Sicker too...

I forgot to mention that Gen A to E will be sicker too. Thanks to Michael Moore and his new movie Sicko for reminding us of the insanity and embarrassment of USA being the only major industrialized nation to not have free universal health care.

Generation A to E - Poorer, weaker, dumber...

Begin rant

If you read this blog you should already know that thanks to Bush Americans are on average poorer than ever before, not to mention enjoying relatively lower standards of living compared to Europe. Americans can mock Europe's socialized medicine all they want but ask them how they would feel about 5 to 6 weeks of vacation a year. I've yet to find a politician who could spin that as bad for you... of course could just tell you that you're busy working hard pursuing the American dream and you don't need all that vacation - working hard is patriotic, yada, yada, yada... Unforunately people are dumb enough to fall for that and not even think about why when standards are supposedly improving they need to work more and more and more...

And if you have half a brain you'd realize that pissing away over $1 trillion dollars (folks that's $3,333 per man, woman, child and illegal immigrant) on fighting Iraq has lead us to the point where we can only blow hot air at other nations who dare defy Uncle Sam. Team USA invade Iran? Not happening. Attack North Korea? No way. All of a sudden Bush thinks maybe he'll give diplomacy a chance. Scratch from the table that his own country would be rioting (not just protesting this time) in the streets if there was another war started in The (Old) White (boys) man (club) House. The US simply doesn't have the resources at hand to do engage any more enemy combatants, I mean it can't even protect its own borders, let alone remote ones.

But the latest revelation is that oh boy, this country has gone dumb and dumber. The simple fact that the above are true is a testament to that fact. A smart populace doesn't put up with declining living standards, a smart populace doesn't support policies that actually make the country more vulnerable. Now we find that America has become a bunch of telly addicts and the media refuses to cover anything but pulp fiction. Anything remotely like an "issue" is off limits so we can become comfortably numb while we become comfortably dumb.

This shouldn't be any surprise to anyone who has been near a school recently and knows how instead of education the prime occupation of kids these days is remembering their A to Es - that's endless streams of A to E answers to multi-choice questions. Whatever happened to essay questions, or completely open ended questions where you might have to express and think for yourself? If all you've ever experienced is A to E questions where the right answer is on the paper somewhere (just roll the dice...) what that heck are you supposed to do in real life where the real answer is something you have to provide? Instead we now have some kind of institutionalized knowledge welfare where everyone expects at every step of the way to be handed a guaranteed right answer to life, the universe and everything on a plate. All they have to do is roll the dice and pick that answer - and if they don't, well they just got unlucky. Whatever happened to just "using your loaf?" (brain).

Instead kids are busy learning to talk with text and email abbreviations (BRB, BF, ROTFL etc.) they are also busy assimilating their entire knowledge base as some bizarre DNA like encoding of DABCEABCDEBABCDCAABEEACEDADBE... etc. and that is supposed to be their and this country's key to prosperity. My only question is just how bad does it have to get before this country just starts falling apart, I'll give it a generation at most so it won't be the global warming that gets us, it'll be global (or in this case local) dumbing that does it...

Assisting that increasing dumbness (and numbness) is America's collective obsession with "faith in god" which statistics claim is something like 90%. But when you really look at it you find that these days more people either don't believe, or don't have any strong convictions than those who are regular church going theists who have any clue of what they really believe (and even if you go to church on a weekly basis it has no real bearing on whether you actually believe or know what you believe - I've heard at some churches there's free food and wine available followed by a good old sing song, doesn't sound so bad...). I guess it shouldn't really come as any surprise that if America was going to do religion it would do it at least as badly as it does everything else these days (diplomacy, economics, health care, welfare, education). And yet the media continues to pander to the deep pocketed god-corps as freely as it does other corporations, so there really is no breaking out of their stranglehold any more than we can escape from the tyranny of the A to E generation. Sigh. Try and get some real publicity for non religious "free thought" and you'll be ostracized and ridiculed just like homosexuals and racial minorities were just a few decades ago.

Oy.

