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Data, data, data - 6-7 January 2011
Jan. 8th, 2011 08:28 amCheers, fact-checkers, keepers of accuracy, and makers of all things truthful. For those who have been fighting for accuracy in determining what contribtues to autism spectrum behaviors, a study that claimed to have a link between MMR vaccinations and autism is not only false, it is fraudulent, with several things changed from reality to fit the desire of the now even-more discredited researcher.
Have a look at a list of things that youth born in this year will likely never have to experience. Some of which I agree with more and others that I think will still be around for a long time.
Out in the world today, Romania has declared witchcraft and fortune-telling to be professions and required that taxes be collected for their practice. In a similar sort of head-scratching exercise, Saudi Arabia detained a vulture with a University of Tel Aviv GPS tag on it as a potential spy for Israel.
A temporary infusion of 1,400 soldiers to Afghanistan to try and hold onto what has already been gained.
More men are willing to embrace in public, yay!
Finally, the Dead Pool provides final rest for Vang Pao, Hmong leader and fighter in the CIA-backed war against communists in Vietnam.
Domestically, Republicans revised their estimates of how much they're going to cut from the budget...downward. Often by half or more. If the reporting from Taibbi is to be believed, The Tea Partiers are going to get as disappointed in Boehner as progressives are in Obama on big things.
Besides, as it turns out, the defense secretary can thumb his nose at them and their promises all by himself, cutting some $78 billion out of the defense budget over five years.
The President chooses a chief of staff, and it's a Daley. He has worked with Democrats a lot, has gotten Howard Dean's approval as someone who will be serious and respectful, and can be easily seen as a "punching the hippies" choice, as Ms. Maddow put it. There are a lot of reasons why he shouldn't be in charge, including his tight ties to Wall Street, his opposition to signature Presidential plans, and the fact that he's been around the block before. Oh, and he's a Daley.
An ex-CIA officer was charged with revealing secret information about Iran to a New York Times reporter.
In tech, the increasing reliance on automated agents to do stock trading as fast as possible makes the system vulnerable to attacks that introduce latency into the system. That slight delay caused by a man-in-the-middle strike? Can net millions of dollars.
In the opinions, the Slacktivist reminds us that basic research must be done on anything you find on the Internet before you fly off the handle and get indignant. That is, unless you're part of the class who is supposed to get indignant at anything, mostly for religious reasons, regardless of whether it's true or not. Such people really shouldn't be listened to, as much as they need to both find and fine-tune their humor-detection senses and then go out and start putting their principles into practice, like charity, hope, and love, for example, instead of wondering whether emulating the gentleman arrested for putting explosive devices in sex toys is worthwhile.
You know, they could talk to the less fortunate among them as a matter of faith, and watch in amazement as one of their works helps a homeless person far more than he thought it would have, keeping in mind that Jesus mentioned that if you want to do good things, the poor are always there, always need help, and helping them in a sincere way will always go over well with G-d.
On politics, now that the various balances of power have shuffled and been set for the next year, Ms. Bondi expects more states to sue the federal government over the individual mandate provision in the health care bill, following an apparent Mandate From Heaven (err, The People) that every aspect of the last two years be repealed, rolled back, and dismantled, and that any savings that those last two years claimed were merely shadow puppetry. This Mandate is based on a single mid-term election that changed the balance of power in one federal government house, but by Jove, they'll make it sound like it's a Republican government now. Additionally, Tait Trussel says the Republicans are ready to kill the bill by defunding it or knocking pieces out of it until it collapses, knowing they can't outright repeal it, based on this same Popular Mandate, and that if all else fails, states will thumb their nose at the requirement and doctors will refuse to participate in it, killing it just as effectively. Besides, "everyone knows" that people who are friendly to the administration will be able to get waivers for its requirements anyway. Those places, I do recall, threatened that they would simply drop coverage for all of their employees if they didn't get a waiver for them to be able to continue screwing their employees on coverage. It's not a matter of rewarding friends and punishing enemies, but keeping coverage for average people until the time when a stunt like that will be met with "Fine. They'll join onto our exchange and get better coverage anyway." Mr. Rove also says the AARP is an insurance provider that has been exemplted from all the rules in place. As far as I know, the AARP does not provide actual insurance, but has negotiations with companies that do to provide more affordable rates. If that's different, let me know.
