gone nukin'

Actually, I happen to agree: nuclear power is one option to mitigate global emissions. I can't believe anyone can seriously levy the argument "you emit when building the plant." Are you retarded? You emit to build a COAL-FIRED PLANT AS WELL! Talk about grasping at straws ...

Associative Proof

How NBC's new television show, Heroes exemplifies the design argument central to Alan Cooper's book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum," and, subsequently, the design theory for his company, Cooper.

You don't please the masses by catering to the masses, you please the masses by catering to one facet of societal norms. That is the secret to success of things like M*A*S*H (Korean/Vietnam war vets), Seinfeld (yuppie Jews), Friends (yuppies), House (cynical people), Law & Order (those with OCD and those who wish their lives were better organized), CSI (OCDs who are closet voyeurists, lol), etc.

It all goes back to that old adage, "do one thing and do it well."


... or was that "Jack of all trades, master of none; oftimes better than master of one?" :o)


... just so long as the trade's not humor I guess, because then you get a fat slice of oppression from the political machine! Be careful now Romney, or you might wind up in Putin's cabinet! haha

how to lose "yous guys" in 7 days

I give you: Trumpia! If you think about it like I did, it's like the anti-social social networking/communication tool.

With further ado, I give you: the comment I left them! (which I wonder if they will answer):

Dear Trumpia,

Let's say a friend of mine is using your service and I get contacted via all my devices until I respond to one. I feel included, and I didn't miss the change of venue for our club meeting. Now let's say I want to sign up for Trumpia. What are the odds that I will want other people to "blast" me on all my devices when, say, I carry my phone with me "all the time?" Close to zero. So I will set my own personal settings to the "path of least annoyance" - the device I have most frequently with me. Odds are also that the person who contacted me originally will have done the same thing. And so on.

Everyone is going to tend toward that setting, especially after the first time they happen not to have their most convenient device with them and they get blasted on all channels. So your service only works well until people either sign up (and change the permissions) or opt out. In the former case you end up back where you were before Trumpia, with everyone being no more connected than the days of just e-mail or chat or text, all of which were supposed to connect people (and did, until they got used to the tech). In the latter case, you aren't using Trumpia, so it's no longer relevant.

I'm not trying to knock your company, because I think it's a move in the right direction, but to me this is a downside that says "fad" rather than "game-changer." Everyone wants to be connected yet no one wants to be annoyed, and I believe people are going to opt for, as I said, the path of least annoyance to them. This will result in the sum of all their communication devices bringing no additional benefit beyond their most commonly-used device.

Have you done user testing to see if the above is an issue?

freedom of information

NYTimes and IHT abandon Times Select. "It was a success." What a terrible, bullshit argument. No business, especially not the struggling newspaper dailies, would dare shelve an idea that was actually making them money.

I'm also glad that a bespeckled geriatric is one of the few people in America with the testicular fortitude to state plainly that the war in Iraq is over OIL and that Bush is a nitwit. Christ, people, W A K E U P!

mmm ... Orwellian

Couldn't have said it better myself:

"After all, it seems the burden of ending the war will fall to the next president. Bush was clear on Thursday night - as he was when he addressed the nation in January, in September of last year, the December before that and in April 2004 - that his only real plan is to confuse enough Americans and cow enough members of Congress to let him muddle along and saddle his successor with this war that should never have been started."

Thanks for that concise and scathing summary of our failures, International Herald Tribune!

lunatic lottery-winner

In stunningly vivid irony. What a greedy son-of-a-bitch. Why is it so hard for society to call a spade a spade? This is greed, exemplified, and yet we'd prefer to make all sorts of excuses for our behavior.

He's beset by sob stories? Here he is on CNN, another sob story. Here is a modest business proposal: if you want to be remembered, be like Buffett. I'll found your non-profit donation (and make sure to funnel 40% of the profits to myself, so that the organization generates no net profit).

Men are from Mars ...

If there were Martians, their preferred method of transport would be second-hand motorcycles.

these are a few of some interesting things

1) Random Mastadon-ness!

