goblinbox

In which I tell a world full of “SEO Experts” that they’re all fucktards and that the loss of net neutrality, when it happens, will be their stupid fault.

Last week, my bro mentioned a jobs website for freelancers, said I might want to check it out.

So I did. And I signed up, and I bid on a job moving a WordPress site and the guy and I exchanged five or six messages. His last message said he’d be getting me my down payment and the server logins so I could begin the work…

That was Sunday. Haven’t heard from him since. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I get about seven messages a day from the freelancer site, telling me of work I might be interested in.

~+~+~
Okay, so, you know how sometimes you stumble across a website that offers you something for free, and maybe you’re under-caffeinated or you’ve just been lobotomized or you’ve never been on the Internet before or you’re just plain stupid, and you click on the free thing – like a button that says you can watch a movie that you know, if you think about it, isn’t even out on DVD yet – and on the next page it says you have to “click on one of these offers” before you can see your TOTALLY FREE MOVIE and so you choose something like, “Have you ever shopped at Home Depot?” and a new window opens, and you’re supposed to sign up for a Home Depot account, and after you do the movie page comes back up and says “Offer Completed! Click here for your FREE MOVIE!” and when you do, about five windows full of ads launch and you end up watching a video about the power company and there’s no way to see the movie online because it was never there in the first place because it’s still in the fucking theatres and you knew that and now you’ve signed up for something you don’t even want and somebody’s going to get paid for tricking you into doing that?

Well, I always wondered where the fuck those websites came from. There are millions of them, maybe billions, and they come from somewhere. Someone had to buy the domain and set up the hosting and install the CMS and design the theme and write the copy and build and place the ads to drive the traffic. These things, ugly and stupid and irritating as they are, don’t grow like weeds: they’re made. And they must be worth it or people wouldn’t do it.

~+~+~
In the past few days I’ve found out where they come from. Some asshole in the US or the UK, some self-styled “SEO expert,” pays people in India and Thailand to build them. Somebody like this douche, who says his areas of expertise are in “advertising, branding, Facebook, Internet marketing, PHP, SEO, Twitter, and website design,” and whose latest job posting says this:

I have set up a wordpress theme very similar to this one watchmovieonlinefree.com. I just need someone to copy paste the last 35 posts text and pictures from watchmovieonlinefree or other sources, and add 5 new ones from my choice.

This job can be done in one day, if you focus on it. I would prefer to change the content of each post, or at least add on it from other sources.

Please bid and be ready to start working on the project, give your time frame, that you will need to respect. Payment will be released once the job is done.

Yeah, he says right there that he intends to copy a site verbatim, and then “change” or “add to it a little.” Isn’t that, like, plagiarism? (Not that it matters, since the original site was built by a fucktard just like the guy who intends to steal it.) And he won’t pay until the job’s complete, even though the site’s standard is a percentage up front, a percentage at halfway, and the remainder on completion? Yeah, real honorable, buddy.

The target site itself is a lie; the movies aren’t available. They don’t exist. People fill out the offers and get bored after being bombarded with ads and crap, and they wander off to do something else because they have no recourse. They can’t complain about the fact that they were mislead, because there’s no one to complain to, and THIS IS THE SHIT THAT’S GOING TO LOSE US OUR NET NEUTRALITY. This crap – this confusing, unregulated crap – is going to cause people to think, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if there were some way to stop those guys. We need regulation.”

I literally can’t stand the advertising/marketing/SEO people. They’re making money where there is none, simply because they’re immoral fucktards and they’re capable of badgering people just to make a little ching. They’re paying overseas workers crap wages to do technical work that is immoral if not illegal, and they do it simply to make money.

Now, I like money, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a limit to what I’ll do to get it.

These people are designing misleading ads to drive traffic to sites that outright lie, and they do it in such a massive way that it’s somehow worth it to them to get a cent or two for each completion. They outsource the grunt work to India and keep the click-thru checks from big advertisers for themselves… NO ONE is getting anything decent out of it. It’s real money for imaginary services rendered. The advertisers are serving ads to badly targeted and/or confused demographics. The survey info is untargeted. The signups are full of errors and lies (I always make up information when presented with a demand for personal information). It’s all crap. It’s all greed.

