Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2010

Redesigning the American dollar bill?

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Gerard Vanderleun isn’t over-enthused by the notion:

The ObamaBuck-U: A New Bill to Inspire Confident Recovery

I’d advise these sooper-genius designers to design the ObamaBuck with a lot of room for extra zeroes. Gotta plan for the forthcoming Weimarization of the US economy.

What else are these hamstrung colonized minds designing in the way of currency? Here’s there list. You can smell the overheated whiffs of sanctimony just reeking from the stack:

$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations [sic] than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.

When was the last time these fools took a history course? Third grade? Where are these drool-cup designing dolts based in the US? San Francisco, where else? The town where the homeless defecate freely on the street and where the artists defecate freely in their brains.

If nothing else, the proposed designs would do one useful thing: they’d stop Americans from sneering at the design of Canadian banknotes!

August 12, 2010

If you search for “James Buchanan worst president ever” you get 1,550,000 hits

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:47

But in spite of that, he’s still getting a dollar coin minted in his honour:

The 15th coin in the presidential $1 coin program honors President James Buchanan. It features an image of the president with the inscriptions “James Buchanan”, “In God We Trust”, “15th President” and “1857-1861.”

The reverse side of the coin shows the Statue of Liberty. The ceremonial launch and coin exchange will take place at Wheatland, the former president’s home.

About the only thing that might make this a good idea is if the value is pegged to the pre-Civil War dollar.

August 3, 2010

The Chevy Volt should be called the milliVolt

Unlike the fond hopes of politicians, the Chevrolet Volt isn’t quite the revolutionary breakthrough in transportation we’ve been promised:

The electric Chevrolet Volt will roll off the assembly lines next year.

The price is a staggering $41,000 US — a BMW price for a Chevy.

Price isn’t the only clanger here. The car can only travel for about 65 km on an electric charge. After that, it fires up a gas-powered engine like everything else on the road. So much for reduce, reuse, recycle — this is a car with two engines. Hummers only have one.

And Hummers don’t have a massive battery that’s about as easy to dispose of when the car’s finally done as a tub of PCBs.

The Volt is more than twice as expensive as its non-electric counterparts. It can’t drive far enough to get from one city to another. And when your Volt has a low battery, it literally takes hours to recharge. So maybe it will ready to go when you need it. Maybe it won’t.

I checked; the name “Smart Car” is already taken, but “Dumb Car” is available.

GM knows this. Which is why it plans to produce only 10,000 of them next year.

I’m very much in favour of an economical electric car: the Volt doesn’t meet that definition. It’s been rushed to market for political, not for economic reasons. It’ll be kept in the market regardless of sales figures for the same reason: it allows Barack Obama and senate leaders to point at the Volt as tangible proof that they care about the environment and reducing American dependence on foreign oil.

July 30, 2010

Chevy’s re-Volt-ing new song

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:45

Iowahawk tries to find the right way to introduce the new Chevy Volt (click through to get the full linkulacious glory):

Consider, if you will, Chevy’s once proud musical history: In the Fifties, Dinah Shore famously saw the USA in her Chevrolet. In the Sixties the Beach Boys saved their pennies and saved their dimes for a 4-speed dual quad positraction 409, while Shutting Down a 413 Superstock Dodge with a fuel injected Stingray; Paul Revere and the Raiders countered with a porcupine Chevelle SS 396. Those vatos from War rocked the Seventies gas crisis in an Impala Low-ri-der, while Sammy Johns was alright with makin’ love in his creepy Chevy Van. In the Eighties, the Dead Milkmen sang the praises of a Bitchin’ Camaro; In the Nineties the Ramones further egged it on with Go Little Camaro Go.

Fine iPod selections all, and in praise of a revered American car brand. Now behold — if you dare — the brave new world of government-sponsored Chevrolet song.

Exactly right

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:32

July 29, 2010

Other things that (some) economists discover unexpectedly

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:43

Terry Kinder rounds up a few more things that economists find surprising:

Other Things That Surprise Economists (other than the economy sucks):

  • Sunrise
  • Sunset
  • Lifetime Television has a lot of chick flicks
  • Milli Vanilli were lip syncing
  • Summer
  • Politicians lie
  • Gravity
  • Christmas
  • Their own shadows
  • Sneezing
  • Near beer isn’t
  • Knock knock jokes

. . . and a whole lot more.

To be fair, Terry is really poking fun at only some economists, but the 90% that work for the government are giving the rest of them a bad name.

