Wait, Let's Do This Too

Trouble with onlinery is it's at hand all the time. I switched from doing something that was probably important within the minimal context of this drone-like job to a quick glance at the news wherein my attention was arrested by the headline, "Gov't Wanted Total Cell Phone Ban For Drivers". The article said what we all know: Hands-free cell phones are no safer than the regular kind. Of course, I take that fact to mean they should repeal the hands-free-only law, but gov'mint (and a few of you nanny-staters too, no doubt) instead takes it to mean cell phone use while driving should be banned entirely. Well, that figgers. I also think I should be able to drive home with a cold can of beer, and that seatbelts should be voluntary. So, whatever. I know the world ain't going my way.

What then caught my eye was an ad for an in-car navigational system. Seems to me if a phone chat provides enough cognitive distraction to kill hundreds of people every year, then at least an on-dash unit that gives you maps, directions, weather, news, internet search capability, restaurant reviews, and movies on demand ought to be safe. We humans can handle it -- we're natural born multitaskers, right? Right!?

It also caught my eye because I worked on that particular product a year ago or so, being one of the main component suppliers, and handled lots of questions and solved problems and so on, but that part of the story isn't nearly as interesting now that I've got to it as I thought it would be. What's more interesting is that, per the article last linked,

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

No fucking duh. So seatbelt habits aside I really am just like other people. Seriously, I think in my father's day, office workers were far more productive. Hell, before getting a desktop internet, I was far more productive. I mean, look what I'm doing now, all because in a distracted moment I clicked the link to Google News. Now I have emails stacked up in my box and must go. Thank Gawd!

Corona Del Mar

Right, that last pic was taken somewhere near La Conchita, on the last stretch into Santa Barbara from south-away. The setting sun was playing tricks with the evening fog and I thought I'd capture it. I was mistaken.

There's a sense of brittle preservation to a neighborhood so exclusive that no one could possibly afford to live there unless they bought in about the time of the Beach Boys, and judging by the age of the people out and about who were not walking to the beach, that pretty well covers it. The location, the weather, the architecture, and the landscaping were all perfection, tuned over many years. One gets a sense the only work left to do is figure out which undeserving children to leave it to. Or hell, Emma, let's just sell it to that Asian plastic surgeon and let the kids and their brats fight over the money. Especially now it's worth half what it was, heh heh.

  

But love is not dead there. A very sweet couple was kissing and cooing on a bench overlooking the sea. She was about seventy five, blonde long since gray, still pretty underneath all the years. He was about twenty five with a Jamaican look. It was all very romantic.

We staked out a spot in the sand and threw a frisbee in the light surf and risked broken ankles going out to the end of the breakwater. Felt like vacation.

  

One thing about the wealthy, though (probably your nouveau riche, selling smartphones to drug dealers). Who the hell spends a couple million bucks on a house by the ocean that was designed for Disneyland? There was another -- not pictured -- that was very spacious and clean and classy in a Bauhaus kind of way and I thought how satisfying it must be to spend six mil on a house that looks like a dentist's office. I did however like one of the sculptures, never mind how stupid-rich you have to be to put a three hundred pound hunk of bronze on your pool deck.

  

Next, if I get around to posting it, we shoot the pier at Huntington Beach.

That Was Close

Facebook has sucked a lot of the energy out of the blogs lately, and since it evens and leavens and homogenizes everyone it isn't nearly as interesting. In a weak desperate moment I started browsing misc.writing, where verbose idiocy reigns supreme and begs, begs for one to put foolish people into their places. But I already know what good that'll do so I backed out again. Geez. Looking for online interaction -- that's mighty pathetic. The obvious answer is to get off of this crap completely.

Well, except for posting pictures now and then, and random things that Must Be Said. It's the looking for interaction online that is simply nowheresville. Yup. That was close.

A pox on 'em

I like how even the VOA's brief mention of the Gaza fighting quotes a Gazan journalist --

"I moved out of my house out of fear. They were bombarding near my house."

-- without bothering to mention Hamas was bombarding Israeli houses for weeks beforehand, daring Israel to do something about it. The obvious intention is to provoke another little war that Israel will call off once Hamas has thrown enough Arabs under the tank treads, thus enabling Hamas' declaring victory as the surviving underdog and further advance the global creep of anti-Semitism. And it will probably work.

Drive Em Out

So on the way home last night I was listening to NPR as I usually do and some gasbag was saying that if we let the Big Three automakers go under, that will also hurt the entire supply chain, which is huge, and that in turn will drag down the foreign makers who build cars here.

And this utter idiocy was left unchallenged by the journalist. Where the fuck do they get journalists these days?

