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>>I’d rather impale myself on a fence post than to live in any of the
>>places where you can buy a white bread 3 bedroom for 95K.
Well, that’s the majority of America. If I were a Republican, I’d say “love it or leave it”. Since I’m not, I’ll allow you to choose your own option.
And personally, I’d rather live in a white bread 3 bedroom $95K house than in a cookie-cutter white bread 5 bedroom McMansion for $500,000. I have a lot of better uses for that extra $405,000.
>>You’ve got me chuckling out loud in my cube.
>>Stop it. You’re hurting me.
Scottie, take your tongue out of OFTLO’s bunghole.
And if you work in a cubicle, how do you afford Manhattan real estate? Mommie? Daddie? Or do you have 1/2-dozen roomates?
#31 – And personally, I’d rather live in a white bread 3 bedroom $95K house than in a cookie-cutter white bread 5 bedroom McMansion for $500,000. I have a lot of better uses for that extra $405,000.
Well, on THAT point we most assuredly can find common ground, but I’ll still take urban living over rural life any day of the week.
#32 – Scottie, take your tongue out of OFTLO’s bunghole.
Hey… I happen to be a pretty funny guy and I have fans. Scott surely isn’t licking my ass by merely laughing at yet another of my many well written posts.
#33 OFTLO
“Well, on THAT point we most assuredly can find common ground, but I’ll still take urban living over rural life any day of the week.”
That is so foreign to me. I have such a hard time understanding why anyone would actually want to live in an urban area. The noise, crowds, lights, pollution, congestion, lack of stars at night. Its just not for me.
I live in the middle of nowhere where you have to drive about 10 miles to get to the closest grocery store and sometimes that seems too close for me! LOL
“Well, I realize we all have different values, but I’d rather impale myself on a fence post than to live in any of the places where you can buy a white bread 3 bedroom for 95K.”
OFTLO, you blue state liberal. I have lived in five states (Michigan, Missouri, Arizona, upstate New York, and Texas) and they all have decent housing values. This you-pay-to-live premium there makes no sense to me unless you absolutely have to work there. Why pay seven figures for housing when you can hop on a plane for a $100 and get a day’s worth of the best NY City, Chicago, CA, or the East Coast has to offer?
Most Americans who can work anywhere in the world still don’t get it though. The best, cheapest place to live is in South America, specifically Buenos Aires. You can buy a house in the heart of the city for $100k, get the best steak you have ever had for $5, meet the prettiest women in this hemisphere (Brazilians may argue that point), and live like an absolute king on $4k a month. Oh, and did I mention a live in maid and cook run $200 a month? If I were single, I would be down there tommorrow.
A million buys you 2 acres in California; it buys you 20,000 acres in Argentina. People who think California is the shit have never been to Patagonia. I’d take Patgonia over Carmel any day.
#32 – MM,
Scottie, take your tongue out of OFTLO’s bunghole.
Sorry if I was making you jealous.
And if you work in a cubicle, how do you afford Manhattan real estate? Mommie? Daddie? Or do you have 1/2-dozen roomates?
Um … obviously if I wanted to add that to my post, I would have, so it’s really none of your damn business. You have your three categories, pick one that makes you feel better about your hick life and live with it.
BTW, the rich traders on wall street (not the mega-wealthy, just the ones getting the 20 megabuck boni), don’t even get cubes. The desk is practically shoulder to shoulder. They like it that way.
The general rule for anyone to afford to buy in Manhattan, which may or may not apply to me, is:
1) Decide on the minimum possible space in which you can live.
2) Decide on the maximum amount of money you can possibly afford to spend.
3) Settle for 10-20% less space and pay 10-20% more money.
4) Jump for joy at being able to live in one of the truly great cities of the world.
#36 – me,
I should add, if you can’t find anything that meets #3 above, sorry, but keep trying to scrape together a larger down-payment, maybe you’ll make it.
>>They like it that way.
Yeah, sounds real nice. I gotta admit, paying 30x the housing costs for the same salary you’d make in Chicago, that sounds real great! Kudos!
>>Jump for joy at being able to live in one of the truly great cities of
>>the world.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, Scottie, but Manhattan is so Last Century. Prices for the 50 square foot apartments may be excalating into the stratosphere, but I have not met a soul in the last five years who would go anywhere near Manhattan. Not without a $500K job, a driver, a parking spot, and AND OFFICE!!!
Heh.
