An obvious example is tax policy. To take an especially common example: We must have lower taxes. Why? Because lower taxes are better. How are they better? Because then I pay less taxes. OK. So what public services do you want to fund with your taxes? Military? Education? Police? Transit? What do you want society to look like? Perhaps your vision of how society should look doesn’t need a large tax base to work. In that case, fair enough. But let’s say you want a strong military and you want low taxes. A strong military costs a lot of money—in America’s case about 4% of GDP. So how strong do you want the military? If you figure out what you want the end result to be, then work backwards to the policies—in this case, tax rates—you will find a policy that supports your vision.

In other words, you have to figure out where you want to go, then find the roads that lead there, and you have look at where you actually ended up when you took the roads you thought would get you there. Did that road take me to the coast? No? Then find another. Rinse and repeat.

At this point it feels like we’re in a situation where two people are trying to plan a road trip:

“So let’s either go to Alaska or Arizona.”

“The car must be blue.”

“We have to decide if the road trip is to Alaska or Arizona.”

“The car must be blue.”

“But where do you want to go? You want to go to Alaska or Arizona? They’re very different.”

“Only a blue car can take us there. White cars are socialist.”

“OK. Sure. Blue car it is. Fine. But what kind of car? SUV? Roadster? And if we go to Alaska we’re going to have to get snow tires.”

“The car must be blue. I’m an excellent driver. Yeah, definitely an excellent driver.”

And on and on like a play where Beckett lost his everloving mind.

What we need in America today for a healthy debate is for politicians to state their goals. What kind of society do they want to create? And platitudes like “a strong America” or “a just society” or “a land of freedom” simply do not count. Those are clichés, not visions. What do you want? What kind of society?

Do you want a strong army? Why? Strong education? Who’s going to pay for it? Do you want dependence on oil? Why? Why not? More police? Who’s going to pay for them?

What is the vision? What the hell do you want?

If I have to sit through a whole election cycle again with nothing but policies divorced from end-goals and a media that doesn’t want to even ask the question I’m going to scream.

The issue? Logging in to Facebook.

What happened was that the afore-linked story on ReadWriteWeb received a higher Google score than the “real” Facebook login page when a user googled for Facebook login. Which meant that some people ended up on the story instead of the Facebook login page when they googled for Facebook login.¹ These people were confused and above all ANGRY. All of a sudden the Facebook login page was different and weird.

Prompting ReadWriteWeb to post an explanation at the beginning of their story:

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

I LOVE FACE BOOK CONNECTED W/PEOPLE I WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL W/ESPECIALY ONE CLOSE FRIEND.KNOW LET ME LOG IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seams like all of the comets i read agree with me you people messed up royal i was enjoying facebook now i am thinking of getting rid of it all

Just let me in please

These are real people experiencing real anguish. Oh, sure, they’re ignorant people, but that doesn’t make their anguish any less real.

And above all, it illustrates the fact that a lot of people have no idea how the Internet works. None. None at all².

Apart from condescending “I’m better than them” kinds of feelings, no matter how much they may keep you warm at night, this illustrates one of the huge holes in The World is Flat kinds of arguments about how what we need to do to stay ahead of China and India is to move up the value-added ladder and increase our creativity, etc.: There are plenty of people in the West today who can not go up the ladder. It’s not their fault. They’re fine people. They’re hard-working. But they can’t go from a factory floor to adding value to a creative process. Not because they don’t want to, but because they simply can not. It’s not a matter of lazy. Can. Not.

And don’t fall into the trap of thinking these people are stupid. They have real problems using computers and the Internet, but that is not the same as stupid. For some reason some people who are otherwise perfectly capable simply cannot get computers and by extension the Internet. Can. Not.

So, the question that needs be to answered is: What happens to these people when we increase our competence and our value-add, etc.?

I’ve yet to see a convincing answer to that question.

¹ You’d be surprised how many people habitually visit Web sites by typing the URL into a Google Search.

² This is why the tech industry consistently fails at predicting which products and services will be commercially successful: the industry undervalues the importance of making things easy for users. Tech enthusiasts and normals are very, very different.

I’ve been somewhat impressed with the way Governor Brewer has been handling Arizona’s fiscal crisis. Not impressed as in thinking she’s doing a great job, but impressed as in she’s been holding back the worst excesses of the kookocracy. So I was hoping against hope for some sanity from her State of the State address.

Alas, it was not to be.

