Not So Fast

Congress is finally legislating, after about a decade of sitting around rubber-stamping stuff.

Apple is trying to force a 30% price increase* on all our internet subscription services (Netflix, Hulu, Rhapsody, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, magazines, newspapers, etc.).

Don’t even try to tell me that the companies won’t pass the expense along to the customer. They’ll either pull out of the app store or raise prices. Either way we lose.

*I know the increase we see won’t be exactly 30% but math is hard and I don’t care enough to figure it out.

As one opposition leader put it before Mubarak’s fall, the Americans “are just waiting to see which side wins and then they will claim to have backed them all along.”

The US president was hoist on a petard 40 years in the making and couldn’t win no matter what he said.

Having supported the stable, but dictatorial, leadership in Egypt for 40 years, we couldn’t just turn on him the instant things started looking bad for him. What if Mubarak hadn’t stepped down? “Oh you’re still in office? You know we’re behind you. 100%. Really. Now, go do this for us.” Also, it would make all the other thugs we prop up in the name of realpolitik nervous.  The results could be catastrophic.

On the other hand, it would be churlish for us to not support a democratic uprising since we always go around saying the world should be more democratic.

What’s right for the Egyptian people versus what’s best for America. It would be a tough line to walk for any president.

5 things Donald Duck invented first [Cracked: NSFW]

Oh, the budget cuts! Think of the children and their lack of medical care and education! Think of PBS and their lack of funding! Think of the poor government workers forced to make due with only 7% more than they had last year!

President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposes to spend $3.48 trillion on everything except interest on the national debt. That’s a 7 percent increase over what the government spent in 2010. And keep in mind that in 2010, there was a lot of stimulus money flying out the door.

The government’s definition of a budget cut and mine are very different. I think a budget cut would mean they actually spend less money than last year, or, if I had my way, 10 years ago. But, the government sees things differently.

Everyone is outraged at everything all the time.

Yes, just push the problem off into the future. That’s worked really well so far.

The DHS is busy keeping us safe from the horrors of international sports.

The lesson to learn from this is to register your domain name in a country with copyright laws you agree with. Also, since they just seize the domain name a careful search will reveal the IP address for all your soccer watching needs.

Heresy I know, but if—if—Brown is really making cuts, I don’t have a problem with continuing the tax hikes if that is what it takes to balance the budget. If he’s just mucking about with the “limiting growth counts as a cut, right?” thing, that’s a different story. But if everyone hates it, I figure it’s a good compromise.

The US savings rate has plummeted again, but basically we need to spend our money anyway before it depreciates further.

Google gives us Street View of Museums.

Their government decided there was no problem with the company that owns both CTV and the last mile wiring to houses implementing a drastic reduction of the bandwidth cap and large overage charges. Netflix is unamused. Steam, XBOX Live users should be upset too, if they have that sort of thing up there.

Remember how Comcast just bought NBC?

Egypt’s whole thing lately has had one positive effect; it makes clear the danger of giving the United States government the ability to shut off the internet in times of “national emergencies”.  Suddenly, people that were all “whatever” realize that it could be a really bad thing.

Yes, the lack of autocomplete will keep me from finding torrents. Because it’s just too much work to type the whole thing out and hit enter so I rely on autocomplete to finish it for me.

/It does have a rather forboding aspect.

Himalayan glaciers are doing fine despite dire predictions. This will no doubt be further proof of Global Warming Global Climate Change.

The ammo manufacturers just caught up with the demand from his election. If Obama says anything about any sort of gun control, even if it’s something reasonable like “criminally insane people shouldn’t be allowed to have guns” which it may or may not be, he’s going to set it all off again.

Chris Christie lays it out plainly again. This time to cops.

I was fine with the cop dude until that “my paycheck only went up $4, how am I supposed to live on that”.  The way the rest of us that haven’t had raises in years have managed to live on our frozen wages? The same way you lived on it last year? Moran.

This whole kerfuffle started with a call to Greek style protests which were riots that killed people and destroyed property over government benefits.

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans’ jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.

For the most part, Americans don’t depend on their government to give them jobs and cushy unemployment and retirement packages, they just want the government to create an atmosphere that encourages job growth and curtail the excesses of the capitalist system, creating a fair playing field. And when the people felt the government didn’t do that, there were protests. You may remember the whole Tea Party thing.

Also, the United States government has never paid for American students tuition, they expect to have to pay it on their own. Unlike British students who were horrified their subsidized ride was going to triple to £9000 ($14,000) and went forth to destroy property, throw flares and billiard balls, and attacking the royals. Why would American students risk life and limb in riots over stuff that the government has never been responsible for?

When a congresswoman can be shot in a parking lot and a professor who falls short of Glenn Beck’s standards of political correctness can be, however anonymously, targeted for execution, we have moved well beyond democracy — to a tyranny of the heavily armed.

Nice juxtaposition. The certifiably insane wacko that actually shot a congresswoman and internet tough guys who shoot off their mouths, they’re all the same.

Did she not want the people to rise up and let their voices be heard, by violent means if necessary, just a couple paragraphs ago? Mixed messages there. Unless she’s saying that it matters whether people die from trampling and Molotov cocktails or gunshot wounds.

*I do not condone threatening people on the internet (or in person). People who do that are idiots and should be shot in the face.