One of the things that has steamed me up the most since I became a grownup and got a job in a real industry is that the major forces driving this world -- the making of policy and the analysis and reporting of same -- is left to lawyers and journalists and the occasional retired college professor. People in other words with no real understanding of how A leads to B leads to C. And so we are getting fuckeder and fuckeder every passing year.

Don't get me wrong. If GM and Chrysler go into bankruptcy, that will be very bad. The ripples will tsunami across the landscape and tear vast holes in the banks and houses and factories and everything else in the way. But the pain will be relatively short-lived -- a few years maybe -- as what's left of industry downsizes and retools and reconfigures and starts hiring again (here's an example of the sort of brilliance GM's failure will make room for). In contrast how the fuck long will the country be burdened with the unintended consequences of an unimaginably huge bailout? We'll essentially be rewarding an old-line 20th Century industry for fucking around in their old-line 20th Century way. They'll forget the scare and go back and do things the same way. Well, except for the oversight provided by, ahem, Congress. If you think that will help, omigod, go rent a brain, will you? Try it out, see if you like it.

I also recall hearing of a contention by the Ford guy, who doesn't really NEED the money, that if the other two go down, then he will need some money too. Well, a) no fucking duh, as CEO he owes it to his stockholders and employees to see to it that a gift given to their competitors comes to them as well, and yet otherwise b) that's bullshit, because it will not only mean he suddenly has a less competitive market to play in but a shitload of experienced and desperate auto workers and cut-rate factories available to go play in it with. Sounds like good times to me.

Did I mention auto workers? Oh, those poor fuckers. It took me two degrees and ten years of experience to make a salary comparable to your average union quarter panel installer and U-joint adjuster. Maybe twenty, I don't know. Fuck em. A major reason we're in this mess -- not the short term mess created by those creative wizards on Wall St but the longer term mess of steadily decreasing American industrial output and the massive strategic and economic Damocletian sword it represents -- is that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch the gravy train we leapt aboard after WWII, and our workers just aren't worth as much more than the rest of the world's as they used to be.

Oo, what a sentence. What meant: As the competing ladders of economic growth lurch upwards, lower costs elsewhere make our workers' entitlements unaffordable. That goes double for the non-workers' entitlements, but I'm not getting into the welfare state today. Seems a bad time of year for that particular rant.

But it is a good time of year for redemption. I offer a case in point, the lovely and talented Carly Fiorina, who lost her job after flying H-P a little too close to the ground but today has some good things to say about the auto company bailout: CEOs seeking bailouts should be willing to resign.

I'm Missing All The Fun

This is like three miles from my house. Mild in-country suburbanites are rioting over same-sex marriage. Agh. I guess the good news is, since it takes two to tangle, this means plenty of people even out here are against Prop 8. But the pro peeps are highly motivated too: they think they are rescuing civilization from itself. However the vote goes, this will not be the end of it.

Crumpled Paper Philosophy

It was in the middle of the corridor as I came in to work. My hands were full and it looked grody so I left it there.

Second time I saw it I had coffee and bagel in my hands and let it lie.

Third time I was on my way to a meeting.

Fourth time, it still looked grody, all crumpled and kind of stained and I was headed for the stairs, no trashcans there.

Fifth time, I had come back up cause I forgot my car keys, which I need to get my gym bag, and it was still there, brushed off to the side, three and a half full hours since I first saw it.

Who sees a crumpled piece of paper on the floor and just leaves it there? What a bunch of slobs. Finally *I* had to pick it up and take it to a trash can. Sheesh.

OMG The Debate!

It’s on! The debate is on! And it’s on tonight!

Pardon my enthusiasm. We were actually planning to put the furniture back into our room after having the carpet stretched. But I just don’t know if I can split my attention like that.

What do you think? Bed in the same place, or against the opposite wall? She thought to put it at an angle with the TV in the opposite corner, and I can make a little chill-out nook by the window behind the headboard: chair, bookshelf, lamp. Not that I’ll actually use it. I’d only use it when she’s asleep, and once she’s asleep ANY NOISE AT ALL awakens her as if to a declaration of war. But still. Large room. Worth a try.

Oh yeah, and the debate could be on while we do it. Sort of like watching football. Look up when there’s cheering.

* * *

What do I think? I think Obama is a smart and thoughtful man, and McCain a man of action. There are un-Presidential risks to both, and Presidential benefits too. I also think the debates are a bad idea. You know, until 1976 there weren’t any, with the famous exception of 1960. Have any of the debates you’ve seen given you any insight into the Presidential quality of any candidate? Not me. We find out who’s glib and who isn’t, who thinks on their feet fast with respect to a domestic audience, who’s encyclopedic and who had to cram. Then a crowd of self-important pundits with crossing agendas declare who “won” according to obscure and thoroughly irrelevant style points. None of that helps me at all.

