this is another nugget: "It found that 80 percent of Americans recognize that childhood obesity is a significant and growing national challenge, and 50 percent think childhood obesity is so important that money should be spent now to address it."
that's what get's me, that people are so concerned that they want to throw money at it. instead of maybe getting their kids off the xbox and away from the cheetos, the government must step in and come up with a solution for these deliquent parents.
i've got another solution. let them die. what ever happened to darwinism and evolution? it is not the government's obligation to keep people from killing themselves with ding-dongs and ho-hos. all this does is perpetuate people's laziness -- "let the government sort out my problems", insead of "i'm not going to eat that bag of lays and go for a bike ride."
seriously, the only way these idiots are going to get on board is if the coddling ceases.
heaven knows i'm no fan of apple. i can't stand the fanboys. i can't stand the smugness, the elitism. i can't stand the culture.
i went to the mall recently and literally saw a velvet rope set up in front of it's apple store for all the morons waiting to buy the ipad. it was pathetic. i mean, a red velvet rope. please, like it's some kind of privilege to buy something anyone can buy.
another thing i can't stand is apple's support for it's legacy products.
i remember back in the day, apple released it's last non-power pc laptop, the powerbook 190. it was the last apple product to use motorola's 6800x0 risc processors. what i remember about the powerbook 190 was that about a year after they stopped selling the thing, they made an announcement, stating that it would no longer be including support for pre-power pc macs in future operating system releases, thus instantly rendering all 0x0 macs irrelevant and useless, including this powerbook, barely past warranty. people had just shelled out $2,200 a year ago and now they were being made to shell out another few grand on new hardware they shouldn’t have to buy just to stay current.
i've seen the company do this with their operating system time and time again. they rush out a new version of the operating system every few years and refuse to support the previous version, often making some excuse that the features of new software are incompatible with the older operating system. i am still running os 10.4.11, because i don't want to give the bozos any money. i am told i must upgrade the operating system all the time. but meanwhile, every time i open itunes i am asked if i want to upgrade to the latest version. the reason is obvious -- itunes is a cash cow. they will support itunes because it brings in revenue no matter what version of os x you are running and simultaneously not support anything else, forcing you to spend $$$ on an os upgrade and possibly a hardware upgrade.
apple doesn't bring in anywhere near the revenue from it's software offerings as it does it's hardware. so, the more often a user is required to upgrade software, the more opportunity apple has to peddle it's pricey hardware. the operating system is the ruse and it's a good one. i've said it before and i will say it again. os x is better than anything else, period. but the apple's hardware just plain sucks, period. it looks neat, but is consistently overpriced and underpowered, which is why my next mac will be a pc.
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i have a 2nd generation ipod touch that is a little over a year old. i was thrilled to hear about how i was going to be able to use my ipod as a dedicated skype phone, with the impending release of iphone os 4 and it's addition of multitasking, but guess what? multitasking isn't available for 2nd generation ipods, so my new ipod is useless.
this means that apple wants me to go out and shell out at least another $200 for a new piece of gear i don't need, because the company won't even support hardware that is barely out of warranty, again. 1st generation ipod touch owners can't even upgrade to the new operating system.
apple had the balls to charge me $10 to upgrade to os 3. os 2 could barely be passed off as a beta and they wanted to charge me to put an os on the thing that should have been it's 1.0 release.
funny thing is that apple tends to screw it's early adopters. anybody remember the iphone price reduction fiasco? all the fanboys camping out got royally screwed by apple. my old boss was one of those people. his reward for camping out in front of an apple store was for apple to stick it in his ass and laugh about it all the way to the bank. only after getting called on it in the media did apple do anything about it.
i'm anxious to see how apple screws it's first gen ipad owners.
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apple's revenues are always sky high, come it's quarterly earnings reports. excessively high revenues mean that a company is charging way more for it's products than it costs to make them.
a few months back, someone opened an ipad and summed up the cost of manufacturing for each unit. apparently apple is charging around twice what it costs to make an ipad. being as companies tend to have consistent revenue philosophies across their product line, i would gather that all of their products have the same cost/revenue ratio.
