Intellectual Poison

The shocking erosion of consumer confidence in the previously untarnished and exemplary marque that was Toyota has resulted in a massive scramble for marketing campaigns designed to win back their nervous customers. And who can blame them really, the idea of a Prius run amok without brakes and a stuck accelerator scares most people (though some of the more rational among us are wondering why the driver didn't put the car in neutral and coast to a stop). Intellectual Poison's crack team of corporate ninjas was able to penetrate the security of Toyota America's HQ Public Relations War Room and steal these ad campaigns under consideration.

Buy a Toyota and Get a Free Coffin - truth be told, this one had already been crossed out in angry red marker.

Toyota Will Get You There Faster Whether You Like It or Not - the suits seemed to like this one as it had been circled in green marker, our data analysts put this campaign at a 5 to 2 favorite to go live.

Toyota: At Least We're Not Chrysler or GM - another strong potential winner if the chicken scratches along the side are any indication.

Toyota Remembers When You Loved Us, You Really, Really Loved Us - it appears that this was a late night entry into the pool, there are doodles on the mock ups as well lipstick kisses, some unidentifiable stains and one cigarette burn.

The next few concept campaigns were mostly brainstormed ideas on a white board, our team of trained monkeys analysts were unwilling to lay odds on any of these even when we offered them some extra bananas.

Betcha Didn't Know Prius' Could Go That Fast?
Even a Prius Without Brakes and a Stuck Accelerator is Better for the Planet Than a Road Hog from Detroit
Everybody Knows If You Die in a Toyota Then You Go Straight to Heaven
(the converse ad) Everybody Knows If You Die in a Honda Then You Burn in the Deepest Pits of Hell Forever!
Buy a Toyota and Inject Some Mayhem Into Your Commute!
Toyota's New Model: The Kamikaze!
Buy A Toyota or Our Senior Executives Will Have to Commit Ritual Suicide
Data Not Wrong, Stupid Round Eye Americans Are Wrong, Buy a Damned Toyota Stupid American
Penis So Small, So, So Small, Toyota Make Good, Good Car
At Least a Toyota Isn't Tainted with Lead (this one was scratched out with an all caps DAMN IT! next to it, note to self, stop eating the paint chips off neighbor's Toyota)
Toyota's Don't Kill People, Our Ninjas Kill People...That Aren't Driving Toyotas
WhyIoughta Buy a Toyota (apparently an attempt at rhyming)

The rest of the board was illegible scribbles with lots of exclamation points, drawings of breasts with googly eyed men ogling them, penises and rocket ships.

We at Intellectual Poison wish Toyota well as they struggle through this swamp of bad publicity following some bad decision making and bad designs. If Toyota would like to, they are more than welcome to deliver a brand new Forerunner to the Intellectual Poison offices for, uhhh, evaluation purposes. We prefer classic black ones if at all possible.

Labels: advertising, recall, Toyota

So I heard the bad news from one of my co-workers that his position has been eliminated as a result of the non-stop budget cuts to education in California. His is, of course, not going to be the only position cut in this latest round of cuts. And I have to remind myself that I'm actually not even a real employee in this district since my position was eliminated last June.

I am a contractor within the district doing pretty much the exact same job I did last year but without any security, health insurance or retirement benefits. Which is to say, I'm a helluva lot cheaper than I was last year all told but it also means I've been in full-on job hunt mode all year. And, if and when I do get another job offered to me, I'm going to bounce and leave someone else to sort out the mess. If the district wanted to buy my loyalty then they'd figure out a way to hire me on full time with all the benefits and protections that implies.

Anyway, here's how I see the continuing rounds of budget cuts after budget cuts. There are three main areas where the system screws itself and, by extension, screws the students in the system.

1. Because the cuts are made based on literally nothing more than length of service the newer, more energetic, more engaged and better educated teachers are the first to go. This is the same as putting old people in the lifeboats first and then seeing if there's space for the younger women and children. Nice if you're an old person but kind of stupid for the long term.

2. Older teachers, those nearing retirement are often the most burned out, fed up and spent employees in the district. They are the worst teachers to work with, they hate technology, they are grumpy, they are short with their students, they are gone absolutely as soon as possible at the end of the day.

3. Many of the older teachers stopped giving a damn about teaching years ago and are, quite honestly, just running out the clock so that they can get their maximum pension. This maximum pension thing can be the difference between pulling $1500 a month until you die or pulling $4000 a month until you die. It isn't chump change but the fact the only reason they keep teaching is to get the bigger pension means they are pretty crappy teachers.

