Interesting Stuff

In keeping with the general theme that lots of people seem to be idiots these days, I just found an excellent blog that I wish I’d heard about months ago. This guy has been chronicling how Verizon employees don’t know the difference between dollars and cents. Literally. The short version is as follows: when he signed up for their data transfer service, he was told by 3 different salespeople that he would be charged 0.002 cents per kilobyte, and got them to put that in writing in their records of his service. He was subsequently charged 0.002 dollars per kilobyte, and went through 4 customer service representatives, including a supervisor and a floor manager, without finding anyone who understood the difference between the two. Thankfully, he eventually got someone higher up to realize the mistake and reverse the charges on his bill.

He also links to the story of another person who had pretty much the same thing happen to them, though they haven’t gotten the charges reversed yet. The audio (embedded as a YouTube “movie”) is amazingly exasperating: it basically comes down to the customer service people agreeing that there is a difference between 2 dollars and 2 cents, but that 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents are the same. This story has apparently appeared on all sorts of news/blog/&c outlets. Verizon has subsequently “changed” their rates from $0.002/kB to $2.05/MB.

I apologise for how ignorant many Americans are about the world in which they continually meddle. Some of us actually know the answers to these questions, and we’re trying to bring the rest of the country up to speed. I hope Americans will eventually know the answers to these and other similar questions, and that we can someday start making the world better instead of worse.

My favourite part is how he introduces himself as the Prime Minister of Australia and then everyone labels Australia as a terrorist country to invade. I can’t stand how the woman at 5:47 doesn’t realize that calling Arabs “diaper head” might be offensive. and my least favourite part is how the guy at 8:54 says he doesn’t think Kyrgyzstan is a threat, but would support an invasion anyway. It’s exasperating how stupid people can be!

First, I want to point you all to an excellent JibJab song about the farce we call the news these days. Their stuff is so great. Also, here’s a quick illustration of Bush’s approval ratings (edit: note that the bottom of the graph is at 20%, which is a bit deceiving). Also, Senator Joseph Biden has an excellent speech about Iraq and the lack of an exit strategy. These last two were found through StumbleUpon, which I mentioned recently.

Finally, I have a question that shouldn’t be too hard to answer: a lot of people seem to be passionately against Hillary Clinton. They don’t want her to be president, they don’t even want her to be a senator. I got to see a video feed of when she was interviewed at Google, and she seemed like a pretty normal politician (she sidestepped many of the questions, but no more than any other politician I’ve seen). Other than that and the fact that she’s married to Bill Clinton (about whom I know a little), I know nothing about her. Why are so many people opposed to her? Is it just because her husband had an affair? Is it because she has some crazy beliefs that I’m unaware of? What’s going on?

There’s been a lot of news recently, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

Despite the inaction of the country as a whole, the western states have banded together to reduce carbon emissions, thereby joining the rest of the world in combating global warming. It’s pretty cool to watch the whole world (with a couple idiotic exceptions) come together to work on this stuff.

A battle has moved through the British courts over how far the freedom of the press extends: there is currently a scandal over a deal made by Tony Blair’s fundraisers, wherein they offered honours to various people in exchange for off-the-record loans during the campaign season, and then tried to cover up the whole thing. The government, claiming it would mess up the police investigation of the events, repeatedly tried to bar newspapers from discussing the evidence. However, it looks like the high court has sided with the press, and they can publish stories about the scandal. Much of this hinges on an email between Lord Levy and Ms. Turner discussing their deal, but I can’t seem to find a copy of the text online. I suspect this will damage even Tony Blair’s reputation, though I could be wrong about that.

Speaking of scandals and cover-ups, “Scooter” Libby has been found guilty of obstructing justice in the whole CIA leak thing (remember, the one with Valerie Plame?). It’s nice to see that his comeuppance has arrived, but it’s kinda too bad that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald couldn’t get enough evidence to try others; I strongly suspect Libby was the “fall guy,” and there are others who are equally guilty but will go free.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to put a timetable on the Iraq war and bring our troops home before Bush leaves the oval office. I strongly doubt this will actually happen, but it’s nice to see that they’re trying to hold him accountable, if only symbolically.

