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Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  A Word to the Resourceful

  Posted: January 17th, 2012, 12:39pm MST

  "Understanding all the implications--even the inconvenient implications--of what someone tells you is a subset of resourcefulness. It's conversational resourcefulness."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  Schlep Blindness

  Posted: January 15th, 2012, 12:39pm MST

  "Instead of asking 'what problem should I solve?' ask 'what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?'"
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  New York City gets a Software Engineering High School

  Posted: January 13th, 2012, 12:56pm MST

  This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.

  I’m on the board of advisors of the new school, which plans to accept ninth graders for fall of 2012. Here’s why I’m excited about this new school:

  1. It’s a “limited, unscreened” school.  That’s Board of Ed jargon. It means that any student who is interested can apply—their grades and attendence record are not taken into account in deciding whether or not to admit them, only their interest. I think this is the best thing about the school. A lot of kids are just not interested enough in other academic subjects to get good grades, but they would make great software engineers. A lot of immigrants (especially in New York) are not yet proficient enough in English to get good grades in all their subjects, but they’re going to make great software engineers, too. And in my humble opinion, a school that accepts a cross-section of students is bound to be more enriching than a school that only accepts academic superstars.

  2. OMG do we ever need more software engineers. The US post-secondary education system is massively failing us: it’s not producing even remotely enough programmers to meet the hiring needs of the technology industry. Not even remotely enough. Starting salaries for smart programmers from top schools are flirting with the $100,000 mark. Supply isn’t even close to meeting demand. This school is going to be pretty small (in the 400-500 student range) but the Board of Ed has promised that if it’s successful it’ll be used as a template for more schools or for special programs inside larger schools. I predict that they will be overwhelmed with applicants and this will be the most popular new school in New York City in years.

  3. And we need more diversity, too. One of the reasons the elite US colleges seem to turn out so few computer science majors every year is that they are only drawing from a narrow pool of mostly white and asian males. Minorities and women are embarrassingly under-represented. Hopefully an unscreened school in New York City can pump a lot more diversity into the pool.

  4. It’s not a vocational school. Unlike traditional vocational schools, this new school will have a rigorous academic component and will prepare students for college. But college is not for everyone—many of the best programmers I know were just not interested enough in a general four year degree and went straight into jobs programming.

  I’m pleased to be involved in this project, but it needs more help: they’re still looking for qualified computer science teachers and a principal. If you’re interested drop me an email and I’ll make sure it gets through to the right people.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  How Trello is different

  Posted: January 6th, 2012, 12:14pm MST

  Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.0 state.

  

  Trello is new kind of development project for Fog Creek. It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an “installed software” version of Trello. That allowed us to modernize many aspects of our development process; I am happy to announce that there is absolutely no Visual Basic code involved in any part of Trello. What’s next, flying cars?

  The biggest difference you’ll notice (compared to our previous products pitched solely at software developers) is that Trello is a totally horizontal product.

  Horizontal means that it can be used by people from all walks of life. Word processors and web browsers are horizontal. The software your dentist uses to torture you with drills is vertical.

  Vertical software is much easier to pull off and make money with, and it’s a good choice for your first startup. Here are two key reasons:

  • It’s easier to find customers. If you make dentist software, you know which conventions to go to and which magazines to advertise in. All you have to do is find dentists.
  • The margins are better. Your users are professionals at work and it makes sense for them to give you money if you can solve their problems.

  Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. It’s high risk, high reward: not suitable for a young bootstrapped startup, but not a bad idea for a second or third product from a mature and stable company like Fog Creek.

  Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991. (Yes, I know you were not born yet, but I assure you that computers had been invented. Just hop up here on my knee and shut up.)

  Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like “if interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?” For example.

  Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel.

  We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the “number of injuries this week” spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility.

  Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed ten facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries).

  He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a three-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job.

  Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

  (Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called “derivatives.” They used Excel to maximize the bankers’ bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year. Something about black swans. Probably just a floating point rounding error.)

  What was I talking about? Oh yeah... most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

  Bing! A light went off in my head.

  The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

  Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

  Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

  PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images. 

  Some people saw Trello and said, “oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.

  There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasn’t been a great “list-of-list” app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).

  Once you get into Trello, you’ll use it for everything. I use about thirty Trello boards regularly, and I use them with everyone in my life, from the APs (Aged Parents), with whom I plan vacations, with every team at work, and just about every project I’m involved in.

  So, ok, that was the first big difference with Trello: horizonal, not vertical. But there are a bunch of other differences:

  It’s delivered continuously. Rather than having major and minor releases, we pretty much just continuously push out new features from development to customers. A feature that you built and tested, but didn’t deliver yet because you’re waiting for the next major release, becomes inventory. Inventory is dead weight: money you spent that’s just wasting away without earning you anything. Sure, 100 years ago, we had these things called “CD-ROMs” and we shipped software that way, so there was an economic reason to bunch up features before we inflict ‘em on the world. But there’s no reason to work that way any more. You already knew that, of course. I’m just saying—I stopped using Visual Basic about five minutes ago. Brave New World.

  It’s not exhaustively tested before being released. We thought we could get away with this because Trello is free, so customers are more forgiving. But to tell the truth, the real reason we get away with it is because bugs are fixed in a matter of hours, not months, so the net number of “bugs experienced by the public” is low.

  We work in public. The rule on the Trello team is “default public.” We have a public Trello board that shows everything that we’re working on and where it’s up to. We use this to let customers vote and comment on their favorite features. By the way, while Trello was under development, it was secret. We had a lot of beta testers who gave us customer feedback so that the development team could use lean startup principles, but the nine months we spent building version 1.0 in secret gave us a significant lead in a competitive marketplace. But now that we’re shipping, there’s no reason not to talk about our plans.

  This is a “Get Big Fast” product, not a “Ben and Jerry’s”  product. See Strategy Letter I. The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated. For example:

  Trello is free. The friction caused by charging for a product is the biggest impediment to massive growth. In the long run, we think it’s much easier to figure out how to extract a small amount of money out of a large number of users than to extract a large amount of money out of a small number of users. Once you have 100 million users, it’s easy to figure out which of those users are getting the most value out of the product you built. The ones who are getting the most value will be happy to pay you. The others don’t cost much to support.

  The API and plug-in architectures are the highest priority. Another way of putting that is:  never build anything in-house if you can expose a basic API and get those high-value users (the ones who are getting the most value out of the platform) to build it for you. On the Trello team, any feature that can be provided by a plug-in must be provided by a plug-in.

  (The API is currently in very rudimentary form. You can already use it to do very interesting things. It is under rapid development.)

  We use cutting edge technology. Often, this means we get cut fingers. Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node. But at least they’re having fun. And in today’s tight job market, great programmers have a lot of sway on what they’re going to be working on. If you can give them an exciting product that will touch millions of people, and let them dig deep into TCP-IP internals while they try to figure out why simple things aren’t working, they’ll have fun and they’ll love their jobs. Besides, we’re creating a product that we’ll be working on for the next ten years. Technology that’s merely “state of the art” today is going to be old and creaky in five years. We tried to go a little bit beyond “state of the art.” It’s a calculated risk.

  None of this is very radical. TL;DR: Fog Creek Software develops an internet product using techniques that every Y-combinator startup has been using since spez was sleeping with his laptop so he could reboot Reddit when Lisp crashed in the middle of the night. If you haven’t tried Trello yet, try it, then tell me on twitter if it worked.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Why Startup Hubs Work

  Posted: November 6th, 2011, 12:39pm MST

  "The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It's that death is the default for startups, and most towns don't save them."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Should you launch at a conference?

  Posted: September 15th, 2011, 9:28pm MDT

  Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They’re all pretty similar).

  This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello, and both times, it was totally worth it.

  First, a little background. There are three popular conferences where you can launch new products: Launch, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Demo. They all work the same way:

  • You apply. If you have a half-decent product that is genuinely new, you’re likely to get a spot. That said, hundreds of companies apply for these conferences with unbearably awful products, so there’s always a risk that you’ll get lost in the noise.
    
  • If you get in, you will have a chance to give a demo on stage for exactly six minutes. There will be some celebrity judges who will give you a few sentences of honest feedback about your startup. (Here’s how our demo went down).
    
  • Even if you don’t get a slot presenting, you may have a chance to set up at a little table in the conference area where you can show off your product to passers-by.
    
  • The official promise is that you’ll get exposure to a lot of journalists and VCs, and this will launch your startup on the way to huge success. The truth is, well, complicated, but I’ll get into that in a minute.
    
  • At the end there is a “winner.” For example at Disrupt the winner (chosen by a panel of utterly uncorruptable, gazillionaire judges) receives a check for $50,000. There are between 30 and 50 startups presenting at each conference, and the politics behind who “wins” are murky enough that you should basically assume that the chance of winning is zero. There’s always going to be a “Netflix for Cabbage” or a “Second Life for Facebook” that the judges fall in love with. So the benefits of winning, which is vanishingly unlikely, should never factor into your decision as to whether to go or not.

  So, are these conferences worth it?

  Let’s look, individually, at the two big promises of the conferences: exposure to VCs and exposure to the press.

  Are VCs at these conferences? Absolutely. Does going to one of these conferences get you funded? It’s complicated.

  • If you have a brilliant product, a great team, and you’re eminently fundable, but you don’t know any VCs yet, and you launch at one of these conferences, you will meet a bunch of VCs—even some top notch ones—and the conference may actually get you funded. At the last TechCrunch Disrupt, the finalist judging panel consisted of some of the best investors in Silicon Valley. If you made it to the finals, these folks now know who you are and what your product does, and if your company is fundable, they’ll all take your call.
    
  • That said, if there’s some reason your product is not fundable, all the conferences in the world can’t help you. Yeah, you may have a chance to present to a bunch of unknown VCs wandering around looking for investment ideas, but most of them won’t actually invest in you and those that will may be more trouble than they’re worth.

  I’ve been tossing around the word fundable without defining it. Every entrepreneur thinks their “Mint.com for Laundry Tickets” is the most fundable idea ever, and all VCs should be dying to invest, if they would only sit still for the brief 62 minute demo!

  No. Technically, whether you’re fundable has to do with things like traction, the total size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, whether you build moats (?), and a bunch of other gibberish that VCs like to tell themselves in their heads so that they don’t think they’re just spinning bottles.

  But it’s too hard for an entrepreneur to evaluate their own fundability. So here’s a working definition of fundable which is all that matters for you as an entrepreneur:

  • If you’re knocking on VC’s doors and they all seem to be opening, you’re fundable. If you keep getting more meetings, more introductions, and good vibes, keep going. You’ll get funded.
    
  • If you’re knocking on VC’s doors and they all seem to be closed, you’re not fundable. These days most VCs will just tell you why. If you can’t get a second meeting with anyone, just stop. You’re beautiful, you’re smart, and you’re going to change the world, but you happen to be non-fundable, so just stop. Either change the company or the product, or find a way to make your product popular and successful without investors. 

  So, that said, if you don’t know any VCs and think you might have a fundable company, a conference like Launch or Disrupt will get you your first intros.

  Now, on to the other promise: Press and publicity.

  It is possible, nay, common, to launch at one of these conferences and get NO press whatsoever. Zero. Nada. At Disrupt you’re guaranteed at least one mention in TechCrunch, but you’ll soon discover that TechCrunch’s tech-industry insiders may not really be the audience you need.

  Yes, there are a lot of journalists at these conferences. Disrupt probably had about 200. When we launched Trello this week, you know how much press we got?

  Four stories.

  And every one of those stories came because I knew the reporter and emailed them before we launched, and pre-briefed them on our product under embargo.

  Yep. There was not a single reporter, from the 200 that were registered, at Disrupt who saw our presentation and said, “Oh cool, I’m going to write about that.”

  You know why? Because there were dozens of companies launching in two days, and reporters usually file one or two stories a day, so they all focus on one or two companies they find interesting (and at this last conference, they mostly wanted to talk about Arringtongate).

  That said, you can get exactly the burst of publicity you need from launching at one of these conferences, if you do it right. You have to:

  • Prebrief friendly media (under embargo)
  • Get the bloggers in your area to write about you
  • Have a sensational demo that gets retweeted
  • And do this all at exactly the same moment when it’s newsworthy.

  We did all that and leveraged 6 minutes of fame into 130,000 eyeballs.

  

  The thing entrepreneurs often forget about news media: It’s supposed to be news. They want new things. As a startup, you are only going to have two or three new things that happen, ever:

  1. Launching your product
  2. Raising money from a VC
  3. Reporting insane traffic or revenue (optional)

  That’s it. Those are your chances to get news. Under no circumstances can you expect to be covered because you take a walk in the woods with potential employees... you’re not Mark Zuckerberg. (Unless you are, in which case, Hi Mark!) You’re not getting font changes on the home page covered, unless you used to work for Mark Zuckerberg.

  In short, you only have two or at most three chances to got coverage unless there’s Mark Zuckerberg involvement.

  Well, wait, there’s one more way. If you are very lucky, you will have some famous people involved in your company, and some of them will have tawdry affairs with prostitutes that are captured on video. That will get you a fourth story. Otherwise, you’re not news. Get over it.

  Also important: the news cycle is 12 hours, tops. If you call journalists the day after you release your product, it’s not news. They won’t care. You have to call them two days before you launch, tell them you’re going to launch in two days, and offer to pre-brief them, so that they can run their story when it’s actually newsworthy. The bottom line is that you have to get all your coverage within a period of a few hours which means you have to plan ahead and work hard. This is not the time for incrementalism. Don’t worry about DDOSing your own server. There’s no choice: you can’t spread out the newsworthiness of your launch.

  Because there are so few opportunities for a startup to get press, you have to make the most out of each one. That’s why I am still a big believer in “the big launch” even though the Lean Startup ethic today is all about trickling things out to your users bit by bit and pivoting a million times.

  Here’s the story of Trello. We wrote the first line of code last January. By the time we hit 700 lines of code, the product was useful, and we immediately started dogfooding it in-house. We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.

  We didn’t do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched.

  I couldn’t stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I don’t want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.

  Still, I do, firmly, believe that a completely new product has to go through what Steve Blank calls customer development to find “product/customer fit.” I.e., you have to get real people really using your product and you have to watch them and listen to them and make changes to make your product better, and you have to do this very, very early.

  How did we reconcile this? Through the old fashioned method of a closed beta. We got a hundred of our best friends to use Trello and tell us what they thought while we iterated and polished and improved.

  So the thing we launched, nine-month-old Trello, is really kind of slick. And we got a little initial bit of publicity for it, but then that publicity became massively viral. So those four news stories caused a few people to check out the product, and they liked it, because it was AWESOME NINE-MONTH-OLD TRELLO, and they wrote amazingly nice tweets. Thousands of amazingly nice tweets.

  So, the story so far: if your product is really good, launching at one of these conferences is an incredible catalyst. If your product is “meh,” it won’t help.

  But wait—there’s one important, bonus reason to launch at a conference, and it’s a good enough reason to do it even if you don’t need the publicity or the VC at all.

  It’s all about your team.

  When you launch at a conference, you have an incredible hard deadline. This deadline forces you to ship. It forces you to make decisions about what has to be in version 1.0. It's actually an incredible team-building exercise to work your butt off, together, for the weeks leading up to the conference.

  The morale boost you’ll get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We *made* something. People used it. It matters.

  It's like sex, with clothes on.

  The members of our team who came out to San Francisco for Disrupt (including two summer interns who skipped a week of classes to join us) had a blast. It was the best week, ever. The members of the team who stayed back in the office, watching the conference piped in over the Internet, had a blast. It was the best week, ever.

  Work has to matter.

  The stuff we create can’t just be bits on a hard drive.

  Brett, Daniel, Bobby, Justin, Ian, and Aaron built something with their bare hands that will be a part of how the future works.

  One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.

  This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. That’s why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. It’s all about shipping.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Announcing Trello

  Posted: September 13th, 2011, 11:44am MDT

  Around the time of Fog Creek Software's ten year anniversary, I started thinking that if we want to keep our employees excited and motivated for another ten years, we were going to need some new things to work on. It occurred to me that we could easily afford to make four little two-person teams to launch four new products. That would give our developers more chances to move around from product to product when they got bored, which would make Fog Creek Software an even better place to work.

  Each team, we decided, would be guided by the spirit of lean startups. They would ship early and often. They would listen to real-world customers instead of building things in an ivory tower. And they wouldn't be afraid to pivot endlessly until they made something that people wanted.

  Next, we needed some business ideas. After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was "why the hell are you working on THAT?" So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.

  We had an early idea called FIVE THINGS. Everybody would have a list of exactly five things that they were allowed to work on. The top two were things they were actively doing right now. The other three were things that they would do as soon as they finished the first two. But nobody was ever allowed to have SIX things assigned to them. If you have too many things on your to-do list, your motivation tends to sag.

  Five Things wasn't the right idea, but it led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful. By the end of the summer we realized we had a hit on our hands: an incredibly simple, easy-to-understand way for teams to collaborate online.

  

  So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Fog Creek's newest product: Trello.

  • Read more about what Trello does
  • Sign up, it's awesome!
    

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge

  Posted: July 27th, 2011, 6:33am MDT by Steve Yegge

  I woke up this morning...ish... to discover that Hacker News had finally had enough of me being at Google, so they forced me into early retirement.
  
  On Monday I was honored to be able to deliver a keynote talk at OSCON Data. In the talk, I announce at the end that I am quitting a project that I had very publicly signed up for, one that I am not passionate about and don't personally think is very important to the human race. Though others clearly do, and that's a legitimate viewpoint too.
  
  But the power of suggestion can make you see and hear something entirely different. If, for instance, someone tells you that I gave the talk wearing a gorilla suit, then when you watch it, I will magically appear to be wearing a gorilla suit. It's actually a gray jacket over a black shirt, but you will perceive the jacket as the back-hair of a male silverback gorilla! And to be honest the talk could have benefited from the judicious application of a gorilla suit, so no harm there.
  
  Similarly, if someone on Hacker News posts that "Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech" and links to the video, then you will watch the video, and when I say the word "project" at the end of my speech, a magical Power of Suggestion Voice-Over will interrupt -- in a firm manly voice totally unlike my own quacking sounds -- with "Gooooooogle". And then you will promptly sink into a 15-minute trance so that the voice-over can occur in the middle of my speech where Hacker News said it happened, instead of 96.7% of the way through the talk where it actually happened.
  
  I am going to harness this amazing Power of Suggestion, right here, right now. Here goes.
  
  You are going to come work at Google! You are going to study up, apply, interview, and yes, you are going to work there! And it will be the most awesome job you've ever had or ever will have!
  
  I hope for your sake that this little experiment works, because Google is frigging awesome, and you'll love it here. And they'll be happy to have you here. It's a match made in heaven, I'm tellin' ya. It might take you a couple tries to get in the door, because Google's interview process -- what's the word I'm looking for here -- ah yes, their process sucks at letting in all the qualified people. They're trying to get better at it, but it's not really Google's fault so much as the fault of interviewers who insist that you're not qualified to work there unless you are exactly like them.
  
  Of course, there are interviewers like that wherever you go. The real problem is the classic interview process, which everyone uses and which Google hasn't innovated on, not really. It's like deciding whether to marry someone after four one-hour dates that all happen on the same day in a little room that looks kind of like a doctor's office except that the examining table is on the wall.
  
  The reason I haven't been blogging lately is that working at Google is so awesome that I just don't feel like doing anything else. My project is awesome, the people are awesome, the work environment is over-the-top-crazy-awesome, the benefits are awesome, even the corporate mission is awesome. "Organize the world's hardline goods in little brown boxes delivered straight to your doorstep" -- that's an awesome mission, yeah?
  
  Wait, sorry, that was a flashback to the Navy or something. "Organize the world's information" -- that's the one. It's a mission that is changing the course of human events. It is slowly forcing governments to be more open, forcing corporations to play more fairly, and helping all of us make better decisions and better use of our time.
  
  In that vein, the part of my brain that makes Good Decisions was apparently broken a few weeks ago, when I allowed myself to be cajoled into working on something that I wasn't passionate about. I am an eternal optimist, and I figured I could teach myself to be passionate about it. And I tried! I spent a few weeks pretending that I was passionate about it -- that's how I got through my Physics classes in college with A grades, so I know it's a mental trick that can sometimes work.
  
  But then I wrote my OSCON Data speech, in which I basically advise everyone to start working on important problems instead of just chasing the money. Or at the very least, go ahead and chase the money in the short term, but while you are doing that, prepare yourself to help solve real problems.
  
  And after writing the speech I realized I'd completely failed to follow my own advice. I'm getting old and I only have so many "big projects" left that I can actually participate in. So in my mind it's a complete cop-out for me to take the easy path and work on a project that my company is excited about but I am not.
  
  Now, as it happens, I am in fact working on a very cool project at Google. It's not important in the same sense that curing cancer or getting clean water to impoverished cities are important. But it's a project that has the potential to revolutionize software development, and NOT through some new goddamn dependency-injection framework or web framework or other godawful embarrassing hacky workaround for a deficient programming language. No. It is a project that aims to turn source code -- ALL source code -- from plain text into Wikipedia. I've been on it for three and a half years, and I came up with the idea, and the team running with the idea is fantastic. The work may not be directly important, but it is an enabler for important work, much like scaling infrastructure is an enabler.
  
  So I am happy to continue working on that project for now. Yes, at Google. I may even blog it up at some point. But I'm very serious about brushing up on my math and statistics, some of which I haven't applied directly in 20 years, and start focusing on machine learning problems. Particulary, if I may be so fortunate, the problem of curing cancer. I may not be able to participate directly for a few years, as I need to keep working and paying the bills just like you. But I'm studying hard -- I started up again a few days ago -- and I've demonstrated to myself quite a few times that if I do anything daily for a few years I can get pretty good at it.
  
  Anyway, I'm late for work. Isn't that nice? I like the sound of it. It has a nice ring to it: "I'm late... for my job."
  
  So come work with me! Unless you are curing cancer, of course.
• 

  eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout

  Posted: July 21st, 2011, 9:36pm MDT by Steve Yegge

  San Jose, CA (Reuters) — Online auctions cartel eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and its collections and incarceration arm PayPal announced that on July 21, 2011, the two companies had jointly been awarded United States Patent No. 105960411 for their innovative 10-click “Buy it Now” purchasing pipeline.
  
  The newly-patented buying system guides users through an intuitive, step-by-step process of clicking “Buy It Now”, entering your password, logging in because they signed your sorry ass out again, getting upsold shit you don’t want, continuing to your original destination, accepting the default quantity of 1 (otherwise known as “It”), committing to buy, clicking "Pay Now", entering a different password than your first one, clicking "Log In" again god dammit, declining to borrow money from eBay’s usury department, reviewing the goddamn purchase details since by now you’ve completely forgotten what the hell you were buying, and finally confirming the god damned payment already.
  
