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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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February 3rd, 2009

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 08:41 am

And the government isn't exactly helping.

On February 2, 2009, NumbersUSA with the Coalition for the Future American Worker launched the above "elevator ad" in an extended nationwide educational campaign on cable TV.

The purpose of the ad is to inform the public of two government statistics that, when placed together, show an outrageous participation of our federal government in increasing the numbers of unemployed Americans.

The two statistics from last year?

  • 2.5 million Americans lost jobs
  • The federal government brought in 1.5 million new foreign workers to take jobs

NumbersUSA has been doing everything in its power the last three months to persuade the nation's political leaders and media leaders to address this incongruous policy. Yet to date, there has been no indication whatsoever of a slow-down in importing an average of 138,000 new foreign workers each month -- even as half-million Americans a month are losing jobs.

This tells only part of the story, of course.  Part of the problem is that employers want to hire the cheapest workers they can, even if they're not the best.  Part of the problem is that sometimes they ARE the best, because US schools aren't graduating enough qualified engineers and other technical professionals.¹  Too many people want the "easy money" careers like law practice and banking.²  On the lower end of the scale, most of the Mexican migrant workers that people complain about are doing menial jobs that the complainers aren't willing to do in the first place.

[1]  The truth of this claim is hard to ascertain.  There are documented claims asserting both its truth and its falsehood.

[2]  Lawyers are perhaps the most egregious example.  The United States has 5% of the world's population, and 70% of the world's lawyers.  The United States has slightly under 2.4 times the population of Japan, and 30 times as many lawsuits per year.  The US has three lawyers for every doctor, five lawyers for every four police officers, two lawyers for every three engineers.

unixronin: Animation:  "One man.  One vote.  HIS vote.  Vetinari '08" (Vetinari)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 10:47 am

Every four or eight years a new president arrives in town, declares his determination to cleanse a dirty process and invariably winds up trying to reconcile the clear ideals of electioneering with the muddy business of governing.  Mr. Obama on his first day in office imposed perhaps the toughest ethics rules of any president in modern times, and since then he and his advisers have been trying to explain why they do not cover this case or that case.

“This is a big problem for Obama, especially because it was such a major, major promise,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.  “He harped on it, time after time, and he created a sense of expectation around the country.  This is exactly why people are skeptical of politicians, because change we can believe in is not the same thing as business as usual.”

And so in these opening days of the administration, the Obama team finds itself being criticized by bloggers on the left and the right, mocked by television comics and questioned by reporters about whether Mr. Obama is really changing the way Washington works or just changing which political party works it.

[...]  “Is this really the message he wants to convey to voters in just his first month in office, a message that it’s O.K. to break or skirt the law just as long as you’re a good guy with a special skill set?” asked Andy Ostroy, a blogger writing on The Huffington Post, a liberal Web site.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
...?

It's easy to talk the talk, but ultimately it doesn't mean much if you can't, or won't, walk the walk.

unixronin: Conan the Barbarian (Conan)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 07:16 pm

... for game designers who think it's a good idea to give a game four bars of music that just repeat.  Over and over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over.  And over....

And what makes it worse is when the game author picks something that you actually liked until you heard four distinctive bars of it a thousand times in a row.

unixronin: A somewhat Borg-ish high-tech avatar (Techno/geekdom)
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 11:04 pm

I successfully added a proof-of-concept implementation of client-to-client encryption over the ICB protocol into ICBM, my threaded Perl ICB client, this evening.  Just because I can, and because I can learn a little doing it.  What makes this a little more challenging is that the ICB protocol is an ASCII protocol with a 255-character packet size limit (before subtracting overhead), and it's not 8-bit clean.  (That's not a major handicap, as it just means adding an extra step to ASCII-armor the ciphertext, but it does reduce transport efficiency.  Then again, I'm probably gaining more efficiency from compressing the plaintext before encryption than I'm losing from armoring the ciphertext.)

I still need to design the key management part of the encryption feature, but I have a little better idea of how I'm going to handle that now.  For obvious reasons, encryption is only supported on private messages.

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