Frustrating debate

I had a very frustrating experience listening to NPR on the way back from a doctor's appointment today. I ended up listening to the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (you know, the guy Incompetent McCronism used public money to hire a PI to investigate?), specifically today's broadcast. On it were Marsha Blackburn, party shill from the enlightened state of Tennessee, and Marty Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts and foe of coherent thought.

Your first inclination might be to become angry at the idiotic drivel spewing from Blackburn's mouth. But, frankly, I'm over that. The Republican party line is so predictable as to be boring at this point. The war's critics are unpatriotic. All the terrorists in the world jumped on a big happy bus and went to Iraq and forgot about harassing the American public for some reason. Etc. Whatever. It's stupid, and probably anyone listening to NPR knows it's stupid. It's a pointless exercise. Like being in the White House press corps.

What really frustrated me was the largely incoherent and ineffective rebuttal Meehan offered. This is really not that hard an argument to refute, and the fact that the Republicans rely on carefully staged events that involve stump speeches is a testament to this. If you can just get a Republican in a debate at all, you're 3/4 of the way to showing the world they're all idiots. And yet Meehan managed to screw up that last 1/4.

Welcome to being a Democrat. It's like having a gun set up on a tripod pointing at a guy who raped your sister and is now being held motionless by iron clamps, the trigger of which is wired to a giant red button labelled "WIN", and then watching in horror as the guy you picked to press the botton climbs up on the tripod, drapes himself upside-down in front of the gun with the muzzle pointed squarely between his eyes, and smugly stretches to try to press the button with his toe. It's really hard to figure out whether you hate the guy in clamps who raped your sister or the idiot trying to press the button with his toe more.

(aren't my analogies colorful?)

Anyway, the problem is that Meehan wasn't contradicting the complete horse shit Blackburn was saying. Blackburn would say something like, "Iraq is the central battlefield in the war on terror, and we have to win," and then Meehan would say something like, "Iraq isn't just about terror. It's about a flawed strategy." And then he would ramble on about tangential shit for the next few minutes (e.g., we haven't caught Osama, blah blah blah). What a fucktard. Look:

1. "isn't just about terror" is a terrible phrase. How about just "isn't about terrorism." Or even better, "has nothing to do with terrorism at all and never did." Is that so hard? How is it he managed to take a rather simple rebuttal point and make himself sound like a whiney 6-year-old?
2. Clearly terror and fear resonate with a significant part of the population. The Republicans have been feeding off it for 5 years now. Don't say "it's not about terrorism." You're just inviting Republicans to accuse you of being soft on defense. It's standing in front of a giant tunnel with a big red sign that says, "Turn Here To Make Me Look Like an Asshole!"

How about instead you say something like, "Look, this isn't about fighting terrorism versus not fighting terrorism. This is about fighting terrorism intelligently, as we want to, or fighting terrorism stupidly and ineffectively as the Republicans have been doing. Iraq has been plunged into a civil war that claims the lives of American soldiers every day while the terrorists make advances in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere. This administration desperately needs you to believe that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism, because otherwise they might actually have to admit the magnitude of the mistake they've made, the resources they've squandered, and the lives they've sacrificed to their own ineptitude and arrogance. I want to support our troops by making sure they're put in a place where they can make the United States the most secure and by giving them the supplies and armor they need to do their jobs. I think will do far more good than repeating the same, tired talking points and rhetoric we've been hearing for the last 5 years. The lives of our soldiers and the security of the United States are more important to me than the hurt feelings of a few people in Washington."

See? Was that so hard?

Smartest cities in America

I'll thank you to note that the top three cities are the three main cities I've lived in in my life. The only logical conclusion is that people around me osmotically absorb my vast intelligence.

Ted Stevens is a crazy douchebag

More proof.

For fuck's sake, this isn't even a partisan issue. People on the right want this as much as the people on the left. What a fucking douchebag.

Once again, act surprised

...and the cavalcade of cronyism and incompetence continues!...

On Wikiality

...because it's this or do actual work that I need to finish before I leave. Pfft.

"Wikiality" really is a fantastic word, and Colbert deserves some kind of award for that (and, of course, "truthiness"). They are ingenious words not only because the concepts themselves are interesting but they so utterly capture the nature of the United States under Bush. I feel I may have made this observation before, but I can't help but note how utterly ironic that the neocon evangelical "the Bible is the Truth!" President is the one that turned reality itself into an exercise in relativity. In Bush's world, facts are utterly irrelevent. All that matters is what people _think_ the facts are. It is objectivity by majority vote. It is quintessential wikiality.

...which brings us to the subject at hand: my intense dislike for the phenomenon of Wikipedia. At core, it boils down to the fact that Wikipedia takes the worst part of democracy and pushes it to its logical extreme. Nobody seems to get that the "majority rules" part of democracy is not, in fact, its best feature but instead its _worst_. The reason that democracy is such a powerful tool is because it is one of the few forms of government that ensures that one's leaders are responsible to the governed. It just happens that the way this is accomplished is through majority voting. In some senses though, that particular aspect of democracy is merely a side effect. It is merely a means to the end of a responsible government, and a lot of times it's a downright shitty means. Mobs have a way of doing profoundly shitty things. Just ask your average black person in Alabama. The problem is that we just haven't come up with anything better, because every other system you can dream up allows a despot or aristocracy to rule with impunity. Doesn't humanity suck? Because people are so goddamn greedy and self-centered, we have to sacrifice expertise on the altar of responsiveness.

