Laurabelle's Blog

There are some pretty evil businesses out there, but as a business model I don't think there's much that beats the payday loan. (Pawn shops are close but not quite as bad.) Under the guise of customer-friendliness, these businesses exploit the ignorant and disadvantaged in order to charge them exorbitant interest rates, thereby leaving them [...]

I didn't pay all that much attention to Hurricane Katrina last week. She was a Category 1 for a few days (Florida got off relatively lightly this time), and as late as Monday it looked like New Orleans had been lucky. Floods are the Biblical natural disaster, but God had help in New Orleans this [...]

I just finished reading a fascinating article on Wired from November 2000 about an entrepreneur's plan to reduce greenhouse gases by stimulating phytoplankton growth with iron. It's a very interesting article. The idea of iron fertilization looks good at first, but it has the potential to screw up marine ecology very severely and to cause [...]

This has to be spam, but the purpose escapes me. The words in brackets are substitutions I made, in order to protect the inboxes and the eyes of the innocent. From: "rescyou@[somedomain].net" <rescyou@[somedomain].net> To: debian-user@[thisdomain].org Subject: you piece of [crap] Date: 24 Apr 2005 18:22:35 -0000 [Screw] off and die, you piece of [crap]. It [...]

I can be a twit sometimes: I would like to add that I find it very hypocritical when right-wing, conservative Christians pray for peace and mercy. Look at me complain about hypocrisy as I sling the same kind of wild, baseless stereotypes that I so despise when imposed upon my own side of the political [...]

Ian Hixie has a humorous take on research about the effects of pornography on psychological health, but actually the article is fairly serious and its subject potentially disturbing. I'm not talking about pornography (though I'm not a fan); I'm referring to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) trying to impose his conservative Christian agenda on the Internet. [...]

I'm listening to To the Point right now on KUOW, and Adam Clymer (Political Director of the National Annenberg Election Survey of the University of Pennsylvania and former chief Washington correspondent and political reporter for the New York Times) just said that only 23% of people who voted for Bush think that his reelection equates [...]

It looks like Gmail is putting pressure on Hotmail, because Hotmail just increased my storage limit from 2MB to 250MB. This, after my storage space had steadily dwindled over the six years I've had that account. Gee guys, don't be obvious about it or anything. And Gmail is still officially only in beta!

I found a hilarious article about the failure of Tim Eyman's Initiative 864, which would have cut property taxes in King County by 25%. Eyman's paid signature-gatherers only got 79% of the number of signatures necessary to get the measure on the ballot for this November. (Everyone who works at KCLS is relieved.) The funny [...]

Last night Jeff and I watched Das Experiment, a German film about the Stanford Prison Experiment gone horribly wrong. (Okay, the SPE gone even more horribly wrong.) Twenty men volunteer to participate in a two-week simulated prison experiment. Eight of them are randomly selected to be guards; the remaining twelve are prisoners. At first it's [...]