Remember 2400 baud modems? Many of you, of course, will not. But even so, you are experiencing the same thing we did back then. I am talking about waiting for pages to load.
As bandwidth has grown, so has the density of pages. Many pages have far more advertisement density than content density. So much so that it takes as much time to load the pages as it did back in the days of 2400 baud.
I think that Yahoo email is a perfect example. Try opening their latest and greatest email without at least a T1 line. More than three quarters of the time I try it, the page gets so bogged down in loading flashy ads that the messenger app never does load. Or the the inbox only half loads. You can see the emails but you cannot select them.
And I do not mean to single out poor Yahoo as the only culprit. There seem to be more offenders than not these days. How many articles never get read because we just get tired of waiting for the damned page to load and so we close the window and move on?
We have all this bandwidth band but we are still waiting for pages to load. If you want your content to draw eyeballs to the ads, then build your pages so the content loads first! Because if all I see are ads and the content still hasn't loaded, I'm leaving.
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
Yes, he really is that evil
I just got through watching the Showtime documentary The world according to Dick Cheney. It reaffirmed every bad thing that I ever thought about him. He really was a Svengali, leading the hapless Bush around by the nose for his entire first term. But what is worse is, he remains happy in the damage he inflicted upon the United States.
He fundamentally changed this country from one where the rule of law mattered, to one where only expediency matters. It know longer matters whether we are the good guys or the bad guys, as long as we win, within his warped definition of winning. That Iran has become the major power in the region as a result of our crippling the only nation strong enough to counter them? When asked about regrets, he said he would do it all over again. While that was never addressed in the interviews, I am sure his solution would be still another war.
That he squandered all the sympathy and good will we had acquired after the September 11th attacks, creating a whole new generation of enemies? Apparently no regrets there either. He turned the United States from the beacon of hope we have tried to represent to the world to the school bully shaking down the other kids for their lunch money. The concept that his actions created more danger in the world, not less, is beyond his understanding.
He set a standard, a tone, that still exists. Laws are for the little people to follow, the lash that keeps them behind the plow, while the powerful may ignore them with impunity. That is true in this country which has become a Security State, and it is true in how this country behaves in relation to it's international obligations.
He argued with Bush for Scooter Libby to be pardoned, but he would never come clean, that Libby was only trying to protect him. His loyalty only goes so far. A Chicken Hawk to the end.
While the program presented some opposing thoughts to a number of Cheney's views, there were very few tough questions asked, and few challenges to his assertions. Yet despite the kid gloves with which the former vice president was handled, he still came off as an soulless ideologue who was uninterested in any fact which might conflict with what he had made up his mind he wanted to do.
It appears to me that in many ways he accomplished his main goal, which was to mold the United States into his own image. He removed morality and justice from the equation, making us mirror images of the evil we found ourselves confronted with back on September 11th. Will we ever recover?
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He fundamentally changed this country from one where the rule of law mattered, to one where only expediency matters. It know longer matters whether we are the good guys or the bad guys, as long as we win, within his warped definition of winning. That Iran has become the major power in the region as a result of our crippling the only nation strong enough to counter them? When asked about regrets, he said he would do it all over again. While that was never addressed in the interviews, I am sure his solution would be still another war.
That he squandered all the sympathy and good will we had acquired after the September 11th attacks, creating a whole new generation of enemies? Apparently no regrets there either. He turned the United States from the beacon of hope we have tried to represent to the world to the school bully shaking down the other kids for their lunch money. The concept that his actions created more danger in the world, not less, is beyond his understanding.
He set a standard, a tone, that still exists. Laws are for the little people to follow, the lash that keeps them behind the plow, while the powerful may ignore them with impunity. That is true in this country which has become a Security State, and it is true in how this country behaves in relation to it's international obligations.
He argued with Bush for Scooter Libby to be pardoned, but he would never come clean, that Libby was only trying to protect him. His loyalty only goes so far. A Chicken Hawk to the end.
While the program presented some opposing thoughts to a number of Cheney's views, there were very few tough questions asked, and few challenges to his assertions. Yet despite the kid gloves with which the former vice president was handled, he still came off as an soulless ideologue who was uninterested in any fact which might conflict with what he had made up his mind he wanted to do.
It appears to me that in many ways he accomplished his main goal, which was to mold the United States into his own image. He removed morality and justice from the equation, making us mirror images of the evil we found ourselves confronted with back on September 11th. Will we ever recover?
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Sunday, March 10, 2013
You'd think I could just leave it alone
I really should stop myself, but I was reading another one of those absurd Yahoo news reports. This one was in their Finance section, talking about Social Security. The news stories themselves are usually pretty innocuous stuff. Nothing that took too much thinking to compose, but if the author stays away from trying to interpret the facts they have copied from Wikipedia then mostly harmless. It is the moronic comments that get my blood pressure going.
