The DJs at Sirius radio have switched channel 30 from a pretty decent - though eventually repetitive - singer/songwriter mix, to a godawful Christmas-themed montage. It's all relentlessly bad covers of songs that were, well, relentlessly bad to begin with. Covering "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" doesn't change the fact that they're both sentimental, tacky crap.
I'm gonna kill someone.
The UAW just doesn't get it. GM is currently moving in to help bail out its doomed Delphi parts spin-off, as UAW workers threaten a potentially crippling strike that could send both Delphi, GM and, by extension, the UAW down the crapper.
I say it couldn't happen fast enough. The automotive industry in this country is riddled with bloat, bloated wages, bloated benefits, bloated pension plans, and bloated vacation policies. It's going to take something like a GM bankruptcy before people will finally realize this. The longer we wait, the harder it's going to be to change, and the longer GM will continue to hemmorhage funds like a watermelon in a Gallagher set.
Went to a thrift store today looking for a couch. Didn't found the couch. Did find a pretty kicking record display though. I went home with:
"Fragile" by Yes
Led Zeppelin I and II (pretty scuffed)
"Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ" by Bruce Springsteen
"Live/1975-85" by Bruce Springsteen (5 LPs)
"The Game" by Queen
Not bad. 10 LPs for $40.
Okay, so we've got two fairly contradictory trends going on in hiring practices. On one side, you've got GM slashing 30,000 jobs and shuttering 12 plants. We've got unemployment numbers still riding high. Those two would seem to go together. Employers are predicting severe shortages of skilled labor in the immediate near future.
Then we've got corporations like Google, which is in the middle of a massive hiring binge, saying things like "I'd rather lose an entire graduating class than one top-notch engineer". Which on one level makes sense, but it just continues the trend of employers putting out incredibly detailed requirements as to what they're looking for.
But there are more engineering and B. Science graduates than there have ever been. What kind of shortage is this? What seems to be happening is that the boomers are starting to retire, and as companies haven't really spent any time or money in the last 10 years working to replace these people, when they have an opening it's for someone with five to ten years of experience with a particular piece of software. Look on Monster for just a few minutes, and you'll see what I mean. You'll see things like "Highway Engineer II", "Rail Design Engineer III", or "Manager of Engineering". There don't really seem to be any entry level positions worth having. Microsoft receives about 100,000 applications for their entry level positions every year. They screen 15,000, interview 3,500, and hire 1,000. That's 100:1 odds for getting a job. Raytheon recently tried to fill two positions and received 158 applications. That's 80:1.
Which means that if you're a 20-something right out of college, you may as well go work in the service industry or in direct sales, because there really isn't any point to your degree. The hotel I work for is hiring, and will be happy to pay you $8.00/hr for a menial white-collar job. The school district in which I live is also hiring, but please have 3-5 years of experience.
Unless employers start rationalizing their demands and offering more entry-level positions, we're going to start having some real problems here, as an entire generation of educated people are unable to find jobs.
Various parties are suggesting the construction of a 2000 mile fence/barrier along the US-Mexico border as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration.
Can anyone think of a reason why this wouldn't work? I'm not asking if it's a good idea, just a simple prediction as to whether or not this would reduce the number of illegal immigrants. Because I can't see any way that it wouldn't.
Check this out. Looks as if Saddam may well have had all the nasties everyone believed he had before the war started.
Fresh on the heels of their resounding DRM success, Sony is now being accused of price fixing by online discount websites.
Running a website is obviously a less expensive way of moving product than having a traditional "brick and mortar" storefront. You don't have to pay for real estate, stock clerks, cashiers, store managers, etc. So if a normal store buys a CD for $6, they might have to sell it at $12 to make a decent profit, whereas a website could make the same margin at a $9 pricepoint. Normal retailers have been exerting pressure on Sony and other labels to set up a price differential to preserve their rapidly aging business model.
Sounds illegal to me. Probably is. Sony's line is that they're offering discounts to businesses that have staff that "build the Sony brand". I'd say a better way to build the brand would be to more more product, wouldn't you?
But no. Sony is interested in selling you a broken product at an inflated price.
BitTorrent is your friend.