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i mean, duh. apple wants money, just like every other asshole multi-national corporation. there is nothing inherently wrong with that. but, beyond the fact that apple is perpetually trying to squeeze money out of it's user base and overcharge them for the "privilege" of using it's products, the thing that irks me the most and the point i've finally made it to is that while this "genius" laden company has the image as being some kind of enlightened, smart, hip company, apple's planned-obsolescense-revenue-generating-tactics do little more than create landfill, which is the opposite of smart. this is not enlightened. this is not smart. this is destructive and ignorant.
i'm not buying another ipod, apple. you can go fuck yourself.
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last week, i walked past a chronicle newspaper stand and saw a headline stating that an attempt to block california's environmental mandate will be on the ballot come this election season. this came after a headline, that ran a few weeks ago stated that the high speed rail initiative, which was already fought for and approved by voters, is heading back to the ballot as well.
i am in disbelief as to just how clusterfucked this state is when it comes to politics.
this is the same state that replaced it's governor it just elected with one liner movie star, famous for being nothing more than a total idiot on screen. and now they hate him. truth be told, i think he has done a better job than anyone gives him credit for. yeah, his hubris really screwed him up in the beginning, but his setbacks made him a more shrewd politician. the only reason people hate him now is because of the economy, which he ultimately has little over. generally, people don't like or trust politicians -- less so in times of recession.
now, regardless of where you stand on these aforementioned issues, this flip-flop behavior is a collosal waste of everyone's time and money. it impedes any progess and momentum.
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there are two major problems with california.
problem one is that california has a significant population of strict partisans -- government hating righties and government acknowledging lefties. these two factions don't work together at all. it's my way or the highway. this was the reason why there was no budget for quite a while. instead of working together and realizing that the solution may be a combination of both tactics, the righties wouldn't allow higher taxes and the lefties wouldn't allow budget cuts. in the end the righties won, as they always do, but it would have been nice if these people could play together and spared the state the shame of looking like a bozo state.
problem two is the fact that the people have too much power. ordinary people should not be involved in politics. i mean, look at how poorly people drive. you want these same idiots driving your state? the same state that, on it's own has an economy as large as a successful western european country?
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i had a rule when living in new york, never trust a californian.
at one point i needed a roommate to fill in the spare bedroom of my bitchin' south williamsburg loft. i get a call from an old san francisco dj named jon howard. he was pretty well known back in the day. i remember seeing his name on many fliers. so, mister howard comes over to my apartment and says he wants the room. he is really excited about it and assures me the that we have a deal. we set the move in date and he takes off. the day of his move in, i make it a point to be around, to help him out. the time when he was supposed to show up rolls by, i don't see him or hear from him. then an hour passes. two hours. i call the dude up and ask him where the fuck he is. he tells me this crazy story about how, just the day before, he'd been walking around in soho and ran into a friend, who had a room for rent in his apartment on tompkins street. he took the room after we had our agreement and never even bothered to tell me.
this is why you never trust a californian and this is why ordinary californians should be as far away from any power as possible -- they are unreliable.
yes, this state is run by a bunch of morons -- it's people. california would be better off outsourcing it's politics to some other state.
i had a further epiphany, here in san francsico when trying to cross 19th avenue. 19th avenue is a notoriously busy street that requires you to push the button and i had just missed getting to the intersection to push the button. i had to wait an entire extra traffic cycle just to cross the street. it happened again, when trying to cross the great highway to get to the boardwalk -- the button was broken and i couldn't even cross the street without being run over.
cars are automatically, through passive sensors, accounted for and influence the traffic cycles for each intersection where there is a stoplight. why can't this be done for pedestrians as well?
the idea is this; on the stoplight sits a sensor that accounts for people waiting underneath it. when a certain number of people are seen to be waiting, or when a small number of people have waiting for the maximum amount of time, the light changes and gives the pedestrians the hand signal.