Now the idiots who simply make fun of the the left, or the right for that matter, I can just gloss over. It is the ones who parrot solutions that they have no comprehension of that I find most irritating. You know the old adage. better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it.
And the one 'solution' that I keep reading is to privatize Social Security. I wonder how many of them (those not being paid by Karl Rove and his ilk) have any idea what that really means.
Put simply, the goal of Social Security is to replace some subset of your income when you are no longer able to work. It does that by levying a tax on both employers and employees, and investing the money in US government debt. That is nowhere near the highest possible return on the money, but it is the safest. The cost of overhead is somewhere between 0.7% and 1.0% (I have seen figures quoted in that range from a number of sources). How would you replace that.
Tell everyone you're on your own? That's like telling everyone that they have to be their own doctor! Imagine a minimum wage cashier in 7-11 being told to invest this money for their retirement. Stock market, gold futures, mutual funds, or any Ponzi scheme that comes along, it is all up to him.
I do invest for my retirement, and doing so intelligently is not an easy thing. I pay for advise not because I am stupid but because I am not a professional investor. I maintain a diversified portfolio of stocks and mutual funds. The older I get the less time I would have to replace this money. And if the market should tank, just before I have to retire, I am screwed. But I would still survive. If I were on the bottom rung of society, without the other assets I have accumulated in my life, it would mean homelessness.
How about government approved mutual funds? In order to be eligible for investment, they would need to meet certain criteria. We have seen just how well that has worked in the veterans benefits and student loan industry. For profit colleges with absurdly low graduation rates, who exist only to suck students dry and then throw them away have been running rampant for years now. Can you imagine the next time the debate for funding the people who would police these funds came around?
The people who are in favor of privatizing Social Security are the same ones who think we spend too much on food inspectors and who try to hamstring any attempt to rein in rampant abuses of consumers. They continue to block the appointment of anyone to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because they consider such things as contracts written in plain English to be an unfair burden on business. You really think they will regulate the investment vehicles for Social Security?
Privatizing Social Security is just code for taking the money and turning it into additional bonuses for investment bankers. People like me, who can afford to pay for professional advise, and have the education and the time to devote to monitoring their investments, will do OK. The people for who Social Security will be the difference between a modest retirement and living in a cardboard box, those are the ones that would suffer.
And the ones who are pushing these concept? They know that too.
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Now the idiots who simply make fun of the the left, or the right for that matter, I can just gloss over. It is the ones who parrot solutions that they have no comprehension of that I find most irritating. You know the old adage. better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it.
And the one 'solution' that I keep reading is to privatize Social Security. I wonder how many of them (those not being paid by Karl Rove and his ilk) have any idea what that really means.
Put simply, the goal of Social Security is to replace some subset of your income when you are no longer able to work. It does that by levying a tax on both employers and employees, and investing the money in US government debt. That is nowhere near the highest possible return on the money, but it is the safest. The cost of overhead is somewhere between 0.7% and 1.0% (I have seen figures quoted in that range from a number of sources). How would you replace that.
Tell everyone you're on your own? That's like telling everyone that they have to be their own doctor! Imagine a minimum wage cashier in 7-11 being told to invest this money for their retirement. Stock market, gold futures, mutual funds, or any Ponzi scheme that comes along, it is all up to him.
I do invest for my retirement, and doing so intelligently is not an easy thing. I pay for advise not because I am stupid but because I am not a professional investor. I maintain a diversified portfolio of stocks and mutual funds. The older I get the less time I would have to replace this money. And if the market should tank, just before I have to retire, I am screwed. But I would still survive. If I were on the bottom rung of society, without the other assets I have accumulated in my life, it would mean homelessness.
How about government approved mutual funds? In order to be eligible for investment, they would need to meet certain criteria. We have seen just how well that has worked in the veterans benefits and student loan industry. For profit colleges with absurdly low graduation rates, who exist only to suck students dry and then throw them away have been running rampant for years now. Can you imagine the next time the debate for funding the people who would police these funds came around?
The people who are in favor of privatizing Social Security are the same ones who think we spend too much on food inspectors and who try to hamstring any attempt to rein in rampant abuses of consumers. They continue to block the appointment of anyone to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because they consider such things as contracts written in plain English to be an unfair burden on business. You really think they will regulate the investment vehicles for Social Security?
Privatizing Social Security is just code for taking the money and turning it into additional bonuses for investment bankers. People like me, who can afford to pay for professional advise, and have the education and the time to devote to monitoring their investments, will do OK. The people for who Social Security will be the difference between a modest retirement and living in a cardboard box, those are the ones that would suffer.
And the ones who are pushing these concept? They know that too.
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