The Iron Yuppie

Don’t mistake me for some kind of rational human being. But the past week’s election coverage has led me to wonder why people are having any trouble deciding on a political candidate. If you accept that most people are rational (which is probably a faulty assumption up front) the process seems to be pretty straight forward.

1) You make a list of drop dead choices where you will never vote for a candidate who supports them. An example of this may be your feeling on pro-choice/pro-life. In truth, I’d bet that though most people think they have a lot of these, they probably have very few. Outside of pure religious reasons, it just does not seem like there would be that many things that if you agreed with a candidate on A but disagreed with them on B through M you’d still vote for them. This is the type of issue that I’m referring to here.
2) If you found one of those, you’re done. If you have not, you make a list of all the things you care about, and how much you care about them (1-10). This can result in a list like the following:

Anti-terrorism 4
Sane fiscal policy 8
War in Iraq 3

And so on.

3) Independent of that, you make a separate list, with all the above issues and how much you think a given candidate will focus on them (1-10 scale, same as above).

Bush:
Anti-terrorism 9
Sane fiscal policy 4
War in Iraq 8

Kerry:
Anti-terrorism 8
Sane fiscal policy 7
War in Iraq 4

I am aware that this could mean that you could rate a candidate highly just because they focus on a issue, but I’m going to assume for a moment that if either given candidate focuses on an issue they will work on it until it is right. You could mitigate this by adding an additional factor of likelihood of success which you would multiply times the amount they focus on it (percentage from 1-100% which would reduce that number). Even this is not perfect, as if you didn’t care at all about an issue, a candidate completely focused on it, but they were very likely to fail, they would align with your issue on that matter, but they would be taking resources away from a different issue you presumably cared more about.

4) Now take the absolute value of the difference between each of the issues and sum. Lowest number wins your vote:

Bush:
Anti-terror = 5
Sane fiscal policy = 4
War in Iraq = 5
Total = 14

Kerry:
Anti Terror = 4
Sane Fiscal Policy = 1
War in Iraq = 1
Total = 6

Some day (hopefully soon) I’d like to write about how there’s a total lack of rationality in people’s actions today. It seems that everyone’s lost the ability to do even basic deductive calculations (all those who point out logic flaws in the above will be awarded brownie points).

I know I said that I really did not want this blog to turn into a political discussion, as I’m just as big a moron as the next person when it comes to deciding elections and having opinions, but in this case, I ran the above for myself, and I just don’t see any way to support Bush in the next election. Do we really think that Kerry will allow the terrorists to invade willy-nilly? Please. Flip-flop? Why should I care? Minus that, is there really any reason to support a Bush administration? I always try and see the other side, when possible, but exactly how do Bush supporters justify Bush’s behavior? I really am more than open to listening to the other side. As always, let me caveat this by saying I voted for the elder Bush and that I’m generally pretty seriously uninformed. But this is my view so far…

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I must say I'm absolutely inspired by the Tour De France. I have been watching for a few years, and certainly posted things on my door and watched highlights on ESPN, but this year I have absolutely been blown away. I was sitting with some friends watching the climb up Plateau de Beille and we started joking about the team. This picture is a great image of exactly why Lance is so dominant:

MSNBC - USPS is delivering 6th title for Armstrong.

They are absolutely robotic in their domination. We were quoting the terminator all over the place –

“Listen. And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

That is exactly what they looked like. There were entire segments of coverage where they would track Jan Ullrich and Iban Mayo and how hard they were having on the race, and every so often they would flash back to USPS to see five riders in perfect formation and perfect rhythm mercilessly keeping the exact same tempo they had for three straight hours. I wish I could have found some of the overhead shots of the team.  You could not have shown a more perfect formation if you had drawn it on paper.  It was so inspiring that I went and used the elliptical for 45 minutes on level 19 (out of 20) the next day. Of course, if I were those guys, I would have had to do that about 4 times as long and set the level to 700.

I have a fairly startling revelation for you all. Not “I secretly killed a hobo and buried him in my backyard” startling, but startling nonetheless. I’ve never heard the Ramones before. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve heard the Ramones hundreds upon thousands of times in commercials, movies or whatever, but this past weekend was the first time I heard an entire album (as a non sequitur, do we still call them albums? I mean what does one call the thing that you buy that’s got a bunch of songs on it? I’ve never even bought a (new) album before, yet that’s what I’ve called them since time immemorial). Now for someone who considers himself even a mediocre music fan, this is a bit of a travesty, but to someone, such as myself, who would like to consider himself a music connoisseur, this is a complete joke. And, of course, upon listening to them, the opinions of the hundreds of thousands of fans who have acclaimed the Ramones as a breakthrough, spectacular band were all made clear to me as being spot on.

