The Dems aren’t the ones refusing to compromise. In fact, they’re bending over backwards to try to compromise with each other and get ANY, even one or two Republican votes. No one is budging. The stakes have gotten way too high to hold to a non-legislated procedural rule.
Misc
22
Jan 10
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: SciFi Dystopian Disasters Set to Come True
For awhile there, it looked like all the paranoid cyberpunk fiction of the 80s and early 90s was just silly. The US had elected its first black president, we were on the verge of getting some kind of major health care reform and things were finally starting to move on reforming banking and finance.
Then came MA special election and Pelosi announcing she didn’t have the HCR votes in the House. That was bad. That was disappointing. It’s nothing compared to the unmitigated disaster that is the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
Since it’s not getting anywhere near the news coverage it should, and frankly, it takes a little bit of time for the ramifications to sink in, I’ll be blunt about what this means:
Corporations can now spend whatever they want on politics.
Let that sink in for a moment. Imagine this had been reality in 2008. Obama spent $740.6 million (Bloomberg) on his presidential campaign, much of it raised is small donations from millions of supporters online. Now imagine that Halliburton was able to spend whatever they wanted on the 2008 campaign. Their 10-k showed $1.124 billion in cash and $1.538 billion in net income for 2008.
So Halliburton, with their petty cash, could have outspent Obama, in favor of McCain (or whatever further right candidate they would choose). And oh, by the way, all those “this ad is approved by… ” such and such disclaimers? Yeah, those are gone too.
This is complete fucking disaster. Democracy, as if it wasn’t already at a discount, is now officially for sale to the highest bidder. Hello Neuromancer, hello Snow Crash, we are on.our.way.
And just for special irony, the entire argument is based around the notion that a corporation is a person, and is therefore entitled to the same rights to free speech as a person. Incidentally, you as an individual can now spend gazillions on campaigns too.
But back to the irony: in order to “protect” free speech, your voice can now be completely, utterly outspent by a “legal person” with no motivation except shareholder value (time to buy more stocks?).
Justice Stevens explains just how little sense this actually makes, in the dissent:
The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corpo ration. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. Nor does it tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose. It does not even resolve the specific question whether Citizens United may be required to finance some of its messages with the money in its PAC. The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.
In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our soci ety, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be man aged and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legiti mate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.
Just who is Citizens United and what was the case actually about? From their website:
Citizens United is an organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United’s goal is to restore the founding fathers’ vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens.
Setting aside the spectacular irony of the first sentence, the rest of it pretty standard fair libertarian buzzwordium.
The organization’s president, David N. Bossie, “led investigations ranging from the Whitewater land deal to the transfer of dual-use technology to China and to foreign fundraising in the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign” (bonus points if you can dissect the special irony about the foreign fundraising). You can read the rest about them for yourself.
The case was about this film they did and, essentially, that they thought they should be able to spend more money promoting it during the 30 day pre-primary window (again, from Stevens: “All that the parties dispute is whether Citizens United had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period”) than the law allowed.
Really, that’s it. I couldn’t make this up. Somehow we got from that dispute to OMFGUNLIMITEDFUNDING.
You know when the last time we had a legislature that was so divided that hardly anything could get passed and there was a really awful, really important supreme court ruling? The 1850s. Scary.
7
Jan 10
Idea Giveaway: How to Kill the Kindle in 4 Easy Steps, No New eReader Required
I was pretty busy today, but I was able to glance long enough at my #ces column in Tweetdeck to see lots of noise about eReaders (for the record, it’s my blog and I can refuse to use the hyphen, cause I hate hyphenated tech stuff). It struck me that all these devices are a high volume of missing-the-vote-itis (that gets hyphens, keeping up?).
The Kindle seemed like the greatest thing ever when I first got mine: “I can finally read Neal Stephenson on the subway without getting neck and should cramps!!!” However, despite being a fantastic device at its launch – especially compared to, ya know, paper – the Kindle actually lacks quite a bit. So here’s my 4 easy steps to killing the Kindle (or making it a lot better, if Amazon is paying attention):
1. Make it social
This seems spectacularly obvious, and there have been a bunch of attempts to link books and social networking, but nothing has really taken off. Consider this: Why can’t you post a review of the book you just finished on your Kindle to the reviews on Amazon from your Kindle? And that’s just to start:
Why can’t you push an update that you just finished a book to Twitter and/or Facebook, from your Kindle?
