Four Reasons Why Justin Bieber Is Better Than You

I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber has a world record for the sheer quantity of internet hate he's received. But I think most of this hate is actually jealousy, because come on, who wouldn't want to have become a multi-platinum recording artist before puberty? Sure, he talks and sings like a 12-year-old girl trying to feign a gangster-lean, but here are four reasons why Mr. Bieber (which, if read aloud, must be pronounced "Meester Beeber") is better than, like, all you haterz, aiite.

4. He's Rich

He's 16 years old, about the same age when you were still begging your parents for an early allowance so that you could go buy yourself a new pack of whatever trading cards you were obsessed with. Mr. Bieber already has a net worth of $25 million. What is that wet feeling in your pants, you ask? Urine, my friend, because you now know that he could buy you and your holographic Pokemon collection a few thousand times over, and still have enough money to spare for a G6.

Far East Movement was talking about the Pontiac G6, right?

3. He Can Echolocate

Have you seen this kid's hairdo? He walks around with a fucking broom in front of his face. The only explanation for how he can go about his life without running into shit all the time (emphasis "all the time") is that he was brought up in an underground cave by bats who taught him the secrets of echolocation. And since bats typically use only very high-frequency clicks to echolocate, this also helps explain why Justin's voice is nigh-ultrasonic.

How the hell else would you explain this?

2. He Has Legions of Passionate Female Fans

Most of you sorry excuses for males would be lucky to get a high-five from the cute girl sitting next to you at the football game. On the other hand, Mr. Bieber has single-handedly filled those stadiums with orgasmically passionate female fans. He has been responsible for injuries to at least a dozen girls, and not via Chris-Brown-inspired rampages either; these injuries were caused by other girls fighting to get closer to Mr. Bieber during at least two separate incidences -- one in New York and one all the way in Australia. He's even rumored to be getting cozy with Selena Gomez, who, since she's now 18 years old, I hope I can call "pretty good looking" without setting myself up for any pedophilia jokes. I hope.

...well, fuck.

1. He Has A Giant Dong

Usher mentors him, Taio Cruz writes songs for him, Ludacris raps for him, Lil' Wayne's songs give shout-outs to him, Shaq dance-offs (?) him, and Rihanna performs with him. In other words, Mr. Bieber is surrounded by black folks. Clearly, he must also be black. And you know what they say about black guys...

Was it something about being good with tape measures?

Looking for a small TV?

I haven't posted here in a few months not because I fell into a massive La-Z-Boy and got infected with obesity, but simply because I had better and more important things to do. Mostly things involving lots of money, beautiful women, and scandalous photos of me leaking onto the internet. I would post them here for your enjoyment, but I actually can't. Which brings me to my next point.

iPads are utterly useless.

Due to a series of unfortunate technical difficulties involving two of my laptops' power chargers, the only computer-like device that I have access to right now is my parents' iPad. Of course I already knew it was useless even before Steve Jobs somehow managed to Jedi mind-trick me into buying an iPhone a few months ago, but now I can verifiably assert that the iPad isn't so much an iPhone for giants, as it's so often been called, but more accurately a flat-screen TV for midgets.

You see, iPhones are useful because you can put one in your pocket and effectively bring a phone, a camera, and the entire internet with you pretty much wherever you go; iPads are not because you have to put yours on a table next to a Wifi router and then upload pictures to it from another, more capable device. Wait...that sounds a little like something else I know: a computer. But wait again...my $300 dollar netbook (currently missing a power charger) can also do things like run Flash, take pictures with its built-in webcam, save and open whatever file types I want, let me type on something where I can manage more than two words per minute, run programs that don't start with "A" and end in "ngry Birds", and most importantly of all, upload pictures to Blogger.

So instead of the marginally pertinent picture that I would otherwise leave you with, here's some ASCII art of a dwarf watching an iPad:

:)-<     |

Comment: A Curious Case of Bravado

In lieu of a better written, more thoroughly researched opinion, I would just like to announce, with all of my millions of readers as witnesses, that I henceto hereforth am calling North Korea's bluff.

