If there is a drug that will make you more productive to your employer, it will be embraced and encouraged.

If there's a drug that gives you pleasure, but doesn't bring a similar boost to a company's bottom line, it will get you sent to jail.

Let's not pretend that adderall in the workplace isn't just more capitalist social engineering. They'll exploit you any way they can.

If you get immunized, you also get ahead in live and work by unnaturally avoiding diseases. Lately there has been noise about forcing people to get shots no matter what they think. Personally I think you should have a choice. But if there are drugs for which beneficial effects dramatically outweigh side effects, I am all for their use becoming widespread. Adderall is definitely not it - current drugs are too blunt and uniformly carried thoughout the body, causing side effects to organs. The future is gene therapy or nano capsules that deliver active ingredients to only a targeted group of cells. On the other hand, people taking it now are volunteer guinea pigs who will help us one day come up with better and safer drugs.

So as it turns out... you do in fact fuck your wife?

Given that my 24 year-old daughter has my eyes and her mother's beauty and brains, yes, but just once and it was a long time ago.

Right, just like generalizing and stereotyping games and gamers as a "Choose your own patriarchal adventure" doesn't deserve all the criticism and derision it got.

Sarkeesian was completely unknown and had zero impact on games or gaming until GamerGate started shitting on the floor in fury that someone would dare think critically of games. Screaming and threatening and smearing shit all over the walls, Now she's famous, is taking in foundation money and her ideas are widely discussed among people who are in a position to affect games and gaming.

I hope you're proud you goddamn morons. You've set gaming back by a generation because you have poor impulse control (most likely the result of a poor experience during potty training). Every goddamn body hates you. From the e-celeb drama, it appears you even hate each other. You have become a punchline to a bad joke. Every single "op" or "happening" has either fizzled or has further embarrassed you.

Once you're lumped in with MRAs, child porn, swatting people, white supremacy, online harassment and stalking, you've kind of painted yourself into a corner. A very smelly, unpleasant corner that people try to ignore, like when a passed out drunk craps himself on the subway.

Shit to not be scared of: killer asteroids, ebola, and oh yeah, and homicidal AIs.

While I agree with your post, I am old enough to remember when, a worldwide ubiquitous information network that could be used to track everyone's conversations, correspondence, whereabouts, patterns of consumption and financial habits" was also "shit not to be scared of".

And here we are.

I don't care that there are people trying to take a long view, as long as we don't take them too seriously. Let them dream, let them write down their dreams and it might be of use to someone, someday, even if only as entertainment.

I also fear stupid people with too much autonomy.

Or with firearms.

So, less than one Iraq War then?

Less than one month of the Iraq War.

For me, this is one of the biggest comforts of riding a train. I use it for short city to city trips.

Not just city to city, but city center to city center. I can't tell you how frustrated I get when I take a 1.5 hour flight that requires 1.5 hours to get to the departure airport and 1.5 hours to get from the arrival airport to downtown.

Plus, on a train I don't feel like I'm being jammed into a can with a bunch of smelly sardines. Headroom is such a pleasure on a 4 hour trip. And any trip up to 4-5 hours is just as fast or faster done on a train.

Full disclosure: I grew up in a railroad family. My grandfather was an engineer and fireman (that's what they called the guys who originally shoveled coal into the boilers on the steam trains and then kept the diesel engines running, later) for the Rock Island and my dad was a machinist for the R.R. I have a full set of china from the dining car of the Golden Rocket and I'm drinking out of a heavy china mug from the original Golden Chief. I dig the railroad. My wife and I took our honeymoon on the trans-Canadian railroad in a luxurious railway cabin, and when you've had sex in a gently rocking sleeping car, the "mile-high club" doesn't really seem all that impressive.

It's not that Netflix doesn't want to show these old movies/TV shows, it's that the content owners often give Netflix scraps hoping to starve them out of existence. They see Netflix as a threat to their old business model and want them gone.

Yeah, we seem to have passed the point where our intellectual property laws encourage artists and innovators and have moved into an age when IP does little but hurt cultural development and future generations.

I mean, it took you 3 and a half hours to get that money in the first place where I crap out a Lincoln almost every 5 minutes.

I don't understand why gamers are considered such a toxic community. Everybody seems so nice!

So, apart from that, what did you think of Melbourne?

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but after eight buckets of lager he wanted to fight everyone in the place. Fortunately the bartender kept a tranq gun behind the bar for these apparently frequent occasions.

Is "Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye in the same way that "Blurred Lines" is by Marvin Gaye?

Yes. Yes it is.

Australia has lots of weird animals. Hell, they've got moths down there that are as big as cocker spaniels. Animals that look like Jim Henson rejects. They've got freakin' yowies down there that make Sasquatch look like Pee-Wee Herman. I didn't actually see a yowie, but after I saw something that looked like a three-way cross between a rat, a jackrabbit and Dwayne Johnson, I don't doubt for a second that they exist. I went there a few years ago and visited a huge national park and it was like Land of the Lost.

I mean, it's a nice place. Nice people. They find out you're from Chicago and you won't have to pay for another drink. Great looking women. Good food. If it wasn't for the annoying accents, you'd think you were somewhere on the West Coast. But the wildlife, man. Way too spooky for me.

When net neutrality splits the Comcast network from the Comcast/NBC/Universal content, and Netflix has to compete for bandwidth on a level playing field, the money to create original content is going to dry up quickly.

Don't you have that exactly backwards? "Net Neutrality" has been the default. The new neutrality laws don't create a level playing field, they preserve it. Why would Net Neutrality and having Comcast separated from the content creators make it harder for Netflix? They're already paying for bandwidth. And Netflix users are already paying for bandwidth. And with the incestuous relationship severed, what would Comcast's incentive to screw with Netflix be?

Or do you believe we've reached peak bandwidth?

Oh shit. I just realized I made a grievous error, in attributing the "Trouble Man" soundtrack to Curtis Mayfield instead of its true creator, Marvin Gaye. Curtis Mayfield did the soundtrack for "Superfly" (which by the way, is also unavailable to stream from Netflix, those bastards). If you are unfamiliar with the Trouble Man soundtrack, go check it out on Youtube right now. You will come away understanding why Pharrell Williams is a punk ripoff.

I just stuck myself in the leg with a pen knife to atone for this terrible mis-attribution.