A summary of the new detention bill in America

Based on http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detention_bill/singleton/

1) It expressly empowers the President — with regard to anyone accused of the acts in section (b) – to detain them “without trial until the end of the hostilities.”

2) It allows the President to target not only those who helped perpetrate the 9/11 attacks or those who harbored them, but also: anyone who “substantially supports” such groups and/or “associated forces.”

3) The only provision from which U.S. citizens are exempted here is the “requirement” of military detention. For foreign nationals accused of being members of Al Qaeda, military detention is mandatory; for U.S. citizens, it is optional. This section does not exempt U.S citizens from the presidential power of military detention: only from the requirement of military detention.

Basically, as a protestor, you can be considered a terrorist because of this law's vague wording. And as a terrorist, even as a US citizen, you can be indefinitely detained.

Posted via email from bryanized

Your Android phone, without apps, may be keylogging you (IMPORTANT)

It's a 17 minute video, so I'll summarize:

if you have an Android device with the stock service provider/manufacturer OS, you may have an app on your Settings -> Manage Applications -> All with "IQ" in the name. This is a keylogger that records your button presses in chunks, and then sends this information back to the phone manufacturer in small bursts (re: not in real time, so you won't always be able to 'see' it in action).

For example, one may be called "HTC IQagent".

The only way to circumvent this is to root your phone and install a clean OS, at this time.

Stay safe my friends!

p.s. the keylogging part of the video starts around 10 minutes.

Posted via email from bryanized

On the Occupy Wall St. Protests #OWS

I don't understand the logic behind wanting a group of people who don't specialize in economics or government policies to come up with a cohesive stand alone message for what they want changed.

It's clear the biggest idea they all seem to share is

• A.) The majority of the country's wealth lay in the hands of too few people.

• B.) Those people are using that money to buy politicians, and there needs to be new laws and policies to stop it from happening.

• C.) More and more people are in debt, and unemployed every single day, and they need a better exit strategy than "You shouldn't have done this, or that, and you should have done this. I do this, and I'm fine."

It's not up to people who don't specialize in creating laws to write one. The demands are there, politicians need to stop screwing around talking about how they don't know what's going on, and start formulating plans. If you're a congressmen, or anything with very good knowledge about politics don't wait around until these people start throwing trashcans in windows out of frustration so you can just discredit the entire thing. Come up with an idea, give it to the public, and keep doing that until a compromise is met.

That's how a government is supposed to work. Not fucking around looking for sound bites of the people who don't know what they're talking about, so you can continue to not care about how you're ruining the country.

Edit: You know, if there is so much general dissatisfaction in the country that nobody can get behind one single message, maybe there is a far bigger underlying problem. I don't think so many people being outraged at so many different things is a bad thing for a movement, it's a wake up call for the entire system.

Another edit: I think the whole 99% vs. 1% slogan (while catchy) is detrimental to the cause. It's not the doctor that is making 450k a year who is the bad guy in this situation. The entire 1% isn't a problem, the problem is the fact that these people are in the 1%. When you think 1% of the population you think billionaires, but that's not who makes up the 1% anymore. That's how uneven the wealth distribution is now. The .1% are the people who are corrupting politics, not the lawyers, and doctors, and the guy who owns 7 burger kings.

Posted via email from bryanized

On the current state of the IT industry (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc)

Because this post was originally intended to be a private one made within Google, it is a sensitive one and may be deleted. Therefore, I am archiving it here. Originally, it was posted by Steve Yegge, and then reposted by Rip Rowan. It's a long one, so be prepared.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 

Rip Rowan  -  11:18 AM (edited)  -  Public

The best article I've ever read about architecture and the management of IT.

***UPDATE***

This post was intended to be shared privately and was accidentally made public. Thanks to +Steve Yegge for allowing us to keep it out there. It's the sort of writing people do when they think nobody is watching: honest, clear, and frank.

The world would be a better place if more people wrote this sort of internal memoranda, and even better if they were allowed to write it for the outside world.

Hopefully Steve will not experience any negative repercussions from Google about this. On the contrary, he deserves a promotion.

