Wednesday happy music blogging

The great Sandy Denny, Britain's answer to Joni Mitchell, sadly died too young of a brain tumor in 1978...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Tuesday cat video blogging

Just a nice polite house cat, very loving, ready for adoption...

Can't.... stop... laughing...

-- Badtux the Tears-in-eyes Penguin

This is crazy

Eight year old boy being charged with murder.

Crap, when I was eight years old, I had trouble with the notion that animals couldn't really talk to each other. I was, like, "what's the point of them living if they can't talk to each other?" Anybody who thinks an eight year old can really understand what murder is or that shooting someone with a gun will get a different result than when Elmer Fudd shot Daffy Duck is daffier than Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd combined. They're loonier than loony tunes.

But that's the nation we live in now, where a kid who gets ahold of a gun and shoots a couple of people gets charged with murder -- instead of that kid's parents, who left said gun where kid could get ahold of it. Sigh.

-- Badtux the Insanity-knowin' Penguin

Bye bye, DRM

Apple announces that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs in the iTunes library will be available without DRM. What they gave up in exchange to the record companies was multiple-tier pricing -- now iTunes songs will be 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29. Reasonable exchange, as far as I'm concerned... especially with my new iPhone, which works as an iPod when you have headphones plugged in. Beats buying CD's, if I can just get a friggin' FM transmitter thingy so I can listen to my tunez in my Jeep...

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

Iphoney

This is being posted from my new iPhone. Whee!

Badtux the Geeky Penguin

This is ridiculous...

I got a jury duty notice in the mail. This is the third jury duty notice in three years. This is crazy, we have 1.5 million people in this county, and they keep bangin' on *me* for jury duty?!

-- Badtux the Well-juried Penguin

A scenario

Someone, let's call him Sam Goldberg, fires a bullet that kills my daughter. So here is the question: Who is responsible for the death of my daughter?

1. Me, for not protecting her from Sam.
2. Me, for not doing anything to reduce crime in my apartment complex.
3. Me, for living in the same apartment complex as criminals, one of whom shot at Sam last week and now Sam is trying to get his revenge on the criminals by shooting through the windows of what he thinks is the criminals' apartment.
4. Sam Goldberg.

Hint: It isn't me that the cops will haul off for the death of my daughter. It is Sam Goldberg.

Unless, of course, Sam Goldberg is an IDF soldier, in which case he's just a patriotic citizen and I'm to blame for my daughter's death. Because Israel works via Israeli rules, not the rules of civilization. In civilization rules it is the person who fires the bullet (and anyone who orders the bullet fired) who is responsible for the death caused by that bullet. In Israeli rules, it's the dead child's parents' fault.

Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Monday happy music blogging

Cat Power, "Maybe Not", from You Are Free. This may be her best album, where she dumped the last vestiges of her punk-ish early music and went straight minimalist melancholy without the ornations that hide the bones of The Greatest. She never has drums where a few chords will do. She never has chords where a single note would do. The only constant is her smoky voice, singing enigmatic lyrics that often obscure more than inform.

The result is hauntingly beautiful, like the Southern landscape from which Chan Marshall came, with the exception of "Names" which is simply chilling. Is any of it true? Does it really matter? When she sings "we can all be free/maybe not with words/maybe not with a look/but with your mind", does she believe it, or is she being ironic? It's never entirely clear what Chan's up to, but it is an experience that stands repeated listening well.

This particular performance is during Chan's drinking days. I don't know the whole story of why Dave isn't introducing her, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that Chan was so staggering drunk that she could barely make it to the piano. She apparently had a psychotic break shortly thereafter, got the right drugs, dried out and got off the booze, and made a couple of albums which aren't so great -- but she's happy now, which she wasn't for a long time. I'm glad for her, but sometimes I selfishly wish we could have gotten another last glimpse of brilliance before she became boring...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Monday morning fiction blogging

I had a problem with my plot. Before I left for my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the person who I *thought* was the bad guy, turned out to *not* be the bad guy. So I had to write in a new bad guy if I wanted my plot to work. Sorry if that seems a bit Manichean, that's just how the mystery / thriller genre works, there's basically one plot that you slot different scenarios and characters into, the secret is in how creative you are at tweaks to that plot and tangling sub-plots around that one plot and how interesting of characters you can drop into the plot. If the character who was slotted into one place in the plot suddenly decides he doesn't like it there, you just have to figure out something to do with him and put some other character into that slot. In my case, the guy I thought was the bad guy turns out to be a victim of a frame-up. Except it's not quite that simple. Heh.

