Sunday, February 27, 2005
Friday, February 25, 2005
When in doubt, call them poopy-heads
I've never really seen the strategy of the Right put so succinctly: The Right "...mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends." And that, my dear readers, is how they get the poor (or at least an economically oppressed middle class) to vote against their best interests.
Gotta admit...given that people are ignorant and dumb, it's a clever way to circumvent the checks and balances of government to promote an agenda. I can't help but wonder if this is just a variation of a theme used in the Dark Ages (probably earlier, but it's the most obvious example I can think of). I've always wondered how such a small group of people managed to keep the rest of the population firmly entrenched in subservient serf-dom. The answer is similar, I suppose: scare the people with a variety of quasi-conjured threats (both spiritual [the devil, evil, etc.] and geopolitical [other countries]), then tie whatever agenda you want to those fears. If you want wealth and you've convinced people to be afraid of the devil and their place in the afterlife, voila, you have indulgences. (It's so adorable that anyone still believes that any human institution can ever be "infallible"...)
Gotta admit...given that people are ignorant and dumb, it's a clever way to circumvent the checks and balances of government to promote an agenda. I can't help but wonder if this is just a variation of a theme used in the Dark Ages (probably earlier, but it's the most obvious example I can think of). I've always wondered how such a small group of people managed to keep the rest of the population firmly entrenched in subservient serf-dom. The answer is similar, I suppose: scare the people with a variety of quasi-conjured threats (both spiritual [the devil, evil, etc.] and geopolitical [other countries]), then tie whatever agenda you want to those fears. If you want wealth and you've convinced people to be afraid of the devil and their place in the afterlife, voila, you have indulgences. (It's so adorable that anyone still believes that any human institution can ever be "infallible"...)
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Apple and Tivo
You have no reason to believe me, but I was honestly thinking a few days ago about posting something to the effect of wondering if Apple would eventually gobble up Tivo. It would make sense. Apple could stage a takeover of home media if they wanted to (and in fact are in a much better position than either Microsoft or Sony to do so).
Are you shitting me?
I think there's a governmental corollary to the Onyedum South Park Axiom ("Every time you think South Park can't get any more disturbing, you see the next episode" ... [rough paraphrase]): Every time you think the Bush administration has made the worst mockery of the institution of government in its ignominious history, it does something worse.
I don't even know where to begin with this one. They're not even trying any more. Almost any comparison I can think of, they've probably done that to. It's like appointing a man convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal head of the Office of Information Awareness. It's like letting oil executives write energy policy. It's like cutting down trees to prevent forest fires. It's like assenting to execution and torture while paying lip service to a culture of life. It's like denouncing "judicial activism" while at the same time bitching that a Democratic minority are blocking the nomination of a woman who seems hell-bent on rewriting law to her whim. And, to round it all out, it's like portraying the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations as a reprehensible, morally corrupt act when you did the same goddamn thing yourself less than 8 years ago.
And yet, about half of the people in this country seem to think moral values are more important to Republicans. And they like Bush.
What luck for rulers that men do not think. -- Adolf Hitler
I don't even know where to begin with this one. They're not even trying any more. Almost any comparison I can think of, they've probably done that to. It's like appointing a man convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal head of the Office of Information Awareness. It's like letting oil executives write energy policy. It's like cutting down trees to prevent forest fires. It's like assenting to execution and torture while paying lip service to a culture of life. It's like denouncing "judicial activism" while at the same time bitching that a Democratic minority are blocking the nomination of a woman who seems hell-bent on rewriting law to her whim. And, to round it all out, it's like portraying the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations as a reprehensible, morally corrupt act when you did the same goddamn thing yourself less than 8 years ago.
And yet, about half of the people in this country seem to think moral values are more important to Republicans. And they like Bush.
What luck for rulers that men do not think. -- Adolf Hitler
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Devil's in the details
What I find most remarkable about this is not that this woman cut off her boyfriend's penis after he agreed to be tied up during sex. Nor is it that she flushed it down the toilet. Nor that utility workers found it, put it on ice, and sent it to the hospital where it was reattached. Oh no. What I find most remarkable about it is that one of the things she was charged with, which is mentioned only in passing and not explained at all, is tampering with evidence.
Let me repeat that because it's important.
She was charged with tampering with evidence. Umm...what? What did she do? Did she draw little smiley faces on it at the police station? Use it in a puppet show? What?! Tell me!
Let me repeat that because it's important.
She was charged with tampering with evidence. Umm...what? What did she do? Did she draw little smiley faces on it at the police station? Use it in a puppet show? What?! Tell me!
What the hell kind of comment is that?
"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table." - Bush 2/22/05
What?! Well thank you, GW...that both unnerving and non-informative. "Hey Iran...I'm not _not_ going to bomb you!...*wink wink nudge nudge*..."
What?! Well thank you, GW...that both unnerving and non-informative. "Hey Iran...I'm not _not_ going to bomb you!...*wink wink nudge nudge*..."
In the Navy!
Don't Ask/Don't Tell does seem particularly retarded given how desperate we are for soldiers, doesn't it? Of course, any self-respecting gay person would be insane to want to go fight on behalf of this administration.
Monday, February 21, 2005
You are your own network
I'm sorry...I know I'm an utter nerd, but this is badass (though questionably useful given things like Bluetooth).
No really, it is about left and right
This is stupid. It's a nice talking point to say management of government contracting is above the left/right debate, but in fact it's central to it. Part of the core argument against privatization is that exactly these issues sap any gains you might achieve through the "free market," and in fact far outweigh any perceived inefficiencies in government ownership.
Sure, of course it makes sense to take the pragmatic point of view that whether or not it's a good thing, privitization has occurred and we should deal with it. Saying that if you do something you should do it well is utterly non-controversial and unenlightening. But it doesn't obviate the debate over whether or not it should have happened in the first place or whether it should continue to happen.
Sure, of course it makes sense to take the pragmatic point of view that whether or not it's a good thing, privitization has occurred and we should deal with it. Saying that if you do something you should do it well is utterly non-controversial and unenlightening. But it doesn't obviate the debate over whether or not it should have happened in the first place or whether it should continue to happen.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Random interesting facts I heard on NPR tonight
- When asked what their ideal income is, American will tell you, regardless of how much they make, that they would finally be content with twice whatever their income currently is.
- The Spanish flu outbreak of the early 20th century killed between 20 million and 100 million people, depending on who you ask, which rivals the death rate of the black plague. It occurred towards the end of World War I, and consequently it was almost universally regarded as "hurting morale" to discuss publicly how many people the flu was killing. Meanwhile, the mortality rate at the Cook County hospital (near Chicago) of flu intakes was a mindboggling 39%. It was called the Spanish flu because Spain was the only country not fighting the war and, consequently, the only country whose papers were actually talking about the pandemic.
- The Sedition Act of 1918, which makes the PATRIOT Act look enlightened, undoubtedly contributed to the silence regarding the flu pandemic.
- Woodrow Wilson ostensibly contracted the Spanish Flu in the middle of negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. Accounts from almost everyone he interacted with after contracting the virus reported he was a changed man and seemed to act strangely. He seemed to get easily confused, and persistent neurological problems were one of the occasionally occurring symptoms of Spanish Flu. It was only after contracting Spanish Flu that Wilson conceded to almost everything Clemenceau wanted, resulting in the oppressive and retributive terms to Germany's surrender that most regard as the direct cause of Hitler's rise to power and thus World War II. So it's entirely possible that influenza (indirectly) caused the second world war.
- Hunter Thompson killed himself. :(
Our soccer game tonight was called early because a fight broke out. I got between two belligerent eastern European men in an attempt to break them up. That probably wasn't smart. Fortunately, I escaped unharmed and with all my Adonis-like features fully intact.
Hey...remember science?
One of the myriad ways the Republicans are fucking up the country. But again, it doesn't seem to bother most of the country that our leaders are flat ignoring objective scientific investigation in favor of hubristic and shallow ideology. Found a comfortable seat in the handbasket yet? :)
A candid Bush
I'm sure you have already heard about this, but I thought I'd throw it in. My takeaway from it is that Bush seems to be more stupid than evil (though certainly a touch of both). His former reputation as a moderate in Texas who could work with Democrats combined with his comments about being frustrated with the Right's attacks on gays suggest that his far right stance is largely a political one: he knew that was the group he needed to court to win. Sure, he's born-again, and sure he's anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion, etc., but it doesn't sound like he was originally much of a far-right idealogue. Certainly not moderate (e.g., McCain, insofar as there are any left), but also not the extremist we've come to know and love. I suspect Rove and Cheney engineered his drift off the deep end, not to mention Dobson who is the (anti-)messiah of the Right.
If there is a God, why doesn't he scorch the balls off people like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell so at least they can't reproduce?
If there is a God, why doesn't he scorch the balls off people like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell so at least they can't reproduce?
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Exxon most valuable stock
Doesn't this bother anyone? How can there supposedly an energy crisis and a faltering economy when Exxon has exceeded GE as the largest company? Keep in mind, GE does _everything_. It sells appliances. It owns media companies. Anything you can think of, they probably sell it. And so it makes sense for them to have huge profits.
But Exxon just sells oil! They're a goddamn energy company. They sell energy. That's it. And at a time when the world is struggling in a variety of ways with energy, they're becoming wealthier than they have ever been. Isn't something wrong here? Isn't this kind of like saying there is a lunchtime poverty problem in the school cafeteria while the resident schoolyard bully declares having "unprecedented revenue"?