I opened a ticket with the freelance site to find out what their standards are; I know I’ve seen several job listings disappear so there’s some kind of surveillance. I mean, you can’t just ask people to build you illegal automatic voting programs in public.

~+~+~
Is it some kind of mental imbalance, then? What makes the vast majority of people do real work for real pay, but misses a few immoral freakazoids who can somehow manage to sleep at night after doing what is, obviously, total crap all day long?

It’s like self-mutilation: there’s a line, but nobody can say exactly where it is. If an intelligent, competent person gets their ears pierced, nobody blinks, even though piercing one’s body hurts and carries a risk of infection or worse. Tattoos, ritual scarification, forked tongues, implants: we accept these things.

But if someone decided to, say, castrate himself, we’d all think that was going too far… but is it? Really? It’s no more extreme than the body mods you see on your typical tattoo parlor employee, in terms of pain and risk.

I think there’s a type of salespeople who are crazy like that. They act pretty much like normal people, but they’re psychologically stunted in some way that enables them to do wrong things for money and think it’s not only okay, but that it’s good. Exciting. Challenging. They’re incapable of knowing that some things just Shouldn’t Be Done.

You’re going to say, “But it doesn’t really hurt anybody.”

And I’m going to say, No, of course it’s not life-threatening to corral someone into filling out a form or taking a survey so that you can earn your couple of cents per completion… but it’s still wrong. That you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

It’s lying, plain and simple, and lying is wrong. And making money out of nothing is also wrong. There’s an entire industry now based entirely on lies and greed. Advertiser’s greed, who think they can get real data for a couple of cents per database record. “SEO Experts’” greed, who think it’s okay to build all this crap to entrap people. End users’ greed, who want to see a pirated movie online for free.

And no, “SEO Expert” person, you don’t get to snicker and think to yourself that only the stupid end up in your trap. They’re not stupid; YOU’RE just a DICK.

And because you’re a dick, you’re going to lose the Internet for everyone. You’re going to pester and confuse the unwashed masses, and they’re not going to want a free and open Internet, and then you’re going to have to go back to scamming people in person. You fucker.

~+~+~
I applied for a couple of virtual assistant positions that looked like they might actually be real. Maybe somebody will hire me and give me something to do for the next few weeks.

~+~+~
A friend of mine told me a few days ago that he’s starting a new job soon, and will be team-building immediately after that, and asked me if I would be interested in working on a QA team? I said something along the lines of omgwtfbbq!!1 WOULD I EVAR and he said “I know you were looking forward to school” and I was all planz change omg srsly d00d.

And now I’m trying not to think about it. It was an idea, not an offer, and who knows if he’ll even get to make his own hiring decisions, or if I’m qualified (or if I’m clever enough to make myself sound like I am), but the point, I guess, is that as totally fun as school sounds I’ve just discovered I’d be way more stoked to get an interesting job.

If no interesting job presents itself before September 20th, however, I will be going back to school with a bunch of 20-somethings to study freakin’ LAN architecture. Which should make for hilarious blog posts, at the very least!

In which I argue with our collective conscience.

The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market.

If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.

Everyone’s pissed off at BP.

They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” ¹

The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net². They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.

I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.

What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:

BP is our fault.

A 42-gallon barrel of oil³ only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.

Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.

Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.⁴ I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life. Read the rest of this entry »

In which I heartily approve.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.

If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.

Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.

Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.

And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)

And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.

In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”

Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?

Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)

If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)

Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.

And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?

I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.

Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

In which I spend a lot of time online, reading stuff. And then I write about it!

It’s important that we all become aware of, and defend against, the “natural family revival.”

There are some batshit crazy Xians out there, and they’re all banding together – some even with (gasp!) Muslims – to bring back the “natural family” (patriarch, baby machine wife, and offspring only: no non-traditional family structures allowed) because it’s the ‘natural basis of society’ and its loss is directly responsible for all kinds of terrible moral degradation.

They dislike the rights individuals within families have been slowly accumulating in the past few generations, and are, essentially, against women’s or children’s rights where they conflict with the family’s (read patriarch’s, I assume) goals.

