Category: noted in passing

So much for the promise of website advertising. I didn’t expect to get rich. The ads presented have no contextual relationship to the content, it’s no surprise the click through rate is abysmal.

This is over several years, since March 2008, not a monthly payout. Since you don’t a check til your total reaches $100, I should see a payment in June 2014.

I wanted to see what posts were being shared through Google+.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
echo "
"
for i in `grep google-plus /var/log/httpd/httpd-access.log | cut -d" " -f7 | sed 's|?share=google-plus-1||g'`; 
do export URL=http://paulbeard.org$i ; echo -n "
" ; GET $URL | grep \||g' | cut -d"< " -f1 ; echo "
" 
done 
echo "
"

Ugly, I know. Don’t ask how much time I wasted trying to get a regex that would pull the title text from between the title tags. I could use sed to remove text but not match and retain. As the quote runs,

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

*sigh*

A tedious run-in with a 9/11 truther caused me to look up some answers to his questions.

Why were some of core columns of the WTC bld found diagonally cut (as in demolition)?

I found a photograph of 1 column, not some, not several, and several articles that point to the same picture. I don’t see any there there. This is building a complex theory that requires a lot of details not in evidence.

Pls explain how a hijackers passport magically evaded the fireball & landed on floor

Landed on the ground, you mean? Stranger things have happened:

[C]onsider this story from the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. The craft broke up on re-entry, 40 miles about the earth, and debris fell over a wide area. Amongst this was one of the experiments involving tiny worms.

The worms and moss were in the same nine-pound locker located in the mid-deck of the space shuttle. The worms were placed in six canisters, each holding eight petri dishes.

The worms, which are about the size of the tip of a pencil, were part of an experiment testing a new synthetic nutrient solution. The worms, which have a life cycle of between seven and 10 days, were four or five generations removed from the original worms placed on Columbia in January.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_worms_030501.html

Pls explain why not a single drop of blood or body was recovered from Shanksville?

United Airlines Flight 93 slammed into the earth Sept. 11 near Shanksville, Somerset County, at more than 500 mph, with a ferocity that disintegrated metal, bone and flesh. It took more than three months to identify the remains of the 40 passengers and crew, and, by process of elimination, the four hijackers…

But searchers also gathered surprisingly intact mementos of lives lost.

Those items, such as a wedding ring and other jewelry, photos, credit cards, purses and their contents, shoes, a wallet and currency, are among seven boxes of identified personal effects salvaged from the site. http://www.post-gazette.com/headlines/20011230flight931230p3.asp [source]

So most of the wreckage was incinerated after being torn apart by the impact. Is that really so hard to believe or understand?

ls explain why George Bush was meeting w/ Bin Laden’s brother on the morning of 9/11?

You mean George H W Bush, father of the 43rd president? We all know that President Bush was in New Orleans reading to school children. Or is there a theory that he wasn’t really in New Orleans at all?

An investor, Shafig bin Laden (Arabic: ???? ?? ?????) is a half-brother to Osama bin Laden,[1] and was in attendance at the Carlyle Group’s Washington, DC conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on September 11, 2001, which George H. W. Bush also attended. [source]

Pls explain how Dick Cheney got @NORAD to stand down on 9/11 enabling the attacks?

Because he was the vice president of the United States? Is this asking about the power of the VP to do that or questioning his reasons for doing so? What would be the alternative? On the morning of 9/11, no one knew what was planned. Do you suppose the passengers and crew would have allowed 19 men armed with box cutters to take over 4 airliners? Now that the lessons of 9/11 have been learned, how successful have new attack attempts gone? Not very. Who has stopped them? Passengers. The passengers of flight 93 realized the odd were in their favor of preventing the planned attack and they did.

How do you explain the apparent demolition of World Trade Center building 7?

This all seems reasonable to me: unchecked fire, something the building wasn’t designed for, as well as structural damage from the two larger towers shedding debris onto it.

