Cause and Effect: Election Day edition

-
Here are a pair of seemingly unrelated links which, upon closer examination, explain a whole lot.

America the Ignorant

The Unbearable Stupidity of American Voters

Depressing...

Be sure and actually check out the links before telling me I'm an elitist liberal a**hole.

Comments

Dan Brekke said…
Doctor, I went to work on Election Night at the Socialist Public Radio Station that's been paying my wages the last few years. Was too busy most of the night to take in much of what was happening outside California. Every once in a while, something would filter through. "He's conceding," I heard a colleague, a transplant from the upper Midwest, say. "Who?" I asked. "Russell Feingold." Oh, no--Feingold lost? And you know how the rest of the evening went. I will admit giving in to Pure Liberal Bias--or maybe it was a little democratic (small d) euphoria--when it became apparent that the billionaire who dumped $140 million into our governor's race (what in the world did she think she was buying?) got thoroughly and decisively thumped.

Anyway, my night ran from about 5 in the afternoon until 7 in the morning. I went home and slept, got up, and looked at the world outside. It was not ending.

Then the next morning, NPR as part of dealing with the new reality put a couple of Tea Partiers on. One, a woman from Texas, complained about how the feds hadn't come across with money for upgrading I-35 (she suggested the cash has been spent on "helicopters for some politician"). A Tea Party guy seemed to concede it was OK that the federal government has spent stimulus funds on building highways--but his nose was out of joint about the signs that had been posted to announce the spending.

I said to the person who is privileged to listen to my early-morning carrying on: "These people are as dumb as rocks. No--they're dumber than rocks. Rocks at least can tell you something useful."
10:30 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contact Fedex Delivery Dept For Your Package....

-
Dear Customer! We have been waiting for you to contact us for your Confirmed Package that is registered with us for shipping to your residential location. We had thought that your sender gave you our contact details. It may interest you to know that a letter is also added to your package. However, we cannot quote its content to you via email for privacy reasons. We understand that the content of your package itself is a Bank Draft worth of $800,000.00 USD, FedEx do not ship money in CASH or in CHEQUES but Bank Drafts are shippable. The package is registered with us for mailing by your colleague, and your colleague explained that he is from the Country but he is here in Nigeria for a three (3)months Surveying Project as he works with a consultant firm in Nigeria West Africa We are sending you this email because your package is been registered on a Special Order. What you have to do now, is to contact our Delivery Department for immediate dispatch of your package to your re...
Read more

Random Thoughts on AI-generated images

-
Image
It's been a while, but I'm back (bitching as usual). Let's start with....Artificial Intelligence generated art! 1. The first thing to remember is this is the new Bright Shiny Object. LIke the camera once was. Upon seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), declared: “From today, painting is dead.” He was a little premature. And there will continue to be be more Bright Shiny Objects that will grab everyone’s attention and cause gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. 2. It’s also version .01 of this Bright Shiny Object. What we’re currently seeing is essentially demo reels: “See what I can do!!” Interesting but not *that* interesting. Once the excitement wears off it will be just another tool, used badly by some, used well by others. The camera did not replace painting, but it opened the eyes of artists to the possibilities of other forms. 3. Where Does the Artificial End and the Artist Begin? in my mind this situation is th...
Read more

Cloud on the Cheap

-
These days, The Cloud is all the rage in the computer world. Cloud storage is probably as far as most folks want (or need) to go - think Box.com, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive/Docs...the list goes on. You can collect quite a bit of free off-site storage if you're of a mind to.  These are all examples of  SaaS - Software as a Service . PaaS - Platform as a Service - gives you a specific pre-configured platform to build applications or services. Finally there is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is virtualized hardware: CPUs, hard drives, networking, firewalls and the like. A little background:  at my day job at Sisyphean Corp, I manage hosting for a couple dozen big websites (I lose count sometimes).When I first took this on, we were on physical hardware. Trouble with this is once you make your decisions about the hardware, you're sort of stuck with it for a while. If you've predicted your needs poorly, or they change, well... I migrated one o...
Read more