***UPDATE #2***

This post has received a lot of attention. For anyone here who arrived from The Greater Internet - I stand ready to remove this post if asked. As I mentioned before, I was given permission to keep it up.

Google's openness to allow us to keep this message posted on its own social network is, in my opinion, a far greater asset than any SaS platform. In the end, a company's greatest asset is its culture, and here, Google is one of the strongest companies on the planet.

Steve Yegge originally shared this post:

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.

Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:

- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.

- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.

- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.

- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.

- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.

That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.

This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.

At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.

That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.

You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable ataws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.

I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world.

The. Most. Important. Thing.

If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible toanyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.

Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.

But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.

That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they're building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby's great, but it's like parts when you need a car.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.

Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.

I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.

So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're doing it.

Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It's embarrassing. We don't have any of that stuff.

Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial.

Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.

After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to gettoo depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.

Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.

I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves.

And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.

Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.

Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.

You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.

But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.

And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.

It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us.

Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.

Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it.

Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.

Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What are they missing?"

The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do external ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company: the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We've tried that and it's not working.

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.

I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I'm sorry.

But we've gotta start doing this right.

 

Posted via email from bryanized

Steve Jobs's words:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Posted via email from bryanized

A post about going into the military

Archiving a personal post about the military, and how it affected his life. Written by MarriedtoMurder:

I enlisted in the Army at 19 to run away from life hoping I'd reinvent myself and become something BETTER. Well... depending on what Branch/MOS you enlist in will determine how you handle this choice - plus, if you are sensitive or if you have an issue with taking orders then the military might not be for you.

I became very good at TAKING orders, I just had a problem with agreeing with or seeing the logic behind them. The military is a very inclusive environment. Once you're in, you become a part of the military. This means that the outside world becomes the past, and everything about your life is military. The people, the ideas, the mindset, the goals - EVERY. THING.

If you do not adapt to this mindset then after a short while you may begin to resent the military. It depends though on the person. I was very home-sick, I didn't like my command, I was so shit tired of the training, the war, the shooting. I was infantry - so the stress was a lot higher than other jobs in the army. I just want to say that the Military will not SOLVE all of your problems.

Yes, it's a stable job and there are benefits, but there is a lot to lose. Yourself, your friends, your life. Many people will downvote me who either were in and enjoyed it, or who buy into the romanticized idea of the military. I lived in the shit for years - hell, my battle buddy hung himself in the middle of the night during basic training in his wall-locker. I woke up to a purple faced friend who left me a note saying, "Thanks for trying."

At 19 that was my entrance into the fast paced, high energy, balls to the wall life that the military is. Your opinion does not matter unless you are a high commander. Your life only matters as long as you are breathing and your family is living in a house. I did enjoy some good times, I met some fucking awesome people. I trained with Navy Seals and I went to many different places.

However, there is a lot that I lost. One of the biggest things is my perception of self. Once I got out I lost the Soldier side of me and nothing I seem to do in life will ever be as... BIG as that. I feel like a Star who is past their prime. I feel like I can never live up to who I used to be, even when I was unhappy - I set super high standards and the feeling of "doing something great for your country" no longer follows me. Once you're out, at least in my case, I have never seen the world through the same eyes. Hard to explain, but life seems... dull.

Its a mindfuck of a life my friend. Whatever you do I wish you the best, the best, the fucking BEST. If you need advice, please PM me. But do NOT fall for the recruiters easy going friendly attitude. You're a number. A car to sell. You mean nothing to them and they would try to sell you the moon if they thought you'd believe it.

Do you regret it?

 

Eh... I did what I did. If I could do it over I would. I mean... honestly - I learned a lot and now I could sleep in a park and not even suffer or bitch about it. It taught me a lot about how far I can push myself. It's just... there are a lot of long-lasting effects that haven't gone away for me. Not just from war, but from the life. It's hard, it really is. And it is not for everyone. There's a 50/50 gamble that you'll adapt.

Most of the people who loved it are those who either wanted to do it since forever - who knew how to play the rank game, not make waves, make friends with higher-ups and move through with ease. Other people who seemed to like it where those who hungered for power, those who LOVED ordering people around. I had some amazing SSGT's who loved to help us, train us young kids, show us about life and mentor us.

