34. People driving on sidewalks and then honking at me when I get in their way, like I am the one in the wrong place. I am not sure what people want me to do in these situations. Am I supposed to go into the street? I generally just ignore them and stand in their way, because it’s a fucking sidewalk.

35. Inconsistent bureaucratic bullshit. My visa says it’s valid for one year, but also says that I can only stay for 30 days. My roommate and another American girl out here got the problem solved relatively quickly by getting a letter from the American Embassy and American Councils (respectively), going to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and resubmitting their passports. Figuring this was a good idea, I also obtained a letter from the American Embassy, the exact same letter my roommate got (with my name replacing her name), only to be DENIED a visa because I didn’t have the proper documents. WTF?!

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

So you might be sort of astounded by how fucking insane a strategy that is, but wait! there’s more!

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

It worked! Can you fucking believe it? But remember, Impeachment is off the table as unilaterally decided by Nancy Pelosi. Even Mecha-Abe Lincoln is surprised:

This entire article is full of keepers, check it out
:::: White House via NYTimes ::::

Okay, UCSC is being really sketchy and incompetent about expanding campus. They created something called the Long Range Development Plan which is poorly conceived and probably illegal. Part of it involves cutting funding to liberal arts, increasing class sizes and increasing funding for the sciences. Many students are justifiably unhappy about this and decided to set up a tree sit in a grove of gigantic redwoods that is going to become a biomedical center. It was successful (to some extent) the trees haven’t been cut down and campus is in a general uproar about the stupidity of the plans. It’s created a flood of student activism. Something happened with a group of hooded intruders breaking into a professors house, after that accounts differ heavily. see the following:

The Campus Provost sent out the following response:

The Media Director of the Tree Sit responded:

:: via AP ::

An undisclosed female associated quipped: “Jesus Christ, I hope there’s some goddamn viagra in there.”

One of the key reasons that I’ve become so disenchanted with studying economics in school is that it’s simply not true. The most frustrating part is that I have to regurgitate inaccurate theories despite the fact that they are obviously and demonstrably wrong. This is only one of a vast majority of *countless* examples where World Bank and IMF policy have actually made poor countries worse off. Economics is little more than extremist free market fundamentalism thinly disguised as academically verified truth.

The whole article is pretty short but definitely instructive in a broader context. Subsidies, when not horribly corrupt, are extremely effective.

::Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts via the NYTimes ::

http://mobile.paypal.com

should obviously be

http://m.paypal.com

if ur on a fone, xtra lettrs suk, duh.

If you ever surf around on the “blogosphere” or the “blagosphere” or whatever the kids are calling it these days you’ll notice that nothing ever blows up from a myspace blog. I’m not familiar with someone posting something so trenchantly insightful or fall off your keyboard hilarious on a myspace blog that it’s gotten 10s of thousands of incoming links in 48 hours. I’ve never seen slashdot, digg, or reddit link to myspace.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, it seems like at least a few of the millions of myspace blogs should be saying something diggworthy. The first thing that comes to mind is that the highly personalized nature of blog posts has a limited appeal to any sort of greater audience (ie omg drama with the bf!!). That doesn’t really fly though because LiveJournal is also personalized but there are still fairly common blog explosions on the major aggregators. Given that Myspace has the largest userbase of any of the social networking sites (it’s the #5 most accessed english website on the internet according to alexa as of this writing) I have a hard time believing that myspacers aren’t writing brilliant and incisive blog posts about the state of the world. As the tagline of technorati says “70 Million blogs out there…some of them have to be good.” A view of technorati’s top 100 blogs shows that a few are hosted in blogger, typepad and wordpress the rest have dedicated domains but not a single one is hosted on myspace.

Closer inspection of my own blog on myspace may reveal the reason why. If you start at my myspace profile(myspace.com/titaniumdreads) and click on [view all blog entries] your taken to my blog page. the nonsensically long uri is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID
=10085330&MyToken=5acd4cbd-b0f5-46e3-96bc-03d97574275cML

I did some logical inference hacking and discovered that I could get to the same page by going to
http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads. However, there is no indication anywhere on the page that it can be accessed with a simplified uri. In fact there isn’t even a permalink the permalink is disguised as a link in the time I made the post.

The permalink is the mainstay of the blogger. If you expect to have people link to your posts you have to have a clear and concise uri. the permalink for my last entry is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID


676-A9DD4FCF97E8C98552665480 =10085330&blogID=231822843&Mytoken=DF89AAC4-40C9-4

There is no fucking way that someone could type that. I believe that myspace is losing millions of dollars because they haven’t programmed their namespaces properly. If you could access my myspace blog through http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads/?p=162 I might not have gone to the trouble to set up this website. Something this simple would be easy to forward around in email and on comments to other users. If you think that this isn’t a big deal you’re wrong. The weblogs inc network was the first to make over a million dollars in advertising with only a handful of blogs, myspace has at least 200 million users growing at a rate of 230,000 per fucking day (although most of those are probably like my friend ruthie). The creators of myspace sold it for 327 million dollars. Not long afterwards google paid 900 million for exclusive search rights. Myspace is currently working on expanding into the chinese market. this minor usability error is costing myspace hundreds of millions of dollars.

To me there’s a bigger issue here. AJ Liebling said that
Freedom of the Presses is for those that own one.” This minor programming error is holding back public discourse in a very significant way. The internet is destroying television and newspapers because *anyone* can have a voice not just the media monopolies that thrive on a cheap political system dominated by sound bites, fear-mongering, emotional appeals, and ad hominem attacks.

Myspace has the shittiest user interface but is the most popular social networking site because it gives users the freedom to create their own pages (myspace). Yet they’ve totally missed that most basic of points with their blogs. Give users the basic uri’s and the ability to embed html in blogs and myspace could make billions while invigorating the public sphere.

First off, if you haven’t been living under a tectonic plate bees are dying en mass and anyone who eats pollinated food is going to be totally fubar’d. Interesting development though…Organic Bee colonies are doing just fine.

and

via Information liberation

also, this came in via email, it’s friday, everybody loves to see things get totally smashed.

This part of the article has spawned a new category, Shitty Journalism Award.

WHAT THE FUCK?!??! Shooting eachother while murdering someones great grandmother raises “serious questions” about following the proper fucking procedure?? Is there something in the goddamn manual about protocol for planting drugs?

Shitty Journalism Award just doesn’t do this justice, anyone out there have some ideas?

::: Better Article via Marijuana Policy Project :::