Bruised Asses

Bruised AssesIs it just me, or is our government becoming a reality TV show? Will all this Asses vs. Elephants drama ever be broadcast at 9/8 central on Wednesdays and hosted by Carson Daly? Will we ever limit voting to only attractive bisexuals? Could New York be New York's next governor? Any of this is possible and, as far as I'm concerned, permissible. U.S. politics has already lost any semblance it had to a serious attempt at governing a country, so we might as well get it on tape.

I am pondering this, Dear Lewsers, because the news this week has me so very confused. What exactly does Barack Obama's 2012 re-election bid have to do with the governor of Virginia? It obviously has something to do with him, because everything has something to do with everything else, if you think about it. The main question is, why is the Virginia gubernatorial race (and the New Jersey one) being covered as a story about Obama and the Asses?

Let me give you a taste of what I'm talking about. Here is the opening paragraph to The Week's main story, Democrats bruised at the polls (emphasis added):

Republicans rebounded sharply from their 2008 defeat this week, winning governors' seats in New Jersey and Virginia in an election marked by crosscurrents. Virginia Republican Bob McDonnell won 62 percent of independents in crushing Democrat Creigh Deeds, 59 percent to 41 percent. In New Jersey, Republican challenger Chris Christie ousted Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine, 48 percent to 45 percent. Exit polls in both states revealed that voters remain generally positive about President Obama personally, but have soured on the economy. The president, who invested substantial time and resources campaigning for Corzine, proved to have little influence there or in Virginia, despite his victory in those states one year ago. "Americans want our presidents to succeed," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican Governors Association. "But the president's policies are very unpopular, and they are hurting Democrats."

Unless you cannot see bold, you will notice that most of that paragraph is gossip about Obama instead of news about things that actually matter. The rest of the page-long article, of course, continues in a similar fashion. Now, there are two thingies that can be pointed out about this paragraph, and out I will point them.

The first thingie is that the media cares mostly about the people in the government, not the government itself. In particular, they seem to care about which people are winning the battles of the day, frivolous though those battles may be. They could be fighting about whether Republicans or Democrats have historically bigger dicks, and the news would cover it. [1] Now, maybe two gubernatorial elections isn't frivolous. But isn't it silly to spin the elections and make it about Obama's popularity instead of about what is going to happen (or what did happen) in those two states?

It is silly to us normal, thinking people. But to the Lewsers in the media, it's another reality brawl. The focus is who is ahead, and the who is never the citizens.

One of my favorite characters in this soap is The Independents. The media loves to stir up emotion by throwing out statistics about this infamous group, The Independents, the deciders of who is more popular. Of course, we know that the Conservatives and Liberals will vote for whoever is the zaniest and whackiest on their own side. But The Independents, ah! Those are the smart ones. Get 59 percent of the vote, and well, that is fine. But 62 percent of The Independent vote, now that is something to be proud of. This candidate must truly be a winner.

The truth is (and this brings me to the second thingie), this just proves that Independents don't know what the fuck they're talking about. If they voted based on some special platform or set of values, they'd already know which party they were in. Anybody who can define their political beliefs and prioritize them can decide whether they are an Ass or an Elephant or maybe a Libertarian or some other whacky thing. But Independents are none of these, which must mean they just wing it every election. They must be voting based on the glitz and the hype (part of which, usually, is them).

The sad thing is that all of this subjectivity is encouraged. It should not matter whether voters "approve" of Obama. They should be asked if they approve of his handling of Guantanamo Bay or Iraq or Afghanistan, or if they approve of his Supreme Court nominee or his nuclear proliferation efforts. Instead, the media pollsters ask you to be polarized. Is he good or is he bad? Should his side win? Decide if you like him or not and help us affect public opinion. It's like American Idol, except without even the reasoning voice of Simon to guide us.

