Ranting to /dev/null

Checking out

I'm currently here for the night, en route to Seabrook Island, SC. The family is on vacation, and will be there all week.

Today was the last day of school. I'm now done for the year. Teaching was a really good experience. CCA has a great group of great kids. I'll have more on that particular subject later - including some pictures - but probably not until after I get back. In the mean time, I've got finals to grade by Tuesdayish.

There's an arts festival in Charleston all week. I may try and catch some of that, tme permitting.

For now, it's been a long day, and it's time to sleep.

And for the record, the audio quality of my new Archos is stunning. So is the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

Goodnight.

If it weren't so scary...

...I'd take comfort in the fact that simply being a competent individual puts you head and shoulders above the vast majority of the American population.

This article describes the phenomenon thusly: "In the long-dead past, incompetents generally recognized their own incapacity and behaved accordingly. Today, every jackass sees himself as a genius, and every fool fancies herself a philosopher."

Haven't I seen it. One of my former co-workers, a product of a vo-tech school in the area who was proud of skipping classes and still being marginally ahead of her cohorts, seemed to believe that she was not only the single most talented individual in the department, but unfairly treated any time she was called to account for making blindingly stupid errors. She quit after being suspended as the result of an annual performance review.

Related to this, is an article by Glenn Reynolds entitled "Managing to Look Busy", about how companies are starting to crack down on web use at work by forbidding all access without explicit prior permission. He thinks this is a way to discourage talented people from working for your company, and he's right. But near the end, almost as an aside, he says:

"Ultimately, this issue isn't about employees but about management. Managers tend to resist output measures because output measures require managers to take uncomfortable action: They have to tell the good employees that they're doing a good job (which tends to encourage the good employees to want more money) and they have to tell the bad employees that they're doing a bad job (which tends to make them resentful and unpleasant)."

He's right about that. During the same performance review after which my co-worker quit, I received glowing scores. My manager told me I was doing an excellent job and wanted me to keep at it. I received a 0.5% raise. If you think my morale took a bit of a hit, you'd be right. When it became apparent that though my superior guest service was not worth enough to pay me more than the people who were merely showing up for work, well... needless to say I found other ways to pass the hours. If I'm going to get paid jack, I may as well get paid jack for doing something interesting. I accepted a position at a local paper less than a month later.

"The Plan", redux

Or not. I crunched the numbers. There isn't quite enough money in the budget. Even if you only give a stipend to citizens over 21, there's still 200,000,000 of us. The US government only spends about $1.5 trillion on the kinds of things listed in the previous post. That's a chunk of change, make no mistake, but it still only works out to $7500/person. Which is almost enough. Still, you'd have to increase government revenues and expenditures by almost 20% to make up the extra $2500 you'd need to make this really viable.

An intriguing idea, and I'm not convinced that it couldn't work. I'd be interested to see what others think.

"The Plan"

There's a book been published recently called In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. "The Plan", as it were, is to completely eliminate all forms of governmental redistributivist plans including, but not limited to, corporate subsidies, Social Security, the Mediplans, welfare, student aid, food stamps, farm subsidies, etc. Instead, replace them with a simple $10,000 grant to every American citizen aged 21 or more.

TCS has a two part series on the subject (part one, two) describing those who are most likely to oppose such a plan.

The first are libertarian types who insist that there shouldn't be any redistribution going on, period. The author's response? "[I]n a democracy, ideas that get 0.34% of the popular vote tend not, whatever their ideological purity, to get taken all that seriously when it comes to public policy."

The second are conservative types who think that you should have to do something to get by. His response: "[W]hat makes you think that the current welfare system is any better?"

But it's the potential liberal objections that really spark interest. They could be from either "[t]hose in the political system simply for the joy of the power they get to exercise [or] those in that very same system simply so they can suck at the teat of the public money cash cow." "As with other interest groups, the very worst thing that can happen is that a problem actually gets solved: if it does, how can the membership be galvanized into donating so that another power lunch can be taken?"

How'd you like to cast into immediate and permenant unemployment, tens of thousands of bureaucrats? Sounds like the kind of unemployment our society could really use.

I don't know all the details of the plan, but if it hasn't already been suggested, I'd say that citizens under 21 should have their $10k invested in a private account, so that by the time they're 21 they'll have about $250k.

New gadgets

So my mp3 player died. It had served me well, but too many passengers not quite getting the power supply connected correctly ended up having it no longer charging at all, which kind of makes it more functional as a paperweight than anything else.

Started looking around for new hardware. Decided to stick with Archos, because they've adopted and maintained the "offer ridiculously more features than an iPod for less money" model, which I like.

I got this, the Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder. 20GB hard drive, mp3 playback, and embedded camera, camcorder, and audio recorder. Nice screen too.

What follows is me goofing around with the camera features. I've uploaded some pictures of my dogs. Not exactly the normal fare around here. You have been warned.

