A Cheery Thought for a Sunday Afternoon

According to this here chart, the USA is already more than halfway down the slope to oligarchy, likely in the banana republic model.

Good thing most of our elected idiots don't believe in numbers!

Behavior I Don't Want to Encourage

Since I'm a blogger who has a handful of people reading his rants -- even though those rants have been thin on the ground lately -- I get the occasional pitch from marketers, asking me to promote this whatzit or mention this thingamabob. I'm entirely in favor of people sending thing to me for free -- e-mail me if you have anything in that line -- but I'm grumpier about offers that don't include the sweet touch of the Package Fairy, or which have that faint whiff of shadiness to them.

(A few days ago, I was offered untraceable money via PayPal -- though, tellingly, it was only after the fact and "if the client was happy," which I assumed meant it was just as solid as it sounded -- if I would post a link, recommend it, and never mention that it was sponsored. I politely demurred, of course -- I probably could be bought, but I don't go that cheap.)

But, today, someone asked me to post an infographic about an oscilloscope. Why? I have no idea. I guess SF is congruent to real science, if you squint really hard, but that hardly seems like a good enough reason to hit me up for it.

It was completely random, there was no whisper of quid pro quo, and oscilloscopes are pretty neat. So what the hell -- here's an infographic about oscilloscopes.

The maker of that particular oscilloscope -- Tekronix, which I thought also made some kind of consumer computer peripherals (networking stuff, maybe), though their website shows only technical measuring tools and similar gee-whiz Buck Rogers stuff -- would really like it if you clicked here to learn even more about oscilloscopes, including a spiffy Tutorial page!

But the next time a marketer wants me to do something, I'm going to be looking for some tangible benefit out of it.

Chicken In Every Pot, 2012 Edition

Not only do I entirely agree with the message of the below infographic, I'm frankly stunned at its source: an blog about MBA programs. Dare we hope American business leaders might have realized that chaining people up for long hours doesn't really acomplish anything?


Naaaaah.

(Clicking should enlarge the image, if it's not large enough to read.)