Austerity has a human price

Mother of 22 year old autistic son kills son, herself.

I've worked with autistic kids in the past. It's hard enough dealing with them when they're little, they don't respond like normal kids, and they get overstimulated very easily at which point they usually respond with self destructive, self-mutilative, or just plain destructive behavior. But they were little kids, and we had special facilities, so we could deal with them. Dealing with a non-verbal autistic adult who has full adult size and strength... no family can do that alone. It just isn't possible. That way lies a nervous break down, depression, and... well.

Public health programs such as respite centers, day centers, and visiting nurses aimed at people with cognitive disabilities aren't just a good idea. They're the only alternative to stories like this one. Thing is, funding for all of these has been slashed to the point where the state-run programs here in California are all shut down and the ones getting Medicaid money are turning away people because they really don't have the money for the clients they already have. And don't think that charities will take up the gap, they have to do the math and put their limited funds where it gets the most bang for the buck. They're having a hard enough time keeping the soup kitchens and food pantries open, a few thousand dollars will feed hundreds of people for a week, while it will barely serve one severely disabled autistic adult for a week. Feed hundreds, or day care for one. That's the unpleasant choice that charities are having to face this time of reduced giving, and they're choosing to feed the hundreds, not provide day care for the one. And who can blame them, really?

So the austerity that Washington has dictated to the states by refusing to give them community block grants the way Nixon did during the '73 recession is killing people. That's the choice that our Representatives, Senators, and President in Washington have made: the genocide of the handicapped on the altar of austerity. I seem to recall a short German dictator who had the same idea about the handicapped(*)...

- Badtux the "Can we call it fascism?" Penguin
(*) The short German dicator at least made it quick, rather than making the handicapped suffer like the Representatives, Senators, and President are doing to them...

The neighborhood where I was born

The Offspring, "The Kids Aren't All Right", off their brilliant 1998 album Americana.

I was born on a street about four miles long that started at the front halls of an elite private Methodist university, went for a mile or so with large and spacious homes on the hill and, across from them, the smaller homes of the college professors, and ended in the most abject segregation-era black poverty at its far end, where the streets were tar dirt and the smell of raw sewage permeated the air as beat-down black faces looked out the windows and small children played in dirt yards with sticks and rocks. My childhood home was on the dividing line between the college professors and the working class neighborhood of plumbers and cops and factory workers that was in the middle of all of this, and my childhood friends were from from both sides of that line.

What happened to them? Life happened to them. The son of the college professor that we all envied for his muscular build and swift intellect that got an "A" in every course he took at the college-prep magnet high school... he ended up a drug addict, living on the streets, spotted from time to time digging food out of dumpsters when he's not in jail for breaking into people's homes to steal stuff to use to buy drugs. The son of the rich doctor? He married his childhood sweetheart then abandoned her with their kids to live in abject poverty, and spends his days living on the road in a minivan to avoid process servers, occasionally popping up from nowhere to get his latest trust fund check. The cop's kid? He ended up being institutionalized when he had a psychotic break, then nobody knows what happened to him after he was released. The skinny tow-headed kid from down the street who lived with an abusive grandfather, who everybody assumed was going to be a criminal because he was always getting in trouble? He moved to the West Coast and learned how to handle boats and recently got his pilot's certification, and married a girl and has two kids and they are all spectacularly ridiculously happy. The weird drugged-out kid who lived in the run-down ghetto house and ran with the cops' kid and the doctor's kid and the professors' kid? Erm. He grew up to be a well-paid engineer in the Silicon Valley.

But for the few success stories, by far the majority of stories from that street are the stories in this song, the stories of kids of all sorts who ended up with broken lives and shattered dreams in the land once known as the land of the free(*) and home of the brave(**)...

-- Badtux the Reminiscing Penguin

(*)Prior to Patriot Act
(**)Prior to "cower! cower in fear!" message beamed into everybody's mind by 24/7 news channels, and subsequent cowering in fear and willingness to give up freedoms by majority of Americans.