But then, Coolidge was more my style so WTF do I know.

* * *

Well, it gives me a reason to leave work “early” (sad that in my biz, before six is “early”). It’d be fun to watch it at a bar. But I don’t hang out at bars, I don’t have any barfly friends, and I’m afraid to pick the wrong bar and wind up having to endure a load of cheering when a candidate says something crowd-pleasing but stupid. So we’ll just click it on at home and reload our bedroom and prepare to cringe. I really hope the guy I can’t help leaning towards doesn’t blow it. At least the veep “debate” will be pre-loaded with low expectations. Looking forward to that.

Obama Veep Brainfever

Biden? Joe Biden!?

Honestly, this game is rigged. Obama has been chosen to take the fall. Whoever told him to choose Biden probably made him an offer he couldn't you know the rest.

Taxes and Dumbness and More Dumb Taxingness

Tomorrow is Tax Day and if there’s one thing that annoys me, it’s presidential candidates who don’t freaking understand taxation and economics.

Question: What would be a quick and easy way to simultaneously:

• Increase the taxes on most middle-class household incomes
• Decrease federal tax revenues
• Slow the stock market down even further

This should be easy because both Democratic senators have promised to try and make it happen. It’s a standard play out of the Demo playbook and, like many such plays, the fact that it makes no damn sense evidently makes no impression on the vast majority of people who vote Democratic.

No, no, not CAFTA. CAFTA’s a Bush thing (I think – the Clinton’s seem split over it, so I guess many Democrats are too). That’s a whole nother animal – too complicated for me.

Answer: Raise the tax on capital gains. WHAT A STUPID IDEA! Nothing more than faux class warfare dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. Oh, yeah, soak the rich. What rich? Forty seven percent of households that paid some sort of capital gains tax in 2005 had incomes under $50k. Double that income to where most of us mid-century two-income types have settled out and participation is seventy nine percent. And is this supposed to help anyone? In ’97 and ’03 when the rates were reduced, capital gains tax receipts went up, not down. Way up. As you’d expect. Profits were not so artificially held down and the markets got more active, is one way to look at it. Stock market picked up, too, future value projections now being higher. Not to mention foreign investment was less discouraged.

See, though we need government, and we need various means to pay for it, taxes are never the less a burden on any economy. Lessen the burden, and the economy picks up. Right, some taxes can encourage economic activity, it’s true. Investments in infrastructure are particularly good, be they roads and dams or schools and hospitals (yeah, I’m a public school supporter and leaning towards public medical too). But come on. Taxing capital gains made sense in the 1930s when no one had any but the fat cats who were riding their Duesenbergs past bread lines and saying there but for the grace of grandpappy go I but it makes no damn sense today, not when more people than ever own homes and participate in the stock market, one way or t’other, and small businesses are being started up and sold and started up again faster’n you can say Quicken and Turbo Tax.

Obama would double the capital gains tax rate. Clinton’s a little more agnostic but would certainly allow the Bush tax cuts to sunset (arguably his greatest if not only success). So yeah, no one’s perfect. But do they have to be so obvious and partisan about it? Along with many other sometimes well-intentioned attempts at social equalization, raising the capital gains tax is a classic example of what George Orwell called, "an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it."

This rant brought to you after listening to this on NPR on the way home form work.

And NO! this doesn't mean I support McCain. There's plenty to complain about all around, this is just one of my hot-button issue button thingies.

Next-day follow-up: Not meaning to over-bash Obama. He's been getting a lot of grief for his guns and religion remarks and maybe I'm a little too San Franciscan at heart but I didn't see anything bothersome in what he said, just empathy and understanding. From a high altitude.

Sick Sect Sex Sets Scriveners Squirting

The press is having a vast collective circle-jerk over this shit.

SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) -- Young teenage girls at a polygamist compound in West Texas were required to have sex in a soaring white temple after they were married in sect-recognized unions, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday ... Agents found a bed in the temple with disturbed linens and what appeared to be a female hair ... Associated Press

Hard-on city, right, boys? Them Mormons was purty clever to raise them girls that way, huh? Jayziz. The FLDS is fucked up. But the media's restraint hasn't exactly been impressive.

I believe in religious freedom. If multiple marriage works for people, fine. Of course, there's debate as to whether it does. I suspect it generally does not. Not if one is raised to believe it's God's Will or some shit. If you come to polygamy or polyamory naturally because that's just the way you are, great. I don't want any laws to get in your way. But if you're only there because you were raised by a bunch of patriarchal power freaks, forget it. And let's not even waste time discussing children being married off, even to someone their own age, never mind some dirty old bastard my age. I know how those guys think.

Indeed I do. A bed in the temple, huh? Hmmm.