This is my dog Lady. As you can see from her eyes, and the fact that she's looking vaguely off to the left of the frame, she's pretty much blind. The breed, while gorgeous, has weak eyes. She is unbelievably sweet, and wants nothing more than to be in the immediate vicinity of whoever happens to be home (preferably mom, but I'll do in a pinch).

Then there's Ginny. She was introduced to the family by the Seeing Eye group, and my brother (nominally anyway) raised her as a pup to be given back as a work dog. She turned out to be a bit too timid to be a reliable guide dog, but makes a fantastic pet. Her lineage is 100% mutt, bred for health, friendliness, intelligence, and longevity, and she's got 'em all.

Everybody panic

A woman on a flight from Lesotho to London died yesterday, apparently of hemorraghic fever, also known as ebola.

If there was ever a superbug, this was it. 50-90% mortality rate. Pretty infectious, though only through physical contact as of yet. It isn't quite as horrific as it's frequently made out to be, but anything with that kind of mortality rate probably isn't something you want in London.

Outrageously cool maps

Someone from the University of Sheffield has put together Worldmapper, a map site that resizes countries based on various criteria. There's 100 maps in all. The first is pretty obvious: land area. The first few are population based, with things like total population and total elderly.

Then it gets freaky. How about refugee origin? Rail freight? Container ports (apparently China has a heck of a lot of internal traffic)? Medicine exports (note that Europe, not the US, is the world's largest net exporter of medicines [also note that that's net])? Machine exports (non-vehicular)? Or, perhaps the most dramatic, finance and insurance exports (the US is a large exporter, but net importer)?

This, my friends, is cool.

Flying

This, I suggest, is as close as humans will ever get to flying.

Why I won't watch The Da Vinci Code

Has nothing to do with what it says about Christianity. What pagans have to say about the faith doesn't matter to me in the slightest. No, I won't watch it because from all accounts, it really sucks.

NSA "wiretapping"

Been thinking about the whole NSA bit for a while now. Not really all that happy about it, but haven't formulated any coherent train of thought, as information has been spotty (it's the NSA after all).

In the past few days it's been rumored that the NSA is maintaining a database of all US telephone activity. Further revelations indicate that this isn't strictly true, and that rumors of major telecos turning over calling histories are probably false. Still, it's not the kind of thing that makes one all warm and fuzzy inside.

Then I read this, an Atlantic piece entitled "Big Brother is Listening". This, in clear, technical, detailed language, spells out exactly what the NSA seems to be doing. And "wiretapping" as such isn't it. They aren't planting bugs on phones. They're doing "signals intelligence" or "sigint". They're basically listening in on the entire data stream and filtering out what they think they want. They intercept all of the satellite and fiber-optic traffic that goes in and out of the country and use supercomputers to analyze it. It's still creepy, but it's not quite as invasive as it sounded at first. It's also really damned cool, but that's neither here nor there.

The NSA is still engaging in activities which, it can be argued, violate or potentially violate the Fourth Amendment. But sigint seems to me to be less intrusive than actual domestic, individual wiretapping. Anyone who believes that their communications are truly private is kidding themselves anyway: they're broadcast for the world to see. There's nothing that prevents anyone from listening in at any time, so it's not entirely surprising that the one entity with the budget and technology capable of such an endeavor would do so.

Still, the move by the president to shunt aside the FISA court is unnerving, and quite probably illegal. I'd also like to know what in the name of all that's holy have the House and Senate Intelligence committees been doing for the past four years. I mean, do your damned jobs people.

Anyway, I'm not nearly as convinced that the Fourth Amendment has been materially breached, though this certainly does not look good and something does indeed need to be done.

European data question

In writing and researching the last article, something occurred to me about all the economic and social data collected from the European nations in the past few decades: does the data fully include their resident non-citizen immigrant populations? Because if it doesn't they're basically ignoring their entire lower class, which would certainly help the numbers.

I'm not really sure how one would obtain such information, and would be open to suggestions.

Sick jokes

Now Chavez is offering cut rate heating oil to assist Europe's poor families.

A nice gesture, no?

No. Not when you remember that poverty in Venezuela, which saw a crippling 43% of its population living in poverty in 1999, has risen dramatically in the past six years, and now has 53% of its population below that level. At the same time, inequality has been on the rise, with income from capital increasing and income from labor decreasing. Conclusion? The poor are being exploited to enrich Chavez and his cronies.

This isn't populism. This is dictatoral exploitation. And it's sick.

You know you're in a Red state when...

...you present the idea of communism to a group of 7th graders in as favorable a light as you know how to present it and they all think it sounds dumb. Not even the slightest bit appealing.

I love my job.

And here it is

Here is a translation (PDF) of the letter everyone is talking about.

And here, gentle reader, is a full text of the Unabomber Manifesto.

I humbly submit both for your careful comparison and analysis.

Anyone who thinks that we're supposed to take either whackjob seriously is crazier than they are. Anyone who thinks that negotiation is what is needed here needs to hook me up with their supplier.