So anyhow, I was puzzling it over for the past two weeks, and think I finally have the solution. I also came up with some additional plot points / scenes to write into the text. So I spent a couple of hours writing tonight to put some of that in, and have another weeks' worth of patch-ups to do before I'm ready to push on into the meat of things with the actual murder. The murder is happening later than I'd like it to happen (generally you want it within the first few chapters, that's how the genre works), but there's a helluva lot of pipe to lay here, and mysteries within mysteries to lay pipe around. All the friggin' foreshadowing I'm doing will simply have to substitute. I mean, I'm up to 24,000 words (typical novel length is around 100K words nowdays), and I'm still laying pipe. And once I have a dead body to play with, there's still a *lot* of plot to go. Oh well, big books are preferred nowdays because if someone is paying $8 for a paperback novel, they darn well want their money's worth. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Writing Penguin

Israeli invasion of Gaza

It was inevitable. The leadership of Israel apparently has gone stark naked mad insane crazy stupid, and forgot this one little fact of human nature:

If someone is dropping bombs on you, you blame the person dropping the bombs on you, not someone else altogether.

The leaders of Israel forgot this fact when they started bombing Lebanon, hoping that Lebanese would blame Hezbollah. That was stupid. Hezbollah wasn't dropping bombs on them. Israel was. Blaming someone who isn't dropping bombs on you is like attacking Mexico in retaliation for Japan's attack upon Pearl Harbor. Only an idiot would do that, and while Lebanese may be Arab, that doesn't make them idiots, no matter how racist and bigoted the average Israeli is about Arabs (let's just say that the average Israeli views Arabs in much the same way that Lou Dobbs and his "Minutemen" view Mexicans or George W. Bush and his Reich Wingers view Iraqis, i.e., as untermenschen, unseemly mud people, not real people like you and me). If someone dropped a bomb on my family, I wouldn't blame George W. Bush for running a racist and violent foreign policy that has killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans. I would blame whoever dropped the goddamned bomb on me, just like I blame Osama bin Laden for attacking the WTC towers, not the violent and racist U.S. foreign policy that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during the 1990's. You're not going to get me pissed at the U.S. government by dropping bombs on me. Fuck, I'm already pissed at the U.S. government. You're going to get me pissed at *you*, the person dropping motherfucking bombs on my goddamned head. Shit, this isn't brain surgery, folks. This is basic fundamental human fucking nature, I don't give a shit whether you're Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, American, or Swiss, it's all the same biological hardwiring at work here.

So anyhow, that was Lebanon, two years ago. Perfect proof that if you want to stop people from shooting rockets at you, dropping bombs on people not shooting rockets at you accomplishes nothing except getting a lot of folks pissed at you. So what does Israel do when some elements of Hamas (maybe) start shooting rockets at them. Well... the SAME GODDAMNED THING THAT DIDN'T WORK THE FIRST TIME. I.e., start dropping bombs on people not shooting rockets on them, in hopes that the Palestinians will blame, well, the people (Hamas) not dropping bombs on them for the bombs falling on their heads. GAH! THE STUPIDITY! IT BURNS, IT BURNS!

So anyhow, it didn't work. Duh. If you drop a bomb on someone's head, they blame you, not someone else. So the Palestinians blame Israel for dropping bombs on their heads, not someone else who, like, didn't drop bombs on their heads (duh). Perfectly 100% predictable. Thus the invasion. Which won't work either, unless it's a permanent occupation followed up with extensive police / intelligence work to find and prosecute-and-or-kill the people who are firing off rockets at Israel. Which, BTW, is *not* Hamas proper, the majority of which is a social services organization, but, rather, a small military wing of Hamas which has maybe 500 members total. Find them, arrest or kill them, and problem is solved.

Right now, it seems to me that the only "solution" to Gaza that doesn't result in permanent Israeli occupation is to cede the whole fuggin' mess back to the Egyptians. Screw it, let the Egyptians handle the situation, have the Egyptian consul walk around Gaza with Egyptian passports and say "Hi, you're an Egyptian!" and send in the Egyptian army to keep order. End of problem. The only question is, who's going to pay for it? Egypt certainly won't. They have enough problems of their own. But that's a story for another post...

-- Badtux the Stupidity-recognizin' Penguin

Clean coal

John Prine talks about it... in 1970. Nobody listened then. Still ain't listenin'.

