Gerrymandering: A Rant

First off, foundationally, districts are reconfigured within a US state once a decade, after the most recent census. Doing it at any other time, for any other reason than "we now have better data on how many people live where," is inherently illegitimate.

Which, of course, is why Texas Republicans are doing it - they've never seen a naked power grab they didn't like. If it spreads, and lots of states do it as well, that will be yet another breakdown of norms, another signpost that the US is speed-running through the Collapsing-Democracy Playbook. So that is bad, obviously.

But there's a lot of talk essentially assuming gerrymandering is magic - that just drawing the boundaries some secret way ensures the people drawing them will win. And that's not the case. 

The other incorrect assumption is that gerrymandering creates "safer" districts: ones more ideologically committed to the governing party. That it tends to reinforce the echo-chamber effect, to lock in ideologically extreme candidates. Again, that's not true.

Gerrymandering - as we're discussing it right now, meaning an effort to maximize the number of districts in a state that are favorable to your party - tends to make districts less safe, on purpose, to make more districts that a particular party has a solid chance of winning.

The opposite strategy is to make districts where your party can't possibly lose, where the voters break for your party overwhelmingly. Democrats have tended, over the past few decades, to create that kind of district, at least in some cases - usually as "majority-minority." (And, yes, that will and has tended to dilute their overall statewide voting power - yet another example of how Dems will always bring a flower to a knife fight. Also, yes, there are other voting systems besides first-past-the-post, and it's really nice that you support them, but you do realize Texas is never, ever going to spring for approval voting, right?)

Especially in larger states, both strategies can be in play - a governing party can "pack" a few districts with their opponents, maybe also "pack" one or two on their side to protect specific incumbents, and then "crack" the rest of the map into districts that are mildly in their favor.

But remember that, no matter what you do in a gerrymander, there's still the same number of voters overall - what gerrymandering does is turn a state with (to make up numbers) twenty districts from this evenly balanced list:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 10
3	R + 10
4	R + 10
5	R + 10
6	R + 10
7	R + 10
8	R + 10
9	R + 10
10	R + 10
11	D + 10
12	D + 10
13	D + 10
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

to this list, where one party is dominant in more districts:

District	Partisan Lean
1	R + 10
2	R + 5
3	R + 5
4	R + 5
5	R + 5
6	R + 5
7	R + 5
8	R + 5
9	R + 5
10	R + 5
11	R + 5
12	R + 5
13	R + 5
14	D + 10
15	D + 10
16	D + 10
17	D + 10
18	D + 10
19	D + 10
20	D + 10

But note that the totals - my example uses partisan lean as the metric; in the real world it's actually the number of voters, and gets very data-wonkish very quickly with race/gender/propensity overlays - are the same in both cases. Gerrymandering does not invent voters, it moves them to be more efficient for the party in charge.

Gerrymandering is a bet - that you'll take a somewhat smaller chance of winning each of a larger number of districts, and that you can do so while keeping the partisan lean higher than the potential swing in any given election.

Because, in the state above, if "partisan lean" has a 10-point error bar, every district could potentially have been a toss-up in Scenario 1, and Scenario 2 would give the R team a chance in any given election to shoot themselves really badly in the foot.

But if the error bar is more like 3 or 4 points, a +5 district is pretty much optimal for your side. You'll win those nearly every time, and any higher lean in your direction is "wasted."

(Note: I am not a data scientist and this is not my area of expertise. I make no claims about what the typical error bar is, or the partisan lean of existing or proposed districts in any state. I do expect the experts know these things, and make their plans based on decent data and reasonable assumptions.)

The more aggressive you go in gerrymandering, the more likely you make it that any given election - possibly the very next one - will shift enough in the direction of your opponents that you will lose power.

This nuance tends to get forgotten in discussions of gerrymandering: that the more you push it, the higher the chances it will go wrong. Yes, we do have really powerful computers, robust data models, and all kinds of insights, but it all still relies on what a large number of people will do on a specific day in the future, so wave elections - and we've had a succession of wave elections for more than a decade now - can be enhanced by an aggressive gerrymander.

