a. fish

Steal this idea: Blog retirement service

I see Shelley Powers is closing down Burningbird. And Russell Beattie has put his notebook to bed.

Just as Dave Winer is preparing to blogmothball Scripting News at the end of the year, Mark Pilgrim returns from his online hiatus. Coincidence? I think not.

Phil the futurist Wolff saw this coming years ago. Now the backlash and shutdown gaining speed.

I'd love to just delete and start over. Kind of like life, start completely over. But there's the guilt: what about linkrot? Web 2.0? We need a blog graveyard for poeple who want to quit, really quit, sell the domain and all, but with a clear conscience.

Blog undertaker to the rescue! Pay Dr. Web (or typepad, technorati, whomever,) a one-time fee to suck your archives down via the virtual hearse to disk. Future searchers, followers of del.ici.ous tags, bookmarks and such, can search two webs: the live one, and the dead. Encounter a webroad-ends-here (as Shelley fears "each time I drop something, even more 404s result")? You'll have an option: see if it's in the dead-web, abstract for free, full blog post plus links for a small fee. Like Lexis-Nexis.

Surely, someone like the Internet Archive is already doing this. They probably are. If not, be my guest -- or my thief, as it were -- steal this idea and give it a shot.

Klling in Chinatown

The SF Chronicle ran a fascinating story about the killing of a community leader, or tong "dragon head", in Chinatown. Reads almost like a graphic noir novel. Two days before Allen Leung was killed by gunfire at his Jackson street import-export business, "someone splattered the headquarters of several Chinatown tongs with red paint," some sort of symbolic fish-wrapped-in-newsprint type of gesture, I guess?

"According to federal authorities, Chinese organized crime had taken over Hop Sing and other tongs. Two of the reputed leaders were Peter Chong and Raymond 'Shrimp Boy' Chow," the Chronicle reported.

<--Raymond 'Shrimp Boy' Chow, who moved to the US from China in 1976 and was later sent to prison to serve ten years of a 25-year sentence, appeared at Leung's funeral in a white suit. "Leung's mourners hold newspapers to block photographers," the Chronicle caption said.

Firefox popup problems - requested popups don't pop up

Lately my Firefox browser has slowed to a crawl. Also I've noticed that request popups, such as clicking on a 'print' link of a news article which should popup a printer-friendly version of said article in a new window, no longer works.

I started experiencing this problem after installing the Netcraft anti-phishing toolbar, which was recommended by Rogers Cadenhead.

I have since uninstalled the toolbar, but the problem persists. Intuitively, using only post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious logic, I ascribe the requested popup failure to the installation of the toolbar.

UPDATE: Problem fixed. Taking this forum tip, I cleared the cache (duh!) and started Firefox in safe mode: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -safe-mode.

Cesar Chavez on immigration

According to Wikipedia's Cesar Chavez entry, Chavez used to report suspected illegal aliens to the INS if they served as temporary replacement workers, or refused to unionize.

"In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike."

I suspect a lot of the xenophobia and anger which inspires some of these draconian immigration reform bills now floating around Congress stems from immigrants willing to work for sub-minimum wages, thereby driving down wages and job opportunities for others.

But if employers were forced to pay minimum, or prevailing wages to all workers regardless of their immigration status, they would simply hire the best workers to do the job.

Of course, a lot of immigrants get fake Social Security numbers in order to get jobs, and are thereby paid minimum wages, which contribute to the Social Security fund. And surely American citizens are out there who work for wages below the minimum or prevailing wage.

Globalization does not just apply to multinational corporations. It can be embraced by labor and service unions.

Letter to the Editor - silly loser-coddling liberals!

This is a letter to the editor of our local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle:

Editor  -- 
Does anybody have any ideas on how to knock some sense into these naive, lefty liberals? How can they remain so utterly ignorant of how the world works? Their ridiculous notion of holding things in common and trying to share undermines the proven superiority of private ownership. 

How else will we profit from the world around us if not for the motivation of a vested interest? Why are they always trying to force us to share and cooperate? They have forgotten the great American values of rugged individualism and good old-fashioned, cut-throat competition. Neither do they seem to appreciate the honor of working hard for personal gain, nor the beauty and ingenuity of getting others to do the work instead.

