matt.alvarado

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Taking work home" - originally published 9/30/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

As a commenter noted, Lincoln’s Cooper Union address remains all too relevant to current events:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

[...]

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

If only the Party of Lincoln hadn’t become the party of Calhoun and Taney…

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Seminar Food" - originally published 9/6/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

The release of new information showing that health insurance premiums are going to be lower than expected under Obamacare means that the Heritage Foundation and conservatives were right when they came up with this whole competition idea way back when. Creating a competitive marketplace where the consumer can make an informed decision about her options really does work to make companies produce their best offer.

That means people are going to be getting a pretty darned good deal in the insurance exchanges, and the companies are going to get a boatload of new customers. It's pretty much a win-win, and proves that solutions can be found in the market. So conservatives should be ending their calls for repeal, and embracing the fact that what they (used to) believe in has been vindicated, right?

So how are Republicans reaction to the news? What about House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who've held 40 repeal votes so far. Maybe they appreciate the news that they had it right.

     

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell?

     

How about RNC chair Reince Preibus?

     

Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint must be excited, since it was his organization's idea in the first place. Anything in the last day?

     

I guess his latest statement still stands.

“Folks, we can’t allow this plague to come onto the American people.”

Okay, then.

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "How was your summer?" - originally published 8/30/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

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A freind from back when I lived in Seattle has a Kickstarter campaign going that is precisely the kind of thing Kickstarter was meant for; quirky, interesting, and not overtly comercial.

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The drip feed of revelations about spying by NSA, related agencies and international subsidiaries like GCHQ, is taking on a familiar pattern. Take some long-held suspicion about what they might be up to, and go through the following steps

1. “You’re being paranoid. That can never happen, thanks to our marvellous checks and balances”
2. “Well, actually it does happen, but hardly ever, so there’s no need to worry about it”
3. “OK, it happens all the time, but you shouldn’t be worried unless you have something to hide”

An example which must have occurred to quite a few of us is whether NSA employees can spy on current or former partners, potential love interests and so on. Until a few days ago, this was at stage 1. Now, it’s been admitted that this not only happens, but it has a name “LOVEINT“. Still, we are told by the great defender of our liberties Dianne Feinstein, this has only happened on a handful of occasions (Stage 2).

All very reassuring, until you read the following

Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.

In other words, while NSA monitors everything you and I do all the time, it relies on witchcraft to detect wrongdoing by its own employees. I guess we’ll just have to hope that NSA staff are too busy snooping on our emails to read any of the 194 000 Google hits on “how to cheat a polygraph”.

On Tuesday, the quintessentially mainstream American real estate brokerage--Re/Max--went public. The housing market is hot enough, its initial filing explained, that raising investor cash could launch it into markets around the country it hadn't yet reached.

But wait--real estate agents? Wasn't the internet supposed to drive them out of business?

The online age has been hard on all kinds of middlemen, after all. Travel agents, for example, rendered obsolete by Orbitz and Expedia. Soft goods retailers, for another, outpaced by Amazon. The effect should be similar with people who sell homes: What do they have but what they know? And what of that can't be better figured out through unbiased, publicly available data, crunched and presented on Web sites like Zillow and Trulia for free?

And yet, real estate agents are still with us. Sure, their numbers declined during the housing crash, and haven't quite recovered:

But the sector may have been overinflated anyway. During the boom, real estate was considered a fast way to make easy money, and the unserious didn't survive when sales dried up. "I think it benefited the profession, because it got a lot of people out of it that shouldn't have been in it," says Lindsay Reishman, who runs his own brokerage in Washington.

And now, according to the National Association of Realtors, agents are as widely used as ever: 89 percent of buyers retained one in 2012, up from 69 percent in 2001. It's the same on the seller side, where only 9 percent sold a home without an agent, down from a high of 20 percent in 1987. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they made an annual mean wage of $51,170, which is down from a high of $55,000 in 2008, but still up from $42,000 in 2003.

There are a few reasons why agents are still around.