Why can’t you click “Recommend this book to [your friend] ” from your Kindle?
These examples are just the beginning.
2 Drop the device
Is the Kindle hardware or software? Think about it. What really makes the Kindle work? It’s the ebook format and the wireless delivery. If you use the Kindle iPhone app you’ve probably realized this. Consumers, particularly geeks and early adopters, already have oodles of devices and there is massive craving for the iSlate or other tablets. And more importantly, all you need is the software and a device: a smartphone, a tablet even a plain old laptop or PC. You could probably launch with the following versions:
- Windows XP/Vista/7/Mobile
- OS X
- iPhone
- Android
3. Make it an open API
Guess what? If you’re selling a socially-networked, multi-device bookstore, you aren’t selling software; you’re selling books, electronically. You want that service to be exposed to as many places as possible and you want the community contributing innovation to your service. You want people integrating the next new hot web service with your service before you’ve even thought of what to do. You want it on new devices before your own employees have even heard of those devices.
And oh, by the way, wouldn’t it be cool if you were on your favorite author’s blog and they just announced their newest book was released in a post, and in that post there was a widget and all you had to do was click to buy the new book and have show up on your device of choice?
4. Give the authors a better deal
The Kindle’s pricing structure eats into the author’s share pretty harshly. Charles Stross has written about this pretty extensively and certainly knows more about the topic than I do. In addition, Amazon doesn’t do much to incentivize authors to encourage their readers to buy ebooks. In fact, the pricing structure discourages it. This is just plain silly.
Now put all these things together and what have you got?
- You’ve got a web (HTTP technically) based store sold through heterogeneous client software
- Your expenses are rights to the ebooks and format licensing, bandwidth and the software to run the store and handle transactions.
- What expenses have you eliminated? For one thing, you don’t need a warehouse, either for the books or devices, which incidentally means you don’t have shipping costs.
- And oh, by the way, unlike the Kindle, you aren’t paying for the customer’s bandwidth because they are using their own devices. You’re only paying for delivering the books, which are small, especially in comparison to other electronic products like music, movies or games.
- You’ve provided your customers with a way to build on top of your services and integrate with future, unknown third parties.
And what have consumers got? They have ebooks that they can read on whatever device they feel like, they can share their experience with what they’ve read on whatever social network they feel like. Their favorite authors will be encouraged to interact with them in this format. And they don’t have yet another device and charger to keep track of.
Now, cue someone pointing me to where I didn’t Google enough and this already exists, cause I would really like it. Or funding it 
5
Jan 10
The 00s in review, part 1, possibly of 1
Well, since everyone is doing lists…
Best moment
The US electing Obama.
Worst moment
Katrina. Yes, it was worse than 9/11. Sorry, it just was. 9/11 may have had a more profound impact on world events and American politics, but ultimately Katrina was a far more horrifying event. (note: I realize this is a profoundly American view. The worst moment for humanity was by far the Indonesia tsunami.)
Douche of the decade
Wow, it was a spectacular decade for douchebaggery. On the list of obvious choices you have Bush or anyone in his administration, Osama bin Laden, Brownie, credit card companies, all the neocon leadership, James Dobson, H1N1, Musa Hilal, RIAA, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Pope Ratz, Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who voted or lobbied for deregulation of the financial industry. Ultimately, unfortunately, it has to go to us, all of us. For letting these idiots get elected, for not doing enough to fight to curb carbon emissions, for not holding anyone in our government or media accountable. Sorry, but you and me and everyone else is the Douche of the Decade. You may now buy yourself a hat or a shirt or whatever as a prize.
Idiot of the decade
Pseudo-tie: Intelligent Design proponents and climate change deniers. Its pseudo since these two crowds often happen to be the same idiots. Both of these movements are like the new religions of the 21st century. ID isnt even pseudoscience, its really just mythology: a bunch of made up horseshit used to control people. And climate change deniers. Wow. I really dont care how financially beneficial it is for you to spout your nonsense. You know why? Cause all that money you might be able to leave to your progeny wont be worth fuckall if the planet becomes inhabitable. Or even if it just starts to suck hard enough to throw us all back to the stone age and your accrued currency will be laughed at for not being potable water.
