Every once in a while a big newspaper sends someone to MIT where they visit a lab said to be engaged in innovation.
With the New York Times, it was MIT’s ‘AgeLab’. Devoted to thinking things up for the haves among the retiring baby-boomers. Not the rest of us who’ll get stuck with the results of a broken economy.
Naturally, it’s full of sickening stuff. Retirement condos where you can store your kayaks. Valets to park your car. A robot that follows you around to nag you to take your pills. Sensors taped to everything in case you fall.
All of my friends have parents who are either dead now or really old. Many of them would be a bit offended by the article seeing that, in the real world, it doesn’t matter if a robot nags you relentlessly to take your pills if your short term memory is gone. Or that computer game puzzles to map your mental decline don’t matter either because there aren’t any things to take to reverse it.
The story, and the people in it, play to those in the upper and upper middle class who believe aging is optional. So there’s really not any innovation in it at all, just annoying applications and widgets for the well to do. Spend a lot for a place that has a robot for everybody while they pay minimum wage to the human old home workers who clean up once you’ve become incontinent.
For the first time ever, getting out of a car is no picnic. My back is hunched. And I’m holding on to handrails as I lurch upstairs.
I’m 45. But I feel decades older because I’m wearing an Age Gain Now Empathy System, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Agnes, they call it.
At first glance, it may look like a mere souped-up jumpsuit. A helmet, attached by cords to a pelvic harness, cramps my neck and spine. Yellow-paned goggles muddy my vision. Plastic bands, running from the harness to each arm, clip my wingspan. Compression knee bands discourage bending. Plastic shoes, with uneven Styrofoam pads for soles, throw off my center of gravity. Layers of surgical gloves make me all thumbs.
The age-empathy suit comes from the M.I.T. AgeLab, where researchers designed Agnes to help product designers and marketers better understand older adults and create innovative products for them.
At the MIT ‘AgeLab’ they’ve even figured out old people don’t like buying telephones with big buttons. And I bet they didn’t eve have to watch that bit in Gran Torino where Clint Eastwood kicks his grown-up kids out of the birthday party they’ve thrown for him.
Further:
Devices for I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up catastrophes, they say, represent the old business of old age. The new business of old age involves technologies and services that promote wellness, mobility, autonomy and social connectivity. These include wireless pillboxes that transmit information about patients’ medication use, as well as new financial services, like “Second Acts??? from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, that help people plan for longer lives and second careers. These financial services offer marvelous opportunities for penalty fee collection in that they’re purposefully more confusing to those with diminished mental capacity, bettering the potential for the bank to collect on the natural gaffes and confusion one is prone to in old age.
Note this great quote on how corporate America’s thinking only of the coming age of retirees:
“Companies are starting to think about how they can be age friendly much the same way they have been thinking about how they could be environmentally friendly over the last couple of decades,??? says Andy Sieg, the head of retirement services at Bank of America.
“A wireless smart pillbox reminds [someone old] to take her daily vitamins,” reads the story. “A computer on which she plays specific word and number games tracks her daily scores.”
“More than a decade later, with boomers starting to turn 65, experts like [MIT’s] Professor Coughlin hope to make gray the new green,” it concludes.
Social Security is bloated, broke and busted. FDR’s New Deal turned out to be the Rip-off Deal …
The only way to truly reform Social Security is to sink it. Settling for anything less than the total destruction of this financial sinkhole would be perpetuating the problem and allowing Fedzilla to continue to pick the pockets of future generations of Americans.
We must have the guts and national resolve to remove the crushing tax burden of this Ponzi scheme from the backs of future Americans …
[We] need to raise the retirement age now. It is a fact that people are living longer …
I’ve said that when Ted Nugent doesn’t use incivility and the threat of violence in his columns at the WaTimes he has nothing to say. Without these things he’s an empty fellow.
Which made his last column appear as sent in by a sleepwalker. Or mostly ghost-written by a frantic editor.
I say conservatives should turn up the rhetoric. When honestly identified, the hues and cries from the right are good for America, calls to get America back on track. Only those opposed to such an upgrade would find fault with such rhetoric.
——–
If liberals truly wanted to tone down the rhetoric, they could prove it by stopping the lying. But that won’t happen. Mr. Krugman and other liberals know that if it weren’t for a steady drumbeat of lies and deceit, the Democratic Party would cease to exist.
Let’s be honest. Those on the left don’t want to tone down political rhetoric. They only want to tone down conservative speech to make it more “fair.”
The Democrats are wrong on everything from energy to health care to taxes. What they despise is having their agenda exposed, dissected and ridiculed.
