Month: December 2015

Quote of the Day, It Certainly Beats Spending It On Hookers And Cocaine edition.

Allahpundit has a definite point about the Reusable Rocket Race going on right now:

Gotta say, in the long list of ways, salutary and otherwise, in which spectacularly rich people have attempted to one-up each other historically, a race between [Elon] Musk, [Jeff] Bezos and whoever else to normalize space travel must rank pretty high.

For one thing, we’re going to get something useful out of this grudge match. Possibly several useful things, since Musk and Bezos are working on similar but not identical concepts. Also: they’re giving the money to a class of people (aerospace engineers) whom I like*. So, you know, win-win and we should all egg on Bezos and Musk to keep upstaging each other.

Moe Lane

*No, my wife isn’t in on this particular contest. But she could be, so I suppose full disclosure, and all that.

:tapping finger on desk: Last day for two-day… whoa. My dad did that.

The finger-tapping thing, that is.  He’d usually do it when Dad wanted to nudge somebody, but not too seriously; it was very much a humorous intent sort of thing. Usually he’d add a mildly sarcastic comment, because my father was a wiseacre from a long line of wiseacres and that sort of thing came to him as naturally as did breathing. And now I’m doing it, which I guess means that my kids will be doing it, forty years from now.  And they’ll have no more idea of which family member first came up with that quirk than I do; after all, my dad could have gotten it from his dad.

Huh.

Anyway, last day for two-day free shipping on Amazon.

Come. Let me show you something that is WORSE than ‘no gift.’

Feast your eyes upon this horror.

dnc

For when you want to say Hi. Not only did I forget to get you something for Christmas, I don’t even care enough to pick out what piece of hyper-partisan junk to give you as a ‘present.’ So I’m just going to give you this gift card so that you can give your contact information to the Democratic National Committee.  And the best part? I thought that all of this was clever.

And for the love of God, RNC: don’t do this.  This is hideous.  It’s almost Hellish, only not in an excitingly transgressive way…

Maybe people shouldn’t do crimes and THEN hike generic drug prices.

Just as a quick push-back to this title: “Martin Shkreli Says Drug-Price Hikes Led to Arrest.” …Sort of. The drug-price hikes in question led people to take a good, long look at Martin Shkreli, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, he did something that people could legitimately arrest him over.  And, hey! Sometimes you roll the dice and you get a crit, just when you need it most.

Moral of the story? Thou art mortal.

Background here.

Tweet of the Day, @SpaceX Landed Their Falcon 9 First Stage Successfully edition.

Let me be honest: I didn’t do anything nearly this awesome today. But that’s OK. It’s not always about me.

My assumption is that you haven’t seen Star Wars by Friday…

…you probably won’t be doing so any time soon. Up to that point, I’m not going to discuss anything that might be a spoiler, period; after that, I plan to talk about the film, with the usual [SPOILERS] tag of course. I figure that I can do that and remain essentially honorable.

Moe Lane

PS: I’ve had to unfriend one person on Facebook who just flat-out threw out the spoilers for the movie. Fortunately, I saw that AFTER I watched the movie, so I was disgusted rather than furious.  There’s being edgy, and then there’s just being a sykes. Don’t be a sykes.

Tweet of the Day, @Wu_Tang_Finance Smacks Bernie Sanders Upside The Head edition.

I’m not going to try for the last in trendy slang*. I’m middle-aged, amiable, and stout. But this is an awesome graph.

Free translation of graph: global poverty rates are not so much falling as they are in a power drive. Because FUCK COMMUNISM, that’s why. And that includes the ones who would be Communists, only they don’t quite dare to be public about it.

*Honestly, I don’t really know if ‘upside his fool head’ (which is what I originally wrote) is in fact recognizably trendy slang.  I’m not really what you’d call tuned in, if that’s what you’d even call it. I just hit the keys on the keyboard, and words come out.