Overcomplicated? Maybe. Virtuous? Damn right: Play as the International Red Cross/Red Crescent and shine a light in the darkness. It makes a change from shooting zombies. Red Cross: ERU. [Flash Warning] [Sound Warning] Thanks to Anne for the link!

User Friendly the Comic Strip

This is an explanation of economics. There's no way to avoid some boring details and glazed eyes when talking about such things. However, I promise to avoid some of the jargon which will send you running to wikipedia, if you in turn forgive me for some oversimplification. The purpose of this article is to explain specific jargon. It will explain the role of FNMA (Fannie Mae) and FHLMC (Freddie Mac), mortgage-backed securities, Credit Default Swaps (CDS), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), mark to market, prime, subprime, a run, the Community Reinvestment Act, and liquidity in the current situation. These terms will be introduced as gently as possible. There's a lot of ground to cover, but what follows is a resource which will help you to understand these frequently used buzz words.

Humans are omnivorous. Probably the reason we are is that we started out as scavengers before we were hunter/gatherers. Eating ancient and primeval 'road kill' must have been nasty enough that some bright ancestor found a pointed stick and jabbed something to death and we tasted fresh meat. That must have gotten old too and so someone else came along and figured out how to prepare and cook meat. The technique of preparing the perfect steak is quite simple and uncomplicated. It's an art that has almost been forgotten.

So King George got on the TV tonight to let everyone know that yes, the sky will indeed fall if those pesky congress persons don't agree to effectively nationalize a handful of companies that may or may not have been poorly managed.So the question is, would a bailout have the desired effect? Given that I am not an economist and the extreme complexity surrounding the many aspects that feed into answering that question, I am going to leave that debate to others. At this point I am not even sure that the psychological effect of the bailout would end up playing out as expected. What I am more interested in is the effect that the bailout is going to have on the next two elections.

Those who spend their weekends doing things other than watching the news woke up Monday morning to a proposed 700 billion dollar bailout of the broader US financial system. The response to the most devastating financial crisis in modern history is surely a complex web of legal and technical intricacy, tied together with thick ropes of incomprehensible financial jargon and heavy-laden with the legislative double-speak inherent to all bills, right? Nope. It's only 2 pages long, and written in near-layman's terms. You would read it, if you were paying attention. If you had read it, here's a section that might have struck you: "Section 8: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

One of our more prolific users, localroger, recently posted a diary about how this online community of ours has failed.  In and of itself, this is not ironic or even remarkable; the perennial breast-beating that our community is dying is perhaps one of the more notable signature memes of our community. No, the irony is in the fact that he based his claim around an essay which is actually an exegesis of the strengths of k5 --- a laundry list of what we are doing right. To borrow a metaphor, yes, k5 is full of alligators, but they're in the moat guarding the castle.

According to History of ASCII Art, a Korean gentleman named Gwang Hyuk Lee (or Gwank Hyuk Lee?), around the time of the Korean war, drew a picture of Jesus Christ (entirely by hand) using the entire text of the Book of John. He used varying pen colors to form the image. If this is true, I am extremely impressed.

I'm going to present to you tips, tricks, and techniques for e-mauling localroger.  In theory many of these will work well against anyone, but I am writing this diary in the hopes that this will help give people that push to let localroger know he's a slimy douchebag, or if they're already doing that to help them spruce up their game. Inside: I show you the innards of my cold, cruel, black heart.

I didn't understand. Every time I've ever been asked to contribute to society, I simply wrote some bullshit excuse to weasel out of it. Contributing is for other people, not a precious important snowflake such as myself.  So I'd pen some dishonest and dishonorable excuse and whine my way out of it.  They'd always let me know that I was excused because, let's face it, if there's anything drearier than a court employee's having to track down some selfish and self-centered asshole and get him to make even the minimal contribution to our common polity, then I don't know what it is.  So I'm not worth their time, and they always let me slide, until now. But this time, they actually had some serious shit brewing.  They were going to make me come in and prove to their faces that I valued my convenience above my honor.

I didn't understand. Every time I got the subpoena before I submitted a written letter stating that I was paid by the hour and sole breadwinner of my household. I'd get a message on my answering machine about a week before my due date advising me that I was excused. This time, the message said "The judge needs to talk to everybody."

Hide Palin under a Bush?OH NO!I'm going to let her shine.

fatalfury writes "Researchers from the University of Vienna asked 20 males and 20 females to rank vehicles based on their appearance. The list of traits included arrogant, afraid, agreeable, disgusted, extroverted, sad, and others. Cars with 'meaner' traits (such as BMW) ranked higher, whereas cars with 'nicer' traits (such as Toyota's Prius) ranked lower. With billions spent on developing new products in the automobile industry, this could spur a trend in meaner-looking cars and perhaps explain why sales of the Prius and other green cars are slow to take off with average consumers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cartoon for Today, Oct 13, 2008

The internet is a competitive market place, there is no such thing as one web site having a corner on a particular niche (tell me if you find one). When a web site, any web site, is not treating its customers fairly, there are usually ample alternatives that the masses can utilize to that do the same thing.

One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox Mobile looks to be coming to a Windows Mobile device near you very soon. With a reported Acid3 Test score of 88/100, the mobile web browser looks nearly complete in the screenshots that have surfaced.

Facebook's recent redesign was in response to that idea, Zuckerberg revealed, and there's more to come in future versions of Facebook:

In this collection, you’ll find 30 brilliant illustration/drawing tutorials using Adobe Photoshop from top-notch Photoshop tutorial sites.

hackingbear writes "The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the U.S. debt was 'merely' a tiny $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra '1,' the clock was hacked: the '1' from "$10.2" has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the '1.' It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a '1' followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe." Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.