March 2008
Monthly Archive
Professional services
| Posted by Chill on 31 Mar 2008 |
Good post here that captures pretty well my thoughts on how most of the American left treats prostitution.
Being a member of the American left myself, it’s galling to see them descend into cloaked prudery and moralizing just like some old-timey tent-revival leader.
This is related and also good.
Our society’s puritan response to sex is not exclusively a trait of social conservatives. That belief may be more prevalent on the right, and I think it’s more explicit there, but it appears in various forms on the left. As Kip highlights, only the reasoning is different. The revulsion is identical.
Yep. Spot on.
I find the notion completely fucking odious that a woman (or anyone) is said by some lead-paint-chompers to be exploited when she does something freely with no coercion, is ready and willing to do it again, says to everyone who asks her about it that she wants to do it, and could choose not to do the action in question if she wished.
As many liberals are using the term “exploitation” in reference to prositution, in their lexicon it just means, “Something I don’t like and wish people wouldn’t do because it makes me uncomfortable and/or I’m scared my husband/SO will visit a prostitute and have more fun than he’s had in years.”
House of the setting sun
| Posted by Chill on 31 Mar 2008 |
Check out the discussion going on over there at Elaine’s blog.
Lots of people’s ARMs are resetting this month, and many are realizing they cannot pay their mortgages anymore due to contracts they freely signed. Who is to blame for that?
Here’s what I had to say about it (one of my full comments):
“The main text of my argument is that everyone — even the borrowers themselves — are culpable in our system (except, perhaps, the ones who were lied to).
It sounds more like you are violently agreeing with me, in most ways, though we disagree on how the blame is apportioned. I didn’t say ‘that’s how the market works.’ I could not find that quote anywhere in my comment, nor do I agree with it.
I specifically called for regulation and for people going to jail who perpetrated fraud. Though I do think pretty-heavily regulated capitalism is the most efficient way to determine supply and demand and set fair market prices in most cases, what we practice here in America is in no way capitalism, unless you consider crony capitalism and fascism to be capitalism.
I do have sympathy for the people losing their homes. However, I think that the vast majority of them are just as responsible for it as the lenders are. The vast majority of them signed non-fraudulent contracts believing that housing prices will always rise, and that they could always sell later, even when they only make $3000 a month and have a $2700 a month mortgage. (For those who were defrauded, however, I do not believe they are culpable, though this is likely a small minority.)
At some point, reality has to kick in — and now that’s happening, and many people who made terrible decisions of their own accord are facing the consequences. Many of these people, and many of the Wall Street panjandrums, believed that there was no risk at all in the market, as housing prices never fall. Unfortunately, many of the Wall Street types who should be going to jail for a long time will not be doing so.
My point was that the whole system was screwed — from the lowliest borrower to the ‘mightiest’ Wall Street titan — and they all, yep, even the ones losing their houses, deserve some measure of blame for what occurred.
I don’t absolve personal responsibility just because something bad happens when someone makes a regrettable decision based on avarice and self-deception. I would never permit myself to do that to myself, so why should I hold other people to a lower standard than I hold myself?
I’ve never bought a house, because I knew the housing market was insane — so apparently, the brainwashing did not work on me, and many others. And now people like me, who took personal responsibility, who did not buy a house we could not afford, are going to be paying for the mistakes of others from the low to high for years and years to come.
I don’t deserve to pay for other people’s errors. Do you?”
Dull edge
| Posted by Chill on 30 Mar 2008 |
Occam’s Razor fails spectacularly on the question, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”
Make a list, check it twice
| Posted by Chill on 29 Mar 2008 |
This article is fucking retarded and I want to use poisoned blowgun darts on everyone involved in it.
Powers
| Posted by Chill on 29 Mar 2008 |
In several Alastair Reynolds novels, extremely advanced AIs have learned how to completely control regular, unaugmented human beings by hacking and reprogramming their brains using only brief visual stimuli. While I thought this was interesting but impossible, things like this seem to give that technique more plausibility.
Granted, I still think it is impossible, but there is basis for this sort of idea that I hadn’t really considered before.
Crockumentation
| Posted by Chill on 28 Mar 2008 |
I was reading a random website today, and a commenter made the point that most documentation tells you what things like buttons and toolbars do, but they don’t tell you how to do anything.