For those of you who haven't heard the hullabaloo (hehe, "hullabaloo") about Operation Invincible Spirit (hehe, "Invincible Spirit"), here's the rundown. The US and South Korea are planning some joint training exercises, dubbed Operation Invincible Spirit, in North Korean waters. Apparently there's going to be an aircraft carrier plus twenty or so American ships involved (in other words, about 1% of the US Naval Fleet). Here is one of many news articles reporting on this epically trivial event. Before you read the next line, make sure you don't have any water in your mouth, because this shit is pretty funny.

In reaction to all of this, North Korea has threatened South Korea and America with, and I quote, a "physical response".

A "physical response" from North Korea? That's like a kick in the balls from Verne Troyer. Or a gunshot wound from Stephen Hawking. It's just really not that scary. Or possible. The last time North Korea tried to launch an ICBM, it ended up crashing into the ocean forty seconds later. I may eat my words, but I'm willing to put my stunningly flawless reputation on the line and say that I really don't think they're going to be getting more physical than a patty-cake competition any time soon.

Why I Don't Give a Shit About Facebook Privacy

There's recently been a general uproar across the Intertubez about Facebook's various new privacy issues. In an attempt to expand its presence throughout websites beyond its own, Facebook is sharing more and more of its users' information with third parties. Users are threatening to boycott Facebook, commentators are calling Mark Zuckerberg the spawn of Satan, and I'm pretty sure someone somewhere has set himself on fire in protest. Even senators clearly too old to have ever used it are involved (link). But I for one couldn't care less about Facebook privacy, and here are some reasons why:

1. It's your fault.

The more you let Facebook take over your life, the more of your life it will have. It's like giving your organs freely to a very charming stranger on the street, and then becoming indignant when he has the audacity to sell them. If you don't want your employers to see pictures of your half-naked ass from last night, don't post them.

2. I already think about what I post on Facebook.

My text message history for the last two weeks is easily more embarrassing than all of my Facebook information combined, for the simple reason that I've never Facebooked drunk. Facebook is where a thousand semi-strangers are going to judge me for every letter I mistype, so any time I update my status or tag a new picture, I've already thought through 95% of the possible social and legal consequences. Of course this is definitely not true for Google, where half of my search queries includes something either illegal or pornographic. Or both.

3. Facebook needs to make money, and I need to keep mine.

If you think about it, it's actually amazing that Facebook is still in business. It gives a few hundred million people worldwide an immersive multimedia and networking experience for the princely price of nothing. And how does it do it? With your information. Because in the world of online advertising nothing is more valuable than customer information, and if I have to share my birthdate in exchange for the power to track down long lost friends from elementary school, then so be it.

5. The less privacy other people have, the more easily I will be able to stalk them.

And that's the whole point of Facebook in the first place.

The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade: Part II

2. The Airbus A380

In 1988 (yes, that's 22 years ago), a group of Airbus executives decided to challenge the Boeing 747's 18-year reign as the super-heavyweight-freight-plane champion. They suggested building a plane so big that it would be to the 747 what the 747 was to pretty much every other plane: its uncle.

After quite a few years of additional research, Airbus engineers projected this gigantic plane could be up to 20% cheaper to operate than the rival 747, and the Airbus bigwigs were overjoyed. A 20% improvement in efficiency sounds pretty good, but keep in mind that by then, it had been almost thirty years since the introduction of the 747. Naturally, no one bothered to point out that a 20% improvement in three decades is actually pretty dismal, nor that there was still no good reason why the new plane had to be the size of a supertanker, so the Airbus executives, fueled by the size of their wallets and, presumably, the lack of size of some of their other appendages, green-lighted the A380 "Let's Get Into A Childish Size Fight With Boeing" project.

Airbus's competitive business strategy: physically block Boeings from getting onto the runway.

But Airbus forgot one key rule of international competition - do not get into size fight with America. Because whether we're building cars, planes, or hamburgers, our first instinct is to make it big. We are damn good at making things big, and we will find every reason to make things big. But when we decide that it's time to move on to smaller and better things, then you can be damn sure we've exhausted every possible reason to keep making things bigger.