End of rant

Zen and the Art of Hot Dogs

A nice little "joke" about Zen and hot dogs that was mentioned by Christopher Hitchens:

Did you hear the one about the Zen Master who said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything?"
The hot dog vendor hands him one with everything. The Zen master hands him a $20 bill and the vendor pockets it.
"What about my change?" asked the Zen master.
The hot dog vendor says, "Change comes only from within."

This morning I laughed out loud on the drive to work when I heard Bush say this:

I admire Paul Wolfowitz. I admire his heart and I particularly admired his focus on helping the poor."

My immediate thought was, yes he really did well for his poor girlfriend, gave her one big fat pay raise to get her out of poverty. Yeah, that Wolfie, one heck of a guy...

Of course by the end of the day he probably got his own big fat hand out from the World Bank in return from his resignation. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a nice tax free World Bank retirement policy included to boot.

Democracy - sold out!

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a special preview performance of Josh Kornbluth's new monologue called "Citizen Josh". It was at once fun, entertaining and thought provoking with a distinctly more political bent than normal - that's great for me since Josh is "one of my guys" but it may make it harder to tour with the performance. Better hope he doesn't experience a Mike Daisey style audience coup!

Anyway,early in the show Josh postulated that perhaps America had done so much "exporting of Democracy" in the past few year that it had simple run out of it at home. Sold out, gone, dried up - no more democracy for you. I know what he means, it certainly feels like that at times. What's a country to do? Well the rest of the monologue is all about that and Citizen Josh got his groove back and rekindled his democratic flame. Nicely done Josh.

Books are good mmmkay

While browsing books in the book lined basement of City Lights bookstore (San Francisco) it occurred to me that they use up an awful lot of trees to make books. No great revelation there - there's a reason they (geeks) call printed media "thin tree format". However trees are made of carbon which means growing trees, turning them into paper and then storing them, often for hundreds of years must have taken an awful lot of carbon out of play. Yes, books are our very own knowledge based carbon sequestration technique. We should be burning or recylcing books but just filling our basements, garages, and homes with them. What a thought, buying books is patriotic!

But then again I have to wonder, does it take more carbon emissions to produce each book than that which is stored in the book on the shelf? If so maybe it is time for low carbon emissions eco-friendly books.

Peace in Iraq for a few billion more...

While Bush is asking for over $100 billion to further his war efforts (I'm waiting for them to rename the defence department "The Ministry of Peace") I have a suggestion that will only cost a few billion, probably less than their original $6 billion invasion plan.

I say they just go into each town of Iraq and seize, destroy, crush, shred and otherwise remove from the streets every single damned car in the country. The result will be no more freakin' car bombs and more people getting on the streets and getting to know each other. Anyone driving a car is either a terrorist or a soldier - that should make things a bit easier then.

I mean, just how many cars are there in Iraq and how much could they be worth after almost years of war? I'm sure there aren't too many shiny new SUVs except for the ones the occupying powers brought with them - everything else, even if its a few million cars could be taken off the road for a few thousand dollars each - more money than most of the owners will have seen in a long time. That would be a total of billions - even if its tens of billions its still far less than Bush is spending - remember the bare minimum the Iraq war has cost is $500 billion, more realistic estimates are closer to $1 trillion - over $3,000 each per man woman and child in the US (or more than ten times as much per Irai!). Just after the initial invasion I read that US forces were at one point going around with trucks of money at one point compensating families of civilian casualties with a few thousand each, maybe $10,000 if they were lucky, so by comparison buying cars is a good deal.

Okay I admit as Palestine has shown there's plenty of opportunity for suicide bombers to wreck havoc without a car - but you know there's no more chick'n shit leaving a car full of explosives at a market and walking away stuff. You've really got to believe that those 40 virgins are waiting for you in paradise to blow yourself up for it. Or you could just take Uncle Sam's money and buy yourself a nice triple venti latte and enjoy the rest of the day watching TV and drinking beer.

Of course the car companies would never allow systematic genocide of automobiles - even though it would basically be a big subsidy for them since eventually all those people, when peace had broken out, would want to by shiny new gas guzzlers. Hey for a few billion more you could get them all a nice new fuel efficient Prius or heck a bunch of solar panels and some electric cars. What kind of nice utopian paradise would that be - maybe they could send a few virgins over there for paradise on earth, actually if some theories are to be believed all they need are some white raisins. Who'd have thought you could get peace, love and paradise on earth for a few billion and a truck load of raisins...