July 22, 2010

The empirical side of engineering

Filed under: Education, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:50

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, most engineering work is unexceptional and we depend on it working without fuss or bother. Engineers learn what is and isn’t possible with the materials and techniques available, but one of the most important teachers is failure:

The sinking of the Titanic, the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the collapse of the World Trade Center — all forced engineers to address what came to be seen as deadly flaws.

“Any engineering failure has a lot of lessons,” said Gary Halada, a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who teaches a course called “Learning from Disaster.”

Design engineers say that, too frequently, the nature of their profession is to fly blind.

Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering “the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.”

July 20, 2010

Paywall experiment not going to plan

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:37

A drop in use was probably expected when the Times put up a paywall on their website, but I doubt they expected the drop to be on the order of 90%:

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now “bounced” to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.

I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times at all, and no longer link to anything there (because most of my readers wouldn’t be able to open the link anyway). The Times might as well have gone out of business, from the online perspective.

July 19, 2010

QotD: “Happy now, whiners?”

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

On Thursday, I hoped that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would admit there’s a problem with the new iPhone’s antenna and apologize for pretending there wasn’t. I didn’t get that apology. Not even close. Instead, in a defensive press conference at Apple’s headquarters on Friday, Jobs argued that the new iPhone offers terrific, out-of-this-world reception. He blamed the media for whipping up a frenzy out of a “fact of life” that affects every phone on the market. As Jobs sees it, the only problems with the iPhone 4 are the pesky “laws of physics,” which pretty much ensure that anyone who holds a mobile phone in her hands is asking for trouble. The only reason people have been focusing on the iPhone is that blogs keep singling Apple out, perhaps because “when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down.”

Still, if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there’s a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. “OK, great, let’s give everybody a case,” he said. Happy now, whiners?

Farhad Manjoo, “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk: Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference”, Slate, 2010-07-16

July 18, 2010

Has the Reality-Distortion Field failed?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

Eric S. Raymond does a happy dance over the discomfiture of Steve Jobs in the (ongoing) iPhone 4 antenna debacle:

The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?

Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.

[. . .]

A day ago, we got to watch Jobs tap-dance his way around the problem. This was a first; I cannot recall any previous instance in which the Turtlenecked One, rather than effectively controlling the agenda, has had to operate in full damage-control mode. He could have manned up and said “OK, we messed up on the antenna design, we’re recalling,” but no. Instead it’s bumper cases for all and a truly smarmy attempt to claim that everyone else in the industry is just as bad.

Way to recover your damaged reputation, Stevie boy! Time was when the wunderkind’s reality-distortion field would have somehow soothed everyone into glaze-eyed insensibility, but that’s not the way it’s going down today. Instead, there’s public pushback from both RIM and Nokia, and neither company is being shy about specifying just how far his Jobness has rammed his head up his own ass.

And there is absolutely no one else to blame for this; it’s obviously Job’s fetishism about cool industrial design, the aesthetic of the minimalistically slick-looking surface above all else, that compromised the antenna design and led him to ignore the warnings. The exact quality that Apple fanboys have been telling us would ultimately win the game for Jobs turns out to be the tragic flaw instead. And now he’s reduced to telling everyone to wrap a big ugly rubber on, it, sparky! Hubris and nemesis; this epic fail could be right out of Aeschylus.

Apple will survive this, but they need to rally the damage control teams and be pro-active, or their reputation will take years to recover . . . and it’s the reputation that allows Apple to charge more than the competition for broadly comparable goods.

July 15, 2010

QotD: Auto history repeats itself

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:54

In the twinkling of an eye (by the standards of bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude’s girls in Paris) the thing was done. On March 7, 1989, the DOT-NHTSA-ODI-TSC-OPSAD-VRTC . . . effort produced an eighty-one page report written by an eight man group of engineering savants with more than fifty years of college among them. This document presented evidence from exhaustive experiment and analysis that proved what everybody who understands how to open the hood of a car had known all along about SAIs: “Pedal misapplications are the likely cause of these incidents.”

Yes, the dumb buggers stepped on the gas instead of the brake. [. . .] Anyway, the truth was out at last. The government had released a huge report showing that there was no such thing as unintended acceleration in automobiles. Stand by for huge government reports on fairies stealing children and poker wealth gained by drawing to inside straights. Meanwhile, cars did not fly away of their own accord. They could be safely left unattended.

