Zack Morris was kind of a scumbucket.
Aaron Renn praises the boring city, which he argues is mostly code for “stuff I don’t like.”
A WWII veteran was given a Viking funeral by the coast guard.
Brian Palmer’s piece on his secular discomfort with medically missionaries got a lot of (mostly negative) attention, though I personally applaud its honesty. Matthew Loftis looks at the role of evidence in medical missionary work.
Marriott apparently made a habit out of jamming signals to get you to sign up for its WiFi service. Turns out, not only is that scummy, but it’s against FCC regulations. (This is also why, for instance, movie theaters can’t disable phones to prevent disruption of the movie.)
Tanya Basu writes about the gender politics of pockets (and smartphones). It does seem to me that a lot of women’s clothes are impractical. Then again, I’m the guy who wears a phone holster and thinks everybody should be wearing utility belts (or at least belts, for chrissakes).
Yeonmi Park escaped from North Korea, and lived to tell the tale.
An estranged daughter in New Jersey took her parents to court over college tuition and won.
Batkid‘s cancer is in remission.
If there is a person that washes rent-control beneficiaries more than this guy, I’d love to hear about it.
My latent skepticism towards solar and wind energies revolve around price (not there yet but getting closer), scalability (progress!), and reliability (hurm).
The president of France is now easier to impeach.
This update on the state of DC Comics is giving me a headache. I have felt for some time that they needed to blow it all up and start over. Which it sounded like they were about to start to do, but they couldn’t even do that all the way, and now they can’t even do half-measures right.
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Aaron Renn praises the boring city, which he argues is mostly code for “stuff I don’t like.”
FWIW, I think there’s a difference between boring cities and boring suburbs and within both categories. In some cases, the suburbs are written off as boring because in many cases there isn’t much to do when compared to the core, and the same could be said for some small towns. So even though Arlington is seen as a boring suburb despite being filled with dense high rises, it’s still not as compelling when compared to the core in DC.
I’ve been to boring cities like Brussels and Ottawa, and they suffer simply by being compared with other more interesting cities. Brussels gets compared to Paris and Amsterdam, so it looks “boring” especially when combined with its stereotype of being a city of civil servants, but it’s still better than what passes in some mid-sized cities. Ottawa, OTOH, is compared to Montreal, and it’s probably the best example of a boring city with civil servants, and the presence of Montreal being so close by just reinforces the notion of people fleeing to Montreal when they want something interesting. I suspect that the classic example of Zurich is usually compared to Munich or Vienna, and they’re all high German cities, but the Zurich is the boring one with bankers while Munich skates by with Octoberfest and Vienna is seen as historic.
I’ll also note that it’s a bit ironic for Kirsten Gillibrand to mock Arlington as boring when she’s from Albany, NY…
When I first started working in Houston, I thought it was my personal definition of hell, starting with the terminally long drive from the airport through untold miles of ageing sprawl. But obviously lots of people love it, as its population continues to soar.
I suspect it’s not so much that everybody who moves there likes it, but they put up with it because of the employment opportunities and cheap housing. In contrast, there are people who like New York, but flee because it no longer works for them from a cost of living standpoint.
The “cheap housing” is not completely inseparable from the boringness, in my view. Especially when it comes to the type of housing that is cheap. It all lends itself to more sprawling, less car-centric urban design.
FWIW, I should note that even in New York, the word boring is thrown around by Hipsters who prefer Brooklyn, or long-time residents to describe the changes in Times Square or the loss of local businesses to corporate chains, upscale restaurants and retail, and banks. So even in the capital of excitement, things can be boring…
Zack Morris was kind of a scumbucket.
You know, if he wasn’t, the show would have been awfully boring.
This is true. Which is sort of what happens with excessive media criticism on sociological bases. This is from the right, but it’s been more notable on the left lately. The whole “Everything you love is ‘problematic’ thing.”
I have to admit that that attitude (with the different, but related, “Everything you like is too lowbrow and stupid”) is one of the things that makes me tiredest. Why this need to judge people on what are often largely aesthetic choices?
(And yes, I get the need for some people to tell people that, say, celebrating Christmas is wasteful of resources and such – but they don’t necessarily know how people live the rest of the year.)
I generally just want to say Shut Up, SHUT UP to people doing that.
Your Christmas example reminds me of when economist-types get obnoxious.
“Gifts are economically inefficient!!!!!!!!”