USC and Texas:

A sports debate. Well, I'm since of the USC cheerleaders, and I've been watching the bowl game scores.

Observation 1: The Big 12 is Really Really Good -
- Missouri upsets South Carolina
- Kansas destroys Houston
- Nebraska beats 20th-ranked Michigan
- Colorado, who was humiliated by Texas 70-3 in their last game, in a close game against 19th-ranked Clemson
- unranked Oklahoma beats 6th ranked Oregon
- Texas Tech, the only other ranked Big12 team, hasn't played yet.

Observation 2: The PAC-10 is shaky
- UCLA did not look good in almost losing to unranked Northwestern (worst of the Big10 teams in bowls this year)
- Rutgers....RUTGERS...almost beats Arizona State, who played USC well.
- California barely beats the WAC's BYU, who also played USC well.

Observation 3: Texas's only close game this year was against then-#4 Ohio State. USC has had two close games, Notre Dame and Fresno, and I think Notre Dame was overrated this year. USC showed substantive weakness on defense in both games. Ohio State only lost to Penn State this year, while Notre Dame and Fresno had less impressive records than Ohio State.

Observation 4: USC's reputation is primarily built on a blowout of substandard Oklahoma last year, and this year's USC team has not look inspired and focused as the previous year's team.

By these measurements, Texas actually looks to be the favorite in this game. Texas will be hungry, as will Mack Brown, who has endured many years of failure and setbacks at the hands of Nebraska and Oklahoma.

I feel so much better.

As former St. Paul (MN) Mayor Kelly was on MN Public Radio explained the reasoning behind his support of President Bush (due to solidarity of support for the war in Iraq), I started musing about this and the Vietnam war, and why these two wars, despite billions of dollars and much political wrangling, are such abject failures. How these two wars are so ugly, so sad, and most damning, so unglorious. And really, that is why these two wars are/were true failures: the vagary and savagery and destruction of war, the extents of which are sadly so quickly forgotten by societies, has to be justified with some grander purpose. And because of the constant pain that war inflicts on both sides, that purpose must be true in nature, as the pain reveals all.

The American Revolutionary War is a particularly interesting one to me in this respect. Our disagreements with England were extensive, but ultimately they were about money and control of the local power structure freeing itself from the overseas power structure. In order to unite the colonies, however, the American propents had to portray the struggle as based on freedom, and in such stark contrast to the current malarky spouted on freedom, the American leaders developed a keen, deep, philosophical desire for freedom and a new way of governance. If the revolutionary war had not been so pitched, desperate, and painful, it is likely that the entrenched colonial power structure would not have enacted such an amazingly balanced, aspirational government such as ours. Regardless of the veracity of the desire and spirit of freedom that initiated our revolutionary war, it is clear that the war itself solidified and unified that desire, and so the founding fathers made such a magnificent philosophical and pragmatic leap ahead of the post-revolutionary French and representational monarchistic British systems of governance.

The Civil War, the most painful and destructive of all American Wars, testified to the strength of such values that the Revolutionary War brought upon us. It was about the strength of the union, and the true, maturing human conception of freedom. The first World War was fought against imperialism, and almost out of compassion to end the grand deadlock of the great trench war. World War II was the ultimate battle against evil and dictatorialism.

But the Vietnam and Iraq wars, both initiated under shady circumstances, both couched in familiar rhetoric of freedom, defense, and patriotism, ultimately show the true colors of their motivations, both being shadowy constructions of imperialistic smoky-back-room power think tanks (the domino theory for Vietnam, neocon conceptions for Iraq). Both are fundamentally about the maintenance of American Power, rather than any real notions of freedom, protection, or defense.

And thus the Iraq war is doomed to failure.

Slashdot just snookered me into another extremetech "article" . This is case one as to how bad XT now sucks. I rarely visit the site, ever since they launched their magazine, which I imagine is doing great. Right. Tech Report, THG, Anandtech, and ArsTechnica are smoking these guys.

On the heels of this is another /. pointer to the worst Toms Hardware Guide article I've ever seen. Seriously, a DVD Burner review that reviews 5 drives and doesn't check burn quality? I could have built a burner that burns media in 1 second, and it would have won the contest. Nevermind it didn't actually do its job...

Oh, yeah, quite a banner day. And this "article" on "nanotech" in future CPUs. If we have 45-nm CPUs forthcoming, aren't we already using nanotech? I'm so sick of that. Most potential "nanotech" technologies in CPUs strikes me of the constant technologies being chased for replacing hard drives. They show promise, until the engineers up the platter densities a couple times.

So this is what the web is like when the interns are doing work while the big boys are on Xmas vacation.