Another sad thing is that the politicians eat it up, too. They are like actors in a film shoot. The Independents and the media give them their motivation, and they act out the scene. Remember when the Secretary of the Treasury fell to his knees and begged Nancy Pelosi to sign on to the stimulus plan? Or when that guy threw his shoe at G.W. and he dodged it like a champ? Remember the Beer Summit? Remember the town halls?

Of course you do. We all do, because they are stupid and unimportant. They are attached to important things, like the stimulus plan, relations with the Middle East, racial profiling, and health care, but they themselves are just drama. But unlike Real World vs. Road Rules where the winners get a cash prize and the losers go home empty handed, the losers in this drama are us. We lose because nobody is willing to seriously discuss government anymore, so we don't get any Change.

Now, Dear Lewsers, take this moment of clarity I am handing you and consider the futility of our republic. What does your vote count for? If the popularity pendulum is to swing forever from Ass to Elephant, why does a vote even matter? Won't both sides eventually get to do everything they want anyways? [2].

It's depressing, I know, and I leave you with more questions than answers. But it is not my style, Dearest of Dears, to end on such a sad note. So let me just say that I personally am reveling that the Asses got beat, or at least, as The Week put it, bruised. That is something that we can all be happy about. I gave up on government a while ago, and so from this comfy futon the whole election process is just an exercise in slapstick. And slapstick goes great with popcorn. Mhmm, I love it. Get some butter on there, some salt...

Notes:

1. Libertarians have huge dicks
2. And forget checks and balances. That shit is long dead.

How to give a proper Turing Test

How to give a proper Turing TestIt recently occurred to me that I have not met all my online contacts in person. Although this kind of cyber-acquaintance has become increasingly common, to me it presents a conundrum: how do I know if one of my IM buddies is French? Also importantly, how do I know that I am conversing with a mortal, and not a mindless computer?

To address this second question, I introduce the concept of a Turing Test. Now, a true TT consists of three parties: the human interviewer, the control subject (a human), and the computer. The idea is that the interviewer must try and guess which subject is the computer and which is the human, after conversing with both of them.

For my more practical and less academic purposes, though, I decided to come up with a modified TT. The MTT consists of two parties: the interviewer (yours truly) and the subject, who may either be a human or a computer. The idea with the MTT is for the interviewer to make an educated guess as to whether the subject is man or machine.

After much research and development [1], I've formulated the following Modified Turing Test:

Question 1: Who's your daddy? Provide an example.

Question 2: Are you French?

Question 3: Explain human emotion and prove that you have it.

This test can be given via email, IM, or any other internet protocol. Typically, I feel it is only polite (assuming that your subject turns out to be human) to preface the test with a disclaimer like the following:

Since I have never met you in person, I am unsure if you are a human or a machine. Therefore, I will administer unto you a Turing Test which will allow me to decide.

Questions one and three should be self-explanatory. On question two, the normal human response is "God, no!" or something to that affect. Of course, French people will respond by saying something along the lines of "Oui, monsieur ou maddame. Je suis un Francophone."

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. I do not accept emails from robots, so I do ask that you include your answers to the above three questions in the subject line.

Notes:

1. Before I created this test, I had another method. It involved me flying to Miami to meet the subject in person. This worked out well, but I decided to devise the written test in order to be more cost- and fuel-efficient.

Why We Hate Microsoft

Why we hate Microsoft I was recently smirked at for declaring that Microsoft is evil.

To be fair, my own smirk probably did deserve to be smirked back at--it usually does. What really bothered me was the gentleman's response to my statement, which was something akin to, "I know it's popular to hate Microsoft, but if it weren't for them you wouldn't be clicking and dragging those nice boxes on the screen all the time--you know, windows."

Ahem.

It really gets to me when people pretend that I don't understand something obvious. The gentleman was right in one respect: it is popular for young computer/programming enthusiasts like myself to hate Microsoft. What he didn't recognize is the reason that we hate Microsoft. I understand that Microsoft has accomplished quite a bit in the world of technology; this is not what I hate them for. I hate them because it is time for them to go away or change drastically, and they are unlikely to do either.