As Airbus was off frolicking in Brobdingnag, Boeing sat down in 2003 and realized that with skyrocketing fuel prices and plummeting customer demand, smaller and more fuel-efficient planes would be a lot more attractive to the airline industry. It would be much easier to fill up such a plane with passengers, and much cheaper to fill it up with gas. While Airbus found itself running into lengthy delays, mostly due to unforeseen complications of the A380's size (e.g. they ran out of copper wire at one point), Boeing started and completed developing the 787 Dreamliner.

Airbus delivered its first A380 to Singapore Airlines in 2007, and Boeing is wrapping up final flight testing for the 787. There are already 866 standing orders for the 787.

Total orders for the A380? 202.

Pardon me, it seems like I'm suffering from a momentary bout of amnesia. Who's your daddy again?

Okay sure, A380s are more expensive, at about $300 mil a pop versus $150 mil per Dreamliner. Even so, Airbus has made less than half as much on the A380 as Boeing has on the 787, even with a three-year head start. The A380 was an overwhelming undertaking with underwhelming results, and frankly, I'm not looking forward to traveling in that flying sardines can any time soon.

So much for making Boeing your nephew, Airbus.

1. The International Space Station

The International Space Station was born out of a semi-noble idea - to maintain a semi-permanent human presence in space. It was hoped to be an unprecedented collaboration between the most influential nations and continents of the globe - America, Russia, Europe, Japan, and, even though we all know it's really just a part of America, Canada. It would serve as a testbed for microgravity experiments and train astronauts for extended missions in space.

The ISS, still in its last phase of construction, has indeed, for the most part, accomplished what it was intended to do. Dozens of research articles are published every month with data collected on board the ISS, and astronauts have learned tons of new ways to prevent their muscles from dying in space. But at what price?

The total cost of the project, according to the European Space Agency, is around 100 billion euros, or about 140 billion US dollars. More than ten times the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program, which brought twelve men to another celestial body. More than twenty times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider, which explodes light to make black holes. And what exactly does the ISS do again? Well, float.

A portion of the International Space Station. I have no idea what that is, but it probably cost your country an A380.

I love space exploration, but I just don't see how the ISS is doing any exploring by hanging around Earth. It's like if Christopher Columbus decided to explore the world by sailing around England a hundred times. I want manned missions to Mars, rovers to Io, another Voyager craft shooting towards the Oort cloud. All of those combined would probably still be cheaper than the ISS, and we wouldn't have to worry about keeping anything from falling down onto our heads.

The International Space Station tops this list not because it was a failure, but simply because 140 billion dollars is such an overwhelming price tag that anything short of cold fusion or world peace is going to suck. And $140 billion for a metal thing that floats? That deserves to be the Most Underwhelming Invention of the 2000s.

Interim

Before I finally get around to finishing my Most Underwhelming Inventions List, I would like the share with you a little moment of disbelief I recently experienced on my way out of LAX, in a new segment I would like to call:

"Wtf Rly?!?!" with Jon Zhang
(not at all an SNL rip-off)

This week's "Wtf Rly?!?" moment - A Toyota Prius with, you guessed it, custom rims.

Let me reiterate: this is a Toyota Prius with custom rims.

To start with, custom rims are a bit like...really expensive cummerbunds. Unfunctional, unnecessary, and something no one would ever miss if you didn't put one on.

Second, there is an inverse relationship between how cool you look in a car versus how many enviro-eco-mental-hollywood-hipster points you earn with it, and that is precisely why Priuses are so ugly.

Third, the only time custom rims can ever possibly be useful is to reduce weight on a really fast sports car. And if there's an antonym for "really fast sports car", then that word is probably "Prius".

So by putting custom rims on a Prius you are spending money trying to make something, whose whole point is to be ugly and slow, prettier and faster. It's like wrapping a carbon-fiber-encrusted cummerbund around Jay Leno's chin.

