These Are The New Rules

The flood didn't stop while we were away from the house. When we returned from the hospital, my wife and I found a stuffed mailbox, and a significant proportion of that was made up of offers from credit card companies. We get offers addressed to me, we get offers addressed to her, and we get offers addressed to some person who has exactly the same first name, last name, address and credit history as my wife, but a different middle initial.

Now, I don't know about your house, but in ours, we have clearly defined gender roles, and that means I dispose of the credit card solicitations. (Here's a hint: we don't need any more credit cards. We're doing our best to get out of the debt we already have, as we're being eaten alive by interest charges.) I used to just tear the solicitation letters up and throw them away, but in our town, we have to pay for every bag of trash we put out to the curb. It doesn't seem fair to me that I should pay for the credit card companies to keep offering me something I don't want. Therefore, I have adopted the vastly more amusing tactic of cutting up the offer letter into tiny pieces, stuffing it into the postage-paid envelope, and mailing it back to them. Let them pay for postage and for someone to open it and process it; maybe someday they will take the hint! (Yes, I know, they can't very well figure out who it came from, so they can't take us off their lists by this criterion. I kind of like it that way.)

One of the offers in our latest batch, however, really caught my eye, just as I was about to put the scissors to it. This one was festooned with the United Airlines logo, and was offering a Visa card tied-in to United's frequent flyer program.

Wait a minute: Is that really United Airlines offering a credit card? United Airlines? What's going on here?

United Airlines, you may recall, was recently allowed to default on its pension fund under the terms of its bankruptcy. The pensioners will see their benefits cut by more than half, and those benefits won't even be paid by United. That will be done on the taxpayer's dime. In other words, you and I, the ordinary taxpaying public, are now assuming billions of dollars' worth of promises that United Airlines made. This will be the largest corporate-pension default in US history. (For now. Now that this smooth move has been given the green light, expect it from every mega-corporation saddled with a pension fund it would prefer to forget, starting with all the other airlines.) And yet, even though they need the court to shield them from their creditors, they have the wherewithal to plaster the country with credit card solicitations.

Isn't that great? United Airlines, filing for bankruptcy protection, gets to stiff a whole bunch of people it had promised to pay. At the same time, thanks to the noxious bankruptcy bill recently rammed through Congress, this is exactly what you and me and United's employees and retirees are now expressly forbidden to do, even when we get in over our heads and are forced to declare bankruptcy. A lot of United's retirees are going to be forced into bankruptcy themselves by this event, since many of them will no longer be able to afford their bills when their pensions are cut by 50% or more. Yet, these people will not have the option of going into any kind of meaningful bankruptcy protection. Hooray for Republican hegemony as they force-march us all into debt slavery!

As the bankruptcy bill was being pushed through a Congress bought and paid for by the banks and the credit card companies, its champions repeated the endless refrain: "people should pay their debts." Well, sure. That's just good old-fashioned common sense. We can all agree on that. People should pay their debts, and they shouldn't be able to discharge those debts except under extraordinary circumstances.

But if you aren't careful with how the Republicans use words, you might have only heard what they said, not what they meant. See, when they said, "people should pay their debts," you might have thought they meant that everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances, should honor the promises they make. And if that's what you heard, good for you: you are a very good, right-thinking American. And you're also wrong.

See, these are the new rules. When people make promises to large, well-connected corporations, those promises must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, when large, well-connected corporations make promises to ordinary people, those promises can be broken at will. If you don't think this will affect you ... just wait.

In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Congress has some advice for you: don't get sick. Don't get laid off. Don't get divorced. Don't let anyone in your family get sick. Don't let your employer steal your pension. And on top of everything else, don't get behind on your monthly interest payments. The payments are more important than your food, your rent, your medical bills, or anything else. After all, there are a lot of K Street lobbyists who want that money. They are depending on you. And they're not about to let you let them down.




PS: Tired of the bullshit? Join the Plastic Revolution - http://www.plasticrevolution.org/

Twinkle Indeed

My wife was trying to calm down our infant daughter a few nights ago, and she was walking around with the baby, singing to her. She thought I was asleep, and she was singing:

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are.

What a lame song, I thought, and I picked up the next verse, singing my own version of the song, surprising my wife.

We know you're a ball of gas
Held in tight by gravity,
Excited to incandescense by
Nuclear fusion in your core.

You are very far away,
And your light takes many years
To reach the people down on earth,
Where we watch you twinkling.

Which incidentally is caused
By turbulence up in our air,
Which differentially refracts
The light you're shining down on us.

Our Sun is a star like you
Which our earth is circling.
Lots of planets have been found
Orbiting stars just like you.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are.

