Sympathy for the trolls: do everyone a favour and walk away from fights online

Everybody's been a troll at one point or another. Sometimes we know when we're trolling, but mostly we're just having a bad day (or week, month, year) and we take it out on someone else.

Sometimes we take it out on customer service representatives on the phone. That's the trolling I'm particularly guilty of, and the one I'm most ashamed of: for some reason I always find myself railing at the phone company. (Which phone company? Any of them.  All of them.)  Thankfully, although those conversations are recorded, they aren't (yet) transcribed and posted publicly.  (Now that would make people behave better on the phone.)

But mostly, it's a case of Duty Calls (when Someone is Wrong on the Internet) and we allow a disagreement to escalate.  I had one of these happen to me today, and I (for once) didn't make it worse.  I was proud of myself because I responded with grace and humour, attempted to defuse the situation, and didn't respond when it got truly nasty.

Instead of mixing it up and making things worse, I went for a walk with my husband and dog, where we saw flames peeking out of a big paper recycling bin.  My husband got someone to call the fire department while I ran to find a fire extinguisher, and then another when the police had used that one up and the fire had reignited.  Very exciting, but at least the fire didn't get out of control for very long before the firefighters arrived:

Later I was especially pleased that I didn't bite because I looked at the troll's Twitter account and saw that he was genuinely upset, having left the forum because of poor quality conversations (apparently a pattern he is experiencing). A woman I know once cried in frustration, "why is it that wherever I work, there's always some bitch who makes life miserable for me?"  Indeed.

Nothing I said could have made it better: he needed me to be the villain.  Okay then.  But that doesn't mean I had to feed the fire; I didn't need to correct him, I didn't need to have the last word, and I didn't need to humiliate him.  He took care of it himself.  And it turns out I really did have better things to do.

In closing: not the most mature choice of videos, but hey, gotta be me.

"Fire! Fire! Come in through the back door...
Fire! Fire! I want to be a fireman... and handle your hose."

Bankers cautious on Eurozone breakup

While some banks are calling for contingency plans in the case of the breakup of the Eurozone, a large majority of investment banks, hedge fund managers, and responsible commentators are saying "hold on a minute."

"Where am I supposed to put the money?" said Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. "As CEO, I'm committed to maximizing corporate profits, and while Goldman Sachs will obviously make bank on this one that will make the real estate bubble look like a pinprick, I personally haven't even figured out what to do with my bonus from that yet."

Most economists agree that a breakup of the Eurozone would mean an immense realignment of riches, and complain that the term "percent" is becoming particularly unwieldy in describing the distribution of wealth. "My friends and I can't even explain how rich we are anymore. Saying 'We're the 0.00001%' is too hard to understand," lamented hedge-fund manager Peter Thiel. U.S. lawmakers are studying proposals for mandating use of a new term "permega", in which percentages would be replaced by fractions based on a million, as part of the recently introduced Division Is So Hard (DISH) Act.

Tax experts welcome the possibility of change, saying that they are running out of zeros when expressing tax liability to their clients. "You need to pay 0.0000001% of your income in tax this year" is just too hard for many of my esteemed colleagues to follow, said H&R Block CEO William Cobb. "Keep in mind, most investment bankers have graduated in the past 5-10 years from top educational institutions in the United States, and although they all got straight As and graduated at the tops of their classes, so did everyone else."

Although momentum has been significant on the DISH act, with ten co-sponsors in the Senate, opposition is growing. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is leading the charge against such a change, arguing that math isn't the problem and the tax code itself is at fault. "We can't keep applying the same logic, putting another zero in front of the tax burden of our nation's most productive workers. My smartest staffers tell me that by simply putting a minus sign in front of the tax rate we could reverse the trend and start getting those numbers under control, especially for workers in the affected brackets. We wouldn't have to invent a new symbol, either."

Notwithstanding these efforts by legislators to soften the blow, plans are proceeding apace to launch new currencies in place of the Euro. "We're still trying to work out how we can absorb all of the wealth of the Euro, as well as all of the wealth in the new currencies that will be introduced," said Mr. Blankfein. "We applaud the efforts of our friends in European governments to include us in discussions on how to build a variety of efficient banking systems that will benefit world economic growth."

