Silicon Valley Redneck

The stupidity-enrichment centrifuges must be working overtime

Following links from TSM this morning, I arrived at this tale of fire extinguishers, and the banishment thereof from English apartment buildings (excuse me, blocks of flats).

Notable quotables:

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: 'Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.'

Yup.  Right up until someone actually moves into the building and piles a bunch of excess cardboard under the stairs.  Or the landlord covers up damaged carpet with incompletely-fireproof throw rugs.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire.

Riiiight.  And those cheap 1A; 10B:C extinguishers I keep scattered around my house would be totally inappropriate for use on a flaming block of magnesium (or, for that matter, uranium), for which you'd want a D extinguisher.  For anything you're likely to encounter in a residential setting, though, the basic multi-purpose extinguishers are just fine.

Your politicians at work!

California may not have a budget, but that could never stop our esteemed state legislature from pursuing higher priorities.  Like, say, mandating noisier cars.

Yup.  Makes lotsa sense.

Oh, and the beneficiaries of this wouldn't so much be the 116,000 blind people... more the vast number of idiots who can see, but who don't bother looking where they're going before wandering in front of cars.

If we're intent on creating Nerfworld, why not just mandate Nerf cars?

OK, now this I'm completely failing to grok.

It seems that a Federal court has just ruled that inability to have sex is a protected disability under the Rehabilitation Act, and thus discriminating against those so disabled is forbidden.

Now here's the funny bit: the plaintiff hadn't applied for a job as a prostitute, porn starlet, or other occupation for which having sex is an obvious qualification.  She'd applied for a job with the State Department (and not, apparently, a Mata Hari position).

The State Department had declined to hire her as a foreign service officer on the basis that proper medical treatment for her underlying condition might not be available in the places she'd be sent.  Nothing to do with the ability to have sex, right?  They're not discriminating based on the disability, but based on work-related concerns about another, related problem?

Apparently the court didn't see it that way.

This seems totally wacky.  If a job applicant is medically disqualified from a job, but the medical condition has led to a psychological disability which is unrelated to the job in question, you have to hire her anyway?

I wonder how many old geezers there are out there whose heart conditions leave them unable to have sex, but who always wanted to be airline pilots....

(Story via Insty.)

Atrocious phrase...

...heard on the radio yesterday, out of the mouth of a San Francisco politician:

"Undocumented citizens."

Er.  I presume the people in question are, in fact, citizens, but of what country?

Watch the chain of logic now.  "Citizens have the right to vote" → "Anyone who is a citizen of any country has the right to vote in the U.S."

Just watch.

(Yeah, I know there are plenty of actual, natural-born* U.S. citizens who don't have handy documentation of the fact.  I don't believe they're a significant constituency in SF, nor that the politician in question was referring to them.)

*Naturalized citizens do come with documentation.

Lunacy on the front page

Yeah, I know, what else is new?

This morning's outrage is just below the fold, on the right-hand side of this morning's Murky, in a story on photo ID for voters:

...critics worry it would disproportionately affect the poor, minorities, and new immigrants.

Er, excuse me? Aren't new citizens just about guaranteed to have suitable ID?

Or are we supposed to be getting all upset over the prospect that non-citizens might be disenfranchised?

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Those amazing folks up there in the Great White North have a cunning plan: tax legal, paid-for music downloads to help compensate artists for piracy.

This has got to rank right up there with Arnie's plan to make health care more affordable by taxing doctors and hospitals.

Well, if you buy certain DVDs, and watch them on legal players, you're forced to wait through an obnoxious "don't pirate movies" ad.  If you pirate those movies off Bittorrent, of course, you're not subjected to this.  I think the same logic is at work.

"I'm a thirty-second bomb! Twenty-eight! Twenty-seven..."

It seems an MIT student was arrested (and nearly ventilated and detonated) for having a "hoax bomb" in an airport.

Said hoax bomb consisted of a circuit board with LEDs on it, connected to a 9V battery.

Because we all know that terrorists openly carry bombs that have lights all over them.  Don't they?

Isn't that, after all, how Israeli checkpoints operate - by watching for people with LEDs on them, or animated Aqua Teen Hunger Force signs, or other things that just shout "bomb"?

Makes ya wonder why our troops in Iraq have such trouble identifying enemies.  Should be easy, shouldn't it?  Anyone with LEDs: Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight.  Anyone else: harmless civilian.

Oh, no!  I just noticed a green LED on a speaker!  It's a bomb!  And there's an LED on my monitor!  And two on the computer!  And three on the UPS!  And they all have wires connected to them!  I'm surrounded by bombs!  Nooooooooo!