Columbia University's law school has just offered to waive their application fee.
Nice. I probably won't go there, as it's ludicrously expensive, but it's anything that makes me feel wanted right now is no bad thing.
The rioting continues in France. Having run out of conveniently parked cars, the rioters have graduated to such things as schools. They're burning schools.
Things are supposed to return to normal quickly. I'm betting the rally planned for today by the far-right National Front Party, which endorses a zero-immigration policy, will help things a lot.
Certain businesses are arguing that corporations should ban the use of Skype on their networks. The argument is that it's a security risk from both a legal and technical standpoint.
I'd say they should ban it because it's probably a bandwidth hog, and employees definitely have better things to do at work.
The recent record oil-company profits are entirely reasonable, and reflect no predatory pricing or unfair competative practices. I can say this with certainty because though companies like Exxon-Mobil posted a profit of $9.9 billion last quarter, they did so on revenues of around $100 billion. That's a 10% profit margin. It's a healthy, reasonable, desirable margin.
Now moonbats, malcontents, and the ignorant are talking about a "windfall tax". There is no windfall. The company is making a solid return on it's investment. When you invest, you expect to see a profit commensurate with the scale of your investment. Large-scale investment yields large-scale profit.
But that doesn't seem to matter to the envious, craven, demanding, ignorant American public. Apparently, no one is allowed to actually make money anymore. Everything has to be given over to satsifying the hunger of the ignorant. We encourage companies to invest their money wisely and make a solid return on their investments, and then we... penalize them for doing so?
To make matters worse, Exxon is currently able to charge a lot for gasoline because they followed the dictates of Congress and haven't built a new refinery in 25 years. Why? Because eco-freaks lobbied Congress to now allow the construction of any new refineries, or, at the very least, to make the construction of such facilities so arduous as to be not worth the time and money. Now Exxon is being criticized for artifically restricting their refining capacity. That is a charge of which they are 100% guilty, but it's because we told them to.
So one day Americans wake up and find that they can't have cheap energy and restrict the ability of oil companies to provide cheap energy. Cry me a river.
We don't have either of them here.
And there's a reason for that: the current cultural climate makes it impossible to be one. Our society's elites are ostricized, abused, vilified, and taxed to death. Recent accounting reforms have legally required CEOs of major corporations to personally sign off on their companies' quarterly statements. Sounds like a way to boost corporate accountability, right? Right?
Maybe, but it also means that anyone who wants to be a CEO - and we do actually need those people - is now taking a huge personal risk just by holding down the job. Which means that to interest anyone in taking on such a position, you have to pay them more. And as executive salaries are currently a hot-button topic, that dog won't hunt. These people just want to run a profitable business, which is hard enough as it is. The number of people who can successfully run a multi-million dollar corporation is vanishingly small. But now they have to deal with accusations of corruption, heartlessness, malice, etc. on a daily basis. Why put up with that? And more to the point, why should any corporate CEO want to show the slightest amount of compassion for the people that hate him? Loving your enemies may be a Christian virtue, but there isn't any money in it, and any society founded upon the premise that people will live like saints is a damnable hippie delusion.
Same goes for physicians. The malpractice climate in this country makes them susceptible to lawsuits if they look at a patient ascance. Which means that it's a less and less desirable position to hold. The vast majority of physicians are all about healing the sick and finding new ways of doing that. But the American population, envious of their salaries, thinks of them as evil, grasping, sadistic fiends. Why should this group of highly-paid individuals give a damn about them?
And strange as it is to say it, the same goes for politicians and high-level bureaucrats. No one has any faith in the political establishment in this country. This distrust is in no small measure well-placed, but it's also self-propagating. The less you trust political leaders, and the less you offer to pay them, the fewer people of quality will want to take up the positions. If you make out every politician to be a graft-ridden, beholden flunky, pretty soon the only people who are willing to take the job will fit that description pretty well. The Pennsylvania legislature recently tried to give itself a raise. The methods they used to do it were probably illegal, and the extent of the raise was pretty high (16% is a bit unreasonable, no?), but the hue and cry has reached the heavens. Just because most Americans make $40k or less seems to have fostered the idea that it's wrong for anyone to make more than that.
