Calling in drone strikes on a wedding party with non-combatants, including children, present: ok
Killing US citizens without a trial, evidence, or oversight: ok
Killing citizens of countries we’ve made no declaration of war against: ok
Wiretapping every US citizen without a warrant: ok
Torturing people in black prisons in Eastern Europe: ok
Torturing US citizens in US prisons without trial: ok
Breaking your marital vows, but breaking no law: NOT ok
Charlie Stross: “I don’t get to vote; I just get to live in a world where the winner’s policies defines a whole bunch of parameters for my life. No, I’m not bitter or anything …”
If it’s any consolation, I do get to vote, but because I live in California (what, the world’s sixth biggest economy?), my vote doesn’t count. The candidates were selected by a small group of people in a small economy in a northeastern state. The nominees didn’t visit this state with the sixth largest economy, nor pander to it, nor run any election ads in it.
Small blessing, I suppose.
But like you, the winner (who was not in any way, shape, or form selected or influenced by the state I live in) defines a whole bunch of parameters for my life. The fact that I, nor anyone else in this state, had any effect on his/her candidacy or eventual election seems to obviate the fact that I pulled a lever (actually, filled in a bubble completely with a number 2 pencil, or close enough) for or against had no effect on his/her election.
And the same is true for many of the other most populous and economically viable states in the US: CA, WA, NY, IL, OR.
Tagged Election, vote
And why not? The new climate is unlikely to be Blade-Runner-esque everywhere, so why shouldn’t it happen on an otherwise lovely day with high clouds, a rich sunset, and snow-capped mountains?
I hadn’t rented a car for work in a long time, as the place where I work no longer sees fit to send most anyone to any non-programmatic travel – conferences and such [1]. The cheap places I rent from for personal travel are all about the lines and agents.
But that’s another story. All that matters here is the fix is in and corporations and subcontractors with unexamined backroom deals are the only ones who still get their rental cars from corporations subsidized by rates somewhere between two and five times as much as anyone with access to Kayak would to rent the same Kia from the place one stop further on the shuttle bus [2]. Yet try to get reimbursed for taking a “car service” to the airport instead of a “taxi”, which costs more. We have to maintain appearances! But not actually lower costs.
They now have video rental kiosks [3] instead of, you know, people [4].
Not someone in Indonesia (yet). DeWayne [5] in Oklahoma City was able to process my car rental over a blocky, over-compressed glorified Skype connection [6], at an ill-designed kiosk. With Max Headroom video compression, Brazil facilities [7], and Gattaca inspired colorization, it was a moment of Future Shock. Me trying to channel my inner Nick Haflinger [8].
The kiosk had a camera so that DeWayne could see me watching him. Surprisingly, neither of us could make eye contact. I’m not sure whether this was technological limitations or human response. I found it very uncomfortable. Amusing, but also subtly wrong [8]. No video or pix because of this. I started to pull out my camera and get evidence, but it just felt wrong. DeWayne didn’t have a choice about this, at least not a good one, I’m guessing. He didn’t look like he wanted to be there either.
The future happened at about 6:40 PM MDT Halloween 2012. Not via the Cray-equivalent communications device I carry in my pocket, or the skycrane-delivered Rover one of my friends drives around on Mars, but via a ruddy middle-aged man in Oklahoma City not making eye-contact with me in Denver.
————————
[1] Why bother keeping your expensive and highly trained workforce up-to-date and motivated when you can just lay them off as their knowledge becomes outdated and bring in fresh meat with unemployment of their age group around 25%, happy to work 80 hours a week to get out of the parents basement? Or the smart ones get fed up and move on to someone not so penny-wise. The guys on ****Watch can cheer here, but eventually you’ll drive all the talented folks to better jobs. Then bemoan the fact that your tax-dollars no longer do bold and challenging things. In the same comment thread.
[2] Nevermind that the difference for a week’s rental would pay for a domestic conference. Or that taking a budget flight overseas instead of the mandated American-flagged (not owned, mind you, who knows who owns the airline these days? Corporations, unlike people, no longer have nationalities, if they ever did) carrier would pay for an overseas conference.
[3] Play buzzword bingo with that bit of corporate hackery. “Best-in-class software” is what they say when they foist the Microsoft IIS server on you. Another backroom deal.
[4] Normally I’m happy to not deal with people when traveling as, like medical appointments and police interactions, the best you can hope for is to break even. That is, to walk away no worse than you were before. While the other direction is everything from a worrying mole we’ll have to monitor downwards to tazed and beaten while left to die of internal injuries without food or water in an unmonitored cell.
