Quotulatiousness

November 11, 2009

Reasons to avoid seeing Disney’s Christmas Carol

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Jim Carrey seems to be channelling his inner Friedrich Engels here:

Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:

“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed…”

Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:

“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge. “Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”

Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.

November 9, 2009

QotD: Society must be protected

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:03

I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings’.

In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved self-important technocratic prigs qualified ‘experts’ who can determine what we are permitted to see.

We must ‘do it for the children’ of course.

Perry de Havilland, “All your images belong to us”, Samizdata, 2009-11-09

November 8, 2009

Over-exuberant celebrations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:51

Ticker tape? Heck, I’m just going to dump all these financial records out the window to celebrate the World Series:

Auditor Damian Salo attended the Manhattan parade honouring the baseball World Series championships. He tells The New York Post he found all sorts of personal financial documents in the mountains of shredded paper tossed from skyscrapers as the players rode up Broadway.

They included pay stubs, banking data, law firm memos and even some court files.

The founder of one financial firm, Alan Sarroff, says his company reprimanded one “overzealous” employee for throwing records out the window that should have been shredded.

November 5, 2009

Rick Mercer on Canada’s Economic Action Plan

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

October 30, 2009

Even CBS News has difficulty with the “jobs saved or created” claims

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:02

The formula for deciding how many jobs are created or saved doesn’t come close to passing the giggle test:

When the WH demanded that those who received Spendulus money “report” back on how many jobs were “saved or created,” they insisted upon a nonsensical rule: If a single dollar of Spendulus was spent on an employee’s salary, whether that employee was a new employee or an old one, that gets counted as a job “saved or created.” If he’s a new employee, that job was created. If he’s an existing employee, that job was saved.

For $1.

Yes, $1. Because the nonsensical rules the White House told these people to count “saved or created” jobs by simply stated: If any employee’s salary is paid, in whole or in part (any part!), count that as a job “saved or created” by the spending.

And then report that number back to us.

Note that the White House’s rules do not seek to discover which jobs really were “saved or created.” To come to that conclusion, one would need a set of more rigorous rules — which excluded some jobs from the “saved or created” category, rather than attempting to include them all under that rubric.

The criteria for deciding are so unrealistic that it would be possible to claim that 787 billion jobs were saved or created . . . and it would be valid under the reporting formula.

October 23, 2009

Worst. Promotion. Ever.

Filed under: Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:52

Behold the culinary crime that Microsoft is committing in Japan:

Microsoft is celebrating the release of Windows 7 in Japan with a Burger King promotion for the Windows 7 Whopper: Seven patties stacked on top of one another in one sandwich. Given that Microsoft has been criticized for releasing top-heavy, bloated operating systems, this could be one of its worst promotional ideas ever.

Windows_7_Whopper

The Windows 7 Whopper weighs in with about 1,000 calories, and likely packs enough cholesterol to require immediate surgery for anyone foolhardy enough to try eating one. It’s a full five inches thick, and costs the equivalent of $8.50.

Check your homework, says the dog

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Brenda and Robert Vale recently published Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, where they made the case that your pets are a greater environmental burden than a typical SUV. Cocoa the dog begs to differ, having checked their math:

Conclusion

0.61 hectares to feed the soulless Toyota Land Cruiser.

0.062 hectares to feed your best friend.

That’s 10 times as much for the Land Cruiser than for me. I could have sworn the professors said the dog required twice as much land as the Land Cruiser. They were only off by a factor of 20.

Bad professors, BAD. Don’t make me rub your nose in it.

When a poll goes very wrong

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Lester Haines reports on a poll that didn’t go quite as the sponsors expected:

An online poll enquiring as to the possible existence of God has somewhat backfired on Christian outfit The Alpha Course, with 98 per cent of the popular vote currently saying he doesn’t:

poll_gone_wrong

According to the Sun, The Alpha Course kicked off a multi-million pound advertising campaign back in September to promote its particular road to enlightenment, described as “an opportunity for anyone to explore the Christian faith in a relaxed setting”.