The problem with police states

Yesterday I mentioned that the 1% have squeezed the turnip that is the 99% so thoroughly to extract wealth that it is taking exponentially greater amounts of state-supported violence to extract each additional increment. Think about it. When you're wringing water out of a wet rag, it's easy to get plenty of water out with the first few twists. But to get additional water out, you have to wring it tighter and tighter. And with 6 million people -- 2% of the population of the USA -- currently in prison, and another 3% out on parole or probation, the amount of wringing that is being done to squeeze those last bits of juice out of the turnips, err, the 99%, is getting pretty dire indeed.

So what's the end game? The first possibility, and the one that I give an 80% chance of happening, is a police state. It's simple: Once you require so much violence on your behalf against such a large percentage of the population, once keeping down the inevitable riots and demonstrations and disorder takes so much power that the police are basically omnipresent, the police end up with so much power that eventually they look at each other and ask, "Why are we doing this on behalf of *those* schlubs?!" and simply take power themselves. They might do so openly, or they might do so quietly by suggesting to the departing power brokers that it'd be a good idea to anoint the secret policeman as their successor, but take power they do, and then work the levers to make sure they *stay* in power. Just ask yourself who the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe is right now. Hint: he's a secret policeman.

The second possibility, and the one to work toward, is peaceful revolution. Luckily our founding fathers wrote a peaceful revolution into our Constitution. It happens every two to four years, and it's called the vote. Every single one of the bastards in Congress or any other elected office got there because the majority of voters in his or her district or state voted for him. If the majority of people vote for the candidate with the best attack ads rather than the best candidate, if the majority of people vote for the candidate they'd like to have a beer with rather than the smartest candidate, they get what they want -- and deserve. But if things got dire enough that people were willing to engage in the political process rather than dismiss it as something irrelevant to their lives, the mechanisms are there for a peaceful revolution *without* the sort of risks that people in Egypt and Tunisia had to take to bring a peaceful revolution to their nations.

One thing I will warn you about, however, is violent revolution. Violent revolution almost 100% leads to a police state. The reason is that violence scares the majority of people. Sociopaths love violence, but it makes ordinary people queasy to their stomachs. And police states are very good at promising safety from violence -- and delivering. All it costs you is your freedom.

One outcome that is *not* going to happen, however, is that the current oligarchy manages to persist for another generation. The amount of government force needed to even maintain their current positions on top of the heap are of a nature that one of the prior two events -- a police state or a peaceful revolution -- are going to happen because the current level of violence simply isn't sustainable in the long term. Our oligarchs are generally pretty dim, the majority having "earned" their wealth by being members of the lucky sperm club rather than via any effort or intelligence on their own behalf (the Walton family members, for example, "earn" more income from their inheritance than the bottom 25% of American *combined*), but the fact that they've overreached is starting to slowly sink in, and they're panicking. To calm down the tornado and extend their rule another generation would require letting loose the screws a bit, letting some of that wealth they've forcibly extracted from the 99% trickle back down into the hands of the 99%. Yet this goes against everything they believe in, which is a toddler's version of the universe, "mine, mine, mine!". My prediction is that they will *not* be able to overcome this conditioning and loosen up the reins. I don't see any FDR's among the current crop of oligarchs, I don't see any of them under the age of 50 (FDR was elected at age 50) with enough sense to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But could it happen? Well, cows could fly, I suppose. Don't count on it. Just plan for one thing: That at some point in time, the discussion will likely change from how to bring about peaceful change in America, to how to maintain an underground pro-freedom resistance movement in the face of a police state that is awe-inspiring in its ability to monitor our every movement. I hope that it never comes to that. But looking at the possibilities, that seems all too probable.

-- Badtux the Gloomy Penguin

Labrys already said it

Riots over shoes?!

The only solace I get is that there is a hard rain that is gonna fall, sooner rather than later... and hopefully these morons are dumb enough that it's gonna fall on them first.

-- Badtux the Sickened Penguin

He was just a nigger with a roach

It ain't as if Ramarley Graham was a REAL American, he wasn't white, he wasn't middle-aged, he wasn't rich, so as far as most New Yorkers are concerned he's just another nigger executed by the NYPD for the crime of being young, black, and havin' a marijuana cigarette, nothing more than a cockroach exterminated and good riddance. Human? Naw, niggers are just dumb monkeys, they ain't human, right?