All of this is a terrible disservice to the students. They are being taught by cranky old teachers from out of date textbooks and using obsolete technological resources (not completely true but generally pretty accurate across the entire district). And yet there is an oppressive mandate to improve test scores while underfunding the system repeatedly? How that's math work?

California is failing its children by failing the entire educational system and we will be paying the tab on this one for years and years to come.

Labels: education, retirement

Contained herein is my list of people I think are in need of a swift hard kick to the nuts and why. Not surprisingly, a bunch of these people are politicians or mouthpieces of a Republican nature. But there might be a surprise or two in the mix.

Jim Bunning - you quite obviously don't care about people in tough financial straits by your now trademark line of "Tough shit" when blocking a vote to extend unemployment insurance benefits. And then whined about missing a stupid college basketball game. Methinks your balls could use five or ten kicks really. Maybe one for every one of the unemployed people your pathetic grandstanding caused to lose their benefits. Might want to get a really big ice pack ready, Senator.

Newt Gingrich - you lie and smear without even a passing glance at the truth and have the smarmiest BS attitude about it, as if your making up facts out of thin air should be above reproach. I think you might need a finger poke in the eyes too.

Sarah Palin - some might say you don't have balls but you do, metaphorical ones sure but balls none the less. How else could you rationalize (sorry, is that too big a word for you, Sarah?) your sound bite rhetoric while pocketing massive speaking fees and spreading misinformation and lies.

Manny Ramirez - your skills are in decline while your ego is blooming to ten times normal size. You are a clubhouse cancer and the only good thing about you now is that you are going to drag the Dodgers down with you. You had a bad year last year, marred by your suspension for using steroids. And the season hasn't even started and you're already saying stupid crap and making yourself look like a bigger idiot than those stupid nasty, nappy dreads do. You might get a few extra kicks in the balls because your nuts are so shriveled up from abusing steroids.

Every climate change denier everywhere - pointing to snowstorms as a sign that global warming is a hoax demonstrates what an utter simpleton you are. You are not a scientist and yet you feel qualified to discard dozens and hundreds and thousands of scientists who all agree that climate change is real and it is going to get worse unless we do something.

Lauren Ashley - Miss Beverly Hills seems to think that the Bible and God says gay people should be executed. Also, she's apparently presumed the title of Miss Beverly Hills since Beverly Hills does not have a beauty pageant. So she's a liar and a hater. Amy thinks her over-the-top statements are a publicity stunt like her predecessor Carrie Prejean. Either way, she needs a hard kick where her danglers would be.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly - doing their best to drag any discussion about anything of importance down into the muck where the wallow like the fat, disgusting pigs they are. I'm not sure I could stop kicking any of the four of these fools once I'd started.

California State Senator Roy AssburnAshburn - You are a closeted gay man in politics who frequented gay bars for years and yet voted time and again against gay rights. Your excuse is that you were voting your constituent's interests which is fair enough on the surface but a total and utter cop out underneath. You represented yourself as something you are not in order to get elected, you are a fraud, a liar and a drunk driving ass. I don't give a fig that you are gay, I care an awful lot that you are a hypocritical douchebag.

Arnold Schwarzenegger - You have simply no business being the governor of a state you can barely pronounce. You're style of leadership is to quote your goddamned action movie lines, insult the other side and admonish your scofflaw skeletal freakshow wife. We'd have to use a magnifying glass to find your steroid shrunken nuts but I'd keep kicking until we did find them.

Meg Whitman - just because you are bored and hold yourself in extremely high regard doesn't mean you know the first thing about politics or how to run California. You couldn't be bothered to even vote as a regular private citizen! You've got balls, that's for sure, balls that need a kicking!

The Entire Democratic Senate and House of Representatives - You need a kick in the nuts but it would be pointless since there isn't a damned set of balls amongst the entire lot of you pussies. As my friend, Jack, is fond of saying, you've taken a 59-41 majority and turned it into a dysfunctional, hand wringing minority. Find a pair, grow a pair, have a damned pair surgically implanted in your dangling sacks just so I can plant my Doc Marten's steel toed boot in 'em.

That's about all that I can come up with right now. I'm sure there are many, many more people that would benefit from a good hard kick to the jewels, heck I'm probably one of them.

Who do you think could use a kick square in the nuts?

