A few days ago, I posted a Facebook update about http://www.rescuemarriage.org/ (it’s not available as I’m writing this; probably got too much traffic and the web host suspended the account). It’s a clever satire site pointing out the hypocrisy of people who supported California’s Proposition 8.
The reactions on Facebook are testimony to how different my life is now from the way I grew up. The two people who liked this post whose names are not blurred out in the image below are current liberal friends who clearly got the satire of the site. The third person who liked the post is someone I knew in high school. She regularly posts updates about rabidly conservative politics, so I’m 99.999% sure that she would not agree with the site if she had actually visited it. And the one person who says she has the same tacky painting of Jesus in her house is also someone I knew in high school. Ugh.

Support John Marcotte, a Sacramento man who has filed a petition with the California Secretary of State to get a voter’s initiative onto the 2010 ballot in California that would make it ban divorce.

We are a Christian nation. Jesus said, “What God has put together, let no man separate.” Divorce is a sin….
People who supported Prop 8 weren’t trying to take rights away from gays, they just wanted to protect traditional marriage. That’s why I’m confident that they will support this initiative, even though this time it will be their rights that are diminished. To not support it would be hypocritical.
We can return this country back to it’s [sic] proud, traditional Judeo-Christian roots.

(Quotes are taken from Rob Cockerham’s interview with John)

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that this MeFi comment is right on target. The heart of the matter:

You may scoff at the stupidity of “death panels”. You may laugh and criticize in a thousand ways the stupid idiotic memes propagated by the right wing forces. But it is you who is missing the point. You are not getting it. Of course the memes are stupid – but that is the point. You get no brownie points for spotting the obvious absurdities. You are missing the point.
The point is to so flood the political discourse with stupidity, that it lowers the IQ of the debate across the board. THAT IS INTENTIONAL. Why?
It bogs down the thinkers – by depriving the thinker – of the very tools which give him/her an edge. When even simple facts are in dispute, when the absurdity of the claims is so huge, it reaches a critical mass – and intelligent discourse is impossible. All the intelligence in the world won’t help, because the discourse is not amenable to the tools of intelligence. Notable example: the Barney Frank controversy re: “dining room table”. People here were crowing on behalf of BF. I took a different view – you are missing the point. Barney Frank lost. How? He was sidetracked. His intelligence was beside the point, because the discourse did not lend itself to intelligent debate – and he was reduced to snark, reduced to the level of insult – exactly what was wanted. He lost. Time was wasted, energy was drained, progress was stopped. Instead of discussing details of implementation, he had to address a dining table. A sick and dying patient was waiting – do you think he’d be more gratified to hear about the dining table, or details about how to pay for his treatment?

God, that’s depressing.

The New York Times recently ran an article about Brooklyn judge Arthur M. Schack who readily throws out foreclosure motions if the lenders do not have their paperwork in proper order. The depressing part of the article is this:

“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”

My dad’s cousin is a sheriff’s deputy in a fairly rural Kansas county. He emails out his weekly report to some family members. They’re usually a good read, both for the kinds of things he encounters and for his dry humor. Highlights from this week’s report:

Deputies were called to a disturbance. When they arrived, the woman causing the disturbance ran out the back door and hid. The Deputies observed a dog standing outside the door to a camper wagging its tail. They opened the camper and found the intoxicated woman inside. She went to jail and later was found to have a warrant issued by another county. She may have to sober up in custody.
I received another call of a cow on highway [redacted] at mile post 58. I did not find anything. I talked to a stock raiser who told me that he thought it was one of his heifers. The heifer must have had a police scanner because it crawled back through the fence when I was dispatched.
I picked up a prisoner from another agency. She was wanted on a check warrant. She was 78 years old. She had a pace maker, and previously knee and hip replacement, as well as a stroke and a heart attack. It appears that a relative may have been passing her checks. She was transported home by a Deputy after court. Her son was in jail in another county, and her daughter did not have a car. The lady has problems we cannot solve.

For years, we’ve had cable TV and internet access from our local cable provider Suddenlink (the small local company was bought by Cox and then Suddenlink). We haven’t had any particular problems with either one. During this time, though, we’ve had several telephone providers. We tried Vonage and Suddenlink’s own VoIP phone service, but in both cases, we could never get good quality (I went around with Vonage’s support multiple times before I just gave up). We finally just went back to AT&T regular landline.
For the last several years, we’ve had a DVR provided by Suddenlink (a Motorola 6400 hundred series with a Microsoft OS). While we knew it wasn’t as good as Tivo, it was good enough. In fact, we’ve become addicted to being able to watch what we want when we want and to forwarding past commercials.
A few weeks ago, however, Suddenlink downloaded a completely different operating system to our DVR. The overall user experience was much poorer than before and we lost some significant functionality.
As a software engineer, that really pissed me off. Clearly, the motivations for this change had absolutely nothing to do with users and were, in fact, hostile to the users. That sealed the deal, we were shopping for a different TV provider.
After some research, we decided to give AT&T’s new U-Verse service a try, mostly because we could have integrated TV, cable and internet. We got a lot more functionality and a few more channels for a little less than we were paying for TV, phone and internet.
The AT&T installer spent four hours at our house yesterday getting it all hooked up. I was not home for the installation, but Katie reported that a knowledgeable-seeming 30+-year Southwestern Bell/AT&T employee did the installation and that it went without any problems.
When I got home last night, I connected my laptop to the wireless, explored the TV/DVR options and got our voice mail set up. Everything seemed to be working without any problems or complicated setup.
I have to say, so far I’m very impressed. It’s clear that U-verse was designed as an integrated service. We had considered getting a bundled deal from AT&T a couple of years ago, but it was clearly a cobbled-together offering: DSL, regular phone and satellite TV from Dish or DirecTV.
With U-verse, I can manage all aspects of my service from their web site. I particularly like being able to manage the DVR from the web site and getting voice mail via email or on the web site; the kids really like having DVR capability on both our TVs.
I’ll try to remember to post an update in a few weeks, after we’ve lived with U-verse for a while.
UPDATE: So, I got my first email notification of a voice mail message shortly after I wrote this post. It’s great that I can listen to the voice mail online, but the email falls a little short. It shows me the number that called and then includes a link to the U-Verse home page. After I click on it, I have to log in and go through about five more clicks to hear the message. Couldn’t they provide a direct link or even attach the *.wav file to the email? So clase, but so far. I guess it’s the 80/20 rule in action.

The unsurprising conclusion of a recent study: People prefer advice from an expert who projects confidence over an expert who shows caution.
One defining difference between American political conservatives and liberals these days is confidence in their opinion: right-wingers tend to believe that they are right, everyone else is wrong, whereas we wishy-washy liberals believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that we should find the truth together. Conservatives tend to make more emotional arguments, liberals more intellectual ones.
Case in point in regard to liberals is the tag line of Rafe Colburn’s blog: “Strong opinions, weakly held.” (That’s a saying that I really like, by the way)
Therefore, we liberals are always going to be behind the conservatives in regard to the passion of our followers. It sucks, but it’s true.

This week, several blogs I follow have linked to Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest Atlantic article about the psychology of overconfidence. it’s an interesting article, but overconfidence is not the subject of this post.
In the article, Gladwell uses Bear Stearns’ former CEO Jimmy Cayne as a case study in over-confidence, and he includes some quotes from Cayne, such as:

The audacity of that prick [treasury secretary Geithner] in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan. Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, “Raise the bridge.” This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend.

I am amazed that someone who had reached the pinnacle of corporate America would be so vulgar–maybe in private, but he would certainly have the sense to tone it down for an interview. But then, maybe Cayne’s not caring about his vulgarity is just another point in Gladwell’s case about Cayne’s over-confidence. Or maybe I just don’t get out much.

I’m a huge fan of Consumerist; it’s usually the first feed I usually check when I open my feed reader. Today, I ran across another interesting consumer blog: Consumerology. I’m a little wary of the organization that sponsors the blog, The Center for Cost-Effective Consumerism, since it’s underwritten by Express Scripts and has the following vision statement:

The Center for Cost-Effective Consumerism gives plan sponsors access to a unique view of what works and what doesn’t when trying to inspire positive change in the way members use the pharmacy benefit.

So, I’ll read their healthcare-related posts with a little wariness, but the academics associated with the Center seem to be very reputable, and at least their blog posts that are not related to healthcare seem to be unbiased.

In my previous post, I pondered how the people who tormented me in high school feel about that now: Do they realize what they did? Do they know it but not think it remarkable? Do they regret it?
I just read a blog post by Bob Sutton that may provide an answer:

This research is part of a long line of studies that show people can be remarkably clueless to their own behavior and how others perceive them. . . This helps explain a lot of things, for example why the Zogby survey a couple years ago found that over one-third of American’s reported being bullied at work and yet less than 1% ever ever reported bullying others.