the art of writing is discovering what you believe
found this in the drafts.
Instead, I think[,] like most people, the[y]se developers are cursed with an agenda of selfishness. So long as they have an unrestricted ability to play in their little sandbox, they’re content. Start throwing up barriers, and they’ll elect or adopt any philosophy convenient to their case.
That it’s often libertarianism seems more a coincidence of convenience than anything else.
They also have the weird habit of saying “we” when they mean “me.”
It was a brutal year for the conservative movement, which at long last came crashing down after dominating American politics for nearly 30 years. One small consolation for at least some leading thinkers on the right is that they began to demonstrate perceptiveness that by and large eluded them in preceding years. Here are the top twelve insights of prominent conservatives in 2008:
[From TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008]
You can read all that if you like, it’s amusing in its cluelessness, but a commenter sums up their core principles thusly:
Conservatives are for government smaller than liberals define it.
Conservatives are for taxes lower than liberals set it.
Conservatives are for regulation lesser than liberals define it.
Conservatives are for what non-Christians are against.
Conservatives are for what non-whites are against.
Conservatives are for what non-heterosexuals are against.
Conservatives are for what non-Americans are against.They don’t have to define what they really believe. They just have to wait for liberals to say something and they’re against it. And if the answer isn’t clear enough, the rhetorical geniuses of the conservatives movement will be happy to fill in the blanks.
[From TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008]
The word reactionary comes to mind.
Well, in a camera, it looks like they want something small, reliable, and that they always have with them. Bonus points if it allows them to upload/share the pictures easily.
The cameras cost about the same or more as the iPhone, are specialized, single-purpose devices, and are bulky and more complicated to use. Next time someone asks me why I don’t get a digital camera, I may ask them why they don’t get an iPhone.
I also wonder if seeing too much contemporary work is problematic. I once had an assistant, Phillip Carpenter, who said something I’ll never forget. Phil started off as a musician in Nashville. He was surrounded by a ton of talent and learned about everything going on. But this knowledge, he said, was eventually damaging. Phil explained that the best musicians often come from nowhere. They are in their parent’s basement in Idaho, don’t really know how to hold the guitar, and consequently develop their own peculiar sound.
So here is the question: If limitation spawns creativity, is the limitless resource of the Internet a good thing? Does it do more harm than good to read all these blogs?
My house is about 3/4 of the way up that hill.
At the corner of my street is a large pickup truck with big tires and lots of manly trim and flash (flair?). Thankfully, no trucknuts (this is Washington, not Alabama or Idaho). Yesterday, it was resting against a telephone pole and a street sign, wheels chocked with big chunks of firewood, the driver’s mirror torn off by the telephone pole but no other damage.
Evidently, the owner thought he could move it today. Now it’s resting against the same telephone pole and street sign, with the driver’s window smashed out, a huge dent in the door where it slammed into the telephone pole and another in the quarter panel where it slammed into the street sign.
Ouch.
But I respect the sentiment and that they are upfront about it.
American Made products from a 50 year old family run, veteran owned, American company. We have done quite a bit of research to determine which of our products to place on our new American made products web site. Please note that when we say that a product is made in America, that may mean that the raw materials have come from outside United States. For example, If an item is made is made of plastic, the oil used to make the plastic may have come from outside the United States. If one of our fire starters is on this site, the striking rod may have come from Europe, but the product itself was made by a small business person probably in his basement in the United States. On the other hand, you might notice that we don’t have any radios on this site. That is because while even though it may be assembled in the Unites States, all the components are made elsewhere and then the product is assembled in the United States with no American made skills or ideas and that is not truly an American made product to us. If you have questions for more detail about an American made product, please contact us[From American Made Campaign Hat]
On days like this — bright, clear, and cold — I have visions of capturing that with a fresnel lens, a radiator full of coolant, and either a set of internal radiators or a heat vault to release it overnight when I need.
Or a Stirling engine that could run a small generator, either to top up a battery bank or re-sell to the local utility. We have lots of days like this in the summer, and while we might not have a lot of EV potential, based on the cost of the materials vs the amount of strong sunlight we get some heat that could be captured.
Mr. al-Zaidi needs more shoes.
Do newspapers matter? Or is journalism, regardless of how it’s distributed, what matters? If you are in the business of selling bundles of paper with ads and news, an item fewer people want, time to think things over. Are you in the publishing business — making physical printed goods — or the news business which can and has gone out in many forms.
Likewise the car industry: are they in the personal transportation business, meaning anything a person can use to get around, or can they only understand 4-wheeled metal boxes with petroleum-fueled engines? Just as the newspapers are more about using paper, the carmakers are all about using dinosaur juice more than giving people what they want.
Why is that?
[from my comments on Facebook | Causes | Don’t Let Newspapers Die]
So I’m a bit hardline when it comes to blocking people . . .
I don’t see the value in using Flickr as whacking material: I expect it means all the more, er, useful sites are blocked, but why do that at work? I think it would be much better to let people go wherever they want and if they wander off to places they shouldn’t, then take steps, just as you would if they were wasting company resources.
I’ve known people who frequented strip clubs on their lunch hours and who spent an awful lot of time scouring the interwebs for porn (I remember one guy who determined to burn it all to CD in case it somehow disappeared: have that many CDs been manufactured?).
She’s right to do this, of course. Shame some people are unable to grasp the subtleties of a naked form used as something other than a glandular stimulus.
