reliably snarky

On November 7, 2009, the US House of Representatives passed HR3961, its version of comprehensive health care reform. The late Saturday night vote came after an all day debate which played out for the American people on C-Span.

For C-Span this was like the first game of the World Series.

The very next morning on his Sunday talk show, Reliable Sources, Kurtz quipped that the vote had come late on Saturday night ‘when no one was watching’.

I think this means that the vote came when Howard wasn’t watching. Sorry, Howard, real people out here in the hinterlands were watching. I put in a supply of low fat popcorn, took a break from reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright Sided” and planned my day around this event. For those of us in the Mountain time zone the vote came early enough.

I feel that Mr. Kurtz is not a reliable source on the C-Span’s audience size since he represents a commercial network, CNN, which competes with C-Span for attention.

I’m posting this now because, once again, we have a Saturday night event, this time in the US Senate, and this time on C-Span2, as Senate Democrats got exactly the 60 votes they neeed to bring their version up for floor debate. Will Kurtz display a similar degree of snarkyiness on his show this morning?

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Death Panel Idol

Dog days, mid August. Congress is out, health care reform is a hot topic. This is a great time to scare seniors with talk of death panels and euthanasia. These imaginary death panels seem to be the work of Betsy McCaughey, a thinktanker at the right-leaning Hudson Institute.

There is a provision in one of the health care bills that says doctors may be compensated by Medicare for the time they spend counselling patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills, Advanced Health Care Directives and such. It takes an evil imagination to twist a noncontroversial idea – seniors should make end of life decisions ahead of time – into some sinister plot to have the government pick who gets health care or not.

Your Gypsy Chief blogger will be 73 next month. Procrastination has been a life issue with me. But the bullshit being foisted off on seniors by Betsy McCaughey, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and friends didn’t make me scared – it made me mad.

Mad enough to do something about it. First thing is we’re all going to die. Recognize that fact. Make it easier on those you leave behind by making your wishes known now, before you fall into a vegatative state.

Second, I don’t feel that I need counselling by a doctor in order to determine what end of life options are best for me.

For me, a consideration is do I want to live a little longer with tubes sticking out until the money is gone, or would I rather leave something for my kids to inherit.

I am so mad about this death panel stuff that I decided to stop procrasting and make a Living Will. I went to LegalZoom.com . The proces is very easy and straightforward. You can save a partially completed worksheet and return to it later. It took me less than half an hour to get the whole thing done.

That is how I beat the Betsy McCaughey – Sarah Palin – Chuck Grassley death panel.

Two other points to be made. People who deliberately make stuff up like these false death panels should not be considered as having a credible voice in the health care debate. I think that news directors make a huge mistake by allowing folks like Betsy McCaughey to have any air time when they have proved they do not deserve it. News directors do so to ‘present the other side of the story’. But that is just nonsense. The story is do we or do we not want to provide Medicare reimbursement for doctors to consult with patients on end of life decisions like Living Wills.

Final point. People think they can scare seniors by using loaded terms like death panels and forced euthanasia. Not all seniors are dumb enough or so poorly informed as to fall for such tactics.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Photo Credit: Paula Abdul Death Panel photo is the work of Mike Licht. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/

For years and years, decades actually the Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet ran a story that said monorail was coming to the San Fernando Valley. It was supposed to come over Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood to Van Nuys.

This story ran again and again, about every two weeks, essentially unchanged from the early 1950s for about 20 years.

Moral: If you are going to get it wrong you might as well be consistent.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Monarchs WNBA Champs 2005

OK, I admit it. My so-called guy friends give me tons of grief when I tell them that I like the Sacramento Monarchs and watch their games.

“You actually watch that?”, one friend asked.

“What’s wrong with the Monarchs?”

“Well, they are a bunch of lesbians”, was the best he could come up with.

My Yahoo! home page lets me know whenever there is a Kings game or a Monarchs game. They don’t always get it right. Sometimes, very infrequently, Yahoo! will make a mistake regarding a Kings game. Wrong starting time, wrong score, whatever.

The Yahoo! track record for the Monarchs is much worse. Again and again Yahoo! reports the score as 0-0 after the game has been played. Or they will report no game when there is a game.

