Welcome to the Moon

"But while the celebrations conjured up images akin to that of the U.S. flag unfurled on the moon by Apollo astronauts, India's flag is most likely scattered over a wide swath of the moon's Shackleton crater after the probe slammed into the surface at more than 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) per hour."

India celebrates planting its flag on moon SFGATE

Ah, new wealth -- always wanting to crash the party.

Government Bailout

Just give us $700 billion. Oh wait, we decided to do something else with it. Well, it sounds a little better than "Plan A," but still looks like a monkey trying to catch a fish flopping around on dry land. A monkey with $700 billion in its pocket?
Paulson: Government won't buy troubled bank assets

Blue / Red

At 05:28 AM 11/8/2008, you wrote:
some revealing cartographic versions of the election's red-blue distribution.

Hey, study that enough, and you might be able to redraw some district boundaries in a way that favors one party or the other !

Some time ago I realized it boiled down to a large difference in the problems encountered by rural or small-town people vs. the people who live in large cities. Different problems encountered every day, different ways of dealing with those problems, and different ways of thinking about the world, based on these encounters.

Gun control -- probably just as many idiots with guns in the country as in the city, but when they fire them off in the country, they're most likely to only injure themselves, their friends, or their family members, whereas in the city, they're going to injure strangers.

Abortion -- rural areas are the baby factories and breadbaskets. In the city, it's ENOUGH PEOPLE ALREADY ! ...and of course, we want to fund abortions for people who can't afford them, because those people will have more problems raising their kids if they can't get abortions. But if you own a farm, you can have 6 wives and 40 kids, and it won't bother your neighbors (or they can shoot at them when they cross the property line!) You can bury the miscarriages in the back yard, but people in the city don't want to see them in the apartment garbage can !

Property rights -- when the next neighbor is 1/2 mile away, who cares? When only wealthy landlords can afford to own rental buildings, of course everybody wants some standards for those buildings and some rights for the tenants, and control over whether someone builds a dynamite factory in the building next door.

Endangered species -- no one in an office cubicle has to worry about their cubicle encroaching on endangered species habitat; those species were driven out years ago ! On the farm, it's, "oh crap, now I'm not going to be able to plow that strip of land, which is going to lose $XX a season."

So the challenge is trying to regionalize the laws -- the current big legal dichotomy is federal / state, but it seems like the dichotomy should instead be federal / county. "States" seem much more artificial than rural / urban boundaries. Maybe there should be a movement towards rural / suburban / urban associations that better define the issues in each area, and work out compromises that are more agreeable, rather than a blanket of laws that don't fit either situation very well.

Burt's Bees eviscerated

Burt's Bees was bought by a giant consumer products corporation, and the soul has now officially been eviscerated and turned into a marketing facade:

PRODUCT COMMENTS:

I am very annoyed by the course you have taken regarding Burt's Bees Herbal Deodorant, now "Deodorant??!!"

First you bought the company -- then you cut the size of the container in half. Now, I see that the word "herbal" has been dropped from the label. Whoa -- smells completely different, and burns the skin a little more. WTF???!!!!

I am sensitive to various products, and it has taken me a long time to settle on a product I like. That's why I stuck with your herbal deodorant when you doubled the price. Now, you've completely changed the ingredients?! ...and you've done so in an extremely deceptive way -- by making the label very similar, so I thought I was buying the same product, not getting screwed by your crew of ruthless profiteers.

I am going to return this container to the store and demand a refund. Do you still make the same product as before, or have you discontinued it ? I am willing to forgive if you can give me the old product back, otherwise, you are scum in my book.

Bold Mandate?

Heck, all he has to do is restore government agencies to their proper functioning ! ...the EPA, the FDA, FEMA Get rid of the clowns who were sent to destroy all these agencies, and get them functioning properly.

Healthcare is vastly more complicated, but it seems we ought to be able to find some minimal standards for public health, and do it with less money than our current inefficient crisis management.

Texas

Thank heavens we will no longer have a president with an agenda of cutting California down to size. Texas can do better than what we finally dislodged.

Tech Support in India

Really, I have nothing against the guy in India who's trying to help me.

It's...

The phone tree which is now voice recognition, but not really, so you have to repeat yourself, or make sure you say one of the words in their vocabulary, because if you don't, you'll be talking to a machine for awhile before it gives up and transfers you.

Oh sure, maybe 99% of calls are in the categories stated, and SERVICE OUTAGE is so rare that SYSTEM STATUS is not something people ever call about. But if you can't look it up on the internet because your service is out, wouldn't you... Call?? You can't say they don't have a sense of humor, asking you if you have a dial tone when you just told them you're calling from the phone number on the account.

