+ 15 - 17 | § ¶Dis(obam)appointment
Obama has an undeserved reputation of being quite liberal. In reality, he's pretty centrist, much like (Bill) Clinton - and this centrism is what makes them both successful.
Most of it is essentially pandering, but that's okay - we want politicians to pander, the system gives them the incentive to do so and as long as they continue doing so while in office then hopefully "the people" generally get what they want. And you can tell when Obama is perhaps doing something more conservative or centrist than he might actually prefer in order to win over support - he over-rationalizes, offers unfalsifiable reasoning, and so forth.
And all in all, I like Obama and agree with many of his convictions and understand many of his compromises. However, there's one topic that has me genuinely puzzled, and it's a big one: education.
Obama has used rhetoric supporting vouchers for some time, but now he's putting his money where his mouth is. What's more, he's also pushing to evaluate teachers on the performance of their students and establish "national standards", and then linking all of this to funding in order to coerce the states to comply (since really education isn't a federal thing anyway).
And this saddens me, because it seems to be his genuine opinion to push for this. Of course I may be a ridiculous communist liberal or somesuch, but it seems blindingly obvious to me that vouchers are just usually unconstitutional. Most private schools are religious, and that's fine, a good thing even to have that option. But they shouldn't get public funding, and the perception that it's people pulling "their" money back out is just stupid. You pay into public schools not as tuition for any children you have but so we have public schools as a public good - an educated populace is for the good of all.
The standards and teacher evaluation methods are equally dumb - you can only teach students who are willing to learn, and establishing rules like this will only further incentivize teachers to teach to the test and students to slack. Education is not about standardization, it's about knowledge, and you can't really measure it, you just have to put it out there and accept that some people will grab it and some people won't. You'll never get true 100% participation, but if you try to force everyone to be studious you'll end up turning more people off than on.
So, we'll see - here's hoping the next president has his head on straight for this issue. Maybe Obama will at least fix health care and foreign policy...
+ 16 - 22 | § ¶Improv poetry
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
When Elvis got high on the bit of an ember
That sat in his ashtray, just by his feet
While wallowing, wallowing, in his defeat.
He asked himself 'How did I get to this place?'
'Why am I so desperate? Why did I lose face?'
He had forgotten that which he had known -
He had at long last reaped what he had sown.
'Away, away demons! Please leave me be!'
'I simply want to once again be me.'
But all hope was lost and cannot be found.
Elvis was no more, his good faith had drowned.
+ 20 - 18 | § ¶Business speak obfuscated
Business speak is an interesting and scary phenomenon - it's similar to the "like, yaknow" filler of teen girls, the "exogenous factors in the development of postmodern dyads" verbiage of academia, and the "winners don't quit" truisms of pop philosophy and inspirational posters. It's interesting because of its prominence and parallels to other utterances, and it's scary because unlike these other cases it seems to have a real impact on (or at least correlation with) career success.
This is all just based on my own anecdotal observations (you're reading a blog, after all), but it seems that those who work their way up various professional ladders really do tend to use a lot of business speak. I'm not implying causality here (in fact I'm quite sure that such vapid phrases do not really cause anything at all), but it's definitely different from the other cases I highlighted. Teenage speak is just a habit/phase and doesn't really matter positively or negatively, and really the same is true of the other cases as well. Being wordy in academia or trite on a poster is not clearly correlated with success or failure - you'll find a mix of all cases.
But business speak really is present and really is taken seriously, it seems. Sure, a lot of people make fun of it (see: Action Item, Professional Superhero), but not enough to stem it or prevent it from being so, well, "impactful." Almost without exception, people in the upper echelons of business use these words, and more frequently the higher up you go. Again I wouldn't suggest that the use of these words causes success (and would be inclined to think the reverse is true), but it is a sad and scary observation nonetheless and it causes many "lower" folks to look up and try to see meaning and wisdom where there is none.