I think I'll keep cleaning this one up and adding to it in anticipation of teaching it to my daughter. In the meantime I'll settle for having made my wife laugh so hard she had to set the baby down.

Zoe

This is me and my brand-new daughter.

BillG: What, Me Worry?

"I played around with [Firefox] a bit, but it's just another browser, and [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better .... So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"
     -- Bill Gates, quoted on the BBC

Google Ubiquity

How did this happen so fast?

I use a lot of different bits of software on a daily basis. The heavyweights in my software universe -- the companies that supply a hefty percentage of that software -- are Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect (Yes, WordPerfect). I run their applications every single day.

This lineup has a new member lately: Google. I have suddenly found myself in the position of using a lot of Google software, and doing so on a daily basis. Of course I've been using Google for search for a long time (who doesn't?), and I've been using Blogger for a couple of years; but it's only been in the past couple of months that I really incorporated Google into my daily routine, with a new Gmail account, Picasa and Google Desktop Search. I just never noticed until now that I'm running a lot of Google software.

Why shouldn't I run a lot of Google software? It's always high-quality, and it's usually free (although Gmail and Google Search are both laden with advertising). What has surprised me is the sudden ubiquity of Google in my life. Since I'm not a reflexive upgrader, I am usually behind the curve on these things. Based on that fact, I'm guessing that Google has achieved a similar ubiquity in a lot of other people's lives.

Another indicator that Google has grown up: Bill Gates is bothered by Google. He'd like to do to Google what Microsoft has done to countless other entities in the past. I mean, take a look at my list again (except for Microsoft): Macromedia, Adobe, Palm, Mozilla (standing in for Netscape), OpenOffice, and WordPerfect. It's a Microsoft hit list. They've all been beaten and bruised by Microsoft; some of them driven out of business by Microsoft. Most of them made technically superior products, but were routed because Microsoft could leverage its Windows monopoly against them and "cut off their oxygen". (The only reason Mozilla and OpenOffice are still around is that their products are offered for free.) Google, with its own free and web-based products, will be much harder for Microsoft to compete against. It will be interesting to see what happens as these two square off against each other.

I expect to keep using Google software for a long time to come. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, I can't say just yet. In the meantime, it is great software.

I Hope We're Not Headed To War In Iraq

You said we're headed to war in Iraq -- I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide,not you.
      -- George W. Bush, moral coward, Crawford, Texas, Dec. 31, 2002 (audio)

When he said these words, he'd long since decided to have a war in Iraq. More evidence of that surfaced on Sunday, when the Times of London revealed that Tony Blair had already pledged British support for the war in April 2002. For the Republicans and other math-challenged reading this, that's at least 8 months before Bush claimed that "I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq." He said that with a straight face, but I bet he was snickering on the inside, because he had been planning to invade Iraq since at least April 2002. Some people say the planning went back to January 2001.

In Britain, Tony Blair is in a little bit of trouble because the independent media over there are revealing that he was telling his public that he had no plans to attack Iraq, even though the decision had long since been made. In America, where there is no independent media to speak of, it's not even a story. So your president is a big fat liar? Yawn. That is so 2002. Nothing to see here, folks -- oh, look, runaway bride!



PS: Why is Bush a moral coward? It's not just that he's a liar. It's that he won't even tell the truth for policies he supports. Rather than stand up for the things he wants, and face the consequences, he prefers to let other people do that for him. See Josh Marshall's excellent analysis of this brand of cowardice.

Saving Throw Against Stupid Ad Copy



Dice has pretty much fixed their embarassingly bad ads for tech jobs. I can't find a whole lot wrong here, because they've finally quit trying to write an ad that's supposed to read like code. See: they're writing comments in the code instead! (Clearly, Dice has received the recent memo that Comments Are More Important Than Code. In any case, comments always compile.) And find_great_jobs() is a perfectly respectable function call. But ... isn't that an unbalanced brace at the end? Or is the matching brace just somewhere up beyond the top edge of the ad? I guess we'll never know...

The Retail Alphabet

The Retail Alphabet is a fun little diversion. Twenty-six letters are presented by each separate puzzle (there are four of them at the time of this writing). They are all lifted from various trademarks and logos you see every day. Your task is to identify the company or product associated with each. The letters are presented out of their familiar context, so it's a challenge.

It's all a bit of harmless fun, but while you're playing this, try to compare the number of corporate logos you can easily identify to the number of birds or leaves you can easily identify. What does that say about us?

For a related bit of fun, have a look at this bit of satire. (Satire, yes, but more true every day.)

The Iraq War in 30 Seconds

The Iraq War in 30 Seconds is a cool Flash movie giving a British perspective on the Iraq War. Sums it up pretty well, and it's entertaining, too!