21February
Metafilter contributor Loquacious warns of an advert trick.
I saw a new ad-trick MLM-scam today. It was an AdSense ad in my Gmail today that read something like "Tour the Red Planet in Style! Comfortable, modern zero G cruise ships. Experience Mars in luxury!"
Naturally, I clicked it. "Tour Mars!? What the fuck?"
Naturally, it redirected to some newfanlged mega-MLM, free-paid survey clusterfuck. If I wasn't using Firefox, AdBlock, NoScript, etc. I probably would have been hit with an IE driveby exploit, a zillion popups and goodness knows what else.
The error of Loquacious's ways should be obvious to all readers. All advertising is bad.
Language Log this week: In search of the millionth word.
Simon Jenkins on the Mad Publicity Disease affecting the government. Where's he been for the past ten years?
When you're at the check-out and you hear the beep, just think of the fun you could have on Chavez's Nationalised Supermarket Sweep! I'm going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalise them. So prepare yourselves! Remind us never to let Dale Winton rule by decree...
And still in glorified game show territory, M Sarkozy is popping up everywhere, this time in a virtual world. The customers of 2eme Vie are mostly saying, Nous ne échappens à cette bâtarde? Il surgit ici, il surgit là, il surgit partout. Ou est la bonne Mme. Royal?
An argument for charging token school fees bears considering. The best predictor of a good education is not funding, but independence; witness the government's perpetual meddling in education since the mid-1980s. Charging a nominal fee, with the taxpayer funding the less well-off, fosters some level of professional pride. And the strangest thing of all: this argument is being made by Charles In Charge.
The London Crass Spectacle will be a disaster. It's already over budget by more than 100%, it is removing allotments for no social gain, and now it emerges that the whole transport system will grind to a halt. Honestly, the people of Atlanta couldn't organise such a cock-up.
But Mister Tony Blair could. See also: his dismissive response to 28,000 people calling out his fat-headed plans for a national identity register (1) (2) (3).