YAF = Yet Another Framework

Java has a real problem. Because of the tower of Babel, god smote his creations with the curse of multiple languages. That syndrome has struck java, with its near limitless supply of latest and greatest frameworks. All a javaphile has to do to be overwhelmed is follow TheServerSide for a month and be overwhelmed. Christ, even struts has split into two projects.

Problem A) Most of these frameworks overlap, or are superfluous copies of one another
Problem B) Most of these frameworks have useless websites and minimal documentation
Problem C) Most of these frameworks can't even define themselves in a capsule

Java could afford to be fractious and inventive in the earlier pre-dotNET days. But things are serious now. The Java Community Process may be the general process for the gradual christening of many of these frameworks, but the JCP takes far too long, usually has to wait for a new JVM release, and the end solution usually is overengineered yet still much worse that the original inspirations. For example:

Log4J vs. JDK1.4 Logging
Hibernate vs. JDO
JavaServerFaces vs. Tapestry

Apache-Jakarta functions in some degrees as a JCP-lite, but it has major problems with documentation, web site development, and limited financial support that would enable those capabilites.

But my biggest beef with frameworks is the pointless marketspeak used to "sell" them. Since 99% of the frameworks are absolutely free, who is this "sell" speak for? For example, every single framework I've seen is lightweight, powerful, scalable, full-stack, high performance, optimized, and obviously full of bullshit, since each and every one of those words are comparison adjectives, which the framework authors never provide. Lightweight compared to what? Walnuts? Powerful? As in able to crush ants in a single stomp? Scalable? As in a three-step pet ladder as opposed to a bench? Full-stack? As in the stack goes to the moon or just up an average person's ass?

I understand framework author enthusiasm. Back in 2000 I wrote my own web framework during which I independently invented/addressed MVC, separation of presentation and logic, provided XML/XSLT web service processing infrastructure, all in the service of sending HDML/WML to phone handsets. I never OSS'd it because I assumed it was useless, even though I used it as a XML web service server, standard web app, portal server.

That was back in the day when Maverick, Cocoon, and Struts were relatively young, and my framework was at least as good as those early versions. But I didn't release it and I just adopted Struts the next time I had to do a web app, and took what I could from the old framework.

I think there is a basic lack of discussion by framework authors, and a distinct lack of cleanup being done by Sun. At the BARE MINIMUM, Sun should have an active MSDN-style resource home page that tracks the major projects, describes them and the problems they address, and a team of people tracking this stuff, even if it conflicts with their religion/coolaid/EJBs.

Then maybe we can keep Java's head start over dotNET, which is closing dangerously fast with standard features that are available in many java projects, but aren't being coalesced.

Enough musings about petty, self-absorbed matters such as whether we are still a democracy. Let's talk about America's survival prospects as a nation.

In order to wage war/defend ourselves, we need an industrial base. A capability to manufacture all manner of low and high technology items. On the modern battlefield, above all this means a computerized, networked, mechanized army, navy, and airforce.

While it used to be that outsourced/offshore manufacturing was in easily overthrown influenced countries such as malaysia and their ilk, increasingly our overseas infrastructure is being centered in two countries: China, and India. Both of these have a billion people. Both have nuclear weapons. Both are rapidly modernizing, using economic booms provided by manufacturing and information processing exports to the US. Both will become primary competitors with us for global oil supplies as their billion-person populations begin to consume resources in proportion to a modern society.

To think that america will have a permanent technology advantage over these rivals is foolish. China and India both graduate armies of engineers and scientists, much as the USSR's excellent schooling systems did, which kept their military technology in arms reach (kind of a pun there) of ours despite gross economic disparities. China has begun an active space program. They are developing state-of-the-art computer CPUs and operating systems independent of american vendors (Intel and Microsoft), and already manufacture the remaining components. The growth of advanced technology manufacturing in China means a vast infrastructure of fundamental technology acquisition and transfer from the West and Japan.

But most of all, both of these rivals aren't encumbered by a backward political system such as the USSR. China, in particular, is exercising a modified form of capitalism that is extremely aggressive, selective, and so far, effective. China manipulates its currency to maintain a trade export advantage and continue to encourage countries to offshore manufacturing in its borders. It can employ despotic policies (such as ignoring its rural populations' basic needs) in order to concentrate resources on its urban manufacturing and services. It can economically repurpose entire regions without the legal wranglings that occur in Western democracies.