Now, Texas Republicans have other tools besides gerrymandering, of course - have we mentioned intimidation and voter suppression lately? - so I'm not trying to say it's sunshine and roses. They do intend to make it harder for groups they think will vote against them to get to the polls, and shifting districts is good cover to do that. (If the gerrymander goes through, expect polling places to tend to move toward red areas and mysteriously disappear or lose hours in blue areas.) And if those ICE raids sweep up citizens, or make citizens less willing to put their necks out, that's good for their side as well. It is, and I don't want to minimize this, a comprehensive "flood the zone with shit" plan, with multiple levels of bad actions.

All I wanted to point out is that gerrymandering, itself, is just one piece of that plan, and that basic arithmetic applies to gerrymandering. It doesn't break the laws of physics; it doesn't invent voters. And doing it really aggressively because one fairly stupid and narcissistic guy insists does not necessarily mean they will win all of those districts in the next election.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

!

I've just spent a few minutes checking to see whether Blogger allows a two-column layout (it doesn't, not natively), entirely because my thoughts about Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente's 2018 YA Eurovision-in-space novel, refuse to settle down into a single track. It's all !!! but also ?#&@!, and what I want to do is run those two trains of thought right next to each other.

I can't, though. So, instead, it will all go here, in something like a single consistent track. I may keep point and counterpoint in roman and italic type, though I reserve the right not to, and to delete this sentence if it turns out to be a stupid idea.

Space Opera has energy and zip and verve and style to spare. It is fizzy and smart and endlessly quotable; Valente's prose is sparkling and lovely and I find it hard to believe I'm going to limit myself to only quoting three things from it, because it is so quotable. Her narrative voice is awesome and assured and every single page of this book is a joy to read. Her universe-building is cacklingly funny a lot of the time, in a clearly and lovingly post-Douglas Adams style. This book is a hoot to read, and I recommend it to anyone who likes energy and narrative voice and humor and zippy writing. (And, if you dislike all of those things, you must be a pretty dull reader, I have to say.)

Space Opera runs on smoother rails than the Shanghai Maglev; it's main characters do, almost literally, nothing in the course of the book, which entirely happens to them. The only actions they take are those they are forced into - not because they're obstreperous or recalcitrant but purely because they never have a chance to make a decision or choice. Three quarters of the way through the book, the plot can be entirely described as "two has-been musicians are taken by aliens to a faraway planet, and are about to attend a party." Sure, there's some background - Valente's background is detailed and textured and interesting and wonderful - but the people this story is supposed to be about are just there in the middle of it, while things happen to them.

OK, look, here's the setup: there was a massive galactic war, around a hundred years ago. (WWII in space! Valente may perhaps be sailing a wee bit too close to her Eurovision model here.) All of the surviving species decided to sublimate all future competitive impulses into one big contest - this is the Jack-Vancean bit, or the every-SF-novel bit, where the One Thing explains Everything - that happens at whatever passes for annually for a galactic civilization.

Every year, each sapient species sends one band - they get to pick, note, and this will be important later - to the contest, and they each play one song, and there's some kind of voting mechanism that Valente either smartly or sneakily does not describe. (No sapient can vote for their own species: we know that. But does each race get the equivalent of one vote? Or does each "individual" in each species have a vote? How do we define "individual" if some species are hive-minds of one kind or another? How is that vote determined? Is it a first-past-the-post, or instant-runoff, or something even more exotic? It's not even all that clear how many species there actually are competing.)

The vote, however those votes are actually determined, decides how the equivalent of Galactic Tax Revenue will be allocated for the next Galactic Year-Equivalent. This is banana crackers but plausible in its nuttiness, and by no means the most stupid funding-determination mechanism in either real life or fiction, so my beef is not here.

