New Google Reader

I just got the new Google Reader. As was to be expected, it reminds me of the old Windows Hi-Res theme. Not really my preference--I like some color--but I'll get used to it. Glad to see they kept the core of Reader unchanged, as expected. I didn't use the social features before and probably won't use the Google+ features now, so I'm left out of that particular bruhaha. I'm just glad to see that it's not going to get Buzzed. It's one of the most powerful web applications.

Now that we've got Google+ integration one way, how about adding RSS feeds to Plus to make it go both ways. I've been wanting to be able to subscribe to people and circles in Reader since the beginning.

I'm also irritated with the lack of themability. The new styles have much larger sticky portions, which is a problem with my ancient monitor and limited resolution. I'm finding myself having to use fullscreen to use Reader comfortably now. In addition, they still haven't added the simple feature of having the search default to the folder or feed you're viewing (as Gmail's search does). That's been annoying for a long time.

Political Paralysis on Taxes and Immigration

Imigration and the Federal budget are two problems that will never be solved. The current situation on both is unsustainable. The deficit is massive and will continue to spiral upwards and more and more Mexicans emigrate here every year illegally. There's a general consensus that both need to be fixed, but there's no way to accomplish a fix.

On immigration, both sides have interests pushing to maintain the status quo. Businesses like cheap labor that, in red states at least, have to live in fear of being discovered and sent back home. Democrats dream of someday turning those illegal immigrants into Democratic block voters (aided by nativist Republicans--the nativist uproar over Bush's comprehensive immigration reform led McCain to do very poorly among Hispanics). Beyond that, the anti-immigration crowd themselves killed said immigration reform during the Bush administration because they didn't trust that the border enforcement would actually happen. There was nothing you could give them that would appease them. Of course the problem is that getting rid of the many millions of illegal immigrants already here would not only be a massive undertaking, it would look like a pogrom at this scale. So nothing much was done.


Likewise conservatives refuse to compromise one iota on taxes, so any budget deal is impossible. We get repeated apocalyptic showdowns and the deficit remains enormous both in the short-term and in the long-term. It's unlikely anything much will be done. Many on the right have been complaining for years that the budget process includes a baseline that causes every part of the government to grow every year automatically. Does the right offer tax hikes in exchange for changing the baseline? Of course not. Tax hikes are from the Devil. Nothing, no matter how monumental, is a good enough trade to get them. Besides, they reason, no matter what they get in return, it will turn out to be a trick. Of course it stands to follow that whatever they extort from the Democrats by threatening to shut down the government or send the nation into default will also be a trick, so what's the point?

More Hanson and liberal faux-hypocrisy

I've noticed that his writings on National Review, even on the Corner, are better thought-out than on PJMedia.com. The latter seems to be a forum for emoting and tossing red meat, very stale red meat, to the hyper-conservative echo chamber there. Hence this piece on charges of hypocrisy against the left that no doubt everyone has heard about a million times. Note that most of it isn't even real hypocrisy. One can discuss whether carbon credits are genuine, but the concept of cleaning up after oneself by planting trees to soak up carbon to offset what you emit isn't invalid. It does put millionaires like Gore in an "easy for you to say" position, since most of us can't afford carbon credits, but then aren't the Republicans in the "easy for you to say" camp on almost everything?

Likewise there's no hypocrisy in wanting to tighten the tax code so that there's less avoidance while taking advantage what's legal now. It may undercut your moral authority a bit to not lead by example, but saying "I believe in gun control, but if everyone around me is packing heat you bet I'm going to do it too." It's living in the system you're in while trying to change it. Hypocrisy comes in when you do something like the Maryland politician who was found to have an unregistered gun when he himself voted for tougher gun registration laws, or when someone hides the fact that he's not leading by example. Besides, if Warren Buffet made his corporations fail to engage in legal tax sheltering, he'd be doing a disservice to his investors for not maximizing the value of their investment as the law would allow.

As for foundations, has Buffet actually come out against outlawing them? It's relevant because there are two reasons to have an inheritance tax: 1) to break up family dynasties and 2) to raise money for the government. Inherited wealth is what produces the idle rich which Hanson himself has so criticized. Bill Gates, by funneling his money into a charitable foundation, is fulfilling the first goal admirably. Every advocate of inheritance taxes should have no problem with that.

He almost has a point on Obama's war on terror policies. It's probably more a matter of growing in office, in a way many progressives see as being partly in a twisted way. Some of it is bowing to political reality combined with having to deal with an inherited problem. Guantanimo springs to mind: if people and state governments, aided and whipped into a frenzy by congress, are unwilling to allow trials for detainees, closing Guantanimo is impossible.