So, it is with deep frustration that I observe Wikipedia. Through the lense I just described, Wikipedia has the idea of populism and democracy utterly ass backwards. What is the responsibility that Wikipedia seeks through popular participation? Does it envision a cloistered academic elite that refuses to admit scientific fact for due to some kind of perverse and inscrutable self-interest?

If so, what horseshit. The academy is one of the few areas of life that hasn't been overwhelmingly tainted by politics, and it does and always has prided itself on its subservience to evidence. Granted, scientists do have a vested interest in hanging on to their own pet research, but the rest of the scientific community has a vested interest in advancing the field even if that means stepping on some egos along the way. It is the one area where you _don't_ have to sacrifice expertise to responsiveness. And yet, Wikipedia righteously does so anyway. Hooray!

Moreover, the modern world of science (and by science, I mean the general practice of evidence-substantiated research, a broad definition meant to include a much wider range of topics than the purely hard sciences) is so complicated that we are often beyond the point where amateurs can contribute meaningfully or, more importantly, reliably. In other words, we _need_ experts, and we need to know that scientific knowledge is coming from experts.

...which brings us back to Wikipedia. At its very core, Wikipedia shuns the idea of experts. It's quintessential thesis is that there are no experts and that all voices are equal. And when it comes to human knowledge, that idea should absolutely terrify you. And anger you.

Now, I will admit that an advantage of Wikipedia is that it serves the "long tail" quite well, i.e., you tend to be able to find very obscure topics in Wikipedia that it is very difficult to find elsewhere. I agree that this is a good thing. But achieving that long tail effect shouldn't sacrifice expertise.

So have an internet repository of knowledge. But don't let the voices of the idiot masses drown out the minority of experts.

Yeeeeeeeeee-haaaaaawww!!!

This seems like a bad idea. It especially seems like a bad idea while smoking. And with a redneck accent.

Great quote

If you trust Google more than your doctor than maybe it's time to switch doctors.
- Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

Quoted on Google, no less. :)

Wikipedia sucks, part 937

I really should start a collection of articles on how relying on Wikipedia as a reliable source of information is, well, retarded.

Homosexual agenda

Hehehehe...I love Mac Hall.

No one is buying Microsoft

I agree with the sentiment of the ZDNET op-ed: somebody's been smoking something at the Financial Times.

Spiritual Technology

This shit pisses me off. Not only is it a bunch of pseudo-science new-age horse shit, it's associated with the University of Washington, so I now take it personally. I hope the fact that this guy is a "senior advisor" doesn't mean Washington State tax dollars are supporting his ass.

Penny Arcade game!

*disturbingly girly squeal of delight*

The 62% violent pac-man

I'm going to have to side with the game reviewer over the Harvard PhD in this one. Specifically, I agree with the statement that the study, which is now notorious for rating Pac-Man as 62% violent, while an interesting piece of research and potentially useful as a basis for other kinds of quantitative research, should never in a million years be used as a basis of policy or a metric in rating games. "Violence" is far too vague and subjective a concept to legalistically quantify by absurd metrics like "number of deaths", "deaths per minute," etc. If you're hellbent on providing a violence rating for a game, you have to have reviewers review it and score it. No stupid rules, no pointless micro-metrics, just a simple, "On a scale from 1 to 10, how violent is this game?" Get enough people to score it like that and you have a rough idea of how violent other people will perceive it to be.

Now, if you can highly correlate those legalistic micro-metrics to the essentially subjective metrics, fantastic. Go for it. But until you do, they have no business in policy.

"Oops"?

Yes, I'm sure it was just an accident.

Goddamn turncoat

This kid needs to be shot. Then beaten. Then shot again.

Never have children

...or they will do this to you.

Don't download this song

Good old Weird Al...

Also, his new album is called, "Straight Outta Lynnwood." That's...that's fantastic.

Bye Bye F-4

F-4 versus wall. Hint: the wall wins.

In the same vein, truck versus pole. Similar result. I can't help but wonder if you couldn't rig the truck to catapult a bomb on impact though, making this exercise somewhat moot?

Fuck Lieberman. Again.

Much as Germans love David Hasselhoff, Republicans love Lieberman.

Why do I feel like I'm in that scene in Star Wars where Annakin discovers Palpatine is a Sith Lord? (and yes, I just used a Star Wars analogy to describe a political situation. Fuck off.)

Judge sacked for consulting imaginary dwarves

I think I'll just let this BBC ditty speak for itself...

Of bargains...

Fucking Avis. I had a reservation with them for my 3 day upcoming trip to Seattle, when I noticed that for some reason (presumably idiocy) I had only booked the car for two days. When I went to change the reservation, they tried to charge me $150 including taxes for 3 days. Are you shitting me? Fuck that.

So, I try HotWire. I enter in my information, dates, etc. Final cost: $75. That sounds like a lot less than $150. So, I buy it. Now, the way that HotWire works is that you don't know who you're contracting with until you buy. Guess who the company turned out to be once I bought? Avis. Fuckers. Why couldn't your dumb asses just give me the reasonable rate out of the gate?

