November 27, 2006 at 7:48 pm
(Culture)
I’m listening to Blind Melon’s first album. At one time I owned this on CD but things get loaned and not returned and so I haven’t listened to it for…years! But because of my subscription to Yahoo music, I can listen to it again.
The Arizona Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz attempts to give us some insight into the long-term effects of this new way of listening to music. The subscription model is certainly attractive in a lot of ways, especially if you are someone who is either musically “adventurous” or who simply purchases a lot under the current scheme. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is getting over the “physical” concept of music contained in CD cases or LP sleeves. This is really tough for me. I like having all my music on a shelf somewhere, and not just CD but legit CDs with liner notes. Even though I haven’t looked at most of them in the five years since I first freed the music from its physical media.
But the subscription scheme bugs me a bit…because I just don’t like the idea of another monthly payment. For an awful lot of people, several bucks a month simply won’t be worth it. And someone is getting rich off the service in the meantime. There will probably be free music (public domain stuff, giveaways.) But I think something needs to ensure that people have access to the songs that mean the most to them more or less permanently.
An interesting side note…(as the MS Zune gets a lot of bad press.) The Yahoo service would be GREAT if I could listen to songs on my iPod. Apple, with its closed service, has prevented that so far. Really this is the only fly in the ointment a/f/a owning an iPod goes. But given the choice of owning songs at .99 a pop or buying a subscription service (even at the 9/month for Yahoo’s service) I’ll spend a lot more on the subscription service. In fact, I barely ever open the iTunes store. We all see that’s where things are going–hopefully Apple has a subscription service in the works.
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November 20, 2006 at 12:56 am
(Civil Rights)
Some time back, I proposed that we dedicate some of the resources currently being committed to the “war on terror” to reduce the death rate to something that kills far more Americans. I was speaking specifically of cars, and it seems that there are efforts underway to reduce drunk driving deaths. Unfortunately, it currently involves somewhat intrusive and not altogether foolproof technology to disable a car if the driver has too much alcohol in his blood. This technology is being used with convicted drunk drivers already, but one group would like to install something similar in every car eventually. Perhaps an unobtrusive (read automatic and foolproof) test wouldn’t bother me too much if it were installed in my car. But certainly, the idea of blowing in a tube to get my car to start after a long day at work hardly seems desirable.
I’m a firm believer that there would be some benefit in reducing our reliance on cars in the first place. Just out of curiosity, I wonder how many drunk driving deaths there are in Manhattan? (As something of a caveat, I have to point out that I drive 40 miles to and from work each day. And no, I won’t consider moving to within walking (or biking) distance to work. I’ll just have to do a better job choosing my next job.)
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November 15, 2006 at 11:45 pm
(Social/Economic)
My company has, for some time, hired a machine shop in California to do a large amount of work for us. In fact, when I went to visit our California facility, I met the owner. But I recently heard that he’d been fired for saying some inflammatory things about immigration on a video that was posted on You Tube. I was interested to see what he said that was so bad, so I took a look.
I imagined, companies tending to serve their PC interests first, that our contractor’s comments would be anti-immigrant (something that probably would not be good for a company trying to increase its presence among Hispanics.) But I began to think about how little sense it would make for this guy to be anti-immigrant when most of his employees were Hispanic. And in fact, the story is a little different.
It appears that our contractor and three other people (ostensibly Mexicans, possibly his employees) were accosted in a parking lot by a group of white supremacists–real losers as you can see in the video. And our guy got a little worked up. I would have too. These guys are honking air horns in his face and yelling at him. In his worked up state, he said some things that in retrospect probably seemed pretty stupid. Things like “fuck America” and “fuck white people.” (Of course these things seem pretty silly when they come from the mouth of a white American, but this I don’t think this kind of reaction is unusual from someone who is being hounded by people who don’t respond well to logic. In fact, that’s exactly the reason why the group was antagonizing him.) He also made some stock statements about Mexicans working harder and attempted to respond to the accusations being made by a group of people who didn’t even know him! This group, and make no mistake, we are talking about rabid xenophobes, berated him for exploiting his laborers. Now it might be one thing if he were, say, hiring laborers for harvesting or something–something where he’d be paying minimum wage or less. But they work in a tool shop. They’re semi-skilled or skilled laborers! Our friends behind the camera are just pissed because they think they deserve a well-paying job without having developed a skill. That they deserve something just because they were born on one side of a line and these other guys over here were born on the other side. This has nothing to do with merit or exploitation. They’re just angry that they grew up in the land of plenty and still wound up being losers.
But our contractor’s real mistake was to be caught with our logo on his badge. The cameraman knew enough to focus in on that. Bad PR is bad PR. Without that three seconds of footage, he would have been just another guy shooting his mouth off in front of these guys.
I don’t know if our contractor hired illegal aliens. Perhaps he has. If so, than undoubtedly he shouldn’t be working for us. But if we fired him for what he said, than I think we were dead wrong. Politicians say stupid things all the time yet rarely see any real consequences (i.e. the loss of their job.) And even Trent Lott got his job back. I won’t say I’d be proud to have this guy back working for us, but we claim to value strong beliefs.
And frankly, I’d say he had great restraint. If they were in my face like that, I would have run those guys down. And then backed up to do it again.
Update:(11/23/06)
The video I mentioned seems to have disappeared from YouTube, along with all others posted by the leader of this “group.” The blog and forum set up by the guy are both down as well. And my company seems to be thinking that competent work is worth more than avoiding a silly “controversy.”
Ahh. All is right in the world after all.
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November 7, 2006 at 8:53 pm
(Political)
The best thing about Republicans is that they are typically against gun control. If they stay in power much longer, it’ll be time to start thinking about buying a gun.
Although, it would seem, Republicans have less scruples about protecting other basic freedoms that we supposedly value in America. Here is an enumeration of cases of questionable (and in some cases illegal) activities meant to favor one particular party. I’ll give you one guess which party seems to be implicated the most.
Some of my favorites are the assaults on Hispanic voters in Tucson (although Hispanics have been more likely to lean to the right, Republicans have been more vocal and more vitriolic about border security the past few years) and long lines at polls in Denver (where they have, I understand, consolidated polling places–an interesting coincidence that this happens in a very blue county in a state that only recently ditched it’s red leadership.) Of course, there is the trick of calling voters and telling them their polling place has changed, a perennial Republican favorite.
And many people are not at all satisfied that the Diebold machines (yes Diebold of the “We’ll deliver Ohio” fame from 2004) have a snowball’s chance at being accurate. I think the best decision we as a country could make is to publicly execute Walden O’Dell and anyone-programmers, engineers, anyone-in his worthless outfit who should have known better. Treason is a serious offense and these fuckers deserve less than Zaccarias Moussaoui or Saddam Hussein. The latter two may be responsible for the deaths of thousands but the former would have taken the basic rights of millions, and for what? Profit motive? Oh wait, I’m against capital punishment.
Even if the Republican party and its various campaigns are not responsible for these tactics and even if Democrats are responsible for isolated shenanigans of their own it’s a pretty clear pattern. Luckily, slow as we are, we’re finally willing to punish the Republican machinery under which these tactics thrive. Nonetheless its shocking. Poll numbers show that Americans get pissed when you lie and when you steal, but there are still far too many Republicans who are willing to cheat.
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