Multi-culti implosion

Christopher Hitchens latest entry at Slate deals with the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch parlimentarian, at the hands of one of Europe's most liberal, "tolerant" societies.

It was only a matter of time before someone with an axe to grind would realize that multiculturalism is a self-defeating proposition. One need only engage in a cursory examination of Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush to realize that his criticisms of American culture are materially the same as the American and European left's, with a healthy dose of theofascism thrown in for good measure.

That's odd

So now Moussaoui wants to withdraw his guily plea because he says he... lied under oath about being involved in 9/11? Whaa....? Huh?

If I were his lawyer, I'd be tempted to file a motion to revisit the competence of my defendent as he's obviously completely [expeletive deleted] insane.

But I think the Federal procedural rules are there for a reason, and I think this is that reason. He thought he was going to be executed and wanted to be. Weird, but let's go with that for a minute. Then he didn't like the way his sentence turned out and wants to reverse the ruling. Don't think so.

Usually, what happens is someone pleas "not guilty", is convicted, and then gets a stiff-to-maximum sentence for the "not guilty" plea. If you plea "guilty", juries and judges are likelier to go easy on you. So once you're convicted, and it's obvious you're going to jail, you aren't allowed to re-plea in an attempt to reduce your sentence.

This case doesn't exactly fit that pattern, but I think the principle still applies: just because you don't like your sentence does not give you the right to withdraw a non-coerced plea one way or the other. Furthermore, why should we believe him now?

I'm also pretty sure that admitting to an entirely different felony of which you have not been accused - perjury in this case - isn't exactly a good way of getting yourself out of trouble.

Right for the wrong reasons

Markos "Screw Them" Moulitsas has an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled "Hillary Clinton: Too Much of a Clinton Democrat?". His thesis is that Hillary cannot win the 2008 presidential election because she represents the mainline Democratic party machine, and not the vibrant, "netroot" progressives represented by the likes of Moulitsas and Howard Dean.

Well, he's right that Hillary can't win in 2008. But the reason is that progressives are in the minority. And while Bush may be an unpopular president who has - I am increasingly ready to believe - committed numerous illegal/unconstitutional acts, the kind of people who supported Howard Dean are completely crazy. Bush may be incompetent, but he's not insane.

Al Gore ran a largely Clinton-esque campaign and got narrowly defeated in the electoral college. The popular vote was essentially split 50%. John Kerry ran a campaign motivated in no small degree by an attempt to look and sound like a moonbat, and got pretty soundly defeated. Not a landslide, by any means, but a clear, undebatable verdict. There aren't nearly as many people on the hard Left as there are on the hard Right. The Democrats didn't do as good a job at mobilizing their base as the Republicans did, but it wouldn't have mattered: there aren't as many of them.

All the Republicans need to do to win the next election is run someone like McCain (not that I'm endorsing him) or anyone else who is visibly outside the influence of the Bushies and GOP machine. Or, they can just run a placeholder against the moonbat that will likely win the Democratic nomination and send sane people everywhere running for cover.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Last week, Matt Drudge ran a piece showing that the Nielson bookscan reported that Moulitsas' book has only sold about 3,500 copies. Kos goes and posts a snarky, condescending piece showing how the numbers are artificially deflated and that the number of books sold is closer to 10,000 with another run of 50,000 in the works.

By comparison, both Ann Coulter and Michael Moore regularly move books in the mid-to-high 6-figure range, and the most recent Harry Potter book sold at least 4.1 million in it's first 48 hours, possibly as many as 6.9 million. Sales figures in the thousands, to me anyway, say that no one is buying this book, as thousands of books sold can probably be accomplished by libraries alone, many of them university libraries. Talk about preaching to the choir.

That's a real cultural phenomenon you've got going on there, Kos. The fact that he's so excited about moving mere thousands of books shows just how out of touch he is with the world as it is.

We don't need no stinking traffic signals

Here's a clip of a busy intersection at some unknown foreign locale. It's a pretty busy 4-ish lane urban street with a lot of people wanting to turn left. And there's no stoplight.

Rather than being sheer chaos, this may wind up being a pretty efficient way of moving traffic under medium loads. The odds of waiting go up a lot, but the length of the wait goes down a bunch. You are almost certainly going to have to let some people pass before you can either turn or continue through the intersection, but you won't have to sit for 2 minutes while the light changes.

There have been studies done on things like this, and these intersections wind up being - counterintuitively - very safe. Why? Because they require you to pay attention and keep on your toes. Accidents at traffic lights happen when people get lazy and rely on the signal instead of looking both ways.

Still, this only works because there isn't a crushing load of traffic. As you can see, when it does get a bit heavy, there's a significant traffic jam. If the load stayed that high all the time, the efficiency of the intersection would plummet. This isn't to say that signals are bad, but that they might not be as necessary as US traffic engineers think they are, especially in urban areas.

New Rosetta stone found

This one contains a contains a translation of one of the most cryptic languages known to man.