Archive for 1/23/2004

Post Office Stuck in Time Loop

Jan 23rd

Posted by David Veksler in [...]

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A leading physicist claims to have figured out why the U.S. Postal Service loses a lot of mail and delivers most of the rest late — post offices are “architectural anomalies” that cause time warps, wreaking havoc with letters, packages, sorting machines . . . and sometimes even mail carriers themselves.

While the Post Office is indeed stuck in some ancient pre-industrial era, a more likely explanation for why I had to wait in line for an hour to send a package this Tuesday is that incompetent government bureaucrats don’t have to care about the service they provide because of a coercive government monopoly that prevents infinitely more efficient private carriers from competing with them.

“Mandatory Masks for the Ugly”

Jan 23rd

Posted by David Veksler in [...]

4 comments

Federal officials who recently reported that over 140 million Americans are fat are now saying that at least that many are ugly. And the solution they’re proposing is a law that would encourage or even require “facially challenged” citizens to cover up with masks, Weekly World News has learned.

But the news isn’t all bad. According to sources at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, those among you who are real homely will be able to choose from a wide range of “beauty masks,” including Elvis in his prime, J.Lo, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

The dramatic move comes as the Feds are reeling from a global perception that most Americans are grossly obese when, in fact, only half are.

Updates

Jan 23rd

Posted by David Veksler in [...]

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I wrote my first Perl script today after three hours of fumbling around in a totally alien syntax. Score one for goal-directed action. I generally avoid Perl like the plague, but it was the only way I could find to do a bulk import into the MT email DB_File notify database. I’ve also written a script to export posts from a SQL/MS Access based database into the MT import format. Let me know if you want either. The scripts are for Mises.org Blog, which I’ve been configuring and tweaking the last two days.

I’m also working on the re-release of ObjectivismOnline.net, which should go live sometime in early February. I scrapped the old PostNuke CMS for Mambo, a clean, fast, and powerful CMS. The new website will feature a meta-blog, for which I am currently seeking writers. Here is the “official” announcement:

Do you want to take a leading role in America’s intellectual renaissance? Then consider joining the team at ObjectivismOnline.net. We are looking for contributors to a new pro-reason, pro-capitalism meta-blog. (A meta-blog is an aggregate web log consisting of original content and links to content at other sites.) We are also accepting essays, editorials, letters to the editor, and reviews to include in other parts of our website.

Interested individuals should contact .. me. The website is still a work in progress, but the forum is growing rapidly and being frequented by several Objectivist philosophers, notably Amy Peikoff, Greg Salmieri, and me :-)