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Learned Helplessness
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2774
Gas now peaking at $122.9 per liter, no explanations coming, little, if any, reaction from consumers.
Here's a chart displaying historical gas VS oil prices:
The last time, you might note, gas prices came close to this was when Oil was close to $150/Barrel. (the last blue spike actually rises up to the 122.9). Now this strategy of "randomly" varying price without correlation to supply or cost, is something we could call "Learned Helplessness", where we, the consumers, are being tested for reaction, and so far we're failing badly. It can be expected, then, that prices will continue to be set without regard for cost, and, ironically, with oil companies in Canada alone making over $100 million/per day with NO OVERHEADS for staffing & extraction (we laid off everyone in the oilsands, remember? And lets face it, we can't compete with $32.00/Barrel) yet we'll be expected to accord them every tax break when production resumes.
Hmmm. It's cheaper at the moment to buy a barrel of oil than it is to fill your car with gas.
We are, of course, not helpless, but in playing and paying along we're setting a very dangerous precedent and overlooking our right, our responsibility to civil disobedience. This could be approached in a variety of ways, including demonstrations outside corporate head offices, certainly I'd not recommend sending letter bombs or Anthrax through the mail unless you were careful to take precautions and not be caught. Really, folks, it's time...
Homme Less
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 2032
Looks good. Clearly he's got the panache and style to pull it off, me, people just try and give me money...
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The IBM Watson Developer Cloud
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 2124
An online algorithm that takes text input from blogs, etc, and analyzes the sort of person you (or the author) is. Copy-paste, the bigger the sample, the more "accurate" the results.
My results:
"Your Personality*
You are inner-directed.
You are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.
You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of well-being.
You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider independence to guide a large part of what you do: you like to set your own goals to decide how to best achieve them."
And I ran it through again, this time only using that content from my dreams:
"You are sentimental.
You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are calm-seeking: you prefer activities that are quiet, calm, and safe. And you are proud: you hold yourself in high regard, satisfied with who you are.
You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of connectedness.
You are relatively unconcerned with achieving success: you make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you."
I tried it a few times, the results were always 90% or greater the same.
I have a certain skepticism of online personality (or any personality) profiles, but it's fun to run through other peoples emails and compare their portrait to your experience of them.
Extraneous Nipples
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2529
I'm in a prospecting meeting, of sorts, other prospectors, some irrelevant people, dark room, a desk with a fat bossy kid, he's taken over from the boss...all around there are disconnected bath fixtures, bathtubs, toilets...
I'm picking at a blackhead on my ankle, start to squeeze it and the puss jets out, at first a narrow stream, then bigger, like toothpaste from a tube...I'm amazed, really, how much is in there, keep squeezing, more and more keeps coming up, I'm wiping it off, looking for a place to wipe it...
...and moving up my ankle, looking for more blackheads, I discover a pair of nipples on my inner ankle bones, I squeeze them, they jet out a splash of milk, then the toothpaste-styled puss, my hands are full of it, I look into the bathtubs, can wipe them in there, only the irrelevant people are sleeping in them...
...The boy, he's still barking directions, I'm paying attention, sort of, despite his bossiness he's proving surprisingly competent...
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