In the near future span of 10-20 years, I see increased outsourcing of manufacturing and technology to China and India while the oil supply stays relatively constant. By the time oil production demands (particularly due to skyrocketing demand caused by two to three billion people modernizing rapidly) could lead to actual tensions with the US, China and India will likely have closed technological gaps, as well as developed fundamental infrastructures such as an effective, technologically equipped air-ground-sea-space military, ICBM nuclear deterrent, and will have the capability to blackmail us with threats of cutting off desired material goods exports if need be, since the US's domestic manufacturing will have been nearly completely atrophied.

Apologists for globalism that ignore the fact that China and India can choose to ignore health care costs, envrionmental regulation, human rights, pensions/social security, and the like, to the point that it is cheaper to manufacture something 3000 miles away and then burn a whole lot of fuel to ship it to the US, but the only levelling effect is a tarriff (which would undoubtedly be defeated explicitly by the World Trade Organization or effectively by shipping goods through a pass-through country that we do not tarriff). But more to the point, rather than waste a trillion dollars on a pointless, ineffective, inflammatory war, we should be investing taxpayer money in fundamental industrial development, as Japan, China, and India do to this day. We should be aggressively funding education and incenting technical graduates. We should retool elementary education to include fundamental computer programming, since it is the effective language of business, science, and life in the next century.

But all I see of America is increasing stupidity, and a dominant political system feeding off that ignorance. And in two decades, America will be the #3 power in the world, behind China and the EU, and possibly India.

Whoops forgot to post this pointless political hack job:

Godwin's Law in action: Bush == Saddam
- cronies raping country for money
- faked/fixed elections
- implicit threat of WMD
- torture

But seriously, Republican standard for impeachment:
A) Lying about a blowjob = yes
B) Illegal Nixonian monitoring of American Citizens == no
C) Lying about WMD = no

How fucked up is the US Medical Care system?

How about GM, whose economy is larger than Denmark's, will probably go bankrupt because of it. Why are New Yorkers walking to work rather than take the subway? Health care costs. Why are legacy airlines going bankrupt right and left? Same thing. Remember when Bush stuck his neck out trying to "reform" Social Security? The big truth is that social security wasn't even in all that much trouble in the long run. Medicare and Medicaid however, have frightening explosions of costs coming down the pipeline.

The problem with presenting this problem to the american public is that there's no one cause to point to. Some people blame insurance companies, some blame doctors and the AMA, some blame ambulance chasing lawyers, some blame drug companies. Get representatives from these four sectors at a table and they'll all point fingers at the other guy.

But here's the truth. All four of them are responsible. There are four fat, fat hogs feeding at this trough. And seeing as how the economy is straining under the current load of retirees' health costs, and considering the time bomb that is the baby boomers is yet to actually strike, there is real cause for pessimism.

Let's go through the four pigs at the trough:

Insurance Companies - As far as I can tell, insurance companies really are the least corpulent of the four, especially when one judges on the basis of their overall profitability. There is relatively healthy competition in this arena, even though lots of mergers have reduced the number of players. Insurance companies mostly make money by delaying the payments of owed monies as much as possible. So while the money sits in their investment and money market accounts accruing interest, they delay payment as long as possible. However, they do it mostly by introducing a ton of red tape, which introduces fundamental inefficiencies in the system.

Malpractice Lawyers - These guys constantly introduce broken statistics as to how they aren't part of the problem, but all people need to do is look at some very simple indicators to see how much cost they introduce: just look at malpractice insurance costs to doctors. They are huge. The doctors certainly don't eat those costs, they try to pass them onto the insurance companies, who pass them off to you in sky-high premiums. Lawyers try to point that without their judgements, incompetent doctors wouldn't be removed from practice, but as far as I can tell, lawyers don't actually push out these doctors. It wouldn't surprise me if they actually influence the review boards and try to keep these guys in the system to make money off of them. Lawyers often self-congratulate themselves that they force greater safeguards and process improvement due to the imposing threat of malpractice lawsuits. But considering how conservative medical practices seem to be, I doubt there is any real effect. But what really annoys me is people assuming that they are owed millions of dollars if the medical system, which is human and more an art than a science, fails them. The medical system is a benefit of a modern society. It isn't a guaranteed right. People choose to have doctors help them, or they can suffer/die without their assistance. Caps on pain and suffering and relying on a basic support network for the disabled are sufficient safety nets for people who use this modern service.