#38 – MM,
Pretty hard to meet Manhattanites out in some little Levittown somewhere where all the little boxes are all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same. And, yeah, Manhattan doesn’t have the grit (or crime) that it had in the 70s, but is still a lot nicer place to live than East Bumfuck. The idea of driving 20 minutes to load up the car with baloney, wonder bread (it’s a wonder anyone eats it) and american cheese just isn’t my idea of the good life.
Chicago’s a nice city too. But, I’m betting your 95K ticky tacky is no where close to any real city. It’s just a total waste of once beautiful landscape. With 6.6 gigapeople on the planet, we need to live stacked on top of each other. And, living in NYC immediately cuts one’s carbon footprint to a third of that in the rest of the country. Doesn’t sound last century to me.
As for a driver in NYC, why the hell would you want to drive in the city??!!? Yeesh. Walk. Take the subway. Ride a bike. When you live in a city, there’s no need to push your fat ass from the couch to your SUV to drive to the Stupid Market. Compare your 95K house in East Bumfuck’s walkability index to any neighborhood in Manhattan or Chicago.
http://www.walkscore.com/
(tangent)
One more point about NYC being last century though, at least it matches our tax rates for the wealthy and business (de)regulations. Why not roll everything back to the unbridled capitalism of the 1890s?
Oh wait, did this tangent actually come back to the main topic of this thread?
(/tangent)
#35 “The best, cheapest place to live is in South America, specifically Buenos Aires.”
You have a good point – so how’s the crime rate? That could be a deal buster. 🙁
Cheers
>>Compare your 95K house in East Bumfuck
Sorry to disillusion you, Scottie, but I don’t live in East Bumfuck, and I don’t live in a $95K house. Most of America does, though. Love it or leave it. In my city, I use my car about once a week (for going out of town); I can walk to everything I need (grocery stores, restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, recreation), PLUS I don’t have to pay $1.2M for a studio apartment.
The last straw for Manhattan was when cousin-marrying Giuliani “cleaned up” Times Square. Watching the hookers and the people going in and out of the “Live Nude Girls” places was at least entertaining; turning it into an urban East Bumfuck full of overpriced Disney restaurants and Olive Gardens took any “cachet” that the city had and swirled it down the crapper.
But hey, you’re there. I don’t blame you for trying to justify it. Somehow.
#35 – This you-pay-to-live premium there makes no sense to me unless you absolutely have to work there.
How do you put a price on a thing that in your heart you call home?
Oh, and Scottie; my “walk score” is 96/100, based on that link you sent me. And I didn’t even have to buy a $1.2M studio apartment to get it. Or live in a gritty, dirty, nasty city with no alleys. Life is good.
>>Um … obviously if I wanted to add that to my post, I would
>>have, so it’s really none of your damn business.
I’ll take that as “Mommie and Daddie helped me”.
Thanks.
>>where all the little boxes are all made out of ticky tacky and
>>they all look just the same.
Oh, and one more thing, Scott-O; if you actually know anything about that Malvina Reynolds song, you’ll know that the South San Francisco “little boxes” she was writing about are now going for upwards of a million bucks. Ticky tacky included. That’s another waaaaaaaaaay overpriced city. But at least San Fran is still cool. Manhattan? Way too 1980’s for my taste, and it’s gotten so much worse since then.
#8 #9. The 1961 song Marvin, sung by the Limeliters, chronicles the life of thrifty wage slave Marvin, who eventually is inveigled into taking a credit card … and before long takes all his cards past their limits. When the cops lead him away after his ride with “starlets” on the airplane he chartered, he says “I don’t mind at all … I sure had a crazy swinging ball !”
OFTLO, I was in LA about two years ago. Took some kids to Disneyland. I was shocked at how obese everyone was. I remember when California and LA in particular was associated with fitness and wellness. When I started talking to people about how much housing cost and how stressed out everyone was with regards to having to pay for housing, I realized they were a lot of folks dealing with their anxiety through food consumption. The thing about all the “great places” people talk (NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, and Florida) about is how damn crowded they are. The kids got tired of the lines at Disneyland and wanted to go to Chuck and Cheese and that place too was mobbed. I am not sure where you live, but if I lived in California, I would have to spend all my time working just for my family to have a decent home. Living elsewhere gives me more time for leisure and to spend time with the family. So to me, it is not just the quality of location but the quality of life. The price I place on my home is therefore how much time I got to spend in the home versus how much I have to spend working.
#40, Buenos Aires is really pretty safe. I have heard of the occasional pickpocket, but I walked around the better parts with no fear at all. The worst cities for crime by far in SA are Rio and Caracas. People in Rio brag about NOT getting mugged it is so common there. I was constantly looking over my shoulder in Rio as a friend of mine got beaten and mugged there.
