Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2013

The day World War III didn’t happen

Filed under: History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

In The Register, Iain Thomson takes us back to the depth of the Cold War, when it nearly turned very hot indeed:

Computer problems are an annoyance for us all, but thirty years ago a fault in the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile early warning system very nearly caused nuclear war, if not for the actions of Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces.

[…]

in the early hours of the morning on the September 26, there was panic when the Soviet early warning system Oko, a monitoring system of geostationary satellites and ground stations designed to spot ballistic missile launches, reported that the US had fired off a missile against the Soviet Union. Then four more launches were reported by the system in quick succession.

“An alarm at the command and control post went off with red lights blinking on the terminal. It was a nasty shock,” Petrov told Moscow News in 2004. “Everyone jumped from their seats, looking at me. What could I do? There was an operations procedure that I had written myself. We did what we had to do. We checked the operation of all systems — on 30 levels, one after another. Reports kept coming in: All is correct.”

Petrov, then the officer in command of the Oko system at a bunker near Moscow, had the responsibility of informing the Soviet high command in the event of a US missile launch. Although he didn’t have launch control of the USSR’s huge nuclear arsenal, he was the first responder, and given the scant minutes available in the event of a surprise attack, his word would most likely have been accepted by the Soviet leadership.

But Petrov didn’t make the call. He knew that the Oko system, which had only gone live the year before, was buggy. He also later described how logically such a move made no sense. While a first strike by the US wasn’t out of the question, if the capitalists were to do so they’d launch everything they had, not a few missiles at a time, he reasoned.

Matt Cassel to start London game against the Steelers

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

The Vikings announced earlier today that quarterback Christian Ponder’s rib injury is severe enough that he won’t be playing against the Pittsburgh Steelers this weekend. In his place, backup Matt Cassel will get the start:

Cassel, who is replacing an injured Christian Ponder (ribs), will try to steer the Vikings towards their first win of the season, and comes into a situation that few expected a month ago. The Vikings are 0-3 and on the verge of their season imploding, if it already hasn’t. With issues at QB, offensive line, and all over the defense, the Vikings have stumbled badly out of the gate, and they really need a spark.

Will Cassel provide that? It remains to be seen. This is the reason Cassel was signed in the off season. Last year, the Vikings had serious deficiencies at the backup position, as was evidenced by the tire fire that was Joe Webb in the Wild Card playoff game against Green Bay. As a starter, Cassel 29-33. In his career, he has a completion percentage of just over 58%, with 82 TD passes and 57 interceptions.

There’s already fan speculation that this is a “designed” play:

Update: The cynics are already hard at work:

QotD: Canadian leaders

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

[Canadians] dislike leaders who look to be show-offs. This is why Brian Mulroney was so comprehensively loathed. Despite a fairly strong record of governance the man is still more hated than PET, whose sixteen years at the top nearly wrecked the country. But Mulroney came off as a nouveau riche poseur and Pierre Le Grande projected the image of a bohemian aristocrat. The former tried too hard and the latter didn’t seem to have to try.

Stephen Harper had a clear idea of why he wanted to become Prime Minister. It’s just that the idea shrank in size over the years. From quasi-libertarian vision to modestly conservative manager of the welfare and regulatory state. His personality is that of an aloof wonk. The badly coiffed one, however, was shrewd enough to mask his intelligence and lack of empathy in a style so bland it could be used to make cubicles.

Richard Anderson, “The Power and the Glory”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2013-09-26

September 26, 2013

Selling things by amping up the “numminess” factor

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:01

I think Ace is making a good point here … modern culture is being retuned to a younger, less adult-oriented default:

A moccachino, topped with lots of nummy whipped cream, is not a sophisticated taste. We emerge from the womb craving the sweetness of sugar, after all.

Again, it’s one thing to indulge in a treat. But it’s another thing to decide to simply revert to one’s childhood self.

Now when he was on this rant, I thought he was full of shit and just being annoyed because Being Annoyed is how Adam Carolla makes his rent.

