A prime example of that can be seen by considering the abandoned building at 11th Avenue E. and Pine St. in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. For over a decade it’s been disused for any purpose save for those of bill-posters. It’s typically covered in ads for upcoming music performances and whatnot.
Well, about a month ago, a group called Grrrl Army decided to appropriate that space for their own. It was a wonderful action which provided a glimpse of what a world where advertising is used to challenge people to become better individuals, instead of simply to turn a profit, could be like:
11th and Pine, before censorship.
This was arguably vandalism, but then again, so was the postering of every available vertical street-facing surface on this structure, which to reiterate has been tolerated for a decade or more. But, it’s postering with a political meaning (as opposed to postering to encourage people to spend money). We can’t have that!
The building’s owners saw to promptly erect a fence to prevent any such further defilement of their precious dilapidated eyesore from happening again:
11th and Pine, after censorship.
What’s particularly amusing about this is that the structure, post-Grrrl Army action, was far more attractive than it had been in years. The unified effect of everything being the same basic color scheme made it look significantly better than the disorganized collection of advertising which it had previously borne. It’s not just me who thinks so, either: a number of my friends volunteered the same opinion.
It seems as if one of my recent posts has attracted the attention of search engines, probably because in relating how I solved a Macintosh frustration, the information has proved helpful to others.
So far, so good. The bad news is that’s attracted the attention of spammers. No, they’re not getting any spam posted: I have several lines of defense against that. But they are getting through the first line of defense: the captcha on the comments form.
They’re probably doing that with the free porn scam, in which one writes some back-end software to impersonate a browser (not hard to do; I’ve done so many times for legitimate purposes), and presents the captcha image to someone who wants to be rewarded by viewing some porn for free if they solve it. The front-end that displays the porn then passes on the solution to the back-end, which uses the information to send back a form response containing the spam.
It’s a pretty minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless. Maybe I’ll get motivated to go through my server logs and start reporting them to those responsible for the IP addresses the requests are coming from.
Note to all: avoid iTunes videos that you must pay for like the plague.
I had been wanting to watch some Portlandia episodes , and last night tried to with iTunes video. Big, big mistake. After charging me $2.99 and commencing the download, iTunes sneeringly informed me that I could not watch said video on my computer, and then launched into a paragraph of arcane technobabble that even I could not understand at first.
Apparently, some lame copy-protection scheme mandated by the Hollywood studios considers all but a select few Macs a piracy threat, presumably because the digital video signal going between the system unit and the monitor could be used to create a decrypted, free copy of the video.
Of course, that’s no excuse for iTunes’ bait-and-switch behavior. iTunes could obviously tell if the system it was running on was unacceptable to Hollywood (hence the message); there’s no reason whatsoever for not sending it before you pay for a video and start the download. None except pure greed on Apple’s part, that is.
While researching the issue, I came across a comment in passing that mentioned BitTorrent and pirated copies of videos. A light went on. I downloaded BitTorrent, downloaded an AVI video player, typed in a few Google keywords, and within a matter of minutes BitTorrent was merrily downloading the content Apple had previously defrauded me for. Content which actually played.
And the BitTorrent download proceeded far faster than the iTunes download had. Just for yucks, I tried it again with another episode and that one arrived promptly and without issue, too.
Way to go Apple and Hollywood: you’ve successfully made it so difficult and risky for customers to pay for content that they opt for the easier option of pirating it instead.
And that’s that the ill-considered initiative measure to privatize liquor sales in Washington State is certain to increase prices. The Establishment media is at this late hour, one week before the state liquor stores close for good, starting to feebly offer the caution that prices “might” go up.
Really, now, how couldn’t they? One of the measure’s selling points, trumpeted by its advocates, was that it would not reduce revenues to the state; the legislation was crafted to be revenue neutral. And capitalists are capitalists: in the retail liquor business, as in any business, the goal of business is to make a profit.
So, the state is still making its profit. To that picture, we now add capitalists taking their cut. Just where is that money going to come from? Does anyone honestly think the new for-profit liquor stores are going to harvest C-notes from a secret orchard of money trees and make their money that way? This is not rocket science we are talking about.
Sure, some of it is going to come from union-busting and pushing worker pay down. But that can only go so far. The advocates of paying workers less always overestimate the profits for owners that this will generate.
In short, prices will go up. It’s as close a thing to a future certainty that a simple economic analysis can predict.
My new apartment is an a ZIP code that is very ethnically and economically diverse. There’s areas that are in a historically low-income, majority-minority neighborhood, and there’s areas (not far away) which are thoroughly bourgeois, where palatial homes enjoy sweeping lake and mountain views.
It seems this diversity is allowing me to get a glimpse into how con artists prey on the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Witness the very strange junk mail I received from the so-called “St. Matthew’s Churches” of Tulsa, OK (complete with a cheesy paper “prayer rug” that I’m supposed to have a spiritual experience with because of an optical illusion about Jesus’ eyes opening), promising financial riches to all who send in their prayers.
I never realized how completely they were until I started studying the things. I mean, sure, they’re a racket because those of us with relatively more money can more easily defer present consumption in the name of savings than those who spend all their income on essentials. They’re classist, in other words. But it goes beyond that.