According to Brewer, Arizona’s problems mostly stem from: Too much healthcare for the poor, the federal government, and immigrants. Not as one might think from massive overbuilding fueled by a corrupt banking system which when the bubble burst left the state gasping for revenue.

It’s the poor, the Mexicans, and the feds that are dragging us down. Dang them.

So how is Arizona going to dig itself out of the $5 billion hole? We will “un-shackle our job creators.” Committees will do this. Somehow.

To give Brewer credit, she does bring up education as an important factor in Arizona’s future. And how do we provide a solid education for Arizona’s children? School choice and loosening teacher standards!

This idea that instead of bringing all schools up to par, we should reward the children whose parents are engaged in the process and punish the children who are born into dysfunctional families is sickening.

Guess they should have picked better parents.

As an extra flourish, Brewer brings out the wingnut trope that “No government ever created a dollar of wealth or a dime of capital.” And then disagrees with herself when she says, “Every one of Arizona’s military bases is critical to our national defense—and to our state and local economies.”

I suppose the military is not government-run.

To be fair, Brewer does hint at supporting tax hikes to help cover the budget deficit. Or at least I think that’s what she meant: “Over the long run I support a responsible pro-growth tax reform package that includes tax cuts. However—we must ensure a revenue base that supports vital functions through this downturn.”

Now I’m depressed.

The full text of the address can be found here (PDF).

To which my horrified response was: THEY’RE NOT ALREADY?

The sheer arrogance of rolling in to perform a complex procedure in which the tiniest detail can mean literally the difference between life and death, and to think you are so flawless you don’t need a checklist, is stunning.

Especially when you’re supposed to perform this complicated procedure under high stress and often severely sleep deprived.

Seriously, there are reasons pilots use checklists, reasons written in blood.

Except he kind of did.

See, the goal of these assholes isn’t to blow up planes. The goal is to terrorize us. The actual blowing up of the plane is just a means to terrorize.

It’s an important distinction to make. Just like the IRA in London in the ’70s (remember them?) didn’t carry some strange resentment about parked cars—they wanted the British to get scared enough to leave them alone.

It makes a lot of psychological sense for the current crop of bastards to keep trying to blow up airliners: Flying is a scary exercise to begin with, and the thought of some nihilist blowing you out of the sky is enough to push a lot of people way outside the realm of rational thought. As a bonus you don’t need a lot of explosives and you can put pretty much any mouth-breather on the job, it seems.

9/11 was such a massive, overpowering shock to the system that it’s hard to blame anybody for going off the deep end with the response. But that was nine years ago. Plenty of time for the last remaining super power on Earth to get rational again.

Which is why it’s so disheartening to see the same kind of knee-jerk response again.

First we had the idiot with the shoes. So, gotta take off your shoes¹. Except not in Europe, for some reason, which is where the shoe bomber was coming from. But you have to when you leave America. OK. No reason to be consistent or find a best practice to apply globally. Let’s just all wing it. You fly in America, you take off the shoes. You fly in Europe, you empty your pockets.

This certainly does not make me feel safe. Either one side of the Atlantic or the other is putting our safety in danger or is inconveniencing people for no good reason whatsoever. Or both. I mean, it has to be one or the other, right? Unless there’s some shady gentleman’s agreement between the terrorists and the authorities that is different in different parts of the world. Which somebody like Glenn Beck might actually believe and turn into a three-hour televised extravaganza of insanity². But which I do not.

Security personnel in different countries looked over the threats and made different decisions. You know, like humans do.

So a dirtbag tried to blow up his shoes, and we ended up putting our shoes through the machine in the security line. And then the next set of dirtbags were planning to conduct a failed high school science experiment on the plane. So: No liquids for you. Except less than three ounces. Because less than three ounces can never be made to explode, even if there are ten of you and you pool your liquids on the plane, turning it into 30 ounces. Because. Well, because, dammit!

Fantastic.

And now we have this latest idiot who tries to blow up the plane by means of his underwear³ right before landing. Which means now we have to spend the last hour of the flight just … staring? Because surely somebody with murderous intent would rather stay home than detonate his bomb two hours before landing? Really? “Curses, foiled again by the western imperialist dogs! Oh, them and their watches!”

Believe me, I want to be as safe as possible when I fly, and I most certainly would like for the insane nihilists who commit these kinds of act to be stopped any way possible, but I also would like to carry on with my life.

