“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

Take a minute from your day to read the whole thing, Paul Ford wrote it for you and he is wise. Though I probably would have gone with Why Was I Not Consulted because it captures the officious tone that I imagine this sort of sentiment being delivered in, and also can be shortened to WWINC, which is at least pronounceable and oh, god, I’m doing it right now aren’t I?

All three of these have been percolating about in my head, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that the cost of America’s recently-concluded latest war, in both human misery and the fiscal sense, has barely even begun to be tallied.

You Have Been The Victims Of A Terrible Swindle

[B]efore you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job. […]

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!”

It’s the infrastructure, stupid!

Basically the US, as a country, is like a rich person that spent an amazing shit ton of money on the best imaginable security for his house, ringing it with multiple moats, missile launchers, thousands of full-time heavily armed guards with the best possible weaponry and equipment, and on and on and on. In fact, this person went so overboard that he borrowed from anyone who would lend to him for all this crazy security. And while the multi-decade project of building this security apparatus was going on, he neglected to pay any attention to the source of his wealth. […] And by the time his security was perfect, he knew nothing but fear and hadn’t yet realized that he no longer had anything worth protecting.

We’re currently at the point where the creditors can still be kept from collecting by the massive military machine we’ve built, but eventually we’ll run out of money to pay them, too. And then the whole house of cards comes down.

And, most tellingly, the contrast of a country actually investing in its people and its future vs. a country that is basically bankrupt. Their Moon Shot and Ours – NYTimes.com

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers […]; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

If that wasn’t clear enough: we are hugely fucked, y’all.

Display your foursquare checkins on Google Maps the easy way:

1. Visit your foursquare feeds page. Right click the KML link and copy it to your clipboard (don’t download it).
2. Visit Google Maps and paste the link you copied into the search box. Hit enter.
3. There is no step 3.

I’m still obsessed with The Awl’s abortive semi-series of conversational, profane recipes, so much so that I think all recipes should be written that way. So I’m going to.

1. Brown a butt-ton of mushrooms, like a pound and a half, in butter (or olive oil I guess but WHY DO YOU HATE FLAVOR) over medium heat. Make sure you salt and pepper them, duh.
2. Put some chicken (or veggie) stock, garlic, basil, whatever you want in there with those sumbitches and cover them, reduce to low.
3. Boil some pasta, then drain it when it’s done.
4. Pour the mushrooms, pasta, a pint of ricotta cheese, more salt and pepper, and some parmesan (oh, say, two cups… to start with) back into the now-empty pasta pot. Stir it up. Add some of the pasta water if the ricotta wants to be all clumpy. Which it probably will.

Now eat it, it’s done. You have nothing but a pan, a pot, and a spoon to wash later, congratulations.

Remember the hoverchairs from Wall·E? Pretty much that.

A “comparison between the number of user generated references to ‘pizza’, ‘guns’ or ‘strip club’.”

That big dot of yellow, representing strip clubs, on the border of South Carolina and Georgia? That’s Aiken county, where I grew up.

Yeah, I have no idea either.

Stupid Fight – The Awl vs The New York Times.

Update: not surprising, given nytimes readers’ limited vocabularies.

Was wondering if this was even possible, and as usual when I wonder about something Android-related, someone has already done it. Awesome.

I could give a shit about the iPad, but Yay! Greg Knauss wrote something. His certainty regarding his main point is hilariously misplaced and he used the wrong “it’s” once, but Yay!

You’ve probably seen that video demonstrating Photoshop CS5′s upcoming ‘content aware fill’ feature. This is a shot-by-shot remake, using features which are already available, for free and Free, in The Gimp. I find this hilarious.

Duh? I seem to recall a study from many years ago saying the same thing, but as is the way of these things, I now can’t find it.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this article is what it recommends instead, the “leg drop,” which (though I’ve never heard it called that) is what I’ve been doing for core exercise for a few years. It can very easily be done while you’re watching TV, which is important since that’s pretty much the only time I ever get any exercise.

The description they give of the activity is succinct and accurate: “lie flat on your back, with your hands at the base of your spine for added support. Raise your legs up at a 90 degree angle, then slowly lower until they’re only inches from the ground. Repeat until your stomach burns and you want to throw up.”

In shocking news, Wal-Mart is still evil. Their commitment to energy efficiency and exploring renewable energy sources has done a lot to greenwash their image with the general public, but as a business their first and foremost goal is still to screw you.

Tiny chart sums it up pretty well. I keep wishing more people paid attention to the farm bill, or were even aware of it. Our own goddamn tax money is killing Americans in droves.

Short answer, yes.

“There are aspects of the food industry that are reminiscent of tobacco — the sowing of doubt where there’s no reasonable doubt, funding of front groups, use of so-called experts, claims that new products which are safer for consumers are available, and the claim that they are not marketing to children.”