Well, it isn't. And if you want the people who rule over you - and make no mistake, there are and will always be people who rule over you - to be the kind of people that you want to rule over you, then you'd better be willing to pay for that luxury. Otherwise they'll stick to running major corporations, making out like bandits, and doing as much as they possibly can to hide their profits from the malicious masses.
French officials are saying that the violence is subsiding. I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. The measure they've been using is "number of cars torched" - which is pretty hilarious if you think about it. But it has one weakness: if there aren't any more cars, there could still be plenty of gangs roaming the streets who simply haven't found a convenient Peugeot.
There is now a ban on public meetings in Paris. Good times.
Well, not really, but here's a really cool video (Quicktime req.). Music isn't particularly interesting, but the video is.
Joel Kotkin has an excellent editorial detailing why Europe is having widespread race riots, while America doesn't and, when it comes down to it, never really has. The French riots have outlasted the two worst race riots in American history - the 12th St. riot in Detroit, 1967, and the Rodney King riots, 1992 - by a factor of 2, and have exceeded their extent through the respective nation by orders of magnitude.
Money quote:
"State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The European Dream," and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity."
Okay, just ordered the new parts. Here's what we got.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8NE
CPU: AMD Sempron 3100+, 32-bit version*
Hard drive: Western Digital WD2500JD**
Video: Gigabyte GV-NX66256DP
Feeback from those of you who know enough to care (or care enough to know, I guess, though the former seems much more likely) is hereby solicited.
*Though 64-bit processors are cool and all, none of the software I want to use is written in 64-bit code, so what's the point? There isn't even a mainstream 64-bit version of Windows available yet, and as all the software I want to run is Windows-based... there didn't seem much point in spending extra money for something I don't want.
**I've already got one, but needed this to turn my 120GB RAID into a fully-functional 250GB array. The 120GB drive I currently have paired up just crapped out. Freaking Maxtor...
Hitch again has a great piece in which he lays out the horrors of peace, in this case the world's apparently first successful genocide. The killing in Darfur is largely over. Why? Because there isn't anyone left to kill. Why? Because we didn't go to war.
Describing the West's failure under similar circumstances in Rwanda, he describes what would have been the case if we had done our job and gone in there, guns blazing. Money quote:
"It is a certainty that at some stage, American troops would have had to open fire on the "Hutu Power" mobs and militias, actually killing people and very probably getting killed in return. Body bags would have been involved. It is not an absolute certainty that all detained members of those militias would have been treated with unfailing tenderness. It is probable that some of the military contractors would have overcharged, and that some locals would have engaged in profiteering and even in tribal politics. It is impossible that any child of any member of the Clinton administration would have been an enlisted soldier. But we never had to suffer any of these wrenching experiences, so that we can continue to wish, in some parallel Utopian universe, that we had done something instead of nothing.
Or not exactly nothing. The United States ended up supporting the French military intervention in Rwanda, which was mounted in an attempt not to remove the genocidaires but to save them. Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves."
You never know when somethin' needs killed.
"The countercultural movement has, from the beginning, been beset by chronic anxiety. The idea that all politics is based on culture, and that all social injustice is based upon repressive conformity, implies that any act that violates conventional social norms is politically radical. Of course, this is an extremely attractive thought. After all, the traditional work of political organizing is extremely demanding and tedious. Politics, in a democracy, necessarily requires bringing enormous numbers of people on board. This creates a lot of unappealing work - licking evenlipes, writing letters, lobbying politicians, and the like. Assembling such vast coalitions also require interminable compromise and debate. Cultural politics, by contrast, is significantly more fun. Doing guerrilla theater, playing in a band, making avant-garde art, taking drugs and having lots of wild sex certainly beat union organization as a way to spend the weekend. What the countercultural rebels managed to convince themselves of is that all of these fun activities were in fact more subversive than traditional left-wing politics because they attacked the sources of oppression and injustice at a "deeper" level. Of course, this conviction is based entirely upon a theory [the link between Freud and Marx forged by Marcuse]. And since it is so obviously in the interest of the rebels to believe in this theory, anyone with a moderately critical turn of mind will naturally find it suspicious."