Sucker of the decade
I could repeat the above, but that’s lazy, so instead: Anyone who bought real estate in 2005/6. Bonus points if you got an ARM.
Best movie of the decade
In retrospect, there were actually a surprising number of great movies, from Fellowship of the Ring to Fahrenheit 9/11 to Food Inc to District 9 to An Inconvenient Truth. I’ll give the nod to Al Gore, if for no other reason than Truth was the most important topic.
Worst movie of the decade
Attack of the Clones. If you had told me in the 1990s that there would be three more Star Wars movies and that I would fall asleep during one of them I would have been sure you were high. Alas… Plenty has been written about all the failings of this movie, from the comical courtship to the astonishingly tensionless action sequences, to say nothing of the actual title. What gets the film the award is that it confirmed that, indeed, the prequels were going to suck. The Phantom Menace left some doubt, after all the lightsaber duel at the end kicked ass, but AotC took a big fat wooden stick and stabbed it deep into the heart of our Star Wars Childhoods, and then twisted it a few times.
Runner up: Cloverfield. The only movie where I’ve actually seen people go to the theater manager and ask for their money back.
Best tech of the decade
RSS and Blogs. That’s right, stupid and simple. Nothing did more to empower so many as keeping web sites simple, giving non-technical users better software, and bringing about a standardized distribution format (Atom is still better, but that’s irrelevant to the point here…). I get asked whats the difference between a blog and web site? a lot. For a long time, I used to just say nothing really. But then I started answering a different question: what makes a blog a blog? A blog is a web site whose format is a list of content. That sounds like a non-answer, but when you look at all the various attempts to revolutionize web navigation (remember when mouseovers were like the greatest javascript trick ever? Or, anything in Flash, see the next entry), the revolution was make a list, and do it in a way that computers and humans can digest the list with equal accuracy.
Best tech of the decade 2
Cloud computing. Despite it befuddling CNN reporters, on-the-fly provisioning and scaling are one of the most fundamentally positive changes to computing. From the short-turnarounds to the benefits of everyone getting their data into a datacenters. And don’t listen to those CNN reporters. Your data is MUCH better off in a datacenter than on DVDs stored in your file cabinet. Yes, there have been a few outages, and there will certainly be more. Guess what, your stuff is still better off in the cloud. Seriously, just ask yourself, who is more likely to lose all your precious photos, Flickr or you? Does your home office have redundant power and backups and electronics-safe fire suppression? I didn’t think so.
Worst tech of the decade
Flash. Yes, I realize that it was around in the 90s, but Youtube, banner ads and ActionScript 3 took Flash to a whole new level of distribution and ambition in the 00s. Never has a technology put more power to crash more computers into the hands of so many.
Im not even sure where to start with all the ways that Flash is awful, but Ill try: Its proprietary, it incurs tremendous overhead for development and maintenance (and bandwidth…), its chock full of opportunities for memory leaks and namespace collisions, its only pseudo-searcheable (and even that is a recent development)… sigh, this is just making me angry. Heres a google link if you need more reasons.
Final thought: If you want to see just how much Flash wrecks your browsing experience, install Flashblock.
Worst tech of the decade 2
Identity. Or the lack thereof rather. How many logins and passwords do you have? How many times do you have to update your physical address if you move? This might be the singular failure of this century, so far, by the tech industry. OpenID isnt going to get it done. OAuth is promising, but it still doesn’t really feel like a solution to this problem. There is a lot of work to be done on identity in the Teens.
Best TV
Battlestar Galactica.
Worst TV
Battlestar Galactica.
Best album
American Idiot.
Most obnoxious musical phenomenon
I couldn’t really do Worst album since Im sure its something I would refuse to listen to. In lieu of that, I have to go with Maroon 5 and all their similar genre of pop. This Loves whiny, choppy, horrid self was inescapable in public spaces for much of the middle part of the decade and personified a large amount of the useless, annoying music that drives people away from pop after they get out of puberty.