PS Yes, I feel a little bad for the Assburn strike above but not bad enough to remove it (and perhaps this is why I deserve a boot to the nuts too).

Labels: balls, kicking, politics

Posting to the blog has been irregular of late because I've been as busy as I've ever been with work, with looking for work, with side work and, last but certainly not least, my family. Oh yeah, and getting some hours at the pre-school co-op as the school photographer which has been an interesting and occasionally aggravating experience.

Amid it all I am trying to get my bike rides in to keep the tenuous grip on what passes for my sanity these days. I can't complain too much though. Weather reports had us ready for a wet and indoors weekend but we didn't get so much as a drop and today ended up being quite nice out. I got a ride in first thing yesterday morning, nothing special, just a couple of loops on the slough paths. But it felt good to get spinning again nonetheless. Today was more of a surprise ride. I came home from a couple of photography appointments, that went very well, to find an empty house. Rather than ask where everyone was, I loaded up my bike into the car and headed up to Santa Cruz. I parked outside my old house in Seabright and enjoyed a slower paced warm up pedal to the base of Delaveaga where the real riding began!

It wasn't a super long ride, maybe ten miles total, but it really felt good to get back on dirt and mud and enjoy some of the nature that's been hiding behind sheets of rain for weeks.

This next week promises to be busy too. Two schools tomorrow, the second going into the early evening. One school or department each day the rest of the week with the photography make up day at the pre-school towards the end of the week. Also in the mix is an evening of computer work at one of my office manager's house and an open house at Grady's new kindergarten school.

One of the few benefits of my semi-employment in the school district is that I can basically choose whatever school I want my son to attend. The school we are assigned to is an under-performing crap hole, to be indelicate. The school he is going to is one of the best performing and most highly regarded schools in the area. The only other school regarded higher is one of the other schools I work at. Yes, I do take some measure of pride in working at two of the best schools in this district.

The downside is that the school is in downtown Watsonville. I don't particularly like this town very much, I don't care for the mentality, the gangs and the general fuck-you-gringo attitude I get alot of places. But to make the best of a pretty crappy situation, this school is it.

I guess I'm rambling now. I'm writing this while running tests and anti-spyware on an XP laptop I've been working on off and of for the last week. It does some stuff no problem and then totally freezes up and crashes with other stuff and not necessarily the same things each time. One thing the recent work I've been doing on Win machines has taught me is how much I hate the XP operating system. It is utter crap, like it was designed by a drunk monkey or something.

Give me my Macs and don't go yapping at me about fan boi shit. My Macs just work and work well. These Win XP machines freeze up, slow down or just plain lag ass all the day long.

Anyway, I need to get this party wrapped up so I can get to bed at a reasonably decent hour so I can hit the ground running tomorrow. So much to do, not enough time. Always.

I think I might try to plan an IP universe update post. I've been writing to several of my other blogs lately and think it might not be a bad idea to toot my own horn, as it were.

For now though, time to feed the dog, get the coffee machine ready and call it a day.

Labels: microsoft, school, update, work, xp

While part of me can appreciate the passion and anger raised by the cuts to public education, the greater part of me sees the protests as doing nothing but polarizing public opinion against the cause.

What does blocking a freeway and causing a massive traffic jam and screwing up people's work days do but piss them off, get them in trouble and make them hate on the idiots who thought it was a good idea?

Much like the underlying sentiment of Critical Mass is lost in the colossal pain in the ass it is for people caught in it when they just want to get home or to work or where ever they need to go.

And what are they really expecting to happen anyway? That the state government is gonna go "Oh gosh, you're really pissed, how about we stop fixing the roads and keeping the prisons open so that you can get a cheap education?". There is no money, the state is $20 billion in the hole. Protest until the cows grow wings and fly to the moon and it isn't going to change the basic fact that there is no more money.

It is, to a lesser extent, the same as showing up for the school board hearings here to protest the cuts that have to be made. Many of the arguments are similar, like the administrators should be taking cuts right alongside the rest of us. But asking the people making the cuts to cut their own pay is really just not going to happen regardless of how long a ways it would go to soothing aggravated students and parents.

Protests do not, as a rule, effect the people they should be effecting. They directly impact people that are right there in the trenches and would otherwise be sympathetic to the protesters if only the protesters weren't behaving like assholes. In the end, the protesters lose public support and their message is diluted by people who break shit just to break shit, who protest just because its more fun than going to classes.

In the end it feels like a big waste of time to no useful end.

