Random Thoughts of a wing nut liberal

Mclatchy again scoops times post networks

2010-03-25T09:16:00.001-04:00

In the runup to the Iraq war, the McClatchy chain had the best reporting; here is another example of McClatchy scooping all the big boys.
the "individual mandate" (you have to buy health insurance, like car insurance) is a republican idea - yet the republicans have denounced this as a gross intrusion into personal liberty and states rights.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/24/1545524/individual-health-insurance-mandate.html

Grossest thing to share

2010-03-22T14:54:00.000-04:00

Toothbrush
Headphones for your MP3 player
Underwear or socks
Fingernail clipper

Microsoft excel and sub prime mortage mess

2010-03-06T01:14:00.001-05:00

calculating payments on a mortgage is very difficult to do by hand. In the old day, say pre 1970, before PCs or even calculators (when I went to college in the mid 70s, a simple 4 function calculator cost $100 - a lot of money back then) the way you looked up the payment for a mortgage was in thick heavy exspensive books.
Say someone wanted a mortgage for 30 years, 200K, 7.5% - you would look up the monthyl payment in the book.
, in the old days (say pre 1970) you couldn't calculate a mortage - you had to look it up in thick, expensive books, say the monthly payment on a 150K loan at 8.4 %
And if the book didn't have 35 years , you couldn't get a 35 year loan, cause the bank literally couldn't do the math

now we have excel.
It is well known to the math geeks that excel fails at elementary statistical aritmetic
which raises an interesting question: if excel can't do math right, and excel was used to calculate payments on complex sub prime mortgages, does that mean the mortgages are wrong and possibly illegal ?

Problems in the social sciences

2010-02-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

A frequent problem with social science experiments, like the taxicab in this one is that the experimenter asks people to do things that are far beyond their competance; in the taxicab experiment, the conclusion drawn by the professors requires the subjects to have an unusual amount of mathematical skill;
I think this experiment illustrates the poor lab skills of professors, not anything usefull about people in general

Do patents help innovation ?

2010-02-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

The problem with answering this question is that when a company has a patent, we hear about it, particularly if the patent leads to money.

However, we don't hear about all the cases where something did not happen, because action was blocked by a patent.
This is similar to the problem discovered a few years ago in how mutual funds were being portrayed; the success of funds was overstated because all the funds that failed were not included in the calculation ( survivorship bias, see wikipedia

In the biotech industry, one can certainly point to huge success stories driven by patents - Amgen and Erythropoietin; Genzyme; Cambridge Antibody Technologys.

However, in this area, one can also point to huge success stories that occured because of open availability, the absecne of patnets: 2hybrid, GFP.

Repulsive Baby Marketing

2010-02-13T14:43:00.002-05:00

Time magazine, inside of the back cover,Feb 22
A photo of the actress Rebecca Romijn and her twins hawking milk. Aside from the fact that we eat way to much fat and protein (where do you think all that obesity and heart disease comes from) and that cows are an ecological disaster on par with Chevy Suburbans (because you grow grain, and then convert the grain to beef; if you fed the grain to people, you get a lot more calories in)
However, what is the real problem ?

Look at the "diaper" on one of the twins - it is a white, hand knitted thing
What wackjob spends that kind of money on a diaper ?
And Ms Romijn (not shown below) is holding two babies wearing some white lace top thingy that probably cost enough to feed a village in haiti for a week
for those of you who don't have babies, they throw up and spit up and generally behave in a manner that makes wearing exspensive clothes, let alone white expensive clothes, a really bad idea

ps: clothes probably from here one of the most obnoxious web sites ever

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PR sleaze at WGBH, Public TV Channel 2 in Boston

2010-02-13T10:02:00.002-05:00

WGBH, home of sesame street, publishes a "members magazine" called explore ! (no shit, they actually have the exclamation point )
The Feb 2010 issue has a picture of two of WGBH's female news persons - Emily Rooney and Callie Crossley.
Now for the sleazy part: the picture of Ms. Rooney has been airbrushed to remove 20 years; she looks like a 30 something.

When you see Ms Rooney on her show, I would say she looks to be in her 60s
Anyway you slice it, reality is taking a hit at 'GBH

Although it is hard to imagine that a magazine from WGBH, with it's liberal members who drive Chevy suburban with ecology group stickers, is not printed on recycled paper from sustainability managed forests, with organic heirloom soybean soy ink, I can't find the any indication in the magazine - maybe they saved ink not printing that little bit of info.