- The post-crash world is more complex: The housing crash and ensuing tighter lending standards, as well as the prevalence of foreclosures and short sales, have made the average transaction harder to navigate without expert help. Getting financing and negotiating tricky contracts, for example, probably shouldn't be done on your own. "There's always something doing down the pike that makes the process more complicated," says Scott MacDonald, who runs a Re/Max brokerage in Chantilly, Va.

- The internet improves productivity: When buyers can find out the homes they want through online research, an agent has to spend less time touring them around. Then, they can just come in and help with closing, and pick up the same commission. Some sites, like Redfin, offer lower rates for less wraparound service--but even Redfin decided last year to flesh out its bare-bones model to cover more home tours, and increased rates for buyers. (That could change more with services like Jason's House, which allows agents to bid on buyers who only need a few specific tasks performed).

- The internet increases agent leverage over brokers: In most states, agents have to affiliate with a brokerage, like Re/Max, Long & Foster, or Coldwell Banker. But when they can self-promote online, they don't need as much in return. "As agents over time were able to market themselves directly to the consumer, that puts the squeeze on brokers," says Reishman. "Agents are in a position where they can keep more of their money, because they're not reliant on the brokerage to get their business." To adapt and add value, brokerages have scaled back on their office space--more agents now work from home, rather than a private cubicle--and offer trainings to deal with different market conditions, like house flippers and investors.

- People still don't trust cheap things: Buying a home is a big decision, and people don't tend to want to take a risk on a cut-rate agent, which is why there hasn't been much undercutting or negotiation of commissions. "I think it does take place, but at least my bet is that at the end of the day, this is the biggest asset they've ever owned, so if you can make people believe you'll handle that process correctly, people are wiling to pay for it," says Reishman. "I've been thinking seriously about saying, my commissions are going to be 8 percent, and people think, this guy is really good!"

It’s not as if he was a paragon of sweetness and light while he was a member of Congress, but as Barney Frank puts it in a column this weekend for the Portland Press Herald, “While in elected office, I had to deal with the things I was doing that annoyed other people. Now, I get to talk about things that others do that annoy me.” Apparently at the top of his list? The Netflix original series House of Cards, which drives him nuts because he thinks the myth of the all-powerful lawmaker will convince viewers at home that they’re powerless to change the system. He writes:

In other respects, “House of Cards” demeans the democratic process in ways that are unfair, inaccurate, and if they were to be believed by a substantial number of the public, deeply unfortunate.

The character is wholly amoral. He has no political principles, either substantive or procedural. There is no issue about which he cares; no tactic he will not employ, no matter how unfair it is to others; and he is thoroughly dishonest. I have never met anyone in a position of power in Congress who resembles that caricature.

There are specific ludicrous examples. He was able to prevent the speaker of the House from seeing the president of the United States. Nonsense. The notion that the majority whip would have the power to step between the president and the speaker is as fanciful as the zombie series with which it competes for viewers.

In another preposterous episode, the police commissioner of Washington — a nonexistent position — is summoned to a post-midnight meeting with the Spacey character’s chief of staff and is persuaded to release a congressman from a drunken driving charge by the promise of aid in his campaign for mayor. In fact, the citizens of Washington deeply resent congressional refusal to let them make their own decisions about public policy. They are so angry at Congress most of the time — with excellent reason — that accepting any intervention of that sort by a congressional leader would be the dumbest thing a mayoral candidate could do. I have never seen that kind of involvement by a congressional leader in a Washington election.

Frank admits that “Dramatic criticism is neither my interest nor my forte,” but if it was, he might have made the argument that House of Cards‘ need to make Frank Underwood into some sort of low-level supervillain, injecting stakes like Congressman-murder into the proceedings actually produces a more boring, generic show than one that was more deeply engaged with the reality of politics and journalism in Washington. Declaring all young political reporters ambitious sluts is less interesting than capturing a spectrum that includes horserace reporters, data nerds, aspiring feature writers, and snappy commentators. Narrowing the question the show asks to whether Frank Underwood is a horrible enough person to do anything in pursuit of power is less interesting–because it’s yes, every single time–than giving him actual limitations and weaknesses. Absolute power tends to circumscribe storytelling and character exploration, rather than keeping them moving. A Parks and Recreation take on Washington would be more revealing than House of Cards‘ embrace of darkness as a signifier. Now if only we could find someone to make it with a Barney Frank-like main character.