He also, I’m sure, went off on his typical rant about adult men watching Super Hero Movies, which does in fact hurt my butt. And I’m sure he connected that to the New Nummy.

[…]

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we’re rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. “We” — and by we I mean Americans, not “we” meaning us here right now — increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

[…]

Why, Yes, actually. Because having all of your trivial cultural preferences flattered by impersonal corporations at every turn is itself Very Nummy Indeed. All little girls want to be told that they’re the Best and Prettiest Little Girl there is, and all little boys want to be told they will play for the Yankees when they Get Big.

To have one’s head patted and cheeks pinched by Admiring Grown Ups at all possible times is the Nummiest Nummy Thing there is.

[…]

Now I have to caveat this: Prior to Tweener Girls becoming the default National Tastemakers, our national culture was determined by the tastes of 19 year old boys, per the Zanuck Postulate.*

So this isn’t just a sexist thing. It’s about losing at least those seven years of maturation, too.

We are drowning in nostalgia and crushing debt and we can’t see the latter because we’ve checked out into our Happy Place to chase the former.

I can’t blame the White House or BuzzFeed for these trends. They’re pushers, but they didn’t create the sad addiction. This stuff works in America.

But why? Why does it work?

When did we all check out of adulthood to revert to tweenerhood? And when did we stop thinking that might be a little indulgent and shameful?

Crony Capitalism and prison privatization

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

I’m generally in favour of moving economic activities out of the government sphere and into the competitive marketplace, but the privatization of prisons is a great example not of free enterprise but of crony capitalism run amok:

Private prisons are antithetical to a free people. Of all the functions a civilized society should relegate to the public sector, it’s abundantly clear incarceration should be at the very top of the list. Jailing individuals is a public cost that a society takes on in order to ensure there are consequences to breaking certain rules that have been deemed dangerous to the happiness and quality of life within a given population. However, the end goal of any civilized culture must be to try to keep these cost as low possible. This should be achieved by having as few people as possible incarcerated, which is most optimally achieved by reducing incidents of criminality within the population. Given incarceration is an undesirable (albeit necessary) part of any society, the idea is certainly not to incentivize increased incarceration by making it extremely profitable. This is a perverse incentive, and one that is strongly encouraged by the private prison industry to the detriment of society.

[…]

In the Public Interest describes itself as:

    A comprehensive resource center on privatization and responsible contracting. It is committed to equipping citizens, public officials, advocacy groups, and researchers with the information, ideas, and other resources they need to ensure that public contracts with private entities are transparent, fair, well-managed, and effectively monitored, and that those contracts meet the long-term needs of communities.

Their report explains how private prison companies insist that states embed “occupancy guarantees” into their contracts with the public sector. They estimate that at least 65% of all private prison contracts have such guarantees, and in some states, like Arizona, the guarantee is a shockingly high 100%. This leads to overcrowding in many instances, and sometimes violent offenders are placed in prisons set up for nonviolent offenses just to fill the quotas. In the event that the beds can’t be filled, the taxpayer makes up the difference to the private prison company. They win no matter what. It’s just more crony capitalism. Below are some highlights from this excellent report.

Major Findings

  • 65 percent of the private prison contracts ITPI received and analyzed included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a “low-crime tax”). These quotas and low-crime taxes put taxpayers on the hook for guaranteeing profits for private prison corporations.
  • Occupancy guarantee clauses in private prison contracts range between 80% and 100%, with 90% as the most frequent occupancy guarantee requirement.
  • Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia are locked in contracts with the highest occupancy guarantee requirements, with all quotas requiring between 95% and 100% occupancy.

Update: On the topic of prison abuse, there’s an interesting post at Reason talking about the hidden-yet-pervasive practice of locking up children in solitary confinement “for their own protection”:

Solitary confinement was once a punishment reserved for the most-hardened, incorrigible criminals. Today, it is standard practice for tens of thousands of juveniles in prisons and jails across America. Far from being limited to the most violent offenders, solitary confinement is now used against perpetrators of minor crimes and children who are forced to await their trials in total isolation. Often, these stays are prolonged, lasting months or even years at a time.