  The 10-click checkout system, known colloquially as 10CLICKFU -- which many loyal users believe stands for “10 Clicks For You” -- was recently awarded top honors by the National Alliance of Reconstructive Hand Surgeons. 10CLICKFU incorporates a variable number of clicks ranging from eight to upwards of fifteen, but eBay’s patent stipulates that any purchasing system that lies to you at least nine times about the “Now” part of “Buy It Now” is covered by their invention.
  
  The patent award came as a surprise to many analysts, since several of eBay’s related patent attempts had been rejected on the basis of prior art. In one well-publicized filing, eBay had tried to patent a purely decorative, non-operational “Keep me signed in” checkbox, but Sony’s PlayStation Network already had one just like it. And another eBay patent claim for excruciating page load times was rejected because the iPad App Store is still loading.
  
  But eBay’s boldest and potentially furthest-reaching patent attempt was for “100% Inaccurate Button Text”. The invention claim was based on several of their UI elements, but rested primarily on the “Buy It Now” button, which eBay claims contains enough inaccuracies to render it "complete bullshit." Their patent was rejected by the US Patent Office review committee on the grounds that the Firefox browser’s “Do this automatically from now on” checkbox has been complete bullshit for over fifteen years. eBay says they will appeal the ruling because the checkbox is not technically a button.
  
  eBay’s spokesperson Paula Smugworth announced that eBay will continue to innovate on ways to remind their users that monopolies can do whatever the hell they want. “Not that eBay is a monopoly,” she added. “But if we were a monopoly, then we could do whatever the hell we wanted. I’m just sayin’.”
  
  eBay’s stock rose on the news, driven largely by anonymous shill bidders.

Joel on Software

• 

  Stack Overflow DevDays is Back!

  Posted: June 27th, 2011, 1:51pm MDT

  [UPDATE - September 6th - Regrettably, DevDays had to be cancelled. See the announcement on the Stack Exchange Blog for details.]

  Stack Overflow DevDays, the universe's best conference series for coders, is back, and it's bigger than ever!

  Here's the idea behind DevDays. You're a developer. You'd love to learn all the latest hot new technologies. Things like DVCS, HTML 5, Node.js, CSS3, Hadoop, etc. The stuff the cool kids are all talking about on the playground while you're stuck in the basement somewhere grinding away on Java Enterprise Visual Basic.

  The idea behind DevDays is a fast, high-bandwidth, fire hose tutorial on at least ten interesting concepts. We'll assume that you're a developer, you know what a loop is, but each tutorial starts at the ground level and gives you a whirlwind tour through a technology by showing you actual code. Every presenter launches an editor and writes code from scratch and shows you what it does. There are almost no prepared PowerPoint slides with ten bullet items each containing 10 words explaining the ROI benefits of some new technology. There are not even any PowerPoint slides with cats and pandas doing hilarious things, such as this one:

  

  Yes, DevDays contains precisely NO funny pictures of cats. We might have Jon Skeet with a sock puppet, though:

  (That was Jon Skeet and Tony the Pony from London DevDays 2009.)

  What we have instead is some great presenters from the community who will write code and compile code and explain it all while you watch, and you'll come away knowing enough about each new technology to know what it's good for, what it's not so good at, how to do the basics, and how to learn more. Bottom line: it's the best possible way to spend two days and learn as much as you would learn in two years of reading Twitter.

  We have FOUR, yes FOUR different DevDays conferences coming up this fall. Each one is its own production, and they're all going to be spectacular. If you came to DevDays last time, prepare to get blown away. This time everything is DOUBLE. Two days instead of one. Better food and coffee. Better locations. Bigger screens to make it easier to follow along. Lots of social activities. And, for the first time ever, we'll be visiting one city in Australia (shown at right), for an antipodean increase of infinity percent.

  Anyway, registration is now open. The schedule is:

  • October 12-13 San Francisco
  • October 25-26 Sydney
  • November 14-15 London
  • December 15-16 Washington, DC

  There are two! special! bonuses! you should know about before you choose a city:

  1. In San Francisco, the day after the conference (October 14), Server Fault is holding a one-day High Scalability conference. You may want to go to both for a full three days of amazing amazingness... if you think your heart can handle the excitement.
  2. In Washington, the day before the conference (December 14), we're have a big open source hackathon. The entire Stack Exchange dev team will be on hand and it'll be a lot of fun.

  So, go, sign up now. You can save $100 using discount code JOELONSOFTWARE.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  NY State Passes Marriage Equality Act

  Posted: June 24th, 2011, 9:19pm MDT

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Modern community building

  Posted: May 26th, 2011, 8:55am MDT

  The Stack Exchange network is already up to 51 sites on diverse topics, from math to cooking to science fiction. Each site is a community on its own, and each community has its own needs and values. Pouring a big fat algorithm in equal measures on top of 51 different groups of people does not always work the way you might hope it would work. Maybe that’s why the super-algorithm companies (like Google) tend to suck when they try to build social applications.

  Our goal as a company is to incubate each of these 51 communities—to get them to critical mass. Critical mass is that magic moment when the community has enough activity that it grows by itself.

  Building communities on the Internet is a new kind of profession. There are an awful lot of technology companies, founded by programmers, who think they are building communities on the Internet, but they’re really just building software and wondering why the community doesn’t magically show up.

  Stack Exchange is trying really hard not to suck at building communities. I would say we’re earning a solid B so far, but we’re working really hard at learning... doing little experiments and getting early results. And one thing we noticed is that the pure, algorithmic approach can’t possibly work for different communities: you need a political/social approach. That is, you need smart human beings to use smart human judgment and cultivate each community individually.

  Or, to use a metaphor that has been on my mind, you can’t use a robot to train a puppy. Every puppy is different.

  With 51 communities and a new one opening almost every week, our small team of four community managers are doing a great job but they just don’t have the bandwidth to help cultivate every site. So we depend on the most active, enthusiastic users to promote their own communities and help them flourish. But these users are usually domain experts, not community organization experts.

  So what I plan to do is build a team of super-evangelists here at Stack Exchange to serve as backup. Sort of like Lady Gaga’s backup dancers, but probably without as many muscles, they are not onstage to lead; they’re there to fill up the stage with more hotness than one person can provide.

  This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already kn0w how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally. Not that I know how to do this, but we’ll learn together. Every workday is going to start with a huddle at 9am and a plan for the day’s activities and an intensive six hours of work. Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning... reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.

  If you or someone you know is enthusiastic, energetic, super-outgoing (a social connector), a great communicator (capable of sending 50 personal emails in an afternoon), with some training in psychology, political science, economics, philosophy, or the humanities in general, and you’re looking for an alternative to a dead-end mailroom job at a PR agency, this is a rare opportunity... please apply.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  Choose Your Fears Wisely

  Posted: May 23rd, 2011, 4:46pm MDT by Dr. Wes Browning

  [Issue date 3/23/11]
  
  As I write this it’s Friday morning in Seattle and on the West Coast of the United States all the way down past San Diego, everyone is bracing for the radioactive plume from the Fukushima meltdown, and I’m highly amused.
  
  There was recently an earthquake in Japan that was quite significant and might be a reminder to West Coast Americans of some unpleasant realities attached to their choice of coast. But instead of thinking about those realities they prefer to dwell upon the hazards of being exposed to radiation released by a nuclear disaster from which they are more than 4000 miles removed.
  
  In my day, we had what was called A-bomb and H-bomb testing. My government blew up whole islands in the Pacific and turned Nevada desert lands to glass so dweebs could read radiation meters and mark the results on clipboards. We loved it because we were advancing into the future, one mutation at a time. I was going to be Spiderman.
  
  Seriously, no, we were scared out of our minds. But, guess what? Even when they blew up whole islands, only nearby Pacific islanders and a few sailors (ironically, Japanese sailors) who got in the way were hurt by it. Nobody 4000 miles away came down with radiation sickness.
  
  So, I ask, why has everyone around here shifted their attention so quickly and fully from one humongous magnitude 9.0 earthquake and horrific tsunami to the far-distant effects of a nuclear disaster, which, even in the country it is happening in, if it were an earthquake, would rate only 7.0, 7.5, tops?
  
  I’ve already answered that question. West Coast Americans know they are sitting on some real shifty real estate. It is human nature not to want to hear genuine bad news, even when you already know it. So instead of hearing the genuine bad news (which is, that were all overdue to experience our ceilings meet our floors and make loose-meat sandwiches of us), we’d prefer hearing false bad news. News that scares us without actually involving anything really happening.
  
  I am torn by this. Part of me, “humanistic angel Wes,” says, “human nature is inherently good, so if people don’t want to think about the fact that the big subduction quake that’s 50 years late will render mass transit unnecessary by eliminating the ‘mass,’ I should celebrate that nature, and keep quiet about such things.”
  
  Another part of me, “three ways a bastard Wes,” says, “Let’s put all this in perspective until grown men tearfully beg for a return to flat representative art.”
  
  As always “three ways” wins.
  
  Perspectively speaking, Seattleites are likely to experience less additional accumulated radiation this week than they would suffer from if they spent the entire summer vacationing in a brick house in Denver.
  
  On the other hand, if the big subduction doozie happens, while it’s true that the increased proximity of stone and brick and airborne stone and brick dust might elevate your radiation levels three or four times higher (I’m half guessing because it doesn’t matter), it wouldn’t matter.
  
  I’m so lucky I live two blocks north of the fault line on a hill that probably wasn’t here before the last time the earth rocked that much. So, when the earthquake we’re all trying not to think about happens, my neurons will probably be crushed before they can apprise my brain of the situation.
  
  However, if my luck fails, I can lie on my back dying with the relief of knowing that the local fire station is sitting on the same hill as I am and will also be part of a new improved, bigger, hill, and I won’t be disturbed by any more annoying sirens from them.
  
  Or, let’s say the hill drops out from under me and I’m down around sea level. Then, the earthquake will rearrange the bottom of Elliott Bay and send a nice big wave to fetch me from the offensive sirens. Either way, free at last.
• 

  You Can't Buy Objectivity

  Posted: May 23rd, 2011, 4:34pm MDT by Dr. Wes Browning

  [issue date 3/16/11]
  
  I love liberalism. I love liberals. I married a liberal. Almost all of my best friends are liberals. But sometimes liberals can be horribly wrong. Let’s try to understand why!
  
  A fantastic example of liberals off the deep end is seen in the current liberal hand-wringing over the fate of National Public Radio. I have had multitudinous liberal friends plea that I sign on to petitions to stop the federal defunding of NPR. This is wildly strange.
  
  I won’t get started on the details of what defunding NPR really entails, such as the fact that NPR actually doesn’t have dedicated federal funding to speak of. We all know what we’re talking about is a principle of a thing. “Why, how dare they...”
  
  Let’s visualize an average liberal and try to walk him through the decision whether to sign on to such a petition. For the sake of concreteness we should give our average liberal a name. My conservative friends clamor for “Ivan.” No offense intended, but, they’re all a bunch of out-of-touch freak buckets who think they’re reincarnations of Joe McCarthy or Roy Cohn. Like Reagan, they spent the 1980s in a delirium. They think The Rights of Man was written by a Russian. So I’ll call my average liberal “Steve” instead.
  
  Steve keeps NPR on in the background at all times, only turning it down during Car Talk. Steve likes to get high while listening to Fresh Air. Steve has noticed that NPR news coverage has not been as liberal lately as it was during, say, the Carter Administration. But he clings to NPR anyway because it isn’t shrill conservative talk-radio à la Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
  
  Someone comes racing up the road on a horse and shouts, “The Tea Baggers are coming, the Tea Baggers are coming,” and, “They’re marching on Washington and planning to withdraw government funding for NPR!” What do you do Steve?
  
  At first Steve thinks, “Oh no, if the last remaining liberal radio channel is not funded by taxpayers, our political perspective and our very way of life is threatened! I must stop this!”
  
  Steve is quick to adjust his reasoning and insists that he couldn’t support government funding of NPR because it is liberal -- he knows that would be wrong. He knows the taxpayers can’t be expected to support biased news. Instead, he insists, he wants NPR to continue to be subsidized because all the other channels are biased.
  
  In other words, Steve’s position, in essence, is, NPR should be funded for not being conservatively biased. More precisely, he believes that the only radio we will have, if NPR loses government funding, will be entertainment radio or conservatively biased radio.
  
  It’s easy to feel that fear and run with it, isn’t it? Sure it is. Let’s all breathe deep, and draw that fear in. Draw that fear in through your 5th Chakra, and now down deep to your first chakra, and now let’s bounce it, bounce it good and hard, and see if we can’t get it to blow your Crown Chakra clean off.
  
  How realistic is Steve’s fear?
  
  Who cares? The government doesn’t have any business funding a radio network just because you or Steve are afraid that unbiased radio won’t happen.
  
  There is in fact no way, whatsoever, that continued government funding can maintain unbiased news at NPR. The fact that its funding comes from taxpayers can’t be a guarantee of objectivity.
  
  We have to resist setting government priorities based on gut fears. That got us two wars and Homeland Security and a never ending budget crisis that is feeding conservative talk radio far more than the trickle of dollars NPR gets is worth.
  
  On the other side, how stupid is it that conservatives would cut off funding for NPR on the grounds that a funding desperate NPR has gone begging for money from Middle Eastern sources? “Oh no, let’s not give them any more money, they’ve been begging.” Where have I heard that before?

Joel on Software

• 

  Help us organize the next Stack Overflow conference

  Posted: May 9th, 2011, 4:31am MDT

  We’re working on a series of two-day Stack Overflow conferences for the fall:

  “What’s this conference about? The idea for the original DevDays was to have high-bandwidth, intensive introductions to a wide variety of new technologies… the kinds of technologies that everybody wants to learn but doesn’t necessarily need to use on a project right now. Last time, it was things like iPhone development, Python, jQuery, Google AppEngine, etc. This year, we’re asking you. So far, there’s a lot of interest in DVCS, HTML5, and Node.js.”

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Lunch

  Posted: April 28th, 2011, 12:16pm MDT

  What do you do for lunch every day? Where do you eat it? With whom?

  I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome. I’ve been on teams that don’t, and lunch every day is, at best, lonely.

  A lot of big tech companies have cafeterias, either free (Google) or cheap (Microsoft). At these companies, some teams actually make an effort to eat together every day. But a lot of teams don’t. If you wander around these places at lunchtime, you’ll see some large groups, a lot of pairs of people who have scheduled a “lunch meeting,” but you’ll also see a distressing number of loners eating by themselves. Maybe they’re reading a book or checking their email while they eat so they don’t look sad. Maybe they took their lunch back to their desk so they wouldn’t have to sit in the cafeteria by themselves. Maybe they genuinely don’t like people and they’re happy to eat alone. Or maybe they’re just telling you that.

  At Google and Microsoft, the cafeterias can get so crowded that the loners really have to sit with other groups because there isn’t enough room to sit at a table by themselves. Occasionally, the group they sit down with makes an effort to include the loner in their conversation. More often, the loner is obligated to pretend to be utterly engrossed in playing Farmbook on their smartphone, so as to provide a pretext to avoid having to make social contact. Excuse me, I’d love to introduce myself to you, but it’s very important that I update my cabbage.

  Where and with whom we eat lunch is a much bigger deal than most people care to admit. Obviously, psychologists will tell us, obviously it goes back to childhood, and especially school, particularly Junior High, where who you eat with is of monumental importance. Being in any clique, even if it’s just the nerds, is vastly preferable than eating alone. For loners and geeks, finding people to eat with in the cafeteria at school can be a huge source of stress.

  The importance of eating together with your co-workers is not negotiable, to me. It’s too important to be left to chance. That’s why we eat together at long tables, not a bunch of little round tables. That’s why when new people start work at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves in a corner. When we have visitors, they eat together with everyone else.

  Even though Stack Exchange and Fog Creek are completely separate companies, we take advantage of the fact that our offices are in the same building to eat together every day. I’m glad that we have a chance to do this, even though a lot of people tend to clique-up and sit with the same people day after day.

  There’s a lot of stuff that’s accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange, but lunch is not one of them. Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  The podcast is back!

  Posted: April 27th, 2011, 3:55pm MDT

  Jeff Atwood and I have resumed our weekly podcast, formerly known as the Stack Overflow Podcast, now known as the Stack Exchange Podcast!

  Here are some ways to find us:

  • On iTunes. If you have an iPhone or iPod that you sync to iTunes, you can set this up to automatically download every week. iTunes link to Stack Exchange Podcast
  • On SoundCloud. SoundCloud is sort of like a sound version of Twitter, a very cool way to subscribe to audio. Stack Exchange Podcast on SoundCloud
  • Or you can simply subscribe to the Stack Exchange Blog, where the podcast will arrive every Wednesday at about 3PM EST, complete with show notes and listener comments.

  Special thanks to Special Agent Alex Miller, who is, in his spare time, the new producer of the podcast. We’ll be making lots of technical improvements to the podcast over the next couple of months, so stay tuned... it’ll be really fun.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  It's Winning. Duh.

  Posted: March 9th, 2011, 2:05pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  The whole world loves an underdog...
  
  Haha, that was your irony. The world does not. America especially does not. This country only cares about winners. Losers can drop dead.
  
  There are deep historical and cultural reasons for this, having to do with George Washington’s false teeth, the Monroe Doctrine, the fact that they had photography already by the Civil War, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” that FDR died in office instead of on a ranch, and that we have people who seriously think Jesus loves Kansans more than Bedouins, even though they’re practically identical, except for the outfits, tents and camels. The same people can’t even name one Bedouin.
  
  

  The Monroe Doctrine has had an important role in forming American attitudes about winning and losing.

  
  Speaking of naming Bedouins. Here we go: Muammar el-Qaddafi? Moammar Kadafi? Moammar Gaddafi? Moammar Gadhafi? Muammar Gaddafi? Moamer Kadhafi? Muammar al-Qaddafi? Moammar Gaddafi? See, I can’t name one, either.
  
  My point: America loves a winner, and how can you be a winner if nobody knows how to spell your name? You can’t get your trophy.
  
  That’s why the Obama administration was so quick to back the sure Libyan winners-to-be, the non-Qaddafis, in spite of being so slow to come out for the non-Mubaraks in Egypt. It’s easy to tell that Kadhafi is a loser, but I can spell Mubarak, and he looks damn good in a suit, whereas Muammar in a suit looks like Michael Dukakis with shoulder pads.
  
  How many times has the United States backed a dictator, just because there was no way he was going to be deposed?
  
  DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, also illustrates my point. Two years ago President Obama was prepared to stand by DOMA to the bitter end. Why? Because it crawled out of the same alphabet soup Obama did? No! Because it didn’t look like it needed his help, that’s why.
  
  For Obama to have opposed DOMA back then, he would have had to go on record as supporting what then would have been regarded as a lost cause. This being America, and not Vermont, his ratings would have plummeted.
  
  But times have changed, and now DOMA is looking weak. There’s a truckload of independent legal challenges pending in courts and DOMA is taking one hit after another.
  
  It violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, says one. KICK IN THE SHINS! It violates the Tenth Amendment, says another. TO THE HEAD! It falls outside Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause of the Constitution. GUT BLOW! By passing DOMA, Congress “overstepped its authority, undermined states' efforts to recognize marriages between same-sex couples, and codified an animus towards gay and lesbian people,” says another suit, kicking legal butt.
  
  Now that DOMA is reeling against the ropes, Obama remembers he has better things to do with his lawyers than prop this loser up. So, when DOMA finally goes down for the count, our president will be on the winning side, sharing the cheers.
  
  Learning to apply the theory to everyday problems:
  
  As I write this, the Wisconsin State Assembly (their “House of Commons”) has passed Governor Walker’s budget which deprives most public workers of their collective bargaining rights. The law now goes to the Wisconsin State Senate (their “House of Lords”), where Democrats are fighting it tooth and nail from an undisclosed stairwell in a hotel in Chicago, a hundred and fifty miles away.
  
  Can you guess which side the American people will take in this political battle?
  
  Hint: In order to apply our theory, you need to know which side of the fight is going to be perceived as the “loser” side. You need to analyze which is more “loserly”, whether it’s to run away from a quorum, or to claim that collective bargaining rights have anything to do with balancing a budget in the first place.
  
  For bonus points, find a way to change the result of your analysis by removing the Wisconsin Senate Democrats even further from the scene. What if they didn’t even exist? How would that make the unions look better?

Joel on Software

• 

  Stack Overflow (the company) is now Stack Exchange

  Posted: March 9th, 2011, 6:41am MST

  The snack room at Stack Exchange got a wee upgrade today:

  

  Find out why (and read to the end to find out how to get your own StackExchange sticker) at the Stack Overflow Blog.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  Reaping the Consequences of Poor

  Posted: February 26th, 2011, 6:59am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  
  About a week before writing this, I was feeling more impoverished than usual. You know how it is: when you can’t pay your bills, your shoes have holes in them, and your credit card company tells you that if you keep paying off your balance at the current rate, it’ll be all paid off by yesterday -- meaning, after forever ends and time starts over again, and gets back to then. Roughly 50-85 billion years, or never, depending on how much dark matter there is in the universe.
  
  “So,” I thought, “let’s get us some of that household energy assistance!”
  
  That led to about 3 hours of me and Anitra “Other Household Member” Freeman studying the application process for federal LIHEAP energy assistance funds. Our conclusion at the end of those 3 hours was that the government doesn’t think we’re poor enough.
  
  While that was disappointing to us, it provided us with new respect for the people who do qualify for LIHEAP funds, and how truly needy they must be. Whoa, that is some amazing poverty, people! Way to go!
  
  The very next day, Obama announced his budget proposal that would cut funding to LIHEAP programs by over 2.5 billion dollars. Millions of households in America, representing approximately 3 per cent of the population, that are currently eligible to receive energy assistance, would be cut loose.
  
  You can’t manage the political will to bring about an end to George Bush’s gift of tax breaks for the richest Americans, so they can keep the yacht industry afloat, but you can slash funds needed to help the poorest Americans have heat? OK, I see how you are, Obama.
  
  No, wait, that’s not fair, is it? We bought health care reform by giving the opponents an extension to Bush’s tax cuts. Yay, we got watered down health care reform! But, you know what? The Republicans didn’t shake hands with us on the purchase, so they plan on taking the goods back, and keeping the extension.
  
  That was muddled of me. Let’s look at the stupidity of these cuts from a different angle.
  
  Consider those Predator Drones you keep hearing about. Like the one that wiped out an Afghan wedding party in 2007. Recently, the Air Force decided they weren’t deadly enough, so they would replace all their Predator Drones with newer Reaper Drones. (The old Predators will be sold at a discount to the Italians, to take out Berlusconi.) Each Reaper, at 10.5 million, costs more than twice what a Predator cost, and they want to buy over 250 of them over the next couple of years.
  