Scripture

According to this article at The Nation, this coalition wants to increase birthrates. (Well, white birthrates.) How they rationalize this in terms of the earth’s available resources, I don’t know, but they’re really taking the old biblical injunction to multiply very seriously.

They’re even making movies about it. Behold the pseudo-science of Demographic Winter:

The bottom line, essentially, is that heathen brown people are breeding too fast and we gotta keep up in order to preserve our way of life, and our women had best be making babies, and don’t even start on the whole gay thing, please, and the best way to do that is to keep girls out of higher learning and build a culture that celebrates their womanly duties: pregnancy, lactation, and, one assumes, cooking.

Due Diligence

Because I believe that most people are essentially good and that no one is really that crazy, I went and found a rebuttal to the Joyce article.

The author claims that global birthrates are falling alarmingly and that we’re going to run out of people to drive the trains by 2050.

Really? Is that true? Are birth rates really that low? Is contraception and abortion really that common?

I googled ‘birthrates worldwide’ and as far as I can tell, yeah, birth rates are dropping from where they have been, but world population is still increasing and there are no serious trends indicating that it will stop.

In fact, the Wikipedia article linked above states that the world’s population increased by 220,980 people every day in 2009, and that only one of the UN’s multiple estimates indicate a growth rate of zero:

“In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.”

I’m religious. I believe in God. I even pray. I understand from experience how a person can believe in and even fight for something they don’t understand: I’ve heard my own Guru speak against the genetic engineering of food crops, and I’m inclined (although I haven’t sided yet) to be against it too even though I don’t know why. (When people are starving it’s hard to be against a strain of rice that produces in difficult conditions; it just is.) But I cannot understand how an otherwise rational person can possibly move forward with a “go forth and multiply” world view just because it’s in the Bible: the world simply cannot sustain 1960s-level birthrates infinitely. It just can’t.

Which indicates a whole ‘nother motivation for the “natural family revival,” and that freaks me right the hell out.

Population

The research seems to show that poor and uneducated people have more children. (They also lose more children so birth rates don’t necessarily equal population.) When people get access to education, they quit having as many children. And very educated, urban people tend to drop the birthrate to less-than-replacement levels.

Maybe that’s the plan, huh? When you get a bunch of us all together thinking about stuff, we stop breeding like animals and start acting more… human?

Jesus was way cool. Religion is good. The Old Testament is a lovely historical document. I think it’ll be awesome when the world’s all brown. Because seriously: white people just don’t look that cool in comparison.

In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.

I don’t know if it’s The Curse^TM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.

Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”

Heh. Pretty clever, huh?

Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”

Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:

“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!

“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.

“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.

“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?

“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.

“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.

“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.

“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.

“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”

Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.

So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.

Thoughts?

In which I like him. I really, really like him.

I’m not a political animal.

I think politics are in equal parts numbingly boring and distressingly childish. While legal language is probably a neat game, I particularly loathe political talking heads and find them to be a most repugnant breed of humanoid: self-important and brash, and doing nothing but deconstructing the work of others and contributing nothing but dissent. Ick.

I think it is impossible to govern a capitalist democracy because it’s impossible to please everybody all the time. It’s impossible to be fair to everyone. Impossible to guarantee rights, when one of those rights is to have more wealth than everybody else does, and another is to be a total fucking ignorant moron that the state cannot legally or morally allow to starve to death.

But I really dig Obama. It’s nice to have a proper orator in the White House. It’s nice not to cringe when imagining his meetings with leaders of other countries. He probably actually reads his briefings and manages not to look like an American punk.

I watched much of his address [transcript] while eating my omelet and toast this morning. While I don’t care enough to speak to specifics of policy, I do have to say that I like the man. (He’ll be reviled and feared by the time he leaves office, but that’s the office’s fault, not the man’s.)

I like that he is still responding to public opinion (they all quit doing that after they’ve been in office for awhile). I like that he states opinions in the first person, like, “(A)nd I promise you, nobody is more frustrated than me with AIG.” I like that he explains his administration’s rationale with care, as here:

“And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of to banks — one of my most frequent questions in the letters that I get from constituents is, “Where’s my bailout?” — and I understand the sentiment. It makes sense intuitively, and morally it makes sense, but the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in $8 or $10 of loans to families and businesses. So that’s a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth. That’s why we have to fix the banks.”

