When wingnuts attack immigrants

Ah, the joys of an election year. Not being satisfied with merely attacking gays and “libruls”, the wingnuts in their infinite political wisdom have decided to launch an pre-emptive attack against immigrants.

I think the best possible response would be:

Look, the people you are after, are the people you depend on.

We cook your meals.

We haul your trash.

We connect your calls.

We drive your ambulances.

We guard you while you sleep.

Do NOT fuck with us!

Exploding in Cambria

Omniorthogonal occasionally muses on the "cambrian explosion" of open source software. Damn straight.

The Open Source CMS site just stunned me. It includes live demos of all the major PHP/Apache/MySQL web software thingies: CMS'es, CRM's, blogs, Wiki's, etc.

The one that particularly caught my attention was SugarCRM. Not 10 years ago I worked for corporations that paid millions of dollars on combinations f buying, writing, and integrating what used to be called "Sales Automation" (now "Customer Relationship Management&quot systems like this. That's not even including the heavy-duty server hardware it had to run on. Even smaller-scalle tools like this were still really expensive, slow, and generally sucky.

And here's one for free, and overall way ahead of the ones we had to deal with. And the "hardware" to run it on can be rented for $1/GB of bandwidth. Astounding.

A tale of two cities

How far from the urban center do you need to go, before you find productive farmland?

Try Roma, Italia.

Now try San Francisco, California.

This is a fun little comparative study in land-use. Scroll around Italy, and look at the pattern of small towns surrounded by actively-farmed, productive land.

Now scroll around the Bay Area. Uh-oh. Non-stop suburban sprawl.. not a farm to be seen for dozens, maybe hundreds of miles.

Look around some other cities in Italy, even the big ones like Milano and Torino. Now look at just about any American city. It's worse the farther west you go. In the northeast, there are still plenty of small towns and cities surrounded by farmland. In the northwest, small towns and cities are surrounded by woodland but that could conceivably be cleared and farmed. But what about asphalt suburban sprawl? How do you reclaim that for farmland? For real fun, have a look at the post-1950's cities: Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Los Angeles.

We have a land-use problem in this country. Big time.

(Cross-posted at DailyKos)