Archive for 'thoughts' Category
2010.02.13
We Love You, Too!
Yesterday was “Colorado Loves California Day” in Colorado. Supposedly it was to try and lure businesses away from CA and over to CO, but in fact I think it was simply to show budgetary solidarity with us.
Here’s the official press release.
No Comments | Catergorized: thoughts2010.02.07
Super Bowl Date Trends
It’s been my observation that over the years the Super Bowl has been coming later and later every year. I remember from my youth that it was a mid-January event. Now it’s more and more an early-February event. Soon enough it will become a mid-February event. Using these dates as reference I’ve put together this handy chart clearly showing this tendency. Click on the chart for full size.
I’d be curious to hear what people’s thoughts might be concerning the incursion of the Super Bowl on Valentine’s Day (which should happen in 2016) and how this will affect gender relationships, if at all.
1 Comment | Catergorized: thoughts2010.02.06
Cutting Services
I read this article and my first thoughts were, “Holy shit!”
COLORADO SPRINGS — This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate what was happening, especially in places where people are averse to taxes. “You don’t want to pay taxes, then here are the consequences.” I think this is pretty much what the state of California needs to do. You don’t want to repeal Prop 13? You want to keep heaping on voter initiatives that cost the state money? Then you will have to deal with the consequences and, like Colorado Springs, it will be painful.
2 Comments | Catergorized: political thoughts2009.12.13
Spanish Textbook Update
A while back I was taunting the French because their Academie Francaise is trying to freeze French and control its usage in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Alas, their government supports them. This is why I was happy to see that when the Spanish updated their official language texts from the old 1931 version, they have taken a more enlightened approach which allows for all the variations of Spanish around the world.
The book is billed as a sort of linguistic map that painstakingly documents today’s Spanish in all its richness — there are nearly 20 ways to say ballpoint pen, for instance — and how it varies from country to country, or within one, or from one social class to another.
…
The new grammar shies from setting cut-and-dry dogma on what is correct and what is not, making instead recommendations as to what the language gurus generally accept to be proper Spanish. The Puerto Rican twist, for instance, is respected as a localism but not something textbook traditional.These gurus say languages are living things that embrace new words — often English intruders like Internet — and there is no use in trying to control them completely.
“Rules are set by speakers. What the academy does is observe and document,” Garcia de la Concha said at a news conference Wednesday night.
Congratulations to the Spanish Royal Academy on their work!
1 Comment | Catergorized: thoughts2009.10.23
Bikers and Dogs
As I’ve been riding lately, it came to me that bikers and dogs have a lot of things in common.
| Dogs | Bikers |
|---|---|
| Dogs can see each other from a mile away. | Bikers see (or hear) other bikers coming from at least as far. |
| Dogs will say hello to each other. | Bikers like to say hello to each other. Bikers mostly do not sniff each other’s crotches, though. |
| If dogs cannot say hello to each other they at least wag their tails. | It’s hard to say hello when riding, so bikers wave to each other. |
| Dogs will always enjoy being outside. | Bikers love to be outside, too… Riding. |
| If dogs are not enjoying being outside it’s because of rain. | Bikers generally do no enjoy riding in the rain. |
| Dogs are generally happy simply being a dog. | Bikers are happy being bikers. Everything else is candy. |
What else to bikers and dogs have in common? Try to keep it clean…
2 Comments | Catergorized: motorcycle thoughts writing2009.08.13
“Socialized” Medicine
I am a proponent of universal health care. Let me tell you why.
When I was kid growing up in the military we had a sort of universal health care. I say “sort of” because it only applied to military families. It was, within the context of the military, completely universal.
Whenever I would get sick, there was a hospital my parents would take me to and that would take care of me. We would go in and my parents would show their ID and that was it. Later, when I had an ID of my own, I could do all of this myself.
Military doctors, as I recall, aren’t necessarily the best doctors in the world. They aren’t called in to Harvard or Stanford to perform surgery on world leaders, for example. However, they are smart, efficient, concerned about your actual welfare as just an ordinary person. I hate hospitals. I have in innate fear of medicine. It’s completely irrational and based on a nurse who couldn’t find a vein in my arm to get a blood sample and took a few too many tries. Aside from that, though, military hospitals were the best. They take care of you. They help you because that’s their job and they can focus on that instead of insurance paperwork.
The United States military medical system is the greatest socialized health care system in the world.
When I finally got out into the civilian working world and had to face the civilian health care system I was completely overwhelmed. PPOs, HMOs, each from different providers with different kinds of coverage (and no coverage) based on the chance that you might get sick or injured. Worse, if anything goes even slightly wrong with the piles of paperwork you’re screwed because your health care insurance provider may cut the amount it pays or simply not pay. $5,000 may not seem like much to have to cover on your own for major cancer surgery, but you’re just as likely to have to pay $5,000 for a simple blood test if you’re not careful. Meanwhile the insurance company pockets your money. Cha-ching for them and bankruptcy for you!
Personally I live in fear of our civilian medical health care system. I know we have excellent doctors and nurses but what’s the use if the insurance, that I and my employer have been paying into regardless of having needed to use it, won’t cover my needs? Universal health care alleviates this problem. I walk into the hospital, I show them my ID, and I’m taken care of. That’s it. How much more simple could they make it?
3 Comments | Catergorized: political thoughts2009.06.08
Muslims Fight Back
I’ve been wondering for years when the Muslim people and not just their pressured governments would start fighting back against extremists in their own countries. It looks like it’s starting now. About time.
No Comments | Catergorized: thoughts2009.05.28
CA Prop 8: The Defenders
Without going into detailed analysis of why I think the CA Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8 was flawed, I would like to simply say it is sad -pathetic, really- that we still live in a world that would curtail rights for anyone. Which is why I think this video, called The Defenders (via SFist), is pretty good except the ending, which probably actually hurts the message.
I’d also like to repeat a previous proposition that by law we should simply ban marriage and institute civil unions. If people of faith want to preserve the symbolic meaning of marriage they can but their marriage will not be recognized by the government in any sense. Maybe that’s just me, though. Honestly, I don’t understand what those folks are defending. They treat the word marriage like a trademark. I would remind them of what happened to words like Kleenex or, I believe, Xerox and is in the process of happening to. Marriage is now a generic term and nothing people of faith can do will ever change its impending genericide.
2 Comments | Catergorized: political rights thoughts2009.03.23
Great Minds
They say great minds think alike. This is clearly not the case because there are just too many idiots out there and not nearly enough people with common sense, let alone great minds.
4 Comments | Catergorized: thoughts2009.03.10
Hot Swap CCD
Here’s an idea, free of charge to electronic manufacturers.
With all the technology being crammed into digital cameras, why not make the CCD that takes the picture hot swappable. That way you could have one CCD for normal color pictures. Another for black and white pictures. Others for trippy, hardwired effects or EM spectrum detection like infrared.
I like the idea in particular for black and white. I know I can use applications like Photoshop to dump the color from pictures, but there’s something special about pictures that are shot in black and white, with that lovely contrast and smooth grays that Photoshop usually manages to make artificial every time. Plus there’s the fact that once in Photoshop it is technically a manipulated image.
Anyways, just an idea, free for the taking.
No Comments | Catergorized: technology thoughts