If there's a new species - and I have to stick a very large pin in "new," since Space Opera makes it clear that Galactic Society both has enjoyed Earth culture since the invention of radio and is considering humans "new" right this moment - then that species also gets to participate!

Yay!

The new species, though, has an entirely different set of possible outcomes. If the new species' song comes dead last, that proves this species is not actually sapient, and so Galactic Civilization will lovingly murder every single one of them pretty much immediately. And, regrettably, most of the time a new species' song will come dead last, for not-knowing-your-audience reasons if nothing else. (And there is much else.)

Oh! And! The new species does not get to choose its act: some friendly Galactic species will choose for them, inform them of the choice, and take away the entrants immediately for the event happening in a few days for which the rest of the galaxy has been preparing for the last year-equivalent.

So, to sum up, here's how it's presented to humanity:

• Aliens have been watching for generations
• We are forced to compete in this year's Metagalactic Grand Prix
• It is happening in a few days
• Humanity must present a brand-new song
• Good luck writing it on a spaceship en route to the venue!
• One batch of aliens have a short-list of potential entrants
• All but one of which are dead
• And that last one is actually one-third dead, since it was a trio
• Sorry, no input from actual humans is wanted or allowed
• Aliens kidnap the remnants of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros
• When they inevitably fail, humanity will be genocided
• Too bad, so sad.
• Should have tried harder to be glam!
• Oh, and did we mention that cheating is encouraged?
• The other bands will try to hobble the humans
• I will say that actual murder is mostly frowned on
• Though there's no real penalty for doing so
• Again, they've had time to research humans
• Humans have no defenses, no research, and are suddenly left unguarded by their supposed protector species right when hobbling becomes possible
• How surprising!

(There is an obvious twelve-book Baen series in the same premise, with the plucky humans somehow taking over the alien planet-murderer ship and going on to wreak havok on those pointy-headed Galactics who couldn't leave well enough alone. I probably would enjoy that series vastly less than I did Space Opera, but it would have affected my blood pressure much less severely.)

Even for a book being published as YA, that is a wildly stacked deck. The fact that we all know that humanity will survive does not change the fact that it's a massively stupid fucking stacked deck. Add that on top of main characters - the aforementioned Decibel Jones and the single surviving Absolute Zero, one Oort St. Ultraviolet - who exist primarily for the alien characters to tell them things and have their clothing and surprised reactions to things described, and one starts to realize that Space Opera does not have a plot in more than the notional sense.

Look, this book is a lot of fun. The words chime, the sentences sing, and the paragraphs strum power chords. But you have to turn off a hell of of a lot of logical thinking to enjoy it, and I want to warn you about that.

Yes, DB and the AZs do rock out in the end, as they must. (I'm not super-clear if they actually follow the rules of the contest; it seems to me that what they play couldn't possibly be considered a new song.) And Valente has some odd hints that the whole genocide thing might be at least partially a shakedown attempt, except that the narrative voice is also super-clear that it is absolutely true and completely necessary for a functioning galaxy to have all new species able to make glamrock music on a moment's notice, because otherwise they are meat and you can just kill meat. (The narrative voice gets really strident on the people/meat dichotomy, frankly, and it worries me.)

Putting my ex-editor hat on, my guess is that this was written really quickly, and that everyone involved thought it was too much of a soufflé for any serious editing or rewriting to be useful and/or helpful and/or possible. Given its debt to Douglas Adams, those flaws start to look like features, too - Space Opera is maddening and rail-driven, but you can not actually hear the flight attendant tell passengers to stow their laptops for final approach to LAX, as you can in one Adams novel.

So...I recommend it? Basically? If you have a worse heart condition than mine, though, maybe not. Particularly if the stuff I obsessed about above bothers you as well.

Stupid Arguments

I'm in the middle of writing about Peter Bagge's 2009 book Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me, and I have to hive off this thought, because it is completely separate from a general view of the book. And this is not meant as an insult to Bagge, since I've seen versions of this argument many places.

But it is a deeply stupid argument.

