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27 Oct 2009 23:11
October 27. Slow week, so I'm going to write about politics. I just saw here that Joe Lieberman is going to join the Republicans in filibustering the health care bill if it includes a public option. That's fine with me, because the present bill, even with a public option, is not nearly good enough. Someone should filibuster it for including a mandate. Anyway, for the Democrats, the obvious tactical move is to stand by the public option, which is supported by a large majority of Americans, and let the Republicans filibuster it as long as they want. Let the nation see a bunch of insurance company goons tying up congress for months as the economy collapses. Let them filibuster it all the way until the 2010 elections, and then some of them will get thrown out, and in the next congress we can get a bill that's not quite as bad.
October 27. Three years ago I bought a used Dell Latitude C610 with no operating system for $205 after shipping, and installed Puppy Linux. It's still working fine and I'm typing on it right now. But with internet bloating, my 1 GHz CPU is frequently maxed out, script-heavy pages take too long to load, and the system often freezes for several seconds when I close a window. Also it would be nice to have more than one USB port, and enough hard drive space to dual-boot with Windows XP and play some games. So last night I snagged this, a Dell Latitude D610 on eBay, with four USB ports, a DVD burner, and an AC adapter (typically not included on eBay) for $230 after shipping -- which is almost exactly what I paid for the last one, figuring inflation. It's still not good enough to play Elder Scrolls Oblivion, so I guess I'll have to wait until 2012 and get a better computer for a million dollars or a can of soup.
October 26. Brief new post, winding down 2009. I'll probably go up once or twice more and then not again until the next round of planting in April.
October 26. Two different readers just sent me this NY Times article, Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways. Even though these kids are suffering and sometimes dying, I don't find this nearly as depressing as reading about kids who have never seen a carrot, or who are not allowed to walk three blocks to school. As the ongoing collapse continues, this trend is only going to increase, and the solution is both obvious and politically difficult: let the homeless move into the abandoned houses, throw enough food and blankets at them to keep them from dying, and help them turn lawns into gardens. Related: "Agriburbia" sprouts on Colorado's Front Range
October 25. Back from the land, with a lot to catch up on. William mentions Dave Pollard's How To Save The World blog, which I've occasionally looked at but I should start checking it more often because it has lots of good stuff. Yesterday he posted this link to Educational Simulations. The site nearly freezes my computer, but they claim to have a product that "enables you to live one of billions of lives in any country in the world." I can't help thinking, if somehow the tech system doesn't crash, and information processing keeps getting exponentially faster, life simulations might become so advanced that you could be in one now.
October 21. I've been thinking about the sociology of different subreddits. Just now I saw a post about a town's reaction to the death of its only homeless guy
October 16. Continuing on the human potential subject, David sends this article about
October 15. On today's post, someone commented that people used to do all reading out loud, so I poked around found this thoughtful .
October 11. A few days ago John Michael Greer did an especially good post,
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