-- Badtux the Listening Penguin

Too many books

I need to do something about this situation. The last of the last batch of white bookcases that I brought home from Ikea last year are now full. I might be able to clear out enough room for another one, but really. Let's face it, half these books, I'm never going to read again, so I need to go ahead and get rid of them. Maybe donate them to the Friends of the Library for their book sales...

What starts up this riff is the fact that I just came back from Barnes & Noble with $75 worth of new books, including C.J. Cherryh's new novel Regenesis (which was originally called "Cyteen II" until it was decided that would make things too confusing). I finished re-reading Cyteen (a Hugo Award winner) a couple of months ago, I re-read it every couple of years because it asks some interesting questions about what it means to be human, but one of the things that has always irritated me about Cyteen is that it just... stops. Stops in mid-air, without wrapping up some pretty damned critical plot points (like, who killed Ari 1? And why did Denys suddenly go fuggin' crazy and try to kill Ari 2?). It was pretty clear that Carolyn was setting up for a sequel. It just took twenty years before she bothered getting around to it. ARGH!

So I guess I'll be busy for the next day or two reading Regenisis. With my luck, it probably sucks and doesn't answer any of the questions that went unanswered in Cyteen. Sigh.

-- Badtux the Literate Penguin

More iPhoney

I've been browsing the iPhone apps store and downloading a boatload of free apps to try out once my iPhone gets here. Man, there's a lot of applications for the iPhone. Only question is how I'm going to get my data from my Palm to over there... I've had PalmOS-based PDA's since 1999, i.e., I have close to ten years of data on my Palm, some of which is important/crucial.

I never thought I was going to get an iPhone. But now that Splint has cut me off of tethering, there's no reason to keep tolerating the maddening limitations of the Palm Treo's browser and mail application. Too bad, Splint was doing fine by me until they decided to fsck me by taking away functionality I had for the previous two years without abusing or overusing (I only used it when travelling and only for email and basic web browsing). So it goes. Screw'em. I'm just another one of the 10,000,000 customers who've deserted them since they turned into assholes, as far as they're concerned, so... screw'em.

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

Friday Happy Music Blogging

-- Badtux the Music Penguin
who, yes, listens to punk / hardcore / ska as well as more mainstream stuff.

Tired kitteh

And big too. This is *not* a small laser printer that The Mighty Fang is sleeping on, this is a big high-speed laser printer that I use to do things like print out SCSI specs, but TMF's butt is falling off the front of it.

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

These kids today...

They're always having this premarital sex and stuff. Dadburn kids, they just don't have any morals, unlike back in my mother's day! Back in my mother's day, kids didn't have premarital sex. There was a lot of premature babies born 6 or 7 or 8 months after marriage (oddly enough, all weighing around 7 pounds despite being three months premature sometimes!), but no premarital sex, dagnab it!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Who, despite the above, can proudly state that he was born exactly 280 days after his mother and father's marriage and thus *clearly* was not the result of premarital sex :-).

Happy New Year

Or is it?

Real estate prices are going to go down by another 20% or so in 2009, as foreclosures continue at all-time highs. We're going to hit bottom somewhere around September 2009. Right now the dollar is being propped up by folks overseas grabbing dollars in order to repay debts denominated in dollars, but that's going to end and shortly the dollar is going to resume its plunge, causing imports -- everything we use to live on, nowdays -- to become outrageously expensive. Unemployment is going to continue to increase because we're a nation of real-estate salesmen selling ourselves our own real estate over and over again, and that's spinning down like a friggin' turd down a toilet bowl. Plenty of down left to happen, and I don't expect any "up" to start happening until early 2010.

Like a turd down a toilet bowl. That was 2008. And 2009, the swirling is going to slow down a bit, but it ain't gonna be until early 2010 that the final "Flush!" happens and the water starts rising back in the bowl again. At least, that's my predictions for 2009, and I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it.

- Badtux the Prognostician Penguin

iPhoney

Well, my new (refurbished) iPhone has been placed on the big brown UPS plane bound for here, and should arrive here early next week. So I will be saying goodby Splint, hello Death Star. So the next question is going to be: What accessories should I get for it first? I intend to use it as a combination iPod/phone, so I suppose I need a case to keep it from getting all scratched up as it lives in my pocket, and one of those little charger/transmitter thingies for the car so that on long trips I can listen to my Tunez (alas, my Jeep's stereo has no port for an external mp3 player)...