Course, the main role of PBS is to salvage the rep of for profit companies after they do bad. Get convicted ? Just buy some time on the mcneill lehrer snooze hour to repair your image (Archer Daniel Midlands is the poster child for this).
I mean, they carry ads from Car Companies touting green automobiles. Thats like a fun prision; private cars, are, by definition, evil and destructive, and probably the most damaging thing you can do to our planet is buy and use a personal automobile (although, to be fair, the latte sipping WGBH members take that challenge seriously, what with the enormous vacation homes they build in the country side, our current MA Gov, the Honorable Deval Patrick, wasted the coutnry side of western MA to build some obscenely huge cabin...)

Henry Kissinger

2010-02-06T10:53:00.002-05:00

Prominent in American Foreign Policy during the Vietnam war Wikipedia.
Lets see what that really means.

You are a vietnamese farmer, sleeping in your little hut with your wife and infant. An American warplane "accidentally" drops some napalm on your village.
Napalm is jellied gasoline, and has an interesting property: it can burn through the human body
So, when you think of Doctor Kissinger, think of those Vietnamese parents, watching the infant burn.
And I have just one question: which is worse, the smell of burning flesh, or the screams of your infant, as the napalm burns through the body.

Is the US more charitable then other countries ?

2010-02-06T10:45:00.002-05:00

Among the rightwacks, it is accepted that the US is more charitable then any other country (we give more dollars per capita to charity). And, our charity is morally superior; whereas other countrys give charity only under gov’t compulsion (taxes) we give charity voluntarily, to private organizations.
I would say this argument is ass backwards, as follows:

1) we should measure charity by results, not dollars. E.g., in the Jewish tradition, helping widows and orphans is the highest form of charity. Thus, we should rank countrys by some scale such as childhood hunger, childhood medical care, etc.
a. by this scale, I would bet that the us does not do well; we all know that our childhood mortality rate is terrible

2) It seems to me that recognizing charity as an obligation, and meeting this obligation in a manner that ensures compliance – by paying high taxes – is morally superior to meeting this obligation in a voluntary manner by making donations to private groups.

3) In the Jewish tradition, anonymous charity is morally superior to non anonymous charity; hence paying taxes to support the social safety net is morally superior to giving money to a charity that recognizes you (the charity in things like “walks” where one solicits money from friends and family to get paid so much per mile walked is particularly offensive to the jewish tradition)

4) What do the dollars given in the US go for ? In many cases, “charity” is not charity, but the wealthy taking care of themselves with tax avoidance mechanisms, or Veblin style consumption, eg, look at salarys in the”non profit sector:
a. The Ford Foundation, which is one-third the size of the Gates Foundation in assets, paid its president, Luis A. Ubinas, $718,084, and vice president, Linda Strumpf, $1,113,590.
b. James Mongan, chief executive of Partners HealthCare System in Boston, with compensation of $2.7 million in 2008, a 99 percent increase over his 2007 pay.
c. Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, with compensation of $2.1 million in 2008, more than twice his 2007 pay, plus a housing allowance worth $336,000.

Source
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thebusinessofgiving/2009959059_gates_foundation_pays.html

Two Suggestions for Gov. Deval Patrick, Dem. MA

2010-02-05T15:56:00.003-05:00

1) forget the stem cell stuff and go electronic.
Some day, in the distant future, after expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars, stem cells may help someone, and the stem cell industry MAY employ a small number of people, and the stem cell industry MAY have revenue that results in tax dollars for the state.

But it is a risky bet; stem cells may in fact just sputter along in the non profit research lab (no tax revenue for the state at the university) for the next 10 or 20 years, employing a relatively small number of people. Just look at gene therapy, or antisense RNA, the wonder technologys of the 1980s (!) and 1990s, both still struggling to find a real role in the world.
Rather then put state money on the stem cell bandwagon, MA should be the home of the electronic body part: go electronic !! For example, implantable insulin pumps are already here; a little improvment, well within our technological grasp, you won't need stem cells for diabetics.
Ditto for electronic hearts, or electronic eyes; those products WILL be here - it is not a speculative gamble like stem cells, but a near certaintly, and the state that has the electronic body part industry will have thousands of good paying jobs, whith lots of tax revenue, long before stem cells get out of the RnD lab.
Not only will electronics results in real products faster, which will result in real jobs and real tax revenues, but we will have less competition; while our natural biotech competitors, like CA, are competing with each other, chasing the stem cell will o' the wisp, we will have less competition for electronic body parts.