-- excerpted from Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
Also known as "Why MoveOn.org can get stuffed" or "Blogging never won an election".
I forget where I read the following, but it's true. The Republicans should love any contest that promises to mobilize both political bases in the country. The first reason is because the Republican base is larger, as proven by the last election. The second reason is that the Democratic base is freaking insane.
Just feeling my corns at the moment. Don't mind me.
The other thing that's spreading is the dysfunctionality of my motherboard. Now it won't even POST. Which means... upgrade time!
I've got my eye on a PCIe video card that I can snag for just over $100, but that means a switch to Intel board, because I'm not aware of any PCIe-capable AMD boards. Am I missing something? I mean, the price/performance ratio between Intel and AMD is rapidly closing, and TigerDirect has a 3.06GHz P4 on sale for $140, but I'm comfortable with the Athlon line, and would like to stick with AMD if possible. But I think I'll finally jump on over if there aren't any PCIe boards to be had.
The violence in France has spread into almost 300 French towns, and has spilled into neighboring European countries, with confirmed unrest in Belgium and rumors in Germany.
Jihad provokes Crusade. How much longer do you think this can last?
France, known for its massive welfare state, and frequently hailed by American lefties as a model of justice and progressive economic policies is being torn apart by racial discrimination the likes of which are... well... French.
The schadelfreude is almost too much. We've heard so much for so long about how it's France, not America, that stands for social justice, equality, and a better way of life. Only to find that not only is unemployment amongst their immigrant underclasses way into the double digits, but that immigrants are routinely denied jobs on the basis of race. This kind of thing does happen in the US, but it's not particularly widespread, and the punishments are severe should they ever be made public. The initially righteous civil rights movement in this country may have morphed into something entirely different in the last twenty years, but there has certainly been a measure of progress. We may have blighted urban neighborhoods, but I'm not aware of vast swaths of near-Third World poverty coupled with crippling unemployment.
But to the extent that we do have these same problems, the solutions are the same here as they are for France: enact business-promoting legislation that boosts growth and business owners will hire the people they need. There isn't any better way of making someone feel like they're part of society than giving them a job. And while affirmative action does lead to injustice of its own sort, it's generally the kind that leads to unfair economic burdens, not race riots. Lesser of two evils indeed.
Can someone explain to me why free trade - assuming it's actually free trade, and not just nominally free - could possibly be a bad thing? Because a minority of South American nations are bitterly opposed, to the point that there have been riots against it in Argentina on the eve of the Summit of the Americas, for which free trade is on the agenda.
I mean, what's wrong with being able to buy and sell goods internationally with no penalty? And how could that possibly cause poverty?
I'm really mystified here. I just don't get the argument. If someone has relevant facts, please point them out, because this just doesn't make sense to me.
A bit of a glut of posts today, but that's because I'll be cutting back. The boss at work has decided that employees are no longer allowed to access the Internet from our workstations. Which sucks, because there isn't enough to do otherwise. But I will no longer have access to the net for 40 hours a week. So you'll probably wind up hearing a lot less out of me from now on.
No, this isn't the next post in a series. Coca-Cola is discontinuing three brands of soda, and one of them is Diet Coke with Lemon. As I consider Diet Coke to be the distilled essence of pure evil, this is a red letter day.
I'm predicting that the French will eventually lose patience with their Muslim underclasses and that there will be a bloodletting, and not a small one. If there's a more self-righteous culture in Europe, I don't know what it is. Americans may be egotistical about our culture, but we don't have laws on the book that refer to "Americanness" the way the French have legal proctections for "Frenchness". We also don't restrict the wearing of religious clothing the way the French do. I say again, America may have race problems, but we can't hold a candle to France.
And what's going to happen is that if the government can't restore order in the next few days, roving bands of Muslim youth are going to be met by roving bands of French youth, and it will be man to man in the arrondissements. And though the Muslim population in France is significant, they're still only 10% of the population. Only one in ten young Frenchmen needs to show up with a lead pipe for there to be a brawl worth writing home about.
This is gonna get messy. The Muslims don't seem to have any problems procuring firearms either. The French police have already used the term "civil war", and if the Islamic leadership gets involved, the term might not be hyperbolic.
