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Laws for thee, not for me

One of the most frequent comments one sees anytime there's a news article about cyclists, cycling, or the death thereof, is how cyclists are scofflaws. We don't obey the rules. We weave about, we ride on the sidewalk (or we don't ride on the sidewalk), we ride on the right, we don't ride on the right, we pass on the right, we don't pass on the right, we take up the whole lane, we don't take the whole lane. Always with the subtext that we're doing it wrong and are therefore fair game.

I will happily buy anyone who posts such a stupid thing on the intertubes a beer, and furnish a folding chair, and we can go sit at the stop sign next to my house and count the number of cars who actually make a full stop (never mind just go through it at full speed). Same thing at any of the six other intersections I ride through daily where I see cars completely disregard stop signs. Less than 50% come to a legal stop.

That doesn't include that quite literally more than half the population who don't understand the term “right-of-way.” Pro-tip: It means the person on your right, all other things being equal, goes first.

Here's the thing: I can't hurt anyone but me. If I go through a stop sign at 10 mph, it's my chance. And the only reason I get hit if I don't stop is because one of you didn't stop or yield or rolled through. I've gotten yelled at because I stopped! And most people don't want me to stop and clip out and put a foot on the ground. Because it's slow, for everyone, and you all hate it when cyclists slow you down almost as much as you despise cyclists just for not being in a car. And you wouldn't follow the rules of the road and give the cyclist ROW anyway, because I can count on one hand the number of times that's happened. A cyclist who tried to take the legal ROW would live a short unhappy life. And most of you don't stop at stop signs either. All of you speed. All of you talk on cell phones, or text.

So I don't wanna hear it. I go through stop signs because it's the safest thing for me to do. All I care about is not getting hit by one of you cell-phone-talking, stop-sign-running, bike-lane-infringing, texting, speeding, passing-too-close motherfuckers. I do what's safe. I roll through stops if it gets me away from you, I ride right down the middle of the fucking street so that you can't pass me, and I make sure that you distracted fuckers see me. Because I'm in your way.

Truth is, you might get pissed, but the number of psychopaths who are willing to just straight up kill me in cold blood is relatively low, compared to the number of you who are willing to kill me just because you're not paying attention. There are a lot of cold-blooded psychopaths, but most of them aren't willing to go to jail (say hi to the GoPro), but there are millions of you who just aren't fucking paying attention and will kill me just as quick, and just as dead. You might be sorry, but I'll still be dead.

So I ride in such a manner as to make you pay attention. Too bad if that pisses you off. I'm less likely to get killed because you're pissed off than killed because you're not paying attention.

TIL

That even a blind pig finds an acorn now and again. A good article in Forbes, of all places.

Is the money the stockholders’, the customers’ or the employees’? Apparently, it can be any of those possibilities, depending on which argument the article is trying to make. In Professor Friedman’s wondrous world, the money is anyone’s except that of the real legal owner of the money: the organization.

One might think that intellectual nonsense of this sort would have been quickly spotted and denounced as absurd. And perhaps if the article had been written by someone other than the leader of the Chicago school of economics and a front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Economics that was to come in 1976, that would have been the article’s fate. But instead this wild fantasy obtained widespread support as the new gospel of business.

Shift-Index-ROA13

The shareholder value theory thus failed even on its own narrow terms: making money. The proponents of shareholder value and stock-based executive compensation hoped that their theories would focus executives on improving the real performance of their companies and thus increasing shareholder value over time. Yet, precisely the opposite occurred. In the period of shareholder capitalism since 1976, executive compensation has exploded while corporate performance declined.

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TIL

That if you give Stellan Skarsgård a metal Halliburton case, bad things are going to happen.

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Picture of the day, 28 June 2013

IMG_0085

Picture of the day, 27 June 2013

Parrots

CC TDS

So I watch The Daily Show from the Comedy Central website. First, their streaming sucks ass. Second, when a TDS finishes, the website auto-starts the most recent Colbert Report. While I think SC is pretty funny, the schtick has worn thin for me, so I generally don’t want to watch it. But you’d think that after it finishes, CC would switch over to the next TDS. But no, once it’s on TCR, it just keeps putting up TCRs. It never switches back to TDS.