From a guy who had no dad, this really helped me. Just... don't make this choice without thinking it through - sitting on it. The military is also cutting (the army at least) 40,000 soldiers next year. They don't really need as many ranks, and it might be even HARDER for you. I know that when I enlisted it was at the height of 2 wars and their standards were much lower (academically, physically and so on). You have to WANT this life, you need to be the type of person who yearns for something more than just a fale-safe stable job.

Those who enlisted because it was a last resort usually were the ones who said, "What the fuck did I do?" Those who had a long family history of serving, those who grew up in the South - hated middle-eastern people or just wanted to go and blow shit up where the ones who seemed to adapt better. For me, just... not being able to hold down a stable relationship - seeing friends come and go (die) - missing out on my family and friends back home... it all just became too hard on me and it made me hate my day-to-day.

In retrospect, I appreciate some things that I went through, so yeah... I'd do it over again because I don't know what else I could have done at that time. If I could go back I'd say... go to school, get any job, try to build skills on your own - open a business, just be.... the military pay is meh - and most of the time you blow the money you save out of bordem, or just because it's the only happy thing you can do in that life. So... like out of a LOT of people I met, only one guy ever saved up money.

Most, out of loneliness married any barracks whore who gave them the time of day. It's a very lonely life unless you love drinking and partying. If you can make it off base then yeah... maybe you will have fun but most off post cities are shitty. So... I'm ranting now lol. All I'm saying is DO THIS IF YOU WANT IT. If you want to be a cop, just do it. Don't go the military route. You will probably be so burned out of bureaucratic bullshit once you leave that you won't even want to go into another profession taking orders. At least... I wouldn't.

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What we learned from Netflix

Under promise. Over deliver.

People became so enamored with Netflix for its wide variety of offerings at a more than reasonable price. Now that the offerings change and the prices adjust due to contracts, Comcasts, and a need for more cash, people scoff, argue, and cancel their accounts. For $16/month, do you think what Netflix has to offer is no longer a great deal?

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Untitled

Written in response to Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, planning to step down and move into the position of head Comcast/NBC lobbyist (merged together only 4 months ago):

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/after-approving-comcastnbc-deal-fcc-commish-becomes-comcast-lobbyist.ars

FCC chairmen have ALWAYS been corrupt (except Newton Minow -- as far as I know, he was kickass). Among the worst was Fowler, appointed by Reagan. Fowler thought tv was "a toaster with pictures" and struck down rules protecting children from host advertising (pikachu selling you pokemon toys), PTAR (the prime time access rule, trying to get local shows on prime time), and Fin/Syn (which made it so that independent production companies and producers, who take all the financial risk in making tv series, are able to make money off their creativity instead of selling their hopeless asses to networks).

He wasn't even the worst -- I think it was 1957-1958 when a representative named Harris led an investigation of the FCC for corruption. The FCC has 7 chairs with staggered 7-year terms. Most of them were having their kids' college paid for by networks or some other equally obvious sign of corruption, all while deregulating limits on how many stations a network could own. Thing was, Harris was getting paid off too -- he ordered his investigator, a guy named Schwartz, to not actually reveal the blatant corruption he had found. Schwartz refused to hide it, and Harris told him he'd destroy his career if he did. So Schwartz trotted over to the new york times and released it all anonymously. Congress decided to conduct hearings of the FCC, and before they even began 5 of the 7 chairs stepped down. The FCC head of the time did not, because, although he had the most blatant evidence of corruption piled against him, he was supported by the then president, Eisenhower.