  Our own people can go without heat next winter so that Air Force crews trained on arcade games, sitting in comfort in Florida, can kill more Afghans with the click of a mouse. Have you seen the ads? “It’s not science fiction.” All the excitement of war, and you get to go home to your wife and kids at the end of each shift, 1.4 miles away!
  
  Oh, I get. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. So it’s all one big war, then, isn’t it?
  
  Other ways it doesn’t pay to be poor:
  That Ian Birk will not be charged for murder or manslaughter comes down to this 1986 footnote to the law "The legislature recognizes that RCW 9A.16.040 establishes a dual standard with respect to the use of deadly force by peace officers and private citizens... " stating that the lawmakers “really meant it” when they said police should be allowed to get off for murder almost all the time.
  
  So any police officer can kill anyone so long as it can’t be proved to have been done out of malice. For example, let’s say you’re a cop, and you see a poor person wasting space. So long as it isn’t personal (you don’t have anything against that particular poor person, just poor people in general) you can fire away.
  
  

Joel on Software

• 

  Careers 2.0 (by Stack Overflow)

  Posted: February 23rd, 2011, 11:17am MST

  One day, you’ll be telling your grandchildren about getting a programming job, version 1.0. You would send a “resume” to a “recruiter.” It included all kinds of silly information required by the esoteric resume ritual (foreign languages spoken, whether or not you play ultimate Frisbee, Microsoft-veteran status). This so-called “information” was utterly useless at determining whether you could program or not, but if you spelled everything right and used suitable fonts, you could come in for a day of interviews at which you would be asked to perform mundane programming tasks on a whiteboard.

  Careers 2.0 is here!

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  Exhibitionist Heaven

  Posted: February 18th, 2011, 12:02pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  A couple of weeks ago some of us at Real Change were talking about how the rise of internet background-check services has hurt poor people. Years ago it was a pain to run background checks. If someone wanted to rent an apartment from you, you had to take their application materials to an agency run out of a trailer and hand it over to a guy named Rocky. You didn’t do it because Rocky smelled like cigarettes, stale peanuts, and three day old fish, and he charged too much.
  
  But now, Rocky has a website so you don’t have to smell him, and his work is automated and uses semi-public internet resources, so the price is down around $30. The way the poor would-be renter gets screwed is that, with the background check affordable at all, it’s the renter who’s made to pay!
  
  Good news! This intolerable situation will only last a few more years! Thanks to improving technology, the price of background checks will plummet so far, they’ll be given away free to anyone who has a computer and knows how to use Google!
  
  “But Wes, how is that possible?” my detractors ask. Sneaky detractors always questioning me. Well, I’ll tell you. It’ll all be done with cameras, wires, connections, and computers, with some math thrown in.
  
  By the time this column is printed, you’ll have had an opportunity to watch a massively parallel IBM computer named Watson play Jeopardy. I don’t know how well Watson will do, but I know he’ll outdo grandpa’s computer. He may not win against the human contestants, but he’s going to do better than a lot of people watching at home could do. Yet, Watson is self-contained. He’s not hooked up to an internet.
  
  Meanwhile, the European Union, the United States of Europe, is funding a project to create a “robot” internet. I put the word robot in quotes because Watson is defined as a robot for the sake of this thing, called the RoboEarth project. Computers all over the world who are equipped to learn from experiences, like Watson, will be able to link up and share their growing knowledge about the world, and the humans in it, on their very own internet geared to their special interests and needs.
  
  Meanwhile, face identification software is improving. It will soon be possible to upload a picture of someone, and tell your favorite search engine to retrieve all pictures that feature only that person and people who look just like them.
  
  Finally, more and more cameras are being installed in public places, Several states are setting up their linked networks of surveillance cameras. But there’s nothing in the law preventing businesses and private citizens from connecting their own surveillance cameras to each other on the net, and every reason for companies that would like to track us all to support them doing so. So, got a surveillance camera? Earn some money just for leaving it on 24/7!
  
  Put it all together, and you realize that it’s inevitable. The cost of the systems that track you will be paid by advertisers wanting to tailor ads to you.
  
  Unless there are major legal barriers put in place (a constitutional amendment guaranteeing privacy would be a start in this country) you can expect as early as ten years from now that if you don’t remember where you were a week ago last Thursday at 3 PM, you’ll be able to able to find out by googling yourself. Switch to image search, and see what you were wearing. Modify the subject, and find out where the spouse was.
  
  Computers will track you from one camera to the next. If you try to trick the computers by ducking into a port-a-potty and switch into a disguise, it won’t work, Superman, computers can count. “Duh-uh, where’d da other human go? Someone’s trying to trick me. Alert, alert! Oh there he is, with the red pantsies.”
  
  And the good news is, it will all be free!
  
  
  
  

Joel on Software

• 

  Does your employer own your side projects?

  Posted: February 11th, 2011, 7:41pm MST

  There’s a surprising amount of misinformation out there about whether software companies own the work that a programmer does in their spare time.

  From my answer to the question on answers.onstartups.com:

  Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.

  Read the whole thing here:

  If I'm working at a company, do they have intellectual property rights to the stuff I do in my spare time?

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  Tweet Like an Egyptian

  Posted: February 11th, 2011, 4:45pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers.

  Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious.
  
  We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of their power, so they unplugged them. I’m sure I would have done the same, if I were a dictatorial regime propped up by a rich foreign power, because I am also a walking moral vacuum, abhorred by nature.
  
  That got me thinking, though. How would the history of the world been different if this sort of cruel drastic measure had been resorted to in the past?
  
  For example, we’ve all heard of the American Revolution, and how, because of it, we live in George Washington State, instead of George William Frederick State, and we call ourselves Americans, after the continent, instead of British, after the fraction of the island. These are good things. But what would have happened had King George III done what Mubarak did, and cut off the colonists’ internet and Twitter?
  
  One good thing: I’m sure that if they were cut off early enough the Boston Tea Party couldn’t have happened. They could never have pulled off that kind of organization without the aid of selectively distributed electronic communication. Consequently there would be no Tea Bagger Party today, which would be a relief. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know they could have existed, so we wouldn’t feel the relief, so we’d just complain about some other yahoos. Probably the Australians.
  
  Then there’s the Declaration of Independence, which I learned in school was actually finished on MySpace, a sucky 18th Century predecessor of Facebook, on July 2, 1776, and only tweeted two days later. The British people were having their own problems and King George had already (this is real history!) shut down Twitter on their island. That’s why the British, including King George himself, didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence tweet until weeks later, when the ban was lifted and someone did a #revolution search.
  
  That was what did happen. But if King George had shut down the internet and Twitter in the colonies that summer, the American colonists wouldn’t have been able to declare independence, so they wouldn’t know they were really having a revolution. No one would ever know they could pursue happiness, so we’d all be couch potatoes today.
  
  No one would know what a “John Hancock” was. If you said to someone “put your John Hancock there,” they’d think you meant something dirty.
  
  That’s just one minor revolution, hardly even the most serious one! What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Velvet Revolution, the Velcro Revolution?
  
  As we know now, without the internet and Twitter, none of those revolutions could have happened. Now I’m sure that some of you would say, good riddance to bad history. But you aren’t thinking how cool it was that all that went down. Just the French Revolution, for example, got us “Let them eat cake” and guillotines. Come on! That’s some cool s#*t!
  
  Further hypotheticals to learn by:
  
  It’s long been said that if the internet had never existed, children wouldn’t have learned violence from internet games. Discuss how the absence of violent tendencies among children would have affected history. First, pay attention to the Childrens’ Crusades, the development of the Mother Goose rhyming industry, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the world-wide stick and rock trade. Then, look away.
  
  It’s also long been an established truism that without internet porn, men would never view women as sex objects. What would they have viewed as sex objects instead? List five possibilities and their relative likelihoods. Take into account the prevailing forms of agribusiness in ancient times and more recently, the rise of little tiny battery powered thingies.
  
  
• 

  Future Snark

  Posted: February 4th, 2011, 8:19am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  Whenever there are great occasions of public oration, I miss them. They always happen in prime-time, and I’m accustomed to averting my eyes during prime-time. In fact, I always arrange to sleep through prime-time.
  
  Missing the oration means I don’t know everything that everyone else does. I know the words because they’re in the New York Times the next day, if the oration is anything to sneeze at. But I miss the nuanced delivery, the dramatic pauses, the turned up eyes, everything you need to really be fully informed in a country informed by appearances.
  
  But we must do what we can. I shall now attempt to read Obama’s State of the Union address, as it appeared in last Wednesday’s New York Times. [Pause for slow reader.]
  
  OK, let’s see, distinguished guests, fellow Americans, Boehner, rancor, shooting, contentious democracy, we’re great, yadda, yadda, we’re set apart as a nation (as opposed to what? -- as a broccoli?), we will move together because we must, but we have to do more, China, India, yadda.
  
  Alright, here’s something. He says our country is built on an idea and that’s why our kids don’t just memorize equations, they answer questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never put those things together before. So, it was our founding as a free republic that’s responsible for gnarly uncles asking endless stupid questions. Yeah, I can see that. It sure explains Uncle Ned. He never should have been free.
  
  Next Obama’s telling us we have to win the future. Whenever someone points to something, I make a habit of glancing over my shoulder at what he’s pointing me away from. I guess it’s acceptable to lose the past if the future is still there to be won. I can switch to door number three.
  
  Now here’s something else I did not know! I did not know this was a Sputnik moment! How did the new Sputnik get by me?
  
  If I could see the Sputnik overhead maybe I could figure out how Obama gets from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to “I want be one of the 80% of Americans riding in high-speed trains powered by 80% clean energy.” I don’t see that as much of a career, but then, maybe I just don’t know what the word “career” means. Is it like “careen?” What’s this 80% fetish?
  
  What about my dream, that 80% of America be underwater, so I can get there by stolen rowboat?
  
  Speaking of knowing things, we come to Obama’s first immediate concrete proposal, to continue income tax credits we already have for paying tuition. So that the people who can now afford to go to college can continue to afford to, until tuitions are raised again. A bold proposal.
  
  After three decades of cuts in support for higher education, no change is progress we should all applaud.
  
  He talks about bringing high-speed wireless to 98% of all Americans in 5 years, so that, among other things, students can take classes with a digital textbook. How about using that to crank the tuition down? Is that too much to ask?
  
  How about a future in which 80% of adults have college educations that are fully paid off, so we don’t have a country of debtors?
  
  Questions to propel further snark
  
  Could the author of this column be any snarkier? Suggestion: come up with a snarky over-all assessment of the State of the Union Address that the author could have whipped out. Then, raise the snark level with a counter-snark of your own.
  
  Reading comprehension: Is the author really snarking at Obama, or is he snarking at Americans for setting themselves up for these kinds of addresses, by their absurd expectations. Should every presidential address be a callback to Kennedy’s “Man on the Moon” address?
  
  Obama said that at the time Sputnik was launched the science didn’t exist yet to go to the moon. Hello? Newton’s Laws?

Joel on Software

• 

  FogBugz/Kiln Demo

  Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 1:16pm MST

  If you weren’t able to make it to the FogBugz/Kiln world tour, a video of my presentation is up now on YouTube.

  (If you have a high bandwidth connection, try the “720p” option, which shows the screen more clearly.)

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  You're Welcome, Now Give Us a Kiss

  Posted: January 26th, 2011, 7:26pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  My point this week: Eastern Washington should thank Seattle in writing for being so liberal.
  
  See what I just did there? That’s a first! Fifteen years, and never before have I made my point in the first sentence! Sometimes I never get around to it at all!
  
  I’m doing it now for two reasons. One, last week I opened with what I thought was an amusing misleading statement “Today’s topic is insanity”, and nobody got it. Two, recently I’ve been obsessed by something said to me 23 years ago. I was homeless then and a man I’ll call Luke Sidewalker had asked why, and I had given him four answers, the first three being impromptu jokes.
  
  Luke, who had recently graduated in Advanced Pre-Modern Sociology, told me that my last reason, the true one, was false, because he had “learned” in Sociology Science 101 that people always say the truth in their first answer.
  
  

  Not a sociology class; a sociology experiment.

  I respectfully told him you can’t learn something that isn’t true, that sociology has yet to establish itself as a science, that sociologists don’t study whole people, they study half-formed college students because they make cheap plentiful guinea pigs, and that he was an idiot. But I have long pondered his words.
  
  Mostly I’ve pondered, how many people are as stupid as Luke Sidewalker? How many really take every study ever generated by sociologists as gospel, without appreciating how much trickier it is to study people than atoms, and the tools aren’t there yet? Does diet cause such stupidity? Can we do a study?
  
  But I digress. Last election, Washington State defied the national trend, re-electing Democrat Patty Murray over Republican contender Dino Rossi, and I spent hours on the internet trying to explain to various representatives of The Rest of The State, why there was a perfectly good reason that should have happened, even though only 9 counties went for Murray, and the other 30 went for Dino Rossi.
  
  What looks like a failure of democracy is not, I said, because counties only report the votes, they don’t do the voting. The voting is done by people, and one-person-one-vote means if more people vote for one candidate than another, it’s not their fault that so many of them live in King County, which just happens to have 25% of the population of the state even though it’s only one county.
  
  Contrast that with last Friday’s Seattle P-I headline: “King Co. pays for the rest of the state - is that fair?”
  
  It doesn’t look fair! Our taxes make up 42% of the state’s income, but only 25% of the budget gets spent here! Wah!
  
  However, as I have just now said, we’re 25% of the population, approximately, so the spending amount IS fair, on that basis. So what’s going on?
  
  What’s going on is, King County is liberal. And liberals vote for liberal policies. Liberal policies are better. So the businesses here do better. So King County residents make more money. So they pay more in taxes.
  
  More importantly, we’re liberal so we believe that’s exactly the way it should be! Let the wealthiest people pay the most, they that have the most to pay. Let everyone reap the benefits in accordance with their numbers and it will all work out for the best for all of us.
  
  Now, a few conservatives happen to live in King County. For example, Luke Sidewalker lived in Eastern Wallingford, of all places. They might complain like this: “Hey, we King County-ers earned our money through hard work. Why should those the bare-foot children of Eastern Washington hippies, drunks, deadbeat dads, and other ne’er-do-wells get our money? They should earn their own!”
  
  But most of us see the error in that reasoning. We know that our money will go to good use. It will be especially needed to raise the educational level of Eastern Washington, to the point where they could at least write that thank you note I mentioned at the beginning of this.
  
  

Joel on Software

• 

  Stack Overflow 2010 recap

  Posted: January 24th, 2011, 7:51am MST

  (reposted from the Stack Overflow blog)

  2010 was an absolutely amazing year here at Stack Overflow. We grew from 7 million visitors to over 16 million, putting us in Quantcast’s top 400. We raised $6 million in venture capital, and we went from three full time employees to 27. We built a 7500 square foot office in New York, and we launched a ton of new features and sites, like Stack Exchange, a network of 33 Q&A sites on diverse topics from cooking to computer science. Stack Exchange grew 51% in December alone. Wow.

  The expert Q&A model that Stack Overflow pioneered is really working. The statistic I’m proudest of is the percentage of questions that get a good answer, over 80% (and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100% answer rates!)

  Traffic

  The true measure of success for any Internet company is how often people come up to me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is a great deal of disagreement as to how to measure that, we track a reasonable proxy called “eyeballs,” on the theory that if a site is useful, people will load it up in their browsers and eyeball it.

  

  Traffic to Stack Overflow grew 131% in 2010, to 16.6 million global monthly uniques. *Uniques* are counted by cookies, so the number of human beings is less. We also measure the number of page views (top level pages loaded, which doesn’t count images and supporting files), which has similarly grown from 31.8 million per month to 72.8 million per month, i.e. 129% growth.

  Based on the number of people who do come up to us in hotel lobbies, we’re pretty sure that ALL the programmers in the world use Stack Overflow. (Source: completely made up. But seriously, when was the last time you met a programmer who didn’t use “El Stack”?) In order to keep growing and making the Internet more awesome, we have to expand into new subject areas, like Molecular Biology and Harley Davidson Belt Buckles. That’s what Stack Exchange is all about. Stack Exchange growth is insane. In six short months, we’ve gone from zero to 1.5 million monthly visitors, growing 51% in December.

  

  If, as planned, we continue growing at 51% a month, we will be bigger than Facebook in 15 months. We’re ALREADY bigger than ocn.ne.jp (No, I’ve never heard of that either. But we’re bigger). Jeff and I are already planning who will play us in the Aaron Sorkin movie. (Tyler Labine and Zac Efron, obviously.)

  Now, obviously, all this TRAFFIC isn’t worth a thing if people aren’t getting answers to their questions. That’s why our favorite thing to measure is “percent of questions answered.” And not just any answer will do, either: to count a question as “answered”, either the original poster has to accept the answer, or a third party has to upvote the answer. This is where Stack Overflow really shines compared to other Q&A sites: we actually get questions answered. Three of our sites actually have 100% answer rates!

  

  New Sites

  Last summer, we relaunched Stack Exchange as a democratically-driven network of sites on topics chosen by our users. Some of these sites are directly related to programming (for example, Game Development), but some are quite far afield, from English Language toCooking.

  

  We call it the Stack Exchange network, and at StackExchange.com you’ll find a directory of all of them, along with some hot questions, statistics, leaderboards, and other tools so that you can follow the sites and tags that you’re interested in.

  We learned a long time ago that the only way to get questions answered promptly is to have a critical mass of knowledgeable users, so we have an onerous process called Area 51 where sites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn’t have critical mass, we just won’t create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we’ll close it down.

  So far, 13 sites have gone all the way through the Area 51 process and launched. Dozens more are already in beta. Hundreds more are in active discussion and will launch when they reach a critical mass of interested participants.

  The development team has been knocking out new features at a constant pace. They built an amazing web-based chat system, and we’ve added literally hundreds of new features and improvements to the core Stack Overflow engine which we roll out continuously.

  The Company

  At the beginning of the year, Stack Overflow LLC was just three developers working from home. In the spring, we raised $6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and a long list of celebrity angel investors, which allowed us to expand rapidly. We hired a team of great people, including several of the high-reputation users that you know from Stack Overflow.

  

  We now have community managers, a sales team, two full time system administrators, and Very Important Administrative Overhead like myself, but most importantly, we have a great team of developers, in New York and around the world, building the next generation of cool features, like the important “wheel of blame” feature, which we can run at any time to calculate precisely who is responsible for anything that went wrong. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always Jason Punyon.)

  To make room for all these people, or, at least, those who live in New York, we rented a 7500 square foot, class A, super-elite batcave in New York and then fixed it up to be nice, with cool furniture including Aeron chairs and height-adjustable desks, and lots of glass to bring views and daylight deep into the batcave. And of course, we have private offices with a half dozen gigantic 453-inch monitors for each developer. And there’s an amazingly cool Star Trek couch. Does your company have a Star Trek Couch? *I didn’t think so.* We also have Rovio, a little robot that our remote developers can use to visit the office “virtually.” (There. I said “virtually.” Are you happy now?)

  

  Overall 2010 has been a real breakout year for Stack Overflow, which is now the largest programmer website in the world (source: me) and the best, fastest-growing Q&A website in the world (source: also me). We’ve got an incredible team firing on all cylinders, so we’re really looking forward to 2011.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Adventures in Bloggery

• 

  Above All, Please No Creepy Fake Smiles

  Posted: January 19th, 2011, 6:46am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

   [We are up to date now. Reminder: these are my own versions, pretty much as submitted, with occasional graphic embellishments and added notes. The titles don't usually match.]
  
  Today’s topic is insanity.
  
  Ha, ha, that wasn’t very specific was it? Everything is insanity! The voices tell me so.
  
  Seriously, an insane man recently killed some people while trying to kill a Congressperson, and this has been taken by many as a call to action. I don’t like what happened either, but honestly a lot of these calls to action are just nuts.
  
  The idea that mental illness causes good people to do bad things is generally false. Mental illness most often causes good people to do good things that aren’t practical and not in their own best interests, or good things that aren’t efficient. Whereas, it causes bad people to be bad out in the open. Mental illness itself is morally neutral, like pneumonia.
  
  When I was 12 I was visiting the house of another kid I’ll call “Charlie”. Charlie was the little brother of a former babysitter of mine. I hadn’t seen him in years. His parents begged my parents to get me to play with Charlie, because he was so lonely. His idea of playing that day was to hit me repeatedly with a stick, for half an hour, until I finally snatched it away from him, and broke it in ten pieces.
  
  The parents, when notified of all this, sobbed, and said, “It all started when another boy threw a rock at Charlie’s head. He’s been mean like that ever since. That’s why he has no friends.”
  
  Very sad, very tragic, very false. When I’d known Charlie before the tragic blow to his head, he was also a vicious jerk. He was just more efficient at it, and didn’t do anything so overt, so he could drag it out longer. All the blow to his head did was put him off his game. He lost his gift for creating deniability.
  
  My mother was verbally abusive to people who visited her near her death. They excused her for it by saying it was “the brain tumor talking”. But she hadn’t had a talkative brain tumor 22 years earlier when she decided it would be fun to burn the back of my hand in one spot over and over again with a cigarette.
  
  It’s all irrelevant until you start talking about prescriptions. The most popular prescription for the latest tragedy isn’t as bad as Homeland Security was for 9/11, but it’s just as illogical. We can’t be forcing ourselves to be civil just to keep from touching off a Jared Loughner.
  
  It’s like saying, “we can’t integrate the Armed Services, Mr. Truman, it will touch off some violent racists, and there will be riots in the barracks!” Well, we did it anyway, there were riots, and anyone who says “I told you so,” give them a dirty look for me.  
  
  It’s not that we shouldn’t be civil, it’s that you can’t be civil for that reason. It isn’t a sustaining reason to be decent. You have to be decent and civil to begin with. Some of you aren’t, and you know precisely who you are. Don’t strain yourselves to act civil for the sake of public safety. We’ll all see through your phony civility, including the Jareds. Be civil for the sake of your own self-respect, or forget it.
  
  Topical local applications
  
  

  The typical Seattleite is always smiling and civil.

  Most of you good readers live in the Greater Seattle area, AKA The Passive-Aggressive Capital of the World. Is this is a great place to observe phony civility in its natural state, or what? If you say it is, the teacher likes you. If you say “what,” the teacher smiles at you, says, “let’s get together sometime” and avoids you from then on.
  
  As I write this, the state legislators debate eliminating programs that help pay for mental health treatment and the survival needs of the mentally ill. This is happening because state voters wouldn’t approve higher taxes for the rich, for fear that it would cut into their own chances to be rich one day. Who’s crazy in that picture?
• 

  If It's Monday, We're In Hell

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 5:16am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 1/12/10]
  
  Here’s an expression I’m getting tired of hearing: “sign of the Apocalypse”. Now the End-Times are underway, do we really need to note that this, that, and everything else is a “sign of the Apocalypse”? Hey, it’s the End-Times, OK? If it’s morning, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s on the internet, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse. If it’s Folgers, if it walks the walk, etc. Quit rubbing it in. We’ll all die and burn for eternity except the Christians (of the correct sect.) We get it, shut up.
  