2) Just plain cool. (hint: it's a trick of the mind)

3) not cool ... not cool at all. A warning label would add what, $0.04 to the cost of manufacture? It may be a ridiculously small percentage of lives saved from injury, but it's undue injury. And if you merely think about how many teens ride with severely reclined seats, even when driving (not that teens would heed the warning labels). Also, even if you don't heed the warning, you do retain some of the information (like advertising). The potential for an airbag to deploy improperly and unduly injure you is very slight, but vehicles still carry warnings about those.

And given the yearly stories of dogs and babies killed in overly hot cars, maybe there should be a warning on the windows. Stupid individualistic sheep need constant reminders in order to maintain their vigilance of their fragile, ignorant little lives (and the lives of their pets - children included).

meal rusiness beetings

They're run absolutely nothing like this. I mean, come on - no one that old knows wtf "pwnd" means!

RIAA = asymmetric profit structure

Yeah, where was this support when Apple launched? Nowhere. Now that it's actually a successful business model, the corporate drones want a bigger slice of the theoretical pie. Theoretical because I sure as hell am not going to pay more than about $1 per song.

The artists are the ones who deserve a larger percentage of my dollar, not these fat-cat executives!

They aren't getting it - they get TEN PERCENT OR LESS of the revenue from each song sold on iTunes! That's not Apple's fault, it's the fucking bullshit industry. Why do you think artists are quick to open their own sites and tour so heavily? That's their only chance to make a decent profit from their work.

Also, if you think about it, how exactly are NBC and its cohorts going to undermine Apple? They can't promote another service that charges more for media, so they'll subsidize some cheap knock-off in order to gain market share, then jack the prices sky-high. Sounds fun, I can't wait until you help them do it! Yes, you, you fucking ingrates - where are the how-to articles on getting real music back on the radio and break the recording industry's stifling grip on artistic talent? That'd be too "subersive" for the mainstream media (and against the media conglomerate's interests, since Universal owns NBC, which owns MSNBC, and the whole thing is owned by GE).

some people can do no right

I don't normally read Forbes because I think it's tripe, but this "welcome screen" (a.k.a., welcome to unwanted advertising interfering with your reading experience) really caught my eye:



On a somewhat related note (involving reading, President Bush's current lack thereof, and the outsourcing of the illegal reading of your private electronic or voice conversations as American citizens), READ THIS.

To some, it's just the same old song and dance, just as when the US government embraced the idea of the "military-congressional-industrial complex" not as loony conspiracy theory but as a business plan and outsourced the building of military hardware to private defense contractors. They then outsourced the military advisors, and now they're looking at the intelligence. It's one thing to outsource the people who follow your orders or give advice, but it's another to outsource the people that actually provide you the data, faulty, politically-motivated, or otherwise, that actually leads to war.

So get this, here's a likely scenario in our future Uneducated State of Ameri-duh: a private contractor, hired by the government to decode intelligence and under pressure to "cut costs" (so to charge only 1.9x what a government employee makes, instead of double), decides its "core competency" is not really intelligence analysis per se, but the delivery of analytical services. And since they need some sort of developing-world interpreters to decode the intelligence, because all of the people at the contractor are American-educated businessmen with little to no knowledge of any language besides English (and a tenuous grasp of that language to boot), they outsource the analysis right to the source.

So imagine having a Chinese analyst, probably in China, decoding intelligence that helps the US determine whether or not we go to war with China over Taiwan. Or, alternately, selling their knowledge to the highest bidder in the Chinese government (not that they don't already, but why make it even easier for them to do so?).

Arguing Against Renewables is like ...

... arguing for a hole in your head when you don't believe in trepanation. Check it out:



Ruining the "view"? Why do we vote for new coal-fired electrical plants - how does doing so enhance one's view?

It only enhances the view because we put the site on unwanted or cheap land, and then fence it off so you can't get too close to actually see how ugly the giant, smoke-billowing towers wreak havoc on you and yours. Oh, and if you are no longer able to see the horizon due to smog and such, because your precious cheap/convenient electricity has pumped too much particulate matter into the atmosphere, how will that haze impact your view, you short-sighted, greedy, selfish, pathetic excuses for a sentient being?

