David Rosenberg has a set of very depressing charts:
More depressing charts at the link.
Keep in mind, folks, it’s all George Bush’s fault, and The Won is doing everything he can to make sure you remember that.
Archive for the ‘Dammit!’ Category
Pop! Goes the Housing Market
Saturday, August 28th, 2010Quick Links
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Most of the federal government hangs on the Commerce Clause. Here’s how that happened.
[Via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.]
“1848 Daguerreotypes Bring Middle America’s Past to Life”
Got any old Daguerreotypes lying around? Look at them under a magnifying glass — or even a 60x microscope. You might find surprising detail.
Smug asshole Schumer wants to kill political speech.
EPA wants to ban lead ammo.
Quote of the Day in bold:
Naturally, the NSSF stresses the reasonable, Fudd angle, telling you to write your unaccountable, unfireable, unelected EPA bureaucrat and tell them:
* There is no scientific evidence that the use of traditional ammunition is having an adverse impact on wildlife populations.Which is, I suppose, more diplomatic than what I would want to write, which would be more along the lines of
* There is anecdotal evidence that the banning of traditional ammunition would have an adverse impact on government bureaucrat populations.
Say Uncle says gives the other QotD, the core definition of being a gun nut:
If you fuck with me bad enough, I’ll kill your ass.
He elaborates. Read the whole thing. And see this at Smallest Minority.
Best Investment Advice. Roughly speaking: pay off consumer debt, and put your assets in cash. The tsunami is coming, folks.
“If this is true, then everybody involved at the IRS must be fired.
Immediately. No excuses.”
Oh,yes. Oh, very yes indeed. If your group is pro-Israeli, you will be singled out for extra scrutiny on your application for tax-exempt status “to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Blatant tyranny. These policies “constitute an explicit admission of the crudest form of viewpoint discrimination, and one which is both totally un-American and flatly unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”
Bravery of the Day: Offending One’s Fans
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Penny Arcade:
[click for full size]
I traded in games for a long time, there’s probably comics somewhere in the archive about it – you can imagine how quickly my cohort and I consume these things. It was sort of like Free Money, and we should have understood from the outset that no such thing exists. You meet one person who creates games for a living, just one, and it becomes very difficult to maintain this virtuous fiction.
I absolutely agree with this, and I absolutely and without undue irony applaud Tycho and Gabe’s honest bravery in posting a comic likely to offend their somewhat rabid fan base, and yet….
This is what comes of treating your customers like the enemy. They stop being your customers, and become your enemies.
And this is what happens when you treat the artists you love like the enemy. Same-same.
City Hall About to Burn Down Chicago Again?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010The invaluable Second City Cop alerts us that Chicago Police Department Internal Affairs is investigating John Andrews, a cop who wrote an extremely critical blog post, asserting that the CPD is so badly managed, understaffed, and maintained that the city is “at War with Itself” and “Fast Tracking to Anarchy”. And that’s just the title. I’m not excerpting anything else. Go read SCC, and read John Andrews.
Daley and his cohorts need to burn. Chicago is one of America’s grand old cities, and Daley has run it into the ground as his personal, hereditary fiefdom.
If the nation blows up, folks, this could well be the primer.
Heart to Heart
Monday, August 23rd, 2010P.Z. Meyers gets a phone call from his doctor’s office.
“We just got the results of your tests from last week. Your heart is a shriveled black lump starved of charity, decency, charm, and kindness,” she said, “a gristly godless clot of marginally functional fibers. You need to go back to Abbott for more tests, and the doctors want to crack your chest and marvel at you.”
“So what else is new? My students are used to that and expect me to be lashing them with fear and pain starting Wednesday…and my black heart is an asset to this job,” I said. “Maybe I can pop in for these tests this weekend. Any chest-cracking can wait for the end of the term and Christmas break, when I wouldn’t be using my heart anyway.”
“No,” she said, “now.”
And I waffled and weaseled and tried to argue with her that this could not be, I had a great deal of work to do right now, and I couldn’t possibly just drop out at the start of the term, and besides, I felt fine. And I bickered, and she exasperatedly told me no way, and I bargained, and then she said, “Here. I’m putting the doctor on.” And the doctor spoke with the voice of Doom and the terrifying tone of I-hold-your-life-in-my-hands-you-dope and she quoth (paraphrased somewhat):
“YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SUDDENLY, ABRUPTLY, WITHOUT WARNING UNLESS WE FIX YOU RIGHT NOW. GO. NOW. DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.”
“Yes’m,” I said.
Prayers I have none. My wishes are of course useless.
Nevertheless, I wish him well. Tough, bitter, and black hearted he may be, we need him. Liberal politics be damned, he is a crucial warrior for the truth, clear sighted and, may I say it, strong hearted in his field, and we need as many of those as we can get.
Gripe
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Why the hell do laundry detergent manufacturers put such heavy perfumes in their products?
My sheets, shirts, and pants reek.
Is there anybody who actually likes these stenches?
