Category Archives: Business

Business, Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

A Modest Proposal

13 Comments

We must, finally, take effective steps to end gun violence:

I’m proposing that we campaign to reduce gun violence, and to meet our constitutional duty, by requiring that every member of the militia — which, of course, we’ll redefine to eliminate the obvious sexism and make it all adults — must own at least one long gun, one handgun, and 1,000 rounds of ammunition for each, or pay an annual $1,000 tax for failing to do so. As I pointed out the last time I brought this up, the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare makes it clear that it’s constitutional to require people to buy a product, so that shouldn’t be a problem. And, federal law would override the local laws in rogue cities like Chicago that prevent members of the militia from fulfilling their constitutional duty.

They can no longer be sanctuary cities from the 2nd Amendment.

Business, Culinary, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Terrible Nutrition Advice

10 Comments

More of the usual nonsense:

The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that at the 34 fast-food chains they analyzed, the average combo meal contains 1,193 calories, and that the quantities of sodium, saturated fat and sugar are through the roof.

But all a person has to do is hold the dipping sauce; remove toppings, such as cheese; and opt for water over soda — and you’ll be good as gravy, says lead author Kelsey Vercammen of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in an interview with Reuters Health.

The problem with fast food is not calories, or saturated fat, or sodium. It’s the bun and the potatoes. The only good advice here is water instead of soda.

Administrative, Business, Mathematics, Technology and Society

Email Problems

18 Comments

I’ve got a problem, that my system administrator won’t help me with. My Trash folder on the server has grown to several gigabytes, and there is no way for me to empty it. It slows down getting and deleting mail, but Thunderbird crashes when I even try to load it. Here is the helpful email I got when I asked to simply delete it on the server (which I can’t do, because I don’t have root privileges–on my own hosted server).

“You’ll need to access your email accounts with a proper email client from your PC to clear them out. We can’t just delete the mail from the server, then the indexes are messed up. You need to be properly emptying your trash. 

You have multiple Gigs of mail in the trash folders on the Simberg account. “

Note that this is nothing I don’t know, except I don’t understand why it would mess up indexes to delete the trash. Is that true?

[Update a while later]

OK, Tbird crashes, but I seem to be able to access it from Evolution. But there is no obvious way to empty it, other than to Expunge, which seems a little drastic, but maybe that’s what I have to do. And it doesn’t load all of the headers; it gets stuck at 99%.

[Update a while later]

Well, I hit “Empty Trash” in Evolution, and it seems to have done the job (even though Evolution says it’s still working on it).

OK, Evolution thinks it’s finished now. My next problem is that it’s not properly displaying my inbox. But now my web interface is much more manageable.