But you know how that goes. It's the NYPD. You know, the guys who go 'round wearin' t-shirts that say Kill'em All and let God Sort'em Out. And apparently the majority of New Yorkers are fine with that, as long as it ain't middle-class white people or rich people being murdered by the NYPD. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Bitterly Sarcastic Penguin

Those darkies are just savages

They're uncivilized and ignorant and not as good as us, so it's okay to do drone strikes on their villages and kill lots of women and children.

Incidentally, the young programming prodigy who was at nine years of age the world's youngest MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) recently died after an epileptic seizure and coma. She will be buried near where she was born, near Faisalabad, Pakistan. Her name was Arfa Karim Randhawa, and she died in Lahore, Pakistan, after complications in the ICU.

Yeah, those darkies are all ignorant savages.

-- Badtux the Darkly Sarcastic Penguin

Quick hits

71-year-old man drives 225 miles with dead wife in passenger seat beside him. He didn't know what to do without his wife to tell him what to do.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Apparently you just order him to go out on patrol, and he follows orders. So now John Kerry knows the answer to his question.

Over the past four years, the monetary base has been tripled. According to Austrian economists, this means we should be going Weimar, and should have been going Weimar for at least a couple of years. According to Keynesian economists, tripling the monetary base when you're in a liquidity trap will have no (zero) effect. So, uhm... who's right? (Hint: Krugman is right. Of course.)

Soldiers are having trouble feeding their families, and can't find jobs after they're mustered out of service, having a harder time than non-veterans even. America supports our troops, woot!

Yet more evidence of the shrinking middle class. Soon there will be only the filthy rich and the abjectly poor. Serfin' USA, dude!

- Badtux the Hits Penguin

Rats are more empathetic than Republicans

When a rat hears another rat in distress, that rat will immediately go to help the rat in distress. Furthermore, if they had a chocolate treat, they'd share that treat with the rat that they helped.

So what happens when a Republican sees someone in distress? Well, the first thing they do is ignore the person in distress. See previous post. Next, if they're feeling particularly generous, they might install a switch to allow the person in distress to escape his trap -- a switch which is *outside* the trap, which the person caught in the trap can't reach (e.g., offering mental health services to the mentally ill... out of reach of the person *inside* the trap of mental illness). But that's the end of any empathy. Past that point, it's "get a job, bum!" or "it's your own fault you got caught in a trap, don't whine to me for help!" and a shrug of the shoulder and move on. And if the cries of distress on the part of those caught in the trap become too disturbing, they dispatch the popo to beat the shit out of those in distress in order to shut up that annoying whining from people who are dying. Because as far as lizard people from planet Sociopath are concerned, human beings are just another kind of vermin, and if vermin makes untoward noise, well. Beat it until it's no longer capable of making noise, right?

Sad, isn't it, that rats are more empathetic than a large percentage of Americans?

-- Badtux the "Guess I have more in common with rats than I thought!" Penguin

It's that time of year again

61 nameless dead. Often mentally ill, ignored during life, spat upon, despised by all but a few, who died young and early of "natural causes" (I guess starvation, exposure, and disease are "natural" but so it goes). Here this year's dead homeless people, homeless people in one of the wealthiest regions of the country, a region with millions of square feet of vacant commercial space at any given time, are given names (click image to embiggen, and pay attention to the age at which those whose age we know died):

-- Badtux the Sombre Penguin

Too evil for evil

The Department of Homeland Security ain't exactly the department of fuzzy fluffy puppy dogs. They have a bad habit of groping grannies and little children at checkpoints, doing warrantless searches at "border stops" well inside the U.S. borders, and otherwise generally treating the Constitution like some sorta toilet paper to wad and flush. So why do I bring them up? 'Cause as evil as the DHS is, there's some evil out there so evil that even the DHS don't want to associate with 'cause of the reek of brimstone. And by that, I'm referring to, of course... Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

If you want the scoop on Sheriff Joe, the place to get it is the Phoenix New Times. They've documented Sheriff Joe's jackboots throwing cripples out of wheelchairs to lie on the floor of jail cells in their own feces and urine... refusing to allow diabetics to take their insulin with predictable result (dead diabetics)... repeated beatings of inmates who have died from their injuries, one of those beatings being one of those cripples thrown out of his wheelchair... and other similar atrocities against people who have been convicted of no crime but poverty (i.e, being too poor to make bail while waiting trial).