I like that he rather scolded us a little for our greed and short-sightedness. I like that he seems to think our educational system sucks, and that he’s pro-science. I even like the Biblical references. Not because I’m Christian, because I’m not, but because it’s a time-honored tradition to reference one’s own culture’s historical documents. (I call the Bible an American historical document because we wouldn’t all be here if our ancestors hadn’t been such total whacko splinter Christians in the first place.) The Bible’s a powerful piece of literature when properly used, and I liked his use of the ‘house upon the rock’ parable. It worked.

I live with a woman who remembers The Great Depression. She lives frugality. She saves rubber bands, gives plastic bags back to the newspaper boy so he can recycle them, eats all of the groceries she buys (no slightly-soft tomatoes in her garbage), and buys nothing on credit ever. When Obama said that his administration intended to create legislation that would protect future generations from ever experiencing this sort of recession, she snorted because she knows shit happens; she’s seen it.

I waste a tremendous amount of resources. My whole generation does. We buy food, don’t eat it, and throw it out. We replace tools and electronics rather than bother to repair them, because we consider our ‘free time’ to be more valuable than money because we have more of one than the other. I can’t even guess how much paper I’ve wasted in my lifetime of using computers and printers; just today I printed two addresses on two sheets of paper, cut out the addresses, and threw 95% of the paper into the garbage.

I toss clothes rather than re-purpose them; I have an attic full of computers that still work but just not well enough; I’ve filled landfills with household waste and empty plastic bottles and bleached toiletries for forty years. I’ve lived in the bubble all my life. I don’t really know how not to.

But I know that I like having someone who seems intelligent (and less than wholly corrupt) in the office of president for once in my life. You couldn’t pay me twelve times his salary to do his job; and I cannot fathom why anyone would ever want to be the president of the United States and therefore distrust any creature who self-selects for the position, but the dude really seems to be well suited to it.

I wish him luck with it. I really do.

In which I can’t figure out why TV still sucks so much when there are technologies available that could easily make it suck less.

Last night, while sitting at the brew pub eating a Gardenburger and idly gazing at the cable commercial showing on the glass teat hanging above the bar, I, who am really not much of a television watcher anyway, wondered why the television industry hasn’t yet invented TV that doesn’t suck.

Consider the following:

- If you shop at Amazon, the site will track what you’ve bought, what you’ve looked at, and what people like you have bought, and make intelligent suggestions.

- If you listen to Pandora, the site will build you an entire radio station based on of the single track or artist you enter, and tailor it to your preferences over time as you click “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to the songs it offers on your station. The more you listen to Pandora, the better it gets at only playing stuff you like.

- Apple’s Genius algorithm (or music genome database or whatever it is) totally works and is awesome, and it collects anonymous information from its users.

- Desktop computers offer profiles, allowing multiple users to store multiple personal settings on the same machine.

- A 1.5 terabyte hard drive only costs $120.

Since all of these things are true, I want to know why my television (or closely attached DVR-like device) doesn’t already do all of the following:

- Keep separate profiles for all users and groups of users in a house, and offer different programming based on who’s watching and when. (“Bob” might want to see football on Sunday afternoon and Debbie Does Dallas when he’s watching at two in the morning by himself.)

- Show me what I most want to watch based on the date and time I turn it on. (If I always watch Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on Wednesday nights, why doesn’t it just show me that the minute I turn it on? Why must I touch the remote at all?)

- Have me fill out a brief demographic survey (age, sex, orientation, income, favorite channels, least favorite channels, favorite programs, hobbies) when I first buy and install my television or closely attached DVR-like device that enables it to target me for advertisements. Ideally there would be no advertisements, but since we’re adults here and realize that we cannot escape commercials we should be able to influence what we have to see.

