Is Good

Unix as Religion

Self Help Books Written Specifically For Me (According to my Wife)

How Not to be Crazy
How to Unbecome an Asshole
Bathing For the Want to be French
How to Put Down a Smartphone
Drinks other than Coffee and Beer
How not to get the Same Hilljacker Haircut From Every Hairdresser
How to Maintain Your Teeth With a Toothbrush
How to Not Comb Your Hair like you are Mentally Disabled

Interesting Idea on Weeding Out Misinformation Networks

It should be possible to statistically prove that the contrarians "conspire" to coordinate their "cross-selling". The tendency for them to mainly refer to claims made by each other could be evaluated statistically. This would then be evidence of their "conspiracy to misinform" by adding the evaluation of the validity of the claims they make and "cross-sell".

The scam of using one person to say something that is then referred to by others as "proof" of something is even used by media groups like Fox News which will have one of their "speculators" say something then have their "News People" repeat the claim but frame it as something that "people are saying", when the only ones saying it are the ones inside their operation hopng to get "others to say it".

www.skepticalscience.com/curry-mcintyre-resist-ipcc-model-accuracy.html

The Credibilty Trap

A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.

The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious, organized hypocrisy.

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-is-credibilty-trap.html

“$20 for a forty-year-old research paper” is functionally indistinguishable from “gone”

I am so stealing that line.  Can be found in an article here regarding why computer indexes start at 0.