The man is evil. Pure evil. Yet the people of Maricopa County, Arizona, have re-elected him every year since a long time ago. What does that say about the folks who live in the largest metropolitan area of Arizona? Disgusting. Just disgusting. That's all I got to say about it.

-- Badtux the Brimstone-smellin' Penguin

Badtux's Law of Internet Forums

"Any forum good enough to become popular eventually becomes big enough to be dominated by total jerks."

I came to this realization, actually, by viewing Craigslist's flagging help forum and realizing that about 20% of the people asking for help about why their for-sale item got flagged did not have their ad flagged for being scams or otherwise violating the Terms of Service, they were being told, "you're asking too much money for it, that's why you were flagged." WTF? So now CraigsList's crowdsourced flagging crew is the Pricing Police, imposing their own Stalistic vision of what things should sell for upon the buyers and sellers on the site?

Why... YES! And CL apparently sees nothing wrong with this. So why did it seem wrong to me? Then it struck me: it's wrong because these people are total JERKS. They are taking a system that was originally designed to deal with spammers and scammers (and I know this because I was *there* when Craig introduced his original flagging system, back when CL was a small San Francisco board with a few thousand friendly users) and using it to impose their own agenda of how society should be organized onto the rest of the users of CL. And if you mention this to anybody at CL, they get all hostile and angry and say if you don't like it, go somewhere else because, like, CL is perfect and has no problems and yada yada. CL's support forums have become a very angry, hostile place because of the CL defenders constantly attacking the users who come on and ask why their item got flagged even though their ad is not spam, a scam, or a prohibited (under the ToU) item or type of ad.

But why can the jerks dominate things so much? Well, it's for the same reason that HOA's are dominated by the HOA Nazis, who fine you if your grass is 1.1 inches tall when their HOA rules say the grass must be 1.0 inches tall and otherwise make your life misery. It's because having the power to impose your own vision upon other people attracts jerks the way that gay prostitutes attract Republican politicians. And when you have enough of these jerks in one place, it's like they form a black hole of Peak Assholery. And CL, as a very popular Internet forum, has attracted enough users to pass this threshhold, and gives the assholes enough power (via the Flag button) to impose their own vision upon the site.

Unfortunately this appears to be a core problem with voluntary crowdsourcing: Voluntary crowdsourcing generally attracts people who are fanatics, assholes, jerks, or all of the above. This is why the OWS movement degenerated into small gangs of radicals rather than growing to encompass the rest of the 99% -- it is the fanatics, assholes, and jerks who want power, who have the motivation to grasp for power, who force their vision upon other people who then, because most people are *not* assholes, simply go elsewhere. Furthermore, when I was involved in one of the first community sites back in the 90's, back in the days when CL was Craig's local listing of classified ads in San Francisco, we ran into the *exact same* problem -- once our site got too popular, the assholes took over and abused the "Flag" button to downgrade posts that complied with our ToS but did not comply with the ideology of the assholes. The solution? Have both upflag *AND* downflag, so that jerks downflagging valid posts for ideological reasons could be overruled, and give flagging points only to a randomly chosen group of people (different every day) as a *privilege* rather than give everybody the ability to flag. That worked at first because jerks are generally outnumbered by non-jerks, but eventually enough jerks got attracted to this very popular site that it reached Peak Assholery and I had to leave because it just wasn't fun anymore dealing with assholes who wanted to impose their own will on everything.

Which, of course, is the other side of Peak Assholery: when enough assholes get on a site and start shitting all over the place, it causes non-assholes to say, "meh, I'm not going to deal with that bullshit" and leave. Which leaves the assholes dominating everything. Hmm... say, have you noticed that I haven't logged into DailyKOS in, like, *ages*? Just sayin' :).

And now that I think of it... does this describe why the American political system is so fucked up, too? Funny, the connections you can make just by observing how assholes are ruining a popular community site...