But the FCC's got no choice. Unfortunately, whenever the FCC steps up to do its damn job and protect people, the politicians of congress step in and rule it "overstepped its bounds" based on whoever's the congressmen are getting paid by at that time. Even external groups get screwed over in an expensive court case if they try to be moral -- the lobbying arm of networks, the NAB, realized awhile back that host selling to kids is insanely immoral, and has huge, huge effects on kids like no one else, because at certain ages they cannot discriminate between the tv show and the ads. So they wrote guidelines (just guidelines!) against host selling, and these were struck down by congress in a pricey lawsuit later. Another case -- the "Fairness Doctrine" was a network's attempt at self-regulation, trying to make sure controversial issues got equal air time on both sides. It was upheld by the supreme court, then struck down in a veto by Reagan. Another example: the FCC tried, way back when cable companies were only CATV (cable antennae tv) to force them not to steal content. CATV was the equivalent of video piracy today -- they found towns where people couldn't get tv signals, attached a big antenna, wired the house, and bounced it down to them -- for a lofty price. And they didn't make their own content, but sometimes charged as though they had made the NBC shows themselves. If a network had a problem with them, they'd cut off the signal to that network, or fuck up its ratings some other way for them like by bouncing a competing stations' signal in from miles and miles away to a top city (think getting the top CBS shows from DC in NYC). The FCC tried to help the networks out by forbidding CATV from doing stuff like this, including cutting out certain networks and not others in a must-carry agreement. Struck down by Congress.

The real kicker is we've already lost everything to corruption, a long long long time ago. Do you have any idea what tv, what radio, originally was? Radio -- way back, by 1912 -- was a TWO-way medium. It was the internet without pictures. And it wasn't expensive -- you didn't have to buy a laptop or head to a library-- you could make a basic radio with some basic supplies, including a coffee canister. People spoke to strangers miles, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Can you imagine what the world would have been like had radio not been seized for commercial interests in 1927? Within 15 years, a medium that brought people together was boxed and sold to companies so they could sell things. Kinda reminds you of something, doesn't it? Kinda reminds you of net neutrality. The internet didn't come into full force until fairly recently. And already, companies are foaming at the mouth, trying to own the newest medium. And they'll probably win in the long run, too.

And we wonder why the US continues to have problems.

 

 

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Great post by yeahiknow5 about America, right now (via Reddit)

I feel like this was worth reading, because I can't say I disagree with any of it, and I'd like to archive it here for anyone else to read. If you have any interest in American politics and future of our nation, you may find interest in it too.

 

The original link is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/g0vaz/breaking_republicans_pass_bill_to_kill_collective/c1k6a3r

 

You should read "What's the Matter with Kansas" & "Deer Hunting With Jesus".

Both are great takes on a working class, anti-intellectual, redneck culture that has been convinced to consistently vote against their own best interests.

I listen to my own father, who has been the victim of layoffs from corporate merger after merger, who's had his retirement fucked, who's lost money on wall street - he's done everything he was 'supposed' to do. He joined the military, went to college, had 2 kids, bought the house, invested & saved his money, worked his fucking ass off all his life & he still has squat to show for it. Now as a man well into his 60s he's feeling the wrath of age discrimination, he's finding his skills becoming outdated & his pay & benefits today (for the last 10 years) are lower than what they've been in the last 30 for him. Living the american life he finds his health failing as he's a lifetime smoker with a growing waistline. He's the prototypical uncultured, red-blooded american male. He slathers his streak in ketchup, votes conservatives down the line, and wants the good old days before the women, blacks and fags took over. He's a flag waver, supports his troops, and fends for himself.

He's always bitching about how much money corporations have to spend bc of regulation & about how the upper class need a tax cut. Nothing in the world makes him angrier than "socialism" & the so-called welfare state. Working people getting needed services bothers him tremendously because a few extreme token examples get painted as degenerate leeches by the likes of AM Radio & Fox News.

ANd then he'll turn right around & support corporate subsidy for just about anything from corn to oil - b/c it "stimulates jobs" and it "trickles down". He refuses to recognize that we as a nation spend more money at the beckoning of corporate America than we even begin to touch what we spend on our own citizenry through what he claims is "welfare" or infrastructure.

He's a working class guy who's been fucked by the system all his life. He still puts his suit on with a kind of sad pride, every day, & goes to work downtown to phone-monkey job nowadays. He's doing a job any body could do but he likes to pretend all his education & experience has gotten him somewhere. He's deluded about what America's exceptional way of life has brought him personally as he is deluded about what the world is like at large.

