Ding ding ding ding!

We have a winnah!

The number of people in other industrialized democracies who feel trapped at their jobs for fear of losing their (or their family’s) health insurance = 0.

That last number is particularly galling given conservative reverence for entrepreneurism. Though it’s difficult to quantify, I would bet that our dysfunctional health care system, more than any other factor, discourages entrepreneurial risk-taking in this country. Which makes all this talk about free markets all the more absurd.

Exactly. I’ve been saying this for a decade now. Small business owners should be out there with pitchforks and torches, demanding government-funded universal medical insurance.

Free market my ass. We don’ t have a “free market” in America. We have a corporatocracy. Huge, trans-national corporations have people by the balls. The best and brightest cannot go out and out-innovate and out-compete the corporations– or even offer a modest, local, smaller-scale alternative–, because, if they leave their jobs, their children will die.

CDBS hate hate hate

Just a moment for some software hate:

I hate CDBS, with a deep and abiding passion.

CDBS is Debian’s idiotic new "make it impossible to update a package" build system. I gave up on building Debian packages from source a few years ago, when CDBS came into common usage.

The main problem with CDBS is that uupdate no longer works. It’s impossible for a non-maintainer to build a Debian package of a newer version of a peice of software, if the old package uses CDBS that is.

There are, happily, older packages which do not use CDBS, and which I can easily and smoothly update to newer versions. But the ones that use CDBS? Forget it. I either blow off the package manager entirely, or build it from source.

Free-market creationists

One of the weirdest contradictions in the modern Republican party and "conservative" (what is it exactly that they conserve? but that’s a different post entirely) movement, is that they can espose a ferverent faith simultaneously in a blind, deterministic, evolutionary "invisible hand", and in a completely centrally-planned, centrally-managed, artificially-created universe.

They will fight tooth and nail against any attempt for humans to centrally manage, plan, or even influence the economy, instead insisting that it must remain free to evolve on its own, and yet fight with even more vigor against anyone who claims that there isn’t any central management or planning involved in biology, geology, cosmology, chemistry, or physics.

How the fuck can they square those two things? Maybe they believe that the "invisible" hand actually belongs to a gray-bearded spooky incompetent father figure in the sky, reaching down to run our economy by divine fiat, just like it put the dinosaur fossils in the earth 6,000 years ago to test our faith in it.

There are surely enough of ‘em who seem to think they have a divine right to wealth, or to rule.

Ubiquitous Design

In one of my (increasingly, these days) rare walks through nature today, I wondered why the idea of creationism has become so persistent nowadays, even leeching into the general language. It’s very common for even people who have no interest whatsoever in creationism, to speak of things as having been “designed for that”, or “not designed for that”, or “designed that way”… even when the things most certainly weren’t designed at all, but evolved or adapted instead.

It didn’t used to be this way. When I was a kid, I was very much in the habit of speaking of natural things as having been “adapted for that” or “not adapted for that”, etc. What happened?

The vast majority of things in my world nowadays were in fact designed! But not by any kind of spooky incompetent father-figure in the sky, but rather by very human (and very fallible) engineers.

You see, the natural world is so small a part of my life nowadays– and that of most people too– that it’s become a habit for me to assume that everything around me was designed.

Not always designed well, and, in the case of software, actually a result more evolution than design (although the engineers fancy themselves designers, and occasionally actually manage to sneak some design in), but definitely artificial.

In an artificial world, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that everything was designed– because, if that’s the world you live in, then it was.

They’re cops!

When I was a kid, I was a fan of the original Star Trek series, which was in syndication by then. I haven’t paid any attention to the whole franchise since reaching puberty. I managed to miss or ignore its whole 90’s-era re-emergence.

Well, recent websurfing somehow led me to a Wikipedia page about Gene Roddenberry, creator of the series. Turns out he was a LAPD cop; a Los Angeles City paycheck fed his family while writing TV screenplays and pitching series pilots on the side. He wrote a lot of Dragnet and other 1950’s and 1960’s cop-show screenplays, under a pseudonym because he was still an active member of the police force.

