Three articles collected over the last evening or two related to disappearing things…
- Disappearing Color.
A fascinating story about the “Desaturated Santa”: A young woman who got fed up with the copycat Santas at SantaCon, so she took special effort to remove the color, and appear as if she had been digitally turned into black and white. The article notes that she bought a sewing pattern and made herself a Santa suit in a dark gray fabric. She then color-matched some makeup for her skin, and obtained a gray wig and contacts. A photographer friend taught her how to paint her face. The result is neat! More photos are here.
- Disappearing Jobs. An interesting opinion column about how companies pull the wool over the eyes of California. In this case, Genetech, which campaigned against Proposition 24 saying it needed to be defeated to save jobs… and then after it was defeated (as they wanted), they laid off over 800. It all goes back to what Alton Brown said ages ago: McDonalds doesn’t care about you, and neither does that little minx Wendy. In other words, corporations only care about themselves and their profits. They don’t care about their employees; they don’t care about doing good for the states that give them incentives. If we give a business a tax break believing they will use it to create jobs, the odds are better than not they won’t create the jobs… or if they do, they won’t be where we want or need the jobs to be created.
- Disappearing Nations. Here’s an interesting question: If climate change (mistakenly called “global warming”) is true, then ocean levels will be rising… and as a result, some island nations will just disappear. So what happens to the nation then? If an island state loses its island, is it still a nation? Does it still control that territory? Can it still enforce fishing rights? Can it still have an internet domain? This is an area of international law that has never been considered, and is something worth pondering.
P.S.: I didn’t report on last night’s dinner. I went out with some colleagues at @tsec to an Austin Locavore restaurant, Kerbey Lane Cafe. I had a lovely salad with grilled chicken, which was just what I needed after the ACSAC reception fare of hot dogs and lamb chops (I only had one hot dog and one lamb chop—and none of the fries they put out). I’ll note that Kerbey Lane also has a gluten-free menu.