Anyway, at the top of page 16, Bagge writes:

My folks wisely refused to buy me a gun of my own, and I can't believe anyone would leave a real gun within a child's reach. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Total bullshit from the ground up. Let me demonstrate.

Murder:
I've never killed anybody, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Drunk Driving:
I've never killed anyone while driving drunk, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Rape:
I've never forced anybody into sex, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Toxic Waste:
I've never released industrial waste into a source of drinking water, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Animal Cruelty:
I've never tortured an animal, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

Bribery:
I've never killed accepted money from Russian oligarchs to do their bidding after I became President, and I can't believe anyone would. Tragically, there are some who do. But how can the government regulate such stupidity? Answer: it can't.

This argument can be used for literally any human activity, and it is an argument that all law is useless. No one who makes this argument actually believes that; they just want to dismiss the possibility of controlling a facet of human activity they want to remain uncontrolled for other reasons.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, and utterly transparent. Do not make this argument; do not allow others to make it in your presence. It is an argument for anarchy.

In fact, if you're really ballsy, punch people in the face when they try to lay this one on you and then say "How can you regulate such stupidity? Answer: you can't."

And then go to jail for battery because, surprise!, we do regulate all of that shit.

How The Hell Did This Happen? by P.J. O'Rourke

You goddamn asshole, P.J. O'Rourke. You, of all people, have the unmitigated gall to title a book How The Hell Did This Happen? and then collect two hundred pages of your writings showing how it happened?

You did it, you fuckhead. You and a hundred other Republican pundits and a thousand Republican elected officials. You've systematically destroyed the ability of government to function, denigrated the character and skills of everyone who actually tried to make government function, and aggrandized an endless series of ever-more-reactionary lunatic slimeballs.

And now you're surprised that the greatest lunatic slimeball has succeeded, after you've been laying the ground for him for three decades? That dog won't hunt, Pat. You own this. This shitstorm has your fingerprints all over it, and trying to slither out by pretending you're a libertarian asshole, so you want to burn down the parts of the government that even the Republicans intend to keep...well, that's no excuse. You're standing there with a book of matches, shrugging your shoulders while the Republic burns? Fuck you.

O'Rourke's books have been getting lazier and more phoned-in for this entire century, if not longer, and How The Hell is solidly in that tradition: it's a fix-up of the political articles he wrote during the nearly two years of the 2016 campaign, edited a bit because the guy from O'Rourke's party won, and that turned out to be the worst possible outcome. (Oops!)

This allows him to edit out any predictions or ideas that turned out to be wrong, but he still engages in endless reams of partisan political bullshit. Just the most egregious example: Bernie Sanders is not a "socialist," and the O'Rourke of 1990 would have known that. I no longer trust that the contemporary one does; he's been drinking too much Kool-Aid for too long. And it's not like the Sanders platform wasn't built on rainbows and unicorn farts to begin with: there was plenty there for a self-professed libertarian to criticize if he wasn't lazily wasting all his time making second-coming-of-Stalin jokes.

Enough. How the Hell Did This Happen? is self-answering, for anyone even vaguely self-aware. He did it. He might even know he did it, on some level. But fuck if the prick will admit it.

If you're #NeverTrump and still a Republican -- which is harder and harder to do for anyone who can and does read, these days -- this book may validate your suffering. But it's really designed for the old white men like P.J.: the kind of rich assholes who are libertarian because that means lower taxes for them and they can pretend that slashing billions of dollars that help people less fortunate than them won't have any effect at all. The willfully blind, in short.

O'Rourke, you and your people did this. And you and your people are the only ones who can fix it right now. There is a mechanism to get rid of that turd in the punchbowl, an entirely Constitutional one, and it's well within the purview of your elected buddies. Don't come back until you've developed enough of a spine to admit your guilt and a willingness to call for the obvious solution.

Drug War Hysteria, Part MMXV!

This here poster is on at least some of the trains that I commute to work on, so it's been annoying me for a while. I took this lousy picture of it a while ago, and just rediscovered it.