The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade: Part I

Though the onset of 2010 certainly brought along less drama than that of the previous decade, it also brought with it the usual bevy of "Top _____s of the Last Decade" lists. I especially liked one entitled "Top 10 Things We'll Miss Most About the 2000s", which reminded me of the sad fact that those cool "200_" glasses, with the middle "00" as the eye frames, will never return until the year 3000. Anyways, I decided that I too would pitch in, somewhat belatedly, to the fray of best-of-the-decade-compilations.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade.

5. The Playstation 3

In May of 2005, Sony finally announced the long-awaited PlayStation 3. It was the sequel to the PlayStation 2, the most successful console ever in the history of video games; it was also the heavyweight retort to Microsoft's Xbox 360 and was supposed to continue Sony's undeniable reign over the game console industry.

On paper, every single hardware spec was better than the Xbox 360. The 360 had three processors, the PS3 had nine. Yes, nine. In fact, even the programmers at Sony didn't know what to do with so many processors, so one of them is dedicated entirely to OS security and another one is completely unused. Still, with seven-ish processors running at 3.2 GHz, the PS3's peak single-precision float capability is estimated at a whopping 204 gigaflops, twice that of the Xbox 360 and probably three or four times that of your computer. The PS3 had built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, native high-definition DVD playback capability, flash memory plug-in support, and bigger hard-drive options than its competitor.

So did the PlayStation devour the Xbox when it went to market? Well, no. It's only sold about 70% what the Xbox 360 has, and it's sold that many only because 1. Blu-Ray, luckily for Sony, won out over HD-DVD and the PS3 is one of the cheapest Blu-Ray players on the market, and 2. hackers like to buy PS3s to use as cheap supercomputers. The Folding@home project at Stanford, for example, uses the PS3's massive processing capability to simulate protein folding.

So how on Earth did the fastest gaming machine in the world get relegated to doing protein origami? Because even though it's got the juice of a supercomputer, the PS3's in-game processing capabilities never matched up to the Xbox 360's. Why? Well that's the saddest story of them all:

The bus speeds were too slow. The processors couldn't communicate with each other quickly enough. They were too fast for their own good.

4. The Atkins Diet

Above, the Atkins Diet (for females) in a single equation. Below, the Atkins Diet in a single word: doubtful. (I am convinced, however, that there exists a way to rearrange the above equation to make it true.)

The Atkins Diet wasn't exactly invented in the 2000s, but for some reason it became the coolest thing since sliced bread steak around 2003, so I'm classifying it as belonging to the 2000s. In short, Dr. Robert Atkins, the man who invented this program, advocated a low-carb, high-protein diet to lose weight and improve cardiovascular health. Which already doesn't make sense.

Low-carb, high-protein means you have to take your standard plate of spaghetti-n-meatballs, take out all the spaghetti, and replace it with even more meatballs. So you take an otherwise wholesome, healthy meal and turn it into artery-clogging juiciness.

And did Dr. Atkins even bother to think for a millisecond about, um, hmm, Asians? Because let's see here: most Asians eat rice, and almost only rice. The rest eat noodles, and almost only noodles. Even well-fed Asians are still some of the skinniest people in the world. So did Atkins ever, um, hmm, wonder why that was the case?

The only reason that I've included this in my list of "underwhelming inventions" rather than just "bad, ill-conceived, and clearly wrong inventions" is because of the frighteningly ardent following that the Diet first attracted, followed by its frighteningly quick abandonment once people realized it didn't work. At one point, around one in ten people in America was on the Atkins Diet. Until, of course, Dr. Atkins himself died in 2003 as an indirect result of a heart-problem he developed. Presumably from eating too many meatballs.

3. The Segway Human Transporter

Admittedly, it's strange that riding on a bicycle, a two-wheeled contraption with a giant knob wedged in between your legs, is still so much cooler than riding on a Segway, a two-wheeled contraption without a giant knob wedged in between your legs.