More generally, the WSJ offers their framing for the next two years - Republican obstructionism and a fingers-crossed hope that the Republicans become the Tea Party, instead of reverting to form now that they convinced the rubes to vote for them. The WSJ is more than happy to play up all the supposed faults of Nancy Pelosi and make it sound like the investment and business markets are suddenly over their "uncertainty" and ready to start investing their money again, now that they have a House that might not make them pay all the taxes they should on it. They also continue to invest in the idea that President Obama is an inveterate leftist liberal, instead of a center-rightist with occasional leftward tendencies, so that they can successfully continue to demonize his accopmlishments and complain that Democrats and Obama are the real reasons that entitlements haven't been dismantled to the satisfaction of Our Corporate Masters.
Since we are in the season of wet and cold in the Norhtern Hemisphere, conservative columnists look outside their windows, trying to think of something to write, and then feel inspired. Thus, some of them are devoting at least part of their columns to why climate change has to be wrong if areas are feeling more extreme weather in the opposite direction of what the models predicted. It's usually part of a broader point to discredit people with degrees and say that they're less intelligent that the Tea Party folk, because those smart people made claims that were obviously disproven - it's colder now, so the people claiming that's a sign of climate change when they were just saying things would get warmer are just claiming anything they can, and those liberals and people with degrees don't have the same respect for the Constitution that us Real People do, or to indicate that while employment at manufacturing jobs is going down, the productivity of those remaining is just as good as it was before, and that will be good for all of us in the end. Oh, and those people talking about climate change have no idea what they're talking about.
Mr. Horowitz shows his contempt for a tenured professor who makes significant amounts of money doing almost no actual teaching, and of what he does teach, it's Marxism and other things Mr. Horowitz consideres debunked. Instead of focusing on the awful plight of TAs and those who will teach forever without ever making it to tenure, Mr. Horowitz paints this particular professor and all of his brethren as loafers that simply feed off of the universities they have their offices at, while doing no work and producing nothing of value. They even fell for a hoax essay, the slackers. Mr. Horowitz needs to peer in on a bunch of tech people poring over a difficult problem. If they're managed well, the problem-solving will look remarkably like goofing off or loafing about, because when creative work or non-standard solutions and thinking are required, it all goes on in someone's head. Sometimes, a change of scenery helps, or talking to a colleague, or doing some research, or occasionally, backburnering the problem and doing something else entirely, like playing a video game or working on a different project entirely. But let's loop back to that awful plight of the overworked, underpaid, and never-going-to-be-tenured TAs for a minute. They, much like the rest of the workers in America, are the victims of the reality that has divorced the otherwise normal coupling of excellent work generating more profit for a company and rewarding workers for the excellent work that is responsible for that increased profit. The person getting paid to make widgets at exactly the same rate they made widgets eight years ago, while the company continues to sell more widgets and make more profit, has lost the incentive to make quality product, as it will not result in raises or bonuses. The company that announces record profits and then lays off half of its workforce to the effect of even greater prodits is not inspiring the remaining workers to redouble their efforts out of any other motivation than fear that their job will be next, and working in fear like that does not create quality product - it creates employees ho want to ensure their job security. So they'll stop documenting code, or implement processes in certain ways that only they would understand. Or they'll be the only people who know what they hell is going on with regard to standardized testing requirements at their school, a fact the school will wail and gnash their teeth about when they discover this fact a year after they got rid of that particular employee. The Slacktivist figures that Corporate America is being held together by the people who take pride in their work and refuse to compromise their quality in the face of increasing demands for productivity...and that current corporate practices are not sustaining those people and rewarding them for their work.