simple and effective, but it doesn't stop there.
as we've all seen before, there are always older people, of handicapped folks, who take much longer to cross. the contemporary, timed approach embodies discrimination and a possible violation of the american's with disabilities act. if i can't make it across the street in the given amount of time and i'm stuck in the middle of the intersection, when the light has changed and get hit, you can bet i'm gonna sue whatever city is responsible for this.
so, in addition to the sensors that determine if people are waiting, there is a radar system that keeps track of the numbers and speed of people crossing the street. each pole has sensors pointed towards the other poles, determining the position of people in the street. the timed approach would be scrapped entirely. this would benefit both drivers and pedestrians. if i'm a quick walking pedestrian and cross the street really fast, the cars wouldn't need to wait for all that extra time. if i'm older and it takes me more time to cross, i would have that time, enough time to cross and not have to live my life in constant fear.
this system of radar or some kind of sensor could possibly even be used to replace the underground sensors that only detect automobiles and not bicycles as well. i've sat at so many intersections, waiting for the light to change, because bikes don't set off the sensors.
the 20th century tools we are given to do the important things in our lives simply do not work for us. this needs to change.
the shows incorporated live acting, dancing, projected sets onto a screen that had a patented ratio of dots per inch. this allowed the audience to see through the screen, so that the actors behind it would appear to be interacting with whatever images were on the screen. george eventually sold this patent. if you ever wondered where all the buses with giant ads, from top to bottom came from, it was this patent.
now, we threw all sorts of projections on that screen, there were film projections, video projections and computer animated projections. fun stuff. also of note, is that all the projections were in 3-d, a full 15 years before the 3-d film trend has hit theaters.
we received most of our hardware as donations from whoever george new. one day; a new silicon graphics monster would arrive, another; a new mac, and another; a sparcstation. i remember the first time i laid eyes on a quadra 840av. wow, what a machine.
anyway, at one point, steve jobs made a most interesting donation. he donated prototypes of a computer that apple fully developed, but would never bring to market. the computer was a powerbook 5300, without a screen, just a pen to write stuff on the screen, like a newton. it had a 3.5" floppy drive, ethernet and other stuff, like any powerbook would. it was the world's first tablet computer. the operating system was a hybrid of os 7.5 and the newton os. it functioned like a mac, but had handwriting recognition, so you could run any mac application.
apple knew they were way ahead of their time and could never market it, so they gave them to george in order for him to make them into something. the only thing he did with them was stick them in actor's hands and tell them to run around with them and touch the screen every once in a while. i remember them often being dropped. i doubt any of them even work now.
this is a true story. don't believe me? ask adam savage, another ex-coates employee and great guy.
now, what is the point of this post?
the ipad is a $500 iphone on steroids. it doesn't run osx, not even a hybrid, but an os made for a cell phone and mp3 player and yet wants to parade itself as the real deal. os x is a mature operating system, with about 40 years(if you count all the unix stuff) of development done on it. it works, well. it is stable and multi-threaded. presently, the iphone os can only run one application at a time. push notifications have been hobbled by apple. one can only load apple sanctioned software onto it, for fear of someone else's building any app that competes with their own. it's a toy operating system. i can't believe they made the decision to run the iphone/itouch os on it. this was obviously a decision made in the marketing department in steve's absence. this decision will forever hinder this product.
apple has hastily announced plans to upgrade the os to 4.0. so what? how long will it take for the iphone os to catch up?
then there's connectivity. what, it has a single wired interface? no usb ports? no firewire? why would i spend money on this? oh yeah, and it costs $700 for the 64gb non-3g model? honey, please! for about $300, i can buy a netbook and install os x on it and have a fully functioning operating system that runs photoshop and has a real fucking keyboard and can connect shit to it.
