Dangerous ideas

Unshelved has it wrong.

The real dangerous ideas are the ones that teach you NOT to think.

(Well, actually, let me reword that.  I’m pretty sure that Unshelved gets it perfectly well.  It’s the complaining parent in this strip who has it wrong.)

742,000 private-sector jobs lost in March

Payroll processor ADP says the private sector cut 742,000 jobs in March, the largest job loss it has recorded in its nine-year history.

In March, the goods-producing sector shed 327,000 jobs, the 27th consecutive decline. Manufacturing lost 206,000 jobs, while construction lost 118,000. Construction has now lost 1.1 million jobs since the peak more than two years ago.

The services sector lost a record 415,000 jobs in March.

ADP apparently projects its numbers from the 500,000 companies to whom it provides payroll and HR services.  Nevertheless, it seems their projections are pretty close to the mark; they projected 706,000 in February, and ended up revising that downwards to 697,000.  That’s only about a 1% correction.  But look what we’re saying here:  1.45 million private sector jobs lost in two months.  That’s about triple the rate for this time last year.  How long can this continue?

(Pointer via koyote)

Conficker update

A brief capsule summary:  Conficker update traffic has been detected on various networks; it’s now switched into a more active update mode in which, instead of checking 250 domains for updated code, it is using a set of 50,000 domains of which it tries a randomly selected 500 per day.  So far, it does not appear that the Conficker creators have put up any update for Conficker to retrieve.  There’s still no clue as to what the update will do when delivered, and no indication yet of any active use of the botnet.

Meanwhile, IBM has cracked the work’s P2P communication and developed a way for ISPs to detect infected customer machines by listening in on their P2P traffic.

Fear and loathing in the Senate

C|Net is reporting that Carly Fiorina (you remember Carly, the second of two CEOs who presided over the destruction of Hewlett Packard) is “seriously considering” running for the Senate.

She has held influence as a chief executive of a major company and as an economic adviser for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during his 2008 presidential bid.

Emphasis mine.  I think that latter part really says it all, doesn’t it...?

Penn Jillette on fire-eating and the recovery plan

But there are some things that are just intuitive.  Did you know, that if you’re going 100 mph, directly at a very, very thick, reinforced concrete wall, and you speed up, so you’re accelerating right when you hit the wall that the accident you have is going to be much worse than if you’d jammed on the brakes as soon as you saw the wall at the end of the street?  Did you know that?  It’s exactly what everything you know and feel would tell you, and it’s exactly true.  Most times when you’re driving, or playing with fire, or handling money, the thing that makes sense to you is also true.

I had an insight earlier.

Damned if I can remember what it was now that I’m sitting at my keyboard again...

Code efficiency

I love it when I can do things efficiently.

One of the features I’ve long wished LogJam (the LJ client I use) had is persistent templates for posts.  It has drafts, but always asks if you want to delete the draft after you submit a post.  Annoying, and carries the risk of accidentally deleting your drafts that you’re using as templates.

Recently I decided to go add a templating feature, but on studying the code, it appeared that it would result in considerable duplication of code.  But it occurred to me that there was another approach to the problem ... and I just used it.

So I just de facto added a capability to LogJam to use drafts as persistent templates, plus a control in the preferences UI to turn the feature on and off ... by adding six lines of C and changing one.  Seven total changes across four different files, to add a significant UI feature.

That’s efficiency.