Listen to 'Shut Up, Weirdo' for 11/6/09 -
Topic: What would you do if you were a member of the opposite sex for a day?
Is this a trick question?
Same thing we do every day, Frangry. Try to take over the world.
jgh:
Seems like it wasn’t too long ago we were striking over this technology that “was years and years” away from becoming a reality. Yea.
Click above to read on.
Big, Major FU to the Theater Owners.
I don’t know anything about this issue so please educate me. What is wrong with releasing movies straight-to-TV (an OnDemand type service, I am assuming?) Yes, it would be put theaters out of business, but is there something wrong with providing consumers more options? Getting the movies at home sounds pretty convenient to me. Not asking rhetorically, as I know I am not seeing the whole picture. Please explain. What is the argument of the theater owners?
I believe the theater owner’s arguments are roughly the same as the Michigan Newspapers who were horrified at the idea that towns would post notices online. I think the argument goes something like: We like money. And we’re scared we’re obsolete.
OK! so we are like 0 for 30 on the ballot referendums. Most of the losses were in 2004, we have Prop 8 in California and 1 in Maine. The prop 8 mess, if you recall, first we blamed all the African-American voters, then it turned out that the team sucked ass and did a really bad job. So everyone was like, “well we did a crappy job on prop. 8, we could have won it.” Well now in Maine, as far as I can tell, the No on 1 campaign worked their ass off, had ample resources, and we still lost by 5-6%.
I would like to read or hear a good lessons learned debate on this, but apparently we do not have a winning message or method.
Now some gay activists (who are usually just shit throwers) think Obama/HRC &c. are to blame. I don’t think Obama helped Corzine or Deeds.
Should the pro gay marriage ads not be about attempting to appeal to fairness or family love being gay and straight? If not, what should the message be? No on 1 supposedly had a top notch GOTV effort, was it the off year nature that doomed us? and if so, if we run a ballot initiative overturning gay marriage bans in target states like California and Michigan, would we be successful?
Being the CEO of Gay, I want options, not questions, pontifications or worse- problems. What should we do?
Keep trying.
Look at the margins in the 30 losses. Lately, they’ve been really close. And as some states have allowed gay marriage and appear to still be on the map, maybe some of the “end of civilization” rhetoric will tone down.
Additionally, watch the rhetoric of the opposing side. Lately it’s been about the children. In other words, straight out discrimination doesn’t have the political clout it used to.
Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad. - Boing Boing
I’m trying to reserve judgment, but I’m not sure how this is defensible.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
- That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
- That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
- That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
- Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
Hopefully everybody’s clear all the measures listed here (when not misconstrued) are consistent with current U.S. law?
jgh:
WHY DON’T I HAVE A PC OR XBOX TO PLAY THIS GAME
FFFUFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Please don’t bring this game to my attention. If I don’t know about it, it can’t take over my life for a week or so.
Enjoy it America. This is what you get instead of universal health care.
Really? We don’t get universal health care because we build amphibious assault ships? I don’t think that’s fair. Not at all.
It’s entirely fair. And it’s not just about money. It’s also about political will. Health care would be nifty, but warships are required! Health care must be deficit neutral but killing machines can cost whatever is “necessary”. Catching up to the rest of the world’s health care is “risky” but fighting hypocritical never-ending, unwinnable wars that foster anti-American sentiment is never even questioned.
We don’t get universal health care because we’ve been convinced that perpetual war is “American” and taking care of each other is “communist.” Our priorities are seriously screwed up. And that’s why we get warships (and prisons and banker bailouts) instead of health care.
In addendum to this, I personally find the concept of making a warship out of the WTC both morbid and disturbing. Not to be totally hippie-dippy or anything.
Why settle for a metaphor for the endless cycle of violence, when you can have a literal representation?
I’m for universal health-care and all, but that’s one sweet-ass amphibious assault ship. I may re-examine my priorities. After all, why settle for a metaphor for the endless cycle of violence when we can have a literal representation?
Think of it as the world’s most dangerous bit of performance art.
(via jgh)
‘Cause you’re a woman.