- Badtux the Geek Penguin

Glad that's over!

Goodbye to 2008. Good riddance.

-- Badtux the Hung-over Penguin

The situation in Gaza

Israel is pounding a lot of terrorists like the one on the left. I would discuss this further, but any discussion of genocide or ethnic cleansing when a Jew is doing it means you're anti-Semitic. It is only allowable to talk about genocide or ethnic cleansing when non-Jews are doing it.

-- Badtux the "Rules are rules" Penguin

Sprint sucks

While I was gone on a trip they removed my bluetooth tethering, making it impossible for me to check my email via Sprint's EVDO network. Going to their web site, they don't even offer tethering anymore.

So fuck'em. I just did the dirty deed of switching to an iPhone on AT&T Wireless. Same cost as Sprint, and much better browser and mail client. If I can't tether, I at least want a phone that has the best mobile browser and email client in the business. Given how rarely I used the Bluetooth tethering on Sprint (roughly once per month, generally while travelling or during service outages on my main Internet connection), they just cut off their nose to spite a pimple. No wonder they're going down, down, down and bleeding customers. Doing things like this to a customer in the middle of a trip is customer service in the same way a stallion services a mare -- i.e., up the rear, long and hard.

-- Badtux the F*cked Penguin

Reinventing history, part 1532

Wow, you find out the coolest things on the Internet. Such as the fact that the failures of communism are due to the fact that communism has never been tried. And the failures of capitalism are due to the fact that pure capitalism has never been tried.

Now, as we all know, pure capitalism works only if everybody is honest. If you have loan brokers misrepresenting the properties that secure loans and misrepresenting the borrowers to the mortgage companies who are providing the funding, if you have mortgage companies misrepresenting the quality of the loans they're selling to mortgage-backed-security pools, if you have bonding agencies misrepresenting the quality of those mortgage backed securities, if everybody is lying in other words, things go to hell in a handbasket as a housing spiral starts up then inevitably collapses once the loans start foreclosing. The only losers are honest people -- the folks who bought those mortgage-backed securities for their retirement funds thinking they were prime grade debt.

So we don't have -- and can't have -- pure capitalism because it simply does not work. It ignores a central fact of human beings: that human beings lie, either deliberately or due to irrational exuberance. Pure capitalism could only work in a perfect world where all human beings tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So now let's look at communism. For the sake of discussion, I'm going to break out the system of government used in, e.g., the old USSR (which was authoritarian dictatorship) from the method of economic organization (communism). Okay, first thing we find out is that the kulaks won't voluntarily join into communes. They're not living the best of lives, life is still hard for them, but they still don't want to join their meagre properties and possessions with that of others into a commune. So what you end up with is either a) a very small minority join into communes, which tend to be short-lived due to leadership and "deadbeat" issues except for the religious-oriented ones like the kibutzen or Amish/Mennonite communities (see James Eliot's notes below), or b) someone has to exert power to force the kulaks to join together into communes, which tends to result in both dictatorship and economic disaster since the kulaks would rather destroy their possessions rather than contribute them to the commune.

Okay, so let's do some hand-waving and imagine a society where there are no kulaks. There have been some of those, after all. For example, most Native American societies basically had no concept of "private property" prior to the intervention of Europeans. They basically were already organized into communes of a sort. The problem here is that economic activity is very low in such societies. The inevitable end result is that other societies end up competing for the same economic assets as populations rise and the collectivist societies get out-competed by more capitalist societies.

But, objects the modern communist, that's not what modern communism is about. Modern communism is about industrial societies. Like the United States used to be. In Karl Marx's time, a textile factory got some raw cotton cloth from a cloth factory, and created clothes out of it. The cloth factory got raw cotton fiber from a cotton plantation and created cloth out of it. So you had three sets of people involved -- the plantation, the cloth factory, and the clothing factory. It is fairly easy to collectivize each one of these and handle the movement of goods between them.

Well, thing is, we don't live in Karl Marx's time. I am a software engineer. I am in Sunnyvale, California. My engineering team is in Shanghai, China. The appliance that we sell is made in Taiwan. The CPU is made in Chandler, Arizona and the chipset is made in Leixlip, Ireland, with Ethernet chips made in Hudson, New York. The hard drive is made in Thailand, using media substrate made in Malaysia and with firmware designed in Orange County, CA. The actual main microchip on that circuit board is made in Taiwan, while the ancillary circuitry such as amplifiers and such are made in Costa Rica, Malaysia, Thailand, and China. The case that the appliance is installed into is made in South Korea. The power supply within that case is made in Taiwan from parts from multiple nations all over the world, including Japan, El Salvador, China, Malaysia, Costa Rica, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan.