I realized this was part of an imminent change in my purchasing habit. When you're on a corporate expense account, you generally don't care who you buy from or how much it costs so long as it's covered by the company. Mostly you care about the accrual of rewards programs. So, at Microsoft, I used United and Avis almost exclusively. I racked up a fuck-ton of miles on United, and I got a discount on Avis and a member of Avis Preferred, which allowed me to go straight to my car.

But, I've realized that the reward programs aren't actually worth it when you're paying with your own money. United, I've noticed, is consistently higher priced than other airlines. From New York to San Francisco, they are consistently $200 more expensive than others (and incidentally, most corporate travel policies allow you to choose any flight within $200 of the lowest fare...coincidence?). So you know what? Fuck 'em. Sure, it's nice to have the miles to use for upgrading and such, but the money you save by taking the lowest-cost flights, car rentals, etc. more than makes up for the miles you don't accrue. Hell, in the New York case, just not taking that one flight is enough to pay for another ticket! Fuckers.

So, I'm officially becoming a bargain hunter. I cancelled my Mileage Plus Visa last December as I realized, far too late for my own comfort, that a $50-$80 annual fee doesn't even come close to being worth the miles accrued, even if I buy everything with my card. Instead, I got a Fidelity MasterCard with 1.75% cash back that goes into my Fidelity Core account, which then begins to earn interest. Much better deal. And as of my last few trips, I take whichever airline is cheapest. Sure, I may pay more to take a non-stop, but I'm not taking United just because they're United any more. It will hurt me to go from being Premier Executive ("1P" in the flyertalk lingo) to being a General Member peon (not even Premier/2P!), but I'll save money.

P.S. I'm a grad student in just over two weeks. Somebody buy me dinner.

Yay Google-bashing!

Or, more specifically, yay Google-as-a-profit-generating-business bashing.

Another idiotic Internet quiz

...but one after my own heart.

You scored as Commander William Adama. You have risen to your position by being damn good at what you do. Not only that, you have the deepest respect for the people under your command. You may be a little grumpy and unapproachable, but every commander needs to distance himself. Shame that you apply that to your children too. Commander William Adama 69% CPO Galen Tyrol 63% Capt. Lee Adama (Apollo) 63% Lt. Sharon Valerii (Boomer) 50% Tom Zarek 44% Number 6 44% President Laura Roslin 38% Lt. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) 38% Dr Gaius Baltar 31% Col. Saul Tigh 19% What New Battlestar Galactica character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

A campaign I can get behind

Well, think about it...who really needs a caps lock key that isn't stupid?

Defensive boobies

"Look, honey, they're for your own protection, I swear! In this age of terrorism, you can't be too careful..."

Interesting take on Bush v. Gore

Well, was it a power grab or not?

Best of Unnecessary Censorship

Normally I'm not a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel (he's better than Adam Corolla, who seems to be famous for absolutely no reason other than he hung around with Kimmel on The Man Show and isn't nor ever has been funny), but this best-of Unnecessary Censorship is fantastic. Who'd have thought you could actually make things worse by censoring? :)

Why it's best that I'm a computer rather than physical engineer

(Or: I am retarded)

So, funny story...my roommate had to move her bed from our townhouse to her storage unit because she's leaving for Ecuador imminently. I advised her that she should probably protect her mattress somehow, but we didn't have anything that would really fit around and/or cover the the mattress. That's when she had her inspiration: green plastic wrap, which she had a fuckload of from packing.

So we proceeded to wrap her entire mattress in this bizarre, green, squeaky plastic stuff, which involved us running around the mattress haphazardly, climbing awkwardly underneath it while it was suspended on the couch, etc. But we did it. Sealed tight, it was! We were very proud of ourselves. I had a brief nightmarish image of my roommate returning to gooey, green, melted plastic that had been cooked onto her mattress in her absence, but luckily I was assured that this would not happen by external parties. Also, miscellaneous, discolored, gooey substances are pretty much par for the course for her bed anyway...

So, we proceeded to load the mattress and box spring onto her friend's flatbed truck, which already contained her inverted desk and some shelves. Now, the only way to get them all to fit was to stand all the pieces on their sides, in particular the mattress and box spring. This all works fine, except that the mattress and box spring are fairly unstable. They were leaning heavily over the not-high-enough truck wall, and one good bump in the road would have sent them flying. So I decreed that we needed a way to bind the mattress and box spring to the furniture. So far so good.

So we come inside. We figure out we have nothing resembling string. Know what we do have? That's right: green plastic wrap.

So outside we go, proceeding to wrap the plastic aroun and around the mattress, box spring, and furniture. Everything seems fine. It's not the most secure thing in the world, but I figure it should do on the short trip to the storage place.

Then we get on the road, and the proverbial shit hits the fan. On the first turn, the mattress and box spring keel over, dragging the furniture with them, and suddenly the mattresses are dangling dangerously over the side of the truck like a shitfaced co-ed on spring break. I nimbly leap from the front seat to the back, open the window, and pull everything back upright. I then stay there to steady the whole piece with my hand as we approach the onramp to the freeway.

(You just said, "Oh god..." didn't you?)