If we end up imploding our economy by not flying because it’s been made so goddam difficult by a bunch of security theater, well, they’ve won. And I really, really don’t want them to win.

¹Which, incidentally, we’ve been doing for a long time now, and still every time I fly half the security checkpoint line acts like this is complete news to them, just like the 3-ounces-of-liquid-or-death policy.

Do people in general actually pay any attention whatsoever to what goes on?

²What would the Founders think? What? What? Perhaps this random statue in the park will give us a hint. I’ll put on my reading glasses.

³I hope the pain of his burned genitals is utterly unbearable. Not quite 72 virgins, is it, having third-degree burns on your scrotum, douche nozzle?

Nothing new about that.

But lately things have been coming to a head. I don’t know if it’s all some elaborate practical joke, if I’m going nuts, or if the thought leaders out there are, in fact, completely insane.

One current source of confusion for me is the endless obsession and lamentation about housing prices. Yep, they crashed, and they crashed hard. If you, for some reason, bought a house at the top of the bubble you are now in a world of pain. And I feel for you. That really, really, sucks.

However—and here’s where I stop tracking the narrative—there was a huge bubble fueled by incredibly sketchy loans; loans that should never have been given. Those loans raised housing prices to fantasy levels, levels that priced homes utterly out of reach of home buyers.

I live in Phoenix, one of the housing bubble poster children, a metroplex where a lot of people are “paid in sunshine”—high-paying jobs are few and far between. According to RealEstate.com, in 2007 Phoenix had a median household Income of $45,474 and a median home value of $347,000.

Do those two numbers jive to you? They shouldn’t. If your household income is $45K, you simply cannot purchase a home for $347K. It’s called math. You can’t pay the vig. There’s nothing mysterious about it.

But now the bubble has burst, and home prices are back somewhere realistic. Which, again, really sucks for you if you bought your house at the top of the bubble. You are now deep in the hole. So I can see all those people desperately wanting house prices to pop up again so they can at some point actually sell their homes without going bankrupt. Granted. As for myself, yes, I enjoyed the fantasy that my house had made me rich, rich I tell you! Which I was for a while, in theory. Theory and reality are not the same. You are rich when you have the cash in hand.

But. If the house prices go back up to bubble levels, nobody can buy the houses without insane loans, and we would be back in another bubble. Which by its very freaking definition is not sustainable. Houses can’t cost more than people can afford, or people can’t buy them. Unless we can start paying our mortgages with unicorn tears, that’s just how it is.

So why am I reading all these stories lamenting the lack of lift in housing prices? Isn’t it a good thing that houses are affordable for working people again?

So people can actually, you know, live in them?

Ready for the grill

Quality ingredients and concave patties are the secret ingredients to making a great hamburger. It’s also so simple it’s frightening:

• Buy good ground meat. I recommend sirloin. More expensive, but you get what you pay for.

• Form into patties. You don’t need eggs or flour or anything. Just make patties. The key is to handle the meat as little as possible. Trust me, they’ll stick together.

• Make sure the patties are concave in the middle. This is the secret. If they are not concave you will flatten them with the spatula. The spatula is the enemy—it drains the juice. The juice is good. You want the juice.

• Grill over low heat, turning every five minutes until done. Patience is the key.

That’s it. Enjoy the best burger you ever had.

Burn, baby, burn

This tendency of course afflicts that last sacred outpost of the suburban male: The grill.

Ah, yes, the last bastion of male domination, a place where fire meets slaughtered animals. Ho-ah!

I don’t know if it’s because of almost all men having grown up listening to endless debates about the Correct Way to Char between more-or-less lubricated family members—at least one of whom has attached himself with the zeal of an Old Testament prophet to the belief that charcoal is the One True Way to grill and that grilling with gas is gayer than wearing ass-less chaps and a pink boa—or simply that the grill stands there in our domain, a last free outpost of manliness, a sanctuary for us to invest with the last rituals of our gender.

Either way, the Correct Way to BBQ inspires much furor.

And it’s all BS.

Unless you particularly ENJOY your meat with a charcoaled outside and red inside, here’s the too-simple-to-be-true way to achieve tasty, tasty carcass from your grill: Low heat and patience.

That’s it. Let me say it again:

LOW HEAT AND PATIENCE.

If you’re BBQing with charcoal, there’s extra patience involved: You will need to let the grill sit until it becomes naught but embers. If you’re cooking with gas, just turn the burners ALL THE WAY DOWN after the grill has heated up. That’s right. All the way down.