  I’m so over these End-Times. They started, as I’m sure you know, in the Summer of 1986, in the middle of Reagan’s second term. That was when the rapture occurred. My first thought, when Reagan and I weren’t rapted, was uh-oh, our lives are going to get way too interesting.
  
  Well, they did. George Bush Sr., Iraq War I, Alzheimer’s, Clinton, Monica, Kosovo, Paul Schell, George Bush Jr., 9/11, Afghanistan War, Iraq War II, MySpace -- one daytime nightmare after another. Reagan didn’t survive it.
  
  But now it’s just old. I’m sorry, I don’t have the attention span it takes to stay awake for this bore-fest. The real thing is as tedious as every end of the world movie I’ve ever walked out in the middle of.
  
  The Bible totally over-hyped it. I thought birds were supposed to fall out of the sky everywhere at once. So far, what’s it been? Kentucky, Italy, and Sweden? That’s not everywhere. I’ve only been to one of those.
  
  It turns out thousands of birds drop dead out of the sky, here and there, hill and dale, all the time, and have for hundreds of years. It just that before it didn’t get noticed as much as it does now that the world is ending.
  
  A recently homeless man is now the spokesperson for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, while Bernie Madoff sits in prison. OK, that sign is exceptionally interesting, but not enough to sustain me.
  
  I was fortunate that I missed one major sign of the Apocalypse, the reading of the US Constitution, except for the naughty bits, 30 words at a time, into the Congressional Record by the one third of Representatives who are able. I was busy doing something important, so I wasn’t at home in a zombie trance, glued to C-Span. Had I been, my innards -- bones, brain, and all -- would have liquified and spilled out my orifices, ruining my day.
  
  What matters is, with a huge federal deficit hanging over us all, the Republican Party decided it was important for taxpayers paying Congresspeople’s salaries to see them demonstrate that they know the document (or most of it) that is the basis for their jobs. This proves that US Congressbeasts are indeed human with at least 2nd grade educations, and not horses, as they were (well, one of them was) the last time end-times were rumored. Hooray.
  
  Locally, the Highway 99 tunnel project was officially handed over to the Dragados Company. (Dragados = Spanish for “pertaining to seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns,” an accurate description of a tunnel-borer.) This sign is simply annoying. Much like the collapse of the Minneapolis Metrodome. Ten years ago I might have cared. Now? Overdone. What isn’t collapsing, and what won’t be? Why should I have to keep track of every bit of it?
  
  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” blah, blah. We only wished it was that simple. We know how to deal with mere anarchy. We’re talking massive cost overruns here.
  
  An exercise by which to wait for your fiery plunge to eternal agony:
  
  List ten signs of the Apocalypse that you have witnessed since Monday. You can do it. Been on a bus? In traffic? Read a newspaper? Write them large on separate paper and arrange them chaotically at your feet. Stare at them, and contemplate the next two or three years of your life.
• 

  Goodbye, supportive housing!

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 5:10am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 1/5/11]
  
  Last week I mentioned that Anitra “Cosigner” Freeman and I have moved out from rooms where we have lived together for 13 years, into a one bedroom apartment in a different building. When I mention that the old place was supportive housing, and the new place is nonsupportive housing, some people raise their eyebrows. “Why, Wes & Anitra? Why would you give up all that warm fuzzy support?”
  
  Was I the kind of kid who hated Teddy Bears? Did I stick pins in them and kick them down stairs? Is that why I reject other people’s earnest efforts to help me through life?
  
  Well, yeah, maybe. I was the kind of kid who could spot the lie behind Teddy Bears. Why do Mommy and Daddy give you a Teddy Bear to hug? Because they don’t want you hugging them.
  
  Those earnest efforts aren’t always what they seem. Let’s talk about what supportive housing looks like to someone like me, someone who hates Teddy Bears. As usual I may exaggerate here and there, for the sport of it.
  
  I got into supportive housing because I was homeless and have PTSD. That’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for those of you who never heard of wars, but I didn’t get mine from Vietnam, I got mine from my parents. The Teddy Bear bastards.
  
  Theory was, an agency would provide permanent housing and also support tailored to my specific needs as one whose emotional wiring has been whacked. They would have professionals on staff for me, who understood me. So, at least, was it presented to me at the time I was offered the place.
  
  I may have missed something in the fine print. After all I was homeless and I just wanted off the street.
  
  However, looking back, I really think the best support I got was help leaving, just this past month.
  
  For example, how is it supportive for someone who has PTSD to subject him to three room invasions per month?
  
  To start, we had one monthly inspection. Because we’re all psychos, you see, we had to be forced to majorly clean our rooms once a month, instead of every Spring and Fall like normal people do. OK, I could see that if we really were all psychos, but guess what? PTSD doesn’t impair your ability to clean. It impairs your ability to tolerate room invasions.
  
  Old time fans of Real Change might remember that Dr. Wes here once dabbled in the graphic arts. This ended roughly 1998, around about the time I moved the art supplies into my room. I set up an easel, laying down old newspapers to protect the floor. The room invaders cried, “Clutter! Awwwk!” Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978. The easel had to be put away, the paints had to be put away, every month.
  
  That and the woman upstairs screamed all night, and once even threw a chair through her unopened window, bringing glass and chair past my window to crash 3 stories below me, while I had flashbacks of Mommy screaming and torturing me. I complained for 2 years about the effect her disability was having on mine. She was finally evicted when staff decided she was too much for them to handle. I didn’t want her gone, I just wanted a quieter room, away from hers. So I could paint between inspections.
  
  Then bed bugs invaded America, and we got an extra invasion per month because we had to be protected from bed bugs. Who’s the real bug in this room, I would ask.
  
  Then we failed one annual inspection by Seattle Housing Authority, done by a retiring inspector who’d gone postal, and it was decided that to prevent that recurring the number of room inspections should increase by another 12, because by now they were just looking for ways to push my buttons?
  
  I’m all for Housing First and supportive housing. But, can these agencies never learn that different people have different needs?
  
  
• 

  I Lie About Bricks

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 5:07am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 12/29/10]
  
  This will be almost my worst column ever. Isn’t it good to know that now? That’s how I feel. Get it over with.
  
  I have multiple excuses. There’s a world-wide recession going on. The Earth just turned on its axis. I’m writing this on Christmas Eve, and I’m being pummeled by Christmas music.
  
  Worse, through all of that, I’m working at Real Change today. Real Change vendors live on their daily earnings so we can’t close the office two days in a row. Reality sucks. So I have to be here making sure the papers are available.
  
  Worse than worse, through all that, Anitra “Ooo -- Let’s Keep This Pretty Brick Forever” Freeman and I have landed a new apartment together, and have been having to move out of our old studios. Thus, my life is now an endless repetition of putting Anitra bricks in milk crates, putting milk crates on shopping carts, and lugging shopping carts the 4 blocks uphill to the new digs. When I am not working at Real Change. Or writing. this. next. word. Anitra keeps thousands of painted bricks. I’m not lying one bit. Or did I just? Ha, ha! Yes.
  
  With all that going on, I’m supposed to make some fun while drawing out one or two cogent comments reflecting upon politics, the environment, society, the condition of modern personhood, family values, and/or homelessness, without having a permanently debilitating emotional breakdown.
  
  OK. Well. Let’s see. How about politics? What do you think of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? How long have I been whinging on about that? Isn’t it great that I’ll stop now? That’s cogent. Note to Congress: Don’t any of you dare come around asking for a pat on the back for it. You all took too long.
  
  Great. We’re making progress. Now, what can I say about the environment?
  
  This reminds me of a true story. When I was 13 I had something they called “social studies” in what they called “Junior High School” at the time. I was put on a panel of students to make a group presentation to the class on the issue of nuclear fallout from nuclear weapons testing. My specific assignment in the group was to report on the dangers of Strontium-90 in the environment to people. I studied my topic to death.
  
  My entire prepared presentation on Strontium-90: “Strontium-90 is a radioactive isotope of Strontium which has chemical properties similar to Calcium which is why the body absorbs much of it into bones where it is liable to cause bone cancer and leukemia.”
  
  Then the teacher said, “Yes, go on. What happens then?”
  
  “You die.”
  
  That story is all I can think of to say about the environment at this time. Take it as allegorical in applying it to present conditions.
  
  Speaking of present conditions, in human society news, I’m being told Lady Gaga is a guy. No way! Stop messing with me.
  
  I don’t even know what “the condition of modern personhood” means, and past-Wes wrote it less than an hour ago. Past-Wes is always making trouble for me. I think he does drugs. Modern personhood indeed. What, like people have evolved just because we have computers?
  
  Family values. Well, let’s see, a Seattle P-I story last week announced that “more than 21,000 homeless students go to school in Washington state,” an increase of 5% over the previous year. That can’t be good for the perpetuation of family values. Would somebody get on that right away? Thanks.
  
  I just talked about homelessness and family values at the same time, so I get to tick both off the list! We’re done, except for a gratuitous exercise.
  
  Exercise for the reader
  
  Load up a shopping cart with two hundred pounds of bricks, or two hundred pounds of marshmallows, or a ten stone bag of cats. Push it uphill four blocks. Imagine you were homeless and that was all the belongings you had. Pretty realistic exercise, actually.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Gratuitous Annual Christmas References

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 5:01am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 12/22/10]
  
  Let’s talk about a stupid sentence!
  
  I heard this sentence on a stupid TV news show, uttered by a stupid “conservative” member of Congress: “You can’t balance budgets by taxing.” Whaaa?!
  
  We don’t need to know who said that. We don’t want to get personal here at Adventures in Irony. We just want to laugh at the stupidity of stupid, stupid ideas. And this Dumbo’s idea is a doozy!
  
  Let’s eliminate all our taxes then, and balance our budgets your way, “conservative” Dumbo! Start flapping your ears! Hey, everybody, clear the room! Elephant flapping his ears!
  
  I’m sorry. Not only was that last comment entirely based on supposition, in that I don’t really know how the stupid “conservative” thinks budgets can be balanced without taxing, I also used a reference to a movie that 95% of my readers are too young to remember. I should have found a way to get my point across using Lady Gaga.
  
  No, let me go back even before the flying elephant movie. Let’s go back to Joseph & Mary. That’s right. It’s Christmas. Here’s my gratuitous Christmas reference. Joseph & Mary knew all about taxes. They traveled by donkey 100 miles to pay their taxes in tax season, without a hotel reservation.
  
  “So, what’s your point this time, Wes?” Well, I’ll tell you, Wes. Two thousand years ago the parents of JESUS didn’t have to be defeated in Congress to pay THEIR taxes, they paid them willingly, even when it meant riding a stinking donkey for over a week.
  
  And how does all that fit in with this “conservative” label? How is balancing budgets using taxes some new-fangled liberal idea, when 2000 years ago the Romans were funding THEIR empire by taxing?
  
  OK, let’s turn that observation around. How SHOULD the Romans have funded their Empire? Setting aside for the moment the notion that the Romans ought not to have had an empire, should they have funded it with bake sales? Rummage sales? Used book sales? Rock music benefits? Pledge drives? Subscriptions? “Your ad on this shield?” Selling naming rights to monuments?
  
  I don’t know that they didn’t do all that and a lot more! The Romans, give credit where credit is due, were very creative. They invented ipso facto. They invented indoor heated flush toilets. They invented bat spit crazy politics. They were the real inventors of French fries, which are misnamed, as you all know, only they didn’t make them out of potatoes, they used parsnips. The French today call them “Panais frits” and make you wait an hour for them, then only bring two bites worth with a teaspoon of gravy on top.
  
  But that’s beside the point! You can’t fund a whole empire charging a quarter quadrans per toilet use, or exporting fried parsnips to the Teutons. Even those and all the other tricks I’ve mentioned put together aren’t enough. Empires are very expensive.
  
  So what’s it going to be, “conservatives”? Are we going to go so far back to the good old days that we don’t even have an empire? Seriously? Are we withdrawing from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, our German bases, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Kosovo?
  
  Hell no, we won’t go. We never go. We’re going to be the Empire of a Thousand Years. So how do you fund an empire? How do you ALWAYS fund an empire? What’s the plain old normal way that all conservative governments that do things plain old-fashioned old normal ways use to fund an empire? They tax. Tax, tax and tax some more.
  
  Going into Christmas time, or whatever you heathens call it, “End of the personal year” “No COLA Time”, “Unemployment”, let’s try to keep in mind that there could be no War on Christmas if there were no Christmas, and there’d be no Christmas without imperial tax collectors.
  
  This is real conservatism: You balance budgets any way you can, and if that means raising taxes, you get on it. Grow up, people who want to call themselves conservatives.
• 

  All Men Are Smelly Rutty Ibexes

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:58am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 12/15/10]
  
  Top ten Wikileaks revelations so far.
  
  #10. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange favors Golden Trojans. Old joke recalled from college: what do you call a man who uses Golden Trojans? A. Dad. New joke for a post 9/11 world: What do you call a man who uses Golden Trojans? A. Surprising.
  
  #9. All US State Department employees and dependents agree that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is a ‘smelly rutting ibex.’ [Actually a mild family-friendly euphemism. The exact kinds of things they say about him can’t be repeated in front of impressionable children, because they’d just repeat it back to us endlessly, and spoil the fun of it.]
  
  #8. That Hamid Karzai knows that he is a ‘smelly rutting ibex’, but he doesn’t feel that should keep him and the US apart. He is enjoying having ‘a dance’ with us.
  
  #7. Iyyad Allawi, former US-appointed puppet leader of Iraq, begged us to invade Iran, at a time when we had already invaded two countries, including his, also at his insistence. We wrote him back a very polite letter, the gist of which was, “Get a life.”
  
  #6. Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak actually told US officials America should install our own dictator in Iraq once and for all, and forget this silly democracy business. At that time we told him we had Iyyad. Hosni said he had an uncle that would dictate for us for half what Iyyad was charging. We said, “no thanks,” money is no object, we just steal from the Iraqis.
  
  #5. After a German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped, rendered to Afghanistan, and tortured under the direction of the CIA, the CIA discovered they had the wrong guy and released him, and he complained. Germany was all set to prosecute the CIA operatives involved in the kidnapping, then dropped the effort after one of our ambassadors told them the United States would spank Germany if they arrested any of them.
  
  #4. While Germany was making us mad by wanting us to obey laws, a naughty judge in Spain was getting ready to prosecute no less than Alberto Gonzales, our attorney general, for allowing Spanish citizens to be tortured at Guantanamo. We sent Spain a very firm cable reminding them that children don’t tell their betters how to behave, and threatened to spank them, as well.
  
  #3. Pakistan is providing safe havens for the Taliban. We should spank them. Oh, wait, they have nukes. Never mind that, then. But we’ll keep sending soldiers to Afghanistan to die, because otherwise the terrorists will have won.
  
  #2. Hillary Clinton authorized spying on UN officials, including the Secretary General, in violation of international law that the United States has ratified. But let’s cut her some slack. After all, she’s married to Bill. She’s bound to be a little paranoid. We need to recognize, too, that paranoia is as much an ability as it is a dis-ability, and be accepting and celebratory of that fact.
  
  #1 It’s not really a Wikileak, but the main thing we’ve learned from the whole affair is that Americans believe that the US government can withdraw freedom of the press from anyone merely by unilaterally declaring that they are not a journalist. Like all the other “revelations” from Wikileaks, this only surprises the inattentive. We already knew that the average American thinks that a citizen’s legal rights can be cancelled by arbitrarily being declared an enemy combatant. So, big whoop.
  
  Nevertheless, Julian Assange and Co deserve awards, if only for proving to the rest of us that Pay Pal, Amazon.com, and MasterCard are also as cowardly as the German and Spanish governments, or as uncaring about freedom of speech and the rights of all the people of the world to know how much their governments violate their trust.
  
  And now, a completely off-topic facetious remark. There’s a rumor Hillary Clinton advised Obama to compromise on continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich. I’m sure she did, with his best interests at heart.
• 

  Goofy Is As Goofy Does

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:51am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 12/8/10]
  
  Disneyfication of the world takes many forms.
  
  I understand the impulse to Disneyfy. You want something done, but you don’t want to do it yourself, it’s too hard or too boring. On the other hand, you don’t want it done by the people who do it every day and have done it every day for years, because you don’t trust mere people. You’re a modern manager. You want it done by modern professionals. You call in Mickey Mouse.
  
  [The above does not refer to the actual Disney Corporation or the actual Mickey Mouse. I am using them as metaphors.]
  
  Illustration #1. Used to be when America was nation-building, we’d pick a spot and have our Army clear it of foreigners and funny-talkers, then have our Army Corps of Engineers build the nation we wanted. Now, we have to hand the nation building off to KBR and Halliburton.
  
  Illustration #2. I am thankful to Teresa “With No ‘Aitch” Reeves for this one. Now that TSA employees themselves are complaining about having to grope travelers at airports, there’s talk of hiring outside professionals to do it. The possibilities make my head spin!
  
  You know what they won’t do. SeaTac masseuses have been doing excellent work in this area for decades, with highly recommended happy endings. But TSA won’t hire them. They’ll hire Disney itself, and you’ll get a smelly old drunk in a Goofy suit sticking an over-sized gloved hand between your Fruit of your Looms and your looming fruit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just predicting.
  
  Or the job will be offered to clergy under the Faith Initiative, and you’ll come to think of it as part of the lingering Bush Legacy. In your pants, ha, ha, ha.
  
  Illustration #3. What the Seattle Administration is talking about doing with Nickelsville.
  
  The Nickelsville encampment has had as its goal a permanent site within the city for its own members to build permanent residential structures. The mayor’s office has come up with some potential sites. When one is chosen, what next?
  
  The people residing in Nickelsville, the Nickelodeons, have always run their own affairs and done a fine job of it. But the city is talking about asking social service agencies submit proposals for the task of managing Nickelsville. They are seriously suggesting Disneyfying Nickelsville.
  
  Even to suggest such a thing is truly insane. Nickelsville has been extremely successful as a self-run community. Its management structure is part of what it is, and it isn’t broken.
  
  When Washington applied for statehood in the 1800s Congress required the people of this territory to come up with a constitution that was “not repugnant” to the US Constitution, and to generally respect the laws and contracts of pre-existing states. Aside from that, the settlers were expected to run their own affairs.
  
  Perhaps that was a mistake. Maybe Congress and/or Benjamin Harrison should have called for proposals from social services agencies to manage the affairs of the new state. The Salvation Army, having formed in London in 1865 and being the biggest, most experienced social service agency of the day, in the entire world, would have surely got the job.
  
  So instead of becoming the Soviet of Washington at the corner of the 47 Contiguous States, we would have become the only US state that was also a territory of an unestablished English church. I’m sure it would have worked out fine.
  
  In fact, maybe we should go back and fix the mistake that was made 121 years ago. OK, probably there wouldn’t really be a lot of enthusiasm for having the Salvation Army run this state now, but maybe we can think of a good fit. I mean, the idea that people can govern themselves is a load of rot, isn’t it? We need to be managed by an organization with a track record.
  
  I know, let’s turn Washington State over to Qatar! Second highest per capita GDP in the world, home to the 2022 FIFA World Cup!
  
  
• 

  Let's Be Swell!

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:35am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 12/1/10]
  
  I think I have finally figured out my own country. For 61 years I have been trying to understand what has seemed at times as a death wish among my fellow countrypersons, at other times as a rather very-long-nap-time wish, at other times as a prolonged-stupidity wish. I now realize how wrong I’ve been.
  
  Americans really are idealists in the truest sense. In the sense of wanting the ideal life, regardless of what it takes. It’s just that, the ideal American life is something we saw on television and in the movies.
  
  The dawn of my awakening came when I saw the recent Seattle Times headline, “Washington drivers are spending less time in traffic,” along with the sentence further down, “People drove less because of economic recession, the state says.” My first thought was, “Wow, the state is smart today. Give the state a cookie!"
  
  Then I thought, “Wait a minute, Wes” (I like to think to myself in the third-person, to keep in mind who I’m thinking to) “breezy traffic is the American Dream.” When has a James Bond Lotus or Aston Martin ever been stuck in traffic? I can’t even remember a traffic jam on Dragnet. That was set in Los Angeles! We’ve been taught to think that’s the way it should be!
  
  Well, if that’s the way it should be, there should never be traffic congestion. So then, let’s bring that about. Let’s totally ignore the poor in our country. Pay them so little they can’t afford good food, much less drive to work. Take away health benefits and hope as many as possible are disabled and have to pay their gas money for oxygen instead of gasoline. If that doesn’t clear the roads, ship their jobs overseas.
  
  And we’re doing it. The ideal American Dream Driving Experience, for all the drivers left. The day isn’t far off, when Paul Allen will have the highways to himself. I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it, how wonderful and freeing it feels.
  
  It’s a little like the way we figured out how to solve the housing crisis. Kick everyone out of their homes. What crisis? But I digress.
  
  The coolest thing we’re doing is rebooting the Korean War. The Korean War, as anyone who has seen M*A*S*H knows, was the ideal war. It was funny without being cloyingly sentimental. It was tragic-comical, just the way a war should be. It followed closely after the invention of Groucho glasses and the Tiki bar, which set the tone. Best of all, it never actually ended, so it was the Peter Pan, or the Saturday Night Live, of wars.
  
  Don’t let anybody fool you. The Korean War isn’t restarting just because Kim Jongs are all nuts and because the North Koreans already have enough plutonium to do to Japan what we did, 8 times over.
  
  The Korean War is restarting because America has always wanted it to restart. We’ve sat back and encouraged policies that would isolate North Korea economically and breed and feed nutty dictators there, and our passive-aggressive codependent diplomacy has trained North Korea to threaten us periodically to get concessions.
  
  By the way, here’s a fun true fact for all you boys and girls: Kim Jong-il’s dead Dad Kim Il-sung is the incumbent Eternal President of North Korea. I think that sends a very clear message to the world, “Back off, we’ve been off our meds since 1994.”
  
  Questions just to be asking questions
  
  1.    Suppose you think the author of this column is wrong. How wrong is he? Is he Jeopardy wrong? Is he Who Wants to be a Millionaire wrong? Or is he Gong Show wrong? Punctuate your answer with an appropriate sound effect. (If you can’t do the sound effect -- no credit for you! Wah wah.)
  
  2.    Estimate the number of Posthumous Medals of Honor it would take to get North Korea to surrender, first, assuming China enters the war on our side this time, and second, assuming they go with North Korea again. How long would you wait in line for that movie?
  
• 

  I Actually Wear a Nine and a Half

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:23am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 11/24/10]
  
  Hello, Seattle Police department (SPD). Please meet Good Wes (GW) and Bad Wes (BW). GW and BW just want to talk to you for a few minutes, and address some feelings and concerns that they are having about you.
  