Labels: protest, protesters

I make no attempt to hide my admiration for the eloquent and passionate diatribes of Keith Olbermann as he rails against the Party of No and their obstructionist and (when you get right down to it) un-American ideologies. I forget the Congressional rep who called out the Republicans last week as being wholly owned by the insurance industry but he is right. Lobbyists for the insurance companies are spending billions of dollars to buy Republican obstructionism to try and save their profits at the expense of our people and our economy. We have a desperate need to reduce the black hole of health insurance in America. The insurance companies are the de facto death panels that Sarah Palin has talked about, they make decisions about care based on their profit margins, not on customer service, not on taking care of their customers, not on anything but trying fatten out their profits. Its despicable and wrong. The quoted bit below is the very end of Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Wednesday before the Blair House health care reform summit. Please take the time to read the whole thing through and then tell me that we don't need universal health care. I dare you. Emphasis is mine.

And to the politicians who go into Blair House tomorrow for the summit: I have some requests as well. Leave your egos at the door. I want, I demand, that you give everybody in this country a chance at the care my father has gotten. And I demand, that you enact this most generous and most kind aspect of the reform proposed: the right to bill the damned insurance company for the conversation about what to do when the time comes, the Life Panel.

And I want all of you to think of somebody lying in a hospital bed tonight who needed that care and needed that conversation, and imagine that that is your father, or mother, or son, or daughter, or wife, or husband, or partner. If you cannot do that, if you cannot put aside the meaninglessness of your political careers for this, my request to you then, is that you not come back out of that meeting for you would not be worthy of being with the real people of this country who suffer, and suffer again because you have acted on behalf of the corporations and not the people.

If you cannot do this, go into that room and stay there and we'll get new ones to replace your worthless roles in the life of our country. My father cannot speak for himself. He appointed me to do so for him and I haven't the slightest doubt he wants me to say this tonight, right now. He mouthed the words to me and I will now give them such voice as I have to you going into that summit tomorrow. Help. Help. Help. Help.

If you have read the entire comment and you are unmoved then I honestly do not have anything further to say to you, perhaps ever. Our nation is in crisis and we have one side trying to do something and the other side doing nothing and worse, trying to prevent anything from changing. All in the name of goddamned profit margins and shareholder dividends while families go bankrupt, families members are allowed to die while awaiting permission from their insurance companies to get medical treatments and those same insurance companies try to cook up new ways to screw over their customers to add even more money to their profits.

It would make me sick but I can't get sick because I can't afford to.

Labels: healthcare, politics

We are a fractured country, we are huddled into our special interest groups and are launching attacks against anyone who dares to not kowtow to our same sets of beliefs. We are for or against abortions, we are for or against universal health care, we are for or against the stimulus, we are for or against Sarah Palin, we are for or against torture, we are for or against Tiger Woods and his sexual addiction, we are for or against whether Joe Stack was a hero or a terrorist, we are for or against damned near everything.

And the middle ground is a swampy hell of seething anger, hatred, bile and slime. The middle ground is unpassable and so the sides stand opposite each other and throw crap at each other.

We have politicians being political and smearing other politicians with deliberate lies because they know the majority of people won't bother to fact check them. We have health insurance companies making massive profits already and deciding it isn't enough so they are going to ream people who can't move to another insurance company because of their pre-existing conditions.

We have big market greed, we have poor getting poorer, we have an education system so woefully underfunded and a prison so overcrowded. We are approaching a precipice and, if we continue on the same path, we will tumble down to rock bottom. Some might say that we are already in the process of tumbling down.

Until the bitterness is forgiven, until the partisan bickering, until our "leaders" stop trying to score points and start trying to fix our country, we will continue to hate, we will continue to struggle and we will continue to spiral ever downward.

Labels: partisan

School spies on kids via webcam and spyware in their own homes. Which raises a pretty serious question: What if they captured video of a child undressing? Wouldn't that immediately make them child pornographers? This is beyond stupid and enters the realm of Epic 'Tardedness.

Oh, and it gets worse. The explanation from the school was that the webcam software was for theft recovery purposes only. However, the program was uncovered when a student was disciplined for conduct observed via the spyware webcam. And what was the student disciplined for doing? Eating Mike & Ike candies. The school official thought the Mike & Ikes were pills. But, if the purported only use of the webcam software was for theft recovery and the student in question obviously hadn't stolen his own computer then the school district is blowing bullshit smoke.