And another thing:
Front loading washers now require so-called “High Efficiency” detergents. We’ve got an LG, and it’s a wonder of quiet, and incredibly smart, but all our old detergent is useless. We’re strictly cautioned not to use it, because it will foam too much and clog the sensors or some such.
So I went out and bought a bottle of All Hypoallergenic, with no added dyes or perfumes — this simplification actually makes it cost more. I was sure to note that I had the HE version.
Then I noticed a larger bottle, similar label, but much cheaper per use. Got it home, started a load, and realized that, no, it wasn’t HE.
I’ll go back tomorrow and buy another bottle — but why, why, do I have to keep track of both these variables now? Why aren’t all detergents HE and stench free? Why can’t I get the stench free, HE version in the large economy size package?
Gah. I love capitalism, I do, but things like this are what mosquitoes are to evolution.
Sick At Heart
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Clayton Cramer is fighting the good fight against Righthaven, an operation that buys the copyrights on articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, then sues bloggers who have quoted any part of the article. I think they’re using the heinous Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which apparently allows suits for arbitrary amounts of money without first issuing a take-down notice.
Righthaven’s CEO, Steve Gibson, told Reason Magazine, “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.” [Information Liberation]
in other words, this isn’t about defending the copyright, which in most cases would involve a simple take-down notice. It’s a flat out shake-down.
Cramer’s pretty shaken about this. I’ve been reading him for years now, and I’ve never read anything like this from him:
When this matter is resolved, I’m retiring from all involvement with public policy, and doing my best to disappear. This system is so fundamentally corrupt, evil, and unwilling to reform itself that I no longer care to take any action to reform it or protect it. It needs to burn, and it needs to die. Why anyone would fight to defend a nation that is as corrupt and evil as this one leaves me utterly confused.
Gibson is doing real evil here. Cramer’s one of the good guys in my book, and and Gibson could well ruin him.
I’m going to miss him badly when he’s gone.
Why this story isn’t everywhere, I don’t understand. Cramer desperately needs help, and none of the people and organizations he’s helped are stepping up.
I’m looking forward to Gibson crashing and burning in court, if only someone with lawyers and money turns the tables on him.
More on Righthaven at Techdirt.
Techdirt also has this article on Righthaven’s self-justification.
Per informationliberation, it’s possible that Righthaven is specifically attacking right-leaning bloggers.
Oh, wait, except when, as Media Matters says, they’re specifically targeting left-wingers
Do You Trust The Post Office To Manage This?
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
As NRO notes:
Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn’t fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”
I have some quibbles about the graphic itself — primarily, I wish it were interactive, so you could choose which aspects of the tangle to concentrate on — but the reality they represent is horrific.
Things to looks at:
Red circles with dark orange interiors are “Rationing Potentials”.
Orange circles with light blue interiors are “Involvements with the health insurance market”.
Note that the Patient, lower right hand corner, is not directly connected to the Physician, lower left hand corner. I suspect, I hope, I pray, that this is a fault in the chart, not a true representation. If it is true, this means that I, cash in hand, cannot go to my doctor, pay him, and be examined and treated without getting some kind of government approval. [update]OK, close examination of the chart shows that the lines are actually labeled with the section number of the Obamacare act establishing that connection. Unless Obamacare breaks the existing patient-doctor connection, no wonder it does not appear on the chart.
One more charting quibble: I’d like to be able to click on one entity and see all the other entities it connects to, and how.
My title asks if you trust the Post Office. This chart shows that you have to trust several non-health-care related agencies, including the IRS, which has a history of being openly hostile to citizens. Other agencies include Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Treasury.
Blind
Sunday, July 25th, 2010So, my sister wants new blinds hung in her bedroom. Going by the Big Orange Box instructions, I measure top and bottom width (to check parallelism), diagonals (to check squareness), and height in the middle.
The openings are neither parallel nor square, although they’re not out by much; I’ve seen much worse.
I set about trying to find the widest blind that will fit in each opening. I can’t find an on-line calculator, and when I try to figure out an algorithm myself (while trying to chip the rust off my Python skills), it turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Any given case is straightforward, using Pythagoras, but there seems to be no general solution. And that’s assuming that the top and bottom are parallel and level.
I mention this at the dinner table.
“Why not just measure the old blinds?”
Good question, Mom. Good question.
I’m still piddling about with writing a calculator, just as an exercise. And I’d like to find an online calculator.
Note: the math might be a bit easier if you measure width of the opening top and bottom, length of both sides, true plumb height at both sides, and both diagonals. But I think you can do it with the usual top and bottom width, overall height (assume level), and the diags, and given that those are the measurements most window blinds sites ask for, that would be best.
Inputs and results to the nearest eighth of an inch, please. If you round, round down — a blind that is too large by the height of the drywall texturing, a sixteenth of an inch or less, will not work. Piss off with your sissy millimeters.
A command line calculator is fine by me, but it must work under Windows as well as Unix.