And you thought I was going to say Britney.
Neatest phenomenon
Voter turnout. Its amazing how well a bad president motivates people.
Most annoying phenomenon
The destruction of written English. I’m as guilty as the next person of having typed lol a gazillion times in the last ten (okay, 15 for me…) years. But really look at this. Wow, just wow.
That’s it for now.
3
Aug 09
How to Naturally Reset Your Sleep Cycle In One Night | Wise Bread
So this is pretty cool. Harvard Med School did a study that says that fasting during sleep deprivation helps to reset your clock (and let’s face it, Harvard Med School probably knows about sleep deprivation).
My only flaw with the suggestions is that trips are pretty much the only time I can plan to fast. The other times that I end up staying awake for a long time tend to be random, work, parties, etc…
How to Naturally Reset Your Sleep Cycle In One Night | Wise Bread.
28
Jul 09
Is it me, or are monitor and hdtv aesthetics backwards?
I’ve been poking around looking at 24 and 30 inch monitors. A few things jump out quickly in this kind of search, the first is that there aren’t actually very many 2560 res monitors out there (because really, what’s the point of a 1920 res 30″ monitor?) I have no idea what’s up with that, but there’s basically five or six choices and none of them are particularly new.
The second point that just baffles me is the disparity between the new HDTVs and large monitors. You basically have the really good Dell 24 and 30 inch screens, the Apple 24 inch LED and a whole bunch of 24 inch screens from everyone under the sun, and the aforementioned dearth of 30 inch monitors.
Samsung has multiple lineups of gorgeous LED HDTVs. Now, I get it, going higher res is harder and more expensive (or maybe it isn’t? I actually have no idea, it just like HAS to be, right?) but you’re already at 1920×1080. You’re telling me you can’t squeeze that to 1920×1200 in a 24 inch format that looks like this beauty??? Really? Look at that thing and then look at every other monitor out there and explain to me why a 24″ version of that wouldn’t be by far and away the best selling thing around? What am I missing? Why does my monitor still look like it was designed by an engineer at IBM in 1982 and my TV looks like it came off a Porsche drawing board? My aesthetics are completely the opposite. I don’t care what my TV looks like anymore. My TV went from a depth of two FEET to a depth of 2 INCHES in one purchase. And you know what? I can’t tell – cause I’m looking at the TV. My monitors are a completely different story. I have three on my desk and I also use my desk to read/write upon (yes, I mean with paper). The point is that the monitors are sharing their space with my other work aesthetics and it would be great if they didn’t look like they belonged in an M1 Abrams.
/rant
23
Jul 09
Where Jesse tries a new way of explaining DNS
Summary of a conversation at work…
Me: “Okay, you know how in the real world every building has an address?”
PersonNotGettingDNS: “Yea”
Me: “Okay, the internet is like that, but on the internet you only need to know the name of a place to get to the address. So, DNS is like a cabbie. All you have to say is ‘Empire State Building’ and the Empire State Building could have moved to Brooklyn and the cabbie would still get you to the Empire State Building. And it doesn’t matter at all that it has a whole new address. So when we say ‘point the DNS…’ we mean we’re telling the cabbie the new address…Make sense?”
PersonNotGettingDNS: “But you can see the Empire State Building”
23
Jul 09
Jesse and Nick get deep on the future of CSS
Via IM:
Jesse
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-flexbox-20090723/
nick
oh man
i’m not even going to bother
to read that
since its a 2009 draft
Jesse
read it
its interesting
nick
which means its not going to happen til 2030
at earliest
in IE31
18
Jul 09
I reverted the theme
The big blue/white theme with the Twitter bird was spitting out raw PHP in the RSS feed so I reverted it to this. I will try to debug the other theme, but I am trying to get out the door to the Gold Cup.
18
Jul 09
Uploading your data psychology
It’s funny, for the most part I’ve gotten over my obsession about not sharing local computer data with big entities. I let my crash reports send their info, I store my RSS feeds on a server, etc. But Nike+? What?!?? No WAY am I letting anyone know how out of shape I am.