elfs | News you can't use...

First, I found this: 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do. My score is zero. On the one hand, my reaction is "of course; I haven't drunk hard liquor since college." On the other hand, y'know, there's a certain machismo to a few of these.

I guess I'm now old enough and distanced enough from those years to appreciate Mark Twain's maxim on regret: "Twenty years from now, you will regret the things you did not do far more than you will regret the things you did."

Nasty politics: The U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Martin Sembler, is currently suing activist Richard Bradbury for invasion of privacy. Bradbury apparently went through Sembler's garbarge and found something rather amusing, which he then attempted to sell on E-Bay. The object? A penis pump.

Bradbury's complaint against Sembler is rather ugly. Sembler was apparently the political and financial clout behind a string of drug rehabilitation centers, most of which were shut down after accusations of child abuse began to emerge from many of them, and Bradbury is part of an action to prevent these sorts of programs from being implemented in the future.

And thanks to The Agitator for pointing out that a story in The Onion turns out to be true: Asymmetric Social Interaction in Economics: Cigarette Smoking Among Young People in the United States basically proves Second-hand smoke leads to second-hand coolness.

Oops: The Japanese version of Social Security, Social Insurance, uses voluntary payments, although it's apparently very hard to opt-out if you're employed by a corporation. If you're self-employed, however, there's rarely a penalty for not paying into the system. Most young people believe that the Social Insurance system won't be there for them when they retire and they aren't paying if they can at all avoid doing so. This includes one actress who recently starred in a series of commercials about the benefits of Social Insurance.

And finally, an email in Bill Gates' inbox once read: "There is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system. It is this switching cost that has given customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy version at times... It would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move." [Emphasis mine] This is from the EU's report on Microsoft's anti-trust action. Read the summary.