After reading your post, I thought I'd check it out, since I had also said maybe later. Yep, I'm all signed up, with one follower, who seems to only write in spanish or portugese, and following seven people. The people I'm following, I'm actually, mostly interested in, but this follower, never heard of him.

I go to help, and look for a way to kill the buzz. It tells me to sign in and go to my account and click on edit next to the product I want to delete. Buzz is not listed. Buzz also persists in saying that I have one follower, although I just blocked him. When ever I check to see who it is, it tells me I don't have any followers. Then it goes back to saying, in two places on the page, that I have a follower.

Fortunately, there is a little teeny link in the middle of a bunch of other tiny text which offers to turn off Buzz.

ivan

I feature compared my last broom purchase a lot more than I did my last computer purchase. Then again, I had a lot more freedom in choosing a price point with a broom. The last computer I bought was before netbooks, and I needed cheap. Buying the most expensive broom hurts a lot less than the second cheapest laptop did back then.

ivan

I don't care, for the moment, how this happened. I'd be quite happy to learn how this happened in fifty years, when some dying old man makes the confession that he accidentally shredded the last four pages of a six hundred page schematic. What ever.

I care that a nuclear reactor just a few miles from my home can't go two weeks without ending up in the news over some screwup. They don't know where the pipes are, or what they do; they don't keep up on maintenence, they choose not to fund their decomissioning fund; they can't cool the water they dump in the Connecticut River; they can't always remember where they put spent fuel rods ...

And they want to up the rates.

You don't think we should all go with Anonymous?

Gods, aliens, who cares?

Let's get back to the mead. I've some in the bottle, and some in the works.

ivan

The trials in Germany don't behave anything like trials in the US. It's even beyond the Napoleonic system, where precedent isn't as big a deal. They don't do the whole adversarial thing. Basically, people talk until the judge decides s/he knows what actually happened, and produces a ruling.

Obviously, this is all based on on thing I over[mis]heard a while back.

I like to think that he'd read that damn book, look up, and say, "This is bullshit. Where did the idea that value could exist outside the mind which perceives value start?"

But, I've always been a hopeless optimist when it comes to fictional supermen. Zarathustra, now there's a fictional superman whose opinion on this topic I'd like to hear.

Are you talking about Fords and Chevys, made in the US, but American workers, or Toyotas and Hondas, made in the US, by American workers?

Or, about Fords and Chevys, made in Mexico, by Mexican workers, or in Canada, by Canadian workers, and all the same again for the Toyotas and Hondas, and Beemers, Benzes, and VWs?

I think you'll find that it's not as simple as "American factories make junk," or "American workers make junk." The connection between quality and geography is tenuous, and much of the real difference is related to labor costs. But that only really works in a negative way. Companies making cheap shit go to cheap labor markets. Companies making quality feces can consider a greater range of factors when locating manufacturing.

The other great thing about a watch is that I don't look quite as stupid when I look at my watch every time I have to think about time. I look at my watch as a sort of self hypnosis. It signals my brain to think in terms of time, even when the time involved was never registered against my watch, or is on a scale which does not register on my watch.

Truthfully, for a couple of years I wasn't wearing watches, and I'd still look at my wrist to think about time.

Here's why I still have a watch: I sync it to the clock which matters.

"A man with one clock always knows what time it is; a man with two is never sure."

I don't have to worry about which clock is accurate. I know that I only have one clock in my life which is unforgiving. Every other random clock can be either close enough that people running off it will not be inconvenienced by my running off a different clock, or ignored.

That book was easy to read, but hard to care about.

It also featured a little disclaimer at the beginning, distancing the author from the views expressed. I hope we can do better.

are you suggesting that believing in God might change God? That may be the single most blasphemous thing I've ever heard.

ivan

The temperature difference also improves the efficiency for energy reclamation systems. Whether you end up mimicking geothermal on a small scale, or put turbines in exhaust stacks, the sustained savings over the lifetime of the DC should be considerable.

ivan

If you built houses and bought a DeWalt, you'd be a fool. Makita is a far superior product, with better support.