The Frustrated Bunny

Technology. Science. Politics. Geek. Etc.

Tagged: news

Personal / Politics / Technology

Gasoline prices redux

Back in June 2007, I wrote a blog post about gas prices. At the time, gas was $3.15/gallon. Gas is a little more expensive now (about $3.70-3.80 here in north Texas), but more or less everything I wrote then still holds true, with the possible exception of my really bad jokes. Nonetheless, I’m not planning on writing another post about gas prices until there’s something truly new and different about how everyone is reacting to it, but I felt that in light of the same old panic about $5/gallon gas and a decrease in demand for gas from the same...

Random

Disaster relief donations: Stretching your donation dollar

Donations toward disaster relief following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan are much lower so far than they have been for recent, comparable catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina. According to CNN, four-day donation totals for Japanese relief are approximately $25 million, compared to $150 million for Haiti and $108 for Hurricane Katrina. Several explanations have been offered for this, including so-called “disaster fatigue,” where people who would ordinarily give feel tapped out from all of the major disasters that have happened around the world in the last few years. The CNN article also provides other hypotheses...

Politics

Thanks, Nate.

I have been trying to put this into words for so long, I think I might want to kiss this guy for formulating a statement I couldn’t. In his post about Congress’ healthcare “time-out,” Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com said: “I don’t think the media has a liberal bias or a conservative bias so much as it has a bias toward overreacting to short-term trends and a tendency toward groupthink.” That’s pretty much the long and short of it. Except for maybe Fox News. They’re just shameless.

Personal / Politics

Learning my “left” from my “right”

So I just signed up for The Forum at CNN.com, made my badge, and realized that “leaning left” and “leaning right” have more to do with the respective parties’ positions rather than their traditional meanings. On Homeland Security, it seems that this disconnect was the most stark: I am shown as “leaning left,” when my reasoning behind opposing the PATRIOT Act, a border fence and warrantless wiretapping stems from strong beliefs in civil libertarianism (with a small ‘L,’ not to be confused with the Libertarian Party) and fiscal conservatism. The disconnect is also pretty strong on the issue of the...

Politics / Technology

A musing on gas prices…

First of all, let me start out by stating the following: I don’t own a car. I don’t drive. I don’t even have a driver’s license. I meet all of the legal (and most of the financial) qualifiers to do all of these things, but I don’t. The reasons for this are varied and numerous, and I shall not get into them. The price of gas, however, still matters to me. It should matter to everyone, really, as it affects more than just the wallets of those poor, ignorant souls who regularly drive their land-yachts with no other passengers for...