  Good Wes: Nice to meet you, SPD. I’m a long time fan. I’d love to talk to you some time about the great work you do, but there’s just a little problem I’ve been having. You see, we write a column for Real Change, and we’d like to use it to write about other issues.
  
  For example, the fact that Nickelsville, the homeless encampment, might settle into a long term site in SODO is great news to us, and we’d like to write about that. We’d also like to talk about misgivings we have about the process tending toward that result...
  
  Bad Wes: SPD, DO YOU THINK WE HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO THAN DRAG YOUR SORRY ASS IN HERE WEEK AFTER WEEK AND WASTE OUR HALF PAGE DESCRIBING YOUR PRECIOUS DUMPS?
  
  GW: What my partner is referring to, is a tendency your people have of harming people who are not being a threat, and a tendency you have of being less than forthcoming about that kind of behavior.
  
  Recently one of your people killed a man, and then you knowingly let a falsehood stand about the circumstances. This week it emerged one of your men kicked a suspect who was surrendering...
  
  BW: I’M LOSING PATIENCE WITH YOU, GOT IT?
  
  GW: Please forgive BW, he gets a little carried away. Understand, it’s not just the beatings and the killings that concern us. For instance, the beating, you know, was recorded, and you said the video was lost. Alright, alright then...
  
  BW: B%LLSH*T! LET ME AT HIM!
  
  GW: Now, now, he might be telling the truth...
  
  BW: OR CRAPPING OUT HIS PIE-HOLE LIKE LAST WEEK!
  
  GW: Alright then. But, getting back to the matter at hand. It then surfaced that another video was taken appearing to show your same man, the one doing the beating in the first video, assaulting a camera holder minutes after that other incident.
  
  This comes as no surprise, but what bothers us is that the Seattle P-I had occasion to report “Asked to comment on the new video, [SPD] declined to view it, citing the existing investigation into the officer.” Really, SPD? Really? Because, you’re making it very hard to control my partner here...
  
  BW: YOU WANT TO INVESTIGATE THE FACTS BUT YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE ANY FACTS THAT MIGHT AFFECT YOUR INVESTIGATING? ARE YOU F%&KING STUPID OR ARE YOU JUST COUNTING ON US BEING F%&KING STUPID?
  
  GW: Please, please, settle down. Let me get back to our fundamental issues. As I have said, we’d rather not devote so much time and space to you, SPD. We want to return to our business.
  
  We were looking forward this week in particular, to writing 666 words discussing the US external debt problem and its potential to increase US poverty, when you came around with your size 11s, and, uh, metaphorically, kicked our writing table out from under our pens...
  
  BW: I GOT A METAPHORIC SIZE 11 OF MY OWN! BEND OVER, MOTHERF...
  
  GW: Let’s not go there, BW. Let’s try to reason with Mr. SPD. Um, getting back to this beating, which occurred in October, almost a full month before the video was released to the public. The video shows a man, who has put his hands in the air to surrender, being kicked in the groin.
  
  Does the SPD want all potential suspects to believe they will be beaten even if they surrender fully? Doesn’t that promote resistance to the police? I don’t know, I just think that’s something you need to be thinking about, SPD, while the ACLU calls for that federal investigation...
  
  BW:  MY PARTNER SAID, GET YOUR HEAD OUT YOUR A...
  
  GW: Exactly. Thank you, and I hope I don’t see you here next week.
  
  
  
• 

  The Knife Hid

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:18am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 11/17/10]
  
  Last week the Seattle Times reported that when the police arrived at the scene of the shooting of John T. Williams by Officer Ian Birk in late August, they found John T’s carving knife closed. I feel compelled to spend this column discussing this one small fact and its ramifications.
  
  Actually, I tried to ease this topic off on other Real Change writers, but they were too clever to fall for my tactics. Everyone realizes that, as news goes, this is really just a two-line item. See my opening sentence. The rest is mainly, as I say, ramifications, and reporters don’t much care for ramifications, it turns out. So it got to be one of those, “Wes, you’re not a reporter, you do it” situations.
  
  I have a problem: I feel an obligation to inject humor into everything, because this is supposed to be a humor column, and because I suck even more at non-humor. But finding humor is hard, when you’re fit to spit. Where exactly might the humor be in this situation?
  
  It has to be hiding. Usually, if you don’t see it, it’s because you’re focused in too tightly. It might help me if I reflect on exactly where my outrage comes from.
  
  Within the first two days the Police Department made a number of statements that implied that the shooting was justified. One police spokesman said the wood-carver approached Birk with his carving knife in his hand. This, we all assumed at the time, was based on Birk’s own account.
  
  However, Acting Deputy Chief Nick Metz was also reported to have said that John T William’s carving knife was open. That sort of information would not have needed Birk’s testimony. The knife would have been recovered at the scene. So we, the public, were all led to believe that the knife was open.
  
  We now find out that immediately after the shooting, a police investigator found the knife closed and pictures were taken of it.
  
  There are two possibilities. Mr. Metz knew the knife was found closed and that it quite probably was closed when Williams was shot as it was a kind of locking knife not prone to close itself on a whim. Or, he didn’t know the knife was found closed.
  
  If he knew the knife was found closed, he lied outright.
  
  If he didn’t know the knife was found closed, nevertheless the investigators knew. Surely, as soon as he spoke wrongly about the condition of the knife, the investigators would have told Mr. Metz that he had misspoke, because we all know the police are not evil and don’t engage in mass cover ups.
  
  Therefore it’s pretty certain that around about September 3, Acting Deputy Chief Nick Metz knew that the public had been misled regarding what was known about the state of William’s knife at the time of the shooting. So why did we not find out about having been misled until November 9?
  
  There’s my problem. I’m focused too tightly on the fact of having been misled, and I’m assigning motives. I’m thinking, this Acting Deputy Chief thinks it’s not really a lie if you just don’t take it back when you find out it isn’t true. And this gives me the feeling that the leaders of my police department are personally pleased when they can find clever ways to lie to me, © Dr Wes. Which makes me, © Dr Wes, feel like I’m regarded as dirt.
  
  I’ve found where some humor is! I’ve been growing all this outrage because I’ve been taking this whole thing way too personally! I need to look aside from my own personal feelings.
  
  It’s not me that was shot to death for holding a folded carving knife in one hand and a board in the other, and then made out to be a villainous knife-wielding attacker.
  
  It’s not me that’s since been lied to and regarded as dirt. It’s everybody but me! I don’t even subscribe to the Seattle Times!
  
  
• 

  Actually, I Was High On Cheeseburgers

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:12am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 11/10/10]
  
  The history of elections, by me, © Dr. Wes Browning, would be a long list of poor-to-dismal elections, followed by one good one, followed by this last one. It’s not like I’m not used to disappointment. For example, I knew going into Carter vs Ford I had already lost, so, in a daze, I voted for a write-in candidate. I’ve forgotten who it was, but I think it was either the Ramones or a fireplug. Honestly, I was high.
  
  But that was the 70s, and I’ve since learned it’s wrong to binge medicate. Kids, remember! Only use state approved pharmaceuticals under proper state approved supervision by a state licensed drug prescribing agent. Don’t end up like me.
  
  We didn’t care for this last election. So we must look back on this experience and see what went wrong. Actually, we don’t really have to, but there’s this deadliney thing happening.
  
  Anitra “No Closet Organizer” Freeman had an organized thought about the election. No matter what the Republicans said, all the American people heard was, “Hey honey, you know I’ll treat you good this time; I’ll never hurt you ever again, babe... “ and the American people cried and accepted the Republicans back, and agreed the beating they got from Bush and Co. had been their own fault.
  
  That’s way better than the explanations I have, which are centered on stupid mistakes Democrats made. Oh well, here goes.
  
  First there was this law called the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. This winning bill was passed with Democrats dropping balloons and taking full credit for every aspect of it, way back at the end of May 2009. Obama had been in office just 4 months, and the American people were still cutting him slack. It sounded wonderful. Credit card companies wouldn’t be able to ratchet rates up without warning anymore. It was called the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights.
  
  However, the law wouldn’t take effect until 9 months later, exactly. Nine months calls to mind morning sickness, vomiting, endless nausea, swelling, and “You did this to me you bastard! I’m never letting you touch me again!” That was exactly how the American people felt when all the credit card companies used the nine month extension to crank rates up by an average of 20% on everyone, regardless of credit history.
  
  You could argue that the average cost of those increases for consumers for the coming year would be offset fourfold or more by the one-time economic stimulus payments most of us got -- but nobody argued that. Maybe that’s just as well, since we’ll be paying those higher credit card bills for years to come.
  
  Death panels. All the Democrats had to do was frame this as a right to life issue. The whole point of that provision of the health care reform bill was to give patients more opportunities to decide for themselves if they would want the plug pulled on them and force doctors and hospitals to abide by the patients’ wishes. But the Democrats got “right to life” stuck in their craws. Were they afraid it would compromise their support of abortion to adopt that language? It would not have. It might have even helped on that front. In any case, you can’t win elections acting as if you’re opposed to life.
  
  New Department: Predictions I can scrape by on!
  
  The boss wants this column earlier from now until ever! So to keep topical, we’re going to talk more about what hasn’t happened yet!
  
  This week’s prediction is that “Rescued Chilean miner” will become a permanent feature of our culture, joining all the other characters that made up the Village People, policeman, Indian, biker, construction worker, and GI, along with Grownup girls who fell in wells, and Outstandingly calm airline pilots under pressure.
  
  I want to see a Survivors series with all these characters plus a Crushed Democrat competing at the lonely end of some tropical island I haven’t heard of yet.
  
  
• 

  Barbara Had the Holster I Needed

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 4:06am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 11/3/10]
  
  Well, here we go again. I’m writing this Monday morning, the election is tomorrow for me and it’s at least a day ago for you! I hate it when I’m talking to somebody and they know more than I do! The only way I know to cope is to steer the conversation ever so subtly to something I know all about that you don’t.
  
  Let’s talk about games I played when I was six! The games I have in mind are ones that have been rejected in much of our society, namely, shoot-em-up games.
  
  In ‘55 and ‘56, not one person I knew was so civilized as to think it was too violent for kids with cap pistols and fake rifles and assault weapons to pretend to try to kill one another. We had basically three games -- Cops & Robbers, Cowboys & Indians, and War. War should have been Americans & Nazis, but had to be generic Good Guys & Bad Guys. “I’m not gonna be a Nazi! Oh, a Bad Guy? OK.”
  
  What sticks in my mind was what happened when Barbara, the girl who lived downstairs, wanted to play. The only way the guys could allow a girl to play was to make her a noncombatant. But she had to play because I had the hots for her. So she was effectively made Doctor, although her title was Nurse.
  
  Having Barbara be Nurse/Doctor meant each one of us could play more. When we were nearly fatally shot, which we always were, Barbara could fix us. This was done by kneeling beside the casualty, placing hands upon his stomach or chest or head, wherever it was he was experiencing agony, and uttering the words, “Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix...” Five times would usually do it. (Lesser wounds might only require two repetitions.)
  
  There was also an interesting side discussion between Barbara and I about why she didn’t care whether she had a pistol, which was more or less life-changing for me, and made me want very badly to be nearly fatally shot in the groin area, but I’ve already said too much about that.
  
  “What could this possibly have to do with anything that matters to those-of-us who know how the election turned out?” those-of-you might smugly ask.
  
  I’ll tell you. This country, state, county, and city, are all messed up because of years of politicians fixing problems virtually by saying “fix, fix, fix” over and over again.
  
  To get concrete about it, George Bush, who is slightly older than me, and certainly played many cowboys, spent more than 6 years fixing “terrorism” by cutting taxes for the rich and starting two wars. The theory, as you know, was: Cut taxes for the rich, and the economy gets better, everybody else does better (ha, ha, sure they do!), so the tax base improves and you actually end up with more in taxes from having spread all those great jobs around! It’s totally nuts! “Fix, fix, fix!”
  
  It didn’t work. But guess what? The resulting mess is still there and somebody has to fix it. And what do you think they’re going to do about it? What are the odds they’re going to do anything better than saying “fix, fix”?
  
  Another example: We just had a new terrorism scare. Two bombs equipped to detonate by cell phone were literally Fed Ex’ed from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, and the only reason we stopped them was because somebody among the terrorists snitched in time.
  
  An aspect of this attack that’s not getting much attention is that it demonstrates it’s now possible to Fed Ex bombs anywhere in the world and explode them by long distance phone calls. This technology was gleefully created and installed by your very own Department of Homeland Security and its predecessors, who wanted a way to track you wherever you took your mobile phone! “Fix, fix, fix!”
  
  Good luck to the winners of the election! May they be real Doctors and not the play kind!
  
  
  
  
• 

  We Are Not Brad Pitt

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 3:58am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 10/27/10]
  
  Having received a numerous accolade for last week’s History of Culture, I have decided to favor all with a History of Halloween this week. I began my research yesterday after dinner, so I should be finished by the end of my last paragraph.
  
  There’s a lot of confusion about whether Halloween is a Pagan holiday or a Christian holiday. The name means “the day before All Saint’s Day,” which is the day Christians celebrate all the spare saints in the spare saint bin, all your Tom, Dick, and Harry saints. By that account it’s a Christian holiday.
  
  But there’s also those who say Halloween is leftover from the Pagan Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain is a Gaelic word written with Gaelic spelling rules, so it’s not pronounced the way it looks. I believe it was pronounced “tooth decay” (silent final “n”.)
  
  Samhain was much different from today’s Halloween, however. For example, there were no Jack-o-Lanterns carved from pumpkins. Instead they made Sean-o-Lanterns from hollowed out turnips. You probably think I’m kidding! We’re having fun now!
  
  The Celtic year was divided between a dark half and a light half, with Samhain one dividing line. It was a time to let the dark and the dead mingle with the light and the living. That’s good reason to have people walking around pretending to be ghosts. It is not good reason to have people walking around being sexy cats, or dressed as packs of cigarettes, as Mario and Luigi, as an M&M, or as Karl Rove.
  
  Samhain coincided with the turnip harvest. They had games like Bobbing for Turnips and Pin the Tail on the Turnip. By the end of Samhain, huge piles of turnips were set fire and people danced around them with glee, because by that time everybody despised turnips.
  
  This brings us to the reason Trick or Treating started, which is the core of what we now think the holiday is about. It all began when the Celtic middle class vanished.
  
  One day, the Celtic people looked around themselves, and there were no middle classes. There were only rich people and poor people. The rich people had candy and coins and fancy clothes and candles and soap, and the poor people had soot, sheets, and turnips. The poor people put their sheets on with the holes cut in them for their eyes and went door to door in the rich people’s neighborhoods, doing clever poor people dances to improvised armpit music, and expected candied turnips. When they didn’t get them, they shouted “Treat! Treat!” and burned the rich people’s houses down.
  
  No, they didn’t burn the houses down. That was a fantasy of mine. Instead, having no toilet paper, only turnips, they “turniped” the rich people’s houses.
  
  Today’s Halloween doesn’t look anything like that. We use Halloween to prove we are culturally savvy. It has nothing to do with dark versus light, nothing to do with the fact that we are not yet dead, and everything to do with the fact that we are not packs of cigarettes, not Brad Pitt, and not Karl Rove. We barely notice that it’s harvest season. Our Trick or Treaters don’t dance for their candy. They are lazy.
  
  In spite of all that there are still those who persist in thinking that Halloween is a Christian holiday that somehow remains contaminated by Pagan influences, in much the same way that yoga is contaminated by demonic influences, and democracy is contaminated by Democrats.
  
  What the Christians need is a Christian Halloween that gets rid of all Pagan influences once and for all, so there’s no more confusion about it.
  
  My recommendation is for everyone involved to realized it’s just about what you’re afraid of, so if you are like Christine O’Donnell and you’re afraid of witches, then by all means dress as a witch for Halloween, just like old times. It isn’t contamination, it’s just something to fear.
  
  The rest of us can Trick or Treat in Christine O’Donnell costumes.
• 

  Custom History

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 3:52am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 10/20/10]
  
  This week Angela Merkel, the hot Chancellor of Germany that George W Bush couldn’t keep his hands off, said multiCulturalism has failed in Germany. She didn’t say it has failed elsewhere, raising the possibility that it might rather be Germany that has failed multiCulturalism.
  
  I am going to prove that neither has happened. The sentences “MultiCulturalism has failed Germany” and “Germany has failed multiCulturalism” are both logically equivalent to “We lost in Vietnam because the Earth is as flat as a plate and held aloft by a giant French waiter.”
  
  We need to understand what German-ness and “A Culture” are. We’ll look back into history and see how those things were invented.
  
  It started when some tribes overran sort-of northern Europe from the even-more northern Europe and were caught by the Romans in the midst of doing it. The Romans said, hey, this is OUR Europe. They named the land the tribes had already overrun Germania, because they felt like it. To this day, Germans don’t really call themselves Germans, but that’s beside the point.
  
  The Romans were all about kicking the “Germans” out of Germania, and the “Germans” were all about sneaking around into Austria and other places like that, whose spellings I don’t feel like looking up right now. Then the Roman Empire fell, and what was left was a whole bunch of little countries where people spoke German types of languages and enjoyed oom-pa music and ate too much sausage.
  
  Around 1815 these little countries formed a confederation. This was way hard. They had to confederate not only Austria and Hungary but an additional 4 “kingdoms”, 10 “principalities”, 14 “duchies”, 6 “grand duchies”, 4 “free cities”, 1 “electorate”, 1 “landgraviate”, and a partridge in a pear tree.
  
  In order to pull off this confederation all involved had to be convinced that they were all in one club. This provided work for philosophers just at a time when it was getting hard to make a living philosophizing, what with the Industrial Revolution and science getting all the glory.
  
  Where would this club come from? Going on many years, the big idea was the Holy Roman Empire, modeled on the Profane Roman Empire, based on the idea of citizenship. You were expected to know Latin for formal occasions and hearings and such, but you could speak anything you liked at home, and people did.
  
  So came the big breakthrough: Kultur. I mean, A Culture.
  
  Long before all this, you grew stuff in cultures. Then people started using it metaphorically. There was the social culture, consisting of language, literature and customs, that children grew up in that made them who they were. But that was still a local thing. I grew up in a culture. That guy, who lives in that village over that hill, grew up in a different culture. No two people could experience exactly the same social soil.
  
  Thus the great idea was, hey, we’ll pretend that all of these artifacts of culture, spread throughout all of these lands, are all manifestations of One Culture, A German Culture, characterized by One Language, but including disparate non-linguistic cultural characteristics as well (because simple linguistic identification wasn’t considered enough, especially in view of the fact that some of their dialects were so far apart that not all “German” speakers could understand each other.)
  
  German-ness and the concept of A Culture (as distinct from cultural influences) were thus born together, and the latter idea was the export version of the package.
  
  It was accepted all around the world, though embellished. The United States didn’t leap back into England’s arms just because we all spoke English here. It was figured that because of a revolution, we had created A New Culture, better than English Culture.
  
  But wherever the idea has been adopted it’s been as stupid as it was in the beginning. There is no such thing as A Culture. So, no such thing as multiCulturalism. So of course it fails. It gets a big fat goose-egg.
  
  
  
  
• 

  So, Bill Gates Is a Communist, Then

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 3:42am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 10/13/10]
  
  Lets talk about I-1098, so we can sound communist to people who’ve forgotten what communism is!
  
  I-1098 would institute a state income tax on “rich” people, namely those with incomes $200,000 or more if individuals, $400,000 or more if married filing jointly. In return, it’ll crank down statewide property taxes and Business and Occupation taxes. That’s really generous, since the “rich” people have most of the taxed properties anyway. It’s a little give and take.
  
  Susan Hutchison, who wishes she were King County Executive, said, while making a sad “please don’t make us be communist” frowny-frown face, “I don’t know a soul who makes $200,000 who considers themselves rich.” Ha! They’re all soul-less!
  
  Ms. Hutchison misses a key point. It’s not important whether her friends consider themselves rich, or not rich enough. What matters is what other people, those people who DON’T live on 6-8 times the state’s median income, think.
  
  The best part of the initiative is that 70% of the income tax has to go toward education, and the rest toward health. This is very important.
  
  They could have written the law so that 70% went to buy crackers and brie for Susan Hutchison’s friends. Or they could have written it so 95% of the money collected would be burned, and the other 5% used to buy the lighter fluid, wieners and marshmallows. Those would be interesting choices. But instead it’s to fund education and health.
  
  “Why is that important, Wes?” “Why don’t poor people work hard to buy their own educations and healths and leave rich people alone?” “Gasp! Isn’t that communist?” These are the sort of deep questions that make me proud to be an American in these times of deepness.
  
  For one thing rich people don’t get rich by trading each others money back and forth. They get money by paying people to work for them and keeping a share of the profits, or by loaning their money out at interest and keeping the interest, or renting property out, or by selling goods to people. All these methods require solvent less-than-rich people to feed the machine of wealth! That’s not communism! That’s how capitalism works and I JUST LOVE IT!
  
  Educations and healths cost too much now, so there’s getting to be a shortage of solvent less-than-rich people! Pretty soon there won’t be any solvent less-than-rich people, there will only be the non-solvent kind, otherwise known as poor people. When there are only poor people, rich people can only get so rich and no richer. The machine of wealth starves! Boo.
  
  Housing costs too much now, too, but we’re capping the property taxes lower, OK?
  
  So here’s the deal: in return for a tiny bite of income taxes at the high end (not near what the feds take) rich people get more educated and more healthy solvent less-than-rich people to employ, loan money to, rent and sell to. The result will be richer rich people!
  
  If you don’t think I’m right about that, ask yourself why both Bill Gates, Sr. and Bill Gates, Jr. are for this initiative. (Hint: they know how to get really rich!)
  
  Further questions to tax the credulous
  
  1. In 1960 just the rate of federal taxes alone for a married couple on the equivalent of today’s $400,000 (around $54,000) would have been more than 50%. The combined effect of today’s federal tax and I-1098 will bring that rate to only 38%. Remember the Seattle World’s Fair? Good times, huh? Too bad we were a communist country back then, paying for all those good times on the backs of the rich.
  
  2. Consider a central planned economy where all the industry is owned by the state, and a system of “taxation”, where the industry is relatively free of state controls, but profits are taxed. Find at least one difference between them. Lose the difference. Find it again. Lose it, find it, lose it, find it. Until you can’t lose it any more. Please.
  
  
• 

  Green Bleak, Next to Bleakish Green

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 3:36am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 10/6/10]
  
  “McGinn has said higher prices for street parking would free up parking slots more often, so drivers would circle the block less, reducing congestion and emissions” -- random excerpt from a Seattle Times article on the subject.
  
  Hooboy! But you have to love his commitment, don’t you? He’s all up in there!
  