However, Mr. Blankfein sounded a note of caution on current U.S. legislative efforts to ease the transition. "Of course we appreciate all of the help we can get, but right now that's up to the European Union. The U.S. government should stay focused on efforts to finance the next round of bailouts."

Greenspan gets a clue after the damage is done

From Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation in today's New York Times:

Facing a firing line of questions from Washington lawmakers, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman once considered the infallible maestro of the financial system, admitted on Thursday that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves without government oversight.

Whoopsie!

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Oh no, he's *distressed*. Well, fuck me with a chainsaw, it sounds like the poor man is suffering! Everybody should be so concerned about Alan Greenspan's legacy while we pick up the ruins of our financial system and economy. I am not sad to see that irrational cult of personality come to such an ignominious end.

U2 joins the middle-aged establishment

U2 sold out a long, long time ago. That's healthy, everybody sells out sometime (except maybe Gus Hall) – but there's selling out, and then there is wallowing in middle-aged greed and unabashed contempt for the people who ultimately give them their money, as does U2's manager in an official statement on behalf of the group. I've long since stopped paying to go to their shows, and the discs I bought in the last century sit at the back of the cabinet, tired and irrelevant; but ever humble, Bono believes that U2's music will "last 100 years":

"You know I'm still hungry," said the 45-year-old winner of 14 Grammy awards. "I still want a lot out of music."

a lot... of money. That explains the weird simultaneous push for copyright extension and debt relief: Bono wants the third world wealthy enough to keep him fat on royalties until the next ice age.

LaCheese Gourmet

We had a gourmet experience yesterday, at the intersection of U.S. Highway 29 and I-94: we lunched at LaCheese.  We had seen the sign on our way to my folks' house, and had screamed in delirium, and my mom said that my cousin Mary had been talking about it as well (that sign is apparently quite the freak magnet).  So we got to meet the inventor of chili cheese fries, and we beat a fellow hipster to an irony-drenched saturated fat-fest.
The hostess was very friendly, though a bit deaf; when we asked for menus, she directed us toward the washroom.  It turns out that the adjacent gas station has no washrooms, as there are signs within the restaurant admonishing non-customers to buy something.

So we got seated and checked out the menu: pizza filled a third of it, and the most intriguing item was "LaCrust": cheese-stuffed double-layered pizza.  My mom asked for a salad (not on the menu) and the hostess (also the cook, bartender, and part-owner) offered to make her one with her ingredients on-hand: which turned out to be iceberg lettuce. I got a pepperoni pizza (playing it safe) but didn't go for the special: second pizza half-price, third pizza free! It was toaster-oven-bar-pizza, in the grand tradition of Tombstone. Mom and Dad got hamburgers (freshly microwaved) and Adolfo hit the jackpot with LaChicken.  Dad also ordered the MexiFries, which our hostess told us they had invented one night from ingredients on hand: french fries, taco "meat" and melted cheez goo. (Delicious, for the record.)

Smut in The Star

I was shocked and appalled when I read Francine Kopun's column "Toronto family plays tourists in their own city." After all, it contained actual, unveiled references to bare buttocks and oral sex! Honestly, it ruined the entire paper for me today. Such columns should obviously have flourescent warnings ("WARNING! SMUT!") printed above them to shield the eyes of the innocent such as myself. After all, a newspaper should always cater to the most prudish, intolerant, and sheltered reader (such as myself), regardless of the subject matter or the intended audience.

Though I sympathise with the author's predicament at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at an (adult-only, nocturnal, big-city) comedy club, I say shame on her for dirtying my poor, chaste mind with such thoughts and images. But really, what did she expect to encounter in an evil, libidinous metropolis like Toronto, much less in such dens of iniquity as an art gallery (shameless libertines!) and a comedy club (humour is the devil's work)? Frankly, she was fortunate to escape with her honour and her life. However, she must be condemned for dragging the rest of us down with her. Shame!