By now, the keeling over incident has stretched the plastic to the point where it's barely useful any more. Everything seems to be willing to stay upright so long as there's no centripedal force acting on it, so I assume everything should be okay from here on out since we're on the freeway and going in basically a straight line.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Interesting thing about mattresses I hadn't thought of: turns out, they make pretty damn good airfoils, especially when placed on the outside edge of a truck. And in such a case, they are airfoils turned sideways, so instead of pulling up as in an airplane wing, they pull out.

These were the kind of philosophical thoughts I might have had if I hadn't been clinging to the mattress for dear life as it pulled mightily towards the side of the truck, begging to be set free and follow its fortune on the asphalt of US-101. I prayed that it wouldn't fly off and kill someone. At least not anyone anybody else cared about or would, you know, sue over. Meanwhile, my roommate was laughing her ass off. Inconsiderate bitch.

The decision was quickly made to pull off the freeway and take side streets. After that, we drove like an Asian grandma, and everything was fine in the end. But for fuck's sake, never let me design anything important like a bridge.

Hippies

"God...damn...hippies!..."

The 7 types of AOL search engine users

The Basket Case is of course my favorite.

While Bush may not keep a blog

...the batshit president of Iran now apparently does!

(wow...I got nuthin'...)

...or not to Google

What was that whole thing about not being evil, again?

The RIAA are assholes

I wish I thought there were going to be a backlash against the RIAA for deposing kids whose parent just died, but no, there won't be...

Sitting in meinem Bonker

I was just thinking I hadn't seen a computer animated music video with singing rubber duckies that look like Hitler in a while...

(It's catchy as-is, but knowing the translation makes it even more entertaining. The chorus literally translates as, "Adolf, you old Nazi pig, just give up..." but I find it more entertaining to believe it translates to, "Adolf, you Nazi fuck, just give up..." Same gist, but somehow more entertaining to think of little hitler duckies calling Hitler a "Nazi fuck"...)

Draconian airport security restrictions easing

Sanity slowly returns.

Beware Paint

You never know what will happen to your innocent scribblings...

Insult to injury...oh, and more injury

Hey, need another reason to despise the Pentagon and policy makers?

For fuck's sake, how could depleted uranium _not_ be bad for you? And these idiots are coating tanks in the stuff?! Suddenly Gulf War Syndrome is much less mysterious...

The dark lord favors this one

"I called him. He's a personal friend," Rove told reporters traveling with Bush to Wisconsin.

Predictable politicizing

Were you surprised to read this New York Times article on the reaction to the bomb plot announcement? I wasn't.

It makes me fucking ill. That Lieberman is joining the Republican chorus makes me especially ill. I think I'm officially downgrading my opinion of Lieberman from "dislike" to "loathe."

This was the one paragraph that gave me some semblance of hope:

But in a sign of how this campaign might be different, Democrats struck a tone notably different from the elections of 2004 and 2002, when for the most part their strategy was to try to turn the subject away from national security. This time, Democrats attacked Republicans as failing to improve airline security and, most of all, argued that the decision to invade Iraq had been a distraction that depleted United States resources and allowed the world to become more dangerous.

For fuck's sake...the "weak on national security" horseshit Republican line is so very, very easy to counter. All you have to say is, "We're pointlessly wasting resources on Iraq, W gave the entire federal budget away to the wealthy so we don't have the resources we need to deal with the real threats to this nation, and even if we had them, the Republicans have managed to screw up, mismanage, and otherwise corrupt the very agencies (like FEMA) that should be on point to deal with crises." Or, perhaps something a little more punchy like, "George W. Bush and the Republicans put a horse judge as the head of the nation's disaster relief. Is this who you want dealing with national security?"

It's always been ridiculous that the Republicans managed to keep the upper hand on security issues, but it's especially ridiculous now that their screwups are not merely predictable (as they were when all of this shit started) but empirical and obvious.

I'm trying not to be conspiratorial and let myself consider the possibility that this plot announcement was politically timed, but I can't help but wonder. What are we?...T-3 months?

Have I mentioned everybody is fucking stupid?

Everyone is dumb

Okay, I'm infuriated, and I need to get this off my chest.

I had thought we were mostly done with the security ridiculousness after we got through the first few weeks after 9/11. I dealt with it. I rolled. I was annoyed, but I got through. I was even willing to take my shoes off. Again, I was annoyed, but I rolled.

But this...this shit is ridiculous. No, ridiculous is too soft a word. Retarded. Assinine. Idiotic. Paranoidly incompetent.

They're banning drinks. And lip balm. And toothpaste. Fucking _toothpaste_. How fucking retarded are these people? Do they really think this is going to make us safer? Look, I understand that they foiled a plot to use liquid explosives with an mp3 trigger on flights from Britain to the US. But first of all, they _foiled it_. Has everyone missed that little detail? They intercepted the terrorists before they could even get to the airports. Wow! What a novel idea! Instead of making idiotic, ineffective rules about air travel, how about we invest in infiltration? With the money we would save on the ridiculous amount of airport security we now have (not to mention the economic losses they induce), I bet we could have remarkable coverage. After all, it's not like you can go to the corner store and order liquid explosives. You can track the sale of ingredients that are required to make such explosives. In fact, that's what they did! Wow! The system works! At least in the UK...I don't know that I have as much faith in the morons running our government.