The poster and ad drive was a response to a Humanist Society campaign last year suggesting there was “probably no God” – a view shared by the vast majority of the 154,500 online votes at time of publication.

October 21, 2009

Brilliant re-mix

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:09

Fark comment thread here.

October 20, 2009

Only in America? Yup.

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Colby Cosh makes a convincing case that “the hoax apparently cooked up by world’s-worst-dad frontrunner Richard Heene” could only have happened in America:

Richard Heene obviously wanted to be an experimenter-entertainer in this American, Edison-meets-Barnum tradition. He was, allegedly, willing to embroil his family in a criminal conspiracy to advance the cause. His determination was so total, he doesn’t seem to have given any thought to the possibility that the suspected domestic-violence complaint recently investigated at his residence might be revealed. What sealed his fate, though, was a near-total lack of genuine scientific knowledge or understanding.

When it comes to detecting folderol, television networks have a poor track record, but even the suits at ABC detected the stench of flim-flam on Heene, who had been a success on their series Wife Swap. His pitch to the network consists of a mix of tiresomely familiar classroom experiments, untrue folkloric claims he obviously didn’t bother to double-check, plain nonsense and furiously-brainstormed wackiness (“How long can we drive before having to pee?”). Even an explicitly stupid show made by a presenter who still thinks of lasers as enticingly novel would surely be unlikely to succeed as entertainment. There are fools all over the world, but the awesome chasm between Heene’s ambitions and his actual abilities — and the sheer disrespect he had for his own limitations — that, I think, could only be found in today’s America.

October 9, 2009

Awful book covers

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:50

John Scalzi has a nominee for the “Worst Book Cover by a Major Publisher” award:

Worst_book_cover_nominee

Seriously, now, DAW, wtf? I know there’s a recession on, but there must be a better class of 12-year-old you can hire to push about the “liquefy” tool in Photoshop. I get that you were aiming for “chintzy, kooky fun” but you landed on “Fourth grade class project on Lulu.com,” and that just isn’t cool, and more to the point, you should know the difference. Were I an author in this particular anthology I would be sad I couldn’t show my friends the book I was in without them asking how much it cost me to publish it. I’m frightened to show it to graphic designers I know because I don’t want to be sued for damages when it causes blood to shoot from their ears. And as a reader, I can say the cover makes a really excellent argument for owning a Kindle.

September 25, 2009

Honda decides it’s sick of being seen as a cool company

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:57

Honda has introduced something to help it shed that coolness factor that’s been bothering it for a while. I guess they figured that Segway shouldn’t be the only company whose name is mocked for innovation in personal mobility:

Gentlemen, start your incredibly lazy engines: Honda has a new answer for those of us too tired to get off our keisters. Meet the U3-X “personal mobility device,” a unicycle-like ride that makes heading into the kitchen for pie as easy as — well, pie.

Sure to excite mall cops everywhere, the Honda U3-X makes the Segway look like an outdated piece of junk that no one in their right mind would ride. (Actually, the Segway already looked like that. Disregard.) The device is a 2-foot tall infinity-symbol lookalike with two pull-out pads for your tuchas. Marketed as a mobility device that “co-exists in harmony with people” — yes, seriously — the U3-X lets you hop a squat and zip around a room simply by shifting your body weight.

August 12, 2009

Final appearance of the Free Agent drive

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

In February, 2008, I bought a Free Agent USB hard drive to use as a backup device for the various computers in our home network. It lasted a month before failure started to set in. A few tweaks, a few visits to the support website, and it worked … until April. This time, it really was dead, so I got an RMA number, shipped it back, and eventually got a replacement drive.

The fact that I’m posting yet another tale of woe should tell you that the replacement was no better than the original. In fact, the replacement drive timed its failure to be almost as inconvenient as possible, failing just before it was needed to move files off a failing internal drive.

