BunkBlog

One would expect a show on Cartoon Network that airs at 4pm to be directed at kids.  I’m pretty sure that “Dude What Would Happen?” is aimed at stoners.  Duuuude.

You almost have to feel sorry for the Republican party this year. Their tactics of screaming loudly, encouraging their followers to scream incoherently, and basically kicking and yelling “no!” have failed to prevent the (watered down) health care reform bill from passing. Already, they plan to introduce legislation to repeal it. Since they could never produce more than a dozen pages of counterproposal, I suppose a “make it go away” bill is about the right length for their proven abilities.

One thing that seems to be a truism in American politics is that everyone is against government spending except when it is something they want.  Also, every new entitlement becomes an entrenched permanent benefit as soon as it becomes law.  Look at the fact that we still have tobacco farming subsidies, even while we do our darnedest to make tobacco usage less popular than a vampiric leper zombie.

Now that the health care reform bill has become law, the GOP is in the unenviable position of trying to reduce benefits and remove people’s health insurance. It’s easy to rant against the evils of socialism, all while ignoring that many of our institutions are socialized (police, fire, road work, military, yada yada). It’s a lot harder to tell people that, for their own good, you’re going to make it okay for insurance companies to more easily deny coverage to their sick mother. Not to mention, the CBO came out with their estimate that this bill will reduce the deficit, which makes the “it costs too much” rhetoric feel a little hokey.

Some of the provisions of the health care reform bill that become effective this year:

• Insurance companies can’t drop your coverage if you become sick while insured
• Parents can insure adult children up to 26 years old
• The Medicare “donut hole” will get a rebate, eventually becoming a solid bismarck-like holeless mass
• Children will not be barred for pre-existing conditions
• Lifetime coverage limits will be gone
• Small businesses will get a tax credit to help provide health insurance for their employees

Of course, John Boehner is upset that one other provision goes into effect this year: tanning beds get a 10% additional tax.  I love that taxes are seemingly randomly associated with anything they are meant to assist, but tanning salons? Weird.

So the GOP is going to be campaigning this year to repeal this law. They will be out there telling their constituents and voters that they want senior citizens to pay $250 more for their medication, that they want to deprive small businesses of a tax credit, that they want to deny coverage to little Jimmy with leukemia… yeah, that’ll work.

Some car dealers have installed “black boxes” in their new cars, which have the ability to shut off your car remotely, or honk the horn, when you’re late with a payment. What could possibly go wrong with that system?

I know that things which appear to be clusters are merely random stastical fluctuations, but if another Canadian child actor from the 80s dies this month, it’ll be freaky.

Corey Haim, 38. At least the vampires didn’t get him.

Pringles has issued a recall on Cheeseburger and Taco Night chips, due to salmonella concerns.  Of course, if you eat either of those two flavors, your stomach is probably made of cast iron anyway.  Ew.

Once again, the War on (some) Drugs has been made to look stupid and petty by its very nature. This time around, a SWAT team busted into a family’s house, shot their two dogs (one of them a very threatening Corgi), arrested the father and traumatized a child. And the big bad druggies they busted? Oh, they were caught with what the police describe as a “small amount” of marijuana. The parents have been charged with possession and with child endangerment. The possession charge is a misdemeanor.

Just to be perfectly clear here – the police believe that possessing a small amount of marijuana is child endangerment, but shooting two family pets in front of that same child is perfectly reasonable behavior.

Wow, that’s some incredible Facebook post…

see more funny facebook stuff!

Any of my contacts not from California – have you ever heard of a Pee Chee?

After many years of being mocked by anyone with a modicum of understanding in medicine or science or reproducible results, homeopathy has been slammed by an actual governmental study in the UK.  I particularly like the line refuting the necessity to fund “traditional” medicine: “Witchcraft is traditional, so does that mean the MHRA should endorse that too?”

I understand supply and demand, and what the market will bear, blah blah blah, but this is entertaining.

Yesterday, Newegg began selling a new gaming laptop, the Asus G73. When Gizmodo and other sites posted it at 8am or so with a claimed price of $1430, the price was $1449 at Newegg. Later in the morning, the sites that blogged about it mentioned the price as $1499.  When I got home, I showed it to my wife, explaining that it was nigh impossible to build a gaming desktop with the same specs for less than the $1500 they were asking. But, when I pulled up the listing, it was $1599.  This morning, just out of curiousity, I looked again – $1549.

There can’t be this much demand and supply change in one 24 hour period, can there? This is like watching Apple stock whenever Steve Jobs speaks.

Apparently the opening speaker of the Tea Party Convention is openly courting racists. Tom Tancredo, who is cuckoo for illegal aliens, started off the proceedings by claiming that President Obama was only elected because people who can’t say “vote” in English elected him. Wow, we must have an awful lot of non-English speakers in the USA, to have over 50% of the vote like that. And then he appeals to people to take back America from “them” – whoever they might be.

I find it interesting that all of Tancredo’s grandparents were immigrants (legal presumably) and yet he’s still so unabashedly xenophobic in his rhetoric. Just for full disclosure, my father’s family immigrated to this continent before the USA was founded (by over a century), and I somehow was capable of pronouncing the word “vote” and casting it for Obama.

Oh, and real socialists most assuredly do not consider this president one of them. At this point, many liberals are saying he’s not even one of them.

We watched Micheal Buble on SNL this weekend, and it’s the first time I’d ever heard him.  Considering that he’s sold millions of records and continues to be in the top 20 Billboard album chart, you’d think we’d have heard him before.  And now that we have, I have to say… I don’t get it. Is “lounge singer” a new hotness? This guy makes Bryan Adams look like he’s got a lot of soul.  To be fair, unlike some singers who perform on SNL, at least he did stay on key. So there’s that.  Zzzzzz….