apple has apparently sold 300,000 of them already and declared it a success. this only points out that there are 300,000 fanboys and girls who have at least $500 in their wallets to hand over to their favorite company, which they would do anyway. i'm not saying it won't take off and won't make apple a bazillion dollars, but i won't shell out money for any product i know in my heart is inferior.
anyway, there is one aspect of the roman empire that most people don't know about or gloss over. that is their penchant for pedophilia and pederasty. felini tastefully portrays this in one of his masterpieces - 'satyricon.' two men fight over the affection of a seventh grader and guess what, nice guys do finish last.
in thinking about all the trouble certain catholic priests have gotten themselves into regarding them having sexual relations with little kids, i had an epiphany. these are all priests > priests of the catholic church > priests of the roman catholic church > the roman catholic church being living remnants of the holy roman empire > the holy roman empire being a remnant of the pagan roman empire. i mean, the catholic church inherited roman polytheism in it's worship of saints, why wouldn't it have inherited it's pedophilia?
i thought about this after cruising through my chinese neighborhood and realizing that i never hear about this sort of thing coming from their ethnic group, though it could be under-reported. dunno.
i can’t imagine how that could be confirmed. possibly examining data on rates pedophilia across the globe and if those folks were raised by europeans and if those people were and so on. there would be room for error in that many places probably don’t even acknowledge it. so i would imagine that it’d be pretty much impossible. just a theory at this point.
it turns out that the paper hired a consulting firm for a million dollar study on how to make money on the internets. so that's what the suits were, consultants. they were all super-young, right out of college. i had never seen consultants before and was perplexed. i didn't understand how you could "consult" and have no experience in anything beyond doing your mid-terms and wearing hats with beer can holders. a coworker of mine filled me in on the whole consulting skam - go to college, graduate, get a cushy job at a consulting firm, work about 10 minutes a day and collect a huge salary. and that's exactly what these kids were doing. their "research" consisted of them surfing around, looking at nothing in particular. stuff like lolcats and the hamster dance and then the sports sites. you could hear them talking amongst themselves every once in a while. they talked a lot about sports. a lot of talk about college football. i hate football as it is, but college football makes my blood boil. it's like pro football times two. twice the stupidity. these kids were straight out of that movie 'happiness', like the fat, heavy breather dude. happless, uninteresting kids with zero ambition beyond making money. they were really annoying.
after about 3 months it was time to gather up all the data and come up with some answers. they picked up their shit and left without saying a word. i'm sure the next client was eager to throw money away and needed the services of these asshole, pronto. so, after about another month, the upper managers, who initiated the study received their answer. the answer came in the form of a three ring binder, with about 200 pages of charts and graphs that meant nothing. it was like a homework assignment from a c- student. my boss found the binder sitting in a pile of old software manuals about a year later. we both laughed or asses off.
the consultants were gracious enough to provide two answers actually. the first answer was internet porn. i'm not shitting you. that was an answer. the second answer was internet radio. this is what $1,000,000 gets you from consultants. a no brainer and a dead-end.
ever since then, any time i read an article/blog/etc. where people take seriously the kinds of research that comes from consulting/marketing/whatever firms, i roll my eyes.
recently i came across one such article in ars-technica. i've actually seen a few stories on this now. nielsen, the giant media consulting firm did a study on the differences between facebook and myspace users. apparently they discovered that facebookers make more money than myspacers.
myspace is for kids. facebook is for adults. this is not news. anyone under the age of 55 knows this.
why would i want to hang out with a bunch of retarded kids, going through their post-pubescent trauma? and why would kids want to hang out with a boring old fart like me? i don't hang out in bars and clubs overrun with hormone addled kids, cuz it's annoying. so, the end result is we hang out in different places. and if older people are using facebook, then it's users have more money, cuz older people have more money than younger ones. end of story.
i've written this in about 1/2 an hour. it probably took months for the nielsen report to come to about.
bottom line, if anybody out there wants to throw their money away, throw it at me, i need the money!
