First, it turns out that the apartment I rented on the coast was in a building where a majority of the tenants smoked like chimneys, despite it being advertised as “no smoking.” Then, I learn that my telecommuting job is going to completely evaporate in a month. So much for the move to the coast.
I am going to somewhat salvage something from it, though. I’m planning on spending a month in a rented room in Astoria, to escape the Portland grass pollen season.
(This development is over a week old, but I really haven’t had any time to write about it here until today.)
First, it’s unlikely the government would lie about Osama Bin Laden being dead, not because governments are intrinsically honest and trustworthy, but because they don’t like being made to look like utter fools. Which is precisely what the US Government would look like if they lied about Bin Laden being dead, only to have him release yet another videotape with a taunting message.
It’s more likely (at least in the theoretical sense) that Bin Laden was killed some time ago and the announcement was made only recently, calculated for a boost in the polls. There’s no risk of an embarrassing videotape coming out if the lie simply is about the time of death, not about the death per se.
Theoretically. Practically speaking, that’s unlikely, too. If the announcement about the time of his death was a lie, it’s embedded in a curiously poor lie to tell. The whole story about his being killed by a military operation in Pakistan proves embarrassing and inconvenient for the US government’s relationship with its Pakistani counterpart. Why tell such an awkward lie, when a much less awkward one can be fabricated just as easily?
I suppose it’s conceivable that an awkward lie was deliberately chosen so as to make the lie more credible, but I really don’t think the ruling elite is all that smart in its plans. Despite the lack of hard evidence, the simplest explanation really does appear to be that Bin Laden was actually killed by Navy SEALs earlier this week.
A much more interesting question is to wonder just why he was killed. Was it deliberately planned to be a “kill mission” (a stupid plan; see next paragraph)? Was he really acting threateningly (that’s increasingly doubtful, based on how accounts now say he was unarmed when he was killed)? Or (probably the most likely, in my opinion), did a servicemember pumped up and high on adrenalin (and really, it would be hard not to be in a combat situation) just pull the trigger without really thinking?
Regarding a deliberately-planned assassination, it’s generally pointless to use more violence than necessary to achieve a goal. Arresting the guy, interrogating him, and putting him on trial would have neutralized the threat he poses just as well. Better, in fact, since there was always the chance he would have spilled some valuable beans during interrogation.
Some of it pretty stereotypical in light of what Middle America thinks of anarchism, some of it somewhat better:
That is what the “will they open the Morganza Floodway or won’t they” story the media has been parroting has amounted to.
Really now, was there ever any doubt that it would be opened? Let’s see now: flood a bunch of rural land which has been pre-designated to be a sacrifice area, or let the two biggest cities in Louisiana (one of which is the nation’s busiest port) flood? Once it was clear there was enough water headed downstream to make that the choice (and it was), anyone with half a brain could figure out what the obvious response was going to be.
And yes, they are flooding a designated sacrifice area. That’s what designating it as a “floodway” means. Anyone who owns property there or who lives there gets a yearly reminder letter from the Army Corps of Engineers saying it may someday be necessary to do… well, pretty much just what is being done right now. And by the way, the farmland that the Corps deliberately flooded to save Cairo, IL from flooding? That was a designated floodway, too.
Both areas have been designated as such for decades. Anyone who lived there and/or owned property there knew about it, and was free to move and/or sell if they were unwilling to run the risk of being in a designated floodway.
It’s still terrible news for those being flooded, of course. What I have said cannot change that. But it does put the story into context, especially with all the clueless whining about how the government is playing God and ruining people’s lives by suddenly deciding to flood them out of house and home.
The little setback with respect to my plans to telecommute from the Long Beach Peninsula has not changed my broader goal of leaving Portland this year, and since both my job and my current housing situation in Portland are evaporating soon, the time to leave is now.
I plan on spending about six weeks in Astoria. I need to do that for health insurance reasons: I cannot leave Oregon until I have coverage in place in Washington. Plus, I have always wanted to live on the coast, and the reality of high-tech job market means that this is the only sort of chance I can expect to have to do so. Then I’m moving on to Seattle. The latter is far from an ideal location, yet at this time is probably the best practical one.
As such, I’ve been doing a lot of packing this week. Moreover, I have also been revisiting the same emotional space I was in when I was making my exit from the Bay Area a little more than a decade ago. Now, like then, I’m making a move completely because I want to, not because I have any immediate job on the line. Now, like then, I have this sense of contentment that what had proven to be a misstep in life is about to be corrected. It’s a good emotional space to be in.
In brief, because so many of them are full of bogus questions, such as the one I got asked today:
Name the two ways of monitoring a file as data is appended to it.
I got one of the two answers (tail -f). It turns out there’s an option to the less command that also does this. But really, who cares? How is this even slightly relevant to the need to ensure a candidate knows how to do this task? The one command I know works just fine. (Why should I waste my limited memory on something superfluous?)
I try to point this out to the interviewer, only to be presented with the objection that tail does not automatically pause after every screenful of output like less does. I explained that if I needed such behavior, I would just pipe the output of tail -f to more (as in fact I have done many times in the past). I could tell from the tone of her voice that she did not consider my answer acceptable.
So I’ve just been screened out from a job I’m probably completely qualified for, just because I can’t answer some stupid trivia question that’s irrelevant to anything that job might involve. Charming.
Monthly Index for 2011 |
Index of Years