Cluster Software Is Back
I am pleased to announce the port of Cluster to Python, available in the old place.
Hopefully my actual writing update will be forthcoming!
I am pleased to announce the port of Cluster to Python, available in the old place.
Hopefully my actual writing update will be forthcoming!
Nice to see we’re keeping it highbrow with our North Korean buddies. It’s amazing to read about these major-dangerous nations working through problems with name-calling.
I officially become an expat on August 1, just some number of days or weeks away from a year since I found out about getting this job.
HR, incidentally, will be nuking our entire “People” system at 2 PM Houston time on July 31. This is the system that generates paychecks and the like.
I think this change only applies to US employees, but I’m expecting this to be another, ah, let’s just say cluster fudge, in the road to righting my employment terms. I hope they manage to pull me out of the US early, because they’re even asking hourly plan employees to enter their time early.
In other news, our beloved government here capped prices a few weeks ago, took a populist victory lap in the papers, and then proceeded to quietly hike the “special consumption tax” to counteract the price reduction. Meaning, they effectively just yoinked a fairly huge chunk of margin from us and the dealers and put it in their own pockets.
This tax, the ÖTV, is blessed to have a dotted O, as this sound is pretty much the kind of sound you make when you find something growing in your pancake syrup or something. We compete with Great Britain on petrol taxes here.
To keep up the language nerding, özel means both “special” and “private.” I leave as an exercise to the reader to ponder what that shared meaning indicates about the differences in culture.
I just saw a spam comment saying to navigate to some website to meet a seemingly endless supply of cougars, all apparently very interested in the good time I’m sure to show them.
I wonder, perhaps with a bit of a naive assumption that these sites can’t be completely baloney, where they get these girls, or women I suppose in this case. It’s probably some sweaty guy with pizza sauce stains on his nose trying to string guys along via chat.
I’ve never really heard how sophisticated this can all get. But, really, cons seem to scale upward in complexity as competition (or law enforcement) increases. This “dating” stuff has been going on for so long, I would assume people have gotten a bit more clever than a Nigerian spammer-type thing.
I may not remember those years too well, but this really reminds me of Clinton:
A White House spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said: “The administration is continuing to work with the Senate to pass comprehensive energy legislation and believes it’s on track.” He declined to discuss timetables.
Why would you need to speak anonymously if you’re saying that?
I was actually just thinking about this before I saw the article.
In our nice little populist bubble we have going on right now, we can’t quite decide if it’s those evil “high earners” or the “rich heirs” that are the problem. When you hear a lot of populists talking, these two groups are pretty much the same. They are in fact very distinct: if you ever walk through an office and look at your mid-senior managers, many of them don’t look exactly like a Carnegie heir even though they are in the wide broom handle tax bracket.
In my opinion, that’s because the baseline assumption for this country, your Joe Sixpack, makes nothing and spends everything. Therefore, income and wealth become mutually exclusive ($1 more income would be spent rather than accumulated) while becoming conceptually identical in their similar lack of attainability.
This allows politicians to screw with “the rich” as a buzzword depending on the situation. “The rich” are the lazy inheritors when it’s time to reinforce the estate tax, while in most Obama-esque policy talks we are mostly concerned with those magic $200,000-type income brackets that include just about anybody who can afford a decent, well-located home in Chicago, San Francisco, or Manhattan.
This leads to a pretty jacked up tax system, since you are effectively putting Rambo on a lazy susan.
I think the best way to liberalize someone like me is to deal on the conceptual margin. “What’s another 0.5% tax rate hike if it’s for the children?” This type of thing. Because it really can, even looking forward to higher pay grades and the like, seem like comparatively small amounts of personal resources for a large public utility.
But then I think of somebody like a friend I met at a Shell event while an intern. I don’t remember the guy’s name and doubt he’s working for the company, but I remember his basic character sketch.
African American guy, super smart, with a great interpersonal talent. Sort of Clinton/Obama-esque in that way. Harvard political science, can’t hurt. Did not give me the feeling that he was a legacy admit to the university. Maybe he was, but I don’t think so. There was none of that air of entitlement that comes with feeling like you are supposed to be somewhere.
He seemed like he was doing everything right. He will waltz into whatever job he wants and do great because he will thrive anywhere he ends up. He will be successful and well paid no matter what.