Targeted advertising would theoretically enable small companies to pay smaller amounts to get ads to a smaller demographic. For example, my favorite yarn store could never afford television ads now, but they could probably cough up a few grand to show only people like me that their new yarn line is in for the summer. I would love to see an ad from them, and I’d probably drop by their site and buy more superfine alpaca if I saw them on telly every so often.

A lot of people are paranoid freaks and would absolutely wet themselves if they thought they were being targeted, but I know from using Google that I prefer targeted ads to random ones and from using iTunes’ Genius function that allowing a company to gather my data can actually benefit me. I hate seeing commercials for SUVs because I don’t have kids and I’ll never, ever fucking buy an SUV, ever. I hate commercials for housecleaning chemicals because I’m not a housewife. I don’t want to see ads for investment firms because I’m poor and I don’t have investments. But if I could turn on my TV and see only ads for things I’m actually interested in – yarn, iPods, Caribbean vacation packages, Neutrogena facial products, jewelry, low-priced eco cars, web hosting, photography, cooking, and related items – I’d be happier about the fact that I’m paying for television in the first place.

They say we self-select for advertisements by the channels we choose, but take Teh BF as an example. He watches both the Today show (a habit he learned from his family) and the golf channel (because he plays golf), but he’s neither a stay-at-home-mom nor a 60-year-old white male in the $100 per annum bracket. The commercials he sees – tampons and air fresheners or expensive cars and investment services – are still badly targeted.

My television should, whenever I turn it on, ask me who I am and then immediately show me what I am most likely to want to be watching just then. If I don’t like what it’s chosen, it should then show me the second most likely show, and so on through a list that contains only things I like and none of the crap I don’t: in other words, I should never be confronted with the speed channel or a hunting show or that Criss Angel crap unless I specifically go searching for it.

My television should occasionally offer me new stuff to like. If I’ve watched ER for twelve years, it should offer me something else to watch during that slot based on my known and recorded preferences.

My television should have a profile for me alone, and the ability to make another profile for me and my boyfriend together, since we will be likely to watch together different shows than we would separately.

My television should offer me ALL programing on demand, not just the occasional pay-per-view movie. The only live TV should be sporting events, politics, weather, and news; literally everything else should be on-demand because bandwidth and storage are so cheap.

My television should push me all the sci-fi, cooking, travel, history, and comedy I can stand, and protect me from car shows, bad buddy movies, shows about fishing, ghost and psychic phenomena bullshit, and HSN. It should tell me when my favorite old movies are on, it should introduce me to new series, and it should only play ads that I might care about. Other than to turn my TV on and off and to answer the occasional query, I should never have to touch my remote again unless I’m in a weird mood and want to watch something unusual.

Modern TV is completely archaic compared to the intelligence of all our other media, and it’s way past time for somebody to do something about it. Too bad I’m in the wrong industry, or I’d totally invent SmartTV and change the world!

Or the worlds of a bunch of couch potatoes, that is.

In which I told you so.

It’s April 1st, 2009, and Conficker has NOT destroyed the Internet.

Some cranked-up jarheads got their panties in a wad for a few minutes [WaPo has a sense of humor! how awesome is that!], but that was pretty much all she wrote.

Now be good boys and girls and keep letting Windows Update do its job and we’ll all (particularly me) be fine.

In which I go off on the states at the lower corners.

Dear California and Florida,

What is wrong with you people? You just passed legislation that may have nullified what were legal marriages only yesterday. What the fuck for? Are you really that threatened by your gay neighbors being able to, I don’t know, do something utterly fringe and bizarre like put each other on their health insurance policies?

What you’ve done is stupid. Let me explain it like this: What if gays became the majority and decided to vote against your marriages? What if you woke up one morning to discover that the law had nullified your partnership? Well, you’d say ‘we still have our love and each other’ and you’d soldier on, right? But what if you couldn’t go to the hospital and make decisions about your dying wife’s treatment because, hey, you’re not really her husband any longer. What then?

On the one hand, marriage is a spiritual state and law can’t affect it. Any two creatures living in a state of marriage are married whether the law recognizes them or not. But. Marriage is also a legal state, and taking it away from any sector of the population because you think you know what God wants is just plain obscene to me.

