Quotulatiousness

September 24, 2013

Reason.com banned from Reddit‘s /r/Politics subgroup

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Nick Gillespie is puzzled that Reddit users are no longer allowed to submit links to Reason:

So I’m left wondering exactly what we did to incur the wrath of TheRedditPope. Reddit penalizes sites and users that scrape articles from original sources, try to game the system by submitting only material in which they have an publishing interest, and don’t add much information or analysis. As several of the commenters in the thread note, Reason.com is the biggest libertarian news site on the web and whether folks agree or not with our take on a given topic, they can’t seriously accuse us of ripping off other sites or not shooting our mouths off with our own particular POVs on any given topics.

Consider the attempted post that brought the ban to our attention. The user who contacted us had apparently tried to submit this story: “Do-Nothing Congress? Americans Think Congress Passes Too Many Laws, Wrong Kinds of Legislation.” Click on the link and you’ll be taken to an extended analysis of information drawn from the latest Reason-Rupe Poll, an original quarterly survey of American voters that has garnered praise from all over the political spectrum and has been cited in all sorts of mainstream and alternative outlets. If the Reason poll — which is designed by Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this site, and is executed in the field by the same group that conducts Pew Research — and that post in particular don’t meet the threshold of original content that is news-rich and original, then nothing does.

I am a huge admirer of Reddit, even in the wake of recent revelations about the /r/Politics ban. As I wrote last year in a Reddit thread,

    Reddit is one of those rare sites that actually delivers on the potential of the Internet and Web to create a new way of creating community and distributing news, information, and culture that simply couldn’t exist in the past. Like wildly different sites ranging from slashdot to Arts & Letters Daily to Talking Points Memo to the late, lamented Suck, Reddit is precisely one of the reasons why cyberspace (or whatever you call it) continues to excite us and make plain old meatspace a little more tolerable.

A new “Laundry” story by Charles Stross

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Charles Stross writes many things, but what first alerted me to his writing was The Atrocity Archives. TOR.com has a new story called “Equoid” online for your reading pleasure:

Charles Stross’s “Equoid” is a new story in his ongoing “Laundry” series of Lovecraftian secret-agent bureaucratic dark comedies, which has now grown to encompass four novels and several works of short fiction. “The Laundry” is the code name for the secret British governmental agency whose remit is to guard the realm from occult threats from beyond spacetime. Entailing mastery of grimoires and also of various computer operating systems, the work is often nose-bleedingly tedious. As the front-cover copy line for Ace’s edition of The Atrocity Archives noted, “Saving the world is Bob Howard’s job. There are a surprising number of meetings involved.” Previous “Laundry” stories on Tor.com are “Down on the Farm” and the Hugo Award finalist “Overtime.”

Like some other stories published on Tor.com, “Equoid” contains scenes and situations some readers will find upsetting and/or repellent. [—The Editors]

This novella was acquired and edited for Tor.com by senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

The horrors of Greek Austerity strike!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Those poor Greek civil servants … this is so hard on them:

In a sign of just how hard the austere financial climate is hitting, it has been reported that the Greek government has been forced to put an end to one of its civil servants’ most treasured privileges. We speak, of course, of the Hellenic Sir Humphreys’ entitlement to an extra six days a year paid holiday if they are compelled to work with that frightful engine of misery, the computer.

Reuters reports that the long-standing regulation, in which all Greek government workers compelled to use a computer for more than 5 hours a day get an extra day’s leave every two months, was axed in an official announcement on Friday.

American governance – Kludgeocracy in action

Filed under: Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:28

Steven M. Teles on the defining characteristic of modern American government:

The complexity and incoherence of our government often make it difficult for us to understand just what that government is doing, and among the practices it most frequently hides from view is the growing tendency of public policy to redistribute resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the poorer and less organized. As we increasingly notice the consequences of that regressive redistribution, we will inevitably also come to pay greater attention to the daunting and self-defeating complexity of public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of American life, and so will need to start thinking differently about government.

Understanding, describing, and addressing this problem of complexity and incoherence is the next great American political challenge. But you cannot come to terms with such a problem until you can properly name it. While we can name the major questions that divide our politics — liberalism or conservatism, big government or small — we have no name for the dispute between complexity and simplicity in government, which cuts across those more familiar ideological divisions. For lack of a better alternative, the problem of complexity might best be termed the challenge of “kludgeocracy.”

A “kludge” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.

“Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy today. To see policy kludges in action, one need look no further than the mind-numbing complexity of the health-care system (which even Obamacare’s champions must admit has only grown more complicated under the new law, even if in their view the system is now also more just), or our byzantine system of funding higher education, or our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from welfare to education to environmental regulation. America has chosen to govern itself through more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than can be found in any comparable country.

Vikings considering trades?

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

With the team finding ways to lose so creatively on their way to their current 0-and-3 record, the fans are starting to face the strong possibility that the Vikings are going to be wheeling and dealing before the trade deadline. Backup running back Toby Gerhart was reportedly one of the options the Colts considered before acquiring Trent Richardson from the Browns. With Gerhart in the last year of his rookie deal — and unlikely to get much playing time behind Adrian Peterson — a trade to another team might be the best thing for the Vikings and for the player. Pretty much the entire defensive line are in contract years, although you might not think so based on the way some of them have disappeared between the starting whistle and the end of the game.

The Daily Norseman‘s KJ Segall has a bit of a moan before getting down to trade scenarios:

This team stinks. From top to bottom. Special Teams, which won ST (maybe) guru Mike Priefer an award last year, has been shaky (again outside our kicker) to say the best. They were embarrassed in Chicago by Devin Hester and at home against a team that ran not one, but two fake kicks. The defense has netted 8 turnovers in 2 games, hooray! Except for every turnover they’ve gotten, they give up multiple 3rd and long conversions, points, and not to mention game winning drives. Flashes of brilliance filled in between by glooming shadows of utter incompetence with the fundamentals isn’t winning football, and it sure as hell isn’t the shutdown D I thought we were growing into. And the offense……. Oh, the offense. When the D does step up and give them the ball back, they either do squat with it, or go ahead and give the ball right back to our opponents. Even the cybernetic machine known as Adrian Peterson has two fumbles in as many games — which I think was also exactly how many he had last year. I will say by and large he remains a fairly solid running back, but when your team is built almost exclusively around said running back, “fairly solid” ain’t cuttin’ it. Our coaches make what is charitably described as “bad” calls, challenge plays that can’t be challenged*, and make what can only be called ‘bizarre’ personnel decisions.

That being said — and it’s hard to pull much positive out of the dumpster fire the team has been so far — he’s not calling for a deliberate collapse:

If you think, by the way, this article is ever going to go the route of “Lambs to the slaughter for Teddy Bridgewater” (the best I’ve heard yet, and I’ll have to give Joshua Deceuster, twitter @DB_JoshD, full credit for it), you’re reading the wrong writer.

He also joins the chorus calling for the head of offensive co-ordinator Bill Musgrave:

In terms of coaching, I’m down for firing Bill Musgrave any time now. Maybe after the season, I suppose I can choke through it until then. But the second the final game clock ticks 0, Musgrave better have security surrounding him, holding boxes filled with the items from his desk and politely offering to escort him to his car. And quite frankly, if Leslie Frazier does anything but, I think as soon as Musgrave has left the parking lot said security guards begin packing his desk.

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