Stumbled upon

It seems that someone at Stumble Upon has stumbled on this site. While the hundreds of hits it is causing are more than welcome (hey hope you enjoy the visit) I'm perplexed that the StumbleUpon website wont tell me where the link that refers to LDTT is. Maybe its a search feature you only get if you sign up, I can't tell. Even more frustrating my web stats software doesn't tell me the URL either.

Perhaps one of those visitors from StumbleUpon would be kind enough to post a comment with a link to the page where they came from - many thanks.

Update: thanks to those who commented on this post - I'm now less in the dark about StumbleUpon. It seems there must be a lot of people out there using it - now I'm feeling bad that I don't post to this blog more often - truth be told most of my posts go elsewhere these days since I have pretty much lightened up in the last year or so. But once in a while the dark side still gets to me!

PS: Something seems to have gone wrong with blogger - it was showing this post twice so I deleted the one with no comments but now it lists no comments when I publish even though it tells me there are still 4 comments attached to it. Strange - must be a Blogger bug... Sigh.

Common Errors in English Usage

While using the abbreviation "e.g." it occured to me I had no idea of the Latin it was an abbreviation for. Of course I know what the meaning is ("for example") but when Googled for the Latin I came across a definition from this website that is also a book "Common Errors in English Usage. I guess a lot of people confuse "e.g." with "i.e." - I don't, my mother set me straight on that a long time ago. But at least I now know that they stand for "exempli gratia" and "id est". Check out the reams of other common errors, e.g. Dangling and misplaced modifiers or By far and away.

Reinvading Iraq costs more than first time

This article from AlterNet states the budgeted price for the current "surge" in Iraq as $5.6 billion, and that another billion has already been added to the price. That's almost $7 billion right off the bat. Does anyone else find that price shocking? Didn't Bush promise that the original invasion would probably only cost about $6 billion... I mean it was pretty much going to be self financing he told us. Now they add a measly 20,000 troops to hold just Baghdad and it costs a whopping $6.6 billion (if you believe they could stick to budget just once!).

And finally...

As Mickey Rooney said this weekend on 60 minutes, the recruitment policies of the US Army are digging deeper and deeper into the barrel, finding more and more desperate souls to go fight their war. The average American has no interest in playing a part in this NeoCon mis-adventure. In future if America wants to go to war it should be paid for by average Americans and if they wont sign up voluntarily then it must be draft.

Personally I think that is a brilliant idea - there should be a constitutional amendment to require a draft before going into any war, even its a specious "on terrorism" war. I think that will give the US public laser focus on the issues next time a misleader is trying to drag us kicking and screaming into another Iraq.

VerizonMath - it's payback time!

VerizonMath is the story of one man's battle to resolve a Verizon screw up in quoting data usage fees as "point zero zero two cents per kilo byte" instead of "point zero zero two dollars per kilo byte". This caused him to run up a $71 data roaming charge instead of what he expected $0.71 or 71 cents.

George Vaccaro posts both emails and an audio recording of his dealings with Verizon and it is pretty stunning how much work (and patience) it took for him to eventually get this resolved. After initially being offered a 50% refund, he was finally given a full 100% refund but without any admission of error but he boldly went on to extract an admission of error and that they will revise customer service material. But wait there is more... days later they are still misquoting the rate in cents per kb instead of dollars per kb. Inspite of George's resolution and the publicity it gained, weeks later another person who had the identical problem has yet to get a refund.

I love the way this thread is going - I wish more people had the time and energy to follow through like George. It looks to me that well dugg stories and YouTube postings have true potential in getting exposure - and the irony of hearing the "this call may be recorded for training purposes" notification is so thick its probably lost on Verizon. Hearing two reps agree there is a difference between a dollar and a cent, and a half a dollar and half a cent but there is no difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents - well that's just priceless.

After reading and hearing all the recordings I start wondering "what if everyone starts doing the same thing as George?". How long will it be before it is just one deafening cacophony of complaints out there on the web with no specific action being taken? And how long before companies start trying to counter such trends with threats of legal action when customers post records of their reps and post emails from them? I know that ultimately that kind of thing will fail because it will backfire (blowback?) too badly - but it could get ugly for a while.