-- Badtux the Observant Penguin

The future

What does the future hold for Arielle Metzger, one of the subjects of yesterday's story? I mean, she's obviously an intelligent and articulate young woman. What does the future hold for all these children, the 25 million children living in dire poverty, and the tens of millions who aren't far from it?

First things first: When you're living under conditions of such dire poverty, pretty much everything seems beyond your grasp. College looks like it might be a possibility in abstraction, but the reality is that a haphazard education caused by being homeless and moving from school to school makes scholarships problematic and grant and state subsidy programs have been gutted to the point where they'll no longer pay for poor children's college educations. Finding a way might happen, but it would be through heroic efforts and the chances... slim.

What other careers might she look at? My guess is that by this time next year she's going to be working as a waitress or as a clerk to make money to bring home to the family. She's going to do this because it's life, that's what you do, you do whatever it takes to get by, and it's what you can do if you're young and reasonably good looking and have no skills other than your ability to charm people. She's going to go to school tired and sleepy in the mornings, she's going to go to work a couple of hours after she gets out of school after studying that amount of time, and then go to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Hopefully she won't get pregnant. But a lot of girls in her situation do get pregnant, because that would qualify the teenb and the child for AFDC, housing subsidies, and a lot of other assistance they don't get as homeless teenagers.

Could she have been the next great composer? The next great inventor? The physicist who finally solves the problem of nuclear fusion? A soccer star? One of the great actresses of the world? The biomedical doctor who finally finds a cure for the common cold? We'll never know, because ten years from now she'll be taking someone's order in a restaurant, her looks will have already started to fade from the years of poor food and lack of access to good medical care and information about exercise and keeping yourself fit, and that's going to be her life, forever.

That is the sad thing of all this refusal of America and Americans to collectively take care of our children: The waste. The utter waste. Arielle is not an idiot. With sufficient bootstraps, she could make something of herself far better than her current fate. What good for our nation have we thrown away, by this refusal to invest in our children? And what kind of a nation, what kind of people, is it, anyhow, that views a few dollars of tax money more important than children?

-- Badtux the Sad Penguin

CBS commits journalism

It's only life.

Just something got in my eye and a case of the sniffles, that's all.

Delays

From a former social worker: True story. 7years ago as a case mgr at a homeless center I broke the rules to let in a young mother w/2 kids. It was very cold.It was night time. I got the cold pizza from the kitchen and she cried. 2 months later, while at the center she killed the 3 year old.

I had forgotten about that. Blocked it right the hell out. Like so much of my time in the career.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

But we have to cut taxes for millionaires so they can create jobs in China...

-- Badtux the Sad Penguin

A vision

Hoisted up from comments, by Bukko:

The entry hall at Dachau, where prisoners were processed as they came in, now has a lot of historical information explaining Hitler's rise to power. (Sorry if I've rattled on about this before on your blog, Tux, don't mean to bore you if this is repetition.) It laid out the "tick-tock" of THIS machination to put Nazis in control of a local legislature, THAT judicial decree oppressing different people's rights, ANOTHER takeover of an industry so that it could be used to manufacture weapons... The bit-by-bit descent into madness.

We see the rise of barbarity as a smooth thing now, compressed as it is by the hindsight of historical perspective. But to the Germans living through the 1930s, caught in the middle of the details, would they have any ability to sense on the grand scale how things were coming apart?

I feel that same way now as I see the U.S. doing its slow-motion collapse. Life is getting nastier. It seems to be building to a vicious crescendo. Each little event, every new "Don't taze me, bro" degradation -- it's part of a pattern that's ramping toward monstrosity. A century into the future, is there going to be a historical multi-media display located in some monument to horror, detailing how the days we're living in today were part of the accretion of details that led to the unimagineable? Can we see it, when we're in the midst of it?

Some people see it. I've been a careful observer for the past forty years and seen the slow slide happening, somewhat less slow over the past ten years when the national security state has ramped up to another level. But given that the only people who can do anything about it are either too apathetic, too narcotized on their drugs of popular culture and entertainment, or too busy fiddling crazy dance tunes to do anything about Rome burning in the background, I don't know what to do other than be that voice saying, "we are going the wrong way, this way lies atrocity." There were such voices in Nazi Germany, before the horrors really started. They were silenced eventually, but perhaps they were the lucky ones, those who did not sell their souls to horror.

