Mundane Ramblings

Yes, I’m just reposting Boing Boing content, but this is so ridiculous I just had to…

Government employees have been ordered to smoke 230 000 packs of locally produced cigarettes in order to boost the economy through taxation.

Um, what?  We want you people to smoke these cigarettes, NOW!   Get started, your lungs won’t blacken themselves.  The article mentions that about 1 million people die each year from smoking related illnesses in China, placing this effort squarely in the “short term solution” category.  Not sure if they have done any rudimentary math on the inevitable increased health care costs of this strategy, but it seems like a net loss kind of a thing to me.  They have actually imposed a smoking quota to make sure people smoke enough of these things.

Absolutely bat-shit insane.

A robot technician with apparently a rather rock-shaped head was almost the most recent casualty in the (slow to start but terrifying in it’s inevitability) human-robot war.  It seems that a Swedish factory was using robots to move head-shaped rocks to and fro for some strange reason unclear in the article.  A tech thought he had turned the power off to the robot to service it, but in a moment worthy of the climax of a movie, the robot moved (DUNH DUNH DUNH DUUUUNH! – that’s how you type dramatic scary music sounds) and grabbed Rocky the Technician’s head, apparently thinking that it was a rock, and wouldn’t let go.  Since he didn’t have a gun, grenade, or any other weapon of glamorized movie violence he just managed to escape from the homicidal robot with his life, if not his ribs (why did he break his ribs if the robot had him by the head?), intact.  Whoa, Dude.  It seems that the thing to do when you are hurt at work when you aren’t following any kind of common sense or safety procedures is to sue your employer, and that’s just what Rocky’s doing.

If there was any movie justice in the real world, a much more satisfying conclusion would be for Rocky and the Robot to go a few rounds and settle the matter once and for all, ending only with the utter destruction of one or the other.  That would be awesome. Instead, we all know that the robot was returned to service and life at the plant went back to normal, humans and Robot working side by side.  Or is Robot just patiently biding it’s time, waiting with inhuman patience for the next victim with rocks in his head to get a little too close…. DUNH DUNH DUNH DUUUUNH!

P.S. No robots were harmed during the writing of this post.

P.P.S.  By the way, Swedish Rock Robot of DOOOM is the very best band name I have come up with since Rubber Truck Nut Lover.

Incredibly, GM lost another $9.6 billion dollars in the last quarter.  Apparently it also set fire to $6 billion in cash, while it was negotiating for that $9 billion in government money.

What in the heck is going on here?  Does this seem insane to anyone else?  How do you spend $6 billion in three months, while at the same time begging with your hat in hand for $9 billion?  Thank god they kept the lights on, churning out crappy vehicles one after another.  They have been dealing with this for months now, and they still have only 6 vehicles out of 54 models available (54!) that even have hybrid as an option, and 4 of those are hybrid SUVs, like we need those somehow.  If this isn’t just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, I don’t know what it is.

Bravo, you guys are really burning up the carpet on this one.  I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, but the sad part is the folks that will suffer because this company can’t seem to pull it’s head out of it’s own butt.

I caught the first of a seven-day run of articles on terrorism on Slate, I highly recommend you read it too.  It’s going to start off at the “don’t worry” level and scale right up to the “pants-sh@!$ing terror” level by the end.  The article quotes Bruce Schneier, who I have mentioned here before as being an entirely sensible voice to listen to in this crazy world.

Stay tuned for the rest of the articles, I know I will be.

It’s hard to come up with a pun that hasn’t been overused here, so I won’t.  In the event that a gun toting maniac decides to come and shoot up the church knitting club in Arkansas, finally the ladies can now throw down and spray some hot lead back.  It’s now legal to carry a concealed weapon to church, so I guess the pastors and fathers of Arkansas had better look smart and not bore the congregation for sure now.

Thank heavens, it’s finally as Jesus had intended, I’m sure.

To be fair to Arkansas, it seems that they are not the first, in fact the article says there are 20 other states that allow churches to decide whether or not to allow concealed weapons.

Most of those states have “firearm blessing” services at the cloakrooms of the churches, allowing patrons to have their sidearms blessed while they themselves are attending church services.

Ok I made that last part up, but it doesn’t seem that far off now, does it?

Some days the slide into chaos seems more fun than others.  This isn’t one of those days.

While the “Big” 3 dwindle and shrink dramatically before our very eyes, it’s kind of hard to ignore the contrast of Exxon Mobil reporting their largest profit ever.  Ever.

$45 billion

That’s even after the price of oil tanking at the end of the year, falling 70% at times.  It makes you wonder just what the hell is going on here, doesn’t it?  Not that I want us to be buying more gas in any way, but that is one hell of a profit (profit, as in AFTER expenses) for a year.  If the price of crude was so high (and it was) wouldn’t profit go down?  Sure, you pass the cost of to your consumers, but this is still rather incredible don’t you think?  These guys really know how to milk  it, maybe someone should talk to them about that little global financial crisis thing.

Seems like there could be at least a little wiggle room in the price of a liter of gas, what do you think?