People like me believe that we are entering a new age in computing. This new age is different from the previous one in the following ways:

1. Source code and protocol standards are usually open
2. Services are free or cheap, and they are monetized using advertising
3. Nothing is centralized

Don't think this is true? Think about the great new things that you use every day. Firefox: open source, free, maintained with input from the internet community. Twitter: open API (that's where all the sweet Twitter apps come from), free, usable from a million different places (not just Twitter.com). Facebook has similar properties. So does Gmail. So do lots of blogs and other popular web sites. So do most popular new things.

Obviously, the prominence of a company like Microsoft is a problem in such an age. In the Microsoft Age, the rules played out more or less like this:

• Source code is secret, because...
• All software products and services are expensive, because...
• Everything is centralized around Microsoft products

This was fine when Microsoft had all the best products for most peoples' needs, and it is why they've had so much success. But peoples' needs are changing drastically and quickly, and their model no longer fits. Which is why it's such a pain when they continue using their model, and why we hate them.

A few days ago I was at a presentation/networking event held by Microsoft and a couple of other big companies at Northeastern University. The idea was to convince business majors that they want to work at Microsoft. At a few points, I couldn't help laughing out loud (or at least smirking out loud) at some things the presenter had in his PowerPoint presentation and his speech that I found to be oh-so-typical Microsoft talk:

• To become the Thought Leaders of tomorrow, you must be surrounded and mentored by the Thought Leaders of today
• Life @ Microsoft = Work + Play + People
• We invented the fun and then others took it and continued to do it (said during an answer to a question)

On a more serious note, Microsoft really does get in the way of the modern developer.

Internet Explorer is a great example. A good deal of being a good web developer is being good at getting things to work in IE despite its many quirks and bugs. Were it not for IE, web sites could be made twice as fast. [1]

Of course, the other Microsoft platform that programs are commonly developed for is Windows, which is just as naggy and annoying. Why is it that great software so often premiers only on Windows, with the Linux/Mac versions released months down the line (ahem, Chrome)? It premiers on Windows because Windows dominates the operating system market. It takes months to develop versions for everything else because developing for everything else is totally different. This explains why horrible languages such as Java are so popular: Java developers only have to deal with a slightly-less-annoying "virtual machine" and can forget the nightmare that is Windows.

And don't even get me started on Windows from the user's perspective. It is a nightmare. Try setting up some simple server mirrors on Windows without buying something really expensive. When working at a development company recently, I remember noticing how much time I spent just grappling with different Microsoft products in order to get my work done. But when it came time to commit to the CVS server running on a Linux box? No problem. Deploying a new build on another Linux server? Smooth. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly the problem is with Windows, but it's there. [2]

This is why we hate Microsoft. They are the big hippopotamus that won't go away. And yes, hating them is popular now. Bite me.

Notes:

1. Granted, IE8 is a promising improvement. But still, how long did it take them to catch up to the rest of the internet? Clue: answer in years.
2. I know I sound like a hack for having an unexplainable, mystery gripe with Windows. The fact is that everything just seems to go more smoothly when I'm not using it. Maybe it's just a placebo effect. As the presenter at that Northeastern event said at least five times, "Mac really did a good marketing job with those commercials."

The MyFox Drinking Game

Throughout Boston, frustrated college students have been searching for new ways to get drunk. My brothers and sisters, I bring you the MyFox Drinking Game, inspired by Fox 25's chief "meteorologist", Kevin Lemanowicz.

The rules are simple: watch for each of the below Kevin Lemannerisms and, when you spot one, call out the corresponding phrase and enjoy the appropriate number of chugs with all your drinking buddies (if you're drinking alone, it's recommended that you call them out anyways; maybe your neighbors will be intrigued and tune in for a taste of the smugness).