The safest big city in SA is Montevideo in Uruguay. It is probably safer there than in any city in the U.S., and it too is dirt cheap with great food, but the women are not of the quality of BA or Brazil. Montevideo is just a short boat ride away from BA, and Uruaguay also has the most famous resort in SA, Punte del Este. That city was the background for one fo the Bond films.
>>Wrong again. It was a reference to Levittown.
Scottie, you’re way too east-coast-o-centric. “Little Boxes was DEFINITELY not writen about any of the Levittowns. I hate to quote Wiki-whatever, but all the on-line resources (with the exception of ONE you provided, which say “allegedly”) state that it was about a San Fran-area suburb.
>>Little Boxes is thought to be inspired visually by the houses of
>>Daly City, California, as Reynolds lived in nearby Berkeley.
Why on earth would somebody who was born, raised, and died in the Bay area, who got a BA, MA, and PhD from UC Berkeley (the town in which she lived ) write a song about something THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY? When she had the little boxes made of ticky-tacky right down 280 from her front door?
Sorry to bust you, Scottie, but you’re busted.
>>Funny, then you’re just blowing out your ass saying how great
>>that lifestyle is. Clearly you’re not willing to live it.
Did I ever say that lifestyle was “great”?? I don’t think so. I just said that $50K/yr would buy you a house in a lot of places, and that’s what most Americans have. Just not in Manhattan.
>>As for Time Sq., if you like the peep shows, they just moved
>>up the block on eighth ave.
Again, did I ever say I “enjoyed the peep shows”?? I think not. I said it was entertaining to watch people slinking in and out of them. And they certainly added more to the former mystery of Manhattan than wall-to-wall Olive Gardens, TGIFs, and McDonalds.
>>Cool, you beat my walk score of 93. More power to you.
>>But, you didn’t do it for 95K I’m sure.
No, I didn’t. But then again, I don’t make $50K/yr. I was talking about the median American. I can afford a somewhat more ostentatious home, because I make more than the national median. But even if I made $500,000/yr, I wouldn’t go near Manhattan with a 100-mile pole.
#50 – MM,
Cool with us. I don’t actually recall reading an invitation from anyone in Manhattan to you. I doubt you’ll be missed here.
>>I doubt you’ll be missed here.
And I doubt I’ll miss your gritty, dirty, money-driven city without alleys. And its Olive Gardens, TGIFs, and Disney restaurants.
And bummer about the Malvina Reynolds song. Next time, maybe you’ll try to know what you’re talking about before you speak. A word to the wise.
#52 – MM,
Wow, you really are getting to be a complete asshole. I post four links showing you I’m right about the song and you still can’t admit when you’re wrong. It really makes you seem like you’ve got some growing up to do old musty one, especially as this is the second time. Seriously, do some soul searching. Figure out why you just can’t seem to admit to ever being wrong about anything.
>>Wow, you really are getting to be a complete asshole. I post four
>>links showing you I’m right about the song and you still can’t
>>admit when you’re wrong.
No Scottoline, you posted ONE link that said the song was “allegedly” (flying in the face of all evidence) that the song was about Levittown. in spite of the fact that Malvina Reynolds was born, raised, educated, lived, and died in the Bay area. The rest of them were just links to shit about Levittown(s).
Ask anybody who knows anything about folk music what the fucking song is about, Scottster. It’s about SF suburbs.
Get over it, grow up, and move on. You’re only making yourself look like a bigger asshole than you already have. You were WRONG. Dead wrong. Malvina Reynolds probably didn’t even know wtf Levittown was.
Face it: You live in a shitty overpriced city, you were wrong about “Little Boxes”; you ought to just quit when you’re behind.
#47 And, 1.2 megabucks will get you a slightly smaller than average 2 BR in Manhattan, even at current rates. It’s about 1,000 sq. ft.
Damn, that’s expensive.
Shanghai is getting that way – Prime apartments in financial area in Pudong (East of the river) are about 2 Mill for about 250sq m. (2690 sq ft) so much better than Manhatten but for China.
Free standing houses in Shanghai? Millions plus…
In other areas in Pudong its an easy 1/2 Mill and up for 190m2 (2045ft2) apartment…
Outside of Shanghai down the gravel road from the Piggly Wiggly its much cheaper though.. LOL
Cheers
Way to love they neighbor Mister Pustard.