He will be taxed throughout his life as a high earner. Once he’s earning significantly he won’t get the mortgage tax credit, or cash for his clunker, or pretty much anything else.
Everything the government does, the basic message it will send, will tell him that he is doing too well.
If he saves, his investment returns will be taxed at a higher rate than the sales tax for convertibles and fancy shirts.
If he saves and never spends a lot of it, he could even owe some inheritance tax, unless he wants to spend more to avoid it.
In my little scenario, he will grow old living as an example of everything this country is doing right, getting the living crap taxed out of him the whole way through.
If he gets the Mercedes and the third villa, he probably owes a higher rate of tax than he would pay under current conditions. Why should the mid- to upper-middle class effectively fund his conspicuous consumption?
If, on the other hand, he saves and does smart things with his resources, I feel he would be greatly wronged by the American system.
I don’t see how we can talk about building equity and wealth without doing something about this doubletalk and doublethink that’s going on right now.
I finally got my Explosions in the Sky music back.
So next week it’s all going to be about the spontaneous Beavis and Butthead style headbang at work.
While that pernicious media machine announces Google’s now-vaporous Chrome OS as a Microsoft killer, I would assume it will do more as an X-Windows killer. I suppose it all depends on how good the replacement windowing system is, and how open the system is to some kind of third-party development.
If Qt and maybe GTK will ultimately target the new windowing system, we’re looking at a mini-revolution on our hands, maybe in a year or two.
Of course, I think the resistance (mostly inertia) to all this will be significant. But at least it’s an option. If most of these ingredients come together, I would expect at least one kind of bleeding-edge distribution like Arch will make the switch.
I would assume Shuttleworth would love to give X the ol’ heave-ho from Ubuntu if its replacement was sane to compile, maintain, and improve.
I’m especially bitter on the compilation front, as I’ve wasted countless hours trying to build X from scratch. For the lulz, I suppose, but it doesn’t matter: I’ve successfully built several Linux kernels, which do quite a bit more critical and complex things than draw windows on the screen. And, aside from using an incompatible compiler or something, I’ve never had a build error.
That aside, from a netbook perspective this all seems like a good idea. Cut a few abstractions off the graphics system (network transparency, etc.), make drivers easy to develop, and give Google Apps the lead role it now deserves.
I mean, seriously, take a look at Google Apps if you haven’t seen it in a year. The spreadsheet allows for matrix formulae, linear programming, conditional formatting, sane charting, import from Office, and even has a neat little integration to Google Finance where you can look up live and historic stock prices using a direct formula. This is serious stuff, like in some ways superior to Excel.
There are still acrobatics it can’t do: macros appear to be absent, you can’t color borders, I don’t think you can disable gridlines (this seems pointless but can really be pretty when done right), and named references seem clumsy. But, I would say I could even use this for the vast majority of my work.
And what I couldn’t use it for directly, I could modify really to the benefit of simplicity. My big management information spreadsheet that I’ve effectively based my whole job on here would be totally incompatible, but it’s an outside case.
I’m pretty much planning on using it for several purposes, mainly to avoid needing to install Office on every computer I touch. It even works in IE 6.
I have a lot of trouble seeing the sense in saying the government underestimated the magnitude of the crisis when passing the stimulus. I remember a lot of hellfire and brimstone in the rhetoric around the bill. And the recent market rally says investors (many of whom opposed the bailout) have been surprised at the economy’s medium-term prospects. Of course, this could be on its way toward reversing itself.
I increasingly feel like every corner of our government spends more time trying to cover its butt than actually doing anything. And, sorry to say, when Reuters starts quoting your “uh”s one has to wonder if your oratorical and diplomatic skill is limited to script reading.
I had a long-term to-do to move “Jimmy’s” cost from one cost center to another. It wasn’t a burning priority and I didn’t really have a great way to do it, so it has sat for some time. But I couldn’t believe there was a Türk named Jimmy.
I wrote down “Jimmy” in handwritten notes in a meeting. Months later, I realize it’s actually Cemil (the C is a hard J), which makes a heck of a lot more sense.
Getting names down in a domestic organization is hard enough. It’s staggeringly difficult in a foreign country!