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

Waiting for the explosion

I've previously talked about the concentration of wealth -- about how 60% of Americans are dirt-poor, lack access to the fundamental capital to make anything of themselves due to everything being hogged by the top 5% and especially the top 1%, and how this is not a tenable situation in a democracy. I view OWS (and to a lesser extent the teabaggers) as a symptom. People are seeing that things are getting worse for most people while certain people (the 1% in particular) thrive, and they don’t know what to do about it, so first thing they start doing is complain about it — the OWS protests. The oligarchs are betting that putting down the OWS protests with force will make everything okay for them, but the problem with that notion is that OWS is a symptom, not a cause. Suppressing OWS won't relieve that pressure building up underneath, it will simply deny it an outlet -- and it will keep building until either there is an explosion and Very Bad Things happen, or the oligarchs are forced to impose a police state so blatant and obtrusive that the notion of America as a free country would be ludicrous to even the ill-informed.

OR the oligarchs could come to their senses and realize that their current route is to either the guillotine or irrelevance. The guillotine if the explosion happens, and irrelevance if they impose a police state. Because the end game of police states is always the secret policemen taking over — see, e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, and the imprisonment or exile of many of the Russian oligarchs who crossed swords with him. The only solution that would allow our oligarchs to preserve their own importance is to return back to the New Deal regime of regulation and taxation that served the nation so well in the period 1945-1981, but that would require our oligarchs to be smart, and due to inbreeding (less than 10% of our oligarchs got there because of merit, the rest got there because of winning the lucky sperm contest and being born rich or going to the right school with the right people and getting a "Gentleman's C" like Dubya), they’re not all that smart anymore…

Americans have figured out the game is rigged, and they want it fixed. They want the America of their parents and grandparents, when hard work and education provided you with a living. If something isn’t done to take us back to when that was so, all hell will break loose, with uncertain results. Well, let me rephrase that. The results will be *disaster*. Because I can't think of any violent revolution, anywhere, that has ever ended up well. They always ended up with thugs of the worst kind in charge. Maybe mailing Marie Antoinette Action Figures to the CEO's of the Fortune 500 and to every Senator and Representative would make that clearer (note that the outcome of the French Revolution was *disaster* for France -- virtually every French male between ages 18 and 35 ended up *DEAD*), but frankly I doubt that our feudal overlords are smart enough to "get it". More likely they'd just arrest you for terrorist threats or some shit like that...

- Badtux the Waiting-for-the-explosion Penguin

Our national values

One of the principal innovators and inventors of the 20th century died recently. You are reading this message courtesy of his inventions. From his office in a major corporation's R&D lab, he created or oversaw the creation of the innovations that made pretty much everything in today's computer world possible. Whether you are using a Windows PC or a Mac, you're using a descendent of one of his inventions, and if you're viewing web sites or receiving email you're using even more.

So of course this man dying is major news. I mean, we're talking about a man who was to computers what Thomas Edison was to lightbulbs. And of course the San Jose Mercury News, the "Newspaper of Record of the Silicon Valley", would devote the majority of the front page to covering this man's life and career because, well, he was a legend, okay, right?

So I take the newspaper out of its bag and open the front page and... uhm... nothing. Indeed, the only mention of his death is a short obit on the obituaries page.

Meanwhile, the death of a marketing con artist and fashion icon got front page news in the Murky plus pages upon pages of section A space over the next few days. But then, Dennis Ritchie actually created stuff, while Steve Jobs was a celebrity pitchman for fashionable items. And being a celebrity is more important than, like, actually inventing the "C" language whose descendants power all current PC's, inventing the Unix operating system that MacOS and most of the Internet is based on, and so forth.

Dennis Ritchie, Sept 9, 1941 - (yesterday?). In a better world, in a better nation, his death would be front page news, and the death of a marketing con man with good fashion sense would have been buried on the obituaries page. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Geek Penguin

Tolerance of evil

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." -- George Orwell, 1984

We're told that we shouldn't use certain words to describe people who do bad things. We're told that using these words is "intolerant". So if I wish to describe the KKK members who killed four little girls for the crime of being black... if I want to describe the bland bureaucrat who devised the "Final Solution" for the "problem" of European Jews... if I want to describe the people who call for or cheer the prospect of the death of fellow Americans... if I want to describe people who want to impose a religious theocracy where only their religion is allowed and non-believers must be registered as a "thought offender" in order to be ostracized and starved to death... if I use the proper word to describe these people -- EVIL -- I'm "intolerant"?