—–
And the conclusion:
In order to defeat liberals on the political-ideology battlefield, conservatives must be clear in purpose and then get after it by targeting (yes, I said targeting) and attacking Democratic nostrums that have weakened America. Expose, isolate and eliminate liberals and their fuzzy-headed policies …
Conservatives have liberals outnumbered and surrounded. Don’t play nice with liberal snakes. Don’t let them escape. Instead, do America a favor and crush liberalism.
Nugent is particularly irked by Paul Krugman, whose twice weekly column and blog must really push his buttons.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development …
As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not … Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
Just for good measure, Nugent — again — from early last year at the WaTimes:
In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam – I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day. I am the steel ballerina. Let’s dance.
It is not good enough simply to spotlight cockroaches: Ultimately, all caring people must always rally to the requisite stomping party. For us varmint hunters, these are truly the good old days of a target-rich environment with no bag limit. Let the stomping increase to a furious frenzy and cacophony of good over evil. May America create the splat heard round the world. My steel-toed boots are giddy with anticipatory delight. Stomp on into a voting booth near you.
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes. The same rules do not apply to the political punks who run our country and genuflect at the altar of inefficiency and graft. We need look no further than the robbing of the Social Security Trust Fund to know that dishonesty is the way of life in DC. I’m surprised Barney Frank hasn’t proposed a tribute for Bernie Madoff.
Notice how the left-wing bureaucrat punks in DC support throwing more good money after bad as the solution to our nation’s health care “crisis”? That’s standard operating procedure for left-wing numbnuts who believe Fedzilla is the answer to every problem in America.
These political robber barons will seemingly support anything that keeps feeding the bloated Fedzilla with our hard-earned tax dollars regardless that our dollars are outrageously wasted and that there is little to no accountability how our dollars are spent. The largest crisis America faces is not health care, the war on terror, or Nancy Pelosi’s crazy rants, but rather the lying, cheating punk politicians in DC who trample on our constitution …
Update addendum:
More of Nugent’s 2010 rant on not enough gun carrying US citizens is worth reprinting. This, coming at a time when there is obviously no gun control in the US. Politically, it has been a third rail, thank to the power of the NRA. And it is only the Loughner massacre in Tucson that makes it now possible to see minor current legislation to curb extended magazines moving forward.
Nugent:
Since the 1960s LSD-inspired goofiness of peace and love, I have always been convinced that the gun-control issue has been the tip of the culture-war spear. Why the peaceniks still deny the truth that more guns equal less crime, in spite of the tsunami of global evidence from every imaginable source, is one of mankind’s greatest mysteries …
More phenomenally stupid is the whole world’s denial of the plethora of statistics proven in John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime,” in which the desirable condition of safer streets and communities with drastically reduced violent crime is accomplished most readily where more citizens not only have access to firearms but actually carry them daily on their persons.
From the ultrasafe streets of Switzerland, where every household has a real, honest-to-God full-auto-assault rifle and ammo on hand (and a proud national respect for their fellow citizens, mind you) to the multitude of jurisdictions across America where more concealed weapons per capita are issued, violent crime not only plummets, but personal-assault crimes such as rape, carjacking and armed robbery actually disappear in many instances.
And Nugent is not quite right about Switzerland, in a self-serving way. The reality is more complicated.
From Der Spiegel, three years ago:
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the peaceful country has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world — lagging [only] behind the United States …
Able-bodied men have to serve in the military and are issued with assault rifles or pistols. They are allowed to keep their weapons and 50 rounds of ammunition at home during military service — which generally goes to the age of 30 or even longer — so that the army can be mobilized at short notice. Many men buy their weapons after they finish their military service, and the arms are often stored in unsecured closets, attics or cellars.
The new public mood is largely in response to a series of shootings involving army weapons. In a 2001 incident which sparked nationwide debate, 15 people died when a man opened fire with an army assault rifle in a regional parliament building in the small town of Zug, shooting 14 people and killing himself.
Around 300 people are killed in Switzerland each year in incidents — mostly suicides and family murders — involving army guns. According to a 25-country survey by the British-based non-governmental organization International Action Network on Small Arms, Switzerland’s total number of gun deaths, including accidents, in 2005 was 6.2 per 100,000 people — second only to the US rate of 9.42 per 100,000.
Gun advocacy in the US has rendered it impossible to research gun control law and statistics on the web. As anyone who tries to do it quickly finds out.
The US gun lobby has not only defeated all politicians but, in this matter, has also bested Google and all Internet search.
Note: The New York Times appears to be starting the move to put an unknown part of its content behind a wall. Readers may notice this if they access Paul Krugman’s opinion piece more than once from the same browser. At which point they are faced with a login prompt.
There is a (perhaps) temporary way around this.