I had a bit of an epiphany with this phone call. "How can I help you today?" is not really a query of "how they can help you," it is merely a computer prompt, where they're listening intently for ONE WORD that matches one of the words on their computer screen. I'm not sure why that function hasn't been replaced by a machine.

But I realized, as the guy goes through his layers of screens searching for how he can help you that I didn't really have to rephrase my inquiry 50 different ways, in case there was some nuance he didn't quite understand. All I had to do was repeat my initial inquiry 4 times, each time becoming more machine-like in my voice, until "Ray" finally found the screen that answered the question. No service outages anywhere in California. Which I find truly amazing, but thanks Ray, I'll check my crappy extension cable and call you back.

"Ray? Is that the name you were born with?"

"Of course."

I didn't say it, but if parents are naming their children "Ray" in India, I feel like there's something a bit sad about that. After all, Ray has probably attended some diction classes, and is doing an incredible job of hiding his Indian accent. I myself, upon leaving Indiana (oddly named after his country) was teased mercilessly about my accent, and worked on getting rid of it. But just as anyone who knows accents immediately knows I'm from the Midwest, pretty much anyone in the United States would detect that Ray is probably in the number one country for outsourcing.

And since we're all aware of that, and since we're both former colonies of England, why not a real name? Americans could do with a little more familiarity with their sister colonies.

Kid gone wrong

Bad parents, bad society, bad kids, bad genes? Maybe all of the above? In other cultures, these children might be working steady jobs, and we would look down our noses at their child labor but otherwise maybe productive lifestyles? Or maybe in those cultures, these children would be in prison and having their organs removed for high-paying transplant patients?

SF Gate - abandoned children in SF as in Nebraska

Water testing eliminated??

At 11:59 AM 10/21/2008, Suzie D wrote:
Perhaps on saturday we could all sign a petition to reinstate the water quality testing???

My local chapter of Surfrider alerted me to this. Pleas email the
governator.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has cut all funding (approximately $1 million per year) for beach water quality monitoring throughout the state. This sudden and unexpected action has gutted the country’s most extensive and progressive beach water quality monitoring and public health notification program. As a result, San Diego County (who received the biggest share of the state funds) has already suspended their monitoring program and other coastal counties may soon follow suit.

Without regular beach monitoring, surfers, swimmers and other beach-goers will be completely in the dark about water quality at their beach. Essentially, a “swim or surf at your own risk” sign just went up all along the California coast.
--------------------------
From: James Lamb
Subject: Re: [dolphinclubsf] beach/water quality testing ELIMINATED

At the national level, believing "sympathy for the impoverished" falls into the rubric of religion, the government still felt there should be a transitory period, where instead of just cutting programs, they should dole out some cash to beef up religious programs before jettisoning the entire notion of social justice to the church.

It appears, however, that on the state level, there will be no transitory period? No period where state funds go to the religious who are of the conviction that clean water is a social necessity? Well, o.k., perhaps some lobbying, but in this era of government bankruptcy, let me know how much extra each member should contribute towards the testing of local waters -- would this be an existing club member taking over the task? I will consider volunteering two days a week in lieu of cash contributions; I have some laboratory backgound, and have actually tested water samples, though in a different setting, I'm willing to learn. Of course, if we post the data, I feel there should be advertising on the web site with the information, to help defray costs.

Proposition F flyer

An Ah-Ha! moment on Proposition F came about only by reading every word of a political flyer received in the mail.

Prop. F would reduce San Francisco elections to EVEN years, rather than having elections for purely local issues on odd years. The arguments for and against in the voter's guide say, well, voters need some elections to focus on local issues without being sidetracked by the national issues. Lousy argument, even if it's true that significantly fewer voters come out for local elections.

But a phrase in the flyer, funded by the SF Association of Realtors says "It would stifle the initiative process and prevent issues from being acted on in a timely manner." Buried in that sentence I think is the big one... initiatives get placed on the ballot on the basis of the number of signatures required -- and the number of signatures required is based on the number of people who voted in a prior election. This means, that if the only elections are the ones combined with national ones, there will always be more voters, and it will be more difficult to place initiatives on the ballot because more signatures will be required.

True, but I don't think that really hampers our current form of democracy. Why? Because even with the reduced number of signatures, the only people who get stuff on the ballot are people with money to pay for signature gathering and a handful of activists with lots of connections. I think those people are still going to do what it takes to get things on the ballot (but it will cost more money for people like the Association of Realtors, who would always pay for signatures ?? Still, I can't see why it concerns them so much. There must be another reason.