It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
About the belief that we invaded Iraq for the sake of civil rights:
Iraq’s Interim Governing Council is in fact regressing on civil rights. Protests ensued.
Note that this would not be a regression if marriage was a purely religious institution, with civil unions functioning as the political equivalent. However, since the spiritual institution of marriage has legal force, it’s pretty harsh.
Note on the below —
“NetNewsWire”: already produces OPML that tags feeds as type “rss”. Reverse compatibility nearly requires others to follow suit; I’m sure NetNewsWire is not the only application that does this.
However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between multiple feed types. I would like to know if a feed is Atom or RSS before I grab it. Saves time, saves CPU on both ends of the transaction, saves network, and so forth.
So yes: type should accurately identify the type of feed, whether that be RSS, Atom, or something else entirely. NNTP, say.
Inquisitive minds may want to know what NASA’s budget looks like now, since Bush proposes redirecting 11 billion dollars of the budget to a moon mission. I’m way into the moon mission; I just wanna know where the money is coming from. I found 2004 budget information here.
This is not an exhaustive examination of the budget, it’s just a summary based on their request. That said, onward. Hm, this is long — follow the link for the bulk of the discussion and information.
According to the usual anonymous sources…
Bush administration officials say regime change in Iraq had been U.S. policy since 1998, when President Clinton was in office, and insist removing Saddam by force was a last resort.
This will come as a surprise to John Bolton, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz — some of whom, I believe, have a role in the Bush administration. They may even be Bush administration officials. If they are to be trusted, Clinton “failed to provide sound leadership” and was “unwilling either to adopt policies that would remove Saddam or sustain the credibility of its own policy of containment.” In fact, he “placed us on a path that will inevitably free Saddam Hussein from all effective constraints.”
Obscure technical quibble of the day follows. Warning: technogeeking ahead.
Dave Winer’s OPML sharing guidelines are a little wonky. Point 1 says:
If an element is pointing to a feed, set its type to “rss”. Do this even if it’s not an RSS feed.
Nope. Set the type to “rss” if it’s an RSS feed. Set it to “atom” if it’s an Atom feed. If you want a generic type name for a feed, I’d suggest “feed”.
The killer combo is the War College report on the foolhardiness of war on Iraq plus the unsurprising revelation that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from day one.
The first story confirms that Iraq is a distraction from the dangers of Al Qaeda. The second story explains why Bush would allow himself to be distracted. It’s time to give up on the claim that Bush knows things we don’t about Iraq’s danger to the United States.
Further, it’s time to stop claiming that Saddam’s defiance of the UN justified the invasion. Even if you still believe that Saddam was hiding WMD from Blix, it doesn’t matter. What’s more important: deposing Saddam (and remember that the UN had inspectors on the ground looking for WMD), or dealing with Al Qaeda? Even if you think Iraq was important, do you think it was more important than the people who blew up the World Trade Center?
Phil Carter has some nice additional commentary on the War College report.
Today we’re gonna mashup Robin Hood. Yeah, there’s a thematic link to last week’s mashup there; it must be the long winter nights getting to me. The core of it all is the old steal from the rich, give to the poor thing — and from there on in it’s all about the variations. Merry Men, Maid Marian, kings away at the wars: what’s not to like?
A tip of the hat to GURPS Robin Hood seems in order as well.
Oh, and a reminder: there’s a mailing list for the weekly announcement of this writing meme and Game WISH. It’s free, and who doesn’t like free? Now, on to the mashup.
Say what you will about Dean’s mythical temper (Real Video, will likely go away soonish), but I can’t see how he was out of line here. You get up at a Democrat’s stump speech, you call the candidate pompous and mean-mouthed, and then you try to interrupt him when he responds to you — perhaps just maybe you ought to expect to be told to sit down.
For your contemplation, I offer a letter from a soldier in Iraq.
I’m not a big reality show guy, although I watched the first couple seasons of Tough Enough. However, my TiVo enables all kinds of degenerate behavior, including reality TV addiction, so I figured I’d watch a couple of episodes of The Apprentice. The basic setup is simple; Donald Trump brings in 8 men and 8 women to compete for a job with him. They split up into two teams, men versus women, and every week they have a different competition. At the end of each show, Trump fires someone from the losing team.
The first week’s competition was selling lemonade. Both teams were fairly pathetic. The women were exceedingly disorganized, but managed good sales by selling lemonade at five bucks a shot with a helping of sex appeal on the side. Seriously. One of ‘em was hawking her phone number along with the lemonade. The men were fairly well organized but hampered by the inherent difficulty of selling lemonade when you’re wearing a tie.
If you figure it by sales volume, assuming the startup costs were around $50 and the guys were selling lemonade at $1.50 per glass on average, the men and the women both sold around 200 glasses based on the final asset figures quoted at the end of the show. I’d call it a tie, but that’s me. It’s pretty reasonable to set up uneven competitions, which I figure is what was going on, even if Trump didn’t acknowledge that he was doing it.
What really disappointed me is that nobody got clever. Trying to sell a glass of lemonade for a thousand bucks doesn’t count as clever, it counts as stupid. You don’t need a full team of eight people to sell lemonade; either split the teams so you’ve got two teams of four at good locations, or put four people on individual lemonade sales and put four people at figuring out some way to sell en masse. Sell lemonade on the subway. Get creative. You aren’t competing for a sales job, you’re competing for an executive job, so act like executives instead of competing on individual sales ability.
The men looked terrible in the segment where Trump chose his victim, anyhow. If I’m managing a team, and Trump asks me “who’s the weakest guy on your team?” I’m gonna say “Sir, I’m not going to damage the cohesion of this team by criticizing one person in front of everyone else. I’d be happy to express those criticisms with you and the person in question in private, but I’m not going to do it in public.” I’d say something similar as a rank and file team member, for that matter. It’s better business and it’s better reality TV show strategy.
That’s probably going to be the main failing of the show, though; it’d take some pretty amazing management style to get through a competitive process like this while still displaying good team leadership qualities. Troy, who got stuck with the management role this time, was very rough on Sam in front of everyone else. He clearly thought Sam was going to be fired, but Sam’s going to be there with him for at least a little while longer. Ooops.
I suppose it’s a test of who can work well together despite personal feelings. Still, once you’ve said you don’t trust someone on a business level, how do you explain why you’re delegating to them next time around?
And yes; this is my Mr. Sterling for this year.