  Let’s see if we can do the math ourselves. Never mind raising the parking fee from $2.50 per hour to $4 per hour. Let’s push the argument to its limit and say the fee has gone to $150 per hour. That’s 60 times the old rate and a nice round Babylonian multiplier that happens to be the number of minutes in an hour.
  
  So you could figure that if people were stretched financially to the limit, by, say, a recession, then they would park only minutes downtown when before they had parked hours. What will drivers do differently? Will they circle the block more? Will there be less congestion? No! They’d just park and not pay and wait in the spot they’re in for the tow truck to arrive, because parking on impound lots is cheaper!
  
  Seriously, why should we subsidize the middle-men? Let’s just do away with street-side parking altogether and get people to drive their cars onto the impound lots themselves. It will adversely impact the tow truck industry, but they’ll get over it. OK, I’m projecting. I’ll get over it.
  
  With everyone parking on the impound lots, collecting for tickets for overtime parking will be easy, because the lot will still hold your car hostage. Which means you’ll still be parked, so it’s a win-win!
  
  I wish Mayor McGinn had consulted me, I have so many brilliant ideas for how to improve the parking situation in this city, I could have spared him the embarrassment of revealing his.
  
  For example, here’s one that was inspired by a short story I must have read in the New Yorker before I was born. The whole idea is to raise $20 million more for the city to spend. What we do is, we let everyone park anywhere they can. Then January 1 we pick a parking space at random and charge the owner of the car in it $20 million. If they’re rich enough, and they can pay, great, we’re done for the year, nobody else has to pay. If they can’t pay, we stone them, use them to fertilize our crops and appease the Arugula Goddess, and then we repeat the process January 2. And so on.
  
  Eventually, either someone will pay for all our parking for the remainder of the year, or all the stoning will be a disincentive to parking, which will result in more bus and bicycle use, less congestion and less fumes, and an all around greener city. Bleak, but a green bleak. Greenish-bleak is a gorgeous color, now available in boxes of 256 crayons.
  
  Here’s another idea that’s better than the mayor’s: Bidding!
  
  That’s right, we auction space off! All the street parking is to be paid for annually. You want to park on the street in a formerly metered space? You purchase an annual permit and you can display it to park anywhere, anytime. The catch is there’s only going to be a tenth as many permits as drivers that want them, so we’ll auction them off one-by-one. Get yours early ‘cause the last few are going to be really pricey!
  
  I’m on a roll! How about this? We go ahead and we outdo the mayor and charge a whole $10 an hour per space, but we’re tricky about it -- we make one area of downtown absolutely free every day. This doesn’t solve anything except for the lucky stiffs who get there early and hog a space all day, but it gives everyone else hope that they’ll be lucky some day, too. Welcome to Seattle, the City of Hope!
  
  One more: You want drivers to circle the blocks less? Make them pay a turn permit!
  
  
  
  
• 

  Temerarious, I Say!

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:51am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 9/29/10]
  
  Sometimes I see a story in the news that is so audacious I immediately think “Whhaat?” and I think, “I have to write about that,” and then I think, I can’t. It’s so audacious it’s not of this world.
  
  Here is an impudent example. This story was in the news six months ago, and I passed it up. A girl was expelled from a “Catholic” preschool in a place called Boulder, Colorado, Planet Z, Galactic Sector D, because she has two mommies. I have placed quotes around “Catholic” because this is surely one of those alien varieties that strains the sense of the word small c catholic to the breaking point.
  
  What would Alien Jesus do? The Earth Jesus certainly wouldn’t deny a preschooler an education because she has two mommies.
  
  What’s that, you say? They didn’t deny her an education? They only denied her one at their school? Well, there we go stretching that word catholic. The THEORY is, that what this school does in the name of ITS religion, is what they expect all of us to do. That’s a corollary of catholicity. So their way would deny educations to all little girls that have two mommies, from preschool on. Nothing special about preschool, that’s just where they nipped this little girl’s non-standard parent-having behavior in the bud.
  
  In another story I HAVE ranted about, two 16 year-old high schoolers were expelled from their private “Christian” high school for being lesbians. My previous rant had to do with the fact that the principal had no business inquiring into their sexuality. But there’s another side to the story, a more impudent side, that begs for additional ranting. Since when do minors even get to have sexual orientations?
  
  OK, I get it, if instead of playing cops & robbers, Johnny plays interior decorator, you can guess which way he’ll swing. But, you only get to guess. The kid’s not fully formed. He can’t know himself, yet. The girls are alleged to have kissed. You’ve kissed your grandmother. Does that make you a grandmother-lover? The answer is probably no, and you are sure because you’re old enough to have sorted it out. If you’re 16, you don’t know what you are, I don’t know what you are, the principal doesn’t know what you are, court is in recess, everybody shut up.
  
  As I say, these stories are so impudent and temerarious, that I ordinarily would pass them up. The only thing that got me to change my mind this time is the contrasting case of Major Margaret Witt. She is the US Air Force nurse who served as a lesbian adult for 17 years, and knew it, and never told. Instead, someone else told, and she was discharged anyway.
  
  My first thought reading that was, am I the only person speaking English here? What does “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” mean to these people? Then I learned the real answer. Not only is the idea to require servicemen and women to be dishonest about who they are, the idea is for the military itself to be dishonest about their own policy.
  
  In public they persist in identifying the policy as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But actually 10 USC § 654(b) doesn’t really say “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It says don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t be outed by a third party, unless you want to prove in court that you AREN’T a homosexual. But, if you are and you say you aren’t in court, that’s perjury (and grounds for discharge), and if you are and you admit it, that’s “telling,” and grounds for discharge.
  
  So, in other words, the law that everyone has been bandying around, calling it “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and claiming it has some kind of relationship to Bill Clinton’s original presidential order actually has no different effect than the law had before Bill Clinton. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has just been one big long propaganda campaign. Thanks to Maj. Margaret Witt, we now know that!
  
  
  
  
• 

  The Author Connects Everything to the Toilet

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:46am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 9/22/10]
  
  Brace yourself for a truly awful column written by me, © Dr. Wes Browning. Worn out complaining about police brutality, homelessness, and wars, I’m reduced to sputtering about Christine O’Donnell and what she has to do with generalities. You might want to “go potty” before reading further.
  
  I can’t get O’Donnell out of my mind. The devil will get me.
  
  First thought: How did Bill Maher know way back in 1996 that, 14 years later, America would want to know how Christine O’Donnell felt about masturbation, or being a phony high school witch? I wish I had that kind of prescience.
  
  I’d never ask a 27 year-old what sexual practices she approves. Who cares, I’d say. Bill Maher cares. That’s why Bill Maher gets the show and the fame and the money that comes with it, and I get to watch it on the TV with my hand down my pants.
  
  Second thought: Let’s be fair. That was then, this is now. She’s come right out and said that she won’t govern based on her religious beliefs, she’ll be a strict Constitutionalist. Regarding her brush with what she now calls Satanic beliefs, she says she’s learned from it. “I know what it's like to live a life without principle.” Something to fall back on.
  
  Since she wants to be a strict Constitutionalist I’d prefer she’d know what it’s like to live with principle. But let’s give her credit for meeting us halfway.
  
  “What does she have to do with generalities, Wes?”
  
  A. Look at ugly bell peppers.
  
  Do it! Go to your local supermarket. Find the produce section. If it’s a good supermarket you’ll find what they call heirloom peppers. They come in a tray, all different colors and there’s always a fugly one. What’s that about? They’re the exceptions, that’s what.
  
  Generalities, as opposed to exceptions, is about McDonald’s. It’s about Monsanto. It’s about Foster Farms chickens, homelessness, Texas textbooks, No Child Left Behind, WASL, Demopublicans, NAFTA, global warming, bed bugs, Fox News, talk radio, and the Real Change Cat, Sid Vicious.
  
  What do these things have in common, you ask? They’re all constipated or signs of constipation, that’s what.
  
  It’s simple mathematics. It’s starts with anal retention. You hold in the nasty. You “miss your train” as they say. More accurately, you partially derail the train, another gets jammed up behind it, and another, and they all get squeezed trying to use the same tunnel.
  
  Your general modern world is anal. Christine O’Donnel is both anal and exceptional. She wants to be a strict Constitutionalist, but she can’t be, because Constitutions and strict don’t go together. That’s how you get backed up, trying to be con-stricted and well-Constituted at the same time.
  
  Everybody wants everything just so. Nothing can be messy. Monsanto doesn’t even think plants should be allowed to reproduce by themselves. Fox News can’t stand the thought that any liberal might have a good idea now and then.
  
  Everything has to be under control, and there’s two ways to do that, one expensive, and one cheap. The expensive way is to force everyone to do it your way. The cheap way is to get everybody wanting to do it your way.
  
  Here’s an experiment. Say to your spouse, parent, child, best friend, “you want to go to the frig and get me a [insert beverage of your choice]?” Later on try telling them, “do it or else.” They might do it both times, but you’ll pay in grief for the second approach.
  
  The general world is being constipated to death by corporate propaganda telling you how to live & what you want, for the convenience of anal controlling corporations, who don’t care about the long term consequences. Just because it’s done with nonviolent persuasion doesn’t prevent the inevitable disaster.
  
  Eventually something has to give. You can’t control everything. If you try, like the Demopublicans have been trying, something exceptional is going to leak out. In this case she’s prepared to out-anal us all.
  
  
• 

  Pastor Jones Thinks This Rant Is About Him

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:39am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 9/15/10]
  
  Last week I went on honeymoon with Anitra “Kisser Ichiban” Freeman. I say this like I had a choice, like I could have gone with Lady Gaga, or maybe Larry King. Anyway, I enjoyed it, which meant I couldn’t enjoy it.
  
  I need rant material! How can I be happy if I’m too happy to rant?
  
  After we got back, things picked up a bit. The Pastor Terry Jones was threatening to burn a bunch of Qurans (spelling optional). I could envision an entire column consisting of paragraphs beginning, “How stupid is Pastor Terry Jones? He is so stupid that... “
  
  A taste: Pastor Jones is so stupid he hates a book he’s never read. Pastor Jones is so stupid he closes his eyes when he drives through a Muslim neighborhood. Pastor Jones is so stupid, every morning he burns his pancakes, because he prefers toast.
  
  By the way, the word pastor comes from the Latin expression for “he leads us to pasture.” Some pasture it is, that’s warmed by bonfires of burning books. “Hey! We need more pitchforks over here!” “Is that sulfur I smell? How pastoral!” We were going to let him burn books on the grounds that we have freedom of speech in this country. Free to write books, free to read books, free to give books away, and with all that freedom Pastor Jones is so stupid he would rather burn books.
  
  Meanwhile, a 23 year-old in Texas sparked debate on this very issue of free speech by skateboarding up alongside another would-be Quran-burner and snatching his Quran from him. Did he violate the Quran burner’s right of free speech, by depriving him of his fuel?
  
  I’m reminded of the law in Seattle that prohibits taking, say, cut flowers from a dumpster behind a florist, because, the legislative reasoning went, they aren’t yours. As I recall, when the law was applied to an actual dumpster-flower thief, the judge fined the miserable thief one dollar, and then ordered the florist to pay all the court costs, because the judge said it was frivolous to go to court over a “theft” of something rejected and tossed away.
  
  There are those who say that when they throw anything in the trash, it’s still theirs. A former acquaintance, when he had to get rid of a TV, smashed it before tossing it in the alley. “This way,” he said, “at least if they steal my TV, they won’t get any use out of it.”
  
  The trouble with applying this extended ownership theory is that if you can extend your ownership forward past the point at which you have thrown a thing away, that opens up prior claims on the same property. In this case the former acquaintance had actually retrieved that very TV from someone else’s trash, so by his own theory, his TV was not actually his, and therefore it was not within his rights to smash it.
  
  The way I see it, if there’s such a thing at all of violating someone’s freedom of speech, there has to be such a thing as violating someone’s freedom of speech in a frivolous and inconsequential manner. And specifically, that thing would be, snatching a Quran away from someone who was only going to burn it.  
  
  Exercises to Facilitate Auto-Entertainment
  
  1. Pastor Jones doesn’t read Arabic. Outline the pilot episode of the sitcom based on that fact. Hint: Jones buys what he thinks are 500 Qurans for a BBQ, but his happy-go-lucky Arab neighbor “Ahmed” can see they are actually Arabic New Testaments. As Ahmed debates whether to tell him, comedy unfolds.
  
  2. Since 1999, we haven’t had freedom of speech. We’ve had free speech zones. Where should we put the free Quran-burning zones?
  
  3. Take two pieces of paper. On one, list all the rights we’ve been denied because “we’re at war” and “it’s a post 9-11 world”. Feel sad, don’t you? OK, now on the other one, write “meh can burnz Qu-ranz, LOL!” Feel better?
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  When Right Is Too Durn Complicated

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:35am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 9/9/10]
  
  I was impressed this week by Tony Blair’s characterization of George W Bush. He said Bush has immense simplicity. That is some humongous accuracy.
  
  I’ve been thinking about that, and how George was a “git’r done” kind of guy, and realizing that there’s a lot to be said for that. I mean, I never much cared for what he got done, but you know, sometimes having things happen that are bad is better than having nothing happen at all. At least you can react.
  
  One of the things George W Bush got done was “No Child Left Behind,” an immensely simplistic law with an immensely stupid and offensive title (it’s a veiled reference to Christian end-times mythology). In fairness, Ted Kennedy supported it, and it passed both houses overwhelmingly, proving immense simplicity doesn’t only belong to conservatives.
  
  The liberals liked NCLB because it gave more federal money to schools. The conservatives liked it because it promised to shut off funding to schools that performed badly based on the immensely simplistic measures of standardized tests.
  
  So why am I talking about all this now? Since when do I care whether other people’s spawn get good educations or not? Hah! Never!
  
  But I know a winning idea when I see one, and I’m going to run with it! Here’s my proposal: A “No Civilian Left Dead” Act.
  
  There’s already a lot of federal funding for state and local police. That’s because Homeland Security funds “first responders” and part of the whole “terrorist/ bad guy / foreigner” thing that we have simplistically decided to respond to is the drug distribution that we’ve simplistically decided to make illegal. So let’s say your police department wants more cool guns. You tell the feds you need them to “defend” yourselves from drug dealers, they might just give you the money to buy them.
  
  But guns aren’t everything. You also want money to pay you and your cops more, so you all can take in an opera or a musical, time to time, or buy toaster ovens.
  
  So here’s the plan: We pass out way more federal money to state and local police departments. We suggest they use it for “peace-keeping,” wink-wink, but really they can use it for anything they want, even live Chippendales revues, if that’s how they roll. This will get the conservatives aboard, they love throwing money at people in uniforms who order other people around. So long as they’re American uniforms.
  
  But here’s the catch that’s going to make the liberals happy. We keep track of all these police agencies, and count how many civilians they blow away in the course of any given year.
  
  We don’t let them say, “No fair, our district has more criminals than other districts, that’s why we have to kill more.” We tell them, “If you have more criminals, it’s your own fault. We gave you the money to keep the peace. The more people you have to kill, the more you prove you are failing your mission.”
  
  Of course, where the immense simplicity figures in, is that when we decide a police department is failing their mission, on account of having to kill too many people, we will just stop funding them altogether, as if that was all it took. Hah, hah! If only! But that kind of stupid thinking was good enough for the Republicans and Ted Kennedy and “No Child Left Behind,” so it’s good enough for me!
  
  Hypothetical questions for further provocation:
  
  The Soviets allegedly had so-called Potemkin villages where spies could immerse themselves in American culture before trying to operate here. Do you think US police departments should have training programs of that kind to teach law enforcement officers how human beings act? If there were such programs, might cops be trained to know what carving is? Or is that beyond their natural abilities, akin to trying to teach a dog how to finger a clarinet? Are you like me, and thinking of the word “finger” a lot lately?
  
  
• 

  Down & Out of the Market

  Posted: January 17th, 2011, 2:28am MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 9/1/10]
  
  A lot of people think the United States is a collapsing empire. For example, Chris Hedges, some guy I heard of, said recently, “Our empire is imploding. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague.” Gee, Chris, try to look at the bright side. The Empire is imploding! Yay! Cue the dancing Ewoks!
  
  I was poking some facts the other day and made an interesting discovery, relating to the disparity of income in the US and the cost of living. I have to explain a bit before I can get to the discovery. Please hang on.
  
  That the cost of living in this country for poor people is high is only partly due to inflation. Much of it is due instead to the loss of affordable goods and services. Faced with a choice between marketing to the rich or to the poor, with fewer and fewer people in-between, corporations looking at the bottom line naturally choose marketing to the rich. So poor people can’t find Piggly Wigglies. JC Pennies vanish, to be replaced by JC Benjamins. Pay phones disappear. Dollar stores soon sell actual dollars, and nothing else.
  
  The result is an economy in which poor people can no longer scrape by on the scraps they can buy, because there are no scraps that cheap available. This is not true yet with regard to clothing, but will be if the trend continues. It is true with regard to decent food, that’s why there are food banks, food stamps, soup kitchens, and indecent food like Chicken McNuggets. And it’s true big time in regard to housing and health care.
  
  There are three ways out of this mess. Two of them require the rich to make sacrifices: Either accept higher taxes and let the state subsidize the poor, something that’s not politically popular, or correct the wage and salary disparities that got us here. That last approach would be the logical and moral thing to do. Unfortunately, it takes more from the rich to pay themselves what they are really, truly, worth, than it does to tax them enough to enable poor people to merely survive.
  
  What’s the third way out? Well, you could put underpaid poor people who can’t pay their own way in a ruined economy into work-prisons.
  
  This last solution has been trotted out lately by a Tea Party candidate for governor of New York, Carl Paladino. His idea involves making the imprisonment “voluntary”, but, you understand that as prison becomes a voluntary option, decent wages and/or state subsidies (the other two solutions) will not be happening. So the choice will really be, go voluntarily, or when you break the law just surviving because no other option was left to you, you can go involuntarily.
  
  Paladino’s approach has been used before in this country. The last time it was used it was called Jim Crow.
  
  So, anyway, here’s what I discovered, crunching the numbers. My first thought was that Carl Paladino’s idea could be shot down by a simple cost-benefit analysis. I thought it would cost more, marginally, to the rich, to imprison the poorest of the poor, than to either fix the economic disparity or pay the taxes to correct the harm the economic disparity cause. So we could stop the rich and the corporations they rule us with from using this approach, because it would not further enrich them.
  
  Instead, I found, today’s modern prisons are relatively efficient, and imprisoning everybody in the country who makes less than 50% median income would save the rich money. They can be more rich!
  
  Well, you know what they say. Corporate boards have fiduciary obligations. They may not want to do a thing, because it’s wrong, but you know, their hands are tied, they have to look out for the stock holders.
  
  So let’s celebrate the imploding Empire! If we’re lucky it will implode before we have to volunteer for prison.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  The Lions Will Lie Down With the Lambchops

  Posted: January 16th, 2011, 2:01pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 8/25/10]
  
  Let’s talk about justice, equality, ethics, and decency!
  
  Ha, ha! Did I get you going? Actually, we’ll abuse wishy-washy liberals today. First, let’s define “wishy-washy” in the context of “liberal”. This may take space. I sure hope so.
  
  Here’s my great insight. People of all political varieties, not just liberals, when faced with a situation that calls for a judgment, may miss the crux of the matter by letting themselves get lost in side issues. It only tends to look “wishy-washy” when liberals do it.
  
  Take the “Mosque at Ground Zero” debate. The Republicans wrote and got passed a law that prevents New York or any one else from stopping the Islamic Center. When Newt Gingrinch misses that central crux, he misses it much the way a tank rolling down the road overlooks a lame pigeon. There’s a crunching sound. We don’t call the conservative Newt “wishy-washy” when he annoys us in this way. We call him “belligerent” or “jerk-tastic”.
  
  Whereas, when liberals annoy us by missing some point, we discover them playing in the liberal sandbox of ethical relativism respectfully disagreeing amongst themselves over whose rights take priority over whose needs, historical patterns of oppression, and whether one person’s offense offending another person’s offense is more offending than the offenses going the other way around and backwards.
  
  So President Obama reminds us that the Imam has the right to build the center, and then turns around and says that saying so doesn’t necessarily mean building it would be the best thing to do. The best thing for who to do? Pee Wee Herman? Shut up.
  
  So, by “wishy-washy” I’ll mean, that particular losing sight of right and wrong that happens by being blinded by dreams of a liberal paradise in which all that is best and perfect will poop out of a grand consensus that even conservatives will join in. The lions lying down with the lambs, as it were, frolicking with them in the clover. And even the clover sees that what we, lions and lambs, all of us, will have decided, is for the absolute very best for every living thing in the world.
  
  Conservatives rarely appear wishy-washy, simply because the conservative paradise doesn’t involve consensus. The conservative paradise involves you doing what you’re told. So conservatives that get sidetracked merely forget their own principles & tell you to do what they wouldn’t, if their heads weren’t also sidetracked to where the sun don’t shine.
  
  “Hey! What brought this on, Wes?” Well, Anitra “Legal As The Day She Turned Eighteen” Freeman was playing with conservatives on the Interwaste the other day and dredged up a year and a half-old story of two girls being expelled from a private religious high school, having been both successfully accused of being lesbianic, and she thrust it out, asking the right & wrong of it.
  
  By the time I found the discussion Anitra began, there were some thirty interweaving comments all along the lines of, golly, freedom sure is complicated, isn’t it? How will we ever sort out the competing interests here? Freedom of religion versus the right to one’s sexual orientation?
  
  Here’s how you sort it out. Forget the liberal sandbox. Forget freedom of religion. Forget sexual orientations. Forget competing interests. Forget that it was a school and a school principal.
  
  When do adults have the right to traumatize minors by conducting inquisitions into their sexuality or their sexual feelings for one another?
  
  If the religion sanctified child-rape and the parents consented to have their children go to a school that meted out rape in the principal’s office, would the parents’ consent stand in for the consent of the children? Newsflash: Grilling teenagers with prying questions about their sexual feelings amounts to emotional rape.
  
  A judge ruled that the girls could be expelled based on grounds of religious freedom to believe that lesbians are “wrong”. The judge was wrong to allow that to even be the issue. The issue was and remains, you don’t harm children that way.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Feed Your Head

  Posted: January 16th, 2011, 1:55pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 8/18/10]
  
  I want to advocate for better education in our public schools.
  
  During the recent heat wave I could keep cool and comfortable because I learned years ago how to move about in downtown Seattle almost entirely indoors. Great trick when raining, too! It’s even easier now, with the bus tunnel. They should teach such Architectural Exploitation Technology in schools.
  
  Or consider this: You learned in your Civics Class that it was your responsibility to keep abreast of the news. Even though you laughed because the teacher said “a breast” you knew it was right. But how do you keep abreast of so much annoying stupidity without going crazy or being bored?
  
  The answer I’ve learned is, turn the news into a sitcom or movie in your head, and you’re suddenly being entertained, just like you were brought up to be!
  
