Tom's LiveJournal

It snowed here last night, the second time this week. There is some dude outside trying to shovel the sidewalk with a garden rake.

One could get the impression that the English are not accustomed to this type of weather.

So it turns out that Barack Obama is just another politician. Disappointing, but not entirely surprising. Voting for the FISA bill was probably the most politically expedient thing to do, because now we won't be inundated with "Barack Obama voted to protect the terrorists" ads this fall. Instead we're left with a candidate who lied to us, and then tried to explain it away by treating us like idiots. Great.

Yet another "robotic exoskelton could be used by the soldiers of tomorrow" article on CNN, but this one has an alarming quote at the end:

"It takes no special training, beyond learning to relax and trust the robot," he said.

...

"relax and trust the robot"

...

"trust the robot"

...

You fools, you've killed us all.

I've noticed a marked decrease in the amount of spam that I get. I used to get about 500 spam emails a day, and now I only get about 200. None of this actually matters because my anti-spam software catches about 99.9% of it, but I am curious what caused the huge drop.

At some point, someone is going to have to resolve the fact that operating systems and hard drive manufacturers use different definitions of a kilobyte.

Right now, because we work in GB, we generally see a number in the OS that is 7% smaller than the number on the hard drive. Pretty soon we'll be working in TB and that number will be 10% smaller. I wish the OS would just use 1KB = 1000 bytes when showing anything to the user. I can understand why, under the hood, the OS uses powers of two, but why the hell should I care about that? All I want to be able to do is look at a file size in bytes and know whether it will fit on a drive for which Windows tells me the free space in GB. Right now I have to do a quick approximation in my head, or open up more screens to get the free space in bytes, and that is annoying.

Here is a statistic I find absolutely stunning:

"...there are 24 unoccupied homes for every homeless person in the United States."

See here for the numbers and analysis.

I know that by now it's kind of passe to talk about what we could have spent the >$500 billion that the Iraq war has cost, which comes to about $660,000 per homeless person. This means we could have easily given every homeless person in the U.S. shelter, treatment for drug abuse, medical, and psychological problems, and government-sponsored employment.

"our economic crisis is, at its core, a housing crisis."

Do Clinton and her economic advisors actually believe this? I doubt it, so why not just tell us the truth? I would think that populist policies that protect citizens from the greed-driven machinations of the shadow banking sector would be an easier sell than policies that bail out the super-wealthy with taxpayer money after they make bad decisions.

We had an earthquake here last night. At around 12:55 the house shook for a second or two, and we both thought "that felt like an earthquake, but this is England." I wasn't really expecting to feel any more of them after leaving Los Angeles, but I guess they are fairly common here, just not strong enough to really feel. This one hit about 60 miles North of Cambridge, and I think it was about the same strength as the only one I felt in L.A., but it didn't last as long.

Thanks, federal government, for the $600. It will be split evenly between the Sierra Club, the ACLU and the EFF. I wonder what percentage of that $160bn will end up in China and Taiwan.

Crumpets are English muffins. The more you know.

It's official. Mitt Romney is no longer running for President. He is running for the office of Dictator. His responses to this survey are frightening.

Today is a good day. Russ Feingold and Christopher Dodd are true patriots, and Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller (both "Democrats") are self-serving traitors. Not surprisingly the CNN article is missing some key facts, not the least of which is that the administration had at least attempted to execute its illegal wiretapping program well before September 11.

This bill, the details of which have gotten basically zero coverage in the mainstream media, is one of the most important political debates of our time. It is a question of whether our government is made up of three equal branches, or an all-powerful executive, and it is a question of whether breaking the law has consequences. I think another good question is this: if you had to be afraid of something, which would you rather be afraid of - foreign terrorists, or your own government?

New Delhi has begun to crack down on its monkey menace: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/14/india.monkeys/index.html . I'm not sure why the saga of New Delhi's monkey trouble is so amusing to me. I think its because I envision the monkeys as a bunch of malcontents that harass passers-by as they go about their business, trying not to make eye contact. Also, I imagine the news stories being read aloud by Norm Macdonald.

If, like me, you weren't clear on how a couple hundred billion dollars worth of bad mortgages could affect entire financial markets in multiple countries, then look no further than the videos in this How the World Works post on Salon. Like all good news sources, it is both informative and amusing.

The next post describes the next financial doomsday scenario, where people do the same retarded shit but with catastrophic insurance policies instead of mortgages. I mean, what could go wrong, right?

This (final) article from Sydney Blumenthal on Salon does an excellent job of explaining what the Republican party now stands for. It has changed from the party of conservative isolationism into the party of unlimited executive power wielded in the service of righteousness.

The thing I find truly fascinating is that most people who call themselves Republicans, and vote for Republican candidates, don't understand that this is what they are voting for. They would claim they are voting for fiscal responsibility, traditional values, smaller government, lower taxes, and free markets. But the Republican party hasn't been about those ideas for decades. They still claim to be, but an examination of their record from Nixon onwards proves that to be false. Republicans who actually hold and act on some ore most of these values, such as Ron Paul, are branded as kooky radicals.

My point is that we've reached a situation where we have to assume that any statement from a politician contains at best no information, and at worst purposely misleading information (i.e. lies). The only way to know who you're voting for is to completely ignore what they say and what they promise, and look at what they've done.

This goes for both parties. In New York and California, Democrats managed to elect neocons-in-disguise Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein is a key Bush ally in the Senate who routinely tips the balance in favor of limitless executive power and lawlessness. Apparently she didn't learn from Lieberman who was basically booted from the party for the same kind of neocon-enabling behavior.

I just wanted to make sure this didn't slip by:

A deputy mayor of Delhi was killed when he was hurled from his balcony by a pack of wild monkeys. Apparently Delhi has a monkey menace problem. There is no way I can imagine this without it being a scene from The Simpsons.

KITTEN! Maya wasn't too happy at first, but she seems to be OK about it now.

Today I got up at 7am so that I could join some people from my ultimate team for a 7:30 run and workout. I've never been actually serious about this game before, but I'm going to give this a try. Presumably in a few months I'll be able to run 50 miles and be totally ripped and and also awesome.

I not exactly sure how to feel about this.

Awesome fact I learned today: in addition to the whole imperial vs. metric thing, a gallon here is actually different than a gallon in the US.

It's kind of amazing how quickly a day can go by even though I don't have anything I actually have to be doing. It's also kind of amazing when you find an 8-foot tall Lego man floating in the ocean.