There's only one quasi-logical argument against wind power: migratory birds.

If your argument is that "big" wind is evil because it disrupts migratory birds and/or kills them, what do you think the particulate matter from a coal-fired generator does to their lungs if it can cause asthma and cancer in humans? Isn't a long, drawn-out death from illness worse than a spontaneous, near-instant death? Nature is red in tooth and claw - I recently watched 2 larger birds force a smaller bird into a pond, from which the smaller bird could not get out b/c his feathers got wet and it could not fly. It kept bobbing up and down, trying to get to the edge, but it drowned before it could get there. It took something like two minutes to play out, and it was gut-wrenching to watch. The bird that was forced into the water had recently flown into a glass window of a nearby buiding - it was obviously no threat to the 2 larger birds and in no shape to defend itself properly, but that's just survival of the fittest, isn't it? I guess how you view it depends on whether you believe in social darwinism or you find it ironic that it takes some of mankind's greatest intellectual capacity to understand the most brutal, possibly immutable, laws of the natural world.

Or you could view birds as deserving of the exact same rights as people, in which case do you also think that birds, if they were endowed en masse positions of relative power and a sentience at (or above) our level, would not hesitate to kill a few humans if it meant they could all have labor-free nests or access to practically inexhaustable supplies of food?

thought

all our fantasies are faded by routine ...

There's no other Cheney quite like this Dick

I found it! Score!



After which came the Cheney apologist (from the WSJ no less, I'm sure Murdoch is salivating):



Where is the answer to Stewart's simple question? Why does it take a Comedy Central to air these types of serious questions? History will mark Haye's silence, due to the utter lack of rational justification for the administration's actions, and treat the Bush administration with the contempt it deserves.

The only thing that "changed" after 9/11 was that the administration knew it could get away with lying because people were single-mindedly fixated on swift revenge. Since they (the political elite) often see the general population as uneducated baboons, they knew people would take dubious pronouncements at face value (and that those who did not would be out-shouted by the war-mongers).

For my Republican friends, you can not say I always disagree with your party, but what I agreed was sound policy in 1994 was not so severely altered by faulty intelligence in 2003 that it justified what the administration did (and continues to do). For those of you that knew me then, you've known I've been a critic of Bush since he first lost the 2000 election. I've disagreed with nearly every policy decision by this White House, save attacking Afghanistan and the marine refuge created around Hawaii. Attacking Iraq opened up a second front in a war (essentially on Iran if you look at a map), which is already an extremely poor military strategy to begin with, Generalissimo NeoCon. Idiots.

What the war-mongers do not understand is how to fight an ideology, ironically despite the fact they themselves subscribe to a very similar, reactionist ideology that they subsequently demonize when referring to their enemies. As a result of 9/11, the terrorists are already winning. Your liberties have been restricted. You wring your hands about traveling abroad. You take out extra life insurance and fret about "what if", and Fox News and the like are right there, in your face, reminding you that we can never lapse in our vigilance (while our nation's ports and nuclear facilities go under-protected, and our airports remain insecure). Many of you think such measures are necessary, but a terrorist does not care about the reason people are frightened or have their freedoms restricted, they care only that it occurs. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

You are all less free. For what? For a few extra dollars? For a few extra corpses? For the business interests of the elite who control the U.S.'s military-congressional-industrial complex? (original term by another Republican, 2-term President Dwight D. Eisenhower) Where is the 'outrageous' conspiracy theory when you've got a Vice President, a public servant, who has closed-door sessions with industry on energy policy and who refuses to stop receiving payments from his former employer, who happens to be gouging the US military in Iraq? Here's a hunt that would make Waldo jealous - find the weak link in those logical implications! Basic capitalist theory supports aligning people's personal interests with their actions. The simplest way to profit off a war? Use your influence to start a war! Why deny that people are acting in accordance with the very theories used to justify cutthroat business practices on a daily basis? If it's good enough for our corporate elite, why not for the soldiers fighting for their profits?