The game is best played with beer, wine, or champagne--anything you can chug. If you're playing with hard alcohol, you can decide whether to substitute a single chug for a full shot or a half. Either way, you can trust Kevo to get you totally crunk any night of the week except Beach Wednesdays. Let's take Boston by storm!!

The Kevin Lemannerisms

Pointing into the camera: one chug

Take a chug whenever Kevin points into the camera--presumably at you, the viewer. We're still not sure whether this is a conscious Lemannerism or not. Most Lemannerists to date think it is a subconscious attempt to remind the audience that we are here and he is there, soaking up the spotlight. Shout out: Fuck you, Kevin!

The Fonzi Point: two chugs

Originally the "double point", the Fonzi Point occurs when Kevin points both fingers at once into the camera. Just cover up all those gray hairs, throw a leather jacket on him, and, ayyyyyy! We got ourselves a regular Fonzi! Shout out: Ayyyyyy!

The Pat: one chug

The Pat is a rather flamboyant gesture whereby Kevin seems to pat an imaginary puppy or some other cute animal on the head. If you watch Fox 25 long enough, you'll get what I mean. Or you could try imagining your ex-girlfriend's hand motions as she explains last week's episode of Gossip Girl. Shout out: Omg omg!

The CLAW: one chug

The CLAW is one of the most special Lemannerisms we know of. It occurs when Kevin shapes one of his hands in the form of a bear claw, as if he is attempting to scratch the life out of the nearest storm or low pressure zone. Shout out: THE CLAWWWWWW!

The Double CLAW: two chugs

The Double CLAW, while frightening to most viewers, is completely harmless. Just imagine he is doing the Monster Mash. It happens, of course, when Kevin makes the CLAW shape in both of his hands. Shout out: we-do-the-MASH (sung)

Smug skies ahead: two chugs

Only use this rule if you can hold your drinks, as it happens in nearly every one of Kevin's intros and outros. Take two chugs if Kevin says something smug or makes a smug grin. Not only is this a frequent occurrence, but if you're partying with smart people (MIT sorority girls, for example) it can lead to interesting and hilarious drunk debates about what is considered smug and what isn't. Shout out: smug skies ahead!

For Advanced Players

There is an additional variant of the MyFox Drinking Game whereby the last person to make the appropriate shout-out must suffer a cruel and unusual punishment. You can settle for an extra chug or two, or you can make them spin around on one foot singing "We Love You Conrad" from Bye Bye Birdie, replacing "Conrad" with "Kevin", of course. You'll have to YouTube the song if you don't know it, but here are the lyrics:

We love you Kevin
Oh yes we do
We love you Kevin
And we'll be true
When you're not near us
We're blue
Oh, Kevin, we love you!

For Kevin Lemanowicz

No hard feelings, Kev. You just have a hilarious weathercast. You know I'm just playin' wichu dog!! Just think, you are now responsible for thousands of college-age jerks getting drunk off the weather. The next generation of weathermen is in your claws.

Flation

I recently stumbled on a great opinion piece about deflation. My aim here is to shamelessly plagiarize it and hopefully add my own two cents.

First, the basics. To understand inflation and deflation, one must first understand something about money. Money, of course, represents value. We know that any item we buy in a store has a certain value in dollars. A medium cup of coffee at my neighborhood Dunkin Donuts has a value of $2.00. However, the reverse is also true: money has value that can be expressed in terms of items. I know that a cup of coffee has a value of $2.00; therefore I know that the value of $2.00 in terms of coffee is one cup, and that $100.00 is valued at fifty cups. This is simple.

Now consider the derivation of an item's value. Typically, the value of items is based on their rarity. Diamonds are rare, so they have a high value. A food like corn is not rare, so it has a low value. Water is rare in some countries, so there it is expensive. But in a country like America water is plentiful, so its value is very low.