Doctors/AMA - Doctors obviously make a lot of money. The golf-playing porsche-driving doc is a common archetype. Doctors go through extensive training and education, which is expensive and time-consuming, with a payoff that only really occurs in their mid thirties, on an education track that begins in college when they are 18. To a certain degree, these people should be paid an elevated standard to reward such a grueling educational path, ensure quality people, and keep demand for profession high.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0194d.asp
However, I notice several ways that doctors and the AMA increase our medical costs. First, medical schools have an extremely small enrollment. These schools clearly restrict the overall supply of education to prospective doctors, and since almost every state has laws that codify that only educated doctors can practice medicine, there are no alternative supply of educated doctors. But that is only the first tier of supply restriction. Yet another restriction of supply occurs in the specialization process, where a general doctor applies to become an anaesthesiologist, radiologist, or cardiologist. These programs have extremely restricted sizes, often only one or two doctors per hospital that runs a program. Finally, the AMA has resisted the creation of cheaper, lower tiers of medical care, a sort of super-nurse or doctor lite that can perform many medical procedures that doctors are simply overkill for. Different tiers of nurses and specializations could treat many mundane ailments and problems for far less costs, without a doctor's elevated costs. For example, many EMT and nurses provide medical care overseas on a volunteer basis, where they can handle sutures, common antibiotics, patient stabilization, bone settings/castings.

Drug Companies - Anyone who knows me knows my beef with the drug companies. First off, some facts about drug companies: they are far and away the most profitable corporate sector. Second, most (40-70%) of their costs aren't in research, it's in marketing of drugs, as anyone who is bombarded by Erectile Dysfunction marketing, allergy marketing, heart ailments, pain relief can testify, which is basically everyone (also, I'd guess using the magic of accounting, that most FDA approval costs are allocated to research to artificially pump up the research numbers). Third, public funded universities provide many of the core science that underlies drugs, thus keeping their private research costs down while reaping all the financial benefits once a technique becomes druggable. Drug companies actively push name-brand higher cost drugs and try to shut out generic, low-cost drugs. Drug companies employ armies of drug salespeople to entice doctors with conventions, trips, and dinners to push their wares on their patients (where do you think all that marketing money goes - not all in ads). As can be seen in several recent drugs, such as Vioxx, drug companies will actively suppress contrarian research and oppose the recall of drugs as much as possible, and will only do the bare minimum of education and "fine print warnings" once problems appear with drugs. Drug companies, even if they know how to synthesize drugs for obscure ailments, will not pursue drugs if they aren't economical to a large audience. Even things such as flu shots, which have a large market, won't be actively pursued or refined. While economic realities have to be recognized, the fact that such grossly profitable companies haven't made greater efforts toward humanitarian drug production is disappointing.

Taken together: insurance red tape, frivolous lawsuits, restricted supply/inflated salary of doctors, and the drug companies, it should be obvious what a many-headed beast our medical system is, and the fact that meaningful reform of the system will involve overcoming the: doctor/AMA lobby, insurance lobby, lawyers lobby, and last but not least, the drug lobby, and prospects for meaningful reform before the boomers bankrupt us are dim.

I suppose the most frustrating thing with medical services is their complete lack of progress in efficiency and service. Since the seventies, we have seen vast technological advance in computers, electronics, software, sensors and the like. The most significant advances have been the ability to make electronics and computers with powerful capabilities very inexpensively. Medical history, patient tracking, treatment monitoring, expert systems, online searchable ailment/medical databases, better drugs, cheap, wide arrays of generic drugs, outpatient surgeries, better, cheaper tests, all of these should have provided a medical care system that is more efficient, powerful, and especially cheaper. Yet things have clearly not progressed, but regressed, DESPITE all these advances.

Sigh.

FISA - Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Haven't read all the details here, but it seems pretty clear that Bush has flagrantly violated this law. As many have pointed out, there are numerous procedurally defined (I don't want to say accepted) methods for obtaining surveillance permits for what the administration was probably doing. The fact the administration did not even attempt to pursue these avenues, even with the Patriot Act being passed to expedite them, should be a clear indicator that shady stuff is probably going on here.

This administration has mirrored the Nixon administration, and parts of the Reagan administration as a truly frightening portent. Why do conserva...I'm sorry they're not really conservative...Republi...oops, they don't really seem to want a republic either...well we'll just say the GOP due to a starvation of appropriate nomenclature. Anyway, why does the GOP insist on stressing the limits of constitutionally defined freedom...I'm sorry, that word doesn't mean much anymore...stressing the limits of rights (conservatives don't care about their rights, do they?), reducing oversight and checks and balances, and engaging in large-scale covert operations that fundamentally destroy our standing in the world, waste our money, and further the ends of only a few? In Nixon's case, we had the lunacy of his actions that prompted the passing of the FISA in the late 70s. In Reagan's case, we had Iran-Contra, as well as us initially establishing and supporting Saddam's regime in Iraq, sponsoring death squads in Latin America.
Now we have the Bush Administration, which tried to execute a coup in (huh, oil-rich, go figure) Venezuela's democratically elected left-wing government, went into Iraq with a flimsy facade of justification covering the only real possible motive (oil of course), a shadow network of torture, flagrant violations of checks and balances, oversight, and, well, the law.