Widely condemned as cruel and unusual punishment, long-term isolation for juveniles continues because it’s effectively hidden from the public. Research efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition have struggled to uncover even the most basic facts about how the United States punishes its most vulnerable inmates.

How can a practice be both widespread and hidden? State and federal governments have two effective ways to prevent the public from knowing how deep the problem goes.

The first has to do with the way prisons operate. Sealed off from most public scrutiny, and steeped in an insular culture of unaccountability, prisons are, by their very nature, excellent places to keep secrets. Even more concealed are the solitary-confinement cells, described by inmates as “prisons within prisons.” With loose record-keeping and different standards used by different states, it’s almost impossible to gather reliable nation-wide statistics.

The second method is to give the old, horrific punishment a new, unobjectionable name. Make the torture sound friendly, with fewer syllables and pleasant language. This way, even when abuse is discovered, it appears well-intentioned and humane.

So American prisons rarely punish children with prolonged solitary confinement. Instead, they administer seclusion and protective custody. Prison authorities don’t have to admit that “administrative segregation” is used to discipline children. Just the opposite, actually. It’s all being done “for their own protection.”

Roll back Obamacare? Not with these tactics

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Coyote Blog calls the current approach by the GOP “Republican Fail” and explains why:

Yes, I understand why things are happening as they are. From a re-election strategy, their approach makes total sense. A lot of these House guys come from majority Republic districts where their biggest re-election fear comes from a primary challenge to the right of them. I live in one of these districts, so I see what perhaps coastal media does not. In everyday conversation Republicans are always criticizing their Congressmen for not rolling back Obamacare. Republicans need to be able to say in a primary, “I voted to defund Obamacare”. Otherwise I guarantee every one of them will be facing a primary opponent who will hammer them every day.

But from the perspective of someone who just wants the worst aspects of this thing to go away, this was a terrible approach. Defunding Obamacare entirely was never, ever, ever going to succeed. Obama and Democrats would be happy to have a shutdown last months before they would roll back his one and only signature piece of legislation. They may have caved in the past on other issues but he is not going to cave on this one (and needs to be seen not caving given his recent foreign policy mis-steps that has him perceived as weak even in his own party). And, because all the focus is on Obamacare, we are going to end up with a budget deal that makes no further progress on containing other spending.

Charles Mingus

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In The Nation, Adam Shatz looks back at the turbulent and creative career of Jazz giant Charles Mingus:

Mingus rarely left his pieces alone when he took them on the road with his Jazz Workshop, as he began calling his bands in the mid-1950s. When the Workshop played “Fables of Faubus,” a dart of sarcasm aimed at Arkansas’s segregationist governor Orval Faubus, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the jaunty eight-minute tune swelled into a half-hour suite, punctuated by tart allusions to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “God Bless America” and a bass clarinet solo of blistering intensity by Eric Dolphy. (The performance is one of five concerts included in The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964–65, a seven-disc boxed set on Mosaic Records.) In the studio, Mingus was always splicing, dicing and overdubbing, enriching the texture of his music, increasing its density. He tinkered with titles, giving old pieces new and sometimes cryptic names: the tender portrait of a woman he loved, “Nouroog,” reappeared after their breakup as “I X Love”; “Better Get It in Your Soul,” a foot-stomping gospel tune that’s still played on jukeboxes, became “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul,” a message to junkies that they’d be better off with a boost from the Lord than one from the needle.

Mingus was always true to his ever-changing moods: he wanted to create music that, in his words, was “as varied as my feelings are, or the world is.” For sheer range of expression, his work has few equals in postwar American music: furious and tender, joyous and melancholy, grave and mischievous, ecstatic and introspective. It moves from the rapture of the church to the euphoria of the ballroom, from accusation to seduction, from a whisper to a growl, often by way of startling jump cuts and sudden changes in tempo. Vocal metaphors are irresistible when discussing Mingus. As Whitney Balliett remarked, music for him was “another way of talking.”

