lexicography.com

My nomination for the best sentence of the week:

The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of “self-esteem” in our schools.

Children were on spring break so we took advantage of the situation to take a short vacation; hence no posts for the last week.

We went to Boca Raton, Florida. A place far removed from the NYC exurbia we normally inhabit. When I visit a new place, I am always curious. Severely curious, in the sense I need to know how the people who live there sustain them selves, what is the attraction of the place, how does the place differ from my familiar home, &etc. I create little explanations, probably fiction, which are sufficient for me to think that I understand the place. Then I can enjoy it.

For someone used to the flora of New Jersey, Boca is heady stuff. Palm trees, flowers and water everywhere. Lately what I see of the exurbs of NYC is very unsatisfactory. Greenery at the side of the road is choked with trash. Retail seems king. Every store has a lot totally dedicated to parking and a blaring trade dress totally out of keeping with the surroundings.

In Boca, the McDonalds is Spanish Mission, its lot is landscaped so that you cannot see a car from the road, and the sign is small and tasteful.

I am a capitalist, but I think New Jersey sold out. The people who controlled the local and county governments allowed business to do absolutely anything which would benefit business. Why should the local Stop and Shop look like an industrial park if it is located in a residential neighborhood? Why should the CVS look like an airport? It is not an issue of money, IMHO. Homeowners have to meet all sorts of restrictions to make their property attractive. It is only the local Dunkin Donuts which is allowed to cover 100% of their lot with parking.

Hilarious: ScrappleFace: Bush Tests New Words for Social Security Reform

“We need to hybridize Social Security,” Mr. Bush told an audience in Seattle this week, hoping the association with the ubiquitous gasoline-electric cars would help his case. “My hybridization plan is the perfect blend of market forces and USSR-style centralized government planning. None of your money will actually be in your hands. But we’ll dictate a few investment choices for you, so you can have feeling of control without the full risk or benefit.”

Collective nouns in a more conventional sense, The Collective Noun Page:

A squeal of nieces (-suggested by Katherine Spivey, SpiveyK-)
A squint of proofreaders (-suggested by Katherine Spivey, SpiveyK-)
A stable of prostitutes (-submitted by Jason Harris, harrij-)
A staff of employees (-submitted by Philip F. Karpel, Jr., pkarpel-)
A stand of flamingo (-submitted by ojo6-)
A stand of trees (-submitted by Jason Harris, harrij1-)
A stash of weed (when hidden, -submitted by Jason Harris, harrij1-)
A steam of turds (-suggested by Adrian de Bear, adebear-)
A stench of skunks (-submitted by David Henderson, davidh-)
A stock of portfolio managers (-suggested by R, K, & F, infoman)

[Email addresses munged] Found via The Linguistic Fun Page.

When I wiped out my MySQL database, I deleted the entry linking to this article about collective words and how they are sometimes misused to justify political action. It is a very entertaining read. A sample:

A phrase to be greeted with skepticism is national followed by just about anything. For example, national resources often refer to things, such as oil deposits, that are privately owned but happen to be located in the United States. The same cautions apply to public, whether preceding property, interest, accommodations, or safety. It is seldom easy to ascertain an intangible like the national security or public interest; both invite controversy, and there are those who doubt that they should ever be legitimate goals. For example, presume that any claim to represent the public interest or accusation of special interest is from an opposing special interest. Nearly all interests are special, to one degree or another, and the rare exceptions are of the order, that all life on Earth not be wiped out is in the public interest. (Except for would-be suicides.) Even something like clean air, as a public interest, is not so straightforward. How clean? Who pays for the cleanliness, and how much? Someone always pays. However, it is easy to tell whether national or public is correctly used when it refers to something tangible like real estate: who gets sued if someone slips and falls on it? If it is not a government, then the property is not national or public.

It is obvious to me why blogs are thriving, both in terms of the number of people producing the product and in the mental space being occupied by blog output.

If you read this essay, How to Start a Startup, you might conclude, as I did, that new enterprises thrive, not due to innovative ideas, new technologies, heroic individual efforts or great vision, but for another reason altogether:

In particular, you don’t need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn’t take brilliance to do better.

Google’s plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn’t suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. [footnote omitted]

There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search was before Google. I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck.

In other words, when you see some thriving enterprise model expanding like crazy at the expense of the competition, it is probably because the competition sucks.

In my local area there are a few dozen public schools and three or four Kumon mathematics tutoring centers (plus a half dozen other private learning centers). The public schools teach math for no charge beyond what you are required to pay in taxes. Kumon charges hundreds of dollars to teach grade school level math after your school taxes. Ten years ago, the public schools did almost all the math education in the area. Now it seems they lost about ten percent of the market despite their total cost subsidy. Clearly the public schools are doing a bad job thereby creating opportunity for others.

