. Here’s an excerpt from the chart:

It’s true that doctors mostly favor generics when it comes to basic pain relievers. But frankly, what’s amazing to me is how little they prefer them. For chrissake, they prefer generic aspirin by only ten percentage points. That means they buy the name brand about 45 percent of the time. Why would a doctor do this? Granted, the extra few dollars is probably no big deal to them, but why waste it anyway? Certainly not because of ignorance. Are their spouses doing the buying? Or what?

And why the active preference for name-brand rubbing alcohol, of all things? It’s hard to think of anything more generic than that. What’s the deal here?

As for Alka-Seltzer, the dislike of generics is so huge that there just has to be some real difference here. But what?

In any case, I suspect this might have some real importance beyond the question of doctors spending a few dollars they don’t have to. If physicians aren’t really sold on generics in their own personal lives, does this mean they’re not really sold on them in their professional lives too? Do they tend to prescribe name brands when they shouldn’t? And how much does this cost all of us?

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Doctors Aren’t Really Very Smart About Buying Generics

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