[5] I’m not sure of the capitalization, because while Hertz has apparently mastered Skype, they have not gotten beyond the Compuserve all-caps stage yet.
[6] Not nearly as good as Skype actually.
[7] Complete with industrial grade payphone handsets scavenged from inner-city telephone booths [10] designed to withstand meth addict depradations, and just a little bit too short for anyone over six foot tall. But no flat surface to set a coffee cup, wallet, mobile, while you practice the long lost art of holding a black Ma Bell phone handset to your ear with your shoulder while pulling out your credit cards and drivers license and trying to keep your luggage in sight. Worse, I’m sure that it was consciously designed this way because dropping the phone and your important things is a better choice for the corporation than having to deal with people leaving stuff behind.
[8] I could link to all this stuff, but if you don’t get it, Wikipedia is not going to help.
[9] I’m sure I’ll get over it. Unless it really is Future Shock, and I don’t.
[10] How ironic that spellcheck no longer recognizes “payphone” as a word.
Tagged Future Shock, Gattaca, Shockwave RiderThe bunnies were particularly suicidal this morning. Four ran out in front of me in the dark.
Missed them all, but after three I started to wonder if they were in league with the squirrels.
Deus ex machina.
I like when a movie sets up a set of rules that it's going to play by, and this is especially important in time travel movies. It doesn't have to be logically consistent, but if it's not, you have keep things moving so that there's no time to dwell on it during the movie. If it is logically consistent (and keeps moving!), then you have the makings of a classic. E.g. Primer. Something that rewards repeated viewings.
Looper does a pretty good job of setting up the rules of its time travel universe, and playing by the rules. Building an alternate universe, and a culture that goes with it. But then it throws in the deus ex machina and tosses out the good will it built up by playing by the time travel rules. That's playing dirty.
I'm still thinking about it though, so that's a positive. But mostly I'm thinking about what went wrong, and how it could have been a good movie. Can't recommend it, except maybe as a Netflix. Watch Brick instead. Or Limitless, which I thought was pretty good. Logic holes, or at least character development holes (Would a smart guy do things with consequences that predictable? But he took the drug, so he's not always smart. Etc.), but moved fast enough to get me past them. I had to watch it again to check them out.
(h/t The Agitator. Source.)
I suspect there is a similar graph to be made of the War on Some Terror But Not That Terror Caused By Random Drone Strikes From Above.
Or Cyberwar, But Not The Cyberwar Perpetrated Without Declaration By Us.
More good news: Long Beach, along with the DEA, shuts down legal medical marijuana dispensaries. Yay, states rights!
I just noticed that the red-light camera downtown is gone, and the LAT confirms it.
Mostly I suspect because it wasn’t making the city money, but when things get better for any reason, it’s reason to be happy.
Meantime, the USFS put in a Z-gate at the top of the access road on the way to work, a very bicycle unfriendly act. But for now, the easy-to-bike through gate is still unblocked, so we’ll see what happens.
And LA is putting in “bike lanes” on my normal bike commute, which I suspect means that they’ll stripe the area next to the curb where cars park and call it a bike lane. Which just makes it more dangerous for bikes, not less, as if you really biked there, you would be swerving in and out amongst parked cars, a recipe for death. And stupid drivers will yell at you for not being in the bike lane and be angry because you’re not swerving in and out of traffic. But we’ll see. Maybe’ll they’ll put in a real bike lane.
An excellent thunderstorm came down from the San Gabriels. 0.83 inches of rain in six hours or so, and a couple of inches of graupel still in the backyard when I got home (I do not like biking in the rain!). Alex liked eating it.
Life is pretty good in the early part of the 21st century. What other simple wonders should I be checking out?
That burning refinery stench? Smells like an Enronning to me.
Retail prices began to skyrocket after Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s 150,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Torrance, near Los Angeles, reduced production Oct. 1 after a power failure. That followed a fire that knocked out a crude-processing unit at Chevron Corp. (CVX)’s plant in Richmond, near San Francisco, in August and the shutdown of a Chevron pipeline that delivers crude to Northern California because of contamination.
Phillips 66 (PSX), based in Houston, delayed the maintenance shutdown of a unit known as a hydrocracker at its 139,000- barrel-a-day Los Angeles refinery for at least a week to cash in on record refinery margins in California, two people with knowledge of the schedule said Oct. 5. The six-week upkeep procedure is now scheduled to begin Oct. 16, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
7.75 issues behind.
First the squirrels. Then the bunnies. Now frogs.
I ran over a frog last night on the way home. Hopped right underneath the tire. Sorry Mr. Frog.
I hope you were a MYLF.