But let's ignore all that for a moment. They're banning liquids. _Liquids_, people. Know what you can store liquids in? Anything. I could put a baggy in my socks and store liquids there. Are they going to make me remove all of my socks? Hell, I could probably find a way to store liquids in pretty much every piece of clothing I own. And all the shit in my carry-on? Pretty sure I could get liquids in there too. Even the book I'm reading. Cut out a few pages, ziplock bag pasted in...presto! Liquid container! I bet I could easily make a makeshift bomb out of a Bible. I fucking _dare_ them to take someone's Bible as a potential terrorist device. I think that's the one thing that would make all this shit worth it.

Let's also remember that baby formula and medicine are still allowed. Because apparently putting liquid explosives in a baby formula container is a moral line the terrorists won't cross.

And btw, last I checked Israel, who let's remember is in an actual war right now, still lets you carry _all_ this shit on planes into and out of Tel Aviv. Which is in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING MIDDLE EAST. Somehow they manage to maintain flight safety with all those volatile tubes of toothpaste on their planes.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*bangs head against wall repeatedly*

Lamont wins, Lieberman is a dick about it

Umm...yay?

Campaign finance law is hard, so we should give up

I hate this sentiment.

The arguments here are similar to those over tax reform. Tax laws are too complicated, so we should simplify them. Well, look kids...there's a reason this shit is complicated. It's because the targets of both, the tax evaders and government bribers, are very clever people, and they find complicated ways to launder their money to make it look clean.

The problem is that the difference between the allowed and the forbidden is very, very fine. So, you have a choice. You can try to enact extremely precise laws, in which case you end up with the systems everyone's bitching about: very complicated, very intricate laws that attempt to surgically extract the bad actors from the good, honest folk.

But there is an alternative. You can trade fairness for simplicity. In other words, if you want a simpler system, fine. We can do simpler. It just won't be as fair. We could, for instance, just lower taxes across the board for those in the lower income brackets instead of the complicated system of credits and deductions, and we could similarly tax the upper brackets at a higher rate in proportion to the amount of money we expect the rich to offshore and otherwise sleaze out of. Similarly, in the realm of campaign finance, we could just forbid any political advertising from any group in an election year, and give a fixed amount of time to each candidate to use as they please (perhaps with a higher proportion going to the challenger to take care of the incombent effect).

Would those be fair? No. Certain honest players would get screwed. But hey, maybe it's worth doing that to take care of the apparently terminal complexity.

Despite the fact that many of the arguments in the article are downright insipid, like comparing the operation of the federal government to the operation of the Virginia government (since, really, who the fuck has a serious vested interest in _Virginia_, for fuck's sake?!), they do have a point: bandaids for campaign finance reform don't work. I agree. I think you need to overhaul the system. Barring a total severing of the tie between money and media exposure, you're screwed. The money always wins.

And don't get me started on the utterly retarded argument that prohibiting media spending is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Last I checked, a guy on a street corner in Bumblefuck, Idaho handing out leaflets is not going to have the same impact on the electorate than a PR piece funded by Monsanto running simultaneously on every tv channel will. Not all speech is created equal. Being drowned out by someone else's message is no better than being forbidden to utter your message at all.

Time Machine

Couldn't help noticing the Leopard preview on Apple's web site (it's currently Apple's yearly World Wide Developer's Conference/Orgy), specifically the Time Machine feature.

Once again I'm struck by the UI. Undelete is nothing new, and frankly it shouldn't be that hard to implement. But Apple really focuses on the UI for such utilities, and that's what makes people love their Apples. This feature's in Windows would be coded by some incompetent intern and end up being some inscrutable dialog box.

Cameroon typo-squatting

I'm not sure exactly why, but i find this immensely entertaining.

New York Times military strategy

Shouldn't we be disturbed when the New York Times is a better source of military strategy than the Pentagon?

Hezbollah really is an army

Holy shit. I did have the stereotypical view of Hezbollah as a rag-tag bunch of crazy para-militaries, but Jesus...those fuckers are organized and well supplied.

Lieberman and Lamont

Blog post catalyzed by this New York Times article on Lieberman's last-ditch effort to salvage his primary bid. I suspect, frankly, that he doesn't give a shit any more and is just positioning himself to run as an independent.

I find the whole thing very frustrating. Having watched Lamont's Colbert Report appearance, I really got kind of a queasy feeling about the whole thing. Lamont clearly has no sense of humor, and I suspect him of merely taking advantage of Democratic frustration with the war (and frankly, with Lieberman) to put himself in power. I have no faith that, were he to win the seat, he would do anything useful. If I were a voter in Connecticut, I'd be despairing rather deeply right about now.

As previously stated, Lieberman's an ass. As noted in a recent Krugman op-ed (which unfortunately I can't link to because it's a TimesSelect article...grumble), it's fantasy and naivety to believe anything other than profoundly partisan politics is operating in the federal government right now. In other words, Republicans have been ramming through their agenda, and you either get on board or be attacked and mowed down. It isn't "bipartisanship" to lend your support to their shit; it's lying down and letting them run over you. Lieberman likes to trumpet the fact that he's a moderate and "doesn't hate" Republicans, and while that may be a nice sound bite that might resonate with Connecticut housewives who haven't been paying attention to the political scene, the fact is that Lieberman has been enabling Repulican shit for years now and not gotten anything in the way of progressive legislation in return. Somebody please explain to me what the fuck Lieberman has been able to accomplish by kow-towing to Republicans time and time again? I would love to know, because as far as I can tell, all he's accomplished is avoiding the Republican attack dogs, which is not so much honorable as it is saving his own ass.