You want to jumpstart the economy? Peg the price of oil, legally, to the export prices of producers. At this point, energy is infrastructure just as much as, say, roads are. It's retarded to allow utilities to be subject to the free market. Demand is highly inelastic. There's not much room for product or business practice innovation. It's just inviting usury and fraud.
The only possible justification for an energy free market, empirically, is that it drives innovation in oil exploration. Oil companies drop huuuuuuge amounts of money into finding new oil fields (as well as new extraction techniques). They use gigantic supercomputers (by gigantic I mean lots and lots of individual machines chewing away at input) to create detailed models of sonar soundings of the ground in order to predict where oil is likely to be. So, you could argue that the energy "market" is driving exploration of new oil reserves and increases in extraction efficiency.
But here's the thing, folks...everyone in the nation (nay, the world) has a vested interest in such innovations. Everyone. As such, energy companies are unnecessary middle men. They're skimming money for themselves off the top. There's absolutely no reason that we, as a nation, could not directly pursue such innovation and exploration on our own without making some dipshit oil executive rich to do it for us. Think of the entire nation coming together to form their own energy company (let's see...everyone coming together to pool resources for a common cause...I could swear there was originally a name for that...oh, it's on the tip of my tongue...oh, right! Government!...). People are then their own consumers. The profit goes back to the collective pool instead of to an oil company. It's a monopoly, but guess what: everyone holds part ownership in the monopolizing entity! They have no one to take advantage of but themselves!
Sound communist? Not really. Communism is mandating levels of demand. You don't need something unless I tell you you do. That's not what I'm talking about. This is an economically efficient system. Demand balances with supply. Unless, of course, you get a small number of government officials in charge of such a program who manage to tap the conduit of money from consumers to the government-owned oil company, in which case you're essentially in an identical situation to having oil companies syphon off the money. Same parasite, different name. In an ideal world, government would be transparent enough so that such a situation wouldn't occur, but we all know how likely that is...
I dunno...guess it's another screwed if you do, screwed if you don't situation. Conniving, greedy bastards will always manage to get their hands on people's money regardless of whether it's through a corporation or through government corruption. In a world where money buys politics, the line between the two is blurred anyway. The only way the system could ever work is if government were completely transparent, none of money, politics, and media overlapped with each other, and if people weren't stupid. I don't think any of those, let along all of them, are achievable. So maybe the Libertarians are right, in a way. Maybe the best of all possible worlds is where the chips are allowed to fall as they may without interference from a patchwork of laws created by non-independent parties aimed at achieving some abstract notion of justice (that no one really agrees on). It would be a shitty world, one where jungle law ruled, but arguably you don't do any better with a strong government in the long term anyway. At least in a Libertarian system you know that people are going to take advantage of each other from the get-go and don't have any illusion of an institution that is somehow supposed to be an arbiter of justice through some hazy notion of foundational morality. The ones that screw you are almost always the ones who claim they will help you, after all.
Makes me wonder if the ideals of the Founding Fathers are really breaking down...that the moral philosophy our government is based on is so outdated (quaint, as Gonzales would inevitably say) and misguided that it can't help but buckle under the crippling weight of reality. They assumed that the problem with previous governmental systems (monarchy, hysterical theocracy, etc.) is that government wasn't accountable to the people under it, and that if it were, things would ultimately take care of themselves. Clearly this is not the case. Most of all, they didn't account for the asymmetry of information. To do the "right" thing, you have to be informed enough to know what the "right" thing is. Most people don't know what the right thing is. I sure as hell don't know what a maximum safe mercury concentration in water is, do you? If someone tells you a particular level is "safe," how do you know that's true? If they tell you it costs too much, how do you know whether to believe them? If you rely on experts, how do you know they're experts? How do you not only know their motivations, but how do you know they actually know what they're talking about? Moreover, how do you know who you're hearing from is actually the majority voice of the "experts"? What makes you think that the media outlet you're getting the information from is being up front with you? Isn't it the government that's supposed to oversee that kind of thing? Do you see how circular this ends up being?
They also didn't account for the power of bullshit. They had the image of people as ultimately rational beings. We aren't. We're stupid, bigoted, irrational, and easily manipulated. What good is being answerable to your electorate if you can just manipulate your electorate into believing what you want them to? After all, as we all know, oil slicks actually make young seal pups' coats soft and supple...
No...the Founding Fathers fucked it up. Not that I really blame them...in their shoes, I probably would have made the same mistakes. But to even begin to have a functional government, we would have to reorient our founding principles to take into account the fact that information is limited and that people are stupid and follow the herd. And everyone would have to understand that. And that's never, ever going to happen. Conclusion? As usual, fatalism: in the end, we're fucked. Enjoy the handbasket ride on the way down. And if you can get that pesky conscience out of the way, the old aphorism of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" always works too...
But Exxon just sells oil! They're a goddamn energy company. They sell energy. That's it. And at a time when the world is struggling in a variety of ways with energy, they're becoming wealthier than they have ever been. Isn't something wrong here? Isn't this kind of like saying there is a lunchtime poverty problem in the school cafeteria while the resident schoolyard bully declares having "unprecedented revenue"?
You want to jumpstart the economy? Peg the price of oil, legally, to the export prices of producers. At this point, energy is infrastructure just as much as, say, roads are. It's retarded to allow utilities to be subject to the free market. Demand is highly inelastic. There's not much room for product or business practice innovation. It's just inviting usury and fraud.
The only possible justification for an energy free market, empirically, is that it drives innovation in oil exploration. Oil companies drop huuuuuuge amounts of money into finding new oil fields (as well as new extraction techniques). They use gigantic supercomputers (by gigantic I mean lots and lots of individual machines chewing away at input) to create detailed models of sonar soundings of the ground in order to predict where oil is likely to be. So, you could argue that the energy "market" is driving exploration of new oil reserves and increases in extraction efficiency.
But here's the thing, folks...everyone in the nation (nay, the world) has a vested interest in such innovations. Everyone. As such, energy companies are unnecessary middle men. They're skimming money for themselves off the top. There's absolutely no reason that we, as a nation, could not directly pursue such innovation and exploration on our own without making some dipshit oil executive rich to do it for us. Think of the entire nation coming together to form their own energy company (let's see...everyone coming together to pool resources for a common cause...I could swear there was originally a name for that...oh, it's on the tip of my tongue...oh, right! Government!...). People are then their own consumers. The profit goes back to the collective pool instead of to an oil company. It's a monopoly, but guess what: everyone holds part ownership in the monopolizing entity! They have no one to take advantage of but themselves!
Sound communist? Not really. Communism is mandating levels of demand. You don't need something unless I tell you you do. That's not what I'm talking about. This is an economically efficient system. Demand balances with supply. Unless, of course, you get a small number of government officials in charge of such a program who manage to tap the conduit of money from consumers to the government-owned oil company, in which case you're essentially in an identical situation to having oil companies syphon off the money. Same parasite, different name. In an ideal world, government would be transparent enough so that such a situation wouldn't occur, but we all know how likely that is...
I dunno...guess it's another screwed if you do, screwed if you don't situation. Conniving, greedy bastards will always manage to get their hands on people's money regardless of whether it's through a corporation or through government corruption. In a world where money buys politics, the line between the two is blurred anyway. The only way the system could ever work is if government were completely transparent, none of money, politics, and media overlapped with each other, and if people weren't stupid. I don't think any of those, let along all of them, are achievable. So maybe the Libertarians are right, in a way. Maybe the best of all possible worlds is where the chips are allowed to fall as they may without interference from a patchwork of laws created by non-independent parties aimed at achieving some abstract notion of justice (that no one really agrees on). It would be a shitty world, one where jungle law ruled, but arguably you don't do any better with a strong government in the long term anyway. At least in a Libertarian system you know that people are going to take advantage of each other from the get-go and don't have any illusion of an institution that is somehow supposed to be an arbiter of justice through some hazy notion of foundational morality. The ones that screw you are almost always the ones who claim they will help you, after all.
Makes me wonder if the ideals of the Founding Fathers are really breaking down...that the moral philosophy our government is based on is so outdated (quaint, as Gonzales would inevitably say) and misguided that it can't help but buckle under the crippling weight of reality. They assumed that the problem with previous governmental systems (monarchy, hysterical theocracy, etc.) is that government wasn't accountable to the people under it, and that if it were, things would ultimately take care of themselves. Clearly this is not the case. Most of all, they didn't account for the asymmetry of information. To do the "right" thing, you have to be informed enough to know what the "right" thing is. Most people don't know what the right thing is. I sure as hell don't know what a maximum safe mercury concentration in water is, do you? If someone tells you a particular level is "safe," how do you know that's true? If they tell you it costs too much, how do you know whether to believe them? If you rely on experts, how do you know they're experts? How do you not only know their motivations, but how do you know they actually know what they're talking about? Moreover, how do you know who you're hearing from is actually the majority voice of the "experts"? What makes you think that the media outlet you're getting the information from is being up front with you? Isn't it the government that's supposed to oversee that kind of thing? Do you see how circular this ends up being?
They also didn't account for the power of bullshit. They had the image of people as ultimately rational beings. We aren't. We're stupid, bigoted, irrational, and easily manipulated. What good is being answerable to your electorate if you can just manipulate your electorate into believing what you want them to? After all, as we all know, oil slicks actually make young seal pups' coats soft and supple...