Ms. Coulter is convinced that she knows the real culprit of the housing crisis - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the governemnt-sponsored enterprises that apparently gave out loans to the unqualified and then were authorized to buy up bad mortgages and hold them. If I recall correctly, the reason they were buying up toxic paper is because the other banks and institutions were threatening that this bad stuff would impede their ability to let the capital flow and it might crash the system if they weren't allowed to sell their bad stuff to the government company. Thus, when things default and the government loses money on it, the system works and the banks intended it. Ms. Coulter has to be a bit heavier on the proof department if she wants to claim that the GSEs originated more of the toxic loans than, say, the banks and the mortgage servicing companies that unloaded all of their bad paper onto the GSEs under threat of collapse.
Mr. Ahlert wants you to be very afraid that the U.S. government will suddenly decide to seize your private savings accounts to fund the gaping maw that is Social Security, based on apparent seizures of pension fund investments by European governments. (That it's characterized as "the cost of socialism" should be noted and salt applied to the rest of the column.) This is to make up for budget shortfalls caused by the current crop of economic catastrophe. Mr. Ahlert suggests that bureaucrats here will raid the Social Security Trust to pay for things now and then renege on their promises to pay Social Security later, because it will be so obviously bankrupted by all the baby boomers retiring. The clear and obvious solution, he says, is to privatize at least part, if not all, of the system, so that retirement money can be taken out of the hands of greedy spenders in Washington...to be put at the tender mercies of The Market, All Praise To Its Currently Crashed-and-Burned Name. Instead of government bureaucrats providing IOUs to you, market forces will eat it up in fees and market downturns and then shrug and say, "Investments may lose money. You saw that on the prospectus, right?" as they take their golden parachutes and bail.
Last out of opinions, stupidity cubed, first in a pundit who Did Not Pay Attention in the part in school when the science people explained that the regular motion of the tides is due to the gravitational pull of Luna, second in a Representative now heading the Intelligence Committee who managed to get the media to ascribe greater smarts to her than she deserved, all by saying the two-word phrase "Presidential Run", and then third, another Representative who believes that Interstate Commerce does not apply to children born in one state and then abandoned in refuse containers within that state, so clearly the individual health insurance mandate cannot be legal.
Last for tonight, always do art for yourself and no other person. And pictures of bookstore cats.
Have a look at a list of things that youth born in this year will likely never have to experience. Some of which I agree with more and others that I think will still be around for a long time.
Out in the world today, Romania has declared witchcraft and fortune-telling to be professions and required that taxes be collected for their practice. In a similar sort of head-scratching exercise, Saudi Arabia detained a vulture with a University of Tel Aviv GPS tag on it as a potential spy for Israel.
A temporary infusion of 1,400 soldiers to Afghanistan to try and hold onto what has already been gained.
More men are willing to embrace in public, yay!
Finally, the Dead Pool provides final rest for Vang Pao, Hmong leader and fighter in the CIA-backed war against communists in Vietnam.
Domestically, Republicans revised their estimates of how much they're going to cut from the budget...downward. Often by half or more. If the reporting from Taibbi is to be believed, The Tea Partiers are going to get as disappointed in Boehner as progressives are in Obama on big things.
Besides, as it turns out, the defense secretary can thumb his nose at them and their promises all by himself, cutting some $78 billion out of the defense budget over five years.
The President chooses a chief of staff, and it's a Daley. He has worked with Democrats a lot, has gotten Howard Dean's approval as someone who will be serious and respectful, and can be easily seen as a "punching the hippies" choice, as Ms. Maddow put it. There are a lot of reasons why he shouldn't be in charge, including his tight ties to Wall Street, his opposition to signature Presidential plans, and the fact that he's been around the block before. Oh, and he's a Daley.
An ex-CIA officer was charged with revealing secret information about Iran to a New York Times reporter.
In tech, the increasing reliance on automated agents to do stock trading as fast as possible makes the system vulnerable to attacks that introduce latency into the system. That slight delay caused by a man-in-the-middle strike? Can net millions of dollars.