2) Go linux. Every day, the state and local Gov'ts, and public shools of MA spend huge amounts of money on software - money that goes largely out of state; all the Windows and Office programs are MA tax dollars going to Redmond , WA.
The govenor should announce that all state computers will run only LINUX and "open source" programs.
And what will happen if we do this ?
First, we will save lots of money that is now going almost all to out of state compnaies, and enriching CA and WA; great places, but it is not the job of the goverment of MA to enrich other states.
Second, we will take all that money and promptly spend it on consultants to help confused state employees with the new software. But at least these consultants will be MA tax payers.

But the real payoff comes when other states and towns and school system see that we have a better way to do software, and that we are saving lots of money. From all over the world, schools and cities and states will come to MA and hire all those consultants (who got trained on state tax dollars) to setup LINUX open soure software.
MA will become the world center of the software industry; thousands of good paying, non polluting jobs.

A liberal admires and loathes rush limbaugh

2010-02-03T19:41:00.004-05:00

as an uber liberal, I admire rush - he is hardworking, entertaining, and very good at what he does; I imagine that walter winchell was like that.
Of course, he is pretty loathsome; it is not that he says things that arent' true, but he is completely shameless in implication; recently he has been blasting Obama and Pelosi for things setup by bush - miranda rights to terrorists (bush/shoebomber) and special plane trips for Pelosi (speakr of the house #2 in sucession , after 9/11 bush hastert setup a private plane policy)

Liberals and rush-haters in general make the mistake of attacking rush on the facts, like the preceding paragraph in this blog. But that is beside the point; rush isn't, at heart, about facts, he is about people who feel, in some way, powerless or mad or something; people like that will twist facts to suit their world view. It's like the old joke, how do you tell a paranoid person they are crazy ? That is the rush audience: even if rush were to go live on TV and renounce his prev life, and say he was now aliberal, the rush lovers would simply say he had something implanted in his brain;

the other amusing thing abut rush is that he represents the petit bourgoisie, exactly in a marxian class based way; he is for the small shop keeper who resents unemployment tax...

Today rush with the entire right wing nutosphere was going on about Obama's comment that you shouldn't spend your college money in Vegas
?What kind of moron would argue with that >

Obama state of hte union 28 Jan 2010

2010-01-28T13:11:00.005-05:00

Last night, Wensday 27 Jan 2010, President Obama delivered his state of the union (SOTU) speech.

The actual speech differs from the prepared transcript in several ways, and many webpages don't indicate that they have the outdated, prepared transcript, as opposed to a transcipt based on the actual speech

A transcript of the actual speech, here ,includes this statement

"But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country."
No dollar figure is given for funding of wind/solar

However, the prepared transcript from the whitehouse, here ,does not contain the statement about clean nukes, but does have a figure for wind/solar - 20 billion, a piddling amount.

Sadly, Obama once again demonstrates that he is smart, but not intelligent; funding clean nukes over wind/solar is just dumb.

why is there nothing to buy, despite a plethora of stores ?

2010-01-27T18:11:00.004-05:00

Countless stores, acres of floor selling space, nothing to buy....

Our coffee maker broke, so I went out to Mall Land - which, for those of us in the Boston Suburbs, is Framingham MA, at the corner of Speen Str and Route 9: the giant Natick Mall; the smaller shoppers world, walmart kohls target lowes homedepot, not to mention all the discount stores on Rt9

What was surprising to me was that there was a limited selection of coffee makers - all the stores had largely the same items - and within that selection, very little choice.

If you wanted a "plain" coffee maker, with just an on/off switch, there were 1 or 2 offerings in the 10 to 20 dollar range; they looked cheap poorly designed.
If you didn't like these, you had to go to something with a lot of electronic controls.
There were no simple, well designed, elegant in a minimilisic way coffee pots like our old Braun 4085
I am not, as this post shows the only person who mourns the passing of a simple coffee maker.

What is worse is what has happened to vacumn cleaners. A vacumn cleaner should have a disposable bag; that way you can discard the dust with no muss/no fuss. almost all of the VCs on sale had re usable clear canisters - you have to shake them out somehow, which, in my experience, leads to dust pretty much everywhere.

Even worse are all the fancy, but useless curves; just like tail lights on 50s cars. I think dyson is responsible, he started this trend of useless gimmickry

Poor Quality of the New York Times Website Blogs

2010-01-24T11:18:00.003-05:00

The New York Times, certainly one of the most influential, profitable and important old media voices in the country, has staked its future on its website nytimes.com.
Part of this future that is different from the past is allowing readers to comment on articles; in the old days, the Times ran a half page of letters a day, which considering it's audience of a million well educated, vocal people, was a pittance (so, in the days of print only, it was quite a priveledge to get a letter in print, and some of them were really well written, and they were all letter perfect in spelling and grammar).