No...the Founding Fathers fucked it up. Not that I really blame them...in their shoes, I probably would have made the same mistakes. But to even begin to have a functional government, we would have to reorient our founding principles to take into account the fact that information is limited and that people are stupid and follow the herd. And everyone would have to understand that. And that's never, ever going to happen. Conclusion? As usual, fatalism: in the end, we're fucked. Enjoy the handbasket ride on the way down. And if you can get that pesky conscience out of the way, the old aphorism of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" always works too...
Welcome to California!
Yes, that would be the same San Mateo county that I live in. Where, to review, women are suing because they were pressured to flash their boobs...to a gorilla...in order to indulge said gorilla's nipple fetish.
Now, if we were indeed talking about the Koko that now works as an investment banker in San Francisco, this would make a lot more sense...
Now, if we were indeed talking about the Koko that now works as an investment banker in San Francisco, this would make a lot more sense...
Farting pig? Chickens? Belgium?
I have absolutely, positively no fucking idea what this is.
(actually, I do, because I'm procrastinating on work, and you can find anything...absolutely anything...on the web if you look hard enough: this is apparently a parody of a children's show in Belgium titled "Big and Betsy"..."fopje flauw mopje" translates roughly to "stupid little people tell stupid little jokes." I guess someone was pissed off at the show. Having seen the recent reincarnations of the transformer cartoons, I can understand that.)
(actually, I do, because I'm procrastinating on work, and you can find anything...absolutely anything...on the web if you look hard enough: this is apparently a parody of a children's show in Belgium titled "Big and Betsy"..."fopje flauw mopje" translates roughly to "stupid little people tell stupid little jokes." I guess someone was pissed off at the show. Having seen the recent reincarnations of the transformer cartoons, I can understand that.)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
So wrong...
I don't even know where to begin. What would the accessories be? What kind of dollhouse? Osama bin Ken?
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Sometimes Mac Hall produces absolute gems
Especially appropriate given my recent rant on children...
Are you a miserable ovoid creature?
Moreover, are you a miserable _and murderous_ ovoid creature?...
I take Zoloft. Maybe an increased aggressive tendency would explain these damn rants. But short of LSD or crack, there ain't no "kill your grandparents" pill. As the great Chris Rock said, whatever happened to just plain "crazy"?
(I'll be nice and post this as well since it's so apropos...)
I take Zoloft. Maybe an increased aggressive tendency would explain these damn rants. But short of LSD or crack, there ain't no "kill your grandparents" pill. As the great Chris Rock said, whatever happened to just plain "crazy"?
(I'll be nice and post this as well since it's so apropos...)
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
People are a bigger security problem than software
This reminds me of the stories I heard in my distributed computing class of how security experts who are hired to test firms' security rarely need to resort to any complicated hacking and can usually just convince an employee to give them a password. The most amusing example was of a security expert who took a financial firm's employees out for drinks and then got them bidding on who would sell their password for the least amount of money.
People who worry about the robustness of one or another encryption schemes always seem a bit silly to me. Sure, if you can build a tool that any schmuck with a computer can use to automatically crack an encryption scheme, that's a problem. But most often, when security is breached, it's some person's fault rather than the software's. Doesn't matter how secure passwords are if your employees write theirs on a damn post-it note next to their computer.
People who worry about the robustness of one or another encryption schemes always seem a bit silly to me. Sure, if you can build a tool that any schmuck with a computer can use to automatically crack an encryption scheme, that's a problem. But most often, when security is breached, it's some person's fault rather than the software's. Doesn't matter how secure passwords are if your employees write theirs on a damn post-it note next to their computer.
Let's get ready to rumble!
So it begins...
Funny how the Republicans seem to forget that they were quite happy to use the filibuster to block judicial nominees back in the 80's when they weren't in power. Didn't seem to bother them not to get an "up or down vote" back then. It's almost as if what they _say_ doesn't always (usually) match what they _do_...huh...
Guess hypocrisy doesn't fall under the auspices of "moral values."
Funny how the Republicans seem to forget that they were quite happy to use the filibuster to block judicial nominees back in the 80's when they weren't in power. Didn't seem to bother them not to get an "up or down vote" back then. It's almost as if what they _say_ doesn't always (usually) match what they _do_...huh...
Guess hypocrisy doesn't fall under the auspices of "moral values."
Death by children
Another interesting op-ed.
Some people (notably my mother) wonder why I don't want kids. I think this kind of article is why. So much literature and popular media is aimed at stressed-out parents who are looking for anywhere and everywhere to save money, save time, stay young, and keep their relationship alive. Parents, their eyes ringed with sleep-deprivation circles and looking rather pale, will tell you that child-rearing is a lot of work, requires great energy and sacrifice, but is "worth it." I have to wonder.
How much of it is simply a combination of biological drive with fending off cognitive dissonance? What if you had a child and allowed yourself the thought that "god...this isn't worth it." Can you even imagine it? Could you go on if you allowed yourself that thought? It's not like you can pay an early-termination fee and get out of the whole child contract thing. You have to think it's worth it to keep going. Along the other path madness lies.
It just seems like you have to give up everything...absolutely everything...to be a parent. There are those detestable yuppies who don't, for whom children are simply part of an image and a conversation piece, who aggressively pursue hollow careers as some stranger is paid to care for their poor latch-key offspring. Offspring who then, we might note, have to find emotional fulfillment in one or all of alcohol, sex, drugs, academic or business achievement, or materialism. And thus the dysfunctional cycle of life continues.
But if you do everything for your children...be there emotionally for them, provide for them, fight all the fights of rearing a child like finding schools, finding health care, etc. etc. etc., you have no more life. You work to support your child, and any remaining time is spent with the child. And hence all the media and marketing attention gets paid to reclaiming small bits of your former individual existence.
It just seems so depressing. One of my greatest fears is to find myself locked in a suburban existence with my 2.3 children, a wallet-pinching mortgage, and a marriage that has become so utterly lifeless as to be more like an uneasy business alliance on the joint venture of The Children than anything resembling an emotionally fulfilling, passionate union of two people. It makes me feel hollow inside just thinking about it.
Maybe it would be different if I liked children. No one believes me that, basically, I don't. Generally I find them annoying and self-centered. Not that children aren't supposed to be self-centered. I understand that's how they're supposed to be. It is Good and Right to be self-centered as a child since you can't provide for yourself and have to call the attention of others to your needs. Doesn't mean I have to enjoy being around them.
I just have this unavoidable feeling that people tend to try to find the emotional fulfillment in their lives through children that they haven't found in their careers, which is, imho, stupid. It's idiotic to believe that there is something you can achieve in your business or academic career that will bring you contentment...and yet, so many people around me seem to believe that is true. They work their asses off for...something. And the something is different for each person. But the philosophers of the world have been telling us for thousands upon thousands of years that there is no goal, at least in this world, that having achieved it will bring you inner peace. It's a cliche that is nonetheless true: the journey is the important part, not the destination. And yet people continue to delude themselves into thinking the destination is at all relevent, that things will somehow be better when you get "there," despite the fact that if you force them to look back on their lives, it is inescapably the case that there were many "there"s in their life, and they were no closer to personal fulfillment upon achieving any of them.
People are dumb and don't learn from their own experiences.
Unfortunately, it is also the case that the vast majority of the world cannot get satisfaction from their work per se. Note I say cannot rather than do not. It is a great myth of management that everyone can find satisfaction in their work if only they try. Bullshit, and particularly insidious bullshit at that. Americans are the only ones who are deluded enough to believe that who you are as a person is defined by the way you earn a living. If we made public policy that acknowledged this basic fact, I think a lot more people would have better lives.
That's why I find it particularly frightening that people look to child-rearing as the answer to finding meaning that they can't find in their occupation. What a vicious circle that creates. Your job leaves you hollow, so you have children, which utterly drain you, forcing you to work harder at your job to provide for them, so you see your children less, etc. etc. etc. Horrifying. Find fulfillment elsewhere. Find a way to express yourself, and find something to do that you enjoy just the process of doing. There's so much to do and see in the world that costs so little in terms of money, effort, and time.
I dunno...maybe work in the modern world is becoming so onerous that you have to have something so major and so positive in your life so as to justify what you have to put yourself through anyway in order to survive. That just feels like an argument that feeds on itself to me. Children demand more work to support them. Work demands more children to make up for the emotional gap created by the workload. And so on. It feels like an addiction mentality.
We just have such a child-centered culture. And consequently, a marriage-centered culture. It's no wonder that the rate of infidelity is so high. I don't advocate mindless hedonism, but damned if I don't think people would be a hell of a lot happier if they would just quit spending all their time compiling building blocks of some illusory future gratification and spend some of that energy on things that actively bring them joy. There's no reason everybody needs to have so many goddamn mid-life crises. I know it's an utter and insulting oversimplification to say "follow your bliss" as Campbell is famous for saying, because there is a certain inescapable core hardship to life unless your particular bliss happens to pay well, but nonetheless fucking find things that make you happy. Slaves found joy in music and singing; the poor and destitute can find happiness in storytelling and the company of others...I guarantee that with a little work you can maneuver yourself into a situation that you find at least tolerable and allows you some respectable portion of your life to go running with your bliss every so often.
I just think in my particular case having to change a shit-filled diaper isn't going to help me find that bliss. It costs millions of dollars to raise a child. It only costs me about $10 in gas to go watch the sun set over the waves of the Pacific ocean while listening to the surf lapping against the shore. Guess which one makes me truly, soulfully happy?