A few other comments on this:

1. I know being a CS rep must suck - I know someone who deals face to face with customers day in and day out and there are some real stinkers out there, over them phone it is even easier to get nasty. That is why I try really hard to be very courteous and patient with customer service people even when I'm near my wits end because they probably are as well. It usually pays off as my many (eventual) success stories with T-Mobile customer service have shown. It is frustrating that you sometimes do have to waste hours of your time and energy to get resolution. If we all calculated the value of our own "free time" on the phone in dollars per hour most people would give up long before resolution, it is simply not economic unless you're trying to get big bucks refunded.

2. I'm almost certain I got a similar misquote of data roaming rate from T-Mobile when I recently enquired about using it when traveling to the United Kingdom. When I went there two years ago it was completely free - part of my US unlimited plan, this time I think I got the point zero zero two cents per kb. I need to go back and check - if they haven't already wised up to Verizon's errors.

3. All this could be avoided if companies would only quote prices in dollars. But, as someone pointed out in one of the blog comments: many people just aren't comfortable with fractions of a dollar so that isn't going to happen.

4. But hello... being unable to distinguish a fraction of a dollar from a fraction of a cent - is it just too much to expect from people educated in "the worlds only superpower"? Vaccaro wasn't talking to uneducated or foreign nationals who might have a language problem, they could clearly hold and follow an English conversation, use a calculator, distinguish a dollar form a cent. So just what is going on with the education system and powers of reasoning in this country?

The inability of the two (and presumably several previous) people to make the cognitive leap and see and agree there was a problem is a striking demonstration of how ill equipped the average person now seems to be to make rational choices and process really, really simple mathematical concepts. Just how can we expect anyone to do anything as complicated as balance and weigh stuff like economic or scientific data when reasoning about which president to elect?

I start to wonder if it was an inability to doubt the corporate info or the computer that caused the reps inability recognize the error, or if it was a true failure of basic math because they don't understand how to use decimals and units in calculations? Obviously someone at Verizon eventually figured it out - was it because they were a) smarter or b) incentivised to (i.e. they realized it would cost too much not to figure it out).

5. Don't get me started on mass confusion that exists over if or when 1k is 1024 or 1000 and if a kb = kilo bit or kilo byte.

6. My inner conspiracy theorist would say that Verizon manufactured this whole thing and deliberately and rigorously trained their staff to confound and dumbfound people like George while secretly they busting a gut trying not to laugh at how hard the customer tries to explain the problem to them.

Hitchens vs. Ford

Sometimes you really need a contrary opinion which requires a contrarian which leads us straight to the door of Christopher Hitchens. So who better to dish the dirt on Gerald Ford in his Slate article The Ugly Truth about Gerald Ford". As he sums up:

To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It ended a dream - the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.

El Predicto strikes again

I think it, someone else makes it.

Priceless?

• Election stolen in 2000 - painful
• Election stolen again in 2004 - shameful
• Five years of "War on Terror" - pointless
• Taliban endorsement of "wise judgement" by American voters in '06 - priceless?

Fair plays dirty?

When FAIR runs a story claiming large corporate advertisers are boycotting liberal Air America it seems to me they are being unfair if they don't mention, or bother to research if those advertisers also boycott right wing radio stations and shows. Of course I don't know for sure if they do, but I have a gut feeling that some corporations just want to steer clear of any vaguely controversial media show - it doesn't matter if its Air America, Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern. Perusing the list of 90 something corporations that wont advertise with Air America I see REI Sporting Goods - I somehow doubt if they particularly singled out a "left wing" radio station, I think the same probably applies to Epson, Sony and Microsoft.

When cartoon worlds collide

One of my favorite comic strips (okay, so its my only comic strip) is Dilbert. As Dilbert readers will know during the week there is usually a continous theme to the strips. This last week (and apparently for the next week too) he's been doing the Dilbert equivalent of "Too Much Coffee Man" who is another comic hero that I briefly got into (I have a TMCM mug and used to have a T-shirt as well). I'm not a big comic or cartoon fan, but I knew a friend of the TMCM creator and as people who know me know, I have a strange ability to suck down too much coffee at all hours of the day. Mmmmm, coffee.