So he denies global warming, blames the unions, blames teachers & other government workers, blames regulation, blames the EPA & the FDA, blames those struggling to make it in this world, blames the blacks, blames the immigrants, blames everyone & anyone but those at the top. He'd rather blame fellow working people trying to grab a piece of the pie, rather than blame the crooks who deprive us all. Because somehow - be it by gender identity, racial identity, national identity, he thinks his class, his type belongs at the top. He's the top dog! But he's not. He's a nigger, i'm a nigger, muslims are niggers and mexicans are niggers, teachers and steel workers, and farmers too. To people like the Koch Brothers, we're all niggers and my dad can't see that. This is an us vs them game and people like my father are fucking deluded as to what side they're on or can be on one day.

Somewhere deep down inside, he admires those at the top - he wants to be them & even though he knows he'll never be one of them, he likes to pretend.

He goes to his Applebee's, Red Lobster & Outback & bitches about all the blacks there. I think this is important to note - it's indicative of his whole perspective. He is the same CLASS of people as these folks, he's spending roughly the same amount on dinner as them, but thinks things are going to hell because they are there. He doesn't get that he IS THEM. He's the same fucking class, in the same fucking boat. He's got relatively the same education level, roughly the same pay checks, living roughly the same way of life. But he's been convinced to fight, to hate, to dislike his own class of people & to admire & defend the class that basically owns & controls his life & all our lives. He has been perfectly trained to rail against the 'other'. Against feminists, environmentalists, labor movements, racial minorities, immigrants, public sector workers, union members. These people aren't HIS brothers & sisters - they are his enemy. He's so busy hating "otherness" that he doesn't realize he is them - and we're all getting fucked by the same small group of people at the top.

This is the same thing as him blaming unions & the welfare state. He has been indoctrinated through the years to fight amongst, to disagree with, to blame, & sometimes to outright hate people in the same boat as him. Surely - he's not on welfare but when you look at his salary and then I look at the income of people laid off for the last 8 months who can't find work and are in need of assistance - you can't help but notice - He is more like them, than the class and wealth that he worships and will never be a part of. Ever. And it's funny - this old man, he's always talking about 'having class', he talks about those stupid "yankees" who "have no class or decency". He would scold me as a child for acting up "have some class!" But the reality is he is a tactless guy, farts at the dinner table and blames in on the dog, has the most difficult time understanding his audience - makes crude and offensive jokes in front of people he barely knows. He dips out of the most important and formal events of his life to 'catch the game'. He did so while my mother was in labor, he did so at my fucking wedding. I could only imagine him at a cocktail party amongst these rich assholes he worships and the stares, gawking, and gasps that would be produced b/c of the shit that pops out of his mouth and the way he acts. He knows nothing of wine, different types of silverware on the table, and has never been able to wrap his head around a multi-coursed meal. He'd rather just have a big well done steak with some french fries, ketchup - lots of ketchup. I know this all sounds like a cheap shot but the man has no culture to him, and little 'class'. He's a grown up 'good old boy' from a small town with a mediocre education who knows suburban American life and that's all he knows. Yet somehow he worships the class above him and to think, these people wouldn't be caught dead eating where he eats, or even eating what he eats when they go out. These people would whisper to each other about his uncouth behavior. His broken English when he says "waRshington" or "waRsh", "y'all", "irregardless" and large portion of the English language that he mispronounces or flat out makes up. These people would not be caught dead with my father. So I fail to see why they get such lavish praise from him. Not only does he kiss the ass of, but actively defend & fight on behalf of those who would take everything away from him, his wife & his family if they could make a buck on it - because he believes in an American dream & a way of life that simply doesn't exist. He's a peasant, a 'working class hero', he's a pawn, a worker-bee, a nigger, a wage slave. He's not them, he'll never be them. And "their" policies directly spit right in his face, in my face, in all our faces.

He talks of freedom of those who have all the capital, but he doesn't worry about his own freedom. Liberty and freedom, when you don't have money, is just a word. It is meaningless drivel when you can't afford healthcare, education, shelter, retirement, and food. Look at Latin America - they were told (or forced) to give up on "socialism" in many nations - they were told privatizing water, electricity and other utilities would increase efficiency and that they would have LIBERTY! Instead - rich people who had no ties to their culture took over the utilities, raised the prices to the point most of these things became unaffordable luxuries. But you know -- they finally had "freedom!", they had "liberty!" That's capitalism baby!