So I polished off my fifth of Knob Creek about two weeks ago, and needed to get a new bottle of whisky. On Wednesday, I went looking for one, and saw that a Scottish single malt called Laphroaig (the 15 year variety) was on sale. It still wasn't cheap, but it looked worth it, and came recommended from a friend. So I splurged a little and brought it home.
Now that stuff is good. There's about three different flavors that hit you, and it finishes with a really nice smokey oak taste. The smell is as of freshly cut hay, and it's almost golden in color. On the whole, a very worthy whisky. Given the price, I'll probably wind up nursing this through January, but it's worth it.
Paris and the surrounding environs are currently in the midst of a week-long wave of riots lead mostly by immigrants. The riots were apparently started when hordes of immigrant youths were angered by the electrocution deaths of two teenagers in an electrical power substation where they were hiding from police. Upwards of 1300 riot police are combing the streets, attempting to restore order, but are frequently harassed and/or attacked by highly mobile groups of rioters. A favorite target seems to be cars as rioters have torched several hundred of them.
This isn't good. But it was bound to happen. You can't maintain a civilian labor force of foreign ethnicity that has an unemployment rate of over 40% (scroll to the bottom) forever. Something's gotta give. For all the racial problems the US has, employment remains relatively strong across all ethnicities. The least-employed sector of the population is, unsurprisingly, the black one, but even that's at 10%, which is bad, but not disasterous. Hispanics are at 7%, and the general population is at under 6%.
What's really surprising to me about all of this is that I hadn't heard about it already. I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times every day, and if any of them had anything about this, it must have been buried towards the back somewhere. Odd. I'd think widespread rioting at a major Western European capital would be first-page news, but apparently minor players in Washington getting indicted for covering up crimes that didn't happen is bigger news.
Democrats, yes, you read that correctly, Democrats have managed to defeat an online free speech bill that would have protected bloggers from having to abide by hundreds of pages of FCC regulations governing political expression.
And I thought they were supposed to be for civil rights? I guess that only applies if you think Lenin and Stalin were on to something.
So I just wiped my C: drive because 1) it was time, and 2) my onboard audio crapped out, resulting in massive system instability and file corruption before I figured out what was going on and disabled the thing. [Note to fellow users: the use of electrical motors e.g. fans in immediate proximity to your motherboard is most sincerely not recommended] As a result, I've had to reload Firefox and redownload all my extensions.
If you're using Firefox, you may find these useful. If you aren't, shame on you.
Here's a list of the ones I'm using:
Flashblock: replaces all Flash objects with a button so you can decide whether or not you want to watch them.
Launchy: adds options on the context menu for opening links in other applications, e.g. IE (for brain-dead sites) or Window Media, etc.
Plain Text Links: adds an option to the context menu to open selected text as a URL in a new tab. Useful for non-hyperlinked URLs.
Hotmail Tabs: lets you open hotmail messages in new tabs, something not otherwise possible.
Disable targets for downloads: prevents binary downloads from opening a blank window.
And my new favorite:
Redirect Remover: automatically removes all URL info with "redirect", linking you directly to the desired link. A much more efficient way of surfing linkdump sites that avoids sneaky and misleading redirects.
All Windows users (at least) will benefit from the following: NoAdHosts. This will disable the vast majority of advertising servers from connecting to your computer. When any page that has content from these servers attempts to load those parts of the page, it just leaves them out. So you don't have to look at the advertising, and it doesn't leave large blank areas of the screen that will still link you to the advertiser's page like simply blocking the images with Firefox's block images functionality.
--UPDATE-- NoAdHosts isn't a Firefox extension, it's a new hosts file for your operating system. This means it will work regardless of the browser you use. It works below the level of your browser and simply routes undesirable domains to localhost, where they're never heard from again. You can also edit the file yourself to filter out any sites you don't want to have to look at.
Fark, home to innumerable, moronic, utterly nonsensical political flamewars - and entirely conscious of that fact - has announced a new thread, which is a Photoshop contest of elements used in unproductive political discussions as collectible card game cards, a la Magic.
My favorite can be found here.