Coincidentally travelling

Some people see coincidences as more miraculous than they are. I say take 6 billion people, shake-em all up and let them rip for 70 years or so and they well see coincidences a plenty, more than there are constellations in the sky.

So today (well yesterday and today) I flew from San Francisco to Chicago and then to London and met up with some old friends in London tonight for dinner.

Coincidence number 1 - my seat neighbor from Chicago to London was a young woman on route to Beirut (that's Lebanon folks). She'd never been there but was meeting someone who was flying in from Saudi Arabi there. So guess what kind of restaurant my friends in London had arranged for us to go to? That's right, Lebanese - I've never been to a Lebanese restaurant but it was pretty tasty. As Ben would say "I'm only here for the burned meat" and really can't go wrong with burned lamb. Mmmm.

Coincidence number 2 - my Beirut bound seat neighbor happened to have started her journey in Madison Wisconsin where she lives, and Madison is also where my dos amigos Erin and Dave hail from. And of course they also just happen to have moved to Chicago which is where that leg of my flight started.

Coincidence number 3 - sitting at SFO the gate next to mine had a last boarding call for passenger Colin Smith which is the name of someone I once worked with at a former company. Mr Smith never showed up but at dinner with my friends who were also from that company his name came up randomly. I haven't seen Colin in years, I think he's at Google now - sure would be nice to hear from him.

Coincidence number 4 - traveling from SFO to Chicago my seat neighbor was a former Vietnam vet who spent his time taking photos hanging from helicopters, in observation planes etc. He is now a consultant specializing in teleprescence and autonomous systems, something me and my business partner are both interested in. After further discussion we turned out to have a lot of interests in common - when someone can list a bunch of pretty obscure books and you've read them all you know there has to be some commonality to explore.

Coincidence number 5 - okay this is kind of weak but as you may of noticed I managed to find out a bunch of stuff about my seat neighbors. I usually try to bury my head in a book or put on the 'phones and tune out the world. Probably the last time I ever talked much to a seat neighbor was a guy who noticed I was reading a book on religion and proceeded to try and proselytize about his particular religion for the next two hours, hence the headphones. However this time I feel I lucked out sitting next to not one but two interesting people with something to say, dare I say - "It sure made the time fly" ???

Urban cleansing for the soul

Yesterday and last night we had our first rain in a long time. I went and checked - not a drop has fallen since May 21st, that's pretty much four and a half months without rain. Even then it was less than a half an inch for all of may - you have to go back to April to find any real rain.

I must say it was quite refreshing, and I was out in San Francisco coming home as it really got started, the streets were pretty deserted and a lot of folks were scurrying around because they were completely unprepared. It doesn't rain here just long enough that you really get used to it and when it comes it is a surprise, even if they tell you before hand. This morning the sidewalks are cleaner, my car is cleaner (but you probably wouldn't notice) and the air is cleaner - big booming cumulus clouds indicate the skies are sucking moisture up into the sky everywhere.

I've heard there was snow abot 8,000 ft in the Sierras - time to start thinking about the snowboarding season....

Lucky to be alive

Some of you may have read about the Boeing 737 that went down Sunday in Brazil with 155 lives lost. What was amazing was that the reason the plane went down was rapidly discovered - it had been in a mid-air collision with a diminutive executive jet, that sustained damage but managed to land with all seven on board safe and sound. Even more amazing was that a New York Times journalist was on board and his story is now online Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living. I have to admit a mid-air is not something I ever worry about when flying, at least not in commercial planes.

What would Jesus blog?

I'm sure if there was a guy alive today like the biblically portrayed character of Jesus then he would have a blog because you know he would have to speak the language of the people to get his message across (and maybe do a bit of spamming bulk mail too). On his blog he would probably relate every day things to some eternal after life to help everyday Homo erectus get a grasp on the concept. Apropos this and my experience of flying this weekend I feel sure that Jesus on his travels would surely one day blog something like this:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a traveler to enter the airline security zone.