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Gay married couples, free of gender stereotypes, have fairer relationships and hence happier marriages

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:10:30 -0700

Gay married couples, free of gender stereotypes, have fairer relationships and hence happier marriages:

Among other results of a detailed, decade-long study comparing gay, lesbian, and heterosexual marriages. They also found that “lesbian bed death” really does happen, that gay couples are most likely to assign power based on how much they earn, and that in general, heterosexual women are the least happy in their marriages, since their marriages are less equal and they get the short end of the stick.

jsparkman: cumaeansibyl: Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:58:00 -0700

jsparkman:

cumaeansibyl:

Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite characters in sci-fi ever because he is Luc Besson’s vision of the hetero sex symbol of the future: a flamboyant, emotionally labile man who wears skin-tight leopard print or decks himself in roses, a man who accessorizes with big jewelry and dabbles in cosmetics. And the ladies love him. Everything about him screams “gay” according to our stereotypes, but he’s portrayed as a 100% straight sexual dynamo.

Besson is one of the few directors I’ve seen who actually recognizes that our ideas of sexuality and gender performance might have changed drastically in the future.

Exactly.

I dunno if I believe all that, but Ruby Rod is one of my favourite movie characters ever.

Fun fact: all the costumes in Fifth Element were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Sergeant Accused of Secretly Filming Female Cadets

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:14:47 -0700

Sergeant Accused of Secretly Filming Female Cadets:

shortformblog:

A sergeant first class on the staff of the United States Military Academy at West Point faces charges for allegedly videotaping female cadets without their consent, sometimes when they were in the shower, according to Army officials.

The Army is contacting a dozen women to alert them that their privacy may have been violated and to offer support or counseling as required, officials said.

The suspect, Sgt. First Class Michael McClendon, faces charges under four articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for indecent acts, dereliction in the performance of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, and actions prejudicial to good order and discipline. Sergeant McClendon, who had been assigned to the school since 2009, was transferred to Fort Drum, N.Y., after charges were filed on May 14, Army officials said.

This makes three major cases of sexual predation to emerge from the U.S. military this month, following the announcement of pending sexual assault and battery cases against members of the U.S. Army and Air Force.

But yeah, it was definitely letting gay people serve openly that was going to destroy unit cohesion in the military.

"Dear God, take down the site! Take it down! Hackers can sweep right in, right click, and look at our..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:51:59 -0700

“Dear God, take down the site! Take it down! Hackers can sweep right in, right click, and look at our code!”

- (via clientsfromhell)

A tornado survivor, pressed by Wolf Blitzer to "thank the Lord" responds that she's an atheist

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:10:12 -0700

A tornado survivor, pressed by Wolf Blitzer to "thank the Lord" responds that she's an atheist:

“We are here, and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.” /via @lauraolin

The immigration reform bill has made it out of senate committee

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:55:19 -0700

The immigration reform bill has made it out of senate committee:

It’s mostly intact but an amendment that it should recognize same-sex couples for the purposes of immigration has been thrown under the bus, a move that I am TOTALLY OKAY with as long as SCOTUS gets its shit together in June.

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and first Tumblr employee, writes hopefully about the acquisition

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:40:16 -0700

Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and first Tumblr employee, writes hopefully about the acquisition:

He analogizes to YouTube, which Google bought as a late-stage company in need of monetization, and I think that’s a good analogy — Yahoo will give Tumblr the runway it needs to monetize without the desperation moves that would drive users away. (His repeated comparisons of Karp to Steve Jobs seem premature, but what do I know?)

Teen Wolf Season 3 Trailer. I’m looking forward to this to...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:43:07 -0700

Teen Wolf Season 3 Trailer. I’m looking forward to this to an embarrassing degree.

Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:44:59 -0700

Exclamation: Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!:

yahoo:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr! We promise not to screw it up.

The Syrian government is paying al Qaeda, with whom they are at war, $2.1m/month to not blow up a pipeline

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:10:22 -0700

The Syrian government is paying al Qaeda, with whom they are at war, $2.1m/month to not blow up a pipeline:

The EU raised sanctions on Syrian oil in an effort to fund the moderate rebels, but instead Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al Qaeda affiliate, gained control of the oil fields and is refining oil in open trenches, polluting the environment and funding itself while the Syrian government — with whom they are nominally at war — pays them via a middleman so that the government can retain its own funding. Meanwhile, fighting between rebels and the government has mostly stopped so the rebels can fight with each other over control of oil fields. Clusterfuck does not begin to describe this situation.