I’d never thought of it that way before, but that’s exactly right. Most documentation for software and even meatspace products says what will happen if you click here, or if you add this or that command-line switch, but it doesn’t tell you how to do anything productive or useful.
It’s not possible to address every scenario, of course, but if documentation could give just a few examples of how to do a task that the product would typically do, this would help immensely. The reason I never read man pages is that they don’t tell me anything. They list a bunch of disconnected, discombobulated switches and commands with no application in sight. It’s like reading something in Klingon, but with less style and beauty. (For you non-geeks, a man page is like the worst instruction manual you’ve ever read, multiplied by infinity infinity times a disaster.)
What I look for when I’m looking for documentation is just how someone’s done something — even if it isn’t exactly (or even nearly, sometimes) what I’m attempting to do.
Knowledge of the process gives me more clues on how to do something than any 900-page manual ever could by telling me what button does what and how hard it does it.
Fake capitalism
| Posted by Chill on 28 Mar 2008 |
The first comment on this story is excellent, quoted here in its entirety:
“21st century America, gotta love it….share songs online – get sued. Make millions passing out paper money loans so folks could by more house then a king and Uncle Sam rewards you !! As the Russians used to say: Decadent capitalists !!”
Gender bender
| Posted by Chill on 27 Mar 2008 |
To whoever searched here for the string “Normal for guys to play female characters?” the answer is, who cares?
Who cares if it’s normal? If you like it, do it. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.
Normal is what got us into this mess. Normal is not the way out.
And if some whiny babies complain that men should not role-play as female characters, be sure to mention how that infantilizes both women and men, and could only serve to harm gender relations and understanding.
Perma-tards
| Posted by Chill on 27 Mar 2008 |
To all those microcephalics who didn’t know Fair Use from a case of scabies, one of the reasons the company here won the ruling was that their product was considered a transformative use, just as the Richter Scales’ use of Lane Hartwell’s image likely would have been.
I call ‘em like I see ‘em, and for those Lane Hartwell apologists, I call you perma-tards.
Bully for me
| Posted by Chill on 26 Mar 2008 |
Interesting post about bullying.
I was bullied a little in late elementary and early middle school, until I beat the absolute hell out of a couple of kids who were bigger than me, and to the chagrin of even my teachers, held one kid’s head down on the ground and made him literally eat dirt. From then on, everyone left me alone. (I also stabbed a pen through one kid’s hand, later, who apparently hadn’t gotten the message.)
The teachers wouldn’t help me, as I’d gone to several of them several times about what was happening. The article, unfortunately, is right — only strength is respected in America, and no one sticks up for the little guy.
It’s incredibly sad that I had to resort to that sort of shit to be left alone, but that’s the way it was.
We seem to believe in the African savannah rules here in the US: “Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”
This is reflected throughout our entire culture.
GPicView
| Posted by Chill on 26 Mar 2008 |
From what I can tell so far, I quite prefer GPicView as my default image viewer in Gnome. It’s faster than the default Gnome image viewer, and has some features I like better.
Clear as onyx
| Posted by Chill on 26 Mar 2008 |
The takeaway from this article:
The ruling class has so entangled the financial system in bogus “products” that they have made it so that if anything fails, it will so fuck it up for everyone else that they must be bailed out or we’ll all suffer.
For what it’s worth, that’s true. Me, I want to burn the whole fucking system to the ground and start over again, no matter the short-term consequences. That will result in something better for all of us, not just the ruling class, much faster than most suspect.
The article writer makes a classic logic error in assuming that because we have the system we have, that ipso facto it is the system we should have.
That is flawed thinking of the worst kind.
Damn Hoover
| Posted by Chill on 26 Mar 2008 |
What the FOMC and others are doing, and proposing, right now is very similar to the actions Herbert Hoover and his administration took during the beginning of the Great Depression that extended that crisis for many years longer than necessary.
I am not saying that this crisis will play out like that one. Many things are different now, some of them vastly so — but money, debt, and human nature does work pretty much the same now as it did then.
Just something to think about.
Give me a C
| Posted by Chill on 26 Mar 2008 |
If you want a working definition of “hardcore,” read this.