In short, for one of our appliances, there are thousands of parts from a dozen different nations. And we sell a dozen different types of appliances, each of which has a different mix of parts. Making sure all these parts all make it together requires some intermediary to govern the production and flow of parts. We call this intermediary "currency". And no, you can't do this all with computerized JIT (Just In Time) manufacturing and avoid all the intermediary stuff. Not yet, anyhow. At my last employer, where I set up the manufacturing system, our orders to the outsourced assembly facility were *faxed*. You'd be amazed at how uncomputerized actual manufacturing facilities are even today.

So this, then, explains why communism as an economic system has failed every time it has been tried. It assumes Karl Marx's world, where manufacturing had few inputs. This is why the Soviet Union was spending 60% of its GDP on its military as it approached collapse... as military weapons became more and more complex, mediating the inputs to those weapons became more and more inefficient. Similarly, this explains why every attempt at communism has been a dismal failure at providing things like medicines, medical equipment, and consumer goods to its people. As these items became more complicated to manufacture, the lack of effective mediation resulted in inefficient and slow manufacturing and distribution of these items. But it also explains why the things communism *has* succeeded in are those things which have few intermediaries. For example, communist nations have typically been very good at education and have produced large numbers of scientists, doctors, and engineers. Education is an example of an industry where there are few intermediaries.

Now: Please note that I am differentiating between communism as an economic system, and communism as a political system. The political system practiced in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc. was authoritarian dictatorship. When communists say that "real communism has not been tried", what they're talking about is the political system called anarchic socialism (or "anarcho-socialism")s, where people are self-organized into worker communes or syndics that provide goods and services to other worker communes or syndics according to the others' needs and are provided goods and services according to their own needs, and governance takes place via consensus of the commune. That, then, is when we run into two problems:

1. No society is a hermetic bubble. There are other societies that compete for the same resources. This requires an organization (we might call it "government") to provide for national defense (at the very least) and which has the ability to requisition resources from everybody else in order to provide that service. I.e., has priority over civilian use of resources -- but only up to the amount needed for national defense. How to make this happen without capitalism (where taxes to support the military make it clear that it's the military sucking up too many resources) is thus far a problem that has not been solved -- in every large-scale attempt at communism, the military ended up sucking down the entire economy after a period of time.
2. Governance of syndics or communes is a serious problem. Thus far every attempt we've made to do this kind of thing has fallen apart within a matter of years due to infighting and schism -- the problem of power that I talk about below -- and eventually devolved to a leader-follower model where a charismatic leader is in charge and uses his subjects for his own enrichment. The main exception is in religious communities which are governed by a "higher power" (i.e., which push the problem of power to a "higher power").

And I had a point, but I think I lost it sometime ago. But the deal is: We've tried capitalism. It didn't work. We've tried communism (anarcho-socialism) on a small scale, and run into problems. Apologists for either form of economic organization who claim that these failures are just because our attempts weren't "pure" or "perfect" enough are ignoring the fact that human beings are incapable of perfection. They just are. If your system of economic organization depends upon being "pure" or "perfect" in order to work properly, then it is a failure by definition.

So what is the "perfect" way to organize an economy? Well... we'll have to discuss that some more, eh?

-- Badtux the Socioeconomics Penguin

Paranoid Kitty is being followed

Paranoid Kitty tries his best, but can't catch that pesky "tail" thing that's following him...

-- Badtux the Cat-admiring Penguin

Monday sad music blogging

John Prine and Nanci Griffith, Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

I'm back!

I've been out of pocket for the past week, in case you haven't noticed all the cat photos and videos taking the place of most of the usual content (such that it is). Now I'm back home after 5,000 miles in an aluminum tube (oh joy!). Hope you guys haven't trashed the place too bad while I was gone :-).

-- Badtux the Flying Penguin

Christmas cat blogging, Day 6

The curmudgeonly Mencken looks down on my messy computer desk with disgust in his expression. Of course, that's his usual expression, so... (shrug).

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Christmas cat blogging, Day 5

The Mighty Fang has never been scared of the kitty carrier, even when he was just a teenage hooligan kitty.

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin