It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

I've been wanting to write this somewhere for a while, and the black hole of the internet seems as good of place as any. After the last presidential election (when the candidate who won the popular vote didn't win the election), everybody who didn't want Bush to win harped on the electoral college as an antiquated system which produces the "wrong" result. The antiquated might be right, but it was a good idea at the time, and it still could be a good idea, it just needs to go further. Way back in the day, presidents were not elected directly, because there was no way to really know the candidates beyond hype, word of mouth, and advertising (sound familiar?). The founding fathers wanted good people running the country, not the people with the most advertising, so the instituted a system whereby instead of voting for a person, you basically nominated someone to vote for you who knew the candidates and could pick the candidate closest to your views. The original syste...

So Microsoft apparently activated a Vista feature to shut down pirated versions of Vista. Ok... but they also sent out a message to OEM to inform them, and tell them "don't risk it, get official MS products." This a couple weeks after their WGA servers went down and people registering Vista were told they had pirated software or something. You might see this as unfortunate timing, but I see a great marketing opportunity. Microsoft is 100% right: don't risk it! Nothing sounds more risky to me than running an OS which will destroy your data if it can't talk to Microsoft servers regularly, or there's a data error, or a programming mistake in the verification, or MS doesn't like your company, or any number of other things. Don't risk it; don't run Windows! Marketing genius, I tell ya.

Cool page: http://www.shadowstats.com/cgi-bin/sgs/data Basically it's the real monetary numbers for the US (adjusted to counter the political driven skew which has been increasing for the last 20 years or so). For example, the CPI calculated assuming you bought the same quality goods over the entire period (instead of the current calculation, which assumes you buy cheaper stuff when you have less money, making the official CPI pretty worthless for measuring actual inflation). It's beyond my understanding of economics and data manipulation to estimate if the fake (official) CPI will ever "catch up" to the actual CPI, and thus reflect actual inflation, but I'm guessing not. Anyway, it's always good to know the real numbers, knowledge = power and whatnot...

So every state wants to have their primary 1st, and all the "we're first" states are engaged in a childish game of oneupmanship to see who can be the last person to set a date for their primary and "win". Soon, primaries will be so far before the actual elections, you might as well schedule them at the same time as the previous election; at least it's a good minimum. Hey, I got a solution for all you geniuses in the various states who want to be competitive for the right to have politicians actually care how your state votes in its primary. Instead of playing leapfrog with all the other kids, pass a law which sets your primary date as the same day as the earliest primary held by any other state. Once you have 20 or so states with this law/procedure in place, it won't matter which of the "we're 1st, nah nah" states actually gets the first primary date, cause half the nation will automatically also vote at the same time. Moreover, it cuts th...

I can't help but think how appropriate that saying is to the current Congress and their effect on the next presidential election. In my mind, there could be no more effective campaign propaganda for republican candidates than the liberal media filling the news mediums with endless stories of Congress' partisan, childish, pointless wastes of time and money whining about partisan crap. We (the American people) get it: you don't like Bush, or any republicans. We got it 6 years ago. We understand that you will condemn anything any republican does. We get that you will stop at nothing, and leave no option unexplored, in your quest to damage republicans just because they are republicans. We get that there's no substance or reason behind any opinions you have, other than they are the opposite of the republican opinions. Your motivation is only to hurt republicans. You don't give a rat's ass what happens to the country, as long as the republicans suffer. You have made a...

The study: There's a correlation between people who drink soda (regular or diet) and people who have heart problems. The idiotic news media interpretation: There's a causality between drinking soda and having heart problems. The restatement of the study conclusions, for the slow people who might otherwise come to (and write about) a totally incorrect interpretation: Fat, unhealthy people are more likely to drink soda than healthy people. Now, anyone who wouldn't read my restatement of the study conclusions and say 'duh...'? Funny how couching something that simple in scientific jargon like 'correlation' and rearranging it causes a stirring of the stupids.

So I heard a funny commercial, promoting why you should work with a Realtor to buy your next home. Among the selling points was how Realtors understand the market and can guide you in making a smart decision. This was followed shortly by how rates are still low, there are lots of properties available, and it's an excellent time to buy. ... It would take a special kind of moron to think that this is a good time to buy a house in Southern California, what with the bubble in the process of popping and prices about to go through the proverbial floor. I can't imagine a worse thing to tell people to promote yourself as a valuable asset because you understand the market. Just... wow.