Runaway Future

This guy won the Powerball.

He won $258 million bucks

He’s got $28.96 in his bank account, three kids split between two women (not counting his girlfriend and her two sons), a shit ton of unpaid bills, owes his buddy money for a truck, just got a job working at a convenience store… oh and he doesn’t have his two front teeth.

He actually said he was going to talk to “people who know about money” to decide if he takes the scheduled payments or the lump sum.

I’m sorry and this is going to come out really negative… but this guy is screwed.

More screwed than he was before with less than 30 bucks in his account.

If his notable quote is about talking to “people who know about money”, someone is going to take advantage of this guy. It’s a shame, because he seems like a nice guy and hopefully that will help him out later on. But I’d be extremely interested to see what this guy is up to in five years and what his quality of life is.

To go from nothing to having everything in his wildest dreams (worth noting that one of those dreams is taking all the kids to Disney World)… that’s going to be a huge shift.

Back at the end of October, coyotes killed a girl walking in the woods in Cape Breton.

Ever since, it seems that the province has been looking for revenge. So, a couple of weeks ago they brought out the coyote bounty program.

First off, this is hilariously self-serving:

MacDonell confirmed he is planning to offer a bounty worth about $20 to members of Trappers’ Association of Nova Scotia, whose members caught 1,900 coyotes last year without a bounty.

…

Ross White, vice-president of the Trappers Association of Nova Scotia, said he opposes a bounty, unless it is offered only to trappers.

“We’re generally the best qualified to handle harvesting coyotes,” he said from Truro.

Of course they are. Even if they don’t kill any more than the previous year, he just earned his members almost $40,000. Solid work. That’s right, the trappers are already killing coyotes like nobody’s business. The only difference is they’re getting some cash for it now (and maybe will kill some more).

Oh and then the kicker is that practically every scientist everywhere is saying this won’t do a lick of work. Hell, Nova Scotia had a coyote bounty program once upon a time and they discontinued it because it didn’t change a thing!

When faced with this proven science, the response from the government was that they had to be ‘pro-active’ and try something.

There’s a great quote by George Santayana that applies to this: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Actually there’s another good one from Albert Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I caught this article in the Metro on Friday:

McAfee software goes berserk, locks up PCs around the world

A pretty interesting story, about how a bad virus definition targeted an essential file of the Windows operating system, causing problems for thousands of computers. But this particular passage caught my eye:

About a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island were forced to stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms. The hospitals also postponed some elective surgeries, said Nancy Jean, a spokeswoman for the Lifespan system of hospitals. The system includes Rhode Island Hospital, the state’s largest, and Newport Hospital, the only hospital on Aquidneck Island.

Jean said patients who required emergency care for gunshot wounds, car accidents, blunt trauma and other potentially fatal injuries were still being admitted to the emergency rooms.

In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem.

At first glance, that seems pretty serious, where this computer screw-up caused problems not just with hospitals but also with the police force.

But that should have never happened.

Things like emergency rooms in hospitals and state police forces are called necessary services. It’s a cool name, because that means they are deemed necessary for our society. Things like this should never happen for necessary services. But, McAfee isn’t to blame here. Sure, they screwed-up, but the IT personnel for the hospitals and the police force should have had things in place to prevent this from every happening.

When I worked for the RCMP, we had testing procedures for any and every update coming through, whether it was for Acrobat Reader, the antivirus or Windows itself. Nothing got rolled out to the actual computers that police officers used unless it was tested and made sure that things like this wouldn’t happen.

Cripes people, recognize the seriousness of this situation and do your job! I kinda hope that people got fired or at least chewed out for this, but likely they just hid behind the adage of ‘blame McAfee’ and made it sound like someone else’s problem.

So through my Tumblr, I came across this article from the Onion: Al Gore places Infant Son in Rocket to Escape Dying Planet.

The basis is a comparison between the Superman mythos and Al Gore’s talk about saving the planet, with Gore playing the role of Superman’s father Jor-El. The article itself is pretty old, coming from July of 2008, but it got me thinking…

In June of 2006, I made this post. In that post, I talked about basically the same thing.

The Onion article goes a bit farther in depth than I do, but it’s pretty cool parallel thinking.

Today, I got groceries, a relatively innocuous activity that everyone does and isn’t really worth recording here.

But maybe it’s because I’m procrastinating folding laundry or writing an article, or maybe watching Food Inc last week really got into my head, but in any case, there was something about my trip to the grocery store worth noting that has caught my interest.

As part of my groceries, I picked up some Rice Krispies and some Miracle Whip.

Here’s where it gets interesting (I swear…):

It cost me less to buy a 700mg box of Rice Krispies than it was to buy a 350mg box.

It also cost me less to buy a 950ml jar of Miracle Whip than it was to buy a 475ml jar.

So, now I have a freakishly large amount of Rice Krispies and more Miracle Whip than I know what to do with. There is no logical reason to own this much mayonnaise but I could use just half of that container, throw out the rest and I would still be saving money.

Something’s wrong with that.