The post Barney Frank’s Awesome Takedown Of ‘House of Cards’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

These tips must be good, if they’re all natural. Remember, as with all fashion, the key is your ability to sport the style, and yet still move and earn a living wage, with which to buy food. And a Netflix subscription. (Rosemary Mosco of Bird and Moon explains the species depicted here on her Tumblr.)

(via Bird and Moon.)

Previously in Fashion

• Hats? Body Art? Both, Kind Of
• 3D Printed Tentacle Shoes!
• Velociraptors Took Over British Vogue

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Friday August 16, 2013

New Comic: Exploration

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This has disaster written all over it:

Archaeologists were surprised when they opened an excavated stone coffin only to find another coffin made of lead inside. The team said they’ve never seen anything like it.

The remains of King Richard III were lost for centuries beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, until archeologists discovered the site in Sept. 2012 and later confirmed the match. But other mysteries have been found, including a double coffin thought to have been sealed more than 100 years before Richard was buried.

Archaeologists returned to the Grey Friars monastery site in early July for more study. After several weeks of excavation, eight people lifted the lid off of a heavy coffin made of stone on July 23. They discovered that an inner coffin made of lead was sealed within the outer stone coffin.

The 7-foot-long stone coffin was thought to have been sealed in the 13th or 14th century. After its opening, the lead inner coffin was moved to the University of Leicester for researchers to analyze how to access it without damaging the remains inside.

A wide variety of end-of-the-world scenarios begin with a tableau just like this. Nothing good can come of opening a lead coffin that somebody saw fit to seal within a stone coffin. It’s the medieval equivalent of the Yucca Mountain. Stay away.

Pete Warden

The wonderful thing about being a data scientist is that I get all of the credibility of genuine science, with none of the irritating peer review or reproducibility worries. My first taste of this was my Facebook friends connection map. The underlying data was sound, derived from 220m public profiles. The network visualization of drawing lines between the top ten links for each city had issues, but was defensible. The clustering was produced by me squinting at all the lines, coloring in some areas that seemed more connected in a paint program, and picking silly names for the areas. I thought I was publishing an entertaining view of some data I’d extracted, but it was treated like a scientific study. A New York Times columnist used it as evidence that the US was perilously divided. White supremacists dug into the tool to show that Juan was more popular than Juan[HF – John???] in Texan border towns, and so the country was on the verge of being swamped by Hispanics. …

I’ve enjoyed publishing a lot of data-driven stories since then, but I’ve never ceased to be disturbed at how the inclusion of numbers and the mention of large data sets numbs criticism. The articles live in a strange purgatory between journalism, which most readers have a healthy skepticism towards, and science, where we sub-contract verification to other scientists and so trust the public output far more. … If a sociologist tells you that people in Utah only have friends in Utah, you can follow a web of references and peer review to understand if she’s believable. If I, or somebody at a large tech company, tells you the same, there’s no way to check. The source data is proprietary, and in a lot of cases may not even exist any more in the same exact form as databases turn over, and users delete or update their information. Even other data scientists outside the team won’t be able to verify the results. The data scientists I know are honest people, but there’s no external checks in the system to keep them that way.

[via Cosma – Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

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As I've noted elsewhere, I believe immigration reform is quite likely dead, unless its biggest supporters accept that fact and take the fight into the political and campaign arena rather than letting it die a slow death of opacity on Capitol Hill.

But it's not too soon to note the main political fatality: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Rubio's vulnerability is so great in part because he staked so much on immigration reform as a way to loft himself to the top tier of 2016 GOP candidates. But the other part is because there was so little to the man in the first place absent his fortuitous would-be positioning as the young new Hispanic face of a Republican party reeling from a reputation for having little to no traction with America's burgeoning non-white population.

Remember, Rubio was basically an accidental Senator, swept up in the floodtide of the 2010 Tea Party mid-term, though it's true that many careers start that way.