This is why items produced in China are so cheap. Consider t-shirts manufactured in China. The population there is very large, which means labor is not rare. The factories that make the t-shirts use materials that are not rare (cotton or synthetics). Furthermore, they make a lot of them. This means that t-shirts from China are not rare at all, which means they have a low value, which means they have a low price in dollars.

So, if money has value and value is determined by rarity, how do we determine the value of money? How can money be "rare" or "not rare"? It is just money. The answer is the same as it is with other things: the more dollars there are the less rare each one is.

Let's say that a t-shirt produced in China has a value of $5.00, and, in total, China produces ten million t-shirts each year. Now let's say one year China decides to produce twenty million t-shirts instead. Since there are now twice as many t-shirts they are each half as rare, and therefore have half the value. The price of a t-shirt would drop to $2.50.

Now the same can be applied to the money supply. Imagine that China simply keeps producing ten million t-shirts per year and they cost $5 each, and the total amount of dollars in the economy is one trillion. Now imagine that the number of dollars in the economy doubles to two trillion. Just like before, the rarity would be cut in half, and so would the value. Since the dollar would now be half as rare and half the value it was before, the price of a t-shirt would rise to $10.00.

The value of money changes when the total amount of money changes. Simple.

Which brings us to inflation. Inflation occurs when money becomes worth less. Money becomes worth less when there is more of it in existence. When money becomes worth less, prices rise. Inflation.

Deflation, you would think, should then be the exact opposite. It is, but it isn't. If the amount of money in existence did decline its rarity would increase and so would its value. This would certainly be considered deflation.

The reality, though, is that the money supply rarely decreases. In economies where gold is the basis of money, the amount of gold usually increases ever so slightly year by year as more is discovered and mined. In economies where money is entirely an imaginary entity (like ours), the government tends to print more money rather than destroy it.

But deflation can occur even if the money supply is increasing slightly. Deflation occurs naturally as technology advances. Computers are an excellent example. As humans become more and more efficient at building computers, it costs less to make them. Computers become less and less rare every year. Therefore, the price of computers is steadily declining. In this sense, the dollar (in terms of how many computers it could buy) is deflating; the value is increasing.

Now imagine an economy where the amount of money is always constant, like in the one trillion dollar economy we imagined earlier. In such an economy, there would probably be a slight deflationary trend, since the only changing factor would be technology. Most items, whether they be t-shirts or computers, would constantly become less and less rare. Therefore, each dollar would have a higher and higher value.

So there you have it, inflation and deflation and why they happen. Now the question is, which one is more desirable?

Deflation is.

If you have ever discussed economics with just about anyone, you probably scoffed at that last remark. The general consensus amongst most popular economists (and politicians, from whom most people learn their economics) is that deflation is dangerous and should be avoided. This is the conspiracy that is discussed in the article I mentioned earlier. To claim to a politician that deflation is more desirable than inflation is almost like claiming to a Viking that the Earth is round. In fact it is exactly like this, because both claims are equally true, both parties mentioned are equally wrong, and both facts are equally obvious.

Fear of deflation is quite silly. According to those who fear it, people do not buy things if their money is increasing in value. When you think about this for less than three seconds, it almost makes sense. A person may decide not to buy something today if he knows it will be cheaper tomorrow (or, more realistically, next year). If deflation ruled, everything would certainly become cheaper and cheaper all the time. So, to the skeptics, this means that if deflation occurred the economy would come to a halt.

Of course, if you have ever heard of an iPod you see the flaw in this theory. iPods get cheaper all the time and, even better, they get cooler and more advanced all the time. This doesn't mean that people simply wait endlessly because they know there is always something better around the corner. People buy iPods because they like iPods, obviously. The same applies to computers and TVs. It applies to lots of things on varying scales. When automobiles were first invented they were expensive and not very nice. Over time they continually got cheaper and better. But did people from the 30's to the 80's decide to hold off on buying a car? Of course not. They bought lots of them.

