The Republican culture of corruption

The Republicans have such a culture of corruption its unbelievable.

Rep. Mike Furguson, who is my U.S. House of Reps guy, has announced that he isn’t going to return the illegally gained money he received from DeLay. Oh, and I just got a flyer from him (paid for with tax dollars because it was an “update to citizens”, not a direct campaign mailing) touting his love of the environment. On the same day he voted for drilling in ANWR his fourth time! Ugh!

“The Republican culture of corruption”. Use it at the watercooler, spread the meme anywhere you can.

Iraq’s election result: a divided nation

By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 21 December 2005

Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.
Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.
The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
Islamic fundamentalist movements are ever more powerful in both the Sunni and Shia communities. Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi commentator, said: “In two and a half years Bush has succeeded in creating two new Talibans in Iraq.”

More: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article334476.ece

"Too Cheap To Meter"

Dang! That’d be an excellent title for a book about the history of the internet, or the economics of the internet, or something.
xthread’s wrote a post that triggered the idea.

Paul Graham wrote an excellent article that sums up the point:

During the 90s a lot of people probably thought we’d have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in the other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.

Serving web pages is very, very cheap. If you can make even a fraction of a cent per page view, you can make a profit. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now eBay had been supplanted by an ad-supported freeBay (or, more likely, gBay).

Odd as it might sound, [our consulting group tells] startups that they should try to make as little money as possible. If you can figure out a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. Though indeed, making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more jobs.

Amazon lists a book with a similar title, but nothing on the topic of the internet.

Maybe I should register that domain.

Major chains agree to end "war on white people"

Brad has the right idea!

Major retail chains Target, Wal-Mart and others announced today they will end the so-called war on white people that had resulted in most stores posting signs welcoming “shoppers” or “customers” instead of “white patrons”, even though white people represented a considerable majority of their business.

“I’m white, and I’m here shopping for gifts for my white friends, and I’m offended that the store has been pressured into making some generic greeting that doesn’t reflect me.” said William O’ Reilly, a concerned caucasian shopper. “If they’re not going to welcome me and my race, I am going to take my business somewhere else.”

O’Reilly’s complaint, echoed by dozens, perhaps scores of other shoppers, has led the chains to alter their policies. Signs declaring “Look good with today’s colors” will be replaced next year with “Look good in colors designed for white skin.” The “Happy holidays” sign, recently changed to “Merry Christmas” will be further changed to “Merry Christmas for White America” to reflect the ethnicity and religion of 80% of the shoppers in the stores.

Arctic Wildlife Preserve saved for another year

The U.S. Senate today blocked oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, rejecting a must-pass defense spending bill onto which supporters had added the drilling measure. Senate leaders were expected to withdraw the defense legislation so it could be reworked without the refuge language. The vote was a stinging defeat for Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who for years has fought to open the refuge to drilling.

Who the fuck is Ted Stevens? The Daily Show answers (You *seriously* need to watch this video!)

Top 12 all-time most "hit" pages on my web site

Today I was watching the logs on my web server and noticed that people coming to my site without going to the index (i.e. were coming from a web search engine) quite often were going to an article that I serve about how to give the best fellatio, which I didn’t write. I simply copied it off a mailing list.

Since I keep logs of what pages get hit since the beginning of the server (July 2000) I was able to generate some interesting statistics:

1. 19106 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/fellatio.txt -- ”How To Suck Cock - A 14 Lesson Tutorial”
2. 16206 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/ -- My homepage
3. 10763 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dnssoa.html -- ”tal explains DNS SOA records”
4. 4566 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/resumetips.html -- ”Tom’s Resume Writing Tips”
5. 3769 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/ip-theft.html -- ”Preventing people from stealing IP addresses”
6. 3719 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/starting-ntp.html -- ”Getting Started with NTP”
7. 3563 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/photos/2001-08-25-Jersey-City-Pride/ -- ”2001 Jersey Pride Pictures”
8. 3029 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/ -- ”Index of interesting articles”
9. 2951 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/abouttom.html -- ”About Tom Limoncelli”
10. 2616 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/credit-reports.html -- My advice about getting your credit reports
11. 2430 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dimsum.html -- Polyamory and Dim Sum
12. 2335 hits: http://whatexit.org/tal/data/cheeseweasel.txt -- Cheese Weasel Day

Interestingly enough, by looking at the logs I can tell what search keywords were used at Google that brought them to my site (Google includes them in the “referer” URL. That plus some other statistics helped me realize:

• People go to the “fellatio” page nearly twice as much as any other page, 50% more than the main page itself.
• Web search engines direct people to my outdated “resume tips” article, which has been replaced by this newer edition.
• A huge number of people need help with starting to use NTP, and and figuring out what DNS SOA records are about
• You know all those adverts for “free credit reports”? Well, it turns out that people search for that too, and often find my advice. (Now I know why there are so many people advertising on that topic!)
• If you are looking for a good place in New Jersey to get Dim Sum, and search for “Dim Sum New Jersey” on Google, your best link is to my article on Polyamory and Dim Sum, which doesn’t help you find restaurants at all. In fact, it only mentions New Jersey by accident.
• A lot of people search Google Images for “leather men” and get a link to my page about Jersey City Pride in 2001, since I captioned a photo “Sexy leather men!”

Amazing!

Stupidity... brought to you by corporate mergers

Last year my water company got bought by a megacorp water company.

The first big change was that automatic payment (withdrawn from my savings account) stopped. I got a letter warning me that this would happen. Basically, rather than transferring all the automatic payment stuff over to the new company’s database, they decided it would be easier to force everyone to re-enlist in the program.

Commentary: Were so few people enrolled in this program that it wasn’t worth it to write a perl script o extract the data from one system and import it into the other? Sheesh!

So out of protest, I decided not to participate in the automatic payment program. I figured that a year of making them manually process checks should be sufficient punishment for such stupidity.

A year later (i.e. this week) I decide that since I’m going to be traveling so much I decide it time to put all my remaining bills on automatic payment. So I send away for their paper form that lets me sign up for automatic payment. To my surprise, my $69/quarter payments will require a $5.75 “automatic payment” surcharge! That’s 8%!

That surcharge is more than the interest I get on my savings account! It would be cheaper to send a year’s worth of payment!

Bastards! That’s why they wanted me to re-apply for automatic payment! They needed me to agree to pay a new fee, which the old system didn’t have.

Who the HELL approved this merger and what “economies of scale will help the consumer” bullshit did they try to claim?