If your brother owns a truck, then I can assure you that he is always being asked to help haul things. That is the curse of being The Guy I Know With A Truck.

I want to say this as someone who generally enjoys Apple products but does find them a bit overpriced, so please withhold fanboy accusations in one direction or another.

An executive at our company recently gave a speech to our team about how impressed he was with Apple's sales theories. He says that he sees Apple as successful because they don't just make products that fit into a certain line - they make new products.

As in... what's an iPhone? If you had to describe an iPhone to someone, what would you say? You would say maybe, "It's a smartphone that functions using a touch screen instead of a keypad and has access to a very large number of small applications and games." Go into an Apple Store, though, and ask a rep what an iPhone is, and he'll say, "Well, it's the iPhone. Here, try it out." Then he'll give you one and let you play with it for awhile.

When you watch a commercial for the iPhone, you never hear things like, "blazing fast 1.5 Ghz speed," or "some of the largest capacity on the market." You also never hear the word "smartphone." When you watch an iPhone commercial, you see people browsing the internet or playing games or chatting on IM. By the way, you might recall how the original iPod commercials never said the words "mp3 player" - they just featured silhouettes of people dancing. And when has Apple ever referred to an iPad as a "tablet computer?"

Whenever Apple markets a product, they don't describe it to you. They tell you its name, they show you what it does, and they try to get you to think of it as a brand new device that has no relationship to anything else on the market. Getting back to our executive at our company, he talked about developing our product suite with a new name that hadn't been used before, and talked about how he'd set up their booth at the last major trade show to have tons of demonstrations, where people could just interact with the product rather than reading a ten-page fact sheet about all of the new and interesting things that product can do. We had a ton of interested customers at that booth this year.

You can't help but compare that stuff to Microsoft, who is always playing catch-up. "Here's OUR mp3 player! Here's OUR user-friendly OS! Here's OUR smartphones!" Microsoft markets its products as the MS iteration of products that always exist, giving them that special MS touch that makes those products better. Apple markets its products as... Apple products. I don't care whether you love or hate Apple or something in between - you have to respect that strategy.

I've been occasionally hearing this argument lately. "Yeah, we know these guys are doing bad things, but what if you find out that your guys are doing bad things, too? That would prove that you're even more evil, now wouldn't it!" It sounds like an attempt to conflate a hypothetical situation with what's actually going on. You know, things that there are no evidence for yet do not deserve equal weight with things that are actually evident.

This is in no way to say that I think the Obama administration is completely blameless and angelic in all things. If we were to discover that this firm was working on some of the same hacking and propaganda techniques on behalf of the government, then I'd damned well like to know about that as well. If the Obama administration was using these tactics on American citizens, I hope the investigation uncovers it somehow. And if you, parent poster, murdered a bunch of people ten years ago, I would hope that you are sent to jail for it. You know, if you did that. But in the meantime, we've got documents pointing to fraud being done by this firm on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, so why don't we start with that?

"The BBC has a clear agenda of promoting a multicultural society while being run by the oxford elite and including very little of the multicultural society and villifying anyone who dares question this."

If this is true, then that would be an example of someone complaining about something that they have no direct knowledge about. That's not a conspiracy theorist. The definition of a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who comes up with theories about conspiracies. For example, the crazy idea that Google is secretly a tool of the liberal government - an idea not backed by any direct evidence of Google's involvement, but simply by drawing lines between names on a whiteboard. Does anyone in Europe advance conspiracy theories in the way that Beck does, from a well-paid platform?

Most libertarians that I know of say that they want to decrease government regulations on businesses, because they consider these to be a distortion of the free market. When asked what will happen to a business that damages the environment or discriminates against people, etc., most libertarians respond that these businesses will simply go out of business because no one will do business with them, there will be boycotts, and the like. It's a theory that implies that governments should not be strong enough to restrict businesses ("government small enough to drown in a bathtub") but should be weak enough that they can be taken down by a coordinated consumer effort. It's a theory that businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals. And if such a thing were possible, then Rockefeller would have gone out of business.

Do other countries have conspiracy theorists with such depth and wide-reaching audiences that have radio or television programs?

Ah, so it was moderately pseudonym'ed. I abscond.

It's not about a "blood for oil" trade. It's that the architects of the war grossly underestimated the costs of the invasion, and part of the pitch for the occupation was that the cost of war would be minimal considering that the money recouped from Iraq's domestic production would help to repay for the invasion. This link has a few good quotes:

"The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment -- as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." -Donald Rumsfeld, 2003

I'm divided on this controversy, because I also know a couple of teachers. They post on Facebook, or they show up in IRC chat, and the number one thing that seem to like to talk about is how there's this one kid that they just absolutely want to strangle some days. Or lesser injustices like kids not doing their homework and such. Considering the stress of the environment and the lack of discipline in some kids, I think it's fair that teachers should want to vent now and then.

What bothers me more about the OP is that the teacher didn't blog behind a pseudonym or behind a locked Facebook post. I'm not sure that putting your actual name on a blog and making it moderately clear which kids you're dissing is a mature thing to do in any case.

A short reminder for those who forget - half of all teachers in America quit within 5 years.

Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school.

That's part of the problem - schools are often funded by local property taxes and the like. Which is to say, the richer areas have richer schools as more taxes get paid into them. You might want to ask why we have such a disparity in teacher salaries from school to school that have little to do with quality of performance.

Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.

The story goes, as I've heard, that one day a work consultant came to my company and offered to analyze their work practices to see if they could discover any positive or negative patterns. One thing they noted in their survey of the staff was that the more productive employees, the ones who had stayed on with the company for a decade, were the ones that had been referred to the company by a current employee. Since then, the company has offered a generous referral bonus for signing up friends.

Of course if you only listen to Rachel Maddow, then you were probably unaware.

If you think that Rachel Maddow doesn't hit Obama for this stuff all the time, then you're just as blindly partisan as you claim other people to be. Characters like Keith Olbermann, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Maher have been giving Obama shit since be got elected - from hiring much of Clinton's economic team with their heavy ties to the financial industry, to his backdoor meetings with healthcare providers promising not to bargain for lower bulk rates if they would support the reform bill.

See, the funny part about all of this is that people like Glenn Beck think that Obama is a socialist, an evil plant of the far-left set out to destroy all American values, but then they turn right around and accusing him of being in the pocket of big business without the least bit of irony. The guy is a centrist, and he's clearly positioning himself to work with the Republican Congress to try and get some compromises and get some things accomplished over the next two-year period - much to the chagrin of his Rachel-Maddow-watching supporters.

Maxwell Smart was more of a bumbler. Much of the time he did do something right or mildly clever to win the day by the episode's end.

This is what I was going to say. Get Smart was goofy, it was a farce, but the lead character was genuinely competent.

And Gilligan's Island? The Professor built radios from coconuts! Dude had The Spark!

+1 Foglio reference.