When it comes to most things (technology excluded), I am a somewhat thrifty guy. Sometimes, I am exceptionally thrifty.

I like my convenience store fake-coffee. They have a double-extreme caffeine variant and, for a little over a dollar, I can be set for the rest of the day, altertness-wise.

The girl at the local supply store who used to sometimes give me coffee for free has moved on, alas, and now they expect me to pay for it and everything. They do have buy-five-get-one-free deals, though. Right now they have a special running where they punch it twice for every coffee I get. Rather than actually redeeming any of these things, I’ve been stocking up. So once I can’t get two punches for the cost of a single coffee, my next several will be free.

This is the latest in a long-line of ways I try to game the system. They punch the code regardless of what size coffee I get. So even when it’s not two-punch month, I end up saving those things up for when I want a really large size. Because, hey, that’s an extra ten or twenty cents.

It feels kind of odd to be gaming a system for ten or twenty cents.

It’s really quite strange to me how quickly Internet Sales Taxes went from being unthinkable to imminent. I think it’s time, though Dave Schuler is concerned.

Megan McArdle and Matt Welch disagree with Garance Franke-Ruta’s assertion that you can’t have major conservative newspapers because their markets are intrinsically liberal. Heck, I’d settle for agreement that the major newspapers at-all reflect their constituencies and yes, in fact, lean to the left. In an ideal world, I don’t think Franke-Ruta is right about the possible existence of major conservative media outlets in large – and largely liberal – cities. In the real world, this is something that conservatives have demonstrated that they can’t pull off under far less challenging circumstances.

I’m not sure how I feel about Newtown voters voting down more money for school security. On the merits, i guess I agree. But something feels… odd about it.

The EPI demonstrates the limits of “Everyone should go into STEM!” policy-making. That said, it’s hard to argue with the returns that many (not all, but many) STEM degrees bring in, regardless of whether they end up actually working in STEM or not. The question is whether the degree qualifies you, or it’s the new Rush Stamp.

T-Mobile is already paying a price for its no-contract philosophy. I guess I can understand where the Washington AG is coming from on this, though I still think it’s lame because T-Mobile is legitimately using a different model, and requiring that they state all of their costs up-front while the others get to tuck theirs in to the contract puts them at a disadvantage.

This is a pretty awesome story. Drop off some tablets into Ethiopia with no instructions, and a bunch of illiterate African kids, and within days they are using apps and within five months they hacked the operating system.

The New York Times (of course) reports on the race for elite colleges and the tradeoff between paying full tuition at one of those or accepting a merit scholarship somewhere less prestigious.

If this causes the downfall of the NCAA, they’ll have it coming. Not because they are evil or even exploitive, but because they are stupid.

Will “Peak Oil” (which I remain a skeptic of, in the large-frame) be solved by methane-hydrate? As Dave Schuler says, interesting times.

The future of smartglasses.

Some awesome engineers in Texas have created Mario Kart… for real!

One of the interesting things about watching Japanese Animation is their portrayal of American culture. So I got a kick out of this, which posits what our news coverage of other countries might look like in reverse.

Sonny Bunch takes issue with io9’s costume redesigns for the sake of making female superheroes… fully dressed:

In a post titled “Fully clothed female superheroes finally look like they can fight crime in the winter,” we are treated to the illustrated stylings of one Michael Lee Lunsford. Check them out, I’ll wait here. Get an eyeful? Which was your favorite? Personally, I liked Wonder Woman. Because nothing screams “Amazon Warrior!” more than creased khaki slacks stuffed into boots worn underneath a blue-and-red skirt with stars on them. Makes a lot of sense.

He then points to several examples of muscular male superheroes, often in tight clothing.

I get where Sonny is coming from on this, but I think he’s off-base. To me, it’s not just that there are scantily-clad female superheroes out there. Nor that there are some who wear tight clothing. I mean, I have a shirtless Hawkman poster in the computer room. And, as he points out, Hulk. Others wear tights – which itself is sufficiently common that it’s considered a part of the deal (“Men running around in tights”).