But, like I said, I don't trust Lamont either. I'd probably vote for Lamont on the principle of punishing Democratic enablers who didn't have the fucking spine to stand up to Republicans when this Iraq shit started (which, yes, would imply I'd vote out pretty much every Democrat in the Senate right now, which I would). But it would definitely be a "lesser of two evils" vote. And now the Democratic party faces having Lieberman run as an independent, which must have the Republicans grinning ear to ear. If Lieberman weren't such a self-centered douche, he would fucking bow out after losing the primary. If he's really the man of principle he says he is, what does he hope to accomplish having alienated his own party if he were elected as an independent? Who the fuck on capitol hill is going to listen to him?

Grr. It's just so fucking infuriating. Why is it so hard to get Democratic candidates who have more charisma than a soggy bowl of corn flakes and are willing to say things like, "Look. 1) We're digging ourselves a hole in Iraq, we're bolstering Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and we need to leave now before more of Americas children die, 2) the nation is going to shit as gas, healthcare, and college costs skyrocket, 3) government stopped looking out for the public (e.g., the EPA, FDA, etc.) the instant Republicans took power, and they're letting big companies poison your children, and 4) the current Republican leadership is too corrupt and incompetent to do anything about it (see 3). I can fix it." Why? Why why why? Why is that so hard? Everyone but the top 1% are getting dicked, and if you made even the slightest insinuation that you want to do something about it, the message would resonate.

I don't understand how the Democrats can be this inept. You couldn't create a better political atmosphere for a liberal revolution if you tried, and they're still managing to fuck it up!!!

Deer vs. hunter

There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a deer beat the shit out of a hunter.

Sleaze 2.0

Welcome to the brave new world of PR.

Women in banking

This has to be one of the hardest industries to penetrate (as it were). I don't think even the tenure process can compete with banking for demanding and time-consuming.

I frankly don't think this is a solvable problem. When hours mean the difference between cutting a multi-billion dollar deal or not, there just isn't that much room for flex-hours or people who are going to prioritize other parts of their life. Even having husbands who will be stay-at-home dads doesn't fix the problem because I suspect it's fundamentally that women don't want to miss their children growing up. There's a fundamental tension that is unresolvable.

Welcome to capitalism.

Is this my future?

I know I'm not in the demographics they're talking about, but still...

Hubris

Jesus tap-dancing Christ:

"Mr. Wilkes capitalized on the system. The license plate on his black Hummer still reads “MIPR ME,” a reference to a “military interdepartmental purchase request” — bureaucratic jargon for payments for a defense contract."

Are you shitting me? Does it get any more brazen than that?

RIAA sues LimeWire

I was wondering how long it would take for the RIAA attack dogs to turn their attentions towards LimeWire.

I don't know how to feel about this. I don't know whether I believe you should be liable if you knowingly enable a criminal act without actually committing said act. In this case, yes, the RIAA are greedy douchebags, and it's tempting to cheer LimeWire on, but what if LimeWire were basing their business model on the exchange of kiddie porn rather than mp3s? Much more disturbing moral implications, but it's the same basic legal question.

Ad-supported OSes and other idiotic ideas

The idea of an ad-supported OS is one of the stupidest ideas I've heard in a while. As any half-intelligent Linux bozo will tell you, most of the cost of a computer over its lifetime is in its maintenance, not in the software license itself. That's the cost places like libraries have to contend with. They could generally care less about paying for the OS license.

Morons.

Craigslist Best-Of jewel

Craigslist Best-Of is getting a bit stale and repetitive these days, but this entertained me...

Entirely predictable

Estate Tax Assassination Fails; Democrats Fail To Stand On Giant Red 'X'

See previous comments re: Republicans who need to be punched.

Apple smugness

A truly satisfying quote:

"Still, the presenters said they ultimately decided to run the demo against a Mac due to what Maynor called the "Mac user base aura of smugness on security."

"We're not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something," Maynor said."

Remember, boys and girls: the primary reason macs have fewer problems with viruses and security is that there are fewer of them out there, not because they're all that much more competently engineered.

On network neutrality

I'm not yet ready to jump on the bandwagon of people scurrying around demanding network neutrality when I'm guessing most of them don't really have any idea what it means. On the one hand, yes, the telcos are behaving like jackasses. I pay for broadband access on my end of your pipe, and Google pays for a fuckload of bandwidth on their end of the pipe, so you're getting revenue out of both sides. Quit yer goddamn bitching.