I'll grant the point about teachers in colleges. I've personally known teachers who were being exploited in that way. Considering how academia's internal politics are, I have no doubt the tenured class aren't too eager to bring equality and put themselves on the chopping block. Nor is it terribly difficult to see that liberals aren't inclined to attack academia and give more excuse for budget cuts, union-busting, tenure-busting, etc.

One more point of note: everyone in American politics protects their own. Accusing anyone of hypocrisy on that score may have some legitimacy, but it's almost like saying water is wet. Of course both sides make the accusations too, so I guess the best response is to yawn and shrug and move on.

Actually, waterboarding IS a dead issue

Why? Because Obama stopped doing it. At least officially, which is probably all that anyone can expect. The CIA has always been up to all sorts of illegal, amoral, and sometimes downright evil stuff. The Bush administration was only unusual in that they got stooges like John "No law or treaty can stop the government from crushing a child's testacles" Yoo to "make it legal" in the Palpatine sense. Even if all Obama did was push torture back into the shadows, that's still a victory for civilization.

"If we can blow them up, then we can do whatever we want to them"

That is the logic Victor Davis Hanson uses to declare waterboarding a "dead issue":

Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?

That's always been a stupid argument, no less so now that Dick Cheney has used it. Since we vaporized lots of Japanese women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and boiled lots of Japanese women in Tokyo with napalm, does that mean it would've been okay for General MacArthur to force Japanese women to serve as "comfort women" for American soldiers? Of course not. Likewise blowing up enemies on the field has no moral bearing on whether it's legitimate to torture them in confinement, i.e., after they have been rendered non-threatening.

Hanson in general has gone to seed in the last few years. Most of the Right has moved on from the disastrous Bush administration, but Hanson must continue to defend them and the failed neocon enterprise. He despises the Obama administration but won't admit that the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration led to the Obama administration.

The other half of Google Reader Users

The World Is Surprisingly Angry About the End of Google Reader - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

This surprises me. I started using Google Reader early on when the social features were still limited. There was no liking or comments, for example. I never really got into the social Google Reader scene. Actually, I didn't even know there was one, as it managed to go under the radar until now. Because of that I was thrilled at the news of the redesign: it meant that Google Reader was not only sticking around, it was still being improved.

One thing I hate: fake third-party logins

Everyone's come across websites that allow you to sign in with Facebook, Twitter, or an OpenID provider. What I've recently come across is sites that purport to let you sign in with Facebook or Twitter, but don't really: once you've authorized them, they try to make you open an account with them. How obnoxious. The whole point in my trying to sign in with Twitter was so I don't have to create a frakking account with them! Digg and Cnet, I'm looking at you!

Update: Okay, I'm partially retracting my rant. Digg only makes you give them an email address and verify it and Cnet only makes you agree to a EULA and choose a username. Still, having to go through account-creation lite is annoying considering that you already did account creation with the third-party service.

Google Buzz, RIP

The latest product to fall is a doozy. I never used it myself (and neither did anyone else), but it used to be a big deal. As I said before, I just hope Google Reader doesn't follow. Of course Google must know that if they kill Reader, they'll get an unending torrent of hate from the commentariat who use it (even if there aren't that many people outside of them that do).

Update: They're revamping Google Reader and replacing its sharing features with Google+ integration. It looks like the basic functionality will remain largely the same, which is good. I never used the social features.

Romney's right, but supporting TARP might be a big mistake politically

Good for him, but he needs to be careful. TARP has always been unpopular. It is probably the key argument against direct democracy that things like that are always very unpopular. Without government action stop the dominoes falling leading to a massive run on the banks and the collapse of the entire financial system, we'd be in the second Great Depression now instead of the Great Recession.

Google+ failing?

It has lost 60% of its active userbase. I have to say that I'm not surprised by this one bit. In order to supplant a dominant product or service, your product or service doesn't need to be just as good or a little bit better. It needs to be a lot better (or significantly cheaper). Just look at the Zune: it never went anywhere precisely because Microsoft couldn't surpass the iPod and its ecosystem and refused to compete on price.

I have to say, for my part, that Google+ feels too much like stripped-down versions of Blogger and Google Reader merged. It just doesn't seem ideal for communicating with people in a non-Internetty way like Facebook is. For instance, sending a private message is a very clumsy process that isn't well-documented.

To be fair about Chrome's bookmarks...

The Windows version has joined the 21st century and now lets you drag a site over a folder on the bar, having it open the folder, and let you drop it in at the top (or wherever you want). It's only those of us on non-MS operating systems that have to suffer the IE4 bookmark system.

How misunderstood is direct messaging?