Oh, oh, oh, but wait! If we’re defining marriage by its output, if we’re really saying that “only a relationship that can produce children should be called marriage,” then when are we going to start taking marriage rights away from barren couples? Because clearly if you can’t conceive it means your marriage is not sanctified in the eyes of God, right? I mean, isn’t that what you’re saying here? That you know what God wants? And God wants you to be married even if you can’t have babies but not them even if they adopt?

Considering how many unwanted children are out there, I’d think the nation would embrace gay marriage if only to save on welfare funding.

You have to understand that I’m actually anti-marriage in general, but I think everyone should be able to marry if they wish. I tried it myself once and thought it was stupid; I think the whole idea is antiquated and dumb. I don’t think anybody should ever get married. But I know that people will get married, and I also know that married people enjoy all kinds of rights that singles don’t. Even their taxes are lower.

There is no rational reason to legally define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman” except to be a creep. If you’re Christian, you’re going against your own scripture to deliver hurt where none was required. Furthermore, you’re doing it at random: don’t you realize your scripture not only condemns homosexuality, but also says “the faithful are required to kill people who refuse to listen to priests (Deuteronomy), kill fortune-tellers and homosexuals (Leviticus), kill adulterers (Leviticus) wipe out an entire city if a single person in it worships a ‘false god’ (Deuteronomy), kill people who work on the Sabbath (Exodus), kill your family and friends if their religious views differ from your own (Deuteronomy) and so the list goes, in a long crimson stretch of barbarism including death for blasphemers and women who aren’t virgins on their wedding nights” (passage stolen gratefully from Trent). How can you stand your crazy selves? Don’t you know that if you oppose homosexuality by your own lights you should be killed if you’ve ever worked a sabbath?!

I’m so pissed I could just spit. I’m going to shut up now and send you here because I’m too pissed to be rational and he already said it better.

Sincerely,
Mush

In which I unstress about the relationship between my dog and my grandmother.

Bindu is fat and listless and can’t finish an entire dog walk around the perimeter of two city blocks. Her belly’s bloated. Her nose is dry and she’s tired all the time. She’s clearly not feeling well.

The week Grandma was out of town, Bindu did much better. I fed her water and Iams and nothing else, and after three days of such cruel denial she perked right up and her overall health and energy levels were much closer to normal.

This morning I told Gramma – again – that she’s got to stop over-feeding my dog. At first she said she wasn’t feeding them that much, that they aren’t getting any people food and only a whole can of wet food each day along with all the dry kibbles and Moist ‘n’ Meaty they can possibly stuff down their gullets… I explained to her that a 30-lb. animal needs about one cup of food per day, and could she please just not feed Bindu anything but dry kibbles and water? She said she can’t feed one dog and not the other because it’s not fair. I asked her to just close the hall door and leave Bindu in the back then, because otherwise she’s going to kill my dog. At that point, she more or less said that the dog ‘lives with a grandmother and is going to be spoiled, period’, and changed the subject.

I might have to find a doggy daycare just to keep my girl from having a food-induced heart attack; I don’t know how else to get the situation handled. I love that dog, but short of quitting my job and being home all the time I can’t keep her from being over-fed. I’ve asked nicely, I’ve asked intensely, and yes she’s tried to feed them less but she’s been in the habit of spoiling her dog rotten with food for a decade, and Bindu finishes everything Chipper doesn’t eat because she’s more alpha than he is and that’s just how dogs function and it has nothing to do with hunger at all: the fact that the dog is eating does not mean she’s hungry. The only way to solve this problem is to leave less food lying around, and it’s okay, Chipper won’t starve! Chipper will eat if he gets hungry enough; he’s omega, not dead.

Yesterday I ate Mexican food for lunch at the joint across the street from the office (it was raining out and the place was convenient). I had a book with me and absently finished off everything on my plate while reading. Maybe it wasn’t a lot of food by typical standards, but I’ve been paying attention to portion sizes these past couple of months and the result of such gross overeating was that I ended up with an absolutely brutal case of food coma: My stomach hurt, my heart felt labored, I was sluggish and exhausted and just so uncomfortable that I hovered on the verge of having a panic attack. I was a total retard for two hours, and it sucked.