My new employer offers them as an option, and I thought they might be useful for the things that insurance does not cover. That is, I thought they might be useful until I started reading the fine print: once they have your money, you will never get it back. You either spend it on health care within an appointed period of time (no rollover allowed), or you lose it. Entirely.
You thought the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition were pure TV fantasy? Think again. Ferengi Rule No. 1: Once you have their money, never give it back. Sound familiar?
To that bit of nastiness we can add how there are multiple health-care savings plans, all complex, and all differing in complex ways. It’s as awful as health insurance plans themselves: those offering the plans deliberately make them complex so as to make it impossible to hold all the details in one’s mind at once and make a proper comparison between different options.
There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet
Looks more like a whole new world of social parasitism on the part of the capitalist class to me.
What value to society does this produce? None, so far as I can see. For the sake of this discussion, let’s be generous to capitalists and take their claim of financial markets being the most efficient way to raise capital at face value. Market forces which are said to work just fine at time scales that humans can perceive (in fact, that’s the scale that all the economic analyses capitalism fans cite as evidence in favor of the utility of such markets work on). There is absolutely no need to go beyond that, and going beyond that consumes labor and resources that could be devoted to producing genuine value.
In fact, by making it more difficult for humans to understand financial markets, such trading actually destroys value, so it is indeed nothing but wasteful social parasitism. There’s actually an effective reformist measure that would put a swift end to it: having a tax on the value of every financial transaction, as France is proposing to do. That would be harmless to long-term investing but take an onerous bite out of short-term trading frenzies.
The question is if and whether it will happen. Those who run markets are sufficiently in the laissez faire mindset that it is ideologically inconvenient for them to be able to see how market forces have naturally evolved in such a way as to destroy value, and to admit the need for intervention to correct this. On the other hand, capitalists have, when presented with the choice between ideological purity and either profit maximization or self-preservation, tended to consistently choose the latter over the former.
After the strikers in Longview made it clear that they were willing to ignore the Establishment’s laws if management also was (it’s a little thing called contract breach), and after they were planning to escalate the confrontation further by inviting the Occupy movement to take place, suddenly the Establishment started to get interested in honoring that existing union contract.
Not because it was the honorable thing to do, mind you, but because they were starting to see how failing to do so was going to end up costing them more than agreeing to do so.
So it has always been: if you look at the times when the Establishment has passed reforms that blunt the fangs of capitalism, it has always been during times when there has been growing radical sentiment: the Progressive Era happened when the IWW and the early Socialist Party were going strong (and it’s main exponent, Teddy Roosevelt, got into the White House because his predecessor was assassinated by an anarchist), the New Deal happened at the height of the Communist Party, USA (why do you think it was so easy for Senator McCarthy to find so many people who had attended Communist Party meetings?), and the Civil Rights era in the Sixties also happened against a groundswell of radical movements.
And indeed, it’s also why the Establishment media tries as hard as possible to smear the Occupy movement by continually focusing on its problems. They know what forces them to kick down concessions, and they don’t want to have to do that.
So, Americans are borrowing more and this “could be a sign that Americans are more confident in the economy”. Of course, the very next sentence contains the catch: “consumers are also borrowing more and saving less at a time when their wages haven’t kept pace with inflation.”
In other words, it’s the same old capitalist Ponzi scheme that’s been playing out since the 1970s: declining unionization, stagnant or declining wages, and increased debt taking the place of increased wages when it comes to consumer spending.
Maybe the capitalists will again figure out how to make it last a few years before it collapses yet again, just like real estate and tech stocks did. Big deal. Anytime money is borrowed, it has to be paid back. This Ponzi scheme will collapse just like the previous ones did.
And each time the newest scheme collapses, it does so harder than the last collapse. So it will continue until either the capitalist class realizes that income inequality threatens the capitalist system itself, or the reemergence of class consciousness prompts the ruled to successfully rebel against their rulers.
Since we’re nowhere near either point at the present time, expect the boom/bust cycle to go through at least one more iteration.
Really, it’s amazing how crappy computer keyboards generally are. I was just at Fry’s getting the capacitor I’m going to try replacing, and had a chance to try out their keyboard selection.
The dominant “rubber dome” technology provides absolutely horrible tactile feedback: the electrical action takes place after the main mechanical action that one feels. Therefore, the only recourse if you want to type quickly is to bang on the keyboard like crazy, to ensure each key stroke hits home and causes a character to be entered. This causes fingers to get much more tired than they need to, because one is exerting on average far more force than one needs.
The only keyboard technologies that provided proper tactile feedback were ones made using IBM’s “buckling spring” technology (which I think is the best), and some mechanical keyswitches (which can get pretty darn good, too). Every subsequent technology has had no advantages for the user whatsoever: the only advantages newer keyboard technologies have has been for the manufacturer’s drive to cut costs.
What astounds me is not that the cheapest keyboards feel like crap (one would expect that, you’re getting pure “dollar engineering”), but how many keyboards with $100-and-up price tags (even ones advertised as “ergonomic”) also felt like complete crap when I tried them. Making a fancy curving layout so one’s hands can be held at a natural angle but using a technology that forces (at the cost of failing to enter the random character) users to use unnecessary force is like having a restaurant that serves a turd as dessert, but frosts it elegantly in icing and serves it on a sterling plate.
The only keyboards that weren’t absolute crap were two models by Razer geared towards the gamer crowd. While spendy, they were still less expensive than many of the crappy ones.
