Bringing the Pigs to Slaughter (Or Why Facebook Will Never Get a Dislike Button So STFU Already)

So yesterday I posted an article about how Mark Zuckerberg is going around killing all the meat he eats this year and apparently killed a bison. If you didn’t read it, well here. Now at first I was thinking, this scrawny ass guy couldn’t kill a gold fish, but the more I thought about it this guy has been slaughtering things for year. The Facebook changes implemented last week were designed with the intended goal and lengthening the time people stay on the site. Anyone else notice that they also cut email notifications meaning you need to go to the site more to check what people said. Now if this is news to you, well sorry, but all these changes are deigned to increase the number of ads that Facebook users click on. I’m thinking next month they might just go to web1.0 glitter banners about penis enhancement. Which then brings me to the like/dislike button. We are never going to get it because having a dislike button would allow people to dislike companies directly. Who is going to pay Facebook to advertise knowing that people can just click dislike, it’s a bad business image. So we are not getting a dislike button EVER just shut up about it. We are little pigs sitting around the barn waiting to be slaughtered. Facebook also has the better upper hand because even if we know all of this we still will stay in the barn. People proved that last week when everyone laughed at the suggestion of switching to Google +. Now Google is doing the exact same thing, but Google has so much of your information already and make money through advertisements more than just social media. Hell the only ads I’m seeing on my Google + anymore are for Google product (Chrome Store, Google Offers, etc.). So run around piggies, I smell a Jungle –esk book in the works about the vile disgusting world of social media.   

What Can Little Boys Accomplish When Not Distracted by Little Girls?

*****WARNING: BLOG MAY CONTAIN COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF SEXISM****

If I were to ask what the biggest threat to American wellbeing is, I hope at least a few of you would immediately say China. It was not until recently that I began to truly realize how imminent the issue was at hand. I thought it would be something I would need to concern myself with before the age of 40. Now it seems I might not see 30 before shit hits the fan.

Where to start? I guess the biggest issue right now is the girth of Chinese consumerism. Every preservationist, tree hugging, non-bathing hippies that thought the Suburbian  mother loved the SUV, they shouldn’t go to China. Recent data has shown that SUV sales topped 1 million in the last year. Now SUVs still only make up 10% of the Chinese auto market, relative to 25% the US auto market, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks easily right. This is also a welcome change then reports from back in 2008 and 2009 about the Chinese addiction to SUVs, in which rural consumers would fill up the SUV in town, drive it until it ran out of fuel, and then abandon the vehicle in a ditch on the side of the road. Talk about road trash!

This isn’t to say that China is all about gas guzzling consumption though. No the Chinese want to have their cake and eat it too, even if that means losing government money. Any American environmentalist that still thinks that the US can enter the solar panel market and gain at least a fighting chance at a competitive edge needs to go take an Intro to Trade Theory course, cause China FUCKED US IN THE ASS ON THIS ONE. (They could have at least wine and dined us, or offered a cigarette after). The “Communist” Chinese government has thrown money at Chinese solar panel companies in recent years allowing these companies to play with free money in developing solar panels, and then dump these panels in the international market at below cost. The only option we have is to adopt a protectionist strategy dealing with solar panels, but that insures that we stand no chance of gaining international leverage with is need for long term production. So guys we kind of screwed the pooch on solar. Anyone have another idea? Nuclear? Hydrogen? Fission? Hamster power?

So back to the title of the article (this is where the sexism could rear its ugly head). What can little boys accomplish without being distracted by little girls? Well, they can screw over a world power for one. If you want to know why that Asian guy in your science class is so much better  at math then you are, it’s because in Communist China you no get pussy. China has somewhere around a 3:1 boy to girl ratio, hell former all girls colleges have better gender ratios. Without the distraction of women, and hell even treating their women as lower being (shut up we don’t have it that bad in the US) you can accomplish other things like getting good at math. So when you have a huge male population with no women it turns into a damn 4Chan forum where each individual needs to play the MY PENIS IS BIGGER contest. How do the Chinese play this? Drive SUVs and screw over the economic efficiency of world super powers. This won’t get them any women, but they do get that warm fuzzy feeling inside. That’s all that matters right?