**no really, don’t threaten people over the internet. It makes you look stupid.

The bad economy has started the Social Security deficit 5 years early. Don’t worry, it’s still on track to run out just about when I would have started taking money out. I’m so happy to have paid in so much and to continue to do so and then to get next to nothing out of it.

“It’s an IOU that is backed by Treasury bonds and the faith and credit of the United States government,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “It is the same faith and credit that enables us to borrow from rich people and from China and from other countries. As you well know, in the history of this country, the United States has never defaulted on one penny owed to a creditor.”

And why does China let us borrow money? They have no choice. Why do I pay Social Security taxes? I have no choice.

The Feds are phasing out the Terror Alert status. Which makes sense since they don’t dare lower it and only raise it after a terrorist attack. One has to wonder why it takes them 3 months to phase out. Or, nine and a half years if you want to look at it that way.

I kinda miss my Sesame Street alerts I had in my sidebar for a long time.

What’s your state the worst at?

The story of Oregon Trail.

1. Pollyana-ish belief in unending wealth creation
2. ??????
3. Profit

It’s pretty dang hypocritical for the federal government to tell the states they won’t get bailouts, but I’m glad they won’t.

Dependence Day.

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.

My new eyeballs are one step closer to reality.

A map that shows national GDPs and the US States they equal. I’m describing it poorly. It’s really cool, go look at it. Idaho=Sudan makes me sad. At least we’re not Mississippi = Bangladesh though.

This guy’s been retired longer than I’ve been alive!

If you’ll remember this article says that China has to keep the US economy afloat in order to keep its people under control. This guy says it might already be losing that battle. This is bad news…for Obama. And the rest of us, of course.

From the hacker’s Chaos Communication Congress, a look at how susceptible our infrastructure is to complete and utter destruction and thus the collapse of civilization as we know it.

A very readable, non-political analysis of the U.S. – China economic interaction.  And how it could go horribly wrong.

More than you ever wanted to know about the international honey laundering trade.

I came across this randomly and the more I look at it, the funnier it becomes.

The kid up front kills me.

Twitter powered coffee maker. My exact response to this was “Dude”.  If I didn’t have a major home improvement task going on right now I would try this this weekend.

Know why I don’t shop in bookstores anymore? Full price books. There’s no reason to have to pay cover price in our day and age.  Also, the selection is always so limited. Having it shipped to the door is just icing on the cake. Also, I have an ereader, so I don’t have to collect books any more.

I don’t know how I missed it this long, but here’s Dave Barry’s Year In Review.

Obama says no to upping the debt ceiling. In 2006, so it probably doesn’t count anymore.

He’s right, it is a failure of leadership. Stand up and say “no”. No you can’t have any more money, we don’t have any. We have less than any. We have been in negative any for quite some time now.

The progressives and the Left aren’t going to appreciate 3:05 onward as the woman explains that they’re just trying to implement communism from within as opposed to armed revolution.

Do these people not know about the horror unleashed on every. single. nation that has tried communism? How once their economies have collapsed and people have starved, every one turns to the evil capitalists to bail them out? Especially after big daddy USSR had to stop propping them up, having destroyed their own economy.

How do they explain why North Korea has to portion out the (incredibly poor) food rations according to the amount of work done despite being the most fervent of communist countries. And don’t be all blaming it on Kim Jong-il and Stalinism and the cult of personality. They were doing it from the very beginning, promising to get rid of it and they still haven’t 50 years later.

I prefer the Elephant Micah version to Big Star, though they both have annoying guitar solos (this video does not plumb the depths of the annoying solo), but good luck finding it *ahem*.

So I saw Tron: Legacy 3D last night. It was awesome and you should go see it. There was a nice War Games shout out and a lot of “homages” to Star Wars.

Great effects, 3D used wisely, most of the time. Only in a couple scenes was it distracting. Does 3D add anything to two heads having a conversation? No. Clu entered the uncanny valley a couple times (his top lip didn’t work right), but for the most part Clu and Tron looked natural.

My beef: the original Tron had a simple, awesome concept. The good and bad programs in my computer are battling it out on lightcycles and in disc games. Easy to understand and relate to. Tron: Legacy started with the battle between open and closed source operating systems which I was fine with, but then it went on to be confusing. Apparently, programs will spontaneously create a new life form that could solve all our problems, but programs don’t like them and we have to be careful that programs don’t escape the devices they’re in and take over the world? Something like that, I think. Between that and Kevin Flynn’s nihilistic “dude, whatever” spirituality I was annoyed by the plot, such as it was. Luckily, the plot wasn’t very important.

To sum up: awesome effects, worth the time and money to see on the big screen.

Like the average American, a lot of state governments don’t have any money and have run out of credit. The video is depressing and the article is depressing.

I have no doubt this will roll down to local governments soon and we’ll all see what our taxes can actually fund rather than what we want them to fund. And then we’ll be mad at them for not doing what we want them to do.

I have a hard time seeing why we need government regulation of the internet. It’s been doing okay for the last 20 years. This looks more like the cable and telecommunication companies getting their lobbying money’s worth.

awesome misheard lyrics there.

Republican congressmen are cutting back on the earmarks. Apparently they aren’t completely tone deaf. The Senate republicans have work to do, but then again they tend to be institutionalized and once inertia gets them in its grip they don’t listen well.

Baen has updated its site from 1997 to 2004.  You have to respect their commitment to classic looks. And hey, free short story!

The Body Browser (requires Chrome Beta or FF 4.0.1).