So why are blogs thriving? That’s right, because the MSM is so bad. Let’s not pat ourselves on the back too heartily on our superior punditry and analysis. Our competition sucks.

Some Congressman or the President announces that we need federal oversight of steroid use by baseball players. Does any reporter ask, by what authority? Does any reporter ask why each State should not have the sole authority to legislate on such a thing? Why uniform national law? There is not a whiff of anything like that. Are there not more pressing problems? Does the Congressman think it is a problem that a person could not run for Congress without hiring a lawyer to follow the election laws? Should all citizens need help from the legal priesthood to do something so basic as run for office? “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” would be “Mr. Smith goes to Federal Prison” under our current election laws, does the Congressman think that is a problem. Do we judge laws by intention (“Reform Bill”) or by effects (no discernable improvement}?

Let’s face it; the MSM cannot even pick the low lying fruit. They are politicized, unwilling to use technology available to anyone to consult experts, lazy and prone to deplorable habits. When an article cites an anonymous source, it is simply a trump card for the writer. It is as if you had to accept whatever your kids said as true because they recited the magic formula. Doesn’t anyone suspect that some reporters make up things attributed to totally forever unverifiable anonymous sources and gloss the credibility by adding “administration”?

Only after being sensitized do I see opportunity everywhere. The Travel and Real Estate sections of the newspapers are total puffery. Travel Guide books are similar, does one mention a negative thing about any destination? Show me the Real Estate section mentioning that an interest only mortgage with an introductory subsidized fixed rate might be a touch risky for the typical family?

If you go to your doctor and complain of stomach pain he will ask ad hoc questions. He may be guided by his arduous medical education, but after years of practice and the malingerers, the depressed seeking attention, the unappreciated wives and the unsatisfied husbands, his queries may have gotten pretty perfunctory. In fact he will ask what he feels like, knowing reimbursement rate pressure will punish him for every second he spends with you, and that you have no idea whether his performance is stellar, average or bad. No airline pilot would get away with such an ad hoc procedure before takeoff, justifying it by saying he is qualified and flying is an art as well as a science.

Poor performance is everywhere, the MSM is ripe for real improvement. I do not know if it is change in technology so much responsible or simple capitalistic evolution to better. Once our big three car manufacturers were as poor in performance as the MSM, yet without a major technological change world competition made quality changes inevitable. Certainly the Internet is empowering individuals, but half the equation is the failure of the non-internet institutions.

I did not even know the fine blog run by the folks at Samizdata.net had a front page above the blog. Well they do and that lead me to this Blog Glossary of terms for people new to the blogosphere. If you are not sure what Fisking means it is the place to stop in.

In Japan, SUV spare tire covers carry environmentalist/green messages in English. Hat Tip Engrish.com

I found this site interesting: Free English grammar online, Learning English letter writing. Language punctuation, prepositions and grammar help

The new look of this blog is from here.

This is a drop in theme for Wordpress 1.5
Looks really great, IMHO

The problem with reading Eternity Road is it makes you think.

I do not have time to link to the source but he has been advocating acting in ways as to increase freedom. Sort of a commando for freedom.

Now when I read this I realize that using our normal political process to ask our masters to please lord over us a little less is hopeless:

It does not behoove a man to entreat such with gentle words and kind gestures: your hearts are cold and your hands are bloody. I shall conduct my life as I see fit, avoiding you and your like to the greatest extent possible. I shall grudgingly acquiesce to your demands when they are presented with overwhelming force, as I would any common bandit, but I shall not take part in your shallow deceptions as to the nature of that force, or of my willingness to have it imposed on me. I refuse, on the grounds of common sense and simple human dignity, to entreat you and your non-existent mercies: you are and remain the sworn enemy of every free man.

He is right. When someone has power over you and holds all the cards, asking for freedom is pretty foolish. The vote is a poor instrument of control over the government.

So, anyway I was thinking about the injunction of Eternity Road to use what is available to forward freedom. The strongest instrument presently available is, of course, the Internet. It has already changed the outcome of one presidential election.

I thought of how the citizens of England used contracts and corporations to accomplish so much that today we would petition government for.

If control over the vast resources of public corporations is weak we need a new statute. Perhaps not. That is the thesis of stockholders.com. We no longer need to ask the SEC, Congress, or the MSM to reign in the powerful corporations. We own them and a simple reorganization of information flow might make them serve us instead of whomever they were serving until today.

Well, the old wordpress 1.2 comment spam control was poor so I upgraded to 1.5 and wiped out my database.

I do this for a living and my normal procedures with customer data are so redundant it is painful. So for myself I took the refreshing course of just upgrading with no backup at all.

Would you not know, it recreated the database right over my old database.

The neat thing is I found this new template which looks good. Tomorrow, when I am less frustrated I’ll link to the author’s blog.