Jul 2, 2009 Jocularity, Sisyphus
I’m not wanted in this state.”
“How many young women work here?”
“I didn’t steal it; I just borrowed it.”
“You touch somebody and they call it sexual harassment!”
“I’ve never heard such a stupid question.”
Believe it or not, the above statements weren’t overhead in bars or random conversations — they were said in job interviews.
43 Things Actually Said in Job Interviews.
I like these kinds of pieces. And it’s a “soft day” anyway.
Jul 1, 2009 Faith and Works, Heart and spirit
That’s Rabbi Avrohom Aronovitch of Passaic, regarding whom eventual turnabout is, I say, fair play.
(Just don’t believe everything you read — whether it suits you or not.)
Jun 30, 2009 Americana, Narcissus Rex, O Mores!, Sisyphus
From the latest Governor Heedless:
The once-promising presidential prospect said he is committed to reconciling with his wife, but professed to The Associated Press his continued love for the Argentine woman at the center of the firestorm that gutted his political future.
In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die “knowing that I had met my soul mate.”
What a pathetic specimen. What a pile of protoplasm.
A stack of unmanly goo.
It is really something to watch a man unravel in public like this. He’s making the brilliant Eliot Spitzer look, well, brilliant, actually.
Now, that takes some doing. So to speak.
Jun 29, 2009 Oppression, Orient
The AP reports that it was much ado about nothing:
Iran’s election oversight body on Monday declared the hotly disputed presidential vote to be valid after a partial recount, rejecting opposition allegations of fraud that have set off an extraordinary wave of protests.
Wow. Imagine our chagrine. If only we’d known! Okay, everyone. You can go home! No biggie.
Jun 24, 2009 Americana, Heart and spirit, Metropolis, Style
My first reaction when I saw this post on a blog called Infrastructurist (looks very cool) (via Boing Boing) was just to link to it on my Facebook page. I also lament the loss of these great — well, in some cases very large and grandiose, if not necessarily actually great — civic works of sculpture. I come to work, in fact, through the new Penn Station every day, and work in One Penn Plaza (yeah, me and those buildings!), overlooking (actually, straddling) the non-entity of a transport hub that now bears the Pennsylvania Station name as well as the depressing Madison Square Garden.
Then I went ahead and wrote this comment, and decided to recycle and touch it up a little here, for the benefit of my larger other audience.
To a large extent the manner in which the loss of these temples of transit compels so many of us is a testament to what we really think about a world ruled solely by utilitarian concerns. That latter, callous attitude toward the spiritual importance of environment on human existence, in the cities as much as anywhere else, is displayed by Alon Levy in the comments at the original post.
God help us in the soulless, bottom-line libertarian future that so many think they want!
Ironically, the utilitarian worldview is incapable of accounting for the long-term utility and welfare (in the microeconomics sense of the word) that derive from civic pride — the decline of which, from the 1950’s on, along with the decline in the quality of inner city life, surely must be linked to the decline of the humane in urban architecture.
And yet: As the (not so godless?) Alon says in a subsequent comment, “Ron Coleman, you’re the first person I see use the word spirituality to mean ‘preserving train station facades.’” Indeed: Many of these buildings were and are obsolete, and the cost of their respective upkeep, utility expense, restoration or retrofit, relevance to modern transportation need or all of the above would constitute a preposterous budget item for almost any public entity saddled with such costs. Only religious dogma, and perhaps theocracy, could justify such devotion.
Rail transport, despite its highly romantic appeal, is great for everyday commuting but is seldom of the choice of travelers from afar, for whom flying — even in its own diminished state as a culture and a humane experience — is a clearly superior choice. Most other travel remains, in America, highway-based, because Americans want to go where they want, when they want and with whom they want, and they want to get back home that way, too.
In addition, the cheap labor and lax or nonexistent building, fire, safety and access standards of the nineteenth century, which made it possible to erect and use these behemoths, are truly relics of a different age. So who is going to foot the bills to maintain these buildings as obsolete white elephants? Or is someone here volunteering for a special tax assessment so Detroiters can stare at their irrelevant grand terminal?
There’s the facts, Jacks.
I sure wish we had the old Penn Station here, though.
Jun 23, 2009 Oppression
Blogola
Glenn Reynolds quotes Shannon Love as follows:
If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?
Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?
Good thinking. But then, hey, full disclosure, right? — I’m a little biased. That’s because in January of 2005 I wrote this on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®:
Last week Instapundit took the unusual step of opening comments on the ethics of Blog-payola. I wrote this:
I am pretty agnostic on this. I think it is hopeless to anticipate a standard of behavior in Blogovia. It won’t happen, and I am not sure it should. No one is free from bias of some sort or another. Being paid to express an opinion is not so different from being affected by your likelihood of getting tenure, or a promotion, or maintaining your anonymity, or getting a choice committee assignment, or for that matter stroking or offending the right or wrong people in the world of blogs, politics, one’s profession or with N.Z. Bear.
The only real difference I can see is that one form of blogola is liquidated, but the other sources of bias can be and of course are in some cases far stronger.
Consumers of blogs have to simply be skeptics. Those who disclose more, and more accurately, will be more trusted on that account. At the end of the day, all you have is your persuasiveness, your intellectual honesty, and — in my case — a good looking picture at the top of your columns.
Okay, I know — not everyone can have such a picture. But you work with what you have. You get my point?
This line of argument led to the publication of this op-ed by me, now far less agnostic, in the New Jersey Law Journal two years later. Amazingly, you still can’t see the article for free on the Law.com site, which it explains the time delay: That’s how long it took Shannon to get the routed copy of the Law Journal out in Chicago!
Jun 22, 2009 Gelt, Nuvo-Techno, Scientificus
Wired.com says the sky is falling because Apple is, surprise, letting business considerations govern who does and doesn’t get to sell stuff for iPhones, and under what conditions:
Free Press, a group that advocates the idea of an open internet — that is, one in which consumers have the right to browse the web and run internet applications without restrictions — is the latest of several organizations to call out Apple for its inconsistencies. Free Press alleges that Apple crippled SlingPlayer, a TV-streaming application for iPhone, so that it would only work on a Wi-Fi connection; the initial version worked with a 3G cellular network connection as well as Wi-Fi. The SlingPlayer restriction is inconsistent with Apple’s approval of the Major League Baseball application, which provides live-streaming of sports events on both Wi-Fi and 3G connections, the group said.
“That strikes us as odd and potentially nefarious because it really represents a carrier picking and choosing applications for consumers as opposed to letting consumers decide which videos they want to watch,” said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press. “It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect in an internet experience that’s controlled by the carrier.”
Yeah, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a business that is in the business of, uh, business. Instapundit, seizing on the title of this piece, “How Apple and AT&T Are Closing The Mobile Web,” understandably says he “doesn’t like the sound of this” — which, of course, is exactly why that title was chosen. But it’s okay, Glenn. It just sounds like free enterprise. That’s a sound you like almost as much as a puppy in a blender!
The anti-Apple screed segues into a legitimate look about the real technological limits the mobile web is approaching, in terms of network capacity. But it completely elides the difference between “the Internet” and “the mobile Web” and “what you can put on an iPhone.” I mean, come on:
“If you’re going to allow video to stream on the 3G network, you can’t pick and choose which video services operate,” Scott said. “You have to let them all operate, otherwise that’s not the internet.”
You “can’t”? Otherwise, what again? Oh — “it’s not the Internet.”
What a bunch of babies it is, this “Internet” you speak of, Wired.
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