I don't give a shit whether I leave a legacy or not. The world is welcome to forget me when I'm gone. I have no need to pass on my genes. Fuck 'em. I am more important than my genetic code. Evolution endowed me with some degree of self-awareness and self-determination. I choose to care about me rather than my DNA or anything about me that might persist beyond my existence itself. To care about such things is to try to find external validation, and if you think your happiness depends on external validation, you're already fucked.
(case in point, I really don't give a shit whether anyone reads this. :) I enjoy the process of having to write these little rants. If they happen to entertain anyone else, hey, all the better...)
Some people (notably my mother) wonder why I don't want kids. I think this kind of article is why. So much literature and popular media is aimed at stressed-out parents who are looking for anywhere and everywhere to save money, save time, stay young, and keep their relationship alive. Parents, their eyes ringed with sleep-deprivation circles and looking rather pale, will tell you that child-rearing is a lot of work, requires great energy and sacrifice, but is "worth it." I have to wonder.
How much of it is simply a combination of biological drive with fending off cognitive dissonance? What if you had a child and allowed yourself the thought that "god...this isn't worth it." Can you even imagine it? Could you go on if you allowed yourself that thought? It's not like you can pay an early-termination fee and get out of the whole child contract thing. You have to think it's worth it to keep going. Along the other path madness lies.
It just seems like you have to give up everything...absolutely everything...to be a parent. There are those detestable yuppies who don't, for whom children are simply part of an image and a conversation piece, who aggressively pursue hollow careers as some stranger is paid to care for their poor latch-key offspring. Offspring who then, we might note, have to find emotional fulfillment in one or all of alcohol, sex, drugs, academic or business achievement, or materialism. And thus the dysfunctional cycle of life continues.
But if you do everything for your children...be there emotionally for them, provide for them, fight all the fights of rearing a child like finding schools, finding health care, etc. etc. etc., you have no more life. You work to support your child, and any remaining time is spent with the child. And hence all the media and marketing attention gets paid to reclaiming small bits of your former individual existence.
It just seems so depressing. One of my greatest fears is to find myself locked in a suburban existence with my 2.3 children, a wallet-pinching mortgage, and a marriage that has become so utterly lifeless as to be more like an uneasy business alliance on the joint venture of The Children than anything resembling an emotionally fulfilling, passionate union of two people. It makes me feel hollow inside just thinking about it.
Maybe it would be different if I liked children. No one believes me that, basically, I don't. Generally I find them annoying and self-centered. Not that children aren't supposed to be self-centered. I understand that's how they're supposed to be. It is Good and Right to be self-centered as a child since you can't provide for yourself and have to call the attention of others to your needs. Doesn't mean I have to enjoy being around them.
I just have this unavoidable feeling that people tend to try to find the emotional fulfillment in their lives through children that they haven't found in their careers, which is, imho, stupid. It's idiotic to believe that there is something you can achieve in your business or academic career that will bring you contentment...and yet, so many people around me seem to believe that is true. They work their asses off for...something. And the something is different for each person. But the philosophers of the world have been telling us for thousands upon thousands of years that there is no goal, at least in this world, that having achieved it will bring you inner peace. It's a cliche that is nonetheless true: the journey is the important part, not the destination. And yet people continue to delude themselves into thinking the destination is at all relevent, that things will somehow be better when you get "there," despite the fact that if you force them to look back on their lives, it is inescapably the case that there were many "there"s in their life, and they were no closer to personal fulfillment upon achieving any of them.
People are dumb and don't learn from their own experiences.
Unfortunately, it is also the case that the vast majority of the world cannot get satisfaction from their work per se. Note I say cannot rather than do not. It is a great myth of management that everyone can find satisfaction in their work if only they try. Bullshit, and particularly insidious bullshit at that. Americans are the only ones who are deluded enough to believe that who you are as a person is defined by the way you earn a living. If we made public policy that acknowledged this basic fact, I think a lot more people would have better lives.
That's why I find it particularly frightening that people look to child-rearing as the answer to finding meaning that they can't find in their occupation. What a vicious circle that creates. Your job leaves you hollow, so you have children, which utterly drain you, forcing you to work harder at your job to provide for them, so you see your children less, etc. etc. etc. Horrifying. Find fulfillment elsewhere. Find a way to express yourself, and find something to do that you enjoy just the process of doing. There's so much to do and see in the world that costs so little in terms of money, effort, and time.
I dunno...maybe work in the modern world is becoming so onerous that you have to have something so major and so positive in your life so as to justify what you have to put yourself through anyway in order to survive. That just feels like an argument that feeds on itself to me. Children demand more work to support them. Work demands more children to make up for the emotional gap created by the workload. And so on. It feels like an addiction mentality.
We just have such a child-centered culture. And consequently, a marriage-centered culture. It's no wonder that the rate of infidelity is so high. I don't advocate mindless hedonism, but damned if I don't think people would be a hell of a lot happier if they would just quit spending all their time compiling building blocks of some illusory future gratification and spend some of that energy on things that actively bring them joy. There's no reason everybody needs to have so many goddamn mid-life crises. I know it's an utter and insulting oversimplification to say "follow your bliss" as Campbell is famous for saying, because there is a certain inescapable core hardship to life unless your particular bliss happens to pay well, but nonetheless fucking find things that make you happy. Slaves found joy in music and singing; the poor and destitute can find happiness in storytelling and the company of others...I guarantee that with a little work you can maneuver yourself into a situation that you find at least tolerable and allows you some respectable portion of your life to go running with your bliss every so often.
I just think in my particular case having to change a shit-filled diaper isn't going to help me find that bliss. It costs millions of dollars to raise a child. It only costs me about $10 in gas to go watch the sun set over the waves of the Pacific ocean while listening to the surf lapping against the shore. Guess which one makes me truly, soulfully happy?
I don't give a shit whether I leave a legacy or not. The world is welcome to forget me when I'm gone. I have no need to pass on my genes. Fuck 'em. I am more important than my genetic code. Evolution endowed me with some degree of self-awareness and self-determination. I choose to care about me rather than my DNA or anything about me that might persist beyond my existence itself. To care about such things is to try to find external validation, and if you think your happiness depends on external validation, you're already fucked.
(case in point, I really don't give a shit whether anyone reads this. :) I enjoy the process of having to write these little rants. If they happen to entertain anyone else, hey, all the better...)
Iraq election results
Well, ok, so maybe it's not as bad as I made it seem. The Shiites are making noises that they're willing to compromise about the role of Islam in state law, and they have to reach consensus with the Kurds and other secular groups before the government can move forward. But even if they work out a compromise, there's no reason you wouldn't see either an overt or clandestine takeover of the government by clerics once the formal rules of government are in place.
Regardless, I don't think Iraq will be the catalyst to bring peace and harmony to the middle east. If the United States has proved anything it's that democracies don't prevent militant, ignorant assholes from rising to power.
Regardless, I don't think Iraq will be the catalyst to bring peace and harmony to the middle east. If the United States has proved anything it's that democracies don't prevent militant, ignorant assholes from rising to power.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Yay democracy!
Let the fun begin! The Sunnis have "a handful of assembly seats and little political clout," the one secular political alliance took only 12% of the vote (which means, boys and girls, that Iraq is all set to become an Islamist state), and the Kurds and Shiites both adamantly believe that their guy should be prime minister. A marginalized minority, civil law and policy that will reflect Islamic law and policy, and strife between the two main political parties...oh yeah, this is definitely a recipe for peace and better relations with the US.
And after spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq to achieve, as far as I can tell, no gain and potentially increased al queda recruitment, GW has the balls to single out social security as the largest looming fiscal crisis? And his solution will do nothing but increase the risk to retirees, pad fund managers pockets with fees, incur a potentially trillian dollar plus changeover cost, and subject every American's retirement to political forces? How does anyone like this guy?! It continues to blow my mind...
And after spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq to achieve, as far as I can tell, no gain and potentially increased al queda recruitment, GW has the balls to single out social security as the largest looming fiscal crisis? And his solution will do nothing but increase the risk to retirees, pad fund managers pockets with fees, incur a potentially trillian dollar plus changeover cost, and subject every American's retirement to political forces? How does anyone like this guy?! It continues to blow my mind...
A word on security
...and that word is, of course, stupid.
I saw some comments on the page that adequately express what an utterly retarded concept this is. The gist: existing passwords are insecure because you can pre-compute values such that breaking a password amounts to doing a lookup in a big database, and that can be done within seconds.. (this is true). The "solution" is to use passphrases. (this is dumb). The argument goes: well, passphrases are much easier to remember, but they're like often 20 to 30 characters long, and it would take forever to crack something that long! Except, you're still assuming that the crack would have to guess all the letters in your password individually. Not true. Even a dumb attacker is going to precompute based on different dictionary words thrown together, and an intelligent attacker is simply going to carry around a Bartlett's quotations instead of a dictionary. The space of memorable quotes is far, far smaller than the string of potentially random letters in a 10-character password. Smartcards are the only reasonable way to do this.
A note on the issue for the less than technical:
How do passwords work? Why do us CS nerd types get a warm fuzzy feeling from passwords that our data is secure. Well, Virginia, what generally happens when you type a password into your computer on your keyboard is that the computer utters a few magic words while in solemn concentration over your secret password and transforms it into a concealed form. Less metaphorically, it computes a cryptographic hash function on your password. The nice property of such a hash function is that after it's done, the output looks pretty much nothing like the stuff you typed in, and it is provable by the dark mages of theory that there's no "easy" way for anyone to compute the reverse (i.e., the hash value back to your password). Such magic wands are called "one-way functions", because you can use such a wand to turn a password into its hash, but you can't do the reverse. So, we can verify that you're typing the right password by hashing it as we did before and comparing it to the original hash. If they match, you gave us the right password. If not, quit trying to steal my shit.
