Book Of Norm

The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants OCT 13 2011, 10:36 AM ET 332 Glen Whitman asks why there are fewer startlingly beautiful flight attendants any more: For an economist, the most fascinating aspect of Pan Am is the highly attractive flight attendants -- or rather, stewardesses, since the show is set in the early 1960s. If you're young enough, you might think that's just TV. But I'm just old enough to remember flying in the 1970s, and I recall stewardesses who really were, in fact, hot. Okay, I was too young to understand the concept of "hot" -- but I was definitely aware that I was being attended by some very pretty young women. Not so anymore. Flight attendants aren't necessarily unattractive now, but they're no more fetching than people in any other service profession that doesn't get tips. And what's changed? In a word, deregulation. Prior to airline deregulation, which was passed in 1978 and completed over the next few years, airfares...

CNN has some very, very bad news. Your BBM's to your martian friends may never reach their intended recipients, as the news service announced that BlackBerry service has been lost across the galaxy... Seriously though, if you are BBM'ing martians, my girlfriend is a psychologist... give her a call...

Petty power leads to corruption, and attracts assholes who want to use petty power for their own purposes. This is one of the reasons why a) the vast majority of cops are assholes, and b) cops almost universally corrupt in a petty and abusive sense. For a funny story about all this.. read on (from Autoblog.com) We're not sure what's more amusing about this story, the obvious and clichéd abuse of power or the retro charm of dialing the wrong fax number. C'mon, who even faxes anymore? We've gotten so used to people getting busted by accidentally e-mailing everyone in their address book or slipping up on Facebook that we almost feel sorry for the clerk in question, entangled by '90s technology. Almost. Joann Reed, the records clerk for the sheriff in St. Clair County, Illinois, sent a three-page fax including a copy of a speeding ticket, with a handwritten note saying, "Dismiss this case" and "The guy is the son of one of our deputies." Os...

Clearly - this should  not be happening. Honestly - the captain is an idiot. Hitting a reef these days with a ship is like running into a library with your car. Buildings don't move, you can see them, they are well marked. Not that it always matters... Thanks to the sheer idiocy of the captain - who could face fines of as much as $8,700... big deterrent there... there are now 1,870 tons (1,700 metric tons) of oil and 220 tons (200 metric tons) of diesel possibly going to be dumped into the ocean, with 300tons already on the loose. For those of you who don't know, when they say "oil" they mean bunker fuel. Bunker fuel is the sludge at the bottom of the refining process. The reason they keep oil and bunker fuel aboard is because with new regulations (some of which my Dad was instrumental in getting passed around the US) ships have to burn diesel in coastal areas, but can still burn bunker fuel out in the open ocean. Bunker fuel is so nasty that it moves like m...

I have to say - this is just disturbing. Realistically, income should not be related to weight. But... it is, and in a pretty fucked up way What this is saying is that the skinnier you are as a woman, the more you make (yay misogynistic hiring practices...), while as a dude, you make more the fatter you are, because skinny guys are "weak" while the obese are "strong..."

I rail on against Apple, I think the company is overvalued and I think its products are limited and overpriced. At the same time, I have enormous respect for Steve Jobs. He completely changed the world, and for the better. He lead the personal PC revolution, realized before almost anyone else where the digital revolution would lead, greatly improved the quality of the modern computer, created the modern smartphone, and now brought about the tablet. He was a man in a billion, and he changed the world. My respect goes out to you Steve Jobs, may you rest in peace.