Would you mind posting a link to back up your story about the damn song? Or, never mind, as usual, your argument is so self-evident that it just must be true. I’ll stand corrected about the damn song and move on.
As for your opinions of New York, we really don’t give a flying fuck what you think of it. An additional 900,000 people are expected to move here by 2020. I love living here. If you don’t like the city how does that change my life? But, you really are showing yourself to be quite the fucktard by assuming that your opinion on an obviously subjective issue is the one true and correct opinion. You really should get some counseling. You’re among the most insecure individuals I’ve every had the misfortune of communicating with.
>>An additional 900,000 people are expected to move here by 2020.
This is about the third time you’ve cited this statistic. Does it make you somehow feel better that 30K people per year are foolish enough to want to live in overpriced squalor? Tee hee!
As to the “Little Boxes” song, would you just give it up, Scottie? You are DEAD FUCKING WRONG, and you just won’t admit it. Try these links on for size
http://tinyurl.com/yr66uw
or
http://tinyurl.com/3a38wm
I’ve been listening to that song for 40 years, have heard Pete Seeger talk about it, and I NEVER heard anything about Levittown. If the song had been about the LI Levittown, the words would have been something like “shitty little suburbs, shitty big city, no alleys and nothing good for you….”
So pipe down, boy. Get over yourself, and just admit you were wrong.
#57 – MM,
Thank you. See, now I don’t have to take your word for it about the song. Now I can read something about it for myself. Then I can say something you are personally incapable of saying. Read carefully and learn from this.
Mister Mustard, you were right. I was wrong. The song is not about Levittown.
See how that works? You should try it some day. It’s really quite painless. Einstein was wrong about the cosmological constant AND wrong about quantum mechanics. Being wrong once in a while does not make you a bad person.
Now, will you admit that you are wrong about there being just a single opinion about a place as complex and large as New York City? Or, are you sticking with your statement that there is only one truly objectively correct opinion of the place?
BTW, why the hang-up on alleys? Why would they be a good thing? I can point you to a few in Manhattan. I try to avoid them.
As for suburbs, all suburbs are shitty. They have all of the negatives of rural life combined with all of the negatives of city life and none of the advantages of either. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the Reynolds song probably deliberately does not name the particular location because it’s unimportant. It’s about AnyBurb, USA. And actually makes a stronger statement about the people all coming out the same than the houses.
Well, thank YOU, Scottie.
In that spirit, I will admit that I was just busting your balls about NYC. I DO think it’s waaaaay overpriced for what you get, but it can be fun. Although in recent years, unless you get way out in Brooklyn or somewhere, it’s become too much like a theme park. So you were right. There are many opinions about NY, and some people love it. I don’t quite understand that (unless you’re Donald Trump or Leona Helmsley), but I recognize that it’s true.
As to the alleys, it’s not so much that I want to go down one, it’s just the somewhat unsavory tenor of a city with no alleys (I know there are a couple of them, but not very many at all). There are some things that should take place out of the public view (ie in alleys); in Manhattan, it all takes place right out there on the street. You go to Chicago or Boston or Montréal or SF, and the streets are laid out with an alley between each two streets. It just doesn’t seem right to have river-to-river store fronts. Besides, where are young drunk guys going to go to take a piss, if there are no alleys? They sure can’t go into a restuarant and use the bathroom, unless they are willing to pay for a $30 lunch.
#59 – MM,
The starbucks on every corner or any Barnes and Noble have become the de facto public restrooms for the city. It is unfortunate that we do not have better recognition that humans are biological creatures. Public restrooms and water fountains are in short supply. B&N has both and is generally every 20 or 30 blocks or so, which is fine when walking around.
BTW, there are still a few restaurants that are not the chains that you mention. And, we probably still have a greater variety of cuisines, even in Manhattan, than can be found in any other U.S. city, even Chicago. Though, I have to admit, the original Pizzeria Uno is really fantastic. The chain blows.
http://www.menupages.com/
The above link has 6255 restaurants in Manhattan. I doubt it’s complete. I haven’t found a major chain in the list. Probably some are though.
Yep, looks like quite a large selection! Although 6255 restaurants in a 23 square mile radius (272 restaurants per square mile) might be a little overkill. And I didn’t notice any Somali restaurants on the list. In some parts of my town, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting either a halal butcher or a Somali restaurant. We don’t have any Swiss restaurants, though.
If I find myself in that neck of the woods any time soon, I’m going to Brooklyn to check out Franny’s (295 Flatbush Ave.). It got a great review in the NYT this week.