Take a look at the add on top of the
page
that just came up when I searched for a phone number using QWorstQWest’s
DEX Online directory.
Hello? Reality check time. Yes, making the White Pages opt-in only would of course save trees. But, making the Yellow Pages such would save even more trees, because the Yellow Pages is an even larger book than the White Pages.
Hmmm, let’s see now. The White Pages
costs QWorstQWest money to print. The Yellow Pages makes
them money, via ad sales. Well, isn’t that a coincidence! They’re
trying to get you to lobby to get the book that is a loss for the phone
company, instead of the book that consumes more paper, phased out.
In my best Church Lady voice: How conveeeenient.
If there’s ever any doubt, consider this.
When Iranians used Twitter to organize their uprising, the ruling elite in the US chimed in with their approval, and denounced the Iranian government for being against free speech when they criminalized tweeting about demonstrations. Now they arrest people who do the same thing about demonstrations in the USA.
If you’re obsessing over how some news reports mentioned in sinister tones the cops finding (gasp!) a pound of liquid mercury in that guy’s house, read on.
Mercury is a very dense metal, denser than lead. A pound of it is slightly more than a fluid ounce of the stuff. Hardly a big cache. Heck, it could be nothing more than the sum total found in some old thermometers and switches. The guy’s a steampunk, after all, and steampunks are precisely the sort of tinkerers who can be expected to have a random collection of dusty old techno-junk around the house. Even if it was a reagent in a vial, so what? Mercury can be used for lots of things, most of them completely non-nefarious. It’s the only common metal that remains liquid at normal ambient temperatures, which is an amazingly useful property.
Really, now, nearly anything can conceivably be used for destructive purposes. For example, an innocent drafting pencil can be used to draw up plans for a bomb. I’m an anarchist myself, and I have a few drafting pencils floating around my place. Does that mean that I can now be arrested at will, because I have “bomb-designing supplies” in my possession?
In other words, the guy is being harassed by the Establishment for nothing more than his politics, pure and simple.
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