Summary page 12 of 36

Warning: This has been migrated from an earlier blog server. Links, images, and styles from postings before 2018 may be funky.

01 Mar 2009 — Jive turkey

At Thursday night’s banquet for the Conservative Political Action Conference, Representative Michele Bachman (R-Minn.), the emcee, was so moved by Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele that she told him: “You be da man!”

27 Feb 2009 — Self-promotion dept.

A short story of mine, “Very Truly Yours”, has been published in the (semi-pro) webzine Polu Texni. Seven thousand words is apparently a bit long for the Web, so they broke it into four parts: I II III IV.

20 Jan 2009 — Hail to the Chiefs!

If you’re doing an inaugural party tomorrow, I recommend adding The Brunching Shuttlecocks’ “88 Lines about 42 Presidents” and Jonathan Coulton’s “The Presidents” to your playlist.

16 Jan 2009 — Fatherly advice from the first century

This week, learning Gemara (Pesachim 112a), I learned:

15 Jan 2009 — The struggle against ASCIImperialism continues

I learned two things about Linux this week. First, even in UTF-8 locales, fold thinks that any byte with a value above 127 is a space.

08 Jan 2009 — Sic transit gloria startup

My employer just laid off a bunch of people. I, thank God and Adam Smith, did not get the axe, but there are good engineers (and sales people and so on) who are pounding the pavement now.

30 Dec 2008 — Because I ought to say something about the mess in Gaza

I’ve seen a lot of opinions flying around Left Blogistan about what the Israeli government and/or Hamas should have done to prevent this carnage. In one sense, I agree with all of it; in another sense, I find it depressingly academic. As osewalrus elucidates, leaders on both sides who chose to escalate made decisions that were perfectly rational in the short term. Neither side’s leadership is in a position to tell its constituents “I know this concession makes you feel like suckers, but trust me, if we stick it out for another year we will all benefit”, because before that year is up, the leaders can be replaced (or assassinated), or the other side can find some excuse for not making a reciprocal concession, or rogue elements can go out and make their own war. You might as well wish for a Middle East populated entirely by Jewish and Arab liberal intellectuals, whose representatives, elected by two-thirds majorities, could work out a comprehensive final settlement over coffee in an afternoon. And a pony.

12 Dec 2008 — “You’re laborers! You’re supposed to be laboring!”

When discussion of an auto industry bailout began to circulate, some people pointed out, as evidence of the shameful sloth of its unionized work force, the United Auto Workers’ jobs bank, in which employees continue to get 95 percent of their base pay and all their benefits if they are laid off. In the heyday of the program (before the most recent round of contract negotiations), the jobs bank cost GM almost a billion dollars a year, which is to say, slightly more than GM was paying out in dividends to its stockholders.

09 Dec 2008 — If you’re gonna be a crook, be a classy crook

Rod Blagojevich, the recently-arrested Governor of Illinois, may be “not as bright” as George W. Bush, but if Ali Ata’s testimony is to be believed, even Blagojevich knows how to take a bribe:

07 Dec 2008 — Democratic tragedy

Imagine a country with a big chunk of disputed territory on its border, a developing economy, and a state-sponsored religion. The inhabitants of this country, a quarrelsome lot, divide into three factions:

05 Dec 2008 — Your fair and balanced religious news from the Middle East

Not quite a month ago, in Jerusalem, Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks demonstrated their deep respect for “turning the other cheek” by brawling over turf in the Church of the Holy Sepulchure.

05 Dec 2008 — How not to lay out your table

HTML has a little-used element, <col>, that can be used to describe attributes for a table column. The HTML 4.01 spec gives an example (which I have reformatted because I can’t stand the ALL CAPS ELEMENT NAMES) of using this element to declare that text in a certain column should be aligned on the decimal point:

02 Dec 2008 — The dignity of labor

I do not have any fundamental objections to any of these newfangled reproductive technologies: IVF, surrogate parenthood, cloning, male pregnancy, whatever. Bring ’em on. And I think progressive income taxes are better for society than sumptuary laws, which is to say, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with being rich and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with rich people buying things that regular folks can’t afford.

09 Nov 2008 — Progressive politics by the numbers

Back in the 1980s, there was a heated debate among Democratic partisans regarding how the party could regain its lost power. The argument centered around one annoying fact: members of demographic groups that favor Democrats do not vote in proportion to their numbers. One group of Democrats argued that the party should therefore intensify its registration and get-out-the-vote drives among those groups, and retake the White House without significantly changing the party platform—indeed, some of these Democrats said, the party should give those voters more motivation to go to the polls by taking stances farther to the left. Another group argued that the party was already doing all it could to get its traditional interest groups to the polls, and that in order to have a future, Democrats needed to move closer to the (new?) political center, in order to win back white working- and middle-class voters who had defected to the Republicans.

28 Sep 2008 — Motzei shabbat time-delayed debate blogging

Let me just post my quick reactions before I find out what everyone else in the world has been saying about this debate for the past 27 hours.

Later posts / Earlier posts