Though he wrote only a few songs with lyrics, his compositions — and his own bass playing, which revealed new dimensions of the instrument and helped liberate it from its traditional time-keeping role — were supremely vocal. He collaborated with poets in East Village coffeehouses and never hesitated to call out to his sidemen when the spirit caught him, as if he was leading a gospel choir. Each instrument in a Mingus tune evoked the voice, invariably in conversation with other voices; and each voice was an extension of his famously tempestuous personality. (“We don’t need a vocalist,” he told the trombonist Britt Woodman. “This band can have an argument with instruments.”) Philip Larkin was astonished by “how every Mingus band sounds like a great rabble of players, like some trick of Shakespearian production.” No matter how small the ensemble, he could create a sense of passionate, often combative dialogue: as one of his sidemen put it, Mingus “liked the sound of a struggle.” If his Workshop settled into a groove, he would suddenly change the time signature: he didn’t want anyone to get too comfortable. Struggle — against complacency, against the confinements of race and genre, against the record industry and the American government — inspired him; he depended on it to create. Though he dreamed of finding refuge on some “colorless island,” it wasn’t clear how he’d spend his time there. He needed something to fight against; his anger, in Geoff Dyer’s words, was “a form of energy, part of the fire sweeping through him.”

The Crazy Years – you’re soaking in it

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Robert Heinlein plotted out the entire arc of his “Future History” stories on a chart that included technological, social, and political events that either featured in or were key drivers for individual stories:

Click to view full size

Click to view full size

While our actual technological advances haven’t matched Heinlein’s predictions, you could make a strong case that the sociological column got it right by calling the era from the late-sixties onwards “The Crazy Years”. Samizdata‘s Johnathan Pearce linked to this post by Charles Steele which makes the case quite well:

In his Past Through Tomorrow and other works, Robert A. Heinlein explored a possible future history for homo sapiens. One of things he foresaw was a period at the end of the 20th Century and beginning of the 21st that he called “the Crazy Years,” in which cultural fragmentation and decay in advanced countries generates political and economic decline and social disruption. He was prescient in recognizing what happens when commonly accepted principles such as an individual’s responsibility for self are forgotten and political correctness and multiculturalism run amok. As advancing technology places increasing power in human hands, human ethics fail to keep pace. In Heinlein’s world, humans do manage to navigate these shoals without destroying themselves and eventually do settle on a MYOB sort of libertarian ethic…but only narrowly averting nuclear self-destruction and environmental self-destruction, and not without going through periods of dictatorship as well as societal chaos.

Heinlein’s story isn’t just fiction. In the course of the development of the Soviet SETI program, astrophysicist Nikolai Kardeshev developed a theory of civilizations and what we might look for in trying to detect them. Kardeshev’s work — which has been further developed by others — gives a classification system based on the scale at which a planet-based civilization can harness energy. The lowest level of civilization, Type I, has the capability of harnessing the entirety of the energy of its planet. As a sort of corollary, it’s hypothesized that a species that is approaching Type I mastery potentially goes through a very dangerous period, akin to Heinlein’s “Crazy Years.” Their advanced level of technology gives them power capable of destroying the civilization if misused. If the species fails to develop behaviors, ethics, institutions, etc. that prevent this it can annihilate itself. I’m uncertain how much of this corollary is in Kardeshev’s original contribution, but physicist Michio Kaku suggests that one thing we could look for in SETI is the wreckage of civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I. And of course, our civilization is our one example, so far, of a civilization entering this transition.