As you may have gleaned by now, it would be better for most people if deflation ruled, or, at least, if inflation weren't so rampant. People would always be buying better things, and so good things would become less valuable, opening the door to even better things and even more advanced technologies. As is pointed out in the Bloomberg article, there really is no historical precedent that suggests deflation is dangerous.

Economists and politicians defend the inflationary economy so staunchly because it benefits them the most. Prices tend to increase first, before wages do. Therefore, working people are forced into debt in order to buy the things they need. Debt is a gold mine for the elite that run the economy. Under deflation, debt is not needed as much and it is easier to pay off. It is also much easier to save money.

For the government, inflation is a way to tax without increasing tax rates. If a government prints a large amount of new money, they will inflate the economy and prices will rise. But the inflation takes some time to occur. In the mean time, the government can spend its new money at pre-inflationary prices. Later on when inflation hits, the companies that the government paid realize that their money is worth less. In order to get the same value of money as they lost by giving away items to the government, they raise prices. The consumer fills in the gap.

The sad result of this is that neither Republicans nor Democrats will ever stop inflating our money supply. Republicans tend to be friendly with big corporations that benefit from inflation. Democrats like to spend money on government programs, so they need the invisible tax caused by inflation. Even worse, most politicians don't even understand these concepts. They simply learn at some point (probably from popular economists, who often get research grants from the government) that inflation is safe and deflation is not. And in their minds, that is that.

Damn Vikings.

I have been rambling on about flation for so long because it is so very important. When you frame political issues in terms of monetary policy they start to look very different then the way they come out of Barack Obama's mouth on TV.

Everybody has heard Obama and others lament about the growing distance between the upper and lower class: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The middle class is disappearing. Not realizing (or not caring) that this is the result of inflation of the money supply, the president and the rest of Washington decide to solve this issue by inflating the money supply at an accelerated rate.

It changes so much that it is hard to keep track, but it is sounding like the government is going to double the national debt over the next several years, or maybe just this year. Either way, this will cause more inflation and more disparities between rich and poor. When the government buys things with imaginary money, it increases the supply of imaginary money. Money becomes less rare. It loses value. It inflates. Simple.

The ramifications of this are enormous. All of a sudden a "recovery act" that is supposed to create all kinds of jobs and wealth starts looking like an inflationary device that will simply keep debt-ridden, poor Americans exactly as they were before: debt-ridden and poor. This is the power of flation. It's not an exaggeration!

Knowing this, you can understand why Ron Paul talks about inflation (and the Federal Reserve, who facilitates most of it) so much. Almost every question he is asked, he ends up coming back to the Federal Reserve and monetary policy. To people who don't think about flation, this makes him seem like a one-line fool. But people who grasp its importance understand that our government's rampant inflation of the money supply is really the root of many of our problems. Really.

This is also why, no matter how many new regulations he puts in place, Barack Obama will not really change America. The economy will continue to work the same way as long as the government continues this behavior, and Barack Obama certainly plans to. "Regulations" are trivial compared to monetary policies that throw trillions of dollars around like they're day-old Skittles.

The most important question is, how do normal people deal with an economy they don't control? There are two answers.

One way to deal with it is to ignore it. Money isn't everything, after all. And, heck, if the country does eventually crumble in depression and get taken over by China, think of all the pork fried rice we'd be eating!

The second way to deal with it is not to vote for idiots. Okay, okay, "idiots" was the wrong word. Politicians like Barack Obama and George Bush aren't idiots, they just haven't accepted flation, and they never will. I recommend checking out Libertarians, or Libertarian-in-the-closet-Republicans, like Ron Paul. It's also a good idea to try and learn economics, which I do by checking out books recommended by Ron Paul. Seriously, that guy's just the man. (And he's so adorable!)

Either way, I suggest you buy your coffee early and often. You never know when Dunkin's gonna pull a fast one on you. That day will come, my friends.