FreeMoneyFinance.com is one of my favorite blogs, financially speaking. But each Sunday it has it’s “The Bible and Money” piece, some I enjoy others just annoy me, such as this weeks. This weeks has to do with how the “Lord’s Way” for charity is better then the “Governments Way”. While it has some good points, I had to post a comment, which is reproduced below.
Being at the tail end of the Primary season, my state doesn’t often hold sway over who gets to be a Presidential contender. That’s changed with the turn of the primary wheel. This time my state might actually get to vote between two contenders for the Democratic ticket. Then again, Clinton may drop out after tonight’s close race in Indiana and massive loss in North Carolina. But if she doesn’t, then Oregon will actually be watched by the politics junkies.
But all this got me thinking about the primary process. Is it really a fair system for both the states and the candidates? As it stands now, Iowa clears out a lot of the no-names that are in the game. Then the other early states finish off the rest. At most it’s gone to Super Tuesday and from that point on it’s all pretense for the remaining states. We know who is going to be the nominee and those states left just go through the motions of holding a primary.
Is that fair to the candidates? Why should Iowa be the first state to vote? Why not let Guam vote first or Florida? Or why not let every state vote on the same day. Give every candidate a chance and every state a voice?
Lars Larson, who I’m not a big fan of, proposed a 24-hour period in which every state, starting at 6am EST, votes. At 6am the following day, the polls close. One day to make a decision, to be heard, to be nominated. It seems perfectly reasonable. I’d vote for it if given the chance.
I’d also vote for a random system. After each primary season the Democratic and Republican parties get together and draw states from the proverbial hat to establish the order in which the next primary season is done. Dates of the actual primaries could be evenly distributed (2 or 3 a week maybe). Each Tuesday would be another set of states voting. Then everything becomes equal. Oregon could still end up on the tail end or it could be among the first. Iowa could be in the middle or at the end, sitting there with California.
Then again, this all seems to reasonable, to tradition breaking. And politicians love their traditions. I makes things predictable.
One of the selling points for new product releases are the new features, to the benefit of products or not (*cough*, Microsoft Office, *cough*). These new capabilities give the user a reason to upgrade and a way for the company to continue their revenue stream. For me, if the the added features give me nothing I want, I don’t upgrade (*cough*, Microsoft Vista, *cough*.), which of course does nothing for the company.
Fully aware of this, companies offer discounts on loyal customers, giving them the chance to buy upgrades at a discount. It’s win (customer), sorta win (company). The company may not get the full purchase price, but they do get some money, via a pseudo-subscription model.
Which brings me to the subscriber model. For years some companies have tried to move to the subscriber model for their software. Microsoft would love it if they could get you to buy a cheaper subscription version of Office that expires after a year unless you cough (maybe I should get that cough checked out) up the subscription fee. As long as you are a “loyal customer” you have access to all the features of Office. Once you become disloyal, buy not paying the for the subscription, they shut down access to the software (and potentially your data). It’s a model that customers have generally disliked and it’s a model that smaller businesses have generally avoided because of the hassle it could bring up (server maintance, license management, etc.).
But in some models it makes sense. Spanning Sync follows one of these models. For those unfamiliar, it is a service that has a client side app that connects to a server that in turn connects to Googles Calandar , syncing between Googles server and your local copy of iCal. It makes sense to provide it as a service. Google could change their APIs or add new ones. Instead of pushing a new client down to the customers with every single Google change, Spanning Sync (the company) changes the server software and transparently the clients have access to the new features. All the customer has to do is be a current subscriber to get these changes. It’s a software I subscribe to and find incredibly useful.
Up until recently, this syncing has been limited between the Google Calander and iCal. With version 2.0 the software will offer syncing between the Google contact manager and OS X’s Address Book, a really neat feature that will be made available to new subscribers as part of the Spanning Sync software. Spanning Sync (the company) has been touting this as a free upgrade, but the thing is that it’s only free to current subscribers. As long as you are paying them, you get this free upgrade, which means it’s not really free, it’s just an added feature to your subscription that new subscriber would get for free anyway.
And there’s nothing wrong with the subscription model, but touting it as a “free to subscribers” is like Comcast saying the new channels that will be offered to new subscribers are a free upgrade to current subscribers. It’s not free, it’s a subscription.
My son has is gaining confidence in his ability to walk. He’s even starting to run a bit. Actually it’s just a faster walk, but he gets the idea of speed. He’s been working on this for some time, first pulling himself up, then hanging on to furniture as he walked, to full blown walking, albeit a bit wobbly. During his trials and errors, he’d do different things to try to get to his goal of walking.