As Wikipedia surfing usually goes, I ended up reading the entries for a few of the original episodes. And I quickly noticed a pattern. In script after script, the Enterprise responds to a distress call, or is ordered in to investigate. Wha? They were cops! Roddenbery sold the series to NBC as being "Wagon Train to the Stars" or "Gunsmoke in Space", and maybe it was in terms of overall feel, but that wasn’t the main plot device. Never noticed that isomorphism between cop shows and Star Trek, but there it is. They cruised around the galaxy, like cops on the beat, responding to a dispatch call. Maybe that’s why the Enterprise looked a bit like a donut.

Huh?

I’m still relatively young (43), but already I’m noticing I’m forgetting shit all the time. Even very common things I use constantly, like, for example certain keyboard shortcuts in Emacs, that I have to type hundreds of times a day, and bash aliases I’ve been using for years, etcx. Lately I’ve just been locking up on them; can’t remember them. Other, non-computer stuff too. I find I go through my daily routine with much less memory of what I actually just did, then II think I used to have, or at least vaguely remember being used to having.

Yesterday I met a Linux-using colleague who is visiting the Bay Area (research at UCB) from Graz, Austria. I sat down to walk him through some of my code for my live music setup (I wrote it 2 years ago and modified it a few months ago), and found that I couldn’t explain to him how any of it worked! In fact, I was sketchy on how my whole system worked, and I was the one who put it together!

It’s not just computer stuff. Words and names too, names of songs, names of musicians and bands. I just lock up on ‘em, can’t remember them, can’t even remember how to remember them. Let’s not even talk about function and library calls… I don’t do much programming anymore and that stuff’s already gone.

Without Google and Wikipedia around, I’m not sure if I’d be useful for anything at this point. Luckily, I still remember how to use those. I hope.

The weirdness of Facebook

I dislike Facebook. A lot. And yet, I can’t look away, like a particularly noxious car wreck.

There are several things I find thoroughly weird about Facebook:

1. Only a handful of “friends” on Facebook are actually friends.
2. Most FB “friends” are people I went to High School with and haven’t heard from in 25 years, random people I worked with 10 years ago and haven’t seen since then, and…
3. Freeking almost every single ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had has found me on FB and friended me. That’s particularly weird. I think I found one or two more on my own– after I figured why not try to make a complete set–, and the rest found me.
4. And most of what everyone does on there is submit quizzes and puzzles and stupid chain-email-style crap.
5. The only moderately entertaining thing about it is the Twitter-like updates from a few people I know. If I could get those via Twitter or Identi.ca, I’d never go near FB at all.

Yes, that’s it. Facebook has jumped the shark; it is now just one big chain email.

Scroll down to see the answer… and send this to 10 of your friends for good luck!!!!!!!

Separated at birth?

I know, it is so silly. But I cannot resist.

James Howard Kunstler:

Eric S. Raymond:

WTF?

I like Kunstler, and can’t handle much of Raymond, but seriously, WTF? They look like twinsies.

Religious analogy salad

Wow, that’s weird.

Our President, giving an excellent and hard-hitting speech about our economy, used two very blatantly religious analogies that are key to two very different religions.

First of all, he very correctly and boldly identifies the key problem with our economy: it’s built on bullshit and a ridiculous level of inequality.

Then he gets to the solution:

1. The Sermon on the Mount (a central teaching of Christianity)
2. and The Five Pillars of Islam

WTF?

This guy is a master at mash-ups. I guess it’s inclusive, which is nice, and will either pull in right-wingers or make their heads explode, but it seems kind of weird to me too– and unnecessary.

His economic analysis is spot-on, but what’s up with all the religious hoo-hah thrown in there?

What he said

Hot damn this is perfect.