As usual, Bush has been greeted with violent protests every where he goes, because most of the world is reasonable and sees this man is a greedy warmonger. This is happening pretty consistently across all of Latin America, on top of Hugo Chavez’s scathing words against him (Bush is on a tour of the area at the moment).

Finally, the UN is beginning to consider an embargo against Iran over its nuclear programme, but China and Russia are expressing their doubts. We’ll see what happens, but Iran will probably not be faced with strong penalties.

As always, remember to use BugMeNot if you can’t access these or other articles.

Iran now claims to have launched a rocket into space, although other countries have yet to confirm the achievement. President Ahmadinejad says this is for peaceful satellite launches, but as always, Europe and America don’t believe him. Moreover, Iran has not halted its nuclear programme in spite of the sanctions imposed by the UN in December. The UN security council is convening with Germany about what to do on this front. Many western countries, chief among them the US, are still of the opinion that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite the Iranians claims of merely having a peaceful energy programme (to which they’re entitled, having signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970). Moreover, UN inspectors have been allowed to examine Iran’s operations since 1992 and have found absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. As Ahmadinejad has said, it’s time for the West to stop “bullying” Iran into giving up what it is rightfully entitled to.

Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and author of Cable News Confidential, gave a talk at work earlier this week.

A summary of the talk →

Huh. It looks like Portugal will legalise abortion soon. I admit I know very little about Portugal, but this entire story surprises me. I hadn’t realized abortion was previously illegal there, nor that it had a Socialist prime minister (nor that his name is Jose Socrates; as bigoted as it sounds, my first impulse on his name was to wonder whether he was Mexican or Greek). Upon further inspection, I’m surprised that my parents can remember a time when Portugal was a dictatorship (which ended in what appears to have been a beautiful, peaceful-ish revolution).

Hurrah for socialism and progressive values!

As more details come out, it looks like I was spot-on last night in my analysis of the embassy bombing in Athens. Hot damn!

It turns out one of my coworkers used to work for Evolution Robotics, which made the ER1 I used in my robotics research a year and a half ago. It’s nice to know that he agrees with me that the ER1 could have been a great product except the basic software, power converter, and marketing department were crap (though apparently if we had sprung for the $1,000 software it would have worked better). Intriguingly, he also thinks that adding a laptop and camera to a Roomba is a good way to get a cheap robot, which is what Prof. Dodds is doing now (he was my robotics research prof). Nifty!

The American embassy in Athens, Greece was apparently bombed this evening? I can’t find any articles on the internet about it, but I suspect there will be several tomorrow. Remember: you read it here first!

More details when I can find them…

Edit: That’s right—I beat Reuters to a news story! by about an hour! The blast appears to have been outside the building itself, and it looks like no one was hurt, though it shattered quite a few windows. Personally, I suspect this is a group of leftist extremists trying to “retaliate” to Bush’s speech last night. Many Greeks are against the Bush administration, as shown by the protests when Condi visited the country in April.

This evening, President Bush gave a speech about his new strategy in Iraq (link goes to the full text). This strategy basically seems to involve sending in 20,000 more troops and doing the same thing they’ve been doing all along. I seriously doubt this is a viable strategy, particularly when a significant part of the “extra” troops will come from simply extending the tours of the soldiers who are currently over there. Anderson Cooper had some interesting analysis, however: pulling out of Iraq would cause the country to break out into a Sunni/Shia civil war, rather than falling back into a state similar to what Saddam’s reign was like. Perhaps the US is actually doing a fair amount to help by keeping this war from bubbling to the surface. Perhaps it would be best to keep our noses out of their business, and let them fight their own wars without our intervention. Either way, it was a point of view I hadn’t heard before.

However, the thing that struck me most about the speech was that it didn’t end in “God bless America.” This is the first speech of his that I have heard that didn’t end that way (for instance, every State of the Union address he has given as well as his inaugural address ended with that or a similar phrase). Instead he hoped that the “Author of Liberty” would “guide us,” which is at least slightly less Christian. Perhaps he has realized that bringing fundamental Christianity into politics, particularly when he’s talking about a Muslim civil war, is a bad idea? Here’s hoping!