Psychological Trends

More self-injury in the news– parents freak out about this shit every couple years, it seems. It’ll be gas-huffing next year, then they’ll be back to kids chugging DXM to get high, and then maybe sex and STD’s. See also apotemnophilia, non-fatal suicidal gestures, trepanation, mass hysteria, recovered memories, ritual satanic abuse.

Political Rant, Avoid if Sensitive

Hey you stupid fuck, why don’t you wake up and notice that your leader supports none of his supposed principles? Are you too in love with your SUV to care? Would it be too much to ask that you check the facts? Well, you’re going to get your ass kicked anyway.

Conventional wisdom has it that Massachussets can’t possibly vote any way other than Democratic, except for a Governor’s election, and I don’t doubt it. So what can I do, aside from vote, to convince people that Bush is a loony nutbag kleptocrat?

Also, where the hell are those stamps I had just a couple days ago?

Sleepless Everywhere

Provigil is in the news again. I looked at buying some Cephalon stock a few months back. But Provigil goes off patent in three years, and it’s their only really exciting drug. Their sales are good, for now, but they’re mostly from off-label uses, which are legal but which they can’t promote.

Besides, long-term side effects could appear at any moment. Or somebody could have a psychotic break and kill people after abusing it, and destroy the drug’s reputation. Even if it’s not the drug’s fault, the reputational risk is huge for the company– one underhanded campaign by a rival firm or pressure group, and the stock price is in the toilet.

But it really is an exciting, if troubling, drug: the first really mass-appeal cosmetic psychopharmaceutical. Sure, Prozac and so forth improve our personalities, but they have enough side effects that you only end up with them when you have at least moderately serious behavior problems. This has an obviously unneeded application with scary revolutionary potential. Who wouldn’t find it appealing? Just think of the money you’d save on crank! Think of the economic benefits of three full-time jobs! Suddenly, minimum wage is a living wage! Suddenly, you can take up painting, spend time with the kids! The trains will have to run all night, of course. That’ll be the day.

Motocicleta Revolucionaria

Finally, a pic of me on the damn scooter. I feel ambivalent about the Che shirt. It’s a great image, and I like that it’s not the standard version of that picture. On the other hand, Che is neither a role model for me nor a new, fresh, or shocking person to put on a shirt. Even the shirts featuring the same treatment of Doctor Zaius, Kramer, and so forth, have gotten a little old.

Krugman had a great article in the NYT last week about the tax-decrease ploy, and he’s pretty scared about the long-term stability of the US government. You look at where Bush is leading us, and it’s to the kind of place where a revolution begins to make sense: where the poor really have nothing to lose. I feel like I’m going to be fine– good skills, no debt, no responsibilities, parents to fall back on. But I don’t want to live in a country that screws the poor the way the right is trying to.

You want to talk entitlement reform? First off, the retirement age is rising to 70, and we’re going to means-test Social Security and medical benefits (Medicare? Medicaid? I can’t remember which is which). That’s obvious to me– I don’t care how unpalatable it is, we’re going to see it happen in the next fifteen years, even if we also raise taxes to avoid defaulting on debts.

If I meet another Libertarian in the street I swear I’m going to kick them in the nuts and then ask them if they want the government to protect them from violent crime.

People, in the People Category

I go on and on about Brad DeLong but he’s great. He ruminates on things that he doesn’t know, reviews his past mispredictions, constantly reviews models. And I agree with a lot of what he has to say. Plus he intersperses his economics lectures with cute stories about his kids.

Chris Lydon has a blog. I’m looking for a transcript or audio encoding of his talk with Krugman at the First United Church this past Friday. He’s pretty neat too.

Requisite Political Blather

Politics have been making me physically ill recently. I can only stand about twenty or thirty minutes of looking at this before I cringe and want to stop. So I’ve been reading the victorian-style novel Tipping the Velvet and the non-political contemporary nonfiction Kitchen Confidential instead. Good stuff.

But here’s the politics: The cover story in The Nation is titled “Blood in the Water,” about how the Dems are now on the attack. So, yeah, they’re attacking. Dean’s stumping madly, and everyone who sees him speak seems to be impressed with his candor and control– this is not sputtering, red-faced, clinton-conspiracy anger.

And of course Paul Krugman, celebrity economist is certainly making some carefully-documented, well-reasoned, statements that we’re being lied to. I’ll be seeing him speak at a Harvard Bookstore event this week.

Lies lies lies: Slate has an article about Condi’s misstatements on post-WWII history. And of course Brad DeLong has been keeping track of all the people keeping track of Bush’s lies. My favorite, however, is that even the
WSJ Editorial Page is questioning Bush’s integrity. When the avowedly rightist, pro-wealthy, pro-big-business WSJ editorial page is questioning you, you know you’re tainted. Jeff Skilling, Kenny Lay, Trent Lott, meet Dubya, Perle, and Cheney: the new recipients of the ostrakon.

Talk like a pirate day is coming up. Of course, nobody specified what kind of pirate that was.

Almost everybody has already seen this Popular Science article on the worst jobs in science. Of the worst jobs in computer science, I would have to say user interface design is one of them: everybody has an opinion about it, and most of them are wrong, but they’ll argue with you and criticize you and hate whatever you do anyway. At least, that’s what it feels like. It’s a fine line between listening to customer feedback and just ignoring the whingers, because there always are some whingers, who will like the new UI once they get used to it.

Of course, I think the UI designers say that the QA people have the worse job, and the QA people make fun of the support techs… I mean, we all chose these jobs. I’d take any job in science or software over most of the others, any day of the week.

But not DBA. You have to be crazy to be a DBA.

UNIX Review Reviews Linux in a Nutshell

UNIX Review reviews Linux in a Nutshell:

If you’re a Linux administrator and you’re not familiar with O’Reilly’s best selling Linux book, Linux in a Nutshell, or if you just don’t own a copy, you need to buy one. Although it costs about $40, its content is equally weighty and probably provides the most information on Linux per dollar of any book in print. It’s now in its fourth edition, and it’s still a must-own book for Linux administrators.

Amazon Rank: 1,108! Go go go!

Money, Money, Math

The collapse of the Doha round of trade talks should convince anyone who still doubted that Dubya has no actual dedication to free or fair trade. But of course, as he says, “Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” Right. Public servant number one. Great.

I’ve always liked to tell a story from when Dubya was in Texas politics and a reporter asked him what he and his poppy talked about when they weren’t talking politics. And Dubya replied without a pause, “Pussy.” That’s our man.

On the plus side, FoxTrot was funny this weekend, as was the Conan O’Brien 10th anniversary special.