Last, but not least, what is their obsession with coddling all the losers  --  even our evil enemies! They are totally in the dark about who deserves our scorn and to be punished, and who is worthy of our praise and admiration.

RON GREENSTEIN

Richmond

Middle class millionaires feel pinch

Via kottke I jumped to the online wall street journal looking for something, but a headline for this other article grabbed my attention: Minding the Gap, where two economists debate what rising inequality, or a hollowing out of the middle class, does to economy and society. Is it a big deal? It's followed by a discussion board, where reader David Vila says:

Interesting discussion but seems to miss a key point. I don't think most people pursue wealth, successfully or otherwise, just to buy more or better stuff. Rather, actual wealth carries with it cushion against a number of day to day worries. It may not protect against illness, or other loss, but it does reduce the added worry about how to pay for medical care for example. In other words, it has the potential to reduce some of life's stresses.

So...from the point of view of a middle class guy, I can say that today, I do not feel more economically secure in my ability to blunt those life stresses because, along with whatever financial and demographic shifts have occurred, there has been a great risk transfer to me as an individual; retirement costs, medical expenses, basic security. Even tho' I am, by all accounts, a millionaire, I do not feel the ecomomic security I always belived would come with that financial position. Yeah, I can buy a whole bunch of DVD players and big screen TVs, even a Mercedes, but I'm not sure I feel better off than my father did a generation ago with less money but less potential volatility. Any consideration of relative wealth needs to take into account that volatility and how much more we need today to deal with it.
Simple fact is that the very wealthy don't worry about these things but I still do, so subjectively, I'd say the gap feels a lot wider than it did 20-30 years ago.

They were models.

Thanks to sfist for pointing out this tidbit from the SF Chronicle's latest installment on police brutality: (bold is mine)

In the end, San Francisco taxpayers would pay the Duthie family, Garrity and their lawyers $175,000 to settle their lawsuit. Part of what gave the suit power, Duthie attorney Matt Kumin said, was that "Alison was what we call 'an eggshell plaintiff'  --  she arrived at the incident with her pre-existing back condition."

Sean Connolly, a deputy city attorney who handled the case, pointed to another factor affecting the March 2003 settlement. "Most plaintiffs who sue the cops come out of a world that usually deals with cops,'' Connolly said. "These were good-looking, middle-class folk, articulate. Two of them were models.

"You always have to assess the credibility of the witnesses and how a jury will see their testimony,'' Connolly said. "This was not a run-of-the-mill case.''

History, or just review. Now more than ever!

This post from The Blogging of the President might be what I was trying to nail down in History. Now more than ever!:

There's an old story which illustrates the heart of what I consider to be conservative political philosophy.

There's a road with a fence down the middle.  You come to me and say "let's get rid of this."

My response is, "tell me why it's there, and maybe I'll let you remove it."

You should never, ever, make a policy change, unless you can say why the policy was enacted in the first place. You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you are able to make the argument for not changing it.

History. Now more than ever!

Newspapers, local newspapers, might attract more readers if they provided more historical context with breaking news stories.

The other day, my friend Roj (pronounced "rahhj") asked me, why don't any reporters write a story about billboards? He brings up billboards a lot, now that I think about it.  "We've got them, but they're a blight. They all seem to be owned by Clear Channel & Viacom. Just how much revenue do they generate for the city?" He continued with several bullet points of questions he'd written out onto a three by five card (listed below fold). Then he always mentions a picture book with photos of billboard-peppered areas coupled with twin photos with the billboards photoshopped out.

I asked my friend, is there something new about billboards that you've noticed? No, he said, he's had these questions since moving into his neighborhood ten years prior. A well-educated friend, who even majored in broadcasting, he didn't recognize the missing currency element from his news story idea (he's been out of college for a while.) But he wanted to know, damnit, how do billboards work? I think a lot of people want to know more about how their towns and cities work. But unless something works in a NEW way, it's not news-worthy, is it?

Later I walked down the Mid-Market section of San Francisco and happened upon an art gallery with a historical photo display of that very downtown section.

Hey Stranger!

Have you ever had a friend, an old friend, who you hadn't talked to for a while? And because you hadn't talked to the friend for quite a while, you felt guilty? Because maybe you felt you hadn't held up your end of the friendship - you hadn't sent a Christmas card, or called on the friend's birthday? And because you felt guilty you avoided the friend? Blogging can be like that.