See also: Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report or Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy theories and Controlled Demolition Myths

And thermite is not an explosive and has never been used in controlled demolition. Thermite is easily made from iron oxide (like what you find in the structural members of a large building), aluminum (as used in airliners), and high intense heat, as you might get from a sudden ignition of several tons of jet fuel. I wonder how one could combine those elements in a big way?

Anyone who has watched a controlled demolition (YouTube has plenty of them) will note the differences between a controlled demolition and what happened on 9/11.

Anyone who isn’t an acolyte of Reagan, Rand, Hayek or Friedman knows that getting money into circulation is the key: money is the lifeblood of an economy and it needs to be moving around.

My example is to imagine putting $1000 in the pocket of a guy who makes $20k vs one who makes $100k. The former will spend it, or most of it, probably on things he has put off buying or to pay down credit cards, etc. But that money will certainly pass through a lot of hands in a short time. Things will be made or repaired. Food service/restaurants will see some of that. The hardware store or home center will benefit. And the ultimate beneficiaries will be the people working at those places. And they in turn will spend that money…

The other guy will put it in the bank, invest it, or maybe buy a big ticket item, something nonessential. It likely won’t be groceries or home repair or something from Main Street. Maybe a new bauble, most likely of non-US manufacture as so many things are. But not much of it will go into local hands, through dining and tips and the incidental friction of the marketplace.

If there is a simpler, more direct argument for raising wages for the lowest earners, I haven’t heard it.

Underlying opposition to this is the deep and abiding disapproval of someone having an unearned good time. “If we give a bunch of mechanics and shop clerks a bump, they’ll only spend on themselves,” goes the predictable response. See above on money as the lifeblood of an economy.

We hear a lot about the desirability of business acumen for elected officials, as if the provision of government services is responsive to market forces or has something like a profit motive.

Actually, being a success in business has nothing at all to do with running a responsive government of any size, let alone the world’s largest. But I get tired of hearing about Willard Mitt Romney’s awesomeness at capitalism without any evidence beyond his personal fortune. Capitalism at its best enriches more then just the proprietors and management, by making products or providing services that are cheaper, better, completely new and original or any combination. Sure, getting rich means you did something right but true success means you bettered the lives of your customers and employees, not just you and your investors.

Staples is mentioned as a big win for Romney. At first glance it looks like the idea was WalMart for office supplies, or another iteration of the “Lower Prices. Always.” idea. You’d think a Harvard MBA would realize that’s unsustainable, a variant on the Greater Fool theory: you buy into an unsustainable or short-run idea, hoping to sell out before the truth of it gets out. It’s not a Ponzi scheme or pyramid game, nothing illegal, just one of the twists of the market.

Staples was the first of the big three office supply chains but in looking over the history at Wiki, Romney isn’t even mentioned. His contributions were probably limited to financing and a seat on the board, as his own bio mentions. He lists a lot of other businesses to which he contributed expertise but I don’t see anything that looks imaginative or visionary. He didn’t start a car company to reinvent Detroit, for example, as a hat tip to his father’s legacy.

And there’s the LBO angle, that old notion from the 80s:

Romney soon switched Bain Capital’s focus from startups to the relatively new business of leveraged buyouts: buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed against their assets, partnering with existing management to apply the “Bain way” to their operations (rather than the hostile takeovers practiced in other leverage buyout scenarios), and selling them off in a few years.

So he’s not really a capitalist/entrepreneur but a consultant/financier. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t fit the narrative he wants us to buy, of the shrewd businessman. He’s not a team member so much as a team owner who hasn’t faced the risks that true capitalists face on a regular basis.

So I’m not buying the idea of the resolute capitalist so much as an opportunist with a bankroll. I’m sure he’s plenty smart (hey, he went to Harvard, just like our President and many others besides). But smart isn’t necessarily imaginative or creative. He certainly isn’t empathetic, doesn’t connect with the people he aspires to serve. And I have no idea why he wants the job other than to get Obama out of it or that it’s his turn, compensation for his father’s thwarted ambition. I think we’d be well served if we could trade the son for his father, since the son never learned anything from his father’s example.

Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see income inequality from space? It turned out to be easier than I expected..

Herewith, some from my own life:

Where I live now:

Where I lived during my high schools years (left side of the image):

Where we lived when our kids arrived:

I need to look at more of this.

Not that anyone will notice but I had to remove all the old comments (after dumping the database to preserve them). They had become linked to different posts than the ones they had been associated with and no longer made any sense. I suspect I broke all that when I cleared out a raft of automagically-saved drafts and revisions and then — stupidly — renumbered the remaining posts. Hmm, those post numbers must be important…

Goes to show how much attention I have been paying to this almost 10 year old wossname.

This is a shell script wrapped around a line of AppleScript that I can to put an OS X machine to sleep. I used at(1) to generate all the housekeeping stuff (paths and variables): the actual command is the very last line.

#!/bin/sh
MANPATH=:/opt/local/share/man; export MANPATH
TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal; export TERM_PROGRAM
GPG_AGENT_INFO=/Users/paul/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent:776:1; export GPG_AGENT_INFO
TERM=xterm-color; export TERM
SHELL=/bin/bash; export SHELL
CLICOLOR=1; export CLICOLOR
TMPDIR=/var/folders/js/82lhv5lh8xn_1r006s6qx0g80000gn/T/; export TMPDIR
Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-vpi61E/Render; export Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render
HTML_TIDY=/Users/paul/.tidyrc; export HTML_TIDY
TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=303; export TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION
TERM_SESSION_ID=A236A172-44B1-4955-8B2D-3EEB9C1E2D52; export TERM_SESSION_ID
USER=paul; export USER
COMMAND_MODE=unix2003; export COMMAND_MODE
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-kZWH3Y/Listeners; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0:0; export __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING
Apple_Ubiquity_Message=/tmp/launch-q0RW5z/Apple_Ubiquity_Message; export Apple_Ubiquity_Message
LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad; export LSCOLORS
PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin; export PATH
PWD=/Users/paul; export PWD
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim; export EDITOR
LANG=en_US.UTF-8; export LANG
SHLVL=1; export SHLVL
HOME=/Users/paul; export HOME
LOGNAME=paul; export LOGNAME
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=launchd:env=DBUS_LAUNCHD_SESSION_BUS_SOCKET; export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_CTYPE
INFOPATH=:/opt/local/share/info; export INFOPATH
DISPLAY=/tmp/launch-LrbuQi/org.x:0; export DISPLAY
SECURITYSESSIONID=186a5; export SECURITYSESSIONID
_=/usr/bin/at; export _
osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to sleep'

[repurposing this from G+]

I just installed a #SOPA blackout plugin for WordPress on the blog that no one but Google reads and it occurred to me, rather than content providers turning their sites black, why not start blocking gov’t netblocks? Congressional offices don’t need the internet, do they? They can use the telephone or a FAX machine, maybe go to the library. Though if I was a librarian and a SOPA sponsor or his staff tried to use the public terminals, I might be inclined to turn them away: you have to know how it works before you can use this, and those people plainly don’t get it.

We know that torrent downloads have been traced to governments everywhere, even our own. Seems to me the best option is a variant of how we deal with email spam: a realtime blacklist. Any organization that attacks free speech should be banned from accessing any website that objects to those attacks. I can see a special 503 error page that makes plain why they can’t be served at this time.

Imagine if email relays refused to send mail from .gov addresses (just the legislative branch), just sent them all back with an error explaining why their mail is undeliverable. Web page loads would fail, display a simple black and white message that “This content cannot be served to you at this time. Users in your domain have engaged in copyright infringement which means your domain is banned. Have a nice day.”

Maybe it’s unworkable, maybe not enough sites would do it, certainly no large ones. But I am tired of this being labelled a technology problem when it’s really a business problem. Someone abuses a technology, be it the internet or a hammer, it’s not the person who made the tool who is at fault but the person using it and in this case, the organization claiming injury.