Michael Alan Miller

Apparently, I’m the top search result over at MSN search for the phrase “Michael is stupid.”

Awesome!

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This was found via Gravity’s Rainbow, as I haven’t been to Feministing in a while since they ignominiously ran Elaine Vigneault off. I give Elaine hell, but she’s a good person and what the Feministing crew did was just wrong.

That said, I’m about to go into full-tilt rant mode now, ok?

This is a terrible story, but I have a really big problem with this statement:

Latoya points out that violence against women is absolutely connected to the fact that men are brought up to think that they have the “right” to talk to and approach women out of nowhere.

I have the right to talk to whoever the fuck I wish to, male or female, as long as I do so politely and respectfully. So I talk to a woman in public, that means I want to beat her? Shoot her? Rape her? That’s exactly what that line is saying. Fuck that insanity. This is why I have a problem with ideologies going over the deep end. Being a feminist-supporter myself, I cannot buy into this line that men should never talk to women in public.

I know what the writer is, poorly, attempting to get at, don’t get me wrong — the feeling that many men have that they have the right to a woman’s time, attention and body.

I am not one of those men, and there are many like me — in fact, the vast majority.

Of the interactions I’ve had with women in public in the last year, 95% of the time, it’s been a woman initiating a conversation with me. Several of them were flirting with me, which would be an abomination if I’d done it. So is that the only way it should be? Women should have rights that men should not? I thought that’s the sort of thing we were trying to get away from. That is exactly the way to proceed to extreme gender division, a la Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, but by following the opposite path. Both still lead to the very same place.

The woman also has the perfect right to tell me to step off and leave, even if I only asked her for the time. That’s life. Some people are asses, even some women. But let me tell you, when I am not “allowed” to talk to whoever I wish to as long as I comport myself as a reasonable human being, I’m fucking moving and leaving you all to your shitheap of a society.

I will talk to who I wish to, and I expect everyone else to do the same, women included, so long as they do it with politesse and lack of presumption. If not, they should be called on it, and hard, no matter their sex.

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There is an extreme shortage of qualified labor in India now; offshoring jobs to that location, at least, is going to be a temporary phenomenon as it will only be profitable for maybe eight or 10 more years.

India graduates a huge number of college students each year, but most of their schools are shoddy and most four-year grads would compare unfavorably to a dull student with a poor American high-school education, so don’t let those numbers fool you.

However, American businesses will overreach and keep offshoring for longer than they should as it has already become a fad and a way to show you are “doing something” to get your bonus rather than a real method of saving money.

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Freeman Dyson is one smart homeboy.

Also, why does The New York Review of Books have Billy Shakespeare, who never wrote any books, as their favicon?

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Even dogs experience the Uncanny Valley.

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I’ve been trying to infect my machine tonight with spyware. Of course, I can’t, because I’m running Linux.

It’s nice being able to click on whatever I want, no matter how “dangerous,” and have nothing at all happen.

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This thread is full of tard.

The misconceptions about housing and renting are legion, especially this:

I see these calculations that start with figures like “rent: $1400/month — buy: $2000/month”. But there is no way a person spending $2000 on a property would ever rent it for $1400.”

Jesus fucking Christ on a coconut-chomping Tyrannosaurus rex! Is there some special tard school out there where they send normal people and tards come out? If so, where is it, and when can we napalm it all to hell?

First, most rental properties were bought relatively long ago and mortgages, especially those taken out by smart people, don’t change over the years. A mortgage taken out 10 years ago (probably about the average for mortgaged rental properties) would be significantly less. Using part of that mental midget’s figures from above, if the rent is $1,400 now, on a 10-year-old mortgage, the owner’s payment would likely be more like $650 a month. Ergo, the owner is making a tidy profit, even though you as the renter can’t now afford to buy in the market.

Second, many landlords outright purchase their rental properties, in cash. This changes things. There is no mortgage, and thus no interest, only a necessary return on investment from rent income.

I could go on, but why bother, really?

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As oil prices go higher and supply continues to decrease, hoarding behavior will ensue, causing further price spikes. That said, I would not be long oil right now. The time for that was in 2003.

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Another “excellent” bit of journalism from Marketwatch.

Correlation is not causation.

It’s just as likely that those who are healthier work longer, rather than the conclusion the headline promotes.