Dear Mr. President,

Go cut up some carrots. Hell, go get some broccoli, green beans, and cauliflower too if you fancy them because this just does not steam my carrots. No, this is a whole steaming vegetable medley. President Barack Obama has finally done it, he managed to get me cussing up a storm before I even got my morning shower. No, he did not ban off-shore drilling again. No, he did not withdraw all the troops we have overseas. No, he did not doing something that would have Rush Limbaugh’s tighty-whities in a bunch. In fact he did nothing that would even remotely piss off the Republican party. So now most people (those of you who were lucky to read my early more Facebook update excluded) are wondering what on Earth one of Richard “Crazy Right Wing Fanatic” Bowers’ least favorite people did if the entire Republican party isn’t up in arms with me against this.

Barack Obama has told the EPA that their new ambient ozone standards are too strict, and “need to be ‘reconsidered’.”

But Richard wait. You have written angry tirade after angry tirade about how the EPA needs to be restructured, redesigned, or dismantled entirely”. Why on Earth would Obama pretty much agreeing with you be something that “steams your carrots”?

Every damn polling agency, every damn day seem to come out with some new poll that put Obama’s performance rating lower and lower. I think that last one had something like Gaddafi had the margin of error above Obama in job performance. About the only people Obama still had were environmentalists and those welfare recipients that still think Obama is going to pay their mortgage and give them some of that “Obama stash” money. So here comes big powerful Obama, taking one look at the EPA proposed standards, and going “FUCK THIS SHIT” this might kill two whole jobs somewhere, or negatively affect the economy. Yes Mr. President, it’s THIS RIGHT HERE that is going to kill the economy once and for all. No, the past three years of you sitting around blaming everyone else while your wife goes to France to shop and stops in London on her way home for fish and chips that was keeping the economy afloat. No the fact that Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still run by the government and have not been held accountable for any part of the crisis. No, it’s the EPA doing its damn job by proposing guidelines that lay out standards with the best possible science available that will push the economy to the point where you can’t blame Bush, or Katrina, or earthquakes, or MY LITTLE FUCKING PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC for the economy being shit.

When you build a campaign that has never ended, and you talk about how important the environment is putting large sums of money into solar panel companies that go bankrupt a year later and then you go actually right now I do not want these new guidelines, guess what? SUCK IT THE FUCK UP! Being the president of (formerly) the most powerful country on the face of the damn planet, hell (as far as scientifically we know) the damn universe is hard. If you are not up for the job step down, let a real man (or woman) do the damn job and you can go make money writing books that idiots will read and your annoying ass wife can take the place of another annoying ass bitch, Oprah, and then you all can live whatever expensive lifestyle not on the tax payer dollar. The government has a lot of agencies and none of their agendas and incentives really line up, but they all have guidelines and doctrines which guide what the can and cannot do and how they do these things. Just because you do not like something, does not mean that you can just say no to this. The Clean Air Act of 1970 (the guiding document for these ozone standards) has been upheld by the courts unanimously. Scalia even agreed. So do not send Cass Sunstien to give EPA Administrator Jackson some bullshit ultimatum to “reconsider” the standards. You are pretty much telling her to do what they hell you want or resign, and if she disobeys the order you’ll remove her. She did her job and proposed the standard with the best possible science regardless of economic considerations. Now do your job to figure out how to make these new standards work into your new image of the world that you are going to give us in a speech tonight, that I’m still pretty sure you will be working on until the actual speech. Please be on time tonight Mr. President, tardiness will only be another mark against you. Even if Administrator Jackson can be so easily removed, I hope which ever candidate from whichever party enjoys the sweet taste of crushing you in the 2012 election, and when that time comes Mr. President don’t cry on camera, it’s really unbecoming. 

Are Angry Birds Holding Us Back?