With the British coalition Energy Secretary pulling a non-sexual* Anthony Weiner and tweeting something he wanted to direct message, this question is relevant. It is extremely ironic that the Telegraph itself misunderstands how Twitter direct messaging (in a paragraph that's sure to be pulled):

It was not clear who the intended recipient was, although he would have only been able to send a Direct Message to one of the 87 people he follows, who include about 30 national journalists and several fellow MPs. 

No, that's not the way it works. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant. I've received DMs from people who never followed me, but I of course followed them. It makes sense when you look at following as a granting of trust, and you can only send people DMs if they trust you.

*He wanted to rubbish some unknown person but to do it from the shadows. This proves once again that Chris Huhne is a backbiting git.

Update: Sure enough, the paragraph has been corrected. It now reads:

It was not clear who the intended recipient was: he would have been able to send a Direct Message to any of his 7,616 followers.

Sarah Palin isn't running

Democrats breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Country-club Republicans (the few that are still left) breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Moderately smart conservative Republicans breath a sigh of relief: the GOP will not nominate a woman who would probably lose even to Obama.

The Religious Right is slightly saddened, but they like Bachmann better anyway.

So good news all around. Not surprising, though. Quitting in the middle of her gubernatorial term was a clear sign that she really wasn't up to it (which most of us knew from the 2008 campaign) and wasn't really interested in running.

I spoke too soon about Firefox 7

The memory leaks are still there, just improved. It still eventually takes over my (admittedly underpowered and outdated) system. I guess I'll take another look at Chrome, though I still prefer Firefox's superior extensions library, excellent bookmarking system, configurability, and the way it makes pinned tabs sticky.

Update: As if I'm really going to leave Firefox. No, I'm sticking with it. They did make a big improvement in the memory leaks so that I have to restart it maybe every two hours instead of every twenty minutes. I've stayed with Firefox this long through the last version or two with abysmal memory leaks, I'll certainly stay now. Especially since the Smooth Gestures developers proved themselves untrustworthy by making their extension spyware. Update: Now I'm not so sure. It definitely swells up, but when I recently tried switching to Chrome again I noted that Gmail and Google Reader (which I have as pinned tabs wherever I am) tend to swell up in memory usage over time in that browser, so that may be the source of the memory loss over time (especially since Chrome ends up using just as much memory as Firefox 7 overall). I also noticed that with Firefox 7 the memory loss has a ceiling, so it isn't really a leak.

The dark side of Wikileaks' anarchist shotgun approach to leaking

The Belarussian government is using the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks to go after dissidents. I wonder how many will be caught in the Wikileaks cyber-blast radius when all is said and done.

Shocking: The Zune finally put down

This has been a long time coming. Microsoft's chief problem is that they competed head-to-head with the iPod price-wise without any compelling reason to choose their product over the dominant one and its ecosystem. The Zune was never far and away better in terms of features, was the same price, and lacked the value-add of the iPod coolness factor and dominant ecosystem. That made it a bad deal.

Zune's media ecosystem will live on in Xbox, which is legitimately successful (mainly due to the Wii not being a "real" console and the PS3 being a semi-flop), and on Windows Phone 7, which will have paid-for marketshare via the Nokia deal.

Chris Christie has some sense

He will not run for president this time around. His political inexperience can be fixed. I'm not sure his other problems can be.

Cheating Facts

After reading my earlier post on academic fraud, Peter emailed in this presentation on academic cheating. The figures are arresting, though I question how serious most of the cases are. I suspect that most of the plagiarism is failure to properly quote rather than passing off a whole paper made up of other people's work as one's own. The fact that watching the movie and writing a book report on that instead of the actual book is considered cheating by the graphic kinda confirms that it's extremely strict; I don't think that counts as cheating either, it's just a good way to get a bad grade. If the teacher can't tell you didn't read the book, then either the teacher or their assignment is at fault as much as the student. It's a bit dishonest, but I certainly don't think it should be punished beyond a bad grade.

Not surprising, though, that those with the most to lose and the highest pressure (i.e., the top grades) are the most likely to cheat. I wonder why they aren't getting caught; stuff cribbed from Wikipedia ought to be the first thing anti-plagiarism software detects.

I remember when I was taking an English Literature college class. I was astounded that most of my classmates were using Wikipedia as their primary source, something I never considered doing as I believed it was inappropriate (aside from the fact that the page could be complete bullshit at the time you read it due to bad luck, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and by the time your in high school you should be beyond depending on encyclopedias as a source for papers).

Graphic after the fold.

Half-term Gov. Christie might enter the race

Okay, first, his political experience beyond being a prosecutor is minimal. Second, he looks like he could be on the Sopranos. Third, he's got the New Jersey obnoxious thing going on. This is an absurd idea. Oh, and he likes to defund public libraries.