And it's no different here. If you cannot find somekind of financial stability for necessities - you aren't free. It's that simple. In this regard, he doesn't worry about the freedom of his neighbors, of his children, or himself. All he see's as those liberal that take away rich people's money are the same people telling him where he can & cannot smoke and that he should put his seatbelt on - so liberals must "hate freedom!". Those damned reading elitist liberal communists!

He has been convinced, as have many Americans - to hate their own & to defend their masters. To squabble over our petty & even cosmetic differences, rather than to unite on our common interests to fight for proper pay, benefits, rights as a consumer & as a worker, & for a clean environment.

This is what happens when you have a class of people who were never taught to think for themselves, who act like reading is for fags, who are more willing to listen to hot heads like Beck & Limbaugh than to read any kind of political theorists, scientists, or economists. This is what happens when you close your mind & you become one who's always looking for that "other" to hate & to blame for your problems rather than to look at yourself or open your eyes to the bigger picture.

 

 

People like my dad are willing to accept AM radio, Fox News talk shows, & even Fwd chain emails as official sources, & then single-handedly ignore any material the talking heads on these shows didn't point him to. Because you can't trust anyone but them!

The ability to critically think, verify, discern the credibility of sources, to do the damned research yourself, is completely lost on these folks. That's what these fucking Tea Party & GOP talking heads hope for. They hope to god that their lies they spew get echoed in the public sphere so often that it becomes reality. That people are too dumb or too lazy to verify what they spout. This makes it so that people who are trying to get real shit done have to waste our time correcting mis-truths & disinformation just to garnish the slightest bit of public support to make progress anywhere.

People don't realize how dangerous this shit is. Right now the economy is & had been in the shitter. People are scared. People have lost their jobs & they're angry. They have organized & mobilized into this populist "tea party". They even think it's a real grassroots org & dismissing the fact that they're being led by billionaires & a corporate media. These are the angry masses that will eat up any scapegoat that their "leaders" feed them. We've seen this in history before.

I'm not trying to evoke Godwins Law or anything but i see a lot of correlations between the right-wing disenfranchised populist uprising here in America & a lot of what people experience in Wiemar Germany. There was a lot of angry people, scared about the loss of their jobs & an economy in bad shape. Those angry, uneducated people were looking for someone to blame. They didn't care if they sided with a political party that would be responsible for fucking them over & destroying their democracy, not to mention the massive harm they would do to other groups.

No, all that mattered was they found leaders who pretended to have answers. People like quick & simple answers & fixes, certainty & shared anger. That's what the Nazi Party gave them. That's what the Tea Party/Fox News/AM Radio & portions of the GOP are giving this right wing uprising too.

Anything intellectual is ignored or met with disinformation & a general air an superior anti-intellectualism. Everywhere I go: home to my parents, at work in the break room, flip on the tv, browse the internet - i see the same message: "My opinion is better than your facts". This approach is rooted deeply in ignorance & anger most of the time. When the populace stops listening to those with brains & ignores factual information, & opts for those that shout opinions, we got a problem.

The Tea Party would be an extremely powerful force if they had a politician that was worth a damn. Every time they have someone who is charismatic, they're an obvious idiot or crook. If somebody comes along who is charismatic & honest the US is in trouble bc of the frustration, disillusionment, justified anger & the absence of any coherent response from liberals. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants from Mexico, the Muslims, teachers, unions, Planned Parenthood, NPR, & blacks (you can toss in atheists, homosexuals & liberals too).

We will be told that WASPy private sector males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves & the honor of the nation. instead of fixing problems that truly affect the all of the working class, the nation will be convinced to support legislation that will further protect & consolidate power for the corporate elite. All those privacy rights, the voice we have in our government, & due process checks & balances that protect us all? Those things just get in the way of security & stability. The right-wing that supports these parties & leaders get hurt too, just in a more subtle way - they give away their rights & are too stupid to realize what they've done to themselves.

 

 

 

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Update on the New Zealand earthquake.. first hand experience

I am privileged to correspond with an ex-American now-New Zealander via a private forum. Today, he updated us with his first hand account of the earthquake aftermath.

Link to pictures: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/4705106/Photos-Before-and-after-the-Christchurch-earthquake

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