You can't cover up a stupid lie with another stupid lie especially when the pre-existing facts completely obliterate your stupid lie.

Someone is going to go down for this. And they damned well should. If I had a teenage kid who might have been spied on by the school, I'd be speaking to my lawyer and planning to sue that district into oblivion.

Labels: lawsuit, spying, stupid

I am coming up on my first full year of being engaged in a network marketing (or multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme or whatever else you want to label it, not a Ponzi scheme because there's no tangible goods in a Ponzi scheme and Kyani's juice, gelcaps and nitric oxide drops are very real). Anyway, I could put engaged in the previous sentence in quotations because at this point my level of engagement in actively working the MLM program is close to zero.

It hasn't always been. When I first started in it, I was very gung-ho. Put too much time into it, invested too much energy in it and eventually burnt myself out after not seeing very much success while others were getting multi-thousand dollar checks (yes, I've actually seen them, they are real, the money is very real).

It wasn't just the lack of conversion from money outflow to income though that burned me out. Never having been part of a network marketing company before I'd didn't have too many preconceived notions going in. And the ones I did have were, like most people's are when they hear the term network marketing or multi-level marketing, negative. Especially since Bernie Madoff was so fresh in the news and the thousands of previously rich people who's lives he smashed against the rock of greed and unsustainable promises.

I went into it cautiously but was seduced by the lure of the formulas, the seeming ease of it and the impressive successes of others. But the funny thing is that it all felt so forced, so staged, so driven by baser impulses that I found that I really didn't have much of a taste for it. Sure, it can be very, very easy money for some people but so can selling piece of shit cars for some people but that ain't me. My inner skeptic overcame my outer adherent.

At this point, or maybe even paragraphs ago, you might be asking yourself why I'm still involved with Kyani at all. And my reason is pretty simple. In the near year I've been using the three products I have not been sick once. My job as a computer tech in elementary schools exposes me to pathogens nearly constantly and I did not get sick once. Also, the Nitro FX makes my bike rides substantially better because of the improved circulatory benefits of the stuff. Before I started using Kyani I was getting sick every six weeks or less. In one stretch I bounced from one flu to the next for over a month, losing work days and feeling like utter crap.

Yes, I know this sounds like a sell job but honestly I'm not trying to sell anyone. I've tried selling people on Kyani and that doesn't work, at least not for me. So, instead I'm going to tell my story and see where that gets me.

It works. Plain and simple. My health is, thankfully, pretty good all the way around. But it is better taking Kyani. I stay with the company not because I like the business side but because I value the health benefits of the products themselves. And I recommend them to anyone who wants to feel better. Would I make a few bucks if someone tried it? Yep, but that's not really why I'd want someone to sign up and try it. I want people to give it a try because it can make a big improvement in your life if you suffer from chronic pain or diabetes or asthma or any number of other things.

And if you do try the Kyani products and they don't work then the company will give you your money back, minus shipping and I'll give you that if you want. Seriously. The worst part about writing this stuff out is knowing how it reads, knowing how quickly eyes glaze over and attention is diverted to some shiny widget.

But if you had a way for someone to not be in pain all the time, if you had a way for someone who's hands and feet tingle constantly from diabetes, if you had a way for someone to breathe more easily, stand up more easily, not ache then wouldn't you want to do every damned thing you could to introduce that possible solution them?

Which brings us around to the cult aspect of network marketing and probably the main reason I'm not more active in the company anymore. The practice of working a network marketing business is to play to psychology, to play the prospects like instruments and get them singing by the end of the meeting. There's psychology in every aspect of the meeting, in every aspect of the invite and in follow ups and introductions and everything else. It is the selling that is distasteful to me

And the edification aspect. That is a huge part of the process, to edify your upline, to talk them up, to psychologically weaken your prospect before they've even met your upline. The whole thing felt and feels forced and unnatural and more shysterish than an honest desire to help other people feel better and live better lives. Especially once you get to know some of the people in your upline and realize that some of them aren't laudable in any way and some are downright sleazebags. In fact, there are a couple of people in my direct upline that I wouldn't stop to spit on if they were on fire.

So there's a little glimpse into the pros and cons of network marketing from a grunt in the trenches. I love the products and loathe the business side of it. I can deal with it though because I know that people who use the products will feel better and lead more complete lives.

I like improving people's lives, its part of why I find technical support so gratifying and it is one of the main reasons I was drawn to network marketing in the first place. But all of the fluffy BS stuff? I can do without it.