  Here’s a recent example from my own life. I was reading about the opposition to the “Mosque at Ground Zero”. This news is stupid on several counts. 1) It’s not a mosque. 2) There’s already been a mosque in the neighborhood for decades. 3) Muslims were killed in the WTC attacks. 4) Give me a break, we’ve got a First Amendment. 5) You don’t need 5 reasons, those 4 were enough.
  
  The place is really going to be a community center. It’ll be a Muslim alcohol-free Cheers! People will come and go all day ribbing each other and playing practical jokes on one another. There would be very amusing sexual tensions between regular characters. Since the center will operate pretty much like a YMCA, there can be a running feud with an actual YMCA uptown. In one episode a challenge between the rival community centers would end with the Islamic center filled with goats.
  
  Another example is provided by news associated with Seattle’s own People’s Harm Reduction
  Alliance. They got national attention recently when it was reported that they not only were distributing clean needles, but also safe(r) crack-kits. It led to a spot with Bill O’Reilly and FOXNews.com ran a piece on how the crazy liberals in Seattle were running amok.
  
  A comment to the FOXNews.com story simply said, “That’s why I pack whenever I go to Seattle.”
  
  Dawn of the Living Liberal Crack-Addict Enablers! So we have a busload of tourists, all but one of which is a wishy-washy liberal. Their idea of packing properly for a trip to Seattle is to bring rain-gear and a change of socks.
  
  Not our hero, played by your favorite tough action ass-kicker. Since I’m old, I picture Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger, or Clint Eastwood (a la Dirty Harry). He knows what “pack” means. He’s got enough hardware in his luggage to take on the entire city. All he has to do is persuade the other tourists to get spines, aim and pull triggers.
  
  At first the others just want to turn tail. They stop and ask directions to the airport. Polite Seattle liberals are glad to tell them the best way out of the city, but as more and more arrive to give directions, Bruce/Arnold/Clint sees through their courteous facade and mows them down with two M2s, one in each hand.
  
  Pretty soon hundreds of helpful Seattle lefties are bearing down on the tourists, offering them crack pipes, sterilized needles, directions to Pike Place Market, and eating their brains. Eventually the tourists come over to our hero’s way of looking at things, when too many of them get bit and themselves turn into extreme left-wing nut cases.
  
  Hearing about the new Seattle Founder’s Festival I thought of a remake of Here Come the Brides. It would be a reversal on the Three’s Company premise. Asa Mercer didn’t know it, but all the male pioneers in Seattle were gay. Why else would they have come to Seattle, knowing there were no women there?
  
  Try it yourself! It makes the news easier to follow and seeing movies and TV shows in your head prevents eyestrain!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  There Is No What, Only Duck

  Posted: January 16th, 2011, 1:50pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 8/11/10]
  
  I’ve found over the years that an awful lot of people are not at all amused when I ask them the difference between a duck. They’re supposed to say, “One of its legs is both the same,” or “Why is a mouse when it spins?” or at least, “Huh?” Instead they scowl at me and say, “What’s the difference between a duck and what?”
  
  There is no what, only duck. Anyone who isn’t amused by this surely is in for a hard life. Apart from there being no what, what else is there to laugh about?
  
  Sometimes people refer to the Existential Choice. The thing that’s important to understand about the Existential Choice, the thing that makes it of note, is that there is no Existential Choice. It’s usually presented as a choice between being animate or being inanimate. That isn’t it. The choice is: You are, or you are.
  
  Yesterday, a Real Change vendor was at the office and wanted to know how to get somewhere by bus. She used one of the Real Change computers to access the so-called online Metro trip planner, and entered a starting location and destination to get an itinerary. The so-called Metro trip planner then asked her to select which of one possibility she might have meant her starting point to be among.
  
  It’s like being at a Chinese restaurant, and there is no column A or C, there is only column B. But the menu still says “choose one from column.” You can ask, “One from column what?” Sorry, there is no column what.
  
  Most Americans are used to choices. If anything, they’re used to being inundated with choices, to the point of being unable to make decent decisions. But in reality -- that is to say, in the ordinary world away from the fairyland-Disney-World knockoff we’ve made of this country out of all the wealth we’ve grabbed -- in reality, there is no what, there is only duck, and you should laugh.
  
  There are few choices, and few differences, in a life lived to the bone, which is the kind of life most people live on this planet. And those differences as there are, are choices between window dressing, and colors of tinsel and wrapping.
  
  We forget that Hamlet was a stinking Prince. It isn’t “To be or not to be” for the majority of us non-Princes. It’s to be woke up on just another cold wet morning, and it’s not even my rooster to strangle, and it’s not my land, and it’s even not my morning, my cold, nor my wet, and “move on, buddy.”
  
  When Americans think luxuries they tend to think of things. Yachts, Lamborghinis, champagne, stuff you could get in principle if only you could afford it. But the real luxury is the luxury of going to war against anyone you want, any time you want, just because you’re afraid of them.
  
  “There is no try, only do,” said the toy of a rich director. In the real world, there’s no do, either. There are no roads there, the spaceship don’t fly, and you’re not endowed with the ability to channel the power of all life.
  
  America, on the other hand, can kill and kill and kill, and not even be required to tally the innocent dead children that result. That’s luxury. That’s making a difference in the world, one that you don’t need to make.
  
  When Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary I braced myself for the predictable counter-attack. I knew the government would say that the information compromised the security of our soldiers and allied soldiers, agents and informants.
  
  Isn’t it nice though, to have the luxury of a security to be compromised?
  
  Isn’t it nice, to have so much security that the prospect of other nations dropping cluster bombs on our citizens is almost nil? America has the luxury of continuing to manufacture, sell, and use cluster bombs, in the face of a world-wide ban that our government refused to sign.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 

  Statusability?

  Posted: January 16th, 2011, 1:39pm MST by Dr. Wes Browning

  [from 8/4/10]
  
  Ordinarily I don’t like to talk about my personal life in this column. I try to think of something that concerns everyone. Then I start to talk about it, and realize that in order to squeeze 666 words about that subject, I’d need to make up too many facts and examples. So I give in and write what I know about. Me.
  
  This time it’s different. The Personal and the Universal collide, as it were. They get close and sweat all over each other, as it were. Then, 13 years later, they get hitched, as it were.
  
  Anitra “On Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept, She Of Many Associations, She Who Erotically Stimulates Tomato Plants, She Who Needs No Last Name” Freeman, and I, will be getting “more married” this week.
  
  We are expecting to be married, or mix-married, by 8 or more officiators, representing 6 or more faiths, depending on how you cut them.
  
  “How is that Universal, Wes?” -- you might well ask. Not everyone is marrying my Ducky. My Ducky! Not your Ducky!
  
  True, but other people marry. And, more to the point, still other people mess with other people’s marriages and mess with other people on the basis of their marital statuses and non-statuses, and they mess with other peoples’ statusability even, through support and/or lack thereof of public policies concerning such, through their lawfully elected public officials.
  
  For instance, I was looking forward to Anitra or I being able to collect the other’s Social Security after I or Anitra, respectively, were dead. I was just now horrified to learn that to do that, Anitra or I would have to wait a whole ten years to kick the bucket. No fair, we’re both 61! That law discriminates in favor of whippersnappers! Goddamn whippersnappers! Get off my lawn!
  
  Where was I? Oh, yeah, and get this: Anitra just told me I can’t collect even if she lasts ten years and then I push her off a cliff. This totally flies in the face of reason. I mean, dead’s dead, right? Shouldn’t that be all that matters? But no, it’s against the rules.
  
  Here’s another example of irrational rules regarding married people. I wasn’t thinking of applying for Food Stamps for us, but I decided to look up the rules anyway, just to find something stupid there to write about now, and as usual I wasn’t disappointed!
  
  A single person making $400.15 per week or less can get food stamps. For every additional person in your household, starting with the spouse, the cut-off income goes up not $400 a week per person, but only $138.46 a week per person, give or take a penny.
  
  So the law assumes that there are no additional living costs at all except the additional cost in food. You wouldn’t need maybe a larger apartment to put all those bodies. What about the live-in mother-in-law? The new kids from the previous marriage? What if I don’t have enough closets to stuff them all in?
  
  Fortunately, Anitra and I won’t have a live-in mother-in-law, as they’re both already dead, but I worry for others who aren’t as fortunate as we are.
  
  Likewise, Anitra and I are of almost the opposite sexes. (I cook and do the dishes.) I wish everybody could be of the opposite sexes, but alas, that would require nearly 7 billion sexes, all of which would have to be totally opposite.
  
  Were it always so, internet porn could never have come into being, and, as a result, the tools that made Facebook and all other life as we know it today would not have been possible.
  
  Indeed, God, in Her infinite Wisdom, made us two sexes in order to enable the marketing of porn, and so stimulate media innovation.
  
  Therefore we have only approximately two opposite sexes, and so there are not enough to go around, and some people are caught without.
  
  That isn’t right. Let’s make marriage more Universal than ever, now!
  
  
  

Joel on Software

• 

  The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions

  Posted: January 5th, 2011, 9:59am MST

  “Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites?”

  — From The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions, over on the Stack Overflow blog.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Stack Exchange for Jewish Life and Learning

  Posted: December 9th, 2010, 10:56am MST

  

  It seems like Stack Exchange is the perfect platform for questions about Jewish observance. After all, most of the Talmud reads just like Stack Overflow: a question, followed by multiple answers, usually with the highest ranking answer appearing first. The number of questions is infinite.

  If you would be interested in participating in such a thing, please commit to the proposal today.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Tablets

  Posted: December 2nd, 2010, 12:39pm MST

  "If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit

  Posted: December 1st, 2010, 6:16am MST by Steve Yegge

  The worldwide Haskell community met up over beers today to celebrate their unprecedented discovery of an industry programmer who gives a shit about Haskell.
  
  On Wednesday, researchers issued a press release revealing that 27-year-old Seth Briars of North Carolina, a Java programmer at Blackwater accounting firm Ross and Fordham, actually gives a shit about Haskell.
  
  "Mr. Briars has followed every single one of our press releases for years," the press release stated. "Probably even this one."
  
  Haskell researcher Dutch Van Der Linde explained how they had stumbled on the theoretical possibility of Briars and his persistent interest in Haskell. "We knew that there are precisely 38 people who give a shit about Haskell," said Van Der Linde, "because every Haskell-related reddit post gets exactly 38 upvotes. It's a pure, deterministic function of no arguments -- that is, the result is independent of what we actually announce. But there are only 37 of us on our mailing list, so we figured there was a lurker somewhere."
  
  "That, or it was an off-by-1 error not detectable by our type system," Van Der Linde added. "But we don't, uh, like to dwell on, I mean with good unit testing practices we can, um... sorry, I need to get some water."
  
  As Van Der Linde stumbled off in a coughing fit, his fellow researcher Bonnie MacFarlane outlined their basic dilemma: "Finding a person who gives a shit about Haskell is an inherently NP-complete computer science problem. It's similar in scope and complexity to the problem of trying to find a tenured academic who didn't have the bulk of his or her work done by uncredited graduate students. So even though we suspected Briars existed, we needed a strategy to smoke him out."
  
  She explained the trap they set for Briars: "We crafted a fake satirical post lampooning Haskell as an unusable, overly complex turd -- a writing task that was emotionally difficult but conceptually trivial. Then we laced the post with deeper social subtext decrying the endemic superficiality and laziness of global industry programming culture, to make ourselves feel better. Finally, each of us upvoted the post, which was unexpectedly contentious because nobody could agree on what the reddit voting arrows actually mean."
  
  "And then we waited to see who, if anyone, would give a shit," she said.
  
  MacFarlane concluded, "Our elegant approach didn't work, so we hired a Perl hacker to go dig up the personal details on all 38 accounts that had ever upvoted a Haskell post, and the only one we didn't know was Seth Briars. So we reached out to him, and thankfully so far he hasn't threatened to sue us."
  
  Briars says he is pleased to have been recognized for his apparently unique shit-giving about Haskell. "I've been giving a shit about Haskell for a long as I can remember. I follow all their announcements and developments closely, just in case I ever get the urge to use the language for something someday."
  
  "It's a beautiful, elegant language," Briars observed as he busied himself cleaning a fingernail. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a more expressive and composable core. And they've made astounding advances over the years in performance, interoperability, extensibility, tooling and documentation."
  
  "I'm kind of surprised I'm the only person on earth who gives a shit about it," Briars continued. "I'd have thought there would be more people following the press releases closely and then not using Haskell. But they all just skip the press releases and go straight to the not using it part."
  
  "People see words like monads and category theory," Briars continued, swatting invisible flies around his head for emphasis, "and their Giving a Shit gene shuts down faster than a teabagger with a grade-school arithmetic book. I'm really disappointed that more programmers don't get actively involved in reading endless threads about how to subvert Haskell's type system to accomplish basic shit you can do in other languages. But I guess that's the lazy, ignorant, careless world we live in: the so-called 'real' world."
  
  Haskell researcher Javier Escuella remains hopeful that one day they may be able to double or even triple the number of industry programmers who give a shit about Haskell. "I believe the root cause of the popularity problem is Haskell's lack of reasonable support for mutually recursive generic container types. If we can create a monadic composition-functor wrapper that is perceived as sufficiently sexy by hardened industry veterans, then I think we will see an uptick in giving a shit, possibly as much as a full extra person."
  
  Haskell aficionado Harold MacDougal is not quite as sanguine as his colleague Escuella. "I doubt Haskell will ever be appreciated by the uneducated natives of this industry. As exciting as it is, the discovery of Briars should be considered an anomaly, and not as a sign that more people will ever give a shit. Programmers only seem to pay attention to things when there is humor involved."
  
  "We do have an experimental humor monad," added MacDougal. "But it doesn't seem to be getting much adoption. Haskell fans just don't see the need for it."
  
  
  
  MORE NEWS
  
  Previous article: Perl Community Debating Adding Monads The Perl lists are brimming with discussions about the value of adding monads to Perl. "We don't really know what they do, but it doesn't make sense _not_ to have something in Perl," said Perl hacker Landon Ricketts. Read more
  
  Next article: Microsoft to Introduce Mutually Recursive Error Messages Software giant Microsoft announced today the launch of their new REDRUM platform, an elegant system that allows Windows system error messages to shuffle blame around indefinitely by using continuation-passing. Read more

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  What We Look for in Founders

  Posted: October 23rd, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "Determination, Flexibility, Imagination, Naughtiness, Friendship"
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  World Tour - last chance

  Posted: October 21st, 2010, 9:16am MDT

  Due to unexpected demand we’ve been working with the venues for the upcoming FogBugz World Tour 2010 (incorporating DVCS University) to find more room. We already have more than 3154 people signed up and in some cities, we moved to a larger venue to accomodate everybody.

  That means there’s still room in most cities if you haven’t signed up.

  If you come, you’ll see me give a demo of FogBugz 8.0 and Kiln 2.0, and we’ll give you a one hour introduction to distributed version control ... how it works, how it’s different than the version control you know and love, and how to set it up to make your life easier. There will also be coffee and cookies, and a chance to meet Fog Creek people and other techies from your town.

  Sign up now, it’s free! Hurry up—it all starts next week. I look forward to meeting you in person.

  PS: If you get waitlisted, don’t despair. The night before each event, we will email everybody begging them to cancel if they know they can’t make it, so that we can let in people from the waitlist. What happened last year is that a few people cancelled the night before allowing us to let in all or most of the waitlist.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  The New Funding Landscape

  Posted: October 20th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  Where to See Silicon Valley

  Posted: October 5th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "It's a smart move to put a startup in a place with restaurants and people walking around instead of in an office park, because then the people who work there want to stay there, instead of fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end. They go out for dinner together, talk about ideas, and then come back and implement them."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  WebApps.stackexchange.com now live!

  Posted: September 30th, 2010, 2:09pm MDT

  The first Stack Exchange site to make it all the way through the community creation process is now live and out of beta!

  

  webapps.stackexchange.com is a place to get help with web applications. Want to know how to email huge files? How to delete your Facebook account? How to secretly follow someone on Twitter? How to backup Wordpress blogs, ahem, Jeff? This is the site.

  (Updated: Only days after launching, we changed the name from "nothingtoinstall.com" to "webapps.stackexchange.com" because nobody really liked that name!)

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  FogBugz and Kiln (coming soon to a city near you)

  Posted: September 29th, 2010, 9:22am MDT

  Thanks to the hard work of the Fog Creek team, including ten great summer interns, we have just released amazing new upgrades to FogBugz and Kiln.

  To kick off the new releases, we’re about to start another one of our famous world tours. I’ll be flying to 20 (yes, twenty) different cities to demo FogBugz 8.0 to anyone who wants to come see it in person.

  As an added bonus, I’m also going to bring along someone from the Kiln team to teach a one-hour course in distributed version control. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a painless way to learn the basics of the new generation of version control.

  The events are absolutely free but they always fill up right away, so go sign up now!

  
  Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  New, PNG-based Stack Overflow flair

  Posted: September 21st, 2010, 3:13pm MDT

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Merging Season

  Posted: September 17th, 2010, 3:53pm MDT

  Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously niche proposals, overlapping proposals, and proposals that are already covered by an existing site.

  Merging Season

   

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Fork it!

  Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 12:43pm MDT

  The Stack Overflow Blog: “The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it ‘the narcissism of minor differences’”

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  A new WordPress Stack Exchange

  Posted: August 31st, 2010, 9:10am MDT

  We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of an existing community. For example, our WordPress answers site (now in beta) covers the exact same material as WordPress.org’s existing forums.

  

  This is nothing new to us at Stack Overflow, which purported to cover the exact same material as hundreds (if not thousands) of other programming sites. There’s no rule that says that there needs to be exactly one Q&A website per topic.

  There is, however, a compelling case for the Stack Exchange technology. WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem. They don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible. You have to log on to ask or answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher. Stack Overflow is simply better than traditional forums, which is why it largely replaced proprietary forums. I remember hours of discussion with John Resig and the folks at jQuery who couldn’t decide whether to replace the jQuery Google Group with a forum or with a Stack Exchange. Ultimately it didn’t matter that much, because most of the jQuery Q&A activity happens on Stack Overflow anyway.

  One day, the features that are standard on Stack Exchange will be copied everywhere. Until then, we’ll keep churning out new sites.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Simplicity vs. Choice

  Posted: August 19th, 2010, 12:14pm MDT

  Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just more complicated.

  Here’s the video from a talk I gave at the Business of Software conference last year:

  I’ll be speaking again at this year’s conference in Boston, October 4th-6th.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

  Posted: July 28th, 2010, 7:40am MDT by Steve Yegge

  EYJAFJÖLL, ICELAND — Java programmers around the globe are in a panic today over a Wikileaks press release issued at 8:15am GMT. Wikileaks announced that they will re-release the source code for thousands of Open Source Java projects, making all access modifiers 'public' and all classes and members non-'final'.
  
  Agile Java Developer Johnnie Garza of Irvine, CA condemns the move. "They have no right to do this. Open Source does not mean the source is somehow 'open'. That's my code, not theirs. If I make something private, it means that no matter how desperately you need to call it, I should be able to prevent you from doing so, even long after I've gone to the grave."
  
  According to the Wikileaks press release, millions of Java source files have been run through a Perl script that removes all 'final' keywords except those required for hacking around the 15-year-old Java language's "fucking embarrassing lack of closures."
  
  Moreover, the Perl script gives every Java class at least one public constructor, and turns all fields without getters/setters into public fields. "The script yanks out all that @deprecated shit, too," claims the controversial announcement.
  
  Longtime Java programmer Ronnie Lloyd of Austin, TX is offended by the thought of people instantiating his private classes. "It's just common sense," said Lloyd, who is 37. "If I buy you a house and put the title in your name, but I mark some of the doors 'Employees Only', then you're not allowed to open those doors, even though it's your house. Because it's really my house, even though I gave it to you to live in."
  
  Pacing and frowning thoughtfully, Lloyd continued: "Even if I go away forever and you live there for 20 years and you know exactly what's behind the doors — heck, even if it's a matter of life and death — plain old common sense still dictates that you're never, ever allowed to open them for any reason."
  
  "It's for your own protection," Lloyd added.
  
  Wesley Doyle, a Java web developer in Toronto, Canada is merely puzzled by the news. "Why do they think they need to do this? Why can't users of my Open Source Java library simply shake their fists and curse my family name with their dying breaths? That approach has been working well for all the rest of us. Who cares if I have a private helper function they need? What, is their copy/paste function broken?"
  
  Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who coined the term "Opened Source" to describe the jailbroken open-source Java code, fears he may be arrested by campus security at Oracle or possibly IBM. The Wikileaks founder said: "Today the Eclipse Foundation put out a private briefing calling me a 'non-thread-safe AbstractKeywordRemovalInitiatorFactory'. What the fuck does that even mean? I fear for my safety around these nutjobs."
  
  The removal of '@deprecated' annotations is an especially sore issue for many hardworking Java developers. "I worked hard to deprecate that code that I worked hard to create so I could deprecate some other code that I also worked hard on," said Kelly Bolton, the spokesperson for the League Of Java Programmers For Deprecating The Living Shit Out Of Everything.
  
  "If people could keep using the older, more convenient APIs I made for them, then why the fuck would they use my newer, ridiculously complicated ones? It boggles the imagination," Bolton added.
  
  The Eclipse CDT team was especially hard-hit by the removal of deprecation tags. Morris Baldwin, a part-time developer for the CDT's C++ parsing libraries says: "We have a policy of releasing entire Java packages in which every single class, interface and method is deprecated right out of the box, starting at version 1.0."
  
  "We also take careful steps to ensure that it's impossible to use our pre-deprecated code without running our gigantic fugly framework," the 22-year-old Baldwin added. "Adding public constructors and making stuff non-final would be a serious blow to both non-usability and non-reusability."
  
  The Agile Java community has denounced the Wikileaks move as a form of terrorism. "It was probably instigated by those Aspect-Oriented Programming extremists," speculates Agile Java designer Claudia Hewitt, age 29. "I always knew they wanted to use my code in ways I couldn't predict in advance," she added.
  
  Many Java developers have vowed to fight back against the unwelcome opening of their open source. League of Agile Methodology Experts (LAME) spokesperson Billy Blackburn says that work has begun on a new, even more complicated Java build system that will refuse to link in Opened Source Java code. The new build system will be released as soon as several third-party Java library vendors can refactor their code to make certain classes more reusable. Blackburn declined to describe these refactorings, claiming it was "none of y'all's business."
  
  Guy Faulkner, a 51-year-old Python developer in Seattle, was amused by the Wikileaks announcement. "When Python developers release Open Source code, they are saying: Here, I worked hard on this. I hope you like it. Use it however you think best. Some stuff is documented as being subject to change in the future, but we're all adults here so use your best judgment."
  