So, one might think that this new future, with lots of reader comments, is important to the Times to have high quality comment software, with lots of features, that make it easy and powerful for the user.
But they don't - they have a really stripped down, feature poor, buggy site.
the bugs are inexcusable; the lack of features shows that they don't understand why people post on websites.
paradoxically, if you look at the most succesfull sites, like slashdot and digg, they are feature rich, hard to use, and wildly popular; this has to do with how people interact with the web, which is driven by the ability to do things at the web site, and not just read or post.

Some examples of how the Times site is defective or second rate:
A reader can recommend a comment made by another reader, but you can't pan a comment made by another reader. If you go to slashdot, they manage to have a rating system that runs from bad to neutral to good. And, I have found over the years that this is one place where wisdom of the crowds works; most posts on slashdot rate high or low are high or low.

Another problem with the times website is that it is not possible to view all of the comments on an article in a single web page. f you go to an article that has a lot of comments, the comments are displayed across multiple web pages; which makes searching for things impossible (at least if you use the Cntrl+F find feature in firefox browser). Inasmuch as these are all text, with a small amount of hypertext, it can't possibly be a page load speed issue.
The Times does provide a member center, where you can see your comments, and the timestamp of submission, but since comments are moderated, you can't use tht time stamp to figure out where in a long (100s) list of comments yours is.

Another annoyance; if you login, after the login, you don't get returned to where you were, but instead have to figure out or remember exactly what page you were on before the login.

On top of these technical issues is the attitude that We are the NYTimes; take or leave it chump.
Not all articles allow comments, and the choices seem pretty arbitrary; you would think that at least they have a policy page that explains what articles allow commenting.

The times closes comments after a period, which seems arbitrary; in some cases, comments are closed when there are only 96 comments/article, which is really wierd.

Many of the Times reports are based on pdfs; while they have started providing links, they still don't do this for a lot of articles; my suspicion has always been that this is profit driven - if you are a times journalist, having the actual pdf that is the basis of your story could be the basis for another book or piece that makes you the reporter money; sharing it with your readers means you make less money as a journalist.

what to call the decade of the oughts ?

2010-01-22T19:13:00.002-05:00

Bet they had this same problem back in 1900, and maybe even in 1800
like the problem with how to say alot when texting and tweeting, exactly the same as problem with morse code and telegraph (telegraph worse, u paid by the word)
probably, you go back to cunieform clay tablets in mesopatamia, tablets are heavy, they had all sorts of tweet like tricks to compress messages

obama care - welfare for the GOP to hang on the Dems

2010-01-22T18:56:00.002-05:00

At the end of the day, much of Obama care is welfare: tax dollars are being used to help the poor. You can argue about the details, and all the other stuff in the plan, but thats the major cost component.
So, the question is: how long before the GOP realizes that Obama care is actually 100 billion dollars of welfare, and how long before we see the willy horton equivalent...
Opening Shot TV Ad: Tired working class guy, maybe a plumber or carpenter, on the job.
Sun angle establishes end of day
Voice over: working extra to pay more taxes for OBama's socialist healthcare plan.
What will the dems do next - make you work all night to pay for illegal immigrants...
Fade out to Flag waving in the breeze
Voice over: The Republican Party, Keeping Your country strong and your taxes low.
(note to conservatives: above is satire)

The Victory of Scott Brown in MA

2010-01-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

Remember , all politics is local; if you are republican, before you celebrate, consider this newstory

The message seems clear: it was jobs and fear of economic problems that drove a lot of voters to vote for the GOP candidate Scott Brown.

Of course the arrogance of the MA democrats - and I speak as a Liberal MA voter - is beyond belief.
Just before the election, a story , also here broke on how the the grossly overpaid president of UMASS got a huge salary increase, at a time when many towns are laying off teachers , fireman and even police officers.

Coakley's emphasis on Abortion was a huge mistake, that cost here dearly among labor unions.

Do people realize how much ad blockers change your web experience

2010-01-21T09:57:00.000-05:00

To browse the web, I use Firefox with "addons" , also called extensions which block a lot of advertisements and animations.
Whenever I switch to Internet Explorer, and visit a site like, say, www.yahoo.com, I am amazed at how much advertising has taken over the screen, and how much the FireFox/adblock plus browser reduces this annoyance.