A year after I posted the “with and without stimulus” economist projection, it’s interesting to see how things have actually panned out.

What expert economists said they expected:

What actually happened:

You can see that the projection was that we’d peak at around 8% unemployment, with the stimulus that was proposed. A much smaller stimulus was put into place, and it peaked about 10% instead. But, the projections also said we’d see see a plateau and reduction in unemployment right around the beginning of 2010, and we did. So, it’s been a bit worse than projected, but it’s turning around right on schedule. Of course, it’s still too early to see if this plateau is done and we’re actually recovering, or if we’re just going to plateau until the end of 2010, which would be what was projected to happen without any government intervention. That would suck.

Fans of the unfortunately-named iPad got another piece of bad news today: Netflix won’t be on it.

So, not only can’t you get any Flash-based web sites (um, most streaming video including Hulu), you also can’t get Netflix (the biggest streaming video supplier).  I know Apple really likes having their own little walled garden, but this is getting silly.

Apple finally announced their much-anticipated tablet computer yesterday, and I still can’t quite figure out what the market is for this device. I’ve spent many hours working on various small computing platforms, and many more hours ruminating over what usage model the tablet computer world is looking for.

I’m one of those strange people who don’t have a cell phone.  It’s not that I don’t see how convenient they could be. I just don’t have a reason to own one. I can’t take it to work (security-crazed high-tech area that forbids almost every piece of 21st-century personal technology), my commute is less than 15 minutes, and I don’t really spend much time on the phone to begin with. Not to mention, cell reception in this town, based on calls I’ve experienced, is sucky at best.

But, even without a cell phone, I’ve been using lots of small computing devices. I had a Palm III, a Sony Clie, and I currently have a Nokia N770.  My beautiful bride has a netbook (also known as the Netflixbook).  I also have my home desktop computer and my homebrew DVR, for non-portable computing devices.  I’ve owned a computer since 1980, and I think I understand how people use them and for what purposes.  But I’m absolutely mystified by where a mass market for a tablet is, at least for something that costs more than $200. I didn’t even buy the N770 until it was clearanced for under 150, because I couldn’t justify the expense of a $300 portable to myself.

Let’s see what the iPad brings, compared to Kat’s netbook (an Asus Eee 1000HE):

• The iPad has wifi 802.11n.  So does the Eee.
• The iPad has a 9.7″ screen, at 1024×768. The Eee is 10″ and 1024×600.
• The iPad has 16-64 GB of solid-state storage. The Eee has 160 GB of hard drive space.
• The iPad weighs 1.6 pounds; the Eee is 3 pounds.
• The iPad runs its own special version of the iPod OS, and only works with programs from the App store (or jailbroken eventually I’m sure). The Eee runs Windows XP, with all that it implies.
• The iPad has 10 hours of hyped battery life. The Eee has 9 hours of hyped battery life. The realities are always different from the marketing, but usually assume 70% of hype for real life.
• The iPad has no keyboard. Eee – keyboard.
• The iPad has available 3G data for an extra $130 and monthly fees. Eee has similar capabilies available (we don’t use 3G any more than we use voice cellular service).
• The iPad will display multimedia and ePub books, but not Flash apps. Eee can do all that AND Flash.
• The iPad has no camera. Eee has a webcam.
• The iPad has no USB ports. Eee has three.
• The iPad has no VGA connector nor Ethernet nor any other standard ports. Eee – yep, got ’em.
• The iPad can’t multitask with non-Apple applications. Eee – yay for multitasking.
• The iPad costs $500 for 16gb and no 3G, up to $830 for 64gb and 3G.  The Eee cost under $350.

I’m sorry. I don’t know who wants these besides fanboys. It runs the same OS as the iPhone, but doesn’t have a camera or the ability to make voice calls. It costs more than an iPod Touch or a netbook, but the only thing it seems to bring to the table is a big screen for your iPod. The reason tablet PCs haven’t taken off, even though Microsoft and others have been trying for ten years, is because they are a solution to a problem very few people have.  For the “vertical market” segment, tablets are big business; that market itself isn’t all that large, but it’s a niche and it can be exploited by standard Windows or custom Linux machines. It isn’t likely to be broken into by a giant iPod, and it certainly seems the iPad isn’t aimed at professional markets but at consumers. Consumers with an extra 700 bucks for a device with a very constrained media-consumption experience. I’ve been amazed at a few things over the years, and if the first-generation iPad is a huge success for Apple, it’ll be another one of those things.

All that said, if someone comes out with a cheap handheld computer with keyboard an a real OS, I’m buying it.  Obviously, I’m not Apple’s market. But, who is?

Thank you, California, for finally diverting some of the “oh no they didn’t” attention from Texas. Menifee, a town in Riverside County, has decided to pull the Webster Collegiate Dictionary from their school library, because it has definitions of terms like “oral sex” and the poor children just can’t handle such things. Seriously, didn’t everyone flip through the dictionary looking for dirty words, just because you could? Our children are not so delicate and easily bruised, people!

Is Menifee in the 909?

Kat and I thought they should have tried to get some of these into the broadcast.

Conan O’Brien is right – the Tonight Show isn’t the Tonight Show if it’s actually tomorrow morning.

A student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee was walking home from work when four men pulled him into an alley and forced him to lie face-down with a gun to his neck. They took everything from his pockets, but when the gang leader looked in the victim’s wallet and saw an Army Reserve ID card, he told his accomplices to give him his stuff back. “The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me and he actually apologized,” the unidentified 21-year-old victim said. “The leader of the group actually walked back [and] gave me a quick fist bump.” Police note that 10 minutes later, the gang robbed another man, who had a Department of Corrections inmate ID in his wallet. They didn’t give him his wallet back.