I'm sure there's some actual argument to be made about over-prescribing opiates for pain management, and how physicians need to be careful and keep an eye out for signs someone might be addicted.

But what I see here is a group trying to shame parents into refusing pain medication for their children who are in pain. (There's a worse one, which basically says that if you let the dentist give your child Novocain for an extraction, you're dooming her to a life of addiction.)

Do not waltz in and ask a random doctor how prescription drugs inevitably lead to heroin abuse, since that only actually happens in the fever dreams of the current generation of Nancy Reagan wanna-bees. But do give your child medication for pain when she is in pain.

My Twitter Lovecraft Rant

Another one of those chin-stroking pieces about the World Fantasy Awards set me off a little while ago, and that made me decide to test out embedding Tweets here.

So this is one-half to save my not-really-deathless thoughts, and the other half testing out a bit of functionality I haven't used yet:

Wish people trying to defend Lovecraft wouldn't say things like "he was racist, like a lot of people of his time."
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

Folks, Lovecraft was *super* racist -- even "for his time." That's not a good argument.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

The good argument is that a lot of what's interesting and compelling about Lovecraft comes from that all-devouring Fear of the Other.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

Lovecraft's best stories are about hideous demon-things that walk like men and want to change us all -- GET IT!?
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

The racism is baked in at a molecular level, & that's what makes him fascinating: it's a mindset almost entirely based on fear of everything
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

But don't try to excuse the racism, or say he was great despite it -- it's too central for that. Ya gotta face it head-on.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

I mean, he was gibberingly racist against *Italians*, in a way that's like a secret code now. No way to sweep that away.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

Course, I did my thesis on Lovecraft and edited a collection of his stories, so I'm not unbiased myself.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

But read weird old racist books! Most old books are racist in one way or another anyway, so you should at least find the weird ones.
— Andrew Wheeler (@Hornswoggler) October 16, 2014

And that says what I wanted to say, I think.

False Equivalencies

I've seen a couple of formulations of this style recently:

A: Racism sucks!
B: Yes, but being falsely accused of racism sucks, too!

Insert "sexism" or "rape" or whatever noun fits the particular situation; it's a one-size-fits-all comeback.

That response is true in the sense that it's not completely wrong, but the problems are so radically different in scale and scope that the effect is to lie.

Here's what these people are effectively saying:

A: It sucks to starve to death.
B: Yes, but it also sucks to lose my morning break and have to go hungry until lunch!

The fact that two things are both not-good does not mean that they are the same, or that they cancel each other out, or that they are even comparable. If being "falsely accused" of something doesn't involve actual law enforcement and at least potential jail time, it doesn't count.

Look, white guys, here's a good test: if you're about to deploy an argument, ask yourself if John Wayne would say that. (Anybody who would use this line of reasoning, I'm pretty sure, is entirely cool with the Duke.) Would he whine about being falsely accused of something? No, he would not. Follow that lead.

You're welcome.

Negative Reviews: The Ultimate Literary Horror

There's a dull and tedious post on The Millions from Friday that pretends to be a review of a very carefully unspecified horrible recent book -- it may actually be a metafictional joke, deliberately vague in order to apply to any literary novel the reader wants it to. Either way, it's a chore to read and a puzzle to understand.

I started typing a comment there, but -- given that The Millions seems to think negatively reviewing something is a source of great trepidation, fear, and uncertainty -- I didn't want to burden them with the full force of my spleen and bile, which would certainly overwhelm their sensitive systems. Instead, here's what I wanted to tell them:

So...either this is a "joke" and there is no specific book Seidel is referencing -- in that case, this essay is pointless, since it's not even funny, and its point is trite to the point of meaninglessness. (Sometimes reviewers have ulterior motives! Shock! Horror!)

Or there is an actual book that Seidel loathed, but can't bring himself to give any real identifying details or explain what's so horrible about it -- and, in that case, this review cannot possibly stop any of us from reading that book.