Ok, so now that I’ve been enlightened, I think the thing that strikes me more than anything is a dual feeling of sadness. I’m sad because the Ramones are broken up, Joey Ramone is dead, and we’ll never be blessed with this music again. Whenever I come upon art of this sort and realize that the artist will never again be available to produce this kind of quality stuff, it just makes me feel like there’s a void in the world. This is particularly curious, since, before being exposed to the art, the void was already there and I just didn’t know about it. I guess it’s kind of the personal sense of loss I feel. I felt the same thing after I had seen “The Rat Pack” and realized what a total fucking bad-ass Sammy Davis Jr. was.

The other feeling of sadness is how I worry how much missing out on the art negatively affected me. Not to the point where I was depressed and I wouldn’t have been if I had heard “Judy is a punk” when I was 15, but it’s just such an amazing experience to hear something or see something that you realize is wonderful, and that for the past 15 years I’ve missed out on that. I guess that I should just be happy that I’ve seen it now, and call it a day.

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I have never been one who considered myself above crude humor. Example: Harry Potter book if you replace "wand" with "wang"

I've spent a bit of time this morning going through my unread blogs, of which there are many. One pointed me at this page: GREENIE WATCH - which is an anti-left, anti-green page. My initial reaction is to this is to think that the person is wrong and this is just another weirdo who has made up his mind and then searches throughout the media to find people to validate his opinion. But, to be honest, who the fuck am I? I’ve read some articles that quote studies to prove that global warming is bad and here and so on. I’ve watched TV shows that explain that if global warming DID come, it would be very bad. I’ve seen plenty of data that shows that IF trends hold the way they are going, then by 2050 (or whatever) the map of the world will have a lot more red on it than it does today and that it will have a lot less green or yellow.

I’ll tell you what I haven’t done. I haven’t gone and read the studies first hand. I haven’t looked at past journals to see how the data is trending. I haven’t even read the sources for the contrary opinions to see if they’re valid (or where they are flawed, if they are!). I’m basically the exact same as the strawman “weirdo” that I portrayed this guy to be. I made a decision that messing up our earth would be a Bad Thing™, and decided that avoiding that at all costs would be a Good Thing™.

What would my response be if you confronted me on this? I’d probably launch into a big discussion about how there’s way too much information in the world and you ultimately have to trust a certain set of sources to be an aggregator for you. But that’s only part of the problem. It’s not that I’m too busy to do go and research all these things, though if you asked me straight out, I probably would give that as the reason I didn’t do the research myself. Especially when I spent last night playing Ghost Recon (which is really just ok, I’m not fond of the way they implemented squad game play), re-organizing some drives in my computer and watching Alias (which was pretty good, but come on… another twist about that Project Christmas and her birth?). I don’t have a decent reason AT ALL for me not properly researching global warming or a thousand other things. It just seems like a diminishing return for me to evaluate the study first hand and quote that instead of the article. Yet if you were to ask me about this, or a thousand other subjects, I’ll quote the articles and the tv shows and the sources I do have at my disposal, and quote them as fact. And I’ll convince myself that if I was even in a position to actually make a decision based on these subjects, because I was mayor or governor or whatever, that I would actually read the studies myself and make an informed decision. But the chances of that (let alone the chances of me being mayor or governor) are vanishingly small.

Just warning you.

I hate doing political commentary. I don't suppose there's something I can post which will be taken as humor, and humor only, instead of political commentary? Evidence of my hopefulness in this regard is evident with this post: The Onion / CHAK | Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

Too funny. Especially that it came out in January of 2001.

Well, i was going to launch into a big discussion about how I hadn't blogged in a really long time, and I felt guilty, and, while I may still do this, I'd just like to say WTF: Segway Human Transporter Insurance

Rats, looks like I got taken in by the Gmail/google mail announcement. Turns out it was/is an April Fool's joke. The problem, of course, was that the story was posted on March 31... thus making it fairly difficult to ferret out as an April fool's joke. Nonetheless, I think we all agree that I'm an idiot.

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I feel like it's 1997 all over again: Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail | CNET News.com

The interesting thing here is that I think Google can make it work... and well. Let's face it, their advertising engines are so well tuned, that they must be making money off of every page view. Once that happens, the calculation is pretty simple:

Estimated advertising revenue - Estimated cost to present pages > 0 ? Yes = Do it.

Essentially, giving people an account with a gigabyte of mail that they check 5 times a day (or whatever) is cheaper per account than they'll make on their advertising. It's nice when economies of scale really get moving. Google is so efficient at running very large amounts of machines that they can basically handle as many machines as necessary in their datacenters. What's next, Geocities.google.com?