What’s the connection between Heinlein and Kardeshev? Think of just a few examples of the dangers we face today:

  • Iranian or Al Qaeda religious fanatics obtaining nuclear weapons…
  • An American federal government — especially the executive branch — working to acquire unlimited power, and already apparently having the power to spy on essentially all communications, everywhere…
  • A growing segment of the population — some poor and some very rich (think Goldman Sachs) — who live as parasites on the productivity of others while creating nothing of values themselves…
  • An intelligentsia that cannot bring itself to condemn Islamism for fear of being seen as insensitive or racist or ethnocentric, but which regularly denounces, in the most hateful terms, anyone who opposes the continued expansion of state power…
  • An intelligentsia that praises socialism, hunter-gatherer economies, massive interventionism, anything but the one system that actually works, free market capitalism, a system they bitterly condemn…
  • A “press,” our mainstream media, that sees its job as promoting political positions and readily lies when lies serve this goal better than truth, and spouts nonsense the remainder of the time, apparently because reasoned analysis is too hard.

Yes, we’re in the crazy years, for sure.

And yet, in spite of all this, he’s still optimistic about the future.

September 25, 2013

“SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE”

Filed under: Business, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

The Register‘s headline perfectly encapsulates the dispute between Oracle/American Express and a high-end strip club:

A San Francisco strip club is suing Oracle after the tech goliath refused to pay a $33,540 bill allegedly racked up on the company credit card.

Larkin Street’s New Century Theater has filed a lawsuit claiming a man — named in the legal paperwork as Jose Manuel Gomez Sanchez — slid into the sexy flesh-pit last year and partied through the night.

It’s alleged he used an Oracle-issued American Express card between 1am and 5am to pay for $16,490 of undisclosed services on 2 October — right in the middle of Oracle’s OpenWorld 2012 conference in the city — and then returned two days later to splurge $17,050.

According to the San Fran Chronicle, Oracle was not willing to settle the subsequent bill. The database giant, easing itself into the software-as-a-service market, declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was submitted earlier this month to the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. The next hearing will take place in February. Sanchez is named as a defendant along with Oracle.

I’m not a lawyer, but it strikes me as a bad idea for Oracle to dispute the charges on the Amex card unless there are strong indications of “creative” billing on the part of the strip club. Just because they disapprove of how their employee racked up the charges doesn’t mean they can stiff the vendor.

Corporate culture, entitlement and unearned benefits

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

I’ve never worked in the investment banking world, but even at the tech companies I’ve worked for over the years, I saw smaller versions of the kind of behaviour that Chris Tell says are sure-fire signs of a toxic corporate culture:

It was the late 90′s, markets were booming and the only thing that seemed to be flowing faster than the pints on a typical Thursday night in the city of London’s watering holes, was of course the money.

Living it up … great food, expensive cocktails — in fact the more expensive the better — that was the prevailing attitude. Never on your own dime of course.

This wasn’t unique to Lehman, who I was with at the time, or to any other bank for that matter. I contracted to a handful of the big names, and they were all abusers.

It was, and still is deeply ingrained in much of the investment banking corporate culture. It’s also been a cancer in many of the businesses I’ve researched over the years.

I now have zero tolerance for it as an investor and business owner, despite the fact that I was more impressionable when younger.

Back then, being young and naive, working for a fancy-pants IB, I was awestruck by my bosses spending hundreds of pounds in a drinking session. As I look back I’m embarrassed for thinking that these wealthy parasites where gods of some kind. The more they spent … the bigger an asshole they were … the more they were idolized and revered!

As far as I could tell most of my fellow inmates had applied to an ad that read something like: Arrogant, obnoxious, self-aggrandizing types being accepted now.

[…]

Humans have a desire for fairness but also love a free lunch. These two aspects work against each other.

Soon one manager sees another manager ordering lobster at lunch and thinks to himself, “Screw it, if he’s getting it so should I.” Rapidly a culture of entitlement develops where mysteriously, corporate travel, apartments, dinners, drinks and other things that have little to no ROI start burning up the expense accounts. These folks rarely stop to consider the impact of their actions, while somehow believing that they have “earned it” and indeed “deserve it.”

I was never able to put my finger on it at the time, but having subsequently spent the majority of my adult life researching and investing in early-stage businesses, I now have a keen eye for spotting this, and will never invest in businesses which allow this type of culture to gain footing.