In the opinions, the Slacktivist reminds us that basic research must be done on anything you find on the Internet before you fly off the handle and get indignant. That is, unless you're part of the class who is supposed to get indignant at anything, mostly for religious reasons, regardless of whether it's true or not. Such people really shouldn't be listened to, as much as they need to both find and fine-tune their humor-detection senses and then go out and start putting their principles into practice, like charity, hope, and love, for example, instead of wondering whether emulating the gentleman arrested for putting explosive devices in sex toys is worthwhile.
You know, they could talk to the less fortunate among them as a matter of faith, and watch in amazement as one of their works helps a homeless person far more than he thought it would have, keeping in mind that Jesus mentioned that if you want to do good things, the poor are always there, always need help, and helping them in a sincere way will always go over well with G-d.
On politics, now that the various balances of power have shuffled and been set for the next year, Ms. Bondi expects more states to sue the federal government over the individual mandate provision in the health care bill, following an apparent Mandate From Heaven (err, The People) that every aspect of the last two years be repealed, rolled back, and dismantled, and that any savings that those last two years claimed were merely shadow puppetry. This Mandate is based on a single mid-term election that changed the balance of power in one federal government house, but by Jove, they'll make it sound like it's a Republican government now. Additionally, Tait Trussel says the Republicans are ready to kill the bill by defunding it or knocking pieces out of it until it collapses, knowing they can't outright repeal it, based on this same Popular Mandate, and that if all else fails, states will thumb their nose at the requirement and doctors will refuse to participate in it, killing it just as effectively. Besides, "everyone knows" that people who are friendly to the administration will be able to get waivers for its requirements anyway. Those places, I do recall, threatened that they would simply drop coverage for all of their employees if they didn't get a waiver for them to be able to continue screwing their employees on coverage. It's not a matter of rewarding friends and punishing enemies, but keeping coverage for average people until the time when a stunt like that will be met with "Fine. They'll join onto our exchange and get better coverage anyway." Mr. Rove also says the AARP is an insurance provider that has been exemplted from all the rules in place. As far as I know, the AARP does not provide actual insurance, but has negotiations with companies that do to provide more affordable rates. If that's different, let me know.
More generally, the WSJ offers their framing for the next two years - Republican obstructionism and a fingers-crossed hope that the Republicans become the Tea Party, instead of reverting to form now that they convinced the rubes to vote for them. The WSJ is more than happy to play up all the supposed faults of Nancy Pelosi and make it sound like the investment and business markets are suddenly over their "uncertainty" and ready to start investing their money again, now that they have a House that might not make them pay all the taxes they should on it. They also continue to invest in the idea that President Obama is an inveterate leftist liberal, instead of a center-rightist with occasional leftward tendencies, so that they can successfully continue to demonize his accopmlishments and complain that Democrats and Obama are the real reasons that entitlements haven't been dismantled to the satisfaction of Our Corporate Masters.
Since we are in the season of wet and cold in the Norhtern Hemisphere, conservative columnists look outside their windows, trying to think of something to write, and then feel inspired. Thus, some of them are devoting at least part of their columns to why climate change has to be wrong if areas are feeling more extreme weather in the opposite direction of what the models predicted. It's usually part of a broader point to discredit people with degrees and say that they're less intelligent that the Tea Party folk, because those smart people made claims that were obviously disproven - it's colder now, so the people claiming that's a sign of climate change when they were just saying things would get warmer are just claiming anything they can, and those liberals and people with degrees don't have the same respect for the Constitution that us Real People do, or to indicate that while employment at manufacturing jobs is going down, the productivity of those remaining is just as good as it was before, and that will be good for all of us in the end. Oh, and those people talking about climate change have no idea what they're talking about.