So the replacement drive has been sitting around for nearly a year, gathering dust. Yesterday, I wondered if it might be a problem that it wasn’t designed to work with Windows XP (why some deep thinking designer might have made that decision, I’ve no idea, but bear with me for a second). So I plugged it into my laptop, which is running Vista. It was recognized and configured immediately. I tested basic functionality by copying a few files over to the USB drive, then verifying that they were identical to the originals. Having passed that rudimentary test, I then dumped a medium-sized backup to the USB drive.

Twenty-six gigabytes of data went down … and 56 bytes were recorded on the USB drive. Yep. Bytes. Not Gigabytes, Bytes.

Now I’m going to borrow a sledgehammer, to ensure that this particular Free Agent drive never bothers anyone else . . .

Update, 14 August: Misery loves company: James Lileks posted a couple of tweets on a similar note.

Just had my fourth pocket hard drive go south. It won’t mount. Why does tech-talk sound like a robot’s sex-chat transcript?
It’s a Maxtor drive, btw. Apparently I enabled Daisy Mae Mode: looks hot, but can’t read or write.

August 11, 2009

Legal FAIL

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Andrew Orlowski shows why Charlie Nesson might as well have been custom-created by the RIAA:

Nesson has achieved something I thought was completely impossible in 2009, and that’s to allow the US recording industry’s lobby group to paint itself in a sympathetic light. No longer must the RIAA explain why their biggest members are not using technology to make money for the people they represent. The Boston case allowed the four major labels to justify an enforcement policy against opponents who appeared compulsively dishonest, irrational, paranoid, and with an abnormal sense of entitlement.

Nice work, Charlie.

Nesson failed in his avowed mission “to put the record industry on trial”. He failed to show why disproportionate statutory damages are harmful, which could have had a lasting constitutional effect. He failed to paint the defendent as sympathetic, or “one of us”. He failed to demonstrate why copyright holders make lousy cops. He even had a Judge noted for her antipathy to the big record labels. In short, he ceded the moral high ground completely and utterly to the plaintiffs, the four major record labels. The labels’ five year campaign against end users is finally at a close, but Nesson’s performance leaves it looking (undeservedly) quite fragrant.

It’s hard to imagine a worse result for anyone except the RIAA . . . they won big, and it’s hard to fault the jury for deciding the way they did . . . Nesson pretty much handed the case to the RIAA on platter:

Nesson could have pointed to the billions of royalties that haven’t been collected by the major labels failure to monetize P2P file sharing. He could have added that the Big Four don’t speak for other parts of the music business in putting Enforcement first. He missed the opportunity to gain the moral and intellectual high ground. Now I’ve no doubt Nesson is sincere in his beliefs that he’s doing everyone a favour, but then again, there’s a bloke on my bus who thinks he’s Napoleon.

Nesson’s case was a misanthropic bundle of intellectual prejudices, a worker’s paradise in which everyone has rights, except creative people. In his Kumbaya world, we’d all be better off, except the people who actually do the art. But once the jury had heard from Tenenbaum — a deeply unpleasant defendant — the die was cast.

The final word, of course, should go to “Weird Al” Yankovic, with his heart-felt, moving “Don’t Download This Song”.

August 10, 2009

QotD: “the federal government is unsurpassed at two things”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:22

Cash for Clunkers has been a thrilling moment for advocates of expanded government, who say it proves what we can accomplish when our leaders put their minds to it. They are absolutely right. The program proves the federal government is unsurpassed at two things: dispersing money and destroying things.

Of course, it already proved that in Iraq. But for sheer rapidity of confirmation, this program is hard to beat. Cash for Clunkers managed to go through a billion dollars in about four days, vaporizing a fund that was supposed to last until Halloween.

Steve Chapman, “The Real Clunkers in this Deal: Why ‘cash for clunkers’ is a terrible idea”, Reason Online, 2009-08-10

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