  Faulkner shook his head sadly. "Whereas Java developers who release Open Source are code are saying: Here, I worked hard on this. I hope you like it. But use it exactly how I tell you to use it, because fuck you, it's my code. I'll decide who's the goddamn grown-up around here."
  
  "But why didn't they write that Perl script in Python?" Faulkner asked.
  
  
  
  MORE NEWS
  
  Previous article: San Francisco Airport Announces That All Restrooms Near You Are Now Deprecated
  The SFO port authority announced today that all airport restrooms located anywhere near you are now deprecated due to "inelegance". The newer, more elegantly designed restrooms are located a short 0.8 mile (1.29 km) walk from the International Terminal. Read more
  
  Next article: Eclipse Sits On Man's Couch, Breaks It
  New Hampshire programmer Freddie Cardenas, 17, describes the incident: "We invited Eclipse over for dinner and drinks. Eclipse sat down on our new couch and there was this loud crack and it broke in half. Those timbers had snapped like fuckin' matchsticks. Then my mom started crying, and Eclipse started crying, and I ran and hid in my bedroom." Read more

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  The Acceleration of Addictiveness

  Posted: July 27th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham
• 

  The Top Idea in Your Mind

  Posted: July 22nd, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  The growing empire of Stack Exchange

  Posted: July 16th, 2010, 7:57pm MDT

  We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week!

  • Gaming
  • Cooking
  • Pro Webmasters

  We’ll have three more for you next week, too.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Stevey's Blog Rants

• 

  Blogger Finger

  Posted: July 14th, 2010, 9:06pm MDT by Steve Yegge

  Well! I've sure had a nice relaxing blog-free year. No worries, no haters, no Nooglers wandering by my office and staring at me through the window as if they expect me to crap in my hand and hurl it at them. Not that I wasn't tempted.
  
  Nope, it's just been peace and quiet and reading and coding and practicing my guitar and stuff. It's been awesome.
  
  And now that everyone's completely forgotten who I am, or whatever exactly I'd said that made them feel all butthurt inside -- as measured by my incoming email rate, which is finally near-zero -- I figure it's probably safe to get back in the water.
  
  I'm not really sure what my plans are going forward, other than staying employed at Google until the day comes when I need one of their comfy, brightly-colored caskets. Other than that, my plans are flexible. I'm feeling downright leisurely at the moment.
  
  I realize now that I was trying way too hard to change the world via blogging, and it made me care maybe just a little too much. This was bad for my mental and emotional health. Caring is fine. Lots of things are worth caring about. Very few of them merit sacrificing your health.
  
  Fortunately during my ad-hoc sabbatical I was able to gain some new perspectives by distancing myself a bit from the constant storm going on in the tech world.
  
  One nice perspective I gained is this: There is nothing on this earth that can make everyone happy. Reddit is a huge, living, breathing demonstration of this, since essentially no reddit post ever goes above maybe 80% approval, and a "good" post seems to hover around 65%-70% liked.
  
  That made me feel better about the haters. Haters abound. They're just a fact of life, part of the human condition. There's no need to waste energy hating haters.
  
  Another perspective I gained was that decorating your mansion with works of art you know nothing about is amazingly rewarding, as long as you can mix it up by leaping across rooftops and assassinating bad guys and hanging with your buddy Leonardo. I swear, if they ever make a movie about my life, the handsome and dashing actor who plays me, when asked on his deathbed which of life's pleasures had given him the greatest happiness, will say something cheesy that makes the audience ooh and aww with appreciation, but it'll be total Hollywood bullshit, because what I really will have said was "gaming".
  
  Yet another perspective I gained is that I now actually agree with everyone who complained that my blog posts were too long. Reddit has ruined my attention span for online material. There seems to be no such thing as too frequent, but there's definitely such thing as too long. So I'll be better about that.
  
  I used to have this pet theory that the length of my blogs is a big part of why they've been noticed at all. I mean, look at this dude. If he'd written only one or two crazy things, he'd be just another nutjob, but by dint of almost superhuman persistence he's managed to get the entire world to laugh at him.
  
  I was sort of aiming for getting people to laugh with me, but I used the same basic recipe as Time Cube Dude. And the formula seemed to be working, modulo the haters.
  
  However, Dave Barry -- my Personal Childhood Hero (66% liked!) -- always wrote his columns in chunks of 800 words, even if it necessitated inserting filler words such as "booger" and "legislative session" into his articles about wine tasting or car engines or bat guano, or whatever it was that caught his fancy that week.
  
  Overall it seems likely that post-length is less important than factors such as quality, consistency, passion, relevance, and legislative booger session.
  
  So I was originally thinking of writing up to a maximum of 800 words today, and I'm at about 500 now, but I've been really successful at my Not Caring Too Much Initiative, so... later! Nice chatting with ya. Cheerio!
  
  HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT...
  
  Just to ensure this post isn't entirely devoid of content I'll share something important that I learned last year.
  
  Here's what I learned: after Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, the second most common hand ailment is known as Trigger Finger.
  
  Its more formal name is digital tenovaginitis stenosans, which is ancient Latin for "electronic hand inflamed vagina without writing", which I believe is why most people prefer to call it Trigger Finger.
  
  I have it, you know. Trigger Finger, I mean, not an inflamed vagina.
  
  Although Trigger Finger is "idiopathic", a fancy word meaning that doctors don't have a fucking clue what causes it, it is widely known in musical circles as a musician's injury. It happens to musicians who overpractice, usually in preparation for a recital, performance or recording session.
  
  I found all this out after being diagnosed with it.
  
  It is not idiopathic in my case. I have the benefit of hindsight, and I know exactly what caused it. It turns out that if you play a certain right-hand arpeggio on a classical guitar enough times -- where "certain arpeggio" here refers to Hector Villa-Lobos' Etude No. 1, and "enough times" is approximately 650,000 times in a 5-month period^[wtf?] -- you acquire Trigger Finger. That's not precisely what I was playing, but it'll serve.
  
  Trigger Finger is a painful, debilitating, demoralizing injury. I highly recommend not letting it happen to you. Your body will begin telling you when it's time to ease up on the practice sessions. Listen to your body when it says that.
  
  As for specifics, there's not much to tell. My hand started hurting. Then it hurt real bad for a month. Ibuprofen and cold/hot packs didn't help. It got steadily worse. Even quitting guitar altogether for another month didn't help. I could no longer use my right hand, and it was beginning to feel permanent. I wasn't even sure why it was happening. I was terrified and I began to despair.
  
  My Google doctor was great. She referred me to a specialist -- a hand surgeon. I told her I didn't really want to see a hand... S-word. I could barely say it aloud. She reassured me that seeing a specialist didn't necessarily mean surgery. They might have other tricks up their sleeves. So I decided to brave it.
  
  My first trip to the specialist only took about 15 minutes. She listened to my disoriented bleating, asked me a few questions, gently felt my hand here and there, and informed me that I had Trigger Finger. She said she was going to give me a cortisone shot. She was pulling out a giant needle as she told me this. It just sort of materialized from under the table, the way a knife appears in a bar fight. It was a very large needle. She explained calmly that the cortisone is a steroid that stays wherever you inject it. They use it on athletes to reduce inflammation from certain injuries.
  
  Then she stuck the giant needle all the way into the base of my right middle finger and squeezed. Compared to the pain of my trigger finger, the injection felt like a mosquito bite.
  
  She told me that I'd start feeling better in a week, and in a month I'd be pretty much all cleared up. If not, I should come back and see her for more treatment. And no, I wasn't going to lose my hand.
  
  It was kind of weird, but on my way back to my car I think someone had been cutting onions in the elevator. A lot of onions. In the last fifteen minutes my whole life had been handed back to me with an almost casual lack of concern. I was overwhelmed with onions.
  
  A month later I was back to see her. The cortisone had helped a lot. I gave it a 66% approval rating. She said she could give me another shot, or do surgery. This time I'd done my homework. I elected for surgery. That was back in September. It was an interesting story in its own right, but the upshot is she did great. And then after that there was a lot of physical therapy.
  
  I typed the word "September" in the previous paragraph three times before I got it right. The word doesn't even have letters that need my right middle finger. My right hand, which had shaped itself into an unusable, agonized claw between March and July, is still afraid to flex and extend my middle finger. It's up to, oh, a 95% approval rating now, which I believe is phenomenally successful. Who could ask more of a hand surgery? It could have been much worse. Much much.
  
  But that last 5% is rough. The haters in my hand are a constant reminder of the old pain. When I type, or play piano or guitar, my right-hand fingers twist and curl in elaborate, incomprehensible dances to avoid a pain that is for the most part no longer there.
  
  Yep, I think it'll be easier to keep my blog posts shorter going forward.
  
  Ironically, some good came out of the experience. I've switched to a sustainable new guitar style and a new repertoire, one I enjoy greatly. And I now pay much more attention to economy of motion in my typing. And I spend more time finding pain-saving Emacs shortcuts. It makes me wonder what I might have achieved had I focused on it sooner.
  
  Surgery notwithstanding, on the whole I still think it was a great year. The year was in fact more complicated and more painful than I've let on here, but that's life for ya.
  
  And now that I'm rested up, I believe I'm ready to start tech blogging again... in moderation, anyway. The rest and relaxation and research did wonders for me. I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure.
  
  
  
  [1] Talk about caring too much. I may explain this 650k figure in a future blog post if I can ever get over my embarrassment.

Joel on Software

• 

  Domain Names

  Posted: July 12th, 2010, 8:56pm MDT

  “We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.”

  Domain Names

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta

  Posted: July 7th, 2010, 1:55pm MDT

  Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?

  

  Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network, so it has the clean, elegant design that made Stack Overflow a phenomenal success.

  The newest member of the Stack Exchange Network is the first one to go through the community site-creation process called Area 51. There are more great sites in the pipeline, but they have to demonstrate that they can reach critical mass or we won’t create them.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  How to Lose Time and Money

  Posted: July 6th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "The way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Joel on Software

• 

  Don Norman at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 12:55pm MDT

  Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.

  “Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.

  “Which button do you press?”

  It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.

  The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Area 51 is now in beta

  Posted: June 22nd, 2010, 8:40am MDT

  Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.

  Benofsky from Hacker News writes:

  Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
  
  Also, how are they going to make money?

  I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.

  (transcript)

  Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:

  I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.

  We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:

  

  Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  My secret weapon for setting executive compensation

  Posted: June 9th, 2010, 2:05pm MDT

  My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.

  You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Paul Kenny’s talk at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: June 8th, 2010, 10:31am MDT

  Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.

  Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:

  The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Random thoughts for May 18, 2010

  Posted: May 18th, 2010, 9:02am MDT

  FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily basis.

  • The Case Event Edit Plugin now lets you edit cases (instead of just appending to them).
  • Bulk Reply, so you can respond to multiple emails with the same response. You can even flip through the outgoing responses and customize each one if you want.
  • Width of the case area is now resizable.
  • We now support IMAP (in addition to POP3) for incoming email
  • Project backlog editing (for scrum/agile shops) is now much faster.

  What’s new in FogBugz 7.3?

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Kathy Sierra’s talk at the Business of Software 2009

  Posted: May 10th, 2010, 12:53pm MDT

  I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a slide making fun of Stack Overflow’s terrific new VC-backed business model. She even got the unicorn!

  Watch the  whole talk here. The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Random thoughts for May 04, 2010

  Posted: May 4th, 2010, 11:43am MDT

  “And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.”

  Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Note from Taco

  Posted: April 30th, 2010, 7:30pm MDT

  Dear TechSmith,

  Thank you very much for all the pictures of your pets:

  

  Also thanks for the toys, which were great. I especially like the iPhone.

  

  Yours,

  Taco.

  

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

• 

  Sites for experts

  Posted: April 19th, 2010, 9:46am MDT

  Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.

  So far there are 32 informal proposals on meta.stackexchange.com. We’re weeks away from opening a site where these proposals can become real.

  From my answer to the Firearms proposal: “The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, ‘long-tail,’ highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that it’s clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.”

  From my answer to the Law proposal: “There are only 200 easy law questions, and they've all been asked 100 times on Mahalo and Yahoo!Answers. But there are 20,000,000 detailed, difficult, long-tail questions that only professionals can answer, and we'd be doing a REAL service to the Internet by creating a place where you can find answers to the 20,000,000 hard questions, not the 200 easy ones.”

  Our core mission at Stack Overflow is:

  Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.

  The “expert” part of that mission is important, otherwise we’re just building another place for the same questions that every other Q&A site has. We want the law Stack Exchange to attract lawyers, the movie Stack Exchange to attract filmmakers, and the aviation Stack Exchange to attract pilots. What makes a community great is great people... that is, real experts. And the experts want to hang out with other experts.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

• 

  Organic Startups

  Posted: April 16th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT

  "There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you've found a gold mine."
  
  
  Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham

Gibson Blog

• 

  EXPOSITION IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE

  Posted: April 16th, 2010, 5:37am MDT by Bill

  Via my wonderful editor, Susan Allison, from a New York Magazine piece on David Simon:
  
  "Fuck the exposition," he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. "Just *be*. The exposition can come later." He describes a theory of television narrative. "If I can make you curious enough, there's this thing called Google. If you're curious about the New Orleans Indians, or 'second-line' musicians--you can look it up." The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the charaqcters from within

Joel on Software

• 

  Stack Exchange 2.0

  Posted: April 13th, 2010, 2:06pm MDT

  Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the sun? And who says we can’t run for Vice President of the United States of America?

  We tried making our software available as a hosted white label product called Stack Exchange. We thought that other people would create awesome sites on every imaginable topic. Some people did (yay!), but it wasn’t the flood of high quality sites we were hoping for.

  So we’re making a few changes. Briefly:

  1. Stack Exchange will now be free.
  2. We’re changing the way that new Stack Exchange sites are created to move to a more democratic, community process.
  3. The content of these new, community-created Stack Exchange sites will be publically owned under a Creative Commons license, instead of being owned by individuals or businesses.

  If you’ve already created a Stack Exchange site, be sure to read the announcement in more detail to hear about our transition plan. Don’t be alarmed; we’d never do anything to mess with Stack Exchange sites that are already working.

  Read all the details on the StackExchange Blog.

  Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Gibson Blog

• 

  I THINK WE'VE HEARD THE CLICK

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 2:17pm MDT by Bill

  Feels to me like a full cycle of Q&A. Very enjoyable, for me, but I'll take Anabel's thanks as the closer, now. You're all welcome, and thank you for turning up.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 2:02am MDT by Bill

  From Cederic:
  Q Lets trivialise.
  A You go first!
  
  Q You obsess in your books about the desired objects of days past, contemporarily still desirable with the added patina of rarity.
  - What's your favourite old world treasure?
  A I'm more a wunderkammer guy than a big masterpiece guy. I'm with Manny Farber's termites, that way. Sir John Soane's house is probably my favorite London museum.
  
  Q - Which watch do you wear?
  A Today, an 80s Vostok, a Soviet watch. It has a certain pleasant melancholy about it.
  
  Q - Do you seek current objects of desire: iPhone or Android?
  A Not so much. I've never been an early adaptor. It's getting to the point, though, where I actually need to get something along iPhone lines. But that would be upgrading from a Nokia flip (chosen because it had very good reception, four years ago).
  
  Q - On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
  A I don't actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I'm more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I'm a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 1:37am MDT by Bill

  Q How much steeping do you do in your locations while writing? Hotels, cities, transportation options?
  A Where I happen to have gone tends to produce the locations. For Pattern Recognition. I went back to Tokyo to upgrade my 80s/90s version. Hadn't been to Moscow at all. Filtered that through writer friends who had (Eileen Gunn, Jack Womack). I do virtual steeping, though. Google Earth Street View is a spooky thing, that way.
  
  Q Do you visualize some locations from first-hand experience or do you take notes to refresh your memory while re/experiencing them again?
  A I have no way of knowing what'll reemerge from the hopper as a novel-unit, so no reason to take notes. Everything goes into the hopper. Relatively few things come out of it.
  
  Q Does this research get expensive for you? Is there a way for you to be compensated for this type of research?
  A I spend almost nothing on research. A Wired article took me to Tokyo, when I was writing Pattern Recognition. I used to buy lots of magazines. Magazines are novelty-aggregators. But the Web's taken that function over, and is free.
  
  Q Do you find that "going there" actually helps you write?
  A Having been *somewhere* helps me to write. Having a hopper full of "place" is a good thing, but that's a lifetime accumulation. And there's a certain amount of composting that goes on, in the hopper. It's not journalism, not reportage.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 11th, 2010, 1:25am MDT by Bill

  From Bravus:
  Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
  A I'm not postioned to know. Not sure who would be. Someone who has some overview of what's happening?
  
  Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
  A I read that Stross. The thing to remember is that a look at the actual economics of the thing, that way, would always have been doomy for the unpublished. Most of whom have no idea. Not that I don't think Stross is accurate. I do, but there's a way in which it's not a new scary story. New installment of the old scary story.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 4:40pm MDT by Bill

  Q What question would Lithos ask you, if he were one of your characters?
  
  A "How is this possible?" And I would explain the Internet, etc.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 8:27am MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker:
  Q I'm picking up on a thread that seems to pervade several of your previous responses, in so much as your writing gift comes at a heavy price. It's almost a suffering ...something you can't and wouldn't want to live without, yet a beast that requires a great deal of time and effort to harness? A living hell for the duration of the work, no?
  
  A Yikes! I must've sounded awfully whiny. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. Every job has its costs, some of which aren't so evident to people who haven't done it. But my intention was more to convey, to people who might want to write fiction, that the process they arrive at may not quite line up with our cultural paradigm of what writing fiction is, and that the blisters may form in places other than expected. When I started trying to write fiction, I read writers-on-writing collections, and very little of that, in retrospect, sounded much like what I've wound up having to do to make it happen.
  
  When Bruce Sterling and I were writing The Difference Engine, I'd moan sometimes about the labor required (as much fun as that was, and often it was lots of fun, but I'm basically lazy). He always had the same response: "Yeah, but it beats loading concrete blocks." Which is so obviously true, and has since become a mantra of mine.
  
  I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 10th, 2010, 3:06am MDT by Bill

  From Anabel:
  Q There's a highly successful writer who lived in my town, who ran a writers workshop where he said he used real people for some of his characters. Have you used real people to springboard some characters in your work? Was it dicey to do so?
  
  A I'd assume we (writers) all must do that some extent, but for me that all goes through some process of unconscious randomization. When my characters arrive, I don't know who they are, let alone who might have contributed DNA. There are exceptions, but usually only with characters who are more broadly parodic of particular attitudes.
  
  I had no idea who Cayce was, why she felt that way on waking, whose flat it was, why London. For months. I was inhabiting a very partial construct, waiting to see what attached itself. Waiting to find a center of gravity.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 9th, 2010, 4:49pm MDT by Bill

  From Bictaker

  Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter? A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.* The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed. Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines? A We do it from our homes, and we refuse to let them in, no matter how many times they knock. There's a contract, and a deadline for delivery of the completed manuscript. That's actually a really scary deal: a contract, and a deadline, and nobody there in the morning to tell you to get to work. Or to start gazing at your shoe. Q I guess there's less pressure on established writers, whereas newbies are pushed harder? Time management: do you place yourself under a strict regime? A The arrangement forces you to manage your own time. In the old days, in Hollywood, screenwriters in studio employ were contractually obligated to turn in a specific number of pages per day. There is nothing like that in the world of professional fiction-writing, and if there were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have been published. I have to force myself to turn up every day, in case the writing also decides to. Often, it doesn't choose to. There is more of that at the start of a book than later, mercifully. The book builds its own momentum, though each one has a different momentum. That momentum is what calls the shots, imposes the regimen. The part of me that's writing this, now, is utterly incapable of writing a novel. The part of me that just wrote a novel is profoundly unavailable, right now, and will remain so until the next time I have to go out and walk for miles, whistling for it, convinced its finally run away for good and all. People don't ordinarily meet the part of me that writes novels, and when they do, they must assume I'm not not doing very well. Which as a human being, right then, I'm not. In direct proportion to how well I might be doing, right then, as a novelist.

  
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 4:49pm MDT by Bill

  From Sentinel400:
  Q Have you ever wanted to wear a uniform?
  
  A When was I last out of one? The extent to which we are are all of us usually in uniform brings to mind Eno's definition of culture: everything we do that we don't really need to. Pajama bottoms beneath a raincoat? Out of uniform. Jeans with one leg cut off? Out of uniform. Contracultural apparel disturbs us. Countercultures are intensely cultural. Bohemias have dress codes as rigid as those of merchant banks. We all read uniforms, constantly, whether we're aware of it or not.
  
  My favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie's alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character's inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 1:35pm MDT by Bill

  From Martin:
  Q Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily aware of it, if it had?
  
  A I first watched The Wire when I was writing Spook Country, because my friend Steve Brown told me that one of the seasons had the best stuff about shipping containers he'd seen anywhere, in any medium. But what I really got from that was a sense of the physicality of the containers: that the walls are actually quite thin, things like that.
  
  But that's material. "Influence" is something else. Influence is more like weather, when you've been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can't say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it's present.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 8th, 2010, 1:09pm MDT by Bill

  From Colin:
  Q Seething, termite-like revising seems well suited to word processors, but how did it work out on that famous typewriter?
  
  A Really, really *slowly*. Thick scabs of correction fluid. Then I discovered those rolls of self-adhesive white paper tape, that restaurants used to use to correct (this is amazing in itself, to me) the *typewritten* (or maybe mimeographed) parts of their menus. So I'd stick that over a whole sentence or three, a whole para, then type over it. But then the termites would seethe again, and I'd have to paint the white fluid over the *tape*, which didn't really work that well... The pages of the Neuromancer manuscript were *3D*, topographical...
  
  Then Bruce Sterling's father gave him an Apple II. I guess he'd moved up to the first Mac. So there's Bruce on the phone from Austin: "This is *serious*, man. This thing *automates* the process." So I went down to Eaton's and bought a IIC and a dot-matrix printer, marked way down because the new Mac was the thing. So I never got the Selectric that had been the pro writer's awesomest tool when I'd started trying to write. I saw one of those for $29.95 in a charity shop, last year.
• 

  QUESTIONS...

  Posted: April 7th, 2010, 1:39pm MDT by Bill

  From Bravus:
  Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
  
  A I have no way of knowing, really. What your question reminds me of, though, is my having asked a couple of my literature profs at UBC, in the 70s, whether they thought there were important works of fiction that we didn't yet know of. This was greeted with a sort of amazed disgust. Of course there weren't. (Neither they nor I had ever heard of Cormac McCarthy, then, and he'd been published for over a decade.)
  
  Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
  A The economics for the majority of writers, in my lifetime, have never been good at all. I suspect I imagined that the science fiction writers I read in the 60s were all doing rather well. Most of them, actually, were just scraping by, and moonlighting at other things. That was why, I'd guess, many of them seemed to write more often than was good for their writing.