            So I decided to clean out my Android this morning. Among the various broken/no longer supported apps I removed, I also removed numerous game apps for one reason or another. This got me to thinking, how much are we really using the technology that we all carry around in our pocket. We literally have the entire knowledge of the internet just a few finger swipes away, but we still sit around and argue who is right when all it takes is a quit check of the ye olde worldwide web. I’m going to hold back on letting this falling into a McLuhanian discussion about the medium being the message and that the technology is an extension of our senses. The argument has been made, it works on a few levels, but honestly looking the technology can be so much more, namely augmented reality integration.

            Ok, I’ll give the nay-sayers time to run and hide under the proverbial rock of yester-year. Augmented reality always seems to get at least one person in a crowd panicking about either crazed robot overlord or surrogate bodies that will leave the population wired only to technology and not to people (there is a move about this and I do not feel like searching IMDB for it right now). At the bottom of this rant I’ve attached two links to other blogs that give a rough idea of some concepts that really strike at the idea of augmented reality. The first deals with integration of visual technology into current smart-phone style tech, creating things like virtual grocery stores anywhere allowing application users to select and purchase groceries and merely pick them up at the actual venue at a later time (think Minority Report). The second on deals with using smart phones in museums and other educational institutions to put the information direct in the user’s hand rather than in pithy wall mounted boards, which are very limited in the information they can provide (think of it as a museums integrated with Wikipedia). Thoughts?

http://bigthink.com/ideas/39800

http://bigthink.com/ideas/39993

Hurricane Irene Really STEAMSMYCARROTS

So as if our earthquake was not enough this week here comes big bad Irene. Now one would think that at this time in history Maryland would be no stranger to hurricanes. One would also think that people would have a plan if they live in a flood prone area, but wait no cause those people that live in flood prone areas are still running around on television panicking because they lack flood insurance. Cause you know Isabelle taught us nothing, and water front property in Maryland is low income housing so they can’t afford it right?

Then we have these mandatory evacuations up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including parts of New York City and Ocean City. These should have been expected, and the fact that the government needs to tell people to GTFO of the way of a hurricane still baffles me. Ok, yeah your stuff might get wet. Pack up valuable shit, throw it in your car, GTFO, and then let the flood insurance take care of the rest. Oh wait, people don’t get flood insurance, until after the fact, a lot like how people this week learned that home owner’s insurance doesn’t cover earthquakes either (READ YOUR DAMN POLICIES PEOPLE). So now we have people running around buying earthquake insurance and then Monday people will be calling in to buy flood insurance (hmmm might become an insurance broker over the weekend). Anyone with any kind of sense should know to get the hell out of the hurricane area, except for the mass media (which really backs up my claims that journalists are the dumbest people on the planet). How they can talk about how dangerous and stupid the people that stay in the hurricane’s path are, but then they go to some ass-wipe from The Weather Channel standing on a beach somewhere getting blown over and smashed by waves. Following that clip they tend to show a Home Depot or Lowes which I swear is stock footage of people loading up on plywood, batteries, and generators. Do people in Florida buy a new generator every damn hurricane, they know those aren’t disposable and can be reused again the next hurricane. Batteries are another thing, how many damn batteries do you need, it’s a hurricane lasting 12 hours max. Ok so power is out for three days, you don’t need a lifetime supply of batteries. Did you lose the last life time supply you bought last hurricane? It’s like people and show shovels, I honestly think people throw out their snow shovels after every snow storm (like they go bad or something).

Eggs and milk I’ll never understand either. Now I might be a city-type, but I remember milk and eggs going bad if they don’t have refrigeration, right? So wait we are getting disposable generators and life time supplies of batteries, but then we stock our fridge with eggs and milk that we about kill each other over at the store. Do people not keep like enough food in their homes for three days? ITS GONNA BE A 12 HOUR STORM PEOPLE.

So people, CALM THE FUCK DOWN. If you live in a flood prone area GTFO to higher ground. Go get some nice canned goods (you should have some anyway), and keep a nice book handy just in case. And serious CALM THE FUCK DOWN.