So, I'll pile on with another attempt at humor, in the hopes that by continuing to trivialize this language we can slowly chip away at it. I guess this is a bit like the "Beg The Question" language prescriptivism, and equally hopeless, but here goes:
Following are some common business speak terms and silly/obfuscated alternatives (in the spirit of "eschew obfuscation, embrace elucidation!"):
- "Going forward" -> "Moving like a pawn" (in Chess, they only move forwards)
- "On the same page" -> "Literarily proximal" (as an added bonus, literarily sounds like it isn't a word but actually is, and sounds like "literal" which is commonly misused)
- "Add value" -> "Escalate eminence" (alliterative, somewhat unusual word choice)
- "Take offline" -> "Take the red pill" (Matrix reference)
- "Touch base" -> "Haptically plan" (haptically may or may not really be a word, but haptics is relating to touch)
- "Deliverables" -> "Remittables" (with a secondary definition of canceling)
- "High level" -> "Circumvently cirrus-like" (neither are really quite words, but it sounds fun and will make people say "huh?" - and if you know what the words are, it does make some sense)
- "Action item" -> "Vivacious component" (real words this time, but another "huh?"-raiser)
+ 25 - 32 | § ¶Meditations on spam
So I'm behind the scenes tweaking things to make the site a bit more spam-proof, and it caused me to meditate a bit about the existence of spam. Its existence implies its profitability, but its profitability is no doubt contingent on the fact that it doesn't really cost the spammers anything to do what they do (e.g. they're using viruses and such to hijack the computers of others for their own purposes).
The most remarkable aspect of spam is that the spammers are in a sense true researchers of artificial intelligence. We keep on trying to come up with more techniques to block them that mostly try to ensure the poster is truly a human, and the spammers keep on coming up with ways to feign humanity. It would be nice to somehow legitimize and leverage the "research" into cracking captchas that has been done in the name of spam.
+ 32 - 23 | § ¶Renting market
So it seems that the renting market ironically works like this:
- Premise: Economy is crappy
- -> real estate prices going down for foreseeable future
- -> more people waiting to buy houses
- -> fewer people buying houses right now
- -> more people renting right now
- -> renting prices are higher now.
+ 42 - 21 | § ¶Proles.net is Still Alive
This website is a habit I can't keep yet can't kick.
The history of this site is marked by brief flurries of activity and long periods of nothing, like most of the web I imagine. Mostly I just like the domain - it's short and memorable, and actually has decent pagerank last I checked. I've had the domain for awhile, and it's fun (or at least nostalgic) to check out it's evolution over the years.
Of course times change and my focus has shifted a bit - no need to go into details, but if you are interested in computer programming I encourage you to check out blog.soycode.com (and of course Soy Code itself). Unlike Proles, Soy Code will have only one real topic (programming) and as such will be more focused and regularly updated.
So where does that leave this site? Well, I do still have other interests, and it is nice to have a soapbox, even if nobody is actually listening. I'll keep updating this site occasionally, not often enough to be "regular reader" fare, but please do keep it in your feedreader or whatnot if you're interested. I will most likely focus on the topics of videogames and music, with occasional nostalgic and/or meta rant. Poetry and philosophy is still cool too, but the net is full of enough noise already that I'll let you go find the real stuff in a library or something.
+ 35 - 35 | § ¶War on ants
No, not ents (don't mess with those guys) - ants. Specifically, Argentine ants. Apparently California is one giant supercolony of them, with something like 200 billion (and I only wish I was exaggerating) of them stretched over 600 miles from southern Oregon down to San Diego. It's more recently been debated that it's actually more like 4 or 5 distinct colonies, but that doesn't change the fact that they've infested the entire Bay Area. They are omnivorous and have 8 queens per 1000 ants, making them numerous and persistent. They stick around all year but are most noticable during the summer.
And stopping them? Well, don't bother trying - both chemicals and "natural" solutions are ineffective. They'll move in your apartment when it suits them (driven by either hot weather or substantial rainfall), and only move out again when they feel like it again (they eat most anything but their favorite food comes from aphids and trees). California isn't the only place infested by these things - they come from South America, but stretch from Italy to Portugal in Europe. And they aren't just bothersome pests to humans - they displace native ants which can mess with the ecosystem and starve ant predators such as lizards.
Scientists have found a way to turn them against each other, meaning their unique cooperative boon can potentially be taken away. But to actually implement such a solution on a broad enough scale to make a difference, it seems that it will be necessary for us humans to cooperate and coordinate a bit. So, I have a not-so-modest proposal - a war on ants.
Clearly, these ants are attacking our fundamental way of life. And unlike the "war on terror", this is quite literally a battle in our homes. This challenge cannot be ignored, and if the government were to step in and deploy ant bait stations (spraying doesn't really help with these) then there will be some hope in this fight. If not, then we will just have to get used to our inevitable future.