So, as someone who is trying to game the system, you're left with by "brute force" picking random passwords and seeing if they work. This is not so much impossible as it is hard and requires way more time than anyone wants to spend on it. But it turns out that for the password lengths anyone bothers to use, it's fairly easy to pre-compute all such hashes of every password you might possibly be inclined to use, store it on a disc, and then carry it with you in your encryption-breaking shenanigans. Now, you have to actually get a hold of the hash you want to find a password for, which is why they mention watching network traffic go over the wire. Once you have such a thing, voila! Your password is done broke.
I saw some comments on the page that adequately express what an utterly retarded concept this is. The gist: existing passwords are insecure because you can pre-compute values such that breaking a password amounts to doing a lookup in a big database, and that can be done within seconds.. (this is true). The "solution" is to use passphrases. (this is dumb). The argument goes: well, passphrases are much easier to remember, but they're like often 20 to 30 characters long, and it would take forever to crack something that long! Except, you're still assuming that the crack would have to guess all the letters in your password individually. Not true. Even a dumb attacker is going to precompute based on different dictionary words thrown together, and an intelligent attacker is simply going to carry around a Bartlett's quotations instead of a dictionary. The space of memorable quotes is far, far smaller than the string of potentially random letters in a 10-character password. Smartcards are the only reasonable way to do this.
A note on the issue for the less than technical:
How do passwords work? Why do us CS nerd types get a warm fuzzy feeling from passwords that our data is secure. Well, Virginia, what generally happens when you type a password into your computer on your keyboard is that the computer utters a few magic words while in solemn concentration over your secret password and transforms it into a concealed form. Less metaphorically, it computes a cryptographic hash function on your password. The nice property of such a hash function is that after it's done, the output looks pretty much nothing like the stuff you typed in, and it is provable by the dark mages of theory that there's no "easy" way for anyone to compute the reverse (i.e., the hash value back to your password). Such magic wands are called "one-way functions", because you can use such a wand to turn a password into its hash, but you can't do the reverse. So, we can verify that you're typing the right password by hashing it as we did before and comparing it to the original hash. If they match, you gave us the right password. If not, quit trying to steal my shit.
So, as someone who is trying to game the system, you're left with by "brute force" picking random passwords and seeing if they work. This is not so much impossible as it is hard and requires way more time than anyone wants to spend on it. But it turns out that for the password lengths anyone bothers to use, it's fairly easy to pre-compute all such hashes of every password you might possibly be inclined to use, store it on a disc, and then carry it with you in your encryption-breaking shenanigans. Now, you have to actually get a hold of the hash you want to find a password for, which is why they mention watching network traffic go over the wire. Once you have such a thing, voila! Your password is done broke.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Microsoft doomed?
Of course, this article caught my attention. So buckle up, boys and girls! It's time to ride the Rant-Mobile!
Given that I'm not sure exactly what the point of the article is, I can't really tell if I agree with it or not. If Malone's argument is that Microsoft is doomed in the long term without a dramatic shift in strategy, I absolutely agree. In fact, I'll bet if you ask anyone inside Microsoft off the record, they'll tell you the same thing. Microsoft's OS monopoly is doomed, and everyone knows that. Right now I think they're just trying to leech the last few years of ridiculously-sized guaranteed profits on it as they try to sleaze their way into future markets (mobile computing, home entertainment, etc.).
That isn't the same thing as saying Microsoft will be dead and gone in 15 years. It might be, but I doubt it. A company that big doesn't vanish. Say what you will, but Microsoft still makes more in a day than Google makes in 3 months. IBM had a similar monopoly on hardware back in the 80s that was shattered, and yet they're still around. Note that they just sold their PC division which is what they started out doing. They've shifted to business services. They adapted. So will Microsoft. You may believe their execs are evil, but they're not stupid.
Note also that the reason Microsoft will lose their monopoly in the long term is not Linux. I'm sorry, but Linux isn't better than Windows, boys and girls. Linux is an amorphous term for a variety of distributions (Slackware, Red Hat, etc.) that share, at best, parts of the kernel (the core of the operating system). What sucks about Windows is the crap built on top of the kernel (e.g., the shell) and the way it all interacts with each other. Not only is Linux not better in terms of its shell and UI, but I'll put the NT kernel up against the Linux kernel any day. Sure, there are things the Linux kernel does better, but there are also things NT does better (among other things, last I checked, the NT kernel dealt with multiple processors a hell of a lot better than Linux does). Viruses get written for Windows because it's the most predominant operating system in the consumer market. If Linux had the same market share, it would have a lot of the same problems with security and reliability that Windows does. Linux isn't a panacea.
No, the reason Windows is going to lose its monopoly is that the world is going to change. I've been saying for a while now (and so have others before me) that the days of the omnipotent PC are numbered. It doesn't make sense to have a single box that can (and more importantly will) run anything under the sun. It doesn't need to, and you don't need it to. Think about what you actually use your computer for. I'm betting it boils down to web surfing (which amounts to remote information retrieval), email, word processing, and maybe personal finance. Maybe games. But that's about it.
There's no reason to have a computer than is capable of running all of that, and a database, and a web server, and complex scientific calculations, and PVR software, and IM, etc. etc. etc. It's dumb. It's the complexity of trying to have a single machine do all of that that makes it so insecure and unreliable, which is what people hate most of all. You're much better off having several different minimally empowered machines that perhaps have a common way to talk to one another in your home. If you limit the functionality of any given device, it becomes much more dependable and easy to design as well as maintain. How many viruses have you gotten on your Tivo lately? Or even your XBox? Similarly, did you even notice the last time your Tivo updated itself? In that respect, it doesn't make any more sense to have Linux run every arbitrary piece of software under the sun on the same box any more than it does to have Windows do so.
Personally, I think Apple is far more of a threat these days than Linux in terms of the consumer market. Apple has poised itself far better to take over the electronics of your home than either Linux or Microsoft have. And Google is in a position to dominate the software and infrastructure you use to store and access the data in your life (they have the momentum...question is whether they can keep it going and not have their growing pains kill them). Linux is just the wet dream of basement radio-disassembling nerds, as well as ungrounded and shallow idealists, that won't die. I don't know that it will or even should die, but people really need to get a grip on what about it is objectively good and what isn't.
Given that I'm not sure exactly what the point of the article is, I can't really tell if I agree with it or not. If Malone's argument is that Microsoft is doomed in the long term without a dramatic shift in strategy, I absolutely agree. In fact, I'll bet if you ask anyone inside Microsoft off the record, they'll tell you the same thing. Microsoft's OS monopoly is doomed, and everyone knows that. Right now I think they're just trying to leech the last few years of ridiculously-sized guaranteed profits on it as they try to sleaze their way into future markets (mobile computing, home entertainment, etc.).
That isn't the same thing as saying Microsoft will be dead and gone in 15 years. It might be, but I doubt it. A company that big doesn't vanish. Say what you will, but Microsoft still makes more in a day than Google makes in 3 months. IBM had a similar monopoly on hardware back in the 80s that was shattered, and yet they're still around. Note that they just sold their PC division which is what they started out doing. They've shifted to business services. They adapted. So will Microsoft. You may believe their execs are evil, but they're not stupid.
Note also that the reason Microsoft will lose their monopoly in the long term is not Linux. I'm sorry, but Linux isn't better than Windows, boys and girls. Linux is an amorphous term for a variety of distributions (Slackware, Red Hat, etc.) that share, at best, parts of the kernel (the core of the operating system). What sucks about Windows is the crap built on top of the kernel (e.g., the shell) and the way it all interacts with each other. Not only is Linux not better in terms of its shell and UI, but I'll put the NT kernel up against the Linux kernel any day. Sure, there are things the Linux kernel does better, but there are also things NT does better (among other things, last I checked, the NT kernel dealt with multiple processors a hell of a lot better than Linux does). Viruses get written for Windows because it's the most predominant operating system in the consumer market. If Linux had the same market share, it would have a lot of the same problems with security and reliability that Windows does. Linux isn't a panacea.
No, the reason Windows is going to lose its monopoly is that the world is going to change. I've been saying for a while now (and so have others before me) that the days of the omnipotent PC are numbered. It doesn't make sense to have a single box that can (and more importantly will) run anything under the sun. It doesn't need to, and you don't need it to. Think about what you actually use your computer for. I'm betting it boils down to web surfing (which amounts to remote information retrieval), email, word processing, and maybe personal finance. Maybe games. But that's about it.
There's no reason to have a computer than is capable of running all of that, and a database, and a web server, and complex scientific calculations, and PVR software, and IM, etc. etc. etc. It's dumb. It's the complexity of trying to have a single machine do all of that that makes it so insecure and unreliable, which is what people hate most of all. You're much better off having several different minimally empowered machines that perhaps have a common way to talk to one another in your home. If you limit the functionality of any given device, it becomes much more dependable and easy to design as well as maintain. How many viruses have you gotten on your Tivo lately? Or even your XBox? Similarly, did you even notice the last time your Tivo updated itself? In that respect, it doesn't make any more sense to have Linux run every arbitrary piece of software under the sun on the same box any more than it does to have Windows do so.