Labels: cult, health, networking marketing

Not much chit-chat for now, here are my picks for tonight's UFC 110 fights.

Big Nog over Cain
Silva over Bisping
Sotiropolous over Stevenson
Bader over Jardine
Cro Cop over Perosh
Soszynski over Bonnar
Lytle over Foster
Reljic over Dollaway
Pokrajac over Te Huna

Not taking too many risks with picks tonight. Maybe taking Silva over Bisping is a risky call since Silva's lost three of his last four. But I think Silva's going to be just too damned much for the mouthy Brit.

Fight of the Night will likely be Lytle and Foster but might end up being Cain and Big Nog.
Submission of the Night will likely be Sotiropolous and Stevenson.
Knockout of the Night will be Silva and Bisping.

Either way, it should be a pretty decent night of fights. I'm most looking forward to Bader/Jardine, Lytle/Foster and Silva/Bisping with Big Nog/Cain a close fourth.

Labels: mma, prediction, predictions, UFC

There are numerous irritating people in the news on a daily basis. People that have no particular expertise save self-promotion and aggressive PR firms behind them.

The queen bee of these types has got to be Sarah Palin, a disturbing mix of beauty and fervently clung to ignorance with some ego, bravado and venality tossed in for good measure. She's excellent at whipping up a crowd into a frothy frenzy of parroted talking points that have no bearing in reality but answer already held beliefs by her adherents.

The response to justifiable criticisms against her proclaimations is that people hate her because she's strong. Of course this is total bullshit. People hate her because she's factually incorrect most of the time, adds nothing to the national debate stage and actually goes a long, long ways towards undermining any partisan legislation efforts with her divisive and, let's be honest, hate-based rhetoric.

As I wrote in a comment on a recent article on SFGate about her outrage at the Family Guy for poking fun at her, her outrage is uncannily selective. She demanded Rahn Emmanuel's resignation when he used the word "retarded" once, for which he's publicly apologized. Yet when Rush Limbaugh uses the same word more than 40 times on his show, he gets a free pass because he was using it as satire. Her rage is false, her beliefs are opinions, her presence on the national political scene is little more than a distraction from the real problems at hand.

And I think that's why people like Sarah Palin bother me so much. She's not trying to help put America back on track, she's out there hunting speaking fees, whipping up opposition to legislation our country desperately needs and spewing lies and propoganda regardless of how often she is proved to have no idea what she's talking about.

Another person on the national political landscape that does nothing but slow down or obfuscate real issues is Michelle Bachman of Minnesota. I seriously think this woman is a part time nutter at best and a full time loony at worst. She regularly makes up facts to support her chosen perspective (or the perspective chosend for her by the GOP "leadership") and her words do nothing but fan a fire of fucking fools (sorry about that).

I'm sure both Bachmann and Palin think they are patriots. Or maybe they don't, maybe if they were to be honest they'd admit that they are out for nothing more than notoriety, speaking fees and to be the sand in the vaseline of the nation. Or, more likely, the sand in the lube of Democratic party.

Either way, they are hurtful towards America, they are divisive spirits without substance and their continued presence in national politics will do nothing to help get our nation back on track.

I know this blog post actually plays into their hands because they live for rancor directed at them, they feed off the anger they elicit in others and they love stirring up partisan fury based off their lies and intentional misrepresentations of reality. Which makes them dangerously close to traitors to the USA in my estimation. Lucky thing I'm not in charge, for them.

Labels: idiots, more politics, obfuscation

I am extremely hungry so I'm going to get in my car and drive extremely fast to go find some extreme food to eat with extreme vigor. And I'm gonna finish it out with some class and pull the Double McTwist.

And that is my extreme interlude.

Labels: extreme

There's been quite alot of justifiable furor over Google's latest offering, Buzz. It appears that Google stole a page from the Microsoft playbook, the evil playbook. You see, Microsoft has a long and painful history of release and patch software publishing. They'd push an almost done piece of software out with the intention of using early adopters as unpaid and aggravated beta testers.

From a business standpoint this is a solid tactic. Microsoft has grown into the de facto operating system and office suite on the planet largely due to the release and fix philosophy. The only thing is that end users hate being used as non-volunteer guinea pigs. End users just want their shit to work, they don't want to help Microsoft figure out what's wrong and then have them fix it weeks or months later. Its part of the reason I do my best to avoid Microsoft products as much as possible.