At first it was the furniture, but that only allowed him to go where furniture was, normally on the periphery of the room. Then he discovered crawling, moving around on all fours, but that wasn’t how mommy and daddy moved and wasn’t very fast. Then he discovered he could push things while he stood and that allowed him to move upright. Each of these things contributed to his goal of walking in some form or another. But they weren’t the final goal.
I call them shiny baubles. They were things that, while distracting led him to his ultimate goal of walking. Some things he’d give up (holding on to dad’s pants didn’t last long), while others he integrated into his repertoire of abilities that helped him walk. Everything he was doing, everything he was trying was moving him towards a specific goal: walking.
As I watched him it got me thinking about upper level managers at my work. They are like my kid. They have big goals that they are trying to achieve. They have people working underneath them to help achieve those goals. Those people present different things that they think will help achieve that goal. The Manager makes the decision as to which to pursue, much like my son deciding on what works on getting him to his goal. Managers look at these things, these shiny baubles, and try to figure out what will help them accomplish their goal.
Sometimes these baubles are pursued for a while until the Manager decides it’s not working, not unlike my son deciding that daddy’s legs were not good at helping him walk. Sometimes something else comes up that’s so compelling that everything else is pushed to the wayside. The manager, while distracted by this new shiny bauble, is still driving towards their goal. That’s there job, just like it’s my sons job to lean how to walk.
I’m just glad they don’t have diapers that need changing. Some managers are full of shit.
In 2007, Crown Shakur died of starvation. His parents had fed him a vegan diet. Within hours headlines started popping up claiming veganism killed him. Nina Planck wrote a op-ed piece called “Death by Veganism” that attracted a lot of attention (myself included). Ultimately Crown’s death was the result of bad parenting and a bad diet, not that the diet was vegan. But the media loved the headline and for a week I kept finding stories about how veganism had killed Crown.
It’s now 2008 and another child has died because of a lifestyle choice. This time it was a choice of being Christian. Specifically a choice of using prayer as opposed to medicine to heal a child. In this case, Carl and Raylene Worthington are members of a fundamentalist Christian church called the Followers of Christ and believe in faith healing. It’s another sad death by bad parenting.
But here’s the thing, there isn’t much coverage about it going on. A search of CNN and Fox News failed to turn up anything, though MSNBC has a commentary on the affair, though it’s a critque of faith healing and not Christianity. Most of the coverage has been local, with the occasional article via the AP. I heard about it because I live in Oregon and it was mentioned on the morning news, but it’s not receiving the same attention the Crown’s death, despite this being the second reported case of death by prayer in as many months.
The fact is that most people in the U.S. eat meat and veganism is considered “weird”. Anything that confirms this will be held up by the pundents as proof of it’s weirdness. The fact is that most people in the U.S. are Christian, so anything that throws a shadow on it is ignored as anomalies.
In all of these unnecessary deaths, though, it’s not the lifestyle choice that killed the child, it’s the bad parents.
I’ve given up on social news site. Digg, reddit, they’ve all become a mish-mash of often hateful speech (remember “F*** You Texas”) or links to images often punctuated be “WTF”. I just can’t stand to have it polluting my RSS reader.
Really, though, it comes down to this: I’m getting old. I don’t have the time or patience to wade through the cruft to find the original, thought-provoking articles. It’s the same reason I abandoned Slashdot. To paraphrase Matthew Mcconaughey seminal Dazed character: I keep getting older, but the submitters stay the same age. I’ve taken Digg and reddit off my RSS feeds and have decided to stick with bloggers and sites that are edited.
It is often said that the Vice President is “One Heartbeat” away from the Presidency (they are also one scandal away, but that’s another story). While I don’t know if Senator Obama has the experience to be President, it’s a bit of a hypocritical position for Senator Clinton to float the idea of him as her running mate (as VP, of course) while simultaneously saying that he doesn’t have the experience needed to occupy the Office of the President. Either he has the experience to be the President or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t then he shouldn’t be the Vice President. I have to wonder if former Vice President Gore is seeing this as an insult to his skills if the Clinton’s view the Vice Presidential candidate as not good enough for the Presidency.
Years ago, I owned the domain MySquash.com after trying to find something interesting (I started with apricot). That domain lasted for about 2 years and then I abandoned it for samuraipanda.com because I realized it sounded pretty strange. Samuraipanda was a unique, mish-mash of cultures (Japanese and Chinese, respectively) that could create an image in peoples minds. It also had 12 characters in it, an intimidating domain length and one not easily fitted to most forms. But I stuck with it. Lately, though, I’ve been furstrated by it’s length. I’m using tools to auto-complete it for me on computers (AHK and TextExpander), but that still means I have to spell it out for others (”No, not …uri, …urAi. Yes, as in the sword guy. Panda…P.A.N.D.A…Panda. Yes, one word. .com… .COM”). And often it doesn’t fit in space afforded me on various forms (nothing like getting to the Panda and realizing you’re at the end of the page. “I’ll just put the .com underneath”). It’s a bit unwieldy.