Personally, I think Apple is far more of a threat these days than Linux in terms of the consumer market. Apple has poised itself far better to take over the electronics of your home than either Linux or Microsoft have. And Google is in a position to dominate the software and infrastructure you use to store and access the data in your life (they have the momentum...question is whether they can keep it going and not have their growing pains kill them). Linux is just the wet dream of basement radio-disassembling nerds, as well as ungrounded and shallow idealists, that won't die. I don't know that it will or even should die, but people really need to get a grip on what about it is objectively good and what isn't.
Wookie Wang!
Those of us so generously endowed know all too well that with great power comes great responsibility...
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Tsunami video
I've been trying to find a video of the tsunami for a while. Damn. You can catch a glimpse at the last minute how big the wave eventually becomes before breaking. Apparently this was very mild compared to most of the other locations that were hit.
Employee blogging
I find this (and I supposed relatedly this) fascinating from a sociological perspective. Some part of me of course feels bad for them for being fired for something they said or did that was totally irrelevent to their job, and it's frustrating to see yet another example of the chilling effect on free speech that the corporatization of America has. The fact that there's now legal precedent for your company to snoop your email just because they own the email server really bugs me. Most people spend most of their lives in an office and do much of their interaction with the outside world in that context. Just because the company owns the infrastructure an employee uses to communicate with the outside world means that employee has no rights regarding their personal communication? Or that the employee should engage in absolutely no job-unrelated activity while at work? When work hours are getting longer and longer and most of any given person's life is spent in their office? That's bullshit.
On the other hand, it's utterly idiotic and naive to think that you can identify yourself as an employee of a particular company in a public forum and not expect that company to pay close attention to what you say. PR departments exist for a reason. Companies very carefully monitor their public image, and they know very well that if all their employees say whatever they want about them, they no longer have control over that image, and that scenario scares them. Just because Microsoft or Google have "open" policies regarding blogging doesn't mean employee bloggers have a blank check. Do you really think if you say "Windows sucks and you shouldn't buy it" you won't, at the very least, end up having a nice little chat with one of your superiors?
Relatedly, I've always found it rather...some combination of amusing and annoying I guess would be the closest way to describe it...that people ever honestly believe corporate mottos or corporate images mean anything. Apple makes generally good products. I grant you that. Insofar as that's anyone's rationale for liking Apple, I'm fine with that. But for the people who believe Apple holds some kind of ethos, is inherently "good" in a way that someone like Microsoft is not, or in some way holds making "hip" electronics and aesthetics as an absolute ideal that supercedes any business motivation is just fucking stupid. Businesses make money. Period. They will do whatever they can to make money, and they will abandon meaningless mottos like "Think Different" and other PR-created corporate images the instant they interfere with their long-term bottom line. If Apple were going to make more money by selling PCs starting tomorrow covered in garbage and running Windows 3.1, they would.
Same issue with Google. People think it means something that their motto is "Don't be evil." This is clearly a reference to Microsoft, but it's utterly laughable to me. Google will be evil if it benefits them. It just so happens that at the moment it's beneficial to them to tap anti-software establishment sentiment and to create the impression that they have some kind of corporate ethics. In the endgame, they don't. I promise you. At some point, if it significantly affects their bottom line, Google too will be "evil." But, if you believe in the free market, it's not evil anyway. Good and evil are value judgments. In the free market, there is no good and evil. It's just a matter of what you can get away with while maximizing your profits.
...And this, children, is why I don't buy the whole "Microsoft is the evil empire" line. Microsoft is a company. They are a company who through savvy business decisions acquired a dominant market position, and they have aggressively fought to keep that position. The problem is that they were aggressive to the detriment of their public image, and now that is coming back to haunt them. They let their true motivation show through, and the idiot masses don't like to be reminded that businesses inherently have no soul. Nor do they like to be sold crap, but that's a separate issue. My point is that if Google or Apple found themselves in the same market position Microsoft is in, they would act identically. They are all just software companies doing what they think will most benefit them at the moment. Morals don't enter into it.
Does this mean I don't think you should be pissed at Microsoft for being a bully and engaging in some sleazy business practices? No, of course not. The only way to change behavior is to reward good behavior and punish bad. Basic behavioral psychology. My point (I seem to have many of them today) is that while criticizing them is worthwhile, blaming them is not. If you want to prevent businesses from operating as Microsoft has, fix the system. Close the legal loopholes and hold all companies accountable for the actions they take. Don't just get upset that somebody actually bothered to jump through the loopholes. Addressing one particular manifestation of a general problem does not fix the problem.
One final note: the issue of corporate image versus corporate morality is why campaigns like Apple's "Think Different" have always bothered me. I wished people would get more upset at Apple's use of the images of people like Feynman, Einstein, etc. The great scientific innovators' and agents' of social change motivations were pure, insofar as anyone's motivations are pure. They wanted to advance scientific knowledge, teach, and change the world for the better. They were not co-opting those goals to further another implicit end as Apple was and is by using their images. Apple's use of their lives and their work is utterly parasitic, feeding off the reputation of genuine heroes and innovators to bolster their bottom line. I remember a few years ago many people became upset, rightly so in my opinion, at the use of...I think it was an insurance company's?...use of the image of Martin Luther King in an advertisement. Apple's use of Feynman or Einstein is not particularly different. It bugs me, therefore, to see Apple people proudly displaying such Apple posters on their walls while at the same time railing against Microsoft's practices. You can't have it both ways. Either taking advantage of the opportunities and resources (and loopholes and hard work of others) is ok, or it's not. Think about it: if Microsoft evoked the image of Stephen Hawking as part of an ad campaign, would you be upset?
(I'm beginning to think "blog" should be a synonym for "rant"...)
On the other hand, it's utterly idiotic and naive to think that you can identify yourself as an employee of a particular company in a public forum and not expect that company to pay close attention to what you say. PR departments exist for a reason. Companies very carefully monitor their public image, and they know very well that if all their employees say whatever they want about them, they no longer have control over that image, and that scenario scares them. Just because Microsoft or Google have "open" policies regarding blogging doesn't mean employee bloggers have a blank check. Do you really think if you say "Windows sucks and you shouldn't buy it" you won't, at the very least, end up having a nice little chat with one of your superiors?
Relatedly, I've always found it rather...some combination of amusing and annoying I guess would be the closest way to describe it...that people ever honestly believe corporate mottos or corporate images mean anything. Apple makes generally good products. I grant you that. Insofar as that's anyone's rationale for liking Apple, I'm fine with that. But for the people who believe Apple holds some kind of ethos, is inherently "good" in a way that someone like Microsoft is not, or in some way holds making "hip" electronics and aesthetics as an absolute ideal that supercedes any business motivation is just fucking stupid. Businesses make money. Period. They will do whatever they can to make money, and they will abandon meaningless mottos like "Think Different" and other PR-created corporate images the instant they interfere with their long-term bottom line. If Apple were going to make more money by selling PCs starting tomorrow covered in garbage and running Windows 3.1, they would.
Same issue with Google. People think it means something that their motto is "Don't be evil." This is clearly a reference to Microsoft, but it's utterly laughable to me. Google will be evil if it benefits them. It just so happens that at the moment it's beneficial to them to tap anti-software establishment sentiment and to create the impression that they have some kind of corporate ethics. In the endgame, they don't. I promise you. At some point, if it significantly affects their bottom line, Google too will be "evil." But, if you believe in the free market, it's not evil anyway. Good and evil are value judgments. In the free market, there is no good and evil. It's just a matter of what you can get away with while maximizing your profits.
...And this, children, is why I don't buy the whole "Microsoft is the evil empire" line. Microsoft is a company. They are a company who through savvy business decisions acquired a dominant market position, and they have aggressively fought to keep that position. The problem is that they were aggressive to the detriment of their public image, and now that is coming back to haunt them. They let their true motivation show through, and the idiot masses don't like to be reminded that businesses inherently have no soul. Nor do they like to be sold crap, but that's a separate issue. My point is that if Google or Apple found themselves in the same market position Microsoft is in, they would act identically. They are all just software companies doing what they think will most benefit them at the moment. Morals don't enter into it.
Does this mean I don't think you should be pissed at Microsoft for being a bully and engaging in some sleazy business practices? No, of course not. The only way to change behavior is to reward good behavior and punish bad. Basic behavioral psychology. My point (I seem to have many of them today) is that while criticizing them is worthwhile, blaming them is not. If you want to prevent businesses from operating as Microsoft has, fix the system. Close the legal loopholes and hold all companies accountable for the actions they take. Don't just get upset that somebody actually bothered to jump through the loopholes. Addressing one particular manifestation of a general problem does not fix the problem.
One final note: the issue of corporate image versus corporate morality is why campaigns like Apple's "Think Different" have always bothered me. I wished people would get more upset at Apple's use of the images of people like Feynman, Einstein, etc. The great scientific innovators' and agents' of social change motivations were pure, insofar as anyone's motivations are pure. They wanted to advance scientific knowledge, teach, and change the world for the better. They were not co-opting those goals to further another implicit end as Apple was and is by using their images. Apple's use of their lives and their work is utterly parasitic, feeding off the reputation of genuine heroes and innovators to bolster their bottom line. I remember a few years ago many people became upset, rightly so in my opinion, at the use of...I think it was an insurance company's?...use of the image of Martin Luther King in an advertisement. Apple's use of Feynman or Einstein is not particularly different. It bugs me, therefore, to see Apple people proudly displaying such Apple posters on their walls while at the same time railing against Microsoft's practices. You can't have it both ways. Either taking advantage of the opportunities and resources (and loopholes and hard work of others) is ok, or it's not. Think about it: if Microsoft evoked the image of Stephen Hawking as part of an ad campaign, would you be upset?
