pipeline
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy
{ A Dallas woman has filed a lawsuit seeking six figures from a former neighbor and landlord for damage she says was caused by cigarette smoke wafting through adjoining walls of her high-end townhome. Cary Daniel and her mother Chris Daniel no longer live in the townhome, and said they need to wear respirators and goggles when they return to the townhome to retreive their belongings. | Dallas News | full story }
I got a color tv, so i can see the knicks play basketball
YouTube may pay less to be online than you do, a new report on internet connectivity suggests, calling into question a recent analysis arguing Google’s popular video service is bleeding money and demonstrating how the internet has continued to morph to fit user’s behavior.
In fact, with YouTube’s help, Google is now responsible for at least 6 percent of the internet’s traffic, and likely more — and may not be paying an ISP at all to serve up all that content and attached ads.
Credit Suisse made headlines this summer when it estimated that YouTube was binging on bandwidth, losing Google a half a billion dollars in 2009 as it streams 75 billion videos. But a new report from Arbor Networks suggests that Google’s traffic is approaching 10 percent of the net’s traffic, and that it’s got so much fiber optic cable, it is simply trading traffic, with no payment involved, with the net’s largest ISPs.
Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon
{ Calf with Cats for Ears | Abandoned Veterinary School of Anderlecht, Belgium via animal NY | More: The Horror Labs }
Global 2. This is the Chicago Center watch supervisor. Please understand we’re doing everything we can.
The European Union is funding ambitious programs aimed at monitoring human behavior in an effort to identify deviance and pick out potential terrorists. The implications for privacy are myriad. (…)
One system involves a network of cameras in airports that can measure your speed and alert the control room should it seem excessive. The system knows terrorists tend to be nervous and almost never stop for coffee. This makes a speedy traveller a suspicious traveller.
You may also want to think twice about using the airport bathroom more than once. There is a good chance you will be picked out for an extensive security check.
Why don’t you be a man about it, and set me free
If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.
It’s funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they’ve changed completely. It’s expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women — largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income for the family’s bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater — and their choices have seldom been harder.
I said I know it’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it
Adelphia Communications, Barings Bank, Enron, HealthSouth, HIH Insurance, Hollinger International, Tyco International, WorldCom/MCI, Xerox…the white collar crime list goes on. But, did the executives at these companies start out as criminals or did they head down the slippery slope to criminality one misplaced step at a time? According to research to be published in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, there are twelve steps to white-collar crime. (…)
The researchers have broken down the process of white-collar crime into 12 steps, with steps one to four explaining how the “players” first encounter and support each other and begin to spot the opportunity for illegal activity.
These first four steps are: The perpetrator is hired into a position of power. Second step, personality and life circumstances affect the perpetrator in such a way that they recognise their power. In the third step “drivers” who turn a blind eye or condone certain activities come into view. The fourth step sees passive participants recognizing an opportunity.
In steps 5 to 8 the truth of escalating illegal activity is hidden.
In step 5 reluctant participants are drawn into the web of deceit by the “leader”. In step 6 distrust of the other people involved emerges. In step 7, the perpetrator recognizes they have their accomplices in a vulnerable position and begin to exploit that position. In step 8 bullying tactics become increasingly common as illegal goals are aimed for.
In steps 9 through 12 the perpetrator’s actions are challenged and publicised revealing the white-collar crime.
In step 9, the crime continues, but the perpetrators, trapped in their insatiable addiction, become more blaze, taking bigger risks, and seeking more lucrative exploits.
In step 10, an undeniable paradox becomes apparent, as the participants’ values and their behavior are now obviously in conflict.
In step 11, a whistleblower steps up to the mark and the leader loses control.
Finally in step 12, blame is laid at the feet of the perpetrator at which point they either deny everything or admit their guilt and seek forgiveness by laying bare their activities.
photo { Finlay MacKay }
Biff Wilcox is looking for you, Rusty James. He’s gonna kill you, Rusty James.
One reason that real violence looks so ugly is because we have been exposed to so much mythical violence. (…) Contemporary film style may give many people the sense that entertainment violence is, if anything, too realistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. … [They] miss the most important dynamics of violence: that it starts from confrontational tension and fear, that most of the time it is bluster, and that the circumstances that allow this tension to be over come lead to violence that is more ugly than entertaining. (…)
A second myth is that fights are long. (…) Whereas most film and stage dramas compress real time to gloss over the dull and routine moments of ordinary life, they expand fighting time by many times over. (…) In reality, most serious fights on the individual or small-group level are extremely short.
{ Randall Collins | via OvercomingBias | Continue reading }
And start again at your beginnings
Sorry for the blackout.
The server has crashed and everything it was hosting has disappeared. There was no backup — besides the google caches. We’ll have to start over from scratch. (The new shelton wet/dry now looks more like a sand mandala than a Jeff Koons artwork.)
I’ll keep publishing every friday. Thanks for your continued support and readership.
New URL is newshelton.com/wet/dry/