On the other hand, there are reasons and situations net neutrality is a bad thing from a technical point of view. See, this is how things work (listen up Senator Stevens):

Imagine a very strange world in which you can't actually move, but you're within shouting distance of all your friends. There are no telephones, radios, etc., so the only way to communicate is by shouting things at your friends and asking them to shout to their friends and so on until, eventually, the person you were trying to talk to hears your message (assume for a moment that people weren't retarded and that this wouldn't degenerate into an assinine game of telephone; assume everyone is attentive enough that they always pass the message on correctly). So, for instance, if I want to get a message to my good buddy Wilbur, I might first have to yell something to Pedro, who would yell at Rosario, who would yell at Gustav, who would finally yell at Wilbur. I don't know why Gustav knows Wilbur. I think they met in a chat room.

Anyway, this is all well and good. Except not everyone has an infinite capacity for messages. What happens if Pedro's trying to listen to a message from Muffy at the same time that I'm shouting at him? He can't listen to both. So, he has to ignore one. Since no one in their right mind listens to a woman named Muffy, he chooses to listen to me.

But, as we all know, not all messages are created equal. What if it happens to be the case that what I'm shouting is something along the lines of, "Hey Wilbur! I took a crap I'm really proud of! Want to see?" Moreover, what if Muffy's shouting, "Dear sweet baby Jesus! My infant is on fire! And being slowly devoured by a python!" You know what? Shallow, annoying bitch that Muffy is, and as amazing as that monstrous dump was, I think Muffy's message is more urgent.

...Which brings us back to the question of net neutrality. As things currently stand, the "people" (i.e., routers) inside the internet routing messages around are oblivious to what's actually in the messages and who they are coming from and going to. This is what neutrality is all about. The routers are neutral. They don't give a shit about the messages beyond the fact that they're messages.

The problem, as you saw in my oh so clever little metaphor, is that there are indeed times when it may be important to care about what's in the messages, who they're from, and where they're going. A simple example might be that it's more important for you to get the next video frame from video.google.com in the next few milliseconds than it is for Boris to tell Wilma Joe Shitforbrains in Idaho about discounted Cialis in a timely fashion.

That said, a) there's no guarantee that a free market will deliver you a morally optimal outcome (if Boris pays the router owner more, he may well get his Cialis offer delivered in preference to your video frame), and b) since a few companies own most of the internal routers on the internet, there's not a lot preventing them from jacking up their prices for essentially the same level of performance we get today.

So, I don't know. I think network neutrality as it's being talked about is too blunt a hammer. I think it may well end up being important for service providers to be able to strike contracts that allow certain kinds of traffic to be delivered preferentially to others. But by the same token, without some kind of regulation, you'll probably just see the telcos soaking content providers for as much as they can get away with, which is why people like Google and Microsoft are in favor of net neutrality.

Have we learned something today, children?

A very poor argument against net neutrality

At first I thought that this New York Times op-ed was written by Tim Berners-Lee, in which case I might have given it more credence, but it's not. It's written by this Tim Lee instead, a Tim Lee who worked for the Cato Institute, which means he's a Libertarian, which means he's an idiot.

I think there are cases to be made for holding off on so-called "net neutrality" legislation, but he doesn't make any of them. Instead he argues a derivative of the basic libertarian credo, which is roughly that, "Because every government official is corrupt, telco lobbyists will write legislation that gives them control of everything in a legally binding way! See? It happened 150 years ago with the railroads! Eh? Eh?" Ignore for a moment that anti-trust legislation was enacted in the 30's partly due to the railroads. And that the internet is vastly more complex than the railroad system. Ignore all that.

Focus instead on the logic, which basically says that because you can end up with the wrong people writing or influencing regulations, you shouldn't try. That's stupid, and I think most sane people recognize that that's stupid. The same line of reasoning would lead you to declare giving up on the criminal justice system entirely because you can never catch all the crooks, and in the meantime figure that the criminals will kill each other off in sufficient numbers that a few of us normal folk will survive the mayhem. Good system, eh?

And as an aside, the comment, "Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition" is unsubstantiated horse shit (yes, this is my new favorite phrase). The fact that there's only one physical coax cable winding around your sprinkler system and into a hole in your wall is the primary obstacle to competition, and that cable is either connected to something on the other end if you paid your Comcast bill this month, or it's not, you jackass.

(I've decided to cut this rant short and do a separate network neutrality rant)

Discriminatory housing listing

So, I was wandering around HousingMaps for Seattle, and I came upon this listing.

So, not only does it prohibit pets, it prohibits lawyers. And Republicans.

Huh.

That seems like it might be, you know, discriminatory. Although at first I wondered if it really is because it doesn't fall into any of the normal categories like race, sexuality, etc. It's clearly prohibited if Republicanism can be considered a mental disability (sorry...I had to). Ultimately, I decided that it does fall under "creed," though. So I flagged it as prohibited. And sent a note to the person telling them what a douche they are.

Am I going to have to deal with such hypocritical douchebag granola liberals in Seattle? Ugh. They're almost as obnoxious as conservatives.

Almost.

Top-paying tech jobs

The only problem with having a high-paying job in Montomery, Idaho Falls, or Fort Smith is, of course, that you would have to live in Monterey, Idaho Falls, or Fort Smith.

In other news, note to self: find and marry Ivanka Trump. Further note to self: money will make up for the fact that your father in law is an asshole.

Plasma is a girl's best friend

Alternative headline: Women Come To Their Damn Senses.

Just the thought of being asked to pay thousands of dollars for fucking useless rocks has always made me want to bang my head against a wall. Can we move to engagement plasma tvs?

