Tag: complaint

Virginia last in voter turnout in the last primary

USATODAY.com – Fewer primary voters ‘define the range of choices’

I found this via Raising Kaine via Daily Kos.  3.5% of Virginia voters turned out to vote in the primary.  At the school where I voted, it was about 6%, which I thought was pretty terrible, but apparently we were ahead of the rest of the state.  Now, I know there’s a Republican incumbent, so the Republican half of the primary is pretty trivial.  But Virginia allows you to vote in either one.  Those who want Senator George Allen to retain his seat certainly could have decided which of the two Democrats had a better chance of winning, and voted for the other guy.

This seems to be either voter stupidity or voter apathy.  We have a President with a 36% approval rating.  If that doesn’t get people out to vote, what will?  Maybe we need to lose some more civil rights to the war on terror.  Maybe we do need a national ID card, something we’d be required to present all the time to prove our citizenship.  Maybe a draft, to send ground troops in to help Israel, or to invade North Korea.

It blows my mind that people don’t vote.  And then they try to use dissatisfaction with the government as justification.  If you don’t vote, then you don’t get to complain about the government.  I don’t care if George W. Bush himself comes to your house, installs a bug in your phone, and then kicks your dog.  I have no sympathy for you if you don’t vote.

And this solves what?

US wants passenger info before overseas departures – Yahoo! News

This article is a little thin on details, but apparently DHS wants to get a list of all passengers on a plane, plus a bunch of info about them, before any plane in another country leaves the gate bound for the US.  Each passenger must then be cleared by customs before the plane can leave. 

Does anyone really think this makes us safer?  Do we somehow have a list of the names and addresses of every terrorist in the world?  If so, maybe we’d be better served by going to their respective houses and asking them to please stop being terrorists. 

This seems like an excellent way to delay plane departures and make a show of making us safe without actually doing anything.  And there’s the added bonus that most of the passengers will blame the airline, not the government.  It’s really a stroke of genius by Homeland Security.

New tax on VOIP to go to . . . nothing

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger – “Universal Service Fund generated remarkably meager results for $50 billion spent”

I’ve been using Vonage’s VOIP service ever since I bought my condo in March 2005. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although their tech support is less than perfect. Now, the link above is an open letter to Congressional Commerce Committees about the decision of the FCC to apply the Universal Service Fund to VOIP. The USF is supposed to bring telephone service to poor rural areas, a noble goal as far as I’m concerned. But the gist of the letter is that what the USF really does is make it that much harder for Vonage and other VOIP providers to turn the phone industry into a real competitive market.

I think one of the real problems is that, too often, little bits of data transmitted over our internet connections are treated as different objects when they really aren’t. Somehow, it’s totally different, according to some, to transfer voice instead of video, or data instead of voice. This is ridiculous. It’s all the same stuff. It’s as if we decided that you needed one highway for automobiles, and one for SUVs. Never mind that many small car drivers would love this, that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter what you’re sending. This device produces this data, and sends it to that device, which receives it. Does it matter if the first device was a webcam or a VOIP phone?

Apparently it does, and the FCC is going to tax it. I don’t have a problem with the FCC taxing communication to raise money for things that need to be done, but the USF has spent $50 billion over the last 20 years to increase phone penetration in rural areas by about 3%. I would hereby like to volunteer to accept $50 billion and spend the next 20 years trying to get a phone for every person in America. If I don’t have 99% coverage by 2027, feel free to put me in jail. I’ll deserve it.

Dont call kids fat. Wait until heart disease does it for you

Experts debate labeling children obese – Yahoo! News

There’s a ridiculous bit of debate on whether we should tell kids that they are “overweight” or “obese”, or whether we should use other words so the kids don’t feel bad. The real problem here is that they still use BMI to determine overweight. BMI is a ridiculous, meaningless number. Let’s say I’m in perfect shape. I eat healthy foods and exercise regularly. Then I decide to bulk up a bit, and I hit the gym and gain ten pounds of muscle. According to my BMI, I am now less healthy.

It’s ridiculous. Kids are fat. They eat terribly, and don’t exercise enough. And we want to worry about hurting their feelings?

Perhaps the most insane thing ever said by a Senator (But probably not)

27B Stroke 6

This is going around today, I saw it on Fark, they got it from Daily Kos. In any event, it’s a partial transcript of a rambling diatribe given by Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens that plainly shows he does not understand what “the internet” is. He makes the claim that we need to separate the commercial part of the internet from the part that is “essential to small businesses, to our operation of families”. Now, I’m not sure how “small businesses” aren’t part of the commercial world, but maybe he just thinks that people feel warm and fuzzy about small businesses so it’s okay to lump them in with regular people.

He’s arguing for regulation of the internet so that the bandwith hogging applications (he mentions on-demand movie downloads) don’t interfere with little Billy’s email to Grandma. Okay, fine, I’m in favor of that. But there are a couple of directions we can take here.

One, we can make the big bad corporations build their own internet so that it doesn’t interfere with families. Does that mean I’d have to have two accounts with Cox? One for my “family internet” and one so I can get on Buy.com? Not sure how that helps me.

Two, we can look at why (or if) this is really a problem. Maybe the RIAA and MPAA could stop trying to criminalize Bit Torrent and try using it for their own legal distribution. Maybe we could remove some of the monopolies granted to cable companies and get some real competition. Problems like the ones Stevens describes don’t happen in truly competitive markets. When they come up, someone figures out how to fix it, and everyone else follows along or gets left behind. It’s only when the barriers to entry are set so high that competition is impossible that we run into things like this.

