The American Nightmare
This fascinating, well-written first-hand account of working in a US shipping warehouse is one of the most depressing things I've read in a while. I often see articles discussing the (admittedly worse than this) conditions of factories overseas. But as we see in this experiment, the downward spiral of wanting cheaper goods touches a number of Americans in a similar way. And fittingly so, as these jobs are the distribution-side counterpart to the manufacturing hell that we've already heard so much about.
The arguments along the lines of "you should be happy that you have a job" are sickening. I've always felt acutely disappointed by that class of arguments, certainly more so when it's used to abuse and profit from other human beings. Perhaps my whiny, idealistic opinion makes me a liberal soft-ass, but I think that individual happiness *should* be top-of-the-list goal, and considered a sign of a healthy, successful nation. If the only point of living is to subsist with a meager quality of life with the hopes of further propagating your genes--and thus the human race--then suddenly nihilism doesn't seem like so much like the philosophy of madmen as it once did to me.
It doesn't seem to me that it needs to be this way (indeed, the author says the same thing). I've heard a number of variants of pithy quotes along the lines of "The last 5% of the work takes 95% of the effort." -- and I think that it applies here, as well: the last 5% of the efficiency takes 95% of the quality of life from the employees.
It's not clear to me what the proper direction for improvement is. I have no doubt that pieces like this one raising awareness of such conditions is a very large step in the right direction.
The quote that sums it up for me:
I feel genuinely sorry for any child I might have who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a "Place Order" button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.
Gliss for Palm Pre and Pixi fixed for webOS 1.4
After a 3-day delay waiting for update approval from Palm, Gliss and Glissito are finally fixed to work in webOS 1.4, so make sure you update!
I wasn't expecting changes that would affect my game, which is why this change was last-minute.
My apologies for the few days of a non-working game.
WTF, WTFJS?
My co-worker Jason Ostrander recently tipped me off about a new blog that's recently appeared, called wtfjs.com. I'm all about geek humor, so I ran quickly to check it out.
My initial reaction was one of complete annoyance. Anyone who knows me knows that I am certainly no stick-in-the-mud, and I'm certainly willing to forgo some amount of technical accuracy in the name of a good laugh. But for some reason, the approach taken by this site rubs me the wrong way.
I think this is a great site with a lot of potential, but it needs a bit more love and care.
Proposition 8 – Flawed Arguments
There aren't any new arguments here. I just want to gather, in one place, all of the arguments in support of Prop 8 that I have an issue with.
ICY MetaData (ShoutCast song titles)
I wrote a quick python script once to help me parse song metadata from ICY streams. Quite a few popular streams use this format these days, including most of the streams on ShoutCast and IceCast.
Phase Cancellation
Sometimes I get excited about silly things. In this case, I experience the real-life manifestation of a mathematical concept.
Dimensions and Perception
I've been doing a lot of reading about math lately — calculus, complex numbers, the discovery of the transcendental functions, and so on. I also occasionally catch a random article discussing string theory. Now, string theory I don't really understand. It discusses ideas like the possibility that our universe actually exists in many more than 3 dimension, but for some reason, the 3 that we see dominates.