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In Hardy Heron, probably related to idiocy of the Gnome developers (who are enormous idiots), when you mount an NTFS volume, the method of deleting files on that volume has been altered to resemble a waterboarding.

Formerly, it would move the items to a hidden trash folder on the drive that had to be cleaned out — but at least it preserved the files in case you deleted something accidentally.

Now, it’s been replaced by an annoying and unnecessary dialog box when you attempt to delete something, a dialog box with far too many buttons and just no reason to exist:

But now crazy Uncle Mike will tell you how to make NTFS trashes compatible with Gnome trash — yep, this means that when you accidentally delete your treasured goat and Richard Simmons porn off your NTFS drives, it will show up in your regular old Gnome trash can.

Some caveats, first: This particular solution will only work on a single-user system. There may be ways to make it work with groups on a multi-user system. I am the only one who uses my computer, so this works for me — but the groundwork has been laid here for you to modify, if you so desire.

How to make Gnome behave sensibly is to just mount the drive with the UID of your user. The default UID in Ubuntu is 1000, so here’s what the entry for one of my drives in my fstab looks like:

UUID=C218BE6218BE54DF /media/storage ntfs-3g uid=1000,defaults,noatime,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

Apply this to the NTFS drives you desire in /etc/fstab, reboot, and ta-dow, whatever you delete will appear in your Gnome trash can before being relegated to nothingness.

Why this wasn’t a default behavior, I have no idea — but Linux projects have an extremely long history of making things harder than they need to be, to “prove” something.

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Real interest rates are now negative due to inflation. This goes a long way in explaining the run-up in commodities. Other factors are at play, but when real interest rates go negative, commodities always shoot up.

Thanks, Helicopter Ben. Thanks a lot.

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Contextless information is worse than useless.

What this article, and most articles about the implosion-in-progress do not tell you, is that house prices haven’t posted sequential declines so large since the Great Depression. Wouldn’t this be some important information to know? Admittedly, Marketwatch readers are expected to be more savvy than those who read straight news sites, but the web opens up so many more possibilities that no one is using.

More on that later.

A consequence of media consolidation is that the truth is becoming the rarest commodity of all. It should be traded on exchanges like gold or wheat. I don’t know for sure that this sort of shoddy journalism is an example of the typical deliberate obfuscation of the true scale of the housing and credit implosion, but now it’s a mindset that pervades the system — so in a way, it can’t help but be an example.

In the end, though, markets care about the truth in the world, not the prevarication in newspapers, or on TV, or on websites — and in the end in the market, at least, the truth always wins out.

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Buying a house is a liability, not an asset. When (and if) we can get past that lie that’s been told to the American people for the past 50 years, the housing market will find a bottom. Until then, it just won’t.

Look, single-family housing is never a good investment. Do the math yourself. Assuming historical rates of appreciation, minus the upkeep, taxes, fees, levies and all other expenses, you’d be better off investing your money in the worst money market fund you can find. Investing in real estate is about like investing in a meal at Bojangles. It’s just stupid for an individual not doing it as a business (i.e., for rental purposes).

There are other reasons, of course, to buy a house. I’m not saying it’s ipso facto a bad thing. But positioning it as as some sort of great investment is not borne out by the numbers, and in cases like that, the numbers are all I care about.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in real estate investing as a business one day, the time to buy will be when absolutely everyone is saying, “Don’t dare invest in real estate! You’ll be plum ruint!” This time will occur in about five years, is my guess. Keep your eyes open, and your wallet close.

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Outlook is one of the worst, if not the worst, commonly-used applications there is. Almost anyone who works in the corporate world is forced to bend to its invidious will, with its travesty of UI, its neglect of even the standards used in the OS it sits atop of, and the balky, memory-hogging nature of the program itself.

This list of 67 reasons why Outlook sucks is by no means comprehensive — if I had time, I could add 20 more without much cogitation — but it does hit the highlights pretty well.

Outlook is the George W. Bush of programs, the Boss Hog of applications, the Bubbles of consistency. I once had a job that 40% consisted of making Outlook work correctly. Outlook is like a bad disease that hides in your T-cells, waiting to attack.

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If you’ve ever read any Vernor Vinge or Alastair Reynolds, this discussion will appeal to you.

As a rule, people who enjoy thinking about topics like this will tend to build things that matter in the future; those who decry such talk as pointless or stupid will not.

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