Where it does get somewhat problematic to me, though, is primarily the difficulty in finding female superheroes that aren’t showing off a lot of skin, and that to be honest they very much come across in a way to titillate boys and men in a way that Hawkman’s bear chest isn’t for the reverse (though, I should disclose, I never liked the bare-chested Carter Hall costume nearly as much as the Katar Hol one).

Ahhh, but is it a problem if the female costumes as well as the male costumes are designed for boys? That is, after all, who mostly reads comic books! Well, yes, to an extent. We can assign the rationale to grubby capitalism. We can assign it to the fact that an overwhelming number of writers and artists in the comic book world are male (or at least have historically been so). And we can assign the rationale of objection to living the political life.

Really, though? I want to be able to introduce comic books to my daughter. And I’d kind of rather she be able to find role models without dressing like a trollop in the process. I have (or had) this thing that I enjoy(ed) that I can share more freely without being self-conscious. Now, I suppose I could blame the self-consciousness on the uptight feminists or whatever, but given the way that guys respond to other men produced to meet female preferences (Justin Bieber!), I’m not sure I can.

The fan-service in female superhero costumes is not too much unlike, in my mind, the infusion of sex into entertainment. Gratuitous sex (or gratuitous nudity). I don’t mind sex in entertainment when it belongs, but I see it too frequently where it doesn’t.

And it’s sort of like that with superhero costumes. Just as too much entertainment inserts sex just for the sake of inserting sex, the costumes show flesh for just that purpose and often no other. Huntress’s costume went through an evolution through costumes that made sense in various contexts (Bertinelli’s first and second in a more acrobatic sense, her third offered protection) to one that was just about being fleshy (to be fair, the newest is more modest again, but it isn’t Bertinelli). Power Girl, also featured above, has some rather interesting aspects to her character overshadowed by her big chest and the window thereto. This just isn’t as frequent with the male characters and it’s not really that hard to avoid it with female characters.

Now, as for the costumes themselves, I do kind of agree with Sonny about Wonder Woman’s. I sort of agree that the khakis on Wonder Woman are strange. And I should say, I would object to attempts to make every (or most) characters in this fashion, just as I am objecting to the commonality. But I’d like to see more costumes like this, and fewer like the open-window Power Girl costume.

Henry Blodget is excited because he figured out how to make his iPhone battery last all day. I’d gloat, but that’s more than I’ve been able to accomplish with my Android phones regularly. But Android lets me have removable batteries.

One of the common theories about why PC tails are tanking is that they’re too good. Meaning, they are so good that they don’t need to be upgraded. Dave Schuler has an alternate theory.

I suppose it is supposed to give me the creeps, but I think this has potential to do some real good. On the city planner end, anyway. I don’t care if Verizon is making a profit, though I would prefer some measures be taken to protect my identity.

There is a lot of psychological muck in the attempts to make Muggle Quidditch a real sport. I mean, the athletes in the picture look fit enough, but I wonder how much of this is as a fallback sport. Or maybe I’m projecting.

Middle Classitude is about attitude more than anything else.

Utah is allowing organ donation from prisoners. The article states that it’s a thorny issue. I’m not so sure, though I would be concerned about blood or marrow donation.

Dave Schuler’s thoughts on obesity are worth reading. Southerners may not be fatter than the average American so much as they are more honest about their fatness.

Conventional wisdom is that skipping breakfast is a bad dietary strategy. I know that breakfast helped revolutionize my weight-loss efforts. But apparently the conventional wisdom may not be right.

On the efforts to free the nurses. I think mid-level providers as substitute docs is where this is all going to end up. The trick is going to be to get people to go along.

I ran across the Space Jam website a couple years ago. I can’t believe I saw that movie at the theater. Free tickets will get some people to watch some pretty stupid things. Anyway, The Verge has an article on old, relic sites like Space Jam and Dole/Kemp.

This is indeed a really awesome entrepreneur story. I love Sriracha sauce.

Apparently, the real problem with the hookup culture is that the sex is bad.

A look at the effects of high speed rail by looking at China. One of which, interestingly, is a dispersed population.