As far as I can tell, either way, this piece of writing is utterly useless: stilted, roundabout, in love with its own cleverness. The prose is also so oddly phrased that I want to take the first letter of each word, just to see if that spells anything more meaningful.

There is nothing at all wrong with hating a book and saying so loudly -- even if "everyone else" seems to love that book. Seidel needs to grow up, realize that, and move on: if he wants to have opinions in public about things, he needs to honestly present his real opinions, and the reasoning behind them, not hide behind bafflegab and weasel words.

Speaking of Stupid iTunes Things...

Another one that's been baffling me since the "upgrade" to version 11:

Previously, when you had a playlist set to shuffle, and clicked on the sequence column -- the one with numbers; usually all the way to the left -- it would re-sort that list in the order that it was going to be played.

Now, if you click on sequence, it puts the tracks into no order that can be discerned by the mind of man -- it's not the order they did play or will play, not the order of title or album or artist or year, not ranked by stars or alphabetized by comments.

No, as far as I've been able to guess, those tracks are now ranked by how much Jonny Ive likes them. I have no other theory.

It's yet another way that Apple deliberately removed useful features in moving from iTunes 10 to 11, because, I suppose, we jumped on the furniture so we no longer get nice things.

iTunes 11 Is Even Worse Than I Thought

I'm having an annoying problem with iTunes, and my attempts to connect with Apple about this have been less than useless -- I just sent an email to their official support address and got a message back that mailbox is "not monitored."

(Really? You don't even look at the requests to support your expensive products? That's remarkably dumb for a company making multi-billions of dollars a year.)

So here's what I wrote to them, in hopes either some Apple social media drone will see it or one of you folks will have an idea:

1: I went to your site to report a problem in iTunes: I recently upgraded to iTunes 11.1.3 (and, subsequently, to OS 10.9.1, but this problem seems to have begun with the iTunes upgrade).

Now, sometimes when I’m playing music, some of the “comments” field on a track will disappear within 2-3 seconds after that track starts playing.

Since most of my playlists are driven by comments, this is a huge problem for me.

As far as I can tell, the comments are deleted right as the track begins to play — and then, usually, the track drops out of that playlist and so stops playing. (The track is still in my library, though.)

This does not happen all of the time, and I’ve never seen it delete all comments — but it does delete the last phrase or word regularly, and sometimes more than that. I have not been able to determine what triggers the deletion, but if I go back into the comments field and re-add the missing comments, they seem to stay at that point.

(Or, at least, those new comments aren’t instantly deleted with the next play. I have no idea what’s triggering the deletions.)


2: And the second problem has to do with reporting.

I wanted to search Apple Support Communities to see if others had experienced this problem.

But, when I went to log in with my Apple ID, it directed me to this page: https://appleid.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyAppleId.woa/157/wo/wIQeioRlXPjtX5BCZMeyXg/0.0.69.17.5.

I was asked to pick a username, and then — when I did — I got an error that said "An account utilizing this email address already exists. Only one account per email address is allowed on Apple Support Communities.”

But it gave no way to log into that existing account — even though I was ostensibly already logged into it.

I couldn’t get to any Support Communities page, because I couldn’t create a new username (since one already existed) and the site wouldn’t let me use that old username (whatever it is).

That’s a huge catch-22: can’t create a new account and can’t use the old one.


Please let me know what steps I can take to correct these problems — or what steps Apple is taking to fix them directly.

The ironic thing is that I was thinking about posting about how much easier it's been to play games on this Mac under Mac OS vs. Windows -- no drivers or other bumf, just push the button on a PS3 controller and it works -- when Apple decides to fuck up something that's much closer to their USP.

So I don't think I'll be writing any "Apple stuff is really KEWL" posts until they figure out this thing and fix it.

I've given up on getting multiple windows in iTunes 11, though just having that would have made dealing with this problem massively easier. I wonder if Apple knows just how difficult they're making things for people who have been supporting and promoting them for years (two decades, in may case) to keep doing so?