This has happened so often it cannot be a coincidence. The message Yahoo! conveys is that women’s sports is not as important as men’s sports. The WNBA is not as important as the NBA. Is that fair? Certainly the audience for women’s sports is smaller, but that is a different question. And I’d be the first to admit that the WNBA game is different than the NBA game. Still, those ‘lezzies’? are as competitive and as tough as the guys. I love a down-to-the-wire close game with plenty of lead changes. And that’s what I get from the Monarchs. Given the fact that the Monarchs won a WNBA championship (2005) and the Kings didn’t even make the playoffs this year I say go Monarchs. I’ll be watching provided Yahoo! remembers to let me know.

Yahoo! failure to assign resources plays right into the hands of misogynistic men who diss woman’s sports as an acceptable? way to be passive-aggressive. They can’t express disrespect to their wives, girlfriends, sisters or moms without being in trouble. So they diss woman’s sports instead. This makes them feel better. If Yahoo! fails to assign adequate resources to update their web content it must mean that the WNBA is inferior and not worth wasting time on. Heck, nobody’s watching anyway.

The remedy, I think, is for men who don’t hate women to squawk about this.

Complaints from women could be dismissed since they might be coming from [gasp] lesbians.

Yahoo! failure is a failure in sports scores reporting just as serious as it would be for them to consistently get it wrong regarding Kings scores and schedules. And men should speak up.

Posted by Gypsy Chief and Veronica

CNBC anchor Mellisa Lee interviewed two computer security experts shortly after Microsoft released Windows Vista. The thrust of the story was that Internet Explorer 7 was supposed to plug some security holes which had been plaguing Windows users. The security experts said this was not the case.

During the segment it became painfully obvious that Lee was unable to distinguish the difference between a browser such as Internet Explorer, and an operating system such as Windows Vista.

To their credit the experts did not try to correct Ms. Lee’s mistakes and they just continued the interview as if nothing had gone wrong.

Moral of this story – the journalist must always prepare for the assignment.

Posted by The GNUinator

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It’s safe, secure, and easy:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well yes downloading and installing the BOINC client software is simple. There is more to this than you might think.

For one thing, this can get competitive really quick. There are teams all over the world vying to produce more completed BOINC work units than any other team. For another, one may participate in multiple BOINC projects at once.

In addition, participation in BOINC projects has implications for the use of old computers. I define old computers as computers which originally shipped with some version of Windows. From time to time Microsoft announces End of Life for Windows versions such as Windows 98 for example.

What happens to a computer with an old no longer supported version of Windows? Computer professionals have struggled with this question for years. It has been estimated that only 22% of discarded computers are disposed of properly. Too many of them end up in landfills where they harm the environment.

One answer I think, is to put them in strong hands and set them to work producing BOINC work units.

When I say strong hands I mean blow Windows off the hard drive and install some Linux distribution instead. I do not mean this as an anti-Microsoft rant. Consider this. Older versions of Windows were never too secure so they are not very safe on the Internet. After End of Life announcement the third party addons like Zone Alarm and AdAware stop being supported as well. These old computers lack the horsepower to run a newer version of Windows. That is just a fact. But these old computers will run Linux.
Slackware is one Linux distribution which works well with older hardware.

You may have heard of SETI@home, that is, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligience. This is the original project in which the University of California asked for the public’s help to perform calculations needed in the search for life on other planets. Hundreds of thousands of people responded worldwide. Years later the university decided to scrap the original SETI@home client software and to replace it with BOINC client software which could be used to support network computing on a variety of scientific projects.

Today one such effort is the BBC Climate Prediction project where users run thousands of simulations to see what is the effect of small changes in sulphur or carbon dioxide.

This is an ambitious project which requires much dedication as a single climate prediction model can run on your computer for months. In this case an obsolete computer will not do – you need something with more horsepower. However, old computers can still do lots of good things. I have, for example Pentium III computers which produce Einstein at home work units. These look for pulsars in space.

Why is this post categorized as ‘the press always gets it wrong’? Well, you might remember that CNN produced a special report asking ‘is anyone out there?’ … an intriguing question. The report focused on the SETI Institute. The executive director was interviewed and SETI raw data collection was shown. What was not discussed was SETI@home where thousands of regular computer users donate unused CPU cycles to process the raw data at no cost to the SETI Institute or the American taxpayers. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code, etc) described SETI as a government boondoggle. That is his opinion, but he didn’t say a thing about SETI@home.

Posted by The GNUinator