Update: Boingboing has more details.  Sheesh.  MIT was there long before Logan Airport was, people; can't the airport goons get a clue about techies?  (Of course not; if they could, they wouldn't be goons.)  Back in my college days, I used to travel with a variety of homebuilt electronic gadgetry, wearable and otherwise, and the worst reaction I ever got was an idiot screener making me check my LED bow tie (which ended up on the wrong flight, so I didn't have it for the first day of the Wet Toast Computer Faire that year).

How out-of-touch can you get????

Awright, when I followed somebody's link this morning to Fred!'s video commentary (at Fred08, no direct link that I can find) on New Improved Hillarycare, my reaction was, more or less, "What the heck is Fred! smoking?  He must have made that part up!"

But, no.  According to this here AP story, Hillary is seriously proposing to make health insurance a mandatory prerequisite for employment.

Kinda the opposite of the current situation, eh?  Now, the easiest way to get medical coverage is to get a job that includes benefits.  Under Hillary's scheme... well....

You don't have a job, you don't have money, and you can't afford medical coverage.  The obvious solution is to get a job and earn some money, yes?  But, if the medical coverage has to come first, you're kind of up a creek, aren't you?

But, despair not!  For surely the omnibenevolent Great White Father Mother in Washington will promptly come to rescue you from the hole she dug for you!  Right?

Euro-imbecile!

Slashdot links to a story about proposed European censorship... some eu.gov cretin wants to block web searches for dangerous subjects.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.

IMBECILE!

To paraphrase somebody or other... there are no dangerous words, only dangerous people.

Of all the people who google for "genocide," how many do you think are looking for instructions on how to commit it?  Or is Frattini trying to prevent people finding information about which they might become (rightly) outraged?

And someone searching for "bomb" or "terrorism" may well be looking for a current news story.  One about which, again, he might become rightly outraged.

This sounds like the sort of idiot censorware that, years ago in the U.S., gained notoriety for blocking access to sites with information about breast cancer, classifying them as pornography.  Heh, heh - you said breast!

Next, he'll be trying to censor Fish songs.

Gimme sulphur to the measure two:
Send the bullet where you want it to.
Gimme charcoal to the measure three:
Make the powder gonna keep you free.
Gimme saltpeter, measure fifteen:
Sweetest shooting that you've ever seen!

(Proportions corrected here.)

 

IMBECILE IMBECILE IMBECILE

Sorry about the shouting, but I just HAD to get that out of my system...

Got in the car to run a couple of errands.  Turned on the radio, tuned to the news station.  Got some guy with a furrin accent reading a prepared statement.  Tried to figure out who he was, and who'd written the prepared statement - from his manner of speaking, he obviously hadn't written it himself, nor had he read through it before reading it out loud on the radio.

OK, the POV of the author of the statement was American.  Defeatist.  Historically ignorant, too: "we shouldn't be working with the sheiks in Anbar, because we supported the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and thus paved the way for the Taliban" (paraphrased).  Oh, here's a clue: he addresses Gen. Petraeus in the second person.

Finally break for context: the guy reading the statement was Tom Lantos, opening the Petraeus hearing.  Really, now: this isn't an occasion for speechifying by Congresscritters!  Call the General all the way back from Iraq to harangue him?  Why not just put a cardboard cutout of the General up there, and harangue that?

After that speech, it's darn sure Lantos, at least, won't be paying attention to a word Petraeus says.  Or, maybe, he'll be picking out any words that support his position, and ignoring (or simply not hearing) the rest.  "My mind is made up; don't confuse me with the facts!"

First errand complete; radio comes back on.  Petraeus is speaking.  This guy is on the ball, and citing specific facts.  One might hope the Congresscritters would take advantage of this specificity to do some fact-checking, but I doubt they have either the inclination or the competence to do so.  They'll just believe or disbelieve them, according to what they already believed, or to what's politically expedient.

Petraeus comes across as a leader.  I probably wouldn't follow him into Hell, but that's me; I would follow him into a moderate-risk situation.  Lantos, on the other hand, I wouldn't follow to a day at the beach.

Second errand complete.  Now some other guy is speechifying.  From the content, I'm guessing this is Ambassador Crocker.  Sounds like a politician.  Oh, and he used "enormity" to mean "great magnitude."  I guess that's crept into the dictionaries these days, but the primary meaning is still "great wickedness."  This distracts me from his continuing oratory.

Any time I hear Congresscritters on the radio, I'm inspired to a deep and abiding contempt of Congress.  Especially when it's the ones with safe districts and vast seniority... the ones who have been living in their bubbles for decades, and, by virtue of never facing contested elections, have acquired great power within their respective parties, and are thus running the show.