Now that it's clear that the base of the GOP - as expressed in the House GOP's diehard desire to kill reform - is emphatically not on board with the Senate immigration bill to which he tied his fate, his whole plan for the 2016 run is basically in a shambles and his support among conservatives is falling rapidly. (His national numbers, rather than Republicans only, show similar problems: see chart.) There's even a hopeless and unconstitutional movement afoot among Florida conservatives to 'recall' him from office. (Sorry, you can't recall federal officeholders. Been there, done that.)

So what to do?

If you've watched over recent weeks, Rubio has been casting around for basically any right wing position to grab on to. First, there was his quixotic demand to shut down the government if Obamacare isn't defunded. Then yesterday he tried to filibuster the Perez nomination even after the Senate nuclear option deal. And there have been various other examples. But as Dave Weigel aptly notes, now every desperate lurch right looks self-serving, cynical and well ... desperate.

So now Rubio seems trapped, on the wrong side of his party's base on a key issue - and one that looks unlikely even to deliver legislation that might have bipartisanship traction with middle-ground voters. It's one thing to say 'I bucked my party to bring change the country needs', another to say 'I bucked my party on change my country needs but it actually didn't pan out. Sorry.' And now he's forced to become some sort of hyperactive conservative wild man - what he wasn't supposed to be - in order to recoup ground on the right that likely can't be salvaged.

Hey, whatcha reading? Oh, something besides this GQ story about Old Handsome Joe Biden, God Bless Him and Keep Him? Why are you so dumb? Here, let us read, together, the things in Jeanne Marie Laskas’s profile that will make you most want to crawl into Joe’s lap and … well, that’s all. Just the things that will make you most want to crawl into his lap. You know, as opposed to every other day on this planet.

WHAT?

• I saw him freelance a grand Joe Biden entrance into President Giorgio Napolitano’s palace, teeth gleaming, arms fully outstretched, ready to hug this guy, that guy, Hey, guys! I’m here! You’re here! We’re beautiful! Decked out in his smooth blue suit, white pocket square—his broad smile the kind a man reserves for his bowling team. This demeanor contrasted sharply with everyone else’s. Guards in shiny helmets sprouting horsehair ponytails, bedraggled White House advance team in smart skirts and solid-color pumps. A Biden entrance can make the stuffiest event intimate, for an instant human and vaguely…funny.

  Sunshine, apt and miraculous, broke through the day of the pope’s installation Mass. “Your Holiness, this is my sister, Valerie,” Biden said. The pope. Joe Biden and the pope. Val was next to him in her long black chapel veil, the two of them together at church just like back in Wilmington, and Scranton before. Except it was the Vatican. In the reception line, Val didn’t kiss the pope’s ring, and Biden didn’t kiss the pope’s ring (to be fair, plenty of people didn’t kiss the pope’s ring), because they are Bidens, equal, not below or above anyone, not the pope, not some schlub on the street. “Nobody is better than you.” That’s the message their mom hammered into their heads. “You’re not better than anybody, but nobody is better than you.”

  JOE BIDEN DOESN’T KISS UP TO ANYONE, international headlines read later that day, which made it sound way more hostile than his mom ever meant it.

• “Joe Biden doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” says John McCain. “He’s unique from the day he was elected before he was 30 years old. He’s unique in that he’s had some role in every major national-security crisis that his nation has faced in the last thirty-five years. I don’t know anyone like him in the U.S. Senate. Look at the number of times he’s been able to conclude agreements. I would say he’s been the most impactful vice president that I’ve known—certainly in modern times.”

  Not Cheney, McCain says. Biden.

  “President Biden” does not sound preposterous to McCain. “Suppose the economy comes on strong. He’s bound to get credit…. Of course, the State of the Union speech would be the longest in history.”

• “My kids went here. My oldest son, he’s the attorney general of the state of Delaware. We have a rugby team now? I want a picture! Ho ho ho, where’s the White House photographer? And where’s the class president? Can I have a class-president picture? Kate? Hello, Kate! I was class president, too, Kate! Folks, folks—”

  The crowd obeys, falls to a hush. “Folks, when I was here at Archmere,” he says, gathering attention. “One of the reasons I owe so much to Archmere, and by the way, I’m not joking. Don’t laugh when I tell you how. You know, you never make fun of anybody with a club foot or a withered arm, but it’s open season on anybody who stutters.

  “I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.”