Hey Google!

If I wanted to make a bookmark for "Apps" in Chrome, I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself. In fact, you should take a hint: the fact that I didn't bookmark it -- along with millions of other previously happy users of Chrome -- might just imply that I don't want it to sit in my bookmark bar all of the time.

Look, what I'm trying to say is: fuck off and stop trying to "help" by shoving your proprietary solutions in your not-so-endearingly sloppy and geeky way.

There's a word for a company that sticks an un-deleteable advertisement for itself in front of all of its previous happy customers: evil. And that's the thing you used to say you didn't want to be.

The Monday-est of All Mondays

The cherry topping on today's shit sandwich is that I've just discovered that my iPad, newly upgraded to the ugly and apparently otherwise-no-different iOS 7, will no longer sync with my computer unless I upgrade that to iTunes 11 and lose the ability to keep multiple windows open.

Again, Jony Ive can suck my balls -- I've been a Mac user for 20+ years, and this is the kind of thing that could tip me over to going all Windows just to get away from this walled-garden bullshit. Neither one of those upgrades gives me a damn thing, and both just make the experience uglier and less useful.

Before that, my train was massively delayed this morning (sending us all on a bus to NYC and then via PATH back to Hoboken) because some idiot took a walk on the railroad track. And then I got into a fender-bender on the way home, so now my car's in the shop for who knows how long.

(The car is the very most annoying piece, but it's pretty much my fault, so I can't properly vent -- my very first accident ever, and it sucks hugely.)

Apple, you're supposed to make things easier -- you need to realize damn fast that means for your users, not for you. Get back to "it just works" and away from "it just looks really slick."

There'd Better Be Something Good in iOS 7

Because, having just updated my iPad, I'm struck by how ugly and flat all the icons and interface elements look now. Apple did this on purpose?

It's not even retro in its flatness, just dull and lifeless. I can't see how anyone would consider this an improvement in any way.

So there'd better be something that iOS 7 does better than the prior version, or I just smeared a layer of mud on my tablet just to assuage Jony Ive's ego.

Pity the Poor AIG Bankers, Unable To Pay Their Third Mortgages and Fifth Mistresses

Robert Benmosche, CEO of the insurance-finance conglomerate AIG -- you know, the one that nearly tanked the world economy a few years back? that company -- whined to the Wall Street Journal recently that it was so, so horrible that people were outraged about the bonuses he wanted to pay to his hard-working and criminally negligent employees for their economy-wrecking shenanigans.

There is not enough bile in the entire world to express how loathsome his comparison is: he thinks that taxpayers who didn't want their bailout money to go to his incompetent market-manipulators are the same as "pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that–sort of like what we did in the Deep South." Yes, being angry at vast rewards going to people who should rightfully be unemployed -- because their company is vastly worse than bankrupt -- is just like a lynching.

And the thinking behind his statements seems to be the bluntest possible version of "what's the problem? we always make ungodly sums of money -- a little fiscal crisis shouldn't affect that," again showing how vastly out of touch the financial sector is with the real economy and the need to actually provide value in order to be paid. 

The only way to stop the complete financialization of our economy -- and the capture of our political and regulatory apparatus by dangerously self-absorbed cretins like Benmosche -- is to have some real prosecutions of the criminals who caused the crash. Send them to jail for decades, confiscate their property, shut down their companies. (I'd like to say "and sow their field with salt," but a federal judge is unlikely to consider that during sentencing.) Let's start with this clown: he's clearly incompetent at his job, if he's stupid enough to say something like this in public, so the SEC is sure to find evidence of criminal malfeasance if they can just extract their lips from Wall Street's behind long enough to do their damn jobs.

What Is Currently Making Me Angry With the Heat of a Thousand Firey Suns

I need to update information on a website I control with information about a company in India -- and I was just on their contact page a few minutes ago, which loaded and gave me all the data I needed. However, that page now will not load, and no amount of googling or futzing around has made IE just show the god-damned cached page you had five minutes ago!