I have one thing to say about that: Damn straight I'm intolerant of evil. Tolerance of evil is the same thing as condoning evil. If someone wants to harm me or mine (and I count my fellow Americans as "mine" for this purpose), you're damn straight I'm going to be "intolerant", because any other choice is the same as condoning evil. And I want no part of that.

-- Badtux the Do-no-evil Penguin

Viciousness vs. practicality

Two problems regarding the homeless have recently gotten attention here in the Silicon Valley:

1) The problem of homeless people living in run-down motor homes parked by the streets and dumping their raw sewage into the street drains that run to the Bay.

2) The problem of homeless people living on the shores of local streams and crapping in places where rains will wash their crap directly to the Bay.

Needless to say, both of these present water quality issues for San Francisco Bay. So what should we do about them? Here's two possibilities:

1) We can create public dump stations for the motor home people to dump their sewage into and refill their water tanks from, and we can set up porta-potties near homeless encampments so they have a place to shit into rather than directly into the streams, or

2) We can go out and arrest people and throw them into jail for dumping their crap into street drains or shitting into streams.

Which of the above two alternatives do you think would be cheaper? Well, porta-potty rental and weekly cleaning service is around $250/month (deliberately overstating), so figure $3,000/year. A public dump station could be installed near a sewage lift station for fairly cheaply, figure around $5k total, and would basically require no maintenance after that because the incremental costs of processing that sewage are lost in the noise. So figure that for around $50K/year total, you could completely do away with the issue of raw sewage flowing into the bay due to homeless people crapping in the water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

*OR*... you could put ONE SINGLE HOMELESS PERSON into jail for a year for that $50K/year total. And the reality is that you'd need to put HUNDREDS of homeless people into jail to deal with the problem of homeless people crapping into water or dumping their tanks into street drains.

So which alternative do you think the local governments have chosen? Any takers on that one?

Hint: It's the vicious solution, not the practical solution. As usual.

-- Badtux the "Americans are such a vicious bunch of motherfuckers" Penguin

The free market solves all problems

Left: The Free Market Fairy, preparing to solve your problems with extreme prejudice, yo.

So the Free Market Fairy solves all problems, it seems. Including, apparently, the problem of firemen getting old and retiring and drawing their pensions, since the new digital trunking systems foisted onto firefighters in the aftermath of 9/11/2001 often reject mayday calls due to overcrowding, resulting in dead firemen. A problem which doesn't occur with non-trunked analog systems, where you know before you press the mike whether the air is busy or not.

But according to the free market advocates, this can't be, because the magic free market fairy would just wave her magic wand and sprinkle magic free market fairy dust all over and presto, everything would be fine. Err... yeah right. That free market fairy? S/he is a grumpy tranny who'd sooner kneecap you if there's more profit in it. Which is the case here, I know the technology that Motorola and ICOM are selling firefighters (similar radios are sold to ham radio operators, e.g. ICOM's D-STAR system), and I'll tell you this, I wouldn't want to rely on it in an emergency -- there's just too much that can go wrong. Analog may be old-school tin can and strings technology, but it's also bullet-proof.

So what's behind the push for digital? 1) Police departments that want to keep their crime calls secret so that crooks can't listen in and be warned that the coppers are coming (hmm, y'now, there's this thing nowadays called CELL PHONES, why not just give your guy a call on the phone?), and 2) profit, profit, PROFIT. I have to admit that digital gives better use of the bandwidth and generally sounds better *if* you're not in a noisy environment, but if I'm a firefighter down in a basement with a radio and I need to yell for help? I don't want a cell phone. I don't want a digital radio. I want a good old fashioned waterproofed shockproofed analog radio, the kind that's pretty much bullet-proof as long as it's got battery power left.

- Badtux the Radio Penguin