in the passing of time these neutered events can seem even comical. mel brooks was able to satirize nazis long after the fact. something that was not possible while it was happening. we can all laugh at the people who refused to accept that the earth wasn't flat or the center of the universe, where we couldn't then, or we'd ostracized or even murdered in the name of man's invention - god. we should be laughing at the people who deny evolution, but oddly we are still in the midst of it, though we don't face harsh consequences for that.
global warming is the new evolution, is the new round earth theory, is the new earth is not the center of god's universe theory. folks who deny it's existence or man's part in it feel that they can pick and choose which aspects of science they will believe in though science rules every aspect of their lives - their automobiles, cell phones, plasma screen tvs, bibles on their iphones, the genetically modified and irradiated foods they eat, the shampoo they wash their hair with - all things that are the products of science and scientists. their denial has major consequences for all future living things on this planet. these people are even comical now, and yet wield so much power. the power of denial.
i am wary of science myself, only in which exponential amount of power it brings us humans - us humans who are selfish and untrustworthy, but i cannot argue with scientists, who have spent their lives researching these sorts of things and have conclusive data to back up their claims.
history will reveal that these people are the new flat-earthers. and future generations can all laugh at them. or be angry at all of us for not having done anything.
there were many parties in that the area. every weekend in the summer brought on either trance parties or mashup parties or whatever the latest abrasive music was current.
one of these parties was manned by a crew of fixed gear hipsters. these short-panted daredevils loved the mash-ups.
now, instead of these kids bringing their bikes into the common area, they for whatever reason decided to lock their bikes up on the street on meserole. there is not a single bike rack on meserole and there are very few signs, so locking up a bike is a bit of a problem. there were however, two newly planted saplings directly in front of the building. i had to take chibbles out for a walk, so i saw several bicycles attached to each tree.
the party ended at around 3am. and i heard a bit of commotion in the back yard, but couldn't care to figure out what the situation was.
the next morning i found out what it was.
one of the idiots, in the course of their drunken evening had lost the key to their lock. now when this happens, logic dictates that you leave the bike there and then call a locksmith after your hangover wears off. but that's not what happened. what happened was the fucktard actually cut the tree down and left it sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building. so there's a stump and half a tree sitting out there for all the locals to use as further evidence of our collective stupidity.
very few things shock me, but the idiocy of this act did. the only consolation i have is that people with this magnitude of selfish behavior, who ride fixed gears, never stop at lights or stop signs and get run over all the time.
apparently it cost the tenant who's party it was $1000 to replace the tree.
speaking of hubris - that reminds me of a story about some fixie girl who slammed into somebody in carroll gardens. the person who was struck started yelling at the girl and what does she do? she starts crying. she’s tough enough to ride around brooklyn with no brakes and helmet, but she can’t take being told what a turd she is.
boo hoo, poser.
i firmly believe that everyone, and i mean EVERYONE has the right to voice their opinion in this country, and by that i mean white power, black power, brown power, pink power, right wing religious nut-jobs, whatever, so long as what they are saying doesn't relate to violence upon other americans, as should any american patriot. but this pathetic attempt to snuff out all discussion reeks of the violation of freedom of speech. you heard it right. not only do these "patriots" hate americans, but they don't believe that we should be able to discuss issues that we feel are important.
the only item i've heard from the opposition that was coherent was the concern that the bill was too expensive. ok, i can get with that. if it's too expensive, then this needs to be looked at. but simultaneously, if this is going to save us money in the long run, which i believe it is supposed to do, then maybe we need to overlook this.
the other squawk i heard was about how this is socialism. government administered medicine is indeed part of the socialist model, as is medicare. yes, MEDICARE IS SOCIALIST. i don't hear people shouting the national anthem and flying their flags, demanding that we remove socialized medicine for old people. say goodbye to your voter base, morons.
the irony is that while the opposition runs around with flags and sings the national anthem, making it know what great patriots are, they could give a shit about a large segment of the american population. something like 40 million people. what kind of patriot is that? they only give a shit about the haves and that is why we are one nation, under god, hopelessly divided...