. . . So the truth was out, and we people who like automobiles and can tell our right foot from our elbow should have been glad. But there was, in fact, no reason to celebrate. This message from the federal bowl of Alpha-Bits had cost us taxpayers millions of dollars and came too late to save Audi from the ignorance, credulity, opportunism and sheer Luddite malice directed toward that corporation and its products. Furthermore, the Department of Transportation press release introducing the SAI report absolved the paddle-shoed, dink-wit perpetrators of sudden acceleration. It just let Betty Dumb-Toes and Joe Boat-Foot right off the hook:

NHTSA declined to characterize the cause of sudden acceleration as driver error. Driver error may imply carelessness or willfulness in failing to operate a car properly. Pedal misapplication is more descriptive. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly.

The next time I get pulled over by the state highway patrol, I’m telling the officer, “You probably intend to ticket me for speeding, which would be driver error. But pedal misapplication is more descriptive of what occurred. It could happen to even the most attentive driver who inadvertently selects the wrong pedal and continues to do so unwittingly.”

P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government, 1991

July 6, 2010

The anti-ergonomic design of scanners

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Having recently inherited Elizabeth’s printer/scanner because it stopped being willing to play nice with her computer, I found that if anything, James Lileks is being over-charitable to scanner ergonomic design teams:

I just fear dealing with the Canon scanner interface, although it can’t be worse than HP. Yes, yes, I know, buy VueScan. But I had just gotten used to the HP interface on the new scanner. It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”

“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”

“Excellent! Make it so.”

June 22, 2010

Sparkly legal shenanigans

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

As I indicated in a Twitter update yesterday, the nice folks at ThinkGeek received their best-ever cease and desist letter:

Recently we got the best-ever cease and desist letter. We’re no stranger to the genre, so what could possibly make this one stand out from the rest?

First, it’s 12 pages long and very well-researched (except on one point); it even includes screengrabs of the offending item from our site. And we know they’re not messing around because they invested in the best and brightest legal minds.

But what makes this cease and desist so very, very special is that it’s for a fake product we launched for April Fool’s day.

June 18, 2010

A “new chapter in U.S. history”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Ron Hart congratulates President Obama for delivering on his promised change:

We are so in debt to China that President Obama had to visit their president in his first year in office. It was an important meeting between the most powerful communist leader in the world and the president of China.

Obama is so popular in China that a nightclub named after him opened in Beijing. In keeping with the Obama theme, the club opened with $10 trillion in debt. It will, hopefully, close in just four years with $15 trillion in debt and no apologies to its “hope-based” investors.

[. . .]

To sum up our situation just short of two years into this Obamanation of an administration: Our debt is much higher, an unwanted ObamaCare bill that will cost us at least $2 trillion more than predicted was rammed through Congress, more troops are in Afghanistan, unemployment is much higher even after a union handout “stimulus” bill, and the biggest tax increase in American history is coming in 2011. So yes, Mr. President, technically I guess you can say you have brought about “change.”

As for your assertion, Mr. Obama, that you are going to usher in a “new chapter in U.S. history,” it looks like you will make good on that too. Unfortunately, it will be Chapter 11.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

June 17, 2010

The RCMP: determined to shed that do-good reputation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

Matt Gurney looks at the explicitly non-apologetic “apology” offered by the RCMP to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, and points out that the RCMP is its own worst enemy:

So, let’s get this straight. Four Mounties jump a confused, helpless man, who could have almost certainly been dealt with by a Polish-speaking translator and a few kind words, and they Taser him repeatedly, and he dies screaming and kicking. Then they confiscate the tape of the event, and an inquiry into the incident reveals appalling attempts by officers to provide false statements and generally whitewash the whole debacle. And the best the RCMP can muster up is to say, “Gee, that’s a shame. But we’re not really sorry.”

As soon as the tape of four Mounties repeatedly shocking a defenceless man became public, the Mounties should have realized they’d dug themselves an enormous hole and swiftly apologized for this tragedy. Instead, they circled the wagons and did their best to deny what was blindingly obvious — that their officers acted too fast, too violently and then refused to allow the medics who arrived soon after to properly treat a man who was dying before their eyes. It was callous and horrible and has badly shaken the faith millions of Canadians have in their police force, a force now known for corruption and institutional arrogance as much as they are for their iconic red uniforms.

That a high-ranked official such as Deputy Commissioner Bass would sit before a press conference and mouth words of sympathy and apology to the mother of a dead man whilst simultaneously assuring his colleagues that he doesn’t mean a word of it is disgusting and will only add to the calls for a total overhaul of the RCMP. It is a bitter irony that his make-believe apology was given, of all days, on April Fool’s Day. What will the next revelation in this unfolding farce be? Were his fingers crossed, too?

Update, 18 June: The report on this incident has been released, and while it stops short of calling the RCMP officers murderers, it does call the Tasering “unjustified”.

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