Drew Yates

Well, early twenties were interesting. I was an angry kid, teenager, and (obviously) college student. But life is better, I’m better, and I’m going to changing this website to reflect that. (as soon as I get around to it…)

I tried to renew my order for contact lenses online at the same vendor I’ve been using for two years. They have denied my order because “they contacted my doctor and my prescription has expired.” They can’t send me new contacts because contact lens sales are legally restricted as controlled medical devices.

I can’t see without my contact lenses.

I am so pissed. What possible benefit to the public could there be by restricting contact lens to prescriptions?  Is there some danger of illicit contact lens abuse? I hate the medical industry. Why am I forced to go to the doctor to renew a prescription for contact lenses when I don’t have to? If I had a problem, then I’d go. I don’t, so I don’t go.

UPDATE:

I read some of the actual law regarding contact lens sales at The Contact Lens Rule:
A Guide for Prescribers and Sellers

The verification process works like this: the consumer provides prescription information to the seller, who then submits it to the prescriber in a verification request. The prescriber has eight-business-hours to respond. If the prescriber does not respond within the required time, the prescription is verified automatically, and the seller may provide contact lenses to the consumer.

So, in other words, my old doctor explicitly told my provider not to sell me contact lenses to fuck me. Thanks, Dr. Robinson. I’ll be calling your office in a moment.

• Newton was deeply religious.
• Newton invented classical physics.
• Newton was wrong.
• Newton, in his own time, had no way to know otherwise.

In conclusion, nerdy, anti-social, intellectually-elitist atheists are annoying.

Karma is the sweet, sweet numeric consequence of contributing links and comments that other people appreciate. They vote: your submissions move up the list: you get more karma. Karma also helps us identify intelligent users from spam bots and trolls.

The digits which represent news.thinkgene karma are actually merely a physical, symbolic manifestation of a greater spiritual force of all that is internets. Not having karma may be excusable for small mammals and the senile, but for you, your failure to achieve a sufficient quantity of socially-awarded imaginary credits may suggest that you are a bad person and thus may affect your ability to achieve personally favorable outcomes regarding (but not limited to) the following:

• promoting content on news.thinkgene
• convincing others to trust your opinions about biology and genetics
• tax rebates
• home mortgages
• favorable interpretations of various religious prophesies

(yanked from thinkgene.com)

They are young adults and have been coddled by their parents to the point of being ill prepared for a demanding workplace. Morley Safer reports on the generation called “Millenials.”

Oh no, kids are smarter, more aggressive, and better connected than their older coworkers. The older guard, rather than thinking for themselves, desperately seek the authority of consultants. As a millennial myself, I promise you that those consultants and their motivational seminars are not selling nor appealing to other millennials.

The fact is, the traditional, time-consuming activities of the office have been automated by technology, and brute, unmotivated work in an office is probably thrash. Older employees don’t understand that the work they considered to be meaningful, valuable, and even virtuous is today a waste of time and energy. The new technology to avoid thrash-work like editing and copying documents, mass communications, and research, is beyond older generations, and so rather than valuing change, they consider they accuse the new generation of arrogance and immaturity.

But which is “better:” spending a week editing and mailing letters at the office, or a 30 minute email from home at noon? Which is considered “being a good employee?”

[ripped out of a Think Gene comment thread… because… well, see title.]

What really concerns me is that not socially respecting the responsible production of children is pushing the culture of nations towards what is not conducive to modern liberal values. Yes, demographic planning is politically and sometimes ethically challenging. But the alternative is (geometrically) worse.

See: LEBANON. Who were the Shiites a few generations ago? Lebanon was: Maronite > Sunni > Druze. Shittes were just some backwoods ghetto nobodies who had lots of babies. But thanks to the “magic” of geometric expansion: Hezbollah. Two weeks ago these “nobodies” piled into rickshaws and careened through Beirut in a delightful if a bit rowdy little weekend military adventure.

As liberal society, what are we going to do about that? Occupy Iraq because we can trust bunch Saudi sunni koran nerds are going to keep the shiite ghetto boys busy until everyone depends on good ol’ Uncle Sam? Oh wait.
Hezbollah Seizes Swath of Beirut From U.S.-Backed Lebanon Government [NY Times]

So, before I incur liberal American political damage here, I’m not really talking about USA as much as globally.

(Drew’s little reminder that these issues exist beyond the largely benign confines of NYC and SF / LA.) Sorry… I like(d) Lebanon.

Iceland Facing Meltdown as the Credit Crunch Sinks its Currency

Banks all over the world have spent much of the past few years devouring cheap money, but Iceland’s taken the whole thing to quite an extreme. Its big players - Landsbanki Islands HF and Kaupthing Bank - have been on an extraordinary borrowing spree, sucking in vast quantities of cash to fund lending and acquisitions across Europe and the United Kingdom.

Ah, so in other words, in a country of 300,000, a few too-risky banking transactions will sink your currency and end your independence for the foreseeable future.

I strongly do not recommend visiting the main page of this website.

Click’s YTMND galley

It’s recently popular in the press to write about how Iceland is happiest nation in the world. (No Wonder Iceland has the happiest people on earth, The Observer, John Carlin)

I visited Iceland last month on business for about a week.

Iceland seems great statistically because there is no national underclass. Most Icelanders would be considered “middle class” today in the United States: some college, literate, aspiring to home ownership, and employed in services.

In every other country, the national statistics are skewed by some underemployed, undereducated, and often foreign “labor class” (or worse, welfare class). There is no “ghetto” in Iceland (though strangely, graffiti is everywhere). Why?

Because every modern nation was at one time “industrial,” and industrial countries must import/create/preserve a labor class to work factories and plantations. But Iceland went from “frozen rock” to “modern service economy” in about 70 years.

I assure you that it’s not a magical fairyland where everyone is happy. It’s more like an American suburb of 250,000 (maybe Seattle?) where everyone is white and employed in an office… and a glacier/volcano/wind storm has trimmed away the unpleasant urban and rural elements and plunged them into the Arctic ocean.

Icelanders have the same hopes and strifes one would expect in such a suburb.

I sent my parents Paul Graham’s new essay “Lies” in an email in which I mentioned that I had been mean last year.

As in “stop being mean to your sister.”

Though while today, we mean “mean” as “nasty and cruel,” it originally meant “crude like a common peasant.”

So: “stop acting like how common people would act to their sisters.”

Or: “stop acting common.”

Yet today, we tend think of all groups as bell curve. So “common” is means “mean.”

And today, people must behave civilly to work together. So to act “mean” means to act “nice.” So “Why can’t you act like everyone else” means “be nice,” not “be crude.”

So is “mean” nasty or nice?