Anyway, his statement would be really funny if it weren’t so scary.

Its the governments fault

Treehugger: So Why is Ford Backing Away from Hybrid Commitment?

Some short-sighted laws intended to encourage automakers to go green is too restrictive.

According to the US Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center, these laws create an incentive for auto makers to build cars capable of using alternative fuels by “[giving] a credit of up to 1.2 mpg toward an automobile manufacturer’s average fuel economy which helps it avoid penalties of the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.

So, it makes sense that Ford would go towards alternative fuels instead of hybrids that use regular gas, but less of it.  It’s certainly possible that, when they wrote the law, they had the best of intentions.  I doubt they did, but it’s possible.  But now that it’s obvious that the law is having unintended consequences, such as pushing Ford away from hybrids, then we should change the law.  It’s already more difficult to make a hybrid than to change an existing car over to flex-fuel, so we don’t need to add artificial barriers on top of the ones that are present already.

Im sorry, Godwins Law says youre done now.

Pro-lifers against Buffett-Gates alliance – Yahoo! News

How misguided do you have to be to attack a man for pledging tens of billions of dollars to charity? Misguided enough, I suppose, to run smack into Godwin’s Law.

“The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world,” said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

Referring to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi death camp doctor, Euteneuer said Buffett “will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents.”

Now, for a minute, let’s assume that the Judeo-Christian God exists more or less as He’s described in the Bible. Then, we can suppose that Rev. Euteneuer asked Him, “So, God, we have this guy who wants to pledge literally billions of dollars to promote global health. He wants to bring medicine and education and all sorts of necessities to people who need them. But there’s a possibility that a small fraction of the money will go to promote abortion. Should we stone him, or simply banish him into the wilderness?”

Whatever God may or may not be, He’s not stupid. I’m pretty sure He’d tell the Reverend to go take a long walk. Actually, the Bible makes God out to be a little more aggressive. He might actually smite the Reverend.

I understand why people are against abortion. I’m against it, too, although I won’t support laws that make it illegal. But when you’d stand in the way of all the good that can be done with this money just because you don’t like where some of it’s going, you’re not doing God’s work.

And I know the vast majority of pro-lifers aren’t as dumb as this guy. Nor are the vast majority of Christians. But when you let idiots like this be your voice to the public, it’s not helping things.

Ford sucks.

The Spokes-Frog Is Dead, Long Live The Spokes-Frog! – Jalopnik

Jalopnik has a nice summary of an article detailing how, once again, Ford is backing down on a promise to go greener. Ford is spinning it to say that the original promise was “too narrow”, and that they underestimated the changes in alternative fuels, so that their pledge to build more hybrids is no longer reasonable, but it’s hard to believe that’s anything but spin.

I’m continually embarrassed by the state of American automobiles. I would love to buy an American car. In fact, I sort of did, as I’m pretty sure my Mazda 3 has some Ford technology in it. But Japanese automakers are light years ahead of the American automakers in terms of fuel efficiency, reliability, quality . . .

And I don’t understand why GM and Ford are latching on to ethanol so much. We have yet to show that we can produce sufficient quantities of ethanol at a feasible price. And they make most of it from corn, which is a tough, expensive crop to grow.

I know some argue that we need to buy American to support ourselves, rather than sending our money overseas. But I refuse to purchase an inferior product in the name of patriotism. It doesn’t help my country if I reward Ford and GM for failing, and for breaking their promises to get greener. When an American car company makes a car that I can be proud to drive, I’ll buy it. Until then, I’ll stick with Japanese cars.

Ive had it with the rain

For Wetter or Worse: A Wanton Excess of Water

The above Washington Post article suffers from a great many maladies. First, alliteration is a nice literary tool, but I think it’s better suited to fiction, or perhaps poetry. Second, aside from a few quotes and factoids about the weather, it doesn’t have much of a point. “Too much rain can be a bad thing”. Yeah, thanks for the bulletin. At least we were spared some remark about drought in other countries.

Third, and most importantly, I’m a little bitter about the weather already, and reading an article like this (I know, I could have skipped it) doesn’t help. I’m not sure if we’ve broken any records in the DC area these past few days, but I’ve lived in and around the area my whole life, and I don’t remember anything like this.

The article also mentions Al Gore, in the news lately for finally showing that he has a soul (A little late for the Democratic party, who maybe invested some time and money in him a while back).  It doesn’t actually come out and say that the rain is a direct result of the global warming that Gore’s been talking about, but I think it’s clear what we’re supposed to infer.

Anyway, I lost my point long ago.  I just wish it would stop raining.

Hello, WordPress

I’m home from work today due to the power outage. Apparently the DC area got six inches of rain this weekend, most of it last night, and now the whole area is a bit of a mess. I’m supposed to be working from home, but there’s not much I can do without access to the servers, and so I’m awaiting instruction. And by that I mean awaiting the start of the Italy-Australia game.

This morning, I made the switch from Blogger to WordPress. It seems cooler. The template I got from WordPress is certainly nicer than what I had before. And there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know how to do yet with WordPress, so I’ll probably be playing with that today.

And now, a complaint – the traffic lights at Seven Corners weren’t changing this morning. Now, Seven Corners, on a good day, is a miserable place to be. When the traffic lights are on, but never change, and there’s no police presence to keep order, it’s a disaster. Not as big a disaster as Metro seems to be, but a disaster nevertheless.

Edit: It’s pouring again.