Of course political realities will never allow this, I mean, imagine if Nixon had been doing all his shenanigans and the Republicans controlled congress. Would there have been impeachment proceedings? Well, I can imagine that, because really, it's what we have now. Admittedly I am a strident opponent of this administration. But I do have basic abilities of logic: using "war time powers" for justifying unconstitutional and unlawful actions, especially on the basic of a "war" that is equivalent to the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty", both of which arguably have killed and disrupted our day to day lives far more that the threat of terrorism, it just an outright violation.

And now a president with an approval rating of 40% basically tells everyone to fuck off?

In terms of sliding down the slippery slope, I'd say we're picking up a lot of speed.

Gangsta talking heads...

Two of the things I hate most about modern media: The Rush Limbaughs, and the Gansta Rappers. But only recently have I realized that they are the exact same creature.

Both exist as tightly controlled media illusions.
Both appeal mostly to the ignorant.
Both are constantly engaged in a series of ludicrous stunts of one-upmanship in a desperate attempt to be perceived as either truly "right-wing" or truly "street".
Both really don't care about what they are saying, only if it makes them money.
Both explicitly dumb down and destroy the discourse they were originally intended to explore, and understanding in our society in general.
Both exist to make huge multinational media corporations money at any and all costs.
Both inevitably oppress and betray their fans, while claiming the opposite.

And, unfortunately, both have created out-of-control movements. Once a cycle of competition and an opportunity for money is revealed, the originators of the movement, who may have had an ounce of credibility, but as more opportunistic rappers/blatherers appeared to try to steal the thunder of the originators via increased sensationalism, any realism and true depth is rapidly paved over.

Rap, a once common area for improving discourse on the stagnant state of race relations in America, has become instead the opposite. A pointlessly violent divisive force among blacks. A glorification of a destructive lifestyle rather than a portrait and testament of an oppressed society. All while simply lining the pockets of a select few record producers, and providing nothing back to the communities they pretend to represent.

The blathering heads, once existing to provide speculations or thoughtful depth to various positions on political issues, now only serve to rally/inflame a particular side's army of voters, to disparage the other side, and therefore totally destroy any potential for consensus and agreement. All the while, the politicians and corporate lobbyists have their way with the federal and state governments, waste our money, and slowly destroy our country.

From slashdot: old programmer's don't die...they're cast into void*

Wow, a bona fide funny post on slashdot.

The City Pages (Minneapolis's kick-ass free weekly) just tore apart the Peter Jackson King Kong flick. The most damning criticism: Jackson basically ignored any real potential for riffing on the multiple symbolisms and allegories.

Considering that King Kong is what supposedly inspired Jackson to start directing movies, that's pretty disappointing. King Kong is an undeniably enduring icon of American pop culture, and one of the few that has such potential for highlighting the oft-ignored downsides of modern society, downsides that our society goes to great lengths to gloss over.

King Kong is nature. Big, powerful, magnificent. The biplanes are humanity. We're small, seemingly insignificant, we make annoying buzzing sounds. We don't take out nature in one attack, but we methodically pursue it over and over, until it falls. We personify Kong as evil, even if it is us that rip him from his place in the world, us that disturb the peace and balance, to make a quick buck.

The icing on the cake is Fay Wray. Helpless and "innocent". The beauty that drives man to achievement, and is the undoing of nature. I guess that's what makes King Kong so legitimate: most people root for him, but he dies in the end. Not your usual sad ending in Hollywood, where Rose still gets to live until she's 99 with a big honking blue diamond (talk about a blood diamond). Kong's dead, and with him, our future, our past, and our souls.

Least that's what I think.

Ahh, the "attack on Christmas".

In matters such as these, I always turn to the originator of these blathering idiots' religion: the big JC himself.

Do you think JC would appreciate his birthday being turned into nothing but a hollow capitalistic hogfest to drive artificial resource consumption for our plastic kewpie doll economy?

Do you think JC would care if a holistic mother earth symbol, aka the "holiday tree", or his holiday's name, were given a slight tweak to its terminology to encourage inclusion, acceptance, peace, and love?

I mean, Jesus Christ's philosophies really aren't that hard to understand. That's really the core appeal of Christianity throughout the ages. But I guess the current "debate" scores a high Q-Factor for getting the right's panties in a bunch, so we have to put up with this.

Once again, collective human stupidity rules.