“Furthermore, the people who are spending the most to care for their pets are not the ones abandoning them, so I suspect those who would most benefit from a tax break for pet care (me) are those in a position to spend a lot on their pets and have a sufficient cushion that they can spend the money on pets and get some of it back when April rolls around. Until we’re a bit less conflicted on animal welfare, I’m happy to let responsible pet ownership be a largely private virtue.” —
The arguments about what kinds of people do and don’t abandon their pets really doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, although stereotyping is a super fun way of justifying an argument! People who wouldn’t normally abandon their pets (at a shelter, on the side of the road, in their former home) are doing so now because of unusual financial duress.
If you think we should simply raise taxes and put that money toward animal control and shelters, you still are raising taxes on non-pet owners in order to relieve the financial responsibilities of, for the most part, pet owners. You also are ignoring the fact that the overhead of running a shelter or keeping animal control going is far more than people simply taking care of their pets in-home, i.e. you’d need to raise taxes more to pay for the shelters than you would lose tax revenue by giving people a break. At least you’re still arguing to do something about it, though, instead of just shrugging your shoulders, saying “not my problem,” and moving on. (Which is essentially what Jeff is advocating.)
And I’m not really sure what general somewhat permissible animal cruelty has to do with looking the other way as more of it happens, but.
(via robot-heart-politics)
I was actually taking a much more less sympathetic position than Jeff. I wasn’t proposing funding for shelters. I was proposing funding for euthanasia clinics. Less euphemistically, I was proposing raising taxes to kill puppies.
The pet abandonment problem is really, really sad. And if I had infinite money, I would love to do something about it. But there are a lot of problems I would like to fix. But there is a lot of unnecessary suffering. And think the government should work to alleviate human suffering first. And if we’re looking at alleviating animals’ suffering, we’ve got to seriously think about how and why we distinguish between pet animals and food animals.
jgh:
THAT WOULD BE THE MAGNUM OPUS OF “SLUTTY” COSTUMES.
Slutty slut-shamer. It’s a fine line to walk—but if you can pull it off, you revel in sexy, sexy hypocrisy.
A U Mich undergrad is reportedly going as a sexy Charles Darwin.
“The University of Central Florida, where Jordan is a freshman basketball player, has a $1.9 million contract with Adidas that requires all Golden Knight athletes to wear its shoes and apparel. That includes Jordan, son of Nike icon Michael Jordan.”—
Marcus Jordan needs to get with the Central Florida and wear Adidas, not Nike — chicagotribune.com
Forget the controversy over Jordan. The shocking part of the story is that Adidas is paying $1.9 million to the University of Central Florida so that the team will wear Adidas shoes and apparel. This isn’t UCLA, or Duke, or Indiana. This isn’t the University of Florida. It’s the University of Central Florida.
There is an insane amount of money available in the shoe industry.
(via jeffmiller)
And an insane amount of money available to NCAA programs on the backs of talented kids who don’t get paid.
CBS pays the NCAA $545 billion to broadcast their basketball games. Per year. And let’s not even start on football…
Southpol makes exactly the point I should have made. As a good libertarian, I don’t care if private schools offer scholarships to athletes with the proviso that they don’t accept money for their play. But when public schools do this, we’re all complicit in the deal. Because these schools are established by the exercise of government power, denying athletes their market value is exploitation. And for the most part, it’s exploitation of an economically-vulnerable class. In light of the disproportionate racial composition of some of our most popular sports, this exploitation feels more than a little like racism. I don’t mean to suggest that this racism was ever intended by those who set up this system. But I wonder whether our indifference to the fairness of the arrangement has anything to do with race.
As I think more about this, I don’t think our indifference is a reflection of racism. It’s a reflection, I think, of ageism. We largely don’t care about the young. We let them fight our wars; we make them pay our debts. And we make them play games for our amusement.
Some of those numbers are wrong, right? The annual cost of the NCAA broadcast rights can’t be roughly on par with the Iraq War, can it?
College athletics is a complex enough topic that I’ll leave it aside. I’m happy enough to see billions of dollars going to education.