10 Thoughts for February 27, 2014

1. I just wrote a "Dear John" letter to my former insurance agent.  (His first name really is John.)  I felt compelled to explain why I switch to Metro Mile: 64% savings and a bunch of tools that allow me to track my mileage for business deductions, etc.
2. More overreach and more backlash in Arizona: Arizona's governor signed a bill which repealed their earlier efforts to overhaul Arizona's voting laws which had made voting more restrictive.  That's twice in just a few months that Republicans have overreached in Arizona, only to be humbled back into the mainstream.  If they keep doing this, 2014 will end up surprising them.
3. Losing someone as beautiful as Paula Patton over a ridiculously over-the-top show simulating sex with Miley Cyrus at the VMA, is lame.  Continuing to act promiscuously in front of cameras with other women while you're married?  Face palm.
4. It has long become cliche to produce a laundry list of cliches.  Get over it, I say.  Instead, we should partake in the amusement of weeding out ironic or otherwise misunderstood cliches.
5. I had the odd experience of encountering someone suffering from the Dunning-Krueger Effect, online today. He asked me to point out facts that Libertarians enjoy ignoring; I responded succinctly that Bitcoins, contrary to the Libertarian belief, is in fact fiat.  He insisted that "fiat currency" required a state actor to produce the currency.  I was going to do an LOL, but then I realized this might be more of a WOW, WTF moment.  He kept going on, insisting that he knew what "fiat currency" meant, even as a half-dozen others pointed out that he was wrong.  I guess you could call it hilariously sad.
6. Petey talked at USC last night, and reiterated that the NCAA COI had spoken with a biased attitude when they sat down to talk to USC, back when USC was given an opportunity to defend itself.  That more or less reinforces what was written in Todd McNair's response to the NCAA's appeal to release its internal email documents that showed bias.  So where's the accountability going to come from, when all of this gets out?  I'm curious to know who watches the watchdog.
7. Lately, new Nexus 10 tablets have been showing up at discounted prices at clearance outlets online.  This is not refurbished units, but brand new ones.  Meanwhile the Google Play Store has zero inventory.  This must be a sign that a new tablet is coming, I think.
8. Here we are, complaining about the NSA storing metadata from phone calls, while across the Atlantic the Brits are storing images from online chats, of naked people.  Or as I call it: Brits' bits, stored by the gigabit.  The bad news is, that Yahoo won't have full encryption in place until the end of March; Google has had fully encrypted all traffic for some time now.  As I recall, Microsoft's Skype lost its encryption, at least for a while, after they had acquired Skype.
9. I cannot help but wonder, how much the IOC screwed up by letting Russia host the Olympics in Sochi.  It was the warmest Winter Olympics, ever, the most-expensive Olympics ever, the venues were not full, we got to see the police beat down on Pussy Riot members, and they didn't finish construction of everything.  Sure, they say they did, but as you could see, they cut corners and apparently some things started falling apart.  To top it off, US viewership was down overall; significantly down for the closing ceremonies, ranking as one of the lowest.
10. Speaking of Russia, what exactly is their end game for Ukraine?  As they cross the border, they're only going to push the western portion to run faster to the EU and NATO.  So what if they seize Crimea...by doing so, they lose the rest of Ukraine.