Back in the early days of the 'net, it wasn't uncommon to set your browser to "work offline," and poke through the pages you'd loaded before. But that seems impossible now, and of course that's exactly what I need right now.

I really, really hate it when technology removes capabilities.

Update, two minutes later: Before anyone asks, I has a couple of IE windows open at all time at work because our portal site is set up to only authenticate with IE, so most of the systems & resources I have to use only work that way.

Heaving a Large Sigh

So Google is going to shut down Reader, now?

(They aren't satisfied with all of their other failed products, and they need to get rid of one that works well and that I use every day?)

Is Bloglines still out there? I guess I need to start researching what else is out there. And I'm sure porting over all of my folders is going to be a huge pain, curse those Mountain View bastards.

Anyone out there using anything particularly good to read RSS feeds? I really don't want to go back to a list of bookmarks and nothing keeping track of read/unread.

A Short Political Comment, In Re the US 2nd Amendment

Directed to whoever needs to hear it:

Look, nimrod, no part of the Constitution gives you the right to rebel against the government. No part of any legitimate country's legal framework could do so, and, in the case of the US, rebellion is specifically outlawed in the Constitution -- Article III, Section 3, under Treason: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

If you declare that you need guns to battle against the government, you are not protecting your rights under the 2nd Amendment; you are actually declaring your intent to betray your country. Perhaps it's time to empty the prisons of drug criminals so we can fill them up anew with traitors.

Impressing People Who Can't Do Math

I got an e-mail with this message in it some days ago, and it rolled up in my inbox until I had time to properly focus scorn upon it.

Oooh! I'm one of the top twenty million profiles! Let me drop everything and start celebrating.

If your marketing communications assume that your customers can't do basic math, you're doing it wrong.

The Rare Obligatory Political Post

Or, A brief jeremiad aimed at people who agree with Hobby Lobby and the various other companies jumping on their bandwagon.

For those who haven't been following the news, first a chain of profitable craft stores, and now a whole slew of other organizations, are claiming that they shouldn't have to pay for some of the health-care requirements of the Affordable Care Act [1] (aka "Obamacare") because it interferes with their religious freedom.

I know the religious freedom card is one with powerful sentiment, particularly among the kind of white middle-class Christians who have never had to suffer the tiniest bit of actual persecution in their lives, but please do think through the implications.

This is a private company -- not a religious institution, not a non-profit, not any kind of specialized organization, but a plan ordinary company trying to make money -- that wants to enshrine in law a right to avoid following a particular piece of law. And the basis of that right to skip out on a law would be their own interpretation of the personal religious beliefs of the owners. Logically, there's no reason why the same argument couldn't be extended to any company -- or any individual, since a company is a legal person just as a natural person is -- and any law.

In other words, Hobby Lobby is trying to make it impossible for any laws to be enforced at all if anyone can think up a pseudo-religious explanation for wanting not to follow that law. This is literally a prescription for anarchy.

Look, think of even this mild extension of the doctrine: what about a company run by Christian Scientists? They don't believe in modern medicine at all, so does that mean that company should be free to avoid paying any health-care coverage?

This is just a stupid legal argument. Admit it, give it up, and move on. Your side has comprehensively lost the battle against contraception, and the tide is just not going to shift back the way you want it.


[1] Specifically, the requirement that employers cover FDA-approved contraception for female employees, which Hobby Lobby and its lik say they consider abortion. This is actually one of the core issues: this case is based on what they consider a procedure to be, not what the general understanding or the actual scientific facts of that procedure are. In other words, they're demanding that their faith be given preferential legal treatment, because it is their belief.

(inspired by this Chuck Asay cartoon, which I couldn't manage to make work for Editorial Explanations, since it's not even wrong)

The Lack of Context Should Protect Me

Look, nimrod, your Annual Meeting cannot, by definition, be "an unprecedented event."

And if you're a group of smart people, you know that already, and have no excuses.