thene | la la la linkdrop

^stolen from Daisy, cause of much of my tab proliferation:

Ann Romney is a rich woman who has done nothing but hire nannies, and that is not tantamount to raising five boys, or even five houseplants. Sorry, but it just isn't. Are we to believe she is Shirley Jones in THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY, hauling five kids around in her used-schoolbus? Right. She has drivers, she has car-elevators, she has EMPLOYEES. And no, that is not "working"--in fact, the very idea is a JOKE.

Also in truth-in-titling, Thoughts On Fake Schooling:

Once upon a time, companies trained their own employees. Really! But as they grew bigger and bigger (read: greedier and greedier), they didn't like paying people to learn, and decided to cut out this (pricey) introductory first step. So, they successfully dumped this expensive first step onto the tech colleges.

Greenville Tech has a Michelin building, for instance, paid for by Michelin to train the Michelin employees. This way, the EMPLOYEE must pay for their own training! Is that capitalist ingenuity or what? The tech college makes a profit and Michelin has a continuous stream of already-trained, job-ready applicants. You can get hired right out of school, just like Goldman Sachs hires kids right out of Harvard.

There is never enough Daisy; On The Future Of Small Blogs - very relevant to ex-Livejournallers and anyone who's leery of the 'gated community' of Facebook:

Many Facebook people may not have any other online experience and it is entirely possible they have never before argued with people who disagree with them; thus, they promptly go into ideological apoplexy. This is marked by a lot of "you're crazy!" and "you can't be serious!" because they really do believe this. It's not rhetorical. You can tell they have not been exposed to real life ______ (fill in the blank). Atheists, anarchists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, communists, animal rights activists, whoever. They have heard of them, sure, but they've never met them before ... and they often respond by hitting the proverbial roof, flipping out and calling names.

(^this post also linked to A Rape In Cyberspace which everybody ought to have read by now as a) I have linked it so many times before now and b) it was published in 1993 and is still one of the two most compelling nonfiction stories ever written about internet culture. <---facts)

Also in Romneywank, from The Spectator:

...it is disingenuous on Romney's part to decry welfare dependency as a poison to be fought when he has been more than happy to go before the government, role up his sleeve and have another form of poison injected into his arm and then come back for more. Romney is equally disingenuous to suggest that any criticism of his tenure at Bain Capital is an attack on free enterprise itself especially when he never practiced free enterprise in the first place. Mitt Romney is what I would call a corporate welfare bum.

So printed news will allegedly be dead in three years which might explain why it's been left to fucking Esquire to publish this thorough & stats-laden feature that is thusly taglined: 'The recession didn't gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.'

As a testament to how bad I am at keeping up with stuff,

zarla's April Fools present to JRPG fandom; it's painful because it's funny because it's true, although I give the things I love more credit, which I should probably stop pretending they deserve.

For people who hate MPAA ratings, here's something from Salon from late March. oops.