It’s like they don’t want me to 1) stream, and 2) watch TDS. It’s working.

Picture of the day, 21 June 2013

 

Picture of the day, 19 June 2013

Maple roof

How the American higher education system was destroyed

In five easy steps.

I’d say this is utter paranoia, that the Cabal that runs our country is not that cohesive and controlling, that it just happened by accident, but they have done it to the healthcare system, the secondary school system, the public unions, the networks, and the great research labs.

And I read this recently:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.

“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

Daniel Ellsberg to Henry Kissinger, 1968

and I realize that whatever I think, however paranoid I am, there’s just a wealth of information I don’t have, and can’t know. And it doesn’t make me trust them to do the right thing.

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Periodicity: two weeks

Dilbert once again is skulking through the halls where I work:

Dilbert

And now this

I'm gone for a week, and I come back to this. There are a million things one could say, a million words one could write, but in end, it comes down to this:

Defund the NSA. And all its unknown counterparts. Raze the buildings, salt the earth of Ft. Meade, and send the unethical masses off to the U6 12% unemployment lines.

That's the moral, ethical, constitutional, and (should be, if the fourth amendment still had any meaning) legal stance.

The practical stance is that, they, along with the rest of the bloated, fascist security state of the US Government, PRISM, and all its late lamented predecessors (ECHELON, CARNIVORE, TIA) were unable to predict or prevent September 11, 2001. Or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or Bengazi. Or McVeigh. Or the Unabomber. Or Boston. Or anything else going back to December 7, 1941. This isn't because they weren't doing enough of this – PRISMs predecessors were in place, and powerful enough. The answer isn't to do more, but to do less.

So throw it all out. It simply doesn't work.

In every instance, this system has not made anyone safer. It invites abuses. The powers that be are not concerned with terrorism, as any terrorist plot is unlikely to affect them, and in fact will increase their powers. They are concerned about politics, and will, and have, used this very system to spy on their enemies (anti-war activists) when they should have been looking for people they were warned were planning attacks (the Boston Bombers).

They'll make noises about all the mysterious attacks they've prevented, but of course they can't tell you about a single one. Secrecy. Methods. Sources. Must be protected, you see. When what's being protected is budgets, and asses.

The reason why is that they're hugely inefficient. It's not an apparatus for preventing anything. It's an apparatus for hanging someone after the fact. It's a huge, efficient Cardinal Richelieu machine. It's not to prevent 9/11. It's to hang Julian Assange. Bradley Manning. For making sure that no one else blows the whistle on the other stuff we don't know about.

Just you wait til the whispers start about Edward Snowden. They'll start using that huge apparatus on him soon enough.

But oddly enough, the apparatus wasn't able to prevent an Edward Snowden, an honorable man, with ethics and morals.

Too big to nail

That’s the trick. HSBC launders money for the bad guys in the War on Some Drugs and Some People, and some members of the Axis of Evil, and pays a small fine relative to their profits, and the people in charge defer their bonuses for a short time. Not go to jail, not pay a fine, not lose their bonuses. Defer.

Liberty, on the other hand, does exactly the same kind of thing, but in this cases, charges have been filed, accounts frozen, subpoenas issued.

The only difference I can see is that HSBC has better lobbyists and a bigger brass ring. HSBC is a big bank; Liberty is a small one. HSBC is still around. Liberty is not.

Justice (for some), with a price tag.

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Four

Milo4

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TumblrHu

Wait.  Tumblr, which has no path to monetization other than clickthru ads, which were worth about a quarter per thousand last I heard, is worth $1.1B.  Hulu, which has paying subscribers, ad revenue from major corporations, and the most important thing of all, access to content that people might want to pay for, is worth $0.8B?

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NPR

New Personal Record: 17:37

Old PR: 17:45

That's with no angry ex-con pool boys. I made two fast lights, missed two, and got caught behind the bus into the entrance gate. Also cranked up the hill at 20 MPH for long sections. Now I think 17:15 might be possible if everything went right.

I was warm from having gone to the gym and running up the hill at the top of Lake with the pooches. 60 F. Probably didn't hurt.