I urge you to try FireFox, and get the addon 'adblock plus"
if you like it, try the extensions 'trackmenot", "ghostery" , "better privacy' and 'taco"
take back the web - you'll like ti

Newton, MA home of the slob

2010-01-18T17:46:00.000-05:00

Newton MA is a suburb just west of Boston. With 90,000 residents, there are small pockets of poverty and many working class neighborhoods, but, generally, Newton is known as a wealthy town, with a highly educated citizenry: professors from Brandeis and MIT and Tufts and Harvard, doctors from the famous boston hospitals, CPAs, lawyers, and a strong contingent of professionals from the areas biotechnology companies.

Yet despite all this, the citizenry are slobs who are incredibly noisy.

Newton has several little shopping districts, with the expected - starbucks, and clothing shops an so forth, with trash barrels maintained by the city. Since the city doesn't empty the barrels on weekends, the barrels are often overflowing (literally) by Sunday, particulary in the summer when people are out more.

I personally, with my own eyes, have seen people walk up to an overflowing trash barrel, and place their trash on the ground, to be blown about in the wind.

I wonder what the overwhelmingly white citizens of newton would say if they saw a black person do this in Boston.

The citizens of Newton are no more respectful of their athletic fields, heavily used in the spring and fall, then they are of their sidewalks; after every weekend, the fields are littered with plastic bottles and other trash that people were to lazy to take with them; often one fines the plastic bottles in a little pile, surely the ultimate in snobbish arrogance: here maintenance person/maid, I've been so nice as to put the trash in a little pile for you.

when will people realize that google is a monopoly like ma bell

2010-01-18T15:08:00.000-05:00

Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding that google is not the good guy, but rather, sustained by huge monopoly profits, seems to lack the evil traits of most large corporations ?
1) the google search engine isn't that good. Don't compare google to the even worse loosers like yahoo or altavista or nothernlight; instead, think about what you would like in a search engine.
Does google deliver ? I know it sure doesn't deliver for me a lot of the time.

2) What about all those free services and wonderful new technolgys like google earth?
Google is a monopoly; like any monopoly, the huge extra money google earns can give it the appearence of a compnay that is interested in something other then raw greed; just look at the history of Kodak, or Polaroid, or ATT - they to once looked sort of paternalistic, untill they actually had to compete.

3

Why are Professors more liberal then other people ?

2010-01-18T14:29:00.001-05:00

18 Jan 2010
Todays N Y Times has an article that discusses why university professors are more liberal then other people.
The article doesn't mention one obvious reason - that professors, with tenure, are the only professionals in our society who are free to speak their minds.
Anyone who has spent anytime in the business world, particularly in small companies, knows that most CEOs are conservative, and that employees tend to adopt the attitudes of the boss.
You could call it ass kissing, but it is more self preservation: if your boss's boss is an open admirer of (say) George Bush, you will probably be somewhat quiet if you are a liberal democrat.

This effect tends to become a habit; after many years of denying your own beliefs, you take on the beliefs that you pretend to hold.

The other reason people in business are conservative is that convservate thought provides a justification for the often unseemly acts of business. If, say, you are looting the pension plan of a company to make large sums for your self, it is easier to sleep at night if you are a conservative; people don't say "social darwinism" any more (just like they don't say "nigger") but they darn well think it.

New York Times MD Anderson 25 Oct 09

2009-10-25T14:25:00.000-04:00

Front page of today's NY Times is long story about M D Anderson Cancer Center. The story talks about how people with rare cancers are referred to M D for best case treatment.
However, there are other reasons why a local primary care doc would refer someone to MD
Grief avoidance - not that many primary care docs have the mental toughness to deal with a 34 year old with an incurable cancer.

Money - It is quite possible that for the exact same treatment, MD gets paid more then a local doc, so the same treatment is profitable at MD and a loss for a local doc

Lawsuit avoidance - if a person dies of a rare cancer, who is more likely to face a malpractice lawsuit, a primary care doc who may never have seen this type of tumor before or MD Anderson ? Clearly, if a patient with a rare tumor, under the care of a local doc, dies , it is the doc's fault; if that same patient dies at M D, it is an incurable tumor.

Playing God - perhpas the primary care doc knows full well that the cancer is incurable, but decides it is his (the docs) perogitive not to tell the patient this, but to send him to MD go generate a sense of false hope, that the doc thinks, will sustain th patient

Illegal medical research - It could be that the local doc knows quite well that the cancer is untreatable, and that going to MD is not going to do anything, but , playing god, offers the patient as a guinea pig. Now this would be quite acceptable if the doc was honest, and said to the patient, you have an incurable cancer and have two choices - I can provide you with palliative care, to make your remaining time as comfortable as possible, or you can go to M D Anderson and be a guinea pig; if you do this, you will experience months of extreme discomfort, and there is a very small chance that what they learn will help anyone else; but it is your choice.