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:49:23 -0700

Saroff's Place: On Yahoo & Tumblr: “We have vision, delusion and hallucination and I want to know which one this is.”

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:47:58 -0700

Saroff's Place: On Yahoo & Tumblr: “We have vision, delusion and hallucination and I want to know which one this is.”:

Saroff writes persuasively about why the Tumblr acquisition is not a good move for Yahoo, but I disagree:

The growth of Tumblr is going to be enormous, and Yahoo has the people and infrastructure they need to scale cheaply.
Give them time and they will figure out native ads. Twitter did without needing to slap banners on everything.
Tumblr isn’t a “blogging platform”, it’s a social network. Specifically, a social network where you can invent a new identity every week — something that appeals to teenagers today and will continue to appeal to new teenagers tomorrow. Unlike blogging platforms, social networks have network effects that keep people around.

saroff-nyc:

“We have vision, delusion and hallucination and I want to know which one this is.” - quote anonymously attributed to Yahoo COO Henrique de Castro while an exec at Google.

Looks like Yahoo may buy Tumblr for the sticker-shock price of $1.1 Billion.

Wow. Since Yahoo CFO Ken Johnson…

And it’s done. You may now proceed to blame Yahoo for...

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:06:24 -0700

And it’s done. You may now proceed to blame Yahoo for anything bad that ever happens on Tumblr in future.

According to TechCrunch's source, Tumblr has "only a few months of cash runway left"

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:10:00 -0700

According to TechCrunch's source, Tumblr has "only a few months of cash runway left":

We already know why Yahoo is interested in acquiring Tumblr; now we have a clue why Tumblr is interested in being acquired. I’ve previously incorrectly said here that Tumblr made $13m in profit last year; that figure was only their revenue — they are expecting to be profitable in 2013, but evidently don’t have the capital to get there.

I don’t usually care about cosplay but OMG Billy and Teddy...

Sat, 18 May 2013 12:02:00 -0700

I don’t usually care about cosplay but OMG Billy and Teddy IRL.

Tumblr runs fine, is managed nearly invisibly, and there is little user complaint about its usability. There is nothing present or impending to save tumblr from. It doesn’t even crash any more. So where is the comparison between flickr, which needed saving, and tumblr, which already functions properly and requires little change?

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:18:32 -0700

I’m not saying that Tumblr needs saving; all I’m saying is that being acquired by Yahoo doesn’t mean Tumblr will get ruined.

But I guess the root of your question is: if they don’t need saving, why are they getting acquired? And I think the answer is because $1.1 billion is a lot of money, and investors like getting their money back sooner from an acquisition than later from the slow climb to profitability.

To the people complaining that "Yahoo will ruin Tumblr like it ruined Flickr"

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:09:00 -0700

I am super bored of hearing this.

Could Yahoo have done a better job of managing Flickr? Absolutely.

In retrospect, if they’d been patient and poured money into it like Facebook did with their own photo-sharing features, Flickr might have been a lot bigger. (Facebook is by far the world’s biggest photo-sharing site, and tagged photos was key to its early growth, something Flickr didn’t add until 2007)

But that’s in retrospect. In 2005, it wasn’t at all clear what to do. Everyone in the industry was still feeling the burn of gigantic, unprofitable acquisitions prior to the great crash of 2001, so paying money for an barely-profitable site like Flickr still seemed like madness, even within Yahoo. So Yahoo focussed on making it profitable — and succeeded, which is no mean feat.

Could Flickr have done better staying independent? Absolutely no way.

And the way you can tell that for sure is that they let Yahoo acquire them. It’s not like Yahoo in 2005 had a great reputation; the only reason you’d do it is if you were out of money and out of options. In 2005, nobody was going to give Flickr the hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital they needed and hope for the best: it was exit or die.

On top of the bare financial reality, it is an open secret at Yahoo (my former employer) that Flickr’s internals are and have always been an architectural nightmare. They had no idea how to scale and needed huge investment just to dig themselves out of the technical debt they’d accrued. It could have been better, sure, but without Yahoo it would have been much, much worse.

Yahoo didn’t kill Flickr; Yahoo saved Flickr from itself.

Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:37:41 -0700

Yahoo Board to Meet Sunday to Consider $1.1B, All-Cash Deal for Tumblr:

I for one welcome our new Yahoo overlords.

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:03:00 -0700

Since 2004, Americans have been driving less

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:25:17 -0700

Since 2004, Americans have been driving less:

Ending six decades of nearly-continuous increases, this is good news for everybody.