Mr. Horowitz shows his contempt for a tenured professor who makes significant amounts of money doing almost no actual teaching, and of what he does teach, it's Marxism and other things Mr. Horowitz consideres debunked. Instead of focusing on the awful plight of TAs and those who will teach forever without ever making it to tenure, Mr. Horowitz paints this particular professor and all of his brethren as loafers that simply feed off of the universities they have their offices at, while doing no work and producing nothing of value. They even fell for a hoax essay, the slackers. Mr. Horowitz needs to peer in on a bunch of tech people poring over a difficult problem. If they're managed well, the problem-solving will look remarkably like goofing off or loafing about, because when creative work or non-standard solutions and thinking are required, it all goes on in someone's head. Sometimes, a change of scenery helps, or talking to a colleague, or doing some research, or occasionally, backburnering the problem and doing something else entirely, like playing a video game or working on a different project entirely. But let's loop back to that awful plight of the overworked, underpaid, and never-going-to-be-tenured TAs for a minute. They, much like the rest of the workers in America, are the victims of the reality that has divorced the otherwise normal coupling of excellent work generating more profit for a company and rewarding workers for the excellent work that is responsible for that increased profit. The person getting paid to make widgets at exactly the same rate they made widgets eight years ago, while the company continues to sell more widgets and make more profit, has lost the incentive to make quality product, as it will not result in raises or bonuses. The company that announces record profits and then lays off half of its workforce to the effect of even greater prodits is not inspiring the remaining workers to redouble their efforts out of any other motivation than fear that their job will be next, and working in fear like that does not create quality product - it creates employees ho want to ensure their job security. So they'll stop documenting code, or implement processes in certain ways that only they would understand. Or they'll be the only people who know what they hell is going on with regard to standardized testing requirements at their school, a fact the school will wail and gnash their teeth about when they discover this fact a year after they got rid of that particular employee. The Slacktivist figures that Corporate America is being held together by the people who take pride in their work and refuse to compromise their quality in the face of increasing demands for productivity...and that current corporate practices are not sustaining those people and rewarding them for their work.
Ms. Coulter is convinced that she knows the real culprit of the housing crisis - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the governemnt-sponsored enterprises that apparently gave out loans to the unqualified and then were authorized to buy up bad mortgages and hold them. If I recall correctly, the reason they were buying up toxic paper is because the other banks and institutions were threatening that this bad stuff would impede their ability to let the capital flow and it might crash the system if they weren't allowed to sell their bad stuff to the government company. Thus, when things default and the government loses money on it, the system works and the banks intended it. Ms. Coulter has to be a bit heavier on the proof department if she wants to claim that the GSEs originated more of the toxic loans than, say, the banks and the mortgage servicing companies that unloaded all of their bad paper onto the GSEs under threat of collapse.
Mr. Ahlert wants you to be very afraid that the U.S. government will suddenly decide to seize your private savings accounts to fund the gaping maw that is Social Security, based on apparent seizures of pension fund investments by European governments. (That it's characterized as "the cost of socialism" should be noted and salt applied to the rest of the column.) This is to make up for budget shortfalls caused by the current crop of economic catastrophe. Mr. Ahlert suggests that bureaucrats here will raid the Social Security Trust to pay for things now and then renege on their promises to pay Social Security later, because it will be so obviously bankrupted by all the baby boomers retiring. The clear and obvious solution, he says, is to privatize at least part, if not all, of the system, so that retirement money can be taken out of the hands of greedy spenders in Washington...to be put at the tender mercies of The Market, All Praise To Its Currently Crashed-and-Burned Name. Instead of government bureaucrats providing IOUs to you, market forces will eat it up in fees and market downturns and then shrug and say, "Investments may lose money. You saw that on the prospectus, right?" as they take their golden parachutes and bail.
Last out of opinions, stupidity cubed, first in a pundit who Did Not Pay Attention in the part in school when the science people explained that the regular motion of the tides is due to the gravitational pull of Luna, second in a Representative now heading the Intelligence Committee who managed to get the media to ascribe greater smarts to her than she deserved, all by saying the two-word phrase "Presidential Run", and then third, another Representative who believes that Interstate Commerce does not apply to children born in one state and then abandoned in refuse containers within that state, so clearly the individual health insurance mandate cannot be legal.
Last for tonight, always do art for yourself and no other person. And pictures of bookstore cats.
