Arithmetic, it is hard

From the Massachusetts Association of Realtors®:

When REALTOR® members were asked about what they thought was going to happen with interest rates in the next 12 months, 67 percent responded that rates would either increase significantly (1 percent) or increase slightly (66 percent). Thirty-six percent thought interest rates would stay the same and four percent thought interest rates would drop slightly. None of the respondents thought interest rates would drop significantly in the next 12 months.

67% + 36% + 4% = 107%. Obviously there are too many Realtors® in MA...

Political question of the day

Does being associated with an unpleasant substance like santorum impede one's ability to run for President? How do you fight back against what you feel is a smear campaign, especially when you can't call it that?

Rick Santorum's solution is to complain about a double standard of incivility. My proposal: double down with more comparisons of homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia and then choose a new campaign slogan: "More civility, less civil rights." The conservative base will love it.

On the other hand, I've seen some conservative blogger who dislikes Santorum because he supports food stamps. So maybe the faction of the Republican party that hates poor people more than it hates gay people will kick him out in the primaries and the interwebs will have to stop making horrible puns.

A Poem for Thomas Friedman

The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song
as our victorious heroes step up to the plate
their hearts aflame with desire
to eat the calamari of freedom.

Nitwit Narwhal

I installed the new Ubuntu, and of course the new UI is terrible. In particular, you have to guess: unless I knew from previous experience where menu bars and scroll bars ought to be, I would never know they existed. Likewise, unless I knew that previous versions of Ubuntu had control panels, I would never know that such things existed. I'm sure the list goes on.

They care!

NYTimes: "The White House and the Democratic Party are banking on voters focusing not on the unemployment rate, but on a trend of job growth."

Actual jobs are, of course, far less important than the perception that the unemployed might possibly get their jobs back in 2016. After years with no income, degraded skills, and a resume with a giant hole, and... how's that supposed to work again?

Liberating the world, block by block

From the Guardian:

Ayman Abdullah, a 43-year-old teacher, said he regards [Tahrir] Square as liberated territory.

"This is the first piece of the new Egypt. Mubarak does not rule here anymore. Suleiman does not rule here. We will rule here and will rule all of Egypt," he said.

Which reminded me of the Temporary Autonomous Zone:

Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.

...

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism--and who knows what we might attain?

And from Ken MacLeod:

In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being's conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn't mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons.

As someone said on Twitter: 'Yesterday we were all Tunisians. Today we are all Egyptians. Tomorrow we will all be free.'

Can we just shoot Javascript and pretend it never happened?

The Gizmodo/Io9/etc. complex has switched to a new design which is astonishingly, stupidly unusable. And slow. It's like it was designed by some sort of idiot savant who had to invent scrollbars from scratch because he'd never heard of them. For comparison, they still have a variation on the old, sane interface.

I'm sure it works adequately on an iPad though, and that's what really matters, right?

Update: A coworker with an iPad tested it for me, and I was wrong, it's completely broken there.