But, a chorus of angry voices cries out, THAT’S NOT MANLY! Indeed it may not be. See, the goal here is to create tasty, tasty meat, not to make up for the cruel indignities life has visited upon you. That’s what lifted pickup trucks are for.

So, the burners are turned all the way down. You put the meat on the grill. Now leave it the hell alone for ten minutes. Yes, we are going to use manly-man technology to help us BBQ. That technology is called a watch. Wait at least ten minutes, then turn the meat.

Then go sip a tasty beverage for another ten minutes, while watching the grill in case there’s a grease fire. After ten minutes, go turn the meat again.

Depending on the cut of meat, it might be done now, but probably not. Cut it open and take a look. Is it the level of pink you want? Then you’re done. If not, leave it for another five.

If you have a cheap grill—like me—or you buy fatty meats, you’re going to have a grease fire. It’s unavoidable. Just move the meat out of the way and use your scraper to extinguish the fire.

The result of all this is better-tasting meat and less stupidity in the world. These are both fine things.

Great, right? The sitting president, who is a fantastic orator, is going to spend time showing his support for education.

NO, NO, NO! Oh, you fools! He is going to brainwash and indoctrinate them into … well … something FASCIST or COMMUNIST or perhaps even MUSLIM … who knows, but indoctrination!

So the school district my daughter attends is forced to send out a defensive e-mail JUSTIFYING their decision to have the children watch a speech by the, let me repeat myself here, sitting president of the United States of America.

But Nic, you say, you’re a huge liberal/fascist/communist/whatever; of course you’re going to want the children indoctrinated by Obama.

NO. I want my child to hear a message from the, AGAIN, sitting president of the United States of America on the value of education.

And what if Bush had wanted to do the same thing? Even though I loathe him, his administration, and his policies, I would still have wanted my daughter to hear the message from the, say it with me, people: president of the United States of America.

Because guess what? This IS the United States of America, and we are supposed to respect the presidency, if not the president.

Remember those days, when the same bunch of wingnuts who are going to pull their kids out of school on Sept. 8 were screaming about how questioning the president was supporting the enemy and being a traitor? Remember?

Were you one of those people?

Put up or shut up. Let your child hear the—for the last time—sitting president of the United States of America speak, or man up and admit you hate democracy and America.

Wez Loves You. Source: MadMaxMovies.com. Click for original

The other day The Arizona Republic ran a story about survivalists who are responding to the economic crisis by hoarding food, buying guns, and setting up gardens.

To those survivalists I’d like to say: Shine on, you crazy diamond. If it makes you feel better to build a bomb shelter, go right ahead. I mean, it obviously WON’T HELP, but if it eases your worry, great.

Why won’t it help? Because if there’s a real apocalypse—a full-tilt stop to the global economic engine resulting in roaming bands of outlaws—or mutants, why not—fighting for the last resources of civilization, your shiny Magnum and your bags of grains aren’t going to do more than postpone the inevitable for a few weeks, tops.

Unless you have special forces survival training, you won’t be able to find food. Unless you have special forces combat training, you won’t be able to hold off the mobs. Having a bunch of guns is not going to be enough. You have to know how to actually USE the guns effectively. This skill set is not magically imparted by watching a lot of Chuck Norris movies and reading Left Behind. Sorry.

But having a bunch of people respond to fear and uncertainty by deciding to go Mad Max seems to happen all the time, especially in the United States. Soon as there’s a crisis, real or imagined, be it the Y2K bug or Obama building concentration camps, the survivalist bile starts rising for a bunch of people. Man the bunkers! Get the guns! Protect the family!

The last time we saw this on a large scale was the Y2K bug, and one of the things that REALLY got to me back then was the GLEE underlying a lot of the survivalist freak-outs.

IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING! GET TO THE BUNKER! WHEEEE!

The people stockpiling food and ammo often don’t seem to be terrified so much as HAPPY. Finally, they seem to be thinking. FINALLY we’re done with this bullshit society. Finally I’ll be able to live off my wits and superior firepower against the hordes. The HORDES! The bastards who make me pay taxes and arrest me for driving drunk! Finally me and my shotgun will be able to LIVE like we’re MEANT TO. WITH V-8 ENGINES!

It’s the fun park aspect of survivalism that’s so bothersome—like finally we will be FREE.

Is life really that bad for some people that the prospect of the End of Civilization is the only hope for happiness?