(I'm beginning to think "blog" should be a synonym for "rant"...)
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
I never remember to account for whales
There's always something you forget to plan for when taking a vacation...
Monday, February 07, 2005
Hey look! An important person agrees with me!
Friday, February 04, 2005
Sun's BS attack on .NET security
Microsoft has many flaws. So does Windows. I'm happy to admit these. But don't fucking make up shit that isn't true.
I guess what pisses me off about the whole thing is that it's a deliberate mis-interpretation. The guy deals with Java, so he should know better. For the non-technical in the audience, let me quickly explain the issue:
In the days of yore, everything was written in assembly code, which is about half a baby step away from writing programs in ones and zeros. Nothing was done for you, and you wrote code that ran directly on the hardware (i.e., you wrote exactly the instructions that the processor executed). The problem with this is that a) it's hard, and correspondingly b) dificult to get right.
Then god created C, a compiled language. C allowed you to write programs using more easily understood abstractions like variables, function calls, etc. instead of directly telling the hardware what to do. You wrote a program in C, then you ran it through a compiler, and the compiler generated the actual machine instructions for you. These days, unless you're programming a very small, very weak computer (or you're writing a very particular part of an operating system), you're not writing assembly code unless you're an idiot.
But the problem with C is that you could still do just about anything. With great power comes great responsibility. In C, you can directly access any piece of memory you want to. It's all just bytes. C does give you some abstractions if you want them, but you're generally always free to ignore them and flip whatever bits you want to. This fact is indirectly the cause of the vast majority of security vulnerabilities.
So then, the language gods gave us what are called type-safe languages like Java (from Sun) and C# (from Microsoft, and what I most often program in). In type-safe languages, you can no longer directly access memory. To use a bizarre metaphor, if you are playing around with a walrus, you can't suddenly decide you'd rather interact with it as if it were a BMW M3. It's a walrus, and it will always be a walrus, and if you want an M3, you have to go get it from somewhere else. This turns out to be a really great thing, because no matter how stupid you are, you can't accidentally treat the walrus like an M3 because you got confused as to what you had in front of you. You're inescapably forced to treat a walrus like a walrus, and, for instance, no virus writer can trick you into thinking your walrus is an M3.
So what Gosling is complaining about is the fact that there's a way, in .NET, to flip a switch that turns type-safety off. Mostly for backwards compatibility, it turns out that sometimes you need to be able to ignore type safety. So, Microsoft put a way into .NET to allow you to do that. But by default you can't, and you have to have some pretty strong security rights to be able to flip that switch. An applet downloaded off the web from a mischievous web site creator can't flip it, for instance.
So, if you're retarded, you can, as a developer, flip that switch in something you write. And if you're dumb enough to do that without considering the consequences, yes, it can be a security hole. But the decision to flip that switch has to be very deliberate, and as I said, it's off by default. So, saying that this ability, called the "unsafe flag", is a giant security hole is like saying having keys for locks is a security hole because the keys can be used to unlock the lock and then, well, anyone can march into your building!
To which we reply: yeah, well, but there are some times when you do, actually, want to let people into your building in a carefully controlled way, and if you're dumb enough to leave it unlocked the rest of the time, well, that's your own damn fault and not the lock's, now isn't it? A building that you can never open the doors to is admittedly quite safe, but not terribly useful, don't you think?
I guess what pisses me off about the whole thing is that it's a deliberate mis-interpretation. The guy deals with Java, so he should know better. For the non-technical in the audience, let me quickly explain the issue:
In the days of yore, everything was written in assembly code, which is about half a baby step away from writing programs in ones and zeros. Nothing was done for you, and you wrote code that ran directly on the hardware (i.e., you wrote exactly the instructions that the processor executed). The problem with this is that a) it's hard, and correspondingly b) dificult to get right.
Then god created C, a compiled language. C allowed you to write programs using more easily understood abstractions like variables, function calls, etc. instead of directly telling the hardware what to do. You wrote a program in C, then you ran it through a compiler, and the compiler generated the actual machine instructions for you. These days, unless you're programming a very small, very weak computer (or you're writing a very particular part of an operating system), you're not writing assembly code unless you're an idiot.
But the problem with C is that you could still do just about anything. With great power comes great responsibility. In C, you can directly access any piece of memory you want to. It's all just bytes. C does give you some abstractions if you want them, but you're generally always free to ignore them and flip whatever bits you want to. This fact is indirectly the cause of the vast majority of security vulnerabilities.
So then, the language gods gave us what are called type-safe languages like Java (from Sun) and C# (from Microsoft, and what I most often program in). In type-safe languages, you can no longer directly access memory. To use a bizarre metaphor, if you are playing around with a walrus, you can't suddenly decide you'd rather interact with it as if it were a BMW M3. It's a walrus, and it will always be a walrus, and if you want an M3, you have to go get it from somewhere else. This turns out to be a really great thing, because no matter how stupid you are, you can't accidentally treat the walrus like an M3 because you got confused as to what you had in front of you. You're inescapably forced to treat a walrus like a walrus, and, for instance, no virus writer can trick you into thinking your walrus is an M3.
So what Gosling is complaining about is the fact that there's a way, in .NET, to flip a switch that turns type-safety off. Mostly for backwards compatibility, it turns out that sometimes you need to be able to ignore type safety. So, Microsoft put a way into .NET to allow you to do that. But by default you can't, and you have to have some pretty strong security rights to be able to flip that switch. An applet downloaded off the web from a mischievous web site creator can't flip it, for instance.
So, if you're retarded, you can, as a developer, flip that switch in something you write. And if you're dumb enough to do that without considering the consequences, yes, it can be a security hole. But the decision to flip that switch has to be very deliberate, and as I said, it's off by default. So, saying that this ability, called the "unsafe flag", is a giant security hole is like saying having keys for locks is a security hole because the keys can be used to unlock the lock and then, well, anyone can march into your building!
To which we reply: yeah, well, but there are some times when you do, actually, want to let people into your building in a carefully controlled way, and if you're dumb enough to leave it unlocked the rest of the time, well, that's your own damn fault and not the lock's, now isn't it? A building that you can never open the doors to is admittedly quite safe, but not terribly useful, don't you think?
Holy crap!
Family Guy video game?! Usually they fuck up video games of tv shows, but this time it's Take Two (of Grand Theft Auto fame), so it might actually be decent. Maybe.
Regardless, this seems to imply Family Guy is returning to Fox in May!!! Wheeee!
Regardless, this seems to imply Family Guy is returning to Fox in May!!! Wheeee!
Dean as DNC chief
I'm trying to figure out how I feel about this. I think it's a good thing. Making the Democratic party more moderate is not the answer to its failures this last election. You can't out-Republican the Republicans. Don't try. The Democrats need to get some balls, have a coherent agenda, make an organized case to voters, and show the Republican leadership to be the utter sleaze they are. Dean's certainly showed he's not afraid of confrontation, and I don't imagine he'll let the party drift center. Hopefully, Dean will do well. I don't think reversing Republican gains in 2006 is necessarily realistic (I dunno...I haven't looked at which Senators are up for re-election). Probably keeping status quo is the only reasonable goal. It's going to take a bit of time to build the same kind of infrastructure the Republicans already have (think tanks, direct-mail/mass PR compaigns, etc.), but it's doable. I suspect even having any hope of a Democratic President in 2008 is unrealistic (Hillary, though more politically savvy than Kerry, can't win, Obama's too junior and, you know, black...who else is there?). With any luck we'll have Arnold rather than Frist.
God, what a depressing choice...
God, what a depressing choice...
A dark irony
I can't help but feel a little suspicious of the Almighty given the recent death of Stephen Jay Gould as well as now Mayr in the face of Jerry Falwell's continued existince. Creationists will tell you its God's wrath at blasphemers. I think it's simply proof of an all-pervasive dark sense of humor.
Mmmm...Mercury-licious
GW Bush: Bringing You a Culture of Life. Until You're Born. Then You're Fucked. Because It Costs Too Damn Much To Keep Your Dumb, Poor Ass Alive and Healthy.
But hey, if you fuck up enough, we'll be happy to give you the death penalty absolutely free!
But hey, if you fuck up enough, we'll be happy to give you the death penalty absolutely free!
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Things have gotten bad when...
...you have to make travel decisions based on whether you stand to be arrested on war-crimes charges in your destination.
Oh Rummy...what shenanigans will you get into next?!
(kind of a silly issue since Germany would have to be insane to actually arrest the standing Secretary of Defense for the US, but still...)
Oh Rummy...what shenanigans will you get into next?!
(kind of a silly issue since Germany would have to be insane to actually arrest the standing Secretary of Defense for the US, but still...)
Meager opposition
You know, I'm glad the dems are actually making some attempt to challenge the President, and the State of the Union rebuttal was decent (at least a hell of a lot better than the one given by Locke a few years ago...Christ that was pathetic...), but I wish they were nailing him harder on it. His numbers are just plain _wrong_. They're contrived to make social security look in worse shape than it really is, and he's instructed the social security administration to issue statements casting a positive light on his argument. He's lying. Call him out on it. I think one of the biggest problems the Democrats have these days is they're perceived as not being willing to take a stand. And I understand that's partly because they have to maintain an extremely heterogenous coalition, but still...stop acting like vacillating pussies and tell the emperor to shut up and put some clothes on.