So I started looking for smaller domains. Ideally it would be a word, but squatters have used dictionaries to grab all the good english names. I tried other languages. Most of the western languages that are easy for Americans to pronounce (much less spell) are also taken. Inspired by Ubuntu, I went African, but that’s like going Indian. There’s dozens of African languages and dialects. I did snag babayetu.com (Our Father, in Swahili), but it didn’t quite click (though it might still). It is 8 characters long though. A couple months ago I was reading up on Taoism and stumbled across the three virtues: Kindness, Simplicity, and Modesty. Taking the first two letters from each word, I snagged KiSiMo.com (.org, and .net). It was only 6 letters. I would have preferred humor instead of modesty, but kisiHo doesn’t sound right. Then today I was writing my status report and couldn’t remember my team name, so I put weoni (what ever our name is) as a place holder and thought “hmm, that’s an interesting domain possibility”. A quick jump to godaddy and I saw it was free. I promptly requested weoni .com, .org, and .net. A 5 letter domain name is a pretty good find, especially when you can say it out (We-Oh-Ni) and it sounds almost Native American. I could say it meant anything (”It’s Swahili for Great Lover. The Oh is for Oooohhhhh”). But I knew what it actually meant. And being the grammatical person that I am, it didn’t feel right. Was “What Ever” one or two words. I’d seen both (and generally used the singular version). A quick check of the web found this rule on bartleby.com:
“You can use either whatever or what ever in sentences”
I thought, cool, I’d gotten it right. But I continued reading to this line:
“However, you must use the one-word form when whatever is used as an adjective”
Damn.
I’d used it wrong. “What ever our name is” is incorrect. “Our Name” is the noun, “Whatever” is the adjective. The correct way to write it is “whatever our name is”, woni. And of course, like any pronounceable 4-letter domain, woni.com is taken. I doubt I’d want it. Is it pronounced Woo-Ni, Whan-I? The first is easly confused with who-ni and I don’t want to be clarifying it all the time (”Woo, not Who. No, not as in Doctor Who, Woo as in Woooo, like a ghost would make”). It’s the same reason I don’t use the word “chains” in a domain. It sounds too much like “change”.
I hate domain names. I’ll stick with samuraipanda.com for now. Twelve letter and all.
I received an email today from Lars Larson (I’m on his mailing list. I really shouldn’t listen to him when I work from home and send in email comments). Anyway, it was his endorsement of Mitt Romney for president. Actually it wasn’t so much an endorsement of the qualities of Romeny as the things he doesn’t like about McCain (who he calls Juan McCain). Among the things he hings he holds against McCain is limits on getting information to protect the US, e.g. not allowing torture. This got me a little irritated. Torture is a bit of a pet peev of mine, given that it only really works as a plot device in movies and TV shows. You put anyone under enough torture and you can get them to say anything. Drop Lars on a water board and in 5 minutes he’ll be praising Allah and the Gay Marriage Movement in the same, sputtered, breath.
So I sent him an email (which I completely bungled in editing of the first part so it doesn’t read well), which he responded with:
Yep. I do. if we have to torture a thousand terrorists to protect this country, it’s worth it
Of course this just pushes my buttons even more. A “thousand terrorists” could easily be 999 innocent people and 1 terrorist, but people like Lars Larson assume that those they believe are terrorists are going to be terrorists because they couldn’t be wrong. When you watch shows like 24, the protaganist is always doing what needs to be done on the people who have the information. They are never wrong about their assumptions, so their actions are justified (though I haven’t watch 24 in a couple of seasons). In the real world, people are wrong, so if even one innocent is tortured in the name of “protecting the country”, you have to ask yourself if you really want to live like that.
So I responded to his message with my stock response. How far was he willing to take the torture? We know that he’d physically torture, I’m sure he’d emotionally do it. I asked him if he was willing to play Russian Roulette with the kid of someone he labeled terrorist to get the information he “needed to protect this country”. Once you start down this path, it’s easy to take just one more step each time a “terrorist” is put in front of you. But it’s people like Lars Larson who don’t understand this. They sit there behind their microphone and call for any action necessary to protect this country not realizing that some of those actions are going to destroy what makes this country great.
Hopefully I don’t come off to adversarial.