Category: Thoughts

Linked from a Zillow blog post, a house which has attracted a lot of interest… but is it the good kind?

There’s a note on the description saying “Buyer must provide bank prequal letter including credit review, copy of earnest money (min.$500) Cash offers must show proof of funds & copy of earnest money. There is a delay penalty of $100 per day charged to buyer if closing is delayed due to buyer/buyer’s lender.”

The house is for sale for $6,900.00. Less than seven grand. And they’re concerned about buyers getting financing.

I don’t think that’s a sign that “buyers are lurking” on the sidelines, waiting to jump in. I think that’s a sign that the internet loves a goddamn train wreck.

In software, I’ve always felt that if an application needs really long instructions, it’s probably just got a crappy user interface. Obviously a complex application needs complex instructions, but any given task within it shouldn’t require more than a few words of basic introduction. And sure, if one user makes a lot of dumb mistakes again and again, it’s both easy and often correct to blame the user. But when lots of users, even the really skilled ones, keep making the same dumb mistakes, it’s probably the software’s fault.

That thought came to mind today when I read about yet more tax problems facing cabinet nominees. Given that politicians are so prone to public and embarrassing tax problems involving “honest mistakes,” you’d think they would have simplified the tax code to avoid them.

No, it wouldn’t avoid Daschle’s troubles with unreported income but it might avoid some problems. If so many very smart people are making “honest mistakes” on their taxes, maybe the national tax code really is so complex that it’s too easy to make mistakes, especially when they’re in your favor.

Or maybe the tax code is complex enough that it’s easy to hide cheating unless you’re facing dramatic scrutiny. That’s also possible. In which case the argument still stands: Simplify.

Whether you read the profile of our nation’s leading doomsayer in the New Yorker this week (print only) or in The Morning News, you’ve got to acknowledge he’s a man of his moment.

Of course, he was also a man of the Y2K moment, but we’ll ignore that for the moment.

He’s right about a lot of things: Big-box stores are ugly. Suburbia as currently constructed is probably unsustainable. Oil won’t cost $40 a barrel forever, and if it does, we’ll really screw the climate.

On the other hand, he’s also pretty smug about all of those things. He’s pretty sure that society as we know it is headed for collapse in the next 2 years, and that nobody is doing anything about it. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong there. Oil will get more expensive, but it’s not like we’re not developing sustainable initiatives: Better batteries. Better solar. Better hydrogen production. The public transit funding in Obama’s stimulus plan is less than I would like, but it’s not exactly small change either.

Kunstler is basically the sort of curmudgeon who writes those semi-humorous rants in the Sunday paper that mix some important issues with others that are far less germane. The problem is that he hasn’t got the self-awareness to recognize it. He doesn’t understand the difference between oil and climate on the one hand, and the insidious nature of electronic devices and the poor quality of contemporary American architecture on the other. Oh, the kids these days, with their drywall and their iPods and their interstate highway system!

He’s basically confusing global ethics and personal taste, and insisting that everyone who doesn’t share his taste is profoundly unethical. And then he wonders why people don’t take him seriously.

The flag over the statehouse today looked to be at half-mast this morning. I immediately thought of Ted Kennedy, but he’s apparently doing fine. Maybe the flag-raising team just got cold and skipped a few feet?

My new DVD player has an ethernet jack and supports streaming directly from Netflix. This is, frankly, awesome. The library is incomplete, but broad enough that I’ll never get through all of it.

What’s weird is the way it seems to be handling TV shows: Sometimes, you can only stream part of a disc, and then have to order it by mail to watch the rest of it.

For example, 12 of the 14 episodes in “Dead Like Me” Season 1 are available. That’s three and a half discs. To watch the last two episodes, you have to order Disc 4 by mail… a disc which contains two episodes you’ve probably already seen before it arrives.

Season 2 is even stranger: Not only are about half the episodes only available by mail, but they are distributed unevenly through the season. For example, episodes 2, 3, and 4 are streamable, but episode 1 is not.

Can anyone explain why Netflix would bother making only portions of a disc available for download?

Did you watch it on TV? Did you stream the video live to your office PC? Did you beg, borrow, or steal, to get to DC and see it in person?

I didn’t.

I read the speech, and I was inspired. But I didn’t then feel the need to go home and watch the replays endlessly spooled out in hi-def.

There’s not much that the video adds for me. I particularly don’t need to see the announcements of each person on the speaker’s podium. I don’t need to see the outgoing president shaking hands. I don’t need to see the fatuous Pastor Warren invocation of generic Christian pieties cribbed from forebears.

I saw photos of Michelle’s dress, and that was nice, but I don’t need to see every step she takes in it. I feel the same way about other gratuitous video usage — “Dear Prudence” on Slate.com is not improved by having Prudence read the column aloud to a camera.

Yes, I’m excited about the new government sausage. No, I do not need to see every step of its manufacture. At least, not video.

Today in the Metro there was a full-page ad for a computer for “just $29.99 a week!” Even if you have bad credit! What a deal! Of course, that fee is assessed every week for 12 months, meaning the full cost is $1439.52. Compare that to a computer for $379.97 at Best Buy. Do they really think people are that dumb? Apparently so.

I want to start a band named Richard Whiskey.

If only I could sing or play an instrument.

If only more home appliances were as cool-looking as this one. (If you have an Instructables account, you can vote for it in their contest, too).

I got a shout-out from Universal Hub for my recent Kevin Cullen takedown, and felt a little bad about it. Maybe I should have written a critique rather than a series of insults.

But then today, he’s got a new piece titled “Circus Comes to City Hall” that’s not just sloppy but nearly incomprehensible. Besides accusing Chuck Turner of being a Communist because he’s got a funny beard, I’m just not sure what Cullen’s trying to say. At various points he seems to be arguing that it’s disgusting to see people accused of crimes trying to defend themselves and that the lawyers who defend them are morally deficient. But he might also just be trying to revive the word “pinko.”

We all know that newspapers are in trouble for a variety of reasons, but tripe like Cullen’s recent output certainly isn’t going to be what saves them.