Ride on the shuttle...'s booster rocket

In my endless quest for procrastination, I came upon the following video, which is an end-to-end video feed from the top of the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. It's actually kind of cool (though feel free to skip ahead if it starts to get boring). It's continuous from launch until splashdown (which takes about 12 minutes). If you ever wondered what it's like to fall from space into the ocean, here's your video. :)

There's also one for the bottom camera as well, which overall isn't as interesting but does provide a really nice parting view of the shuttle.

Motivation

Someone please, PLEASE remind me to get this for my office once I'm up in Seattle.

Colbert's Wikiality

As I should have expected, Stephen Colbert has had the last word on Wikipedia. And it's genius.

I have absolutely nothing to add to his commentary. :)

So you think you can type?...

Since I know that at some point you're going to be bored enough to test your typing prowess.

My result:
-----
Your score: 474 keys per minute ~ 94 words per minute
Language/mode: en
Ranking: Very fast.
Comparison: 6% of registered TyperA users using this language have typed a better result; 94% have a lower or equal result.

You typed:
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Don't do anything at all. Those texts are called 'reading material. I've just GOT to start labeling my software. But I wouldn't consider it. The kearney communipaw. To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt. Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: Do you think something's wrong? Daughter: IT looks like goat barf. When all else fails, read the instructions. In my experience most of them are trash. Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own problems. Your hangover just makes it seem terrible. Moral: There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. There are running jobs. That's the way this country was built. I went and shouted in his ear. Do not meddle in the affari

Mistakes: IT(It), affari(affair) Well done!
-----

Appropriate props to Lisa.

On the proposed minimum wage hike

Sigh...okay, so certain parties, who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with "Moquee," wondered why I was doing useful work and not posting about the minimum wage. I thought other things were more interesting, partly because it was clearly a cynical election year attempt by Republicans to look like they care about the poor.

But fine. Looky here, then looky here.

Trading a minimum wage hike for elimination of the estate tax is just that: a trade. And it's not even a good one. Ignore for a moment that in a time of "war" with increased military spending and already record deficits, the last thing you should be doing is cutting taxes, let alone taxes on the ultra-wealthy, let alone taxes on the ultra-wealthy _and dead_. Ignore that. The estate tax constitutes about $25 billion in the '07 budget. Republicans will, I guarantee you, immediately after elections start screaming about "runaway spending" (nevermind they're the ones who perpetrated said spending), and will insist on making cuts. And they'll make cuts the same place they always do: social programs. And won't you be surprised when the benefits of the working poor drop further than $2 per hour per person. This is all, of course, assuming that Republicans won't turn around and find a way to undo the wage hike directly.

But okay...maybe the wage hike will make up for those cuts. Except that even if it did (which it won't), there's no guarantee that the minimum wage will keep pace with inflation. Which means the wage increase is, in effect, temporary, while the estate tax repeal is permanent. If you figure about a 4% inflation rate, in less than 9 years low-wage workers will be right back where they are now.

So, like I said, not only is it a trade, it's a bad one. And the first Republican you see claiming a Democrat doesn't care about low-wage workers because he/she didn't vote for the minimum wage hike, punch them.

Err...so much for the Hippocratic Oath?

Ow.

AOL is dumb

You know, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: AOL is dumb.

AOL is dumb not just because, well, it's just inherently dumb, but because it is and always has been a non-viable business model, and they're finally realizing that. All AOL is and has really ever been is a thin veneer over the general internet that they're trying to charge a premium for. AOL can't possibly compete with the internet as a whole for content, nor can it really compete on the basis of its user interface when people like Google and Microsoft give away their products for free. Add to that the fact that, even if you could charge for either the content or the UI, AOL is shit on both accounts.

So, basically, the only viable market for AOL is people who don't know any better, and reliance on ignorance of something as now pervasive as the internet is a fucking stupid business plan. Why the fuck would you pay AOL when you can pay any old ISP less and get essentially more unless you're a) stupid or b) ignorant?

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has realized this as well...they seem to be shifting away from MSN and towards the "Live!" brand.

Texas is useless

I never thought I'd see the day when a Texas Democrat was behaving more idiotically than a Texas Republican. Both are scraping the bottom of the barrel to begin with...

His name is "Fred Head," which is a strike against him out of the gate, and he's stupid enough to make large numbers of copies of this statement in print:

"Would you vote for a candidate who wrote a trashy, pornographic romance novel that glorifies premarital sex and seeks to arouse sexual interest as your State Comptroller of Public Accounts?" Head asks in a campaign flier.

Jesus. I think the idiocy of that statement speaks for itself.

Science versus religion

My takeaway:

When science and religion clash, science always ultimately wins. Ironically this is because science, unlike religion, contains objective truths. Indeed, the scientific method has proved to be the only path to anything even vaguely approximating objective truth. The problem, of course, is how long the battle takes. Occasionally the battle literally takes centuries. Sigh.

Kind of interesting though...I'd never quite looked at it like that before. For all the fundamentalist decrying of moral relativism, it is precisely religion's lack of objectivity that ultimately damns it when it tries to make assertions about the material world.

Hope for Kansas?

I hate little tidbits in the news that give me hope.