And Google has done the same stupid, stupid thing with Buzz, their attempt to destroy Facebook and Twitter. Only they rolled out this new service without bothering to code in end-user controls, important end-user controls like, oh I don't know, privacy, notifications and other pretty basic service requirements. Google has taken information that many people don't necessarily want made public and went ahead and made it public without regard to their customer base's wishes.

And when a company starts acting without the slightest regard to its customers then they are strolling the fine line between good and evil. And Google has publicly stated their philosophy is to not be evil. Well, Google, Buzz is perilously close to being evil in addition to being non-intuitive, oddly slapped into Gmail and in desperate need of some end-user controls. Without some controls on my end, I'm liable to shut if off altogether.

I don't get why Google, ostensibly a very well run "smart" company, would risk pissing off so many users with this half-baked offering. Much like I don't get why Google decided to change how information is displayed on my Google home page where they forced me to put up with a huge space wasting gutter navbar on the left side of the screen. Its only through the use of an extension have I reclaimed that space. Google is well aware of people's hatred of this stupid, unnecessary space waster and yet they do not appear to be planning to do anything to fix it.

How many more missteps will Google make before people really do start think they are just another evil corporation bent on nothing but shareholder profits and maintaining their market shares? Many people already consider Google the next great big evil internet behemoth and its hard to argue against them lately.

Google needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize that end users can be fickle and, when pushed too hard, will just leave Google altogether.

Google needs to fix up its shit before pushing out any more partially finished products like Buzz. Until then, it will flounder and fail.

Labels: evil, facebook, google, microsoft, twitter

Here's a recap of recent Twitter finds you may have missed in the blur of posting.

The 6 Weirdest Things Women Do to Their Vaginas

Passwords are like underwear...

Vibram Five Fingers running "shoes"

Anthem Blue Cross to raise rates by 39%

Job losses comparison Bush vs. Obama - the source for the graphic above.

Miley Cyrus' 9 year old sister launches lingerie line

John Murtha passed away, so did Capt. Phil Harris.

I wrote To Helmet or Not To Helmet over on NorCal Bikers.

Understanding what's scarce and what is not - breakdown of Jeff Jarvis' post by Techdirt.

In other news, Celine Dion is headed back to Vegas after Barbra Streisand couldn't be lured in. Sarah Palin is a fucking retard, satirical use of the term here, according to Stephen Colbert. I'd add that she's a hypocritical fucking retard but why beat a dead pig with lipstick on?

I'm sure there will be more stuff I forgot, there always is, but this'll do for now.

Labels: links, twitter

Found over here at the Wonk Room. Seems pretty clear to me.

Add in Anthem Blue Cross's latest giddy proclamation that they are raising rates in California for nearly a million people by, get this, 39%! Why? Because they can and because they want more, more, more of our money. Their total bullshit rationalization is that, due to more people being unable to afford their insurance coverage because it is so high, they have to raise rates on people that can afford it so compensate for their lost revenues.

Which is, of course, utter bullshit.

The people who have no choice but to pay their exorbitant rates have pre-existing conditions and can't afford to lose health insurance for even an instant lest they find themselves completely unable to secure any kind of coverage at all.

The facts are that the United States of America is the last industrialized nation on earth without universal healthcare. Why? Because our supposedly elected representatives are pretty much owned by Big Pharma and Big Insurance who don't want to see their swollen revenue streams dammed up by little things like rationality, honesty and fair access.

Something like one third of every single dollar that goes into healthcare in America goes to administrative overhead. Think about that for a second. Think about the thousands of different providers who each have their own special filing procedure, think about all the people in all the medical offices across the country who have to fill out forms for each specific provider. Think about how much of our medical services get compensated by Big Pharma to push drugs.

Our healthcare system is seriously broken and in need of a fresh start without insurance companies acting as the de facto Death Panels the Republican asshats are so fond of invoking. Folks, there are death panels now, they are faceless nameless paper pushing bureaucrats who can conveniently lose your paperwork while waiting for them to authorize your liver transplant just long enough for you to die before it processes.

We don't just want universal healthcare, our nation's survival depends on it coming to fruition. Not just from a financial standpoint either. We are falling behind the rest of the world in almost every area while trying to convince ourselves that America is still the shining beacon of awesomeness it has been. Our education system is atrocious, our infrastructure is aging and failing and our healthcare system is a bloated special-interest owned cash cow for Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

Labels: healthcare