Digestion is the single most energy-intensive function the body performs. Most heart attacks happen after a meal. Overeating can kill you.

And that’s how my dog feels all day, every day. Food coma. And she’s got a heart murmur, and she’s packing on extra weight, and I can’t get my grandmother to just lock my fucking dog out of the kitchen while she kills her own pet with kindness.

It’s not like Bindu doesn’t love her new life at Gramma’s house; she adores the rigid schedule and the big yard and the nice lady who indulges her and the little black dog who lives there too. I don’t want to keep her away from the house or anything, and I’m abjectly grateful that I have somewhere comfortable to leave her when I’m out working and playing…

The bottom line is that the woman comes from an era when they didn’t have dog food. Dogs ate table scraps and they died a lot; there weren’t any scientifically formulated bags of dog food lying around when she was a kid. Spoiling a dog is a kindness by her lights, not a cruelty. And I get that, but I want my blue dog to have a nice, long old age too.

I’m caught between Scylla and Charybdis ^[def] and it suX0rZ ^[def], but here’s some cute pet porn of my blue girl.

In which I’m trying to figure my own shit out by observing my reactions to others.

Let me preface this whole thing by saying I know I’m hideously flawed myself and that I’m hardly one to talk about anything, ever. I’m sorry in advance if you see yourself here and get mad at me. I’m talking to myself as much as anyone, k?

That said, I need a t-shirt that reads, “Shut up and listen.”

It drives me nuts when people – my roommates are the most ready example [but not the only ones by far and they mustn't, when they read this, assume I'm speaking only of them, because I'm not, m'kay?] – pick at each other. It doesn’t upset me in a ‘mommy and daddy are fighting’ sort of way, it offends me because they’re communicating badly and they’re doing it on purpose. And it reminds me of my own failed relationships… He’s not hearing her subtext, and she’s not hearing his, and they’re both saying the same thing – “I need you” – but are too busy being hurt and going on about themselves to listen.

Listen.

You know what the root of virtually all communication is? It’s simply, “I need you.” That’s what we’re all saying when we’re talking to each other. I need attention, love, validation. I need you to see me.

Love me.

The actual content of the majority of our talking is irrelevant. On our death beds we won’t remember the content, but the feelings. Looking into someone’s eyes while you spoke and seeing love and acceptance is what you’ll remember, not the gossip you were actually speaking at the time.

Lately I’ve been noticing a trend when my friends tell me their stories. “So-and-so was a jerk to me,” they say. “And I’m mad, so I’m not telling him. I’m telling you.”

Oh, great.

In other words, they’re upset, so they ‘punish’ their friends by not telling them what they’ve done. They nurse these hurts and avoid the one whose ignorance (or selfishness, or awkwardness, or laziness, or stupidity) caused the hurt in the first place, and triangulate another person to bolster themselves.

Love me.

And just how, I ask you, is anyone supposed to improve themselves if, when they fuck up, their victims slink off into brooding silence?

I realize that we’re supposed to say nothing at all if we can’t say something nice, but there’s a limit to this axiom, people. Defend yourselves. Stand up for yourselves! Love yourselves! And love me enough to let me improve by telling me your truth, rather than brooding silently and vibing me bad, won’t you?

If I ever hurt you, let me have it. I want to know. (I rarely try to hurt anyone on purpose, so it follows that any pain I may have given was an accident.) Give me the chance to fix it, please.

But. If your hurt is so incredibly stupid that you’re ashamed to bring it up to me? Then adjust yourself. You’re an adult. Do it. No, it’s not comfortable but it’s not exactly difficult, either. Be the person you know you’re supposed to be. It’s that simple.

Listen. Are you being loving? As loving as you can? Are you giving enough? Are you doing all you’re capable of? Or are you just being a horrible, selfish, petty little baby?

These are important questions, people. And if we don’t ask them, who the fuck will?

I read a blog post last night by a young woman who had survived surgery. She said that it had pissed her off to listen to people bitch about such petty, stupid shit all the time. The message, in a nutshell, was that life’s too short to waste.

So, shut up.

Listen.