  Without looking, he reaches out to Kate, the class president, grabs her hand.

  “The most frightened I was. The hardest speech I ever had to make my whole life was my senior year, and all I had to do was introduce my family. And I was scared to death. Just, even now, thinking about it. ‘Father Diny, parents, guests, I’d like to introduce to you my c—’ And I almost couldn’t say c-c-c-c—”

  Kate is short, in a pretty flowered dress. She has her eyebrows up, leans forward as if to help.

  “C-c-c-c-class,” he says. “Of 1961. It literally was one of the turning points of my life that I was able to stand there. And it was because of the priest and nuns here at Archmere.”

  The students have put their phones down. No one expected the vice president of the United States to come, no one expected a speech on the last day of school.

  He turns to Kate, leans down, kisses her forehead.

  “Anyway, I’ll get out of your hair.”

• “He was, you know, made fun of,” says his sister, Valerie Biden Owens. “One guy called him ‘Dash,’ signed the football to ‘dash dash dash Biden,’ because it was ‘J-J-J-Joe Biden.’ He worked hard. He practiced speaking. He learned cadence and rhythm. He memorized poems. He worked very hard.”

  Game it out. That’s what he taught himself. Like, collecting money for the paper route. The people who answer the door are going to talk to you, and you have to say something back. He learned their interests, rehearsed at home. The guy in the red house? A Yankees man. Know the box scores. Practice. “Did you see Mantle hit two homers yesterday?” Memorize. Get the cadence. Did you see/Man-tle hit/two hom-ers/yes-ter-day. Practice.

• The job of vice president is important, really it is, way more important than it used to be, but not in that fucked-up way Cheney made it important. I got the feeling Biden would have loved to say “fucked-up way Cheney made it important.” But he didn’t say that, not with all the tape recorders going, and the staffers there, and him in his breakfast-with-the-king-of-Jordan blue suit. Still, the uneasy expectation that he might say something like that is the thing, always the thing with Biden, the guy who trips and falls, gets back up, gets taken out, keeps getting back in.

  He will say foolish things he doesn’t quite mean, and he will say bluntly brilliant things that others long to say. “This is a big fucking deal,” he whispered to Obama, as the president was about to sign the health-insurance-reform bill into law. Of course it was. Thank you, Joe. “Who do you love?” he said on Meet the Press. “Who do you love? And will you be loyal to the person you love?… Whether they’re marriages of lesbians or gay men or heterosexuals.” Of course. Thank you, Joe.

Send us your address, Jeanne Marie. We got what you need.

[GQ]

That McDonald’s. It’s such a sweet New Gilded Age corporation, helping its employees learn how to live on its minimum wage salaries. Here’s the sample budget journal:

As Robyn Pennacchia notes, that $1105–that’s assuming a 40-hour workweek. So McDonald’s is telling you to work another job, adding up to a mere 62 hour workweek if they live in Illinois, that land of moochers and takers. 74 hours if they are on the national minimum wage. Very Gilded Age. And when you work those 62 or 74 hours, you know what you don’t get? Heat.

Where the $20 a month health insurance comes from, unless we are talking Gilded Age solutions of buying a bottle of whiskey to kill pain, I don’t know.

Monthly spending money includes food, gas, and any basic necessities of life. Including heat I guess.

On July 13th the PBS Tumblr posted this photo, of a recognizable red hat and black glove combination with the caption,

Where in the world did this come from? Stay tuned for something awesome!

It would appear that we have a mystery on out hands. However, the question today isn’t “where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”, but where in time will we be getting what looks a lot like more of our favorite jet-setting villain. Children of the 90′s, start looking for clues!

(PBS Tumblr via Tipster Lexie)

Previously in Carmen Sandiego

• Who In The World Is Carmen Sandiego Essay
• J-Lo Wants To Produce A Carmen Sandiego Movie
• Carmen Sandiego Cosplay

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New Comic: Near Miss

In this interview with AFI archives from late 2012, actor Dustin Hoffman remembers the initial planning for Tootsie, the film in which his character disguises himself as a woman for a job. It was the first makeup test which led Hoffman to break down in tears over a huge revelation about men and women in our society. Take a look.

(via It’s Walky)

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