Yes, social security is heading into the red. The baby-boomers are coming of age, so you're going to have a huge influx of beneficiaries, and that money has to come from somewhere. In a few decades, social security won't have enough in and of itself to cover those costs (unless, of course, you believe Bush's own hyped economic growth forecasts of sustained 7% growth over the next 50 years, in which case social security will be doing just fine, thank you, and why are we having this discussion?). But for one thing, after the baby-boomers die off, social security will do just fine. It's just like any basically solvent business: you go through periods of losing money, but over the long haul, things even out. That's very different from the system being "fundamentally broken."
So given that, the answer is to either temporarily reduce benefits for those who don't need it (unpopular, so therefore probably not realistic), or you infuse the system with extra money to cover the time it needs the extra funding. Hell...with the money we spend on Iraq every week, we could probably cover social security for several years!
These days, I can't figure out who I dislike more: the neocon Republican leadership, or the dumb fuck voters who actually believe them despite copious proof of their lying and manipulation of evidence. I suppose I could settle for just hating everybody. That could work.
Yes, social security is heading into the red. The baby-boomers are coming of age, so you're going to have a huge influx of beneficiaries, and that money has to come from somewhere. In a few decades, social security won't have enough in and of itself to cover those costs (unless, of course, you believe Bush's own hyped economic growth forecasts of sustained 7% growth over the next 50 years, in which case social security will be doing just fine, thank you, and why are we having this discussion?). But for one thing, after the baby-boomers die off, social security will do just fine. It's just like any basically solvent business: you go through periods of losing money, but over the long haul, things even out. That's very different from the system being "fundamentally broken."
So given that, the answer is to either temporarily reduce benefits for those who don't need it (unpopular, so therefore probably not realistic), or you infuse the system with extra money to cover the time it needs the extra funding. Hell...with the money we spend on Iraq every week, we could probably cover social security for several years!
These days, I can't figure out who I dislike more: the neocon Republican leadership, or the dumb fuck voters who actually believe them despite copious proof of their lying and manipulation of evidence. I suppose I could settle for just hating everybody. That could work.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Sometimes Gabe is a better writer than Tycho
This paragraph was a work of such staggering comic genius that it necessitates not just linking but outright quoting. I love the last sentence. It should be enshrined in some fashion...
"Tycho seems near death which is a real problem since he is my gravy train. There has been a lot of talk recently about creative teams breaking up, but I assure you that will never happen here as long as I can help it. It’s really not even fair to describe us as a creative team since that implies a level of comradery that just isn’t present in our relationship. You see I recognized his talent for writing years ago while the two of us were still in high school. It seemed that his suicidal pessimism and fierce inner demons drove him to create some pretty incredible creative works. It was then that I developed a plan to harness his crippling depression and ride it to financial success, even if it killed him in the process. For the twelve years that I’ve known him I’ve treated him like a powerful creative furnace that I must feed with insults and contempt in order to produce clean, warm creativity. My greatest fear is that he will one day die or feel true joy." -- Gabe, 2/2/05
"Tycho seems near death which is a real problem since he is my gravy train. There has been a lot of talk recently about creative teams breaking up, but I assure you that will never happen here as long as I can help it. It’s really not even fair to describe us as a creative team since that implies a level of comradery that just isn’t present in our relationship. You see I recognized his talent for writing years ago while the two of us were still in high school. It seemed that his suicidal pessimism and fierce inner demons drove him to create some pretty incredible creative works. It was then that I developed a plan to harness his crippling depression and ride it to financial success, even if it killed him in the process. For the twelve years that I’ve known him I’ve treated him like a powerful creative furnace that I must feed with insults and contempt in order to produce clean, warm creativity. My greatest fear is that he will one day die or feel true joy." -- Gabe, 2/2/05
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
You may ask...
"Why the hell is Nick posting so goddamn much? Does he honestly expect me to read this shit?"
No. I got in a writing groove and couldn't stop. The submission deadline for HotOS (a CS conference) is tonight, and I've helped edit not one but two papers that are being submitted, so my brain got stuck in the "try to undermine this argument" mode, and well, it spilled over into real life. Sorry 'bout that.
Where is the exciting destination for HotOS this year? Fucking Santa Fe. Where was it last time? Lihue, Hawaii. Yeah. Yeah...at least if I end up going to SOSP this year, it will be in Brighton, England. Good for frequent flyer miles if nothing else.
No. I got in a writing groove and couldn't stop. The submission deadline for HotOS (a CS conference) is tonight, and I've helped edit not one but two papers that are being submitted, so my brain got stuck in the "try to undermine this argument" mode, and well, it spilled over into real life. Sorry 'bout that.
Where is the exciting destination for HotOS this year? Fucking Santa Fe. Where was it last time? Lihue, Hawaii. Yeah. Yeah...at least if I end up going to SOSP this year, it will be in Brighton, England. Good for frequent flyer miles if nothing else.
The Sunni perspective
Reporting from the Sunni polling areas (audio clip):
"...a professor who says all that is going to happen out of this new government is that the Shiites will, essentially, get in bed with Iran and the Shiite clerics that rule that country, and they want no part of it..."
Hey, that sounds great! Thank god we got rid of the secular government of Saddam Hussein, who again had absolutely no ties to Al Qeada! We'll be much better off with a democratically-elected (sort of, 'cept not really) government of Shiite muslims who want to get together with their pals from Iran! Thanks Mr. Bush! Your foreign policy is peachy keen!
Then again, what am I worried about? It's not like fundamentalist muslims have an international bond with their fellow devotees or have a relatively unifying hatred for the West...
Sarcasm aside, do I think it's great that large numbers of Iraqis are voting? For them, psychologically, sure. It's the first time they've felt like they had a voice in trying to fix the living hellhole their country has become. Is it really a democratic election? Not really. When the largest minority already feels disenfranchised in a country where conditions are poor and the basic resources for daily life are scarce, you're in dire risk of civil war. Also, it doesn't really count when some idiots from another country march in, point guns at you, and say, "Hey, we don't like your leader. You should have democratic elections! So, umm, go do that."
It's possible that it will work out. One of the main Shiite clerics seems to be making at least some rudimentary effort to include Sunnis in the new government. Who knows...maybe they can get their shit straight and actually put a country together. That doesn't mean a) it's good for the United States if they do, or b) that the whole "regime change" bullshit was a good idea in the first place. Does anyone remember the whole Shah of Iran thing? Anyone? We deposed a popular, democratically elected leader and ended up with the xenophobic, fundamentalist Shiite regime we've come to know and love? Anybody? Bueller?
Just because Iraq might become a functioning democracy doesn't mean it will be any more interested in cooperating with the West or quelling terrorism. Even if you did have a complete dick for a dictator (a far-flung hypothetical for every liberal out there, I'm sure), how would you feel if another country invaded you? Warm fuzzies all around? Send them Christmas newsletters?
"...a professor who says all that is going to happen out of this new government is that the Shiites will, essentially, get in bed with Iran and the Shiite clerics that rule that country, and they want no part of it..."
Hey, that sounds great! Thank god we got rid of the secular government of Saddam Hussein, who again had absolutely no ties to Al Qeada! We'll be much better off with a democratically-elected (sort of, 'cept not really) government of Shiite muslims who want to get together with their pals from Iran! Thanks Mr. Bush! Your foreign policy is peachy keen!
Then again, what am I worried about? It's not like fundamentalist muslims have an international bond with their fellow devotees or have a relatively unifying hatred for the West...
Sarcasm aside, do I think it's great that large numbers of Iraqis are voting? For them, psychologically, sure. It's the first time they've felt like they had a voice in trying to fix the living hellhole their country has become. Is it really a democratic election? Not really. When the largest minority already feels disenfranchised in a country where conditions are poor and the basic resources for daily life are scarce, you're in dire risk of civil war. Also, it doesn't really count when some idiots from another country march in, point guns at you, and say, "Hey, we don't like your leader. You should have democratic elections! So, umm, go do that."
It's possible that it will work out. One of the main Shiite clerics seems to be making at least some rudimentary effort to include Sunnis in the new government. Who knows...maybe they can get their shit straight and actually put a country together. That doesn't mean a) it's good for the United States if they do, or b) that the whole "regime change" bullshit was a good idea in the first place. Does anyone remember the whole Shah of Iran thing? Anyone? We deposed a popular, democratically elected leader and ended up with the xenophobic, fundamentalist Shiite regime we've come to know and love? Anybody? Bueller?
Just because Iraq might become a functioning democracy doesn't mean it will be any more interested in cooperating with the West or quelling terrorism. Even if you did have a complete dick for a dictator (a far-flung hypothetical for every liberal out there, I'm sure), how would you feel if another country invaded you? Warm fuzzies all around? Send them Christmas newsletters?
Random musical aside
"I walk alone" is the first and probably only song by Green Day I have or will ever like. That said, hey, pretty good song. Usual teen angst lyrics, but done well.
More damn lies (with numbers!)
I really should be surprised that privitization advocates' numbers don't add up. But I just can't muster it. People honestly believe that economic gains resulting from Bush's tax cuts can make up for the mindboggling deficit we've run up during our escapades from Iraq without our having to raise taxes. Why should I believe Republicans would have any more honesty about a topic much more easily obfuscated?
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