After months of intense media speculation that ranged from hoverboards to anti-gravity propulsion, inventor Dean Kamen introduced the Segway Personal Transporter in 2001, and it turned out to be underwhelming before it had even had a chance to sell a single unit. Not a hoverboard, nor that floating car Obi-Wan Kenobi had in Episode IV, the Segway was instead revealed to be a platform on two wheels that could keep itself upright with what I would like to call "a bunch of gyroscopes and shit". Oh, and you could stand on it, and make it move.

So it's surprising that, despite how a bicycle could do pretty much the exact same thing, the Segway was still hyped like there was no tomorrow. Steve Jobs thought it would be as significant an invention as the personal computer. John Doerr, a well-known venture capitalist, said it would be more important than the Internet. Dean Kamen himself said that it would "be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy". The company estimated it would sell 100,000 units in the first year alone.

But tomorrow came, and now, more than nine years later, the Segway has sold a grand total of...drumroll please...50,000 units. Half of its first-year predictions. If the car had performed this dismally against the horse and buggy, then we'd probably still be riding in carriages today. And to add insult to injury, the Segway isn't just a massive business failure, but it's also become a popular target to lampoon, whether it's by Andy Richter on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien or by the writers of Arrested Development, who made the Segway the vehicle of choice for the underachieving, melodramatic magician named Gob.

So how can anything be even more underwhelming than something that was supposed to be more important than the Internet? Stay tuned for Number 2 and Number 1.

The Church of JRZ - Genesis

Once upon a time, I thought that "money" was synonymous with "power". I thought that if Bill Gates just kept investing in the stock market, he would one day swallow everyone else's bank accounts and become a world dictator. I hoped that I would earn enough money throughout my career to buy a tropical island from Bill Gates after he took over the world. And I worked hard to make that dream a reality.

But thanks to the strange wonder that is democracy, quite a significant number of retards (sorry, that word is insensitive) criminally underqualified neo-Democratic terrorists (CUNTs) have now been chosen to run our country. And because of their infinitely nonexistent wisdom, combined Federal and State income tax for a top-earning Californian is creeping over 50%, not to mention the myriad of sales, property, capital gains, and estate taxes that've been shoveled into our tax code. But that's not even the bad part, because the CUNTs are now going to be taking that money and giving it to a homeless illegal immigrant to feed his Nyquil addiction. Though this isn't exactly the first example of American socialism, it just proves once again that you really are better off being poor.

So what now? Is there any point in even trying to earn a good wage anymore?

Nah.

A sensible man might try to run for political office instead. But then again, no one sensible is going to win an election in this country.

So you know what I'm going to do? You guessed it: start my own religion.

You see, religion, I believe, is now the only way to have the best of both worlds: to get both money and power; to have my cake, eat it, and then throw it in Nancy Pelosi's face, too. I'm not going to pull a Catholicism and ask for donations, nor am I going to declare myself the fourth Prophet. But if I can convince enough followers to have my religion formally recognized by the IRS, then I think we might be able to come up with something world-changing.

I haven't worked out all the details yet - like for instance, its name. I could name it "Zhangism" after myself, but that sounds too Oriental and I don't want to be inadvertently attracting the neo-Yogi white-mom crowd. Nor have I really concocted an inane creation myth. But for now, I'll just sketch out some basic tenets of the Church of JRZ (to be later amended):

1. Charitable donations are tax-deductible. Every Follower must donate his entire gross, pre-tax income to my Church.

2. Taking out a loan is tax-deductible. My Church will grant every Follower a zero-interest loan equal to his donation.

3. Business expenses are tax-deductible. Every Follower must have his own registered business. He must make as many of his purchases business-related as possible.

4. In any election (federal, state, regional, municipal, etc.), every Follower must support the candidate who promises the lowest taxes.

5. Stealing from another Follower is not permitted. Stealing from any person or organization with socialist tendencies is encouraged (e.g. the CUNTs in Washington, a university with an overzealous financial aid program), to a degree corresponding to the severity of that person's/organization's socialist practices.

6. Followers must abuse government wealth-redistribution programs (Medicare, welfare, social-security) as much as possible.

And that's all for now. You get the point. Now if I can just come up with four more and find some rocks or golden plates to scratch these on...