Once let in the door it grows like a cancer and completely destroys shareholder value.

Incidentally, it’s not distinctly different to how career politicians view themselves. They actually believe that what the do, day in and day out is worth something more than it is. That it’s somehow more than just community service, and they should be compensated in the fashion that they (currently — hopefully temporarily) are.

Redefining “austerity” (again)

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:51

At Coyote Blog, an illuminating comparison of “austerity” measurements, responding to a piece in Mother Jones by Kevin Drum:

He uses this graph to “prove” that our fiscal response to this recession is weak vis a vis past recessions. The graph is a bit counter-intuitive — note that it begins at the end of each recession. His point is that Keynesian spending needs to continue long after (five years ?!) after the recession is over to guarantee a good recovery, and that we have not done that.

Government spending after recessions

[…]

I took roughly the same data and started each line two years earlier, so that my first year is two years ahead of his graph and the zero year in my graph is the same as the zero point in Drum’s chart. His data is better in the sense that he has quarterly data and I only have annual. Mine is better in that it looks at changes in spending as a percentage of GDP, which I would guess would be the more relevant Keynesian metric (it also helps us correct for the chicken and egg problem of increased government spending being due to, rather than causing, economic expansion).

Here are the results (I tried to use roughly the same colors for the same data series, but who in the world with the choice of the entire color pallet uses two almost identical blues?)

Government spending before and after recessions

That second image tells a radically different story to the first one, doesn’t it? Hard to make that fit into the traditional definition of the word “austerity” though…

Potential service interruption

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:49

A while back, I mentioned that my hosting service was moving the site to a new server. Fortunately, this change appears to have happened without disrupting anything. Today, however, I had to make a DNS setting change that may take up to 24 hours to take effect. If you get a 404 message that the site is unreachable, try again in an hour or so and hopefully the new settings will be in place. Or, I could be worried over nothing and this will also be a transparent change from the users’ point of view (fingers crossed, anyway).

QotD: “Liberaltarianism”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Oh, so anyway, another peeve of mine is the way liberals — and many libertarians — act as if there’s a lot of common cause between liberals and libertarians. The thinking seems to be that since both liberals and libertarians are for drug legalization, gay marriage, etc., that liberals can be seduced to the libertarian cause or that libertarians and liberals should forge a new “liberaltarian” political alliance to replace the old right-leaning fusionism. This was my friend Brink Lindsey’s big cause for a while, and I never bought it. It’s also something you hear from a lot of liberal college kids who want a wee bit more plausibility when they pose as rebellious.

But the truth is that what we call liberals today — a.k.a. progressives — simply aren’t libertarian even on most of their “libertarian” issues. As I’ve written before, being a “social liberal” isn’t the same thing as being a libertarian:

Your typical liberal Democrat says she’s liberal on social issues but that doesn’t make her in any meaningful way a libertarian. For instance, the vast majority of the libertarians I know hate things like speech codes, smoking bans, racial quotas, and the vast swaths of political indoctrination that pass for “education” today. They tend to oppose gun control, think fondly of homeschooling (if not always homeschoolers) and are generally split on the question of abortion. They do not, however, think that the government should be steamrolling religious institutions with Obamacare or subsidizing birth control. Liberals tend to loathe federalism or states’ rights (though there’s been some movement there), libertarians usually love the idea. The liberals who don’t like it fear that states or local communities might use their autonomy to live in ways liberals don’t approve of. Libertarians couldn’t care less.

Sure, there’s overlap between liberalism and libertarianism on things like gay marriage. But the philosophical route libertarians and liberals take to get to that support is usually very different. Libertarians are disciples of thinkers like Hayek and von Mises. Liberals descend from thinkers like John Dewey. The former believed in negative liberty, the latter positive liberty. And therein lies all of the difference. As a gross generalization, libertarianism advocates freedom to do whatever you like (short of harming others). Liberalism supports freedom to do whatever liberals like; everything else is suspect.

[…]

That’s because libertarianism is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File, 2013-08-23

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.

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