If you want to provide the appropriate counter-incentive to the current sytsem of collusion, it's very simple: require every Congressperson to send their son(s) or daughter(s) to fight in whatever war or other military action they allow the President to undertake. It's like a draft-lite, just 535 possible families, not quite Vietnam-era enough. But it's a great step toward a system of true checks and balances.

If you wish to debate the point above don't talk to me - just call your representative (and hopefully ask to get the U.S. the fuck out of Iraq). Or, for a more personal response from the government, just call someone you know who's currently abroad so that your government can (il)legally listen in to the overseas call. If you don't know who to call, just dial me - lord knows I'm enough of a pinko commie liberal to pique the NSA's interests. I mean, Hungary's still Communist, isn't it?

our bestest friends

"China loves me, this I know, lead-tainted Sa-arge, told me so!"



Erin Burnett is a shining light of logic in these dark, lead-colored times. Keep your friends close, keep the tainted pinko Commies closer, Erin! haha

you are dust

... and to (space) dust you shall return.

Reminds me of the Bill Hicks sketch:

"Today young men on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one conciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves ... here's Tom with the weather."

vicarious irony

I walked into the break room and CNN International was showing a story on Paris Hilton's release from jail. I found the situation amusing because the reporter on scene was reading a viewer's statement, and that viewer was questioning why the media was there. The reporter, of course, treated it as the rhetorical question it was not.

Breaking News - You are the media! Why are you there?

Random stories that have caught my interest of late.

No one told me that the circus was coming to town! And here I am without any popcorn ...

So, how does international law work again? State-running tyrants are evil, but state-sanctioned tryanny is A-OK? To be fair, I am sure they were asking for it.

Things would be so much easier if only the same rules applied to everyone!

Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a RIM technician!

Does anyone really wonder why a lot of the world hates the U.S. and its brand of laissez-faire capitalism more generally? A lot of people claim to, but they seem to miss the more subtle, often cultural cues.

They do get part of it right, in that a large part of it has to do with envy — envy that something as frivolous as "Blackberry Thumb" can be a person's sole reason for visiting a doctor.

If there are any doctors to be had, that is. Because, you know, doctors live just around the street corner everywhere in the world, just like milk and apples come from your local supermarket conglomorate.

Behold, the ridiculously small-minded American excecutive. Your thumb hurts? Boo-hoo. Either work out or stop typing so many useless e-mails! You aren't providing leadership or clarity, you're cluttering the already-saturated information channels of your colleagues.

Also, for those of you that aren't aware, Research In Motion (RIM) are the makers of the Blackberry, which has become ubiquitous in the modern business environment. The title has nothing to do with rimming, though that would make for an extremely amusing title.

"What do you do?"

"Not much, just working as a RIM technician right now, looking to get into something a bit more advanced later on. You know, something that stretches my skills a bit."

" ... I'll bet you are!"

Though it is said that developing world countries are contracting our maladies, so I guess they are going to need a lot of RIM technicians after all.

All this text is making my fingers cramp ... medic!

Walking home from bowling I had a thought: the current Industrial Revolution (e.g., 'modern' society post 1700-ish) is experiencing a condensed form of resource abuse in the same style as agriculture did. The Middle East used to be quite habitable, and there is evidence to suggest intensive farming by humans is a large part of the reason it's so arid today (not universally). Until people thought of things like crop rotation or terraced farming, we were on a path to self-destruction (albeit over a much longer time horizon and with a lot lower public knowledge of the consequences). Industry finds itself in the same predicament today, whether it cares to admit it or not.

My hope/dream is that we can one day find new ways to fully make use of the land, in the same way modern farmers have been able to (and like native Americans used to in their hunting). If we could live in a "carbon neutral" society, whereby we exhausted only those emissions absorbed by plants through photosynthesis, or didn't emit anything beyond negligible emissions at all, that would truly be a great achievement for civilization.