It’s tied to your nytimes.com cookie for now. So if you run your browser in a program like Sandboxie, as DD does, you can simply exit when faced with the prompt and delete all contents in the virtual sandbox. That will destroy the cookie and, as far as the New York Times website is concerned, you’ll look like a new reader the next time you access the material.
Probably won’t work forever, though. And if that bit of information was too much to follow, never mind.
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed.
The next most popular way — chosen by 20 percent — was to cut defense spending.
Poll by 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair.
The more The Democratic Party and the president take up the aims of the Republican Party, the more they dig the holes the voters will eventually toss them into.
We’re all familiar with mediocrity and fail in the US of A.
But it’s always astonishing to see total dogshit presented as pr by the US military.
Here’s an example that makes the Air Force look gratuitously fucked up — by one of their own.
The guy can’t sing, can’t play guitar, has no sense of rhythm, is tone deaf and shitty at limericks and language. Also can’t make even thirty seconds of crisply smart video. It redefines the meaning of offal awful.
Of all the grenades I’ve asked you to jump on in this last few months, this is by far — the worst. From a promotion for Luke AFB in Arizona.
If anyone had sense, they’d muster whoever’s responsible out with a big chicken dinner idiot conduct discharge.
Thinks California smaller than Pennsy, went red on Tuesday. Plans to try more hating on Latinos next year.
Much laughter all around.
Pennsy heevahava and ersatz Republican Blue Dog Democrat Jason Altmire on Nancy Pelosi:
“I am not voting for Nancy Pelosi.”
“I don’t get the sense that Speaker Pelosi understands what happened on Tuesday. We lost middle America. The Democratic party got crushed … I would rather have someone who understands middle America and someone who can relate to the districts we lost.”
Not here in California, buddy boy.
Classically, Altmire’s is a case of bad thinking. Because he almost lost, and three of his ersatz Republican Blue Dog Pennsy pals did, he thinks the fault lies not with them but with someone else, from that state of commie fags.
“Altmire voted against major pieces of Democratic legislation, including the health care bill,” added CNN helpfully.
What actually happened, of course, was that Obama failed to do enough to boost the economy, plus totally failing to tap into populist outrage at Wall Street. And now we’re in the trap I worried about from the beginning: by failing to do enough when he had political capital, he lost that capital, and now we’re stuck.
But he did have help in getting it wrong: at every stage there was a faction of Democrats standing in the way of strong action ..
Which leads to the phenomenon of the Blue Dogs, or Democrats who try to be fake Republicans.
Pennsylvania has a load of them and here in Pasadena we’re stuck with Adam Schiff.
With Adam Schiff, one holds the nose while voting because there’s never anyone from the GOP who even remotely resembles a human being on southern California ballots.
In Pennsylvania, however, three of them — Chris Carney, Patrick Murphy, and Kathy Dahlkemper — lost their seats.
Tim Holden, from Schuylkill County, did not. He should show some stones and change party affiliation, like Arlen Specter in reverse. And Jason Altmire retained his seat.
The Blue Dogs found that GOP voters don’t go for fake Republicans. Half of them lost their seats. And why should they? Who likes the feckless who lack the nerve to identify themselves as they really are?
Third-tier Republicans.
Those Blue Dogs who kept their seats? I’m betting it was because the GOP had trouble nominating opponents who weren’t obvious criminals in their respective districts.
Today marks my official parting with the old Blogger version of this page. The posts from it won’t go away. But it will become the equivalent of a petrified tree.
Google Blogger will turn off FTP-publishing on May 1, perhaps sooner.
I started with the application in 2006. It seemed like a good idea for about a year and half. However, Blogger’s FTP publishing became progressively shakier and fragile.
As annoying as it was to me — as seen here — Blogger employees eventually copped to it being equally annoying to them. At which point they decided to pull the plug.
The migration to WordPress in the last month was easy. But Google Blogger’s decision put a hit on readers, as everyone who was using FTP finds out.
Favors don’t come easy, if they come at all, on the web. And you’re always under threat of being obsoleted or upgraded out of existence.
Blog readers, I’ve found, are a bit like cats. They’re not fond of changes in scenery and location. Adding a new address to ‘favorites’ or even something as simple as reading the new URL for a different page inside the domain is often a bridge too far.
In any case, by 2009 the old blog had brought in well over a quarter of a million readers. Not bad for an mix of national security, music and personal idiosyncracy postings.
For example, this completely whimsical post on Joan Jett is still serendipitously one of the old blog’s highest downloads.
Two distinct audiences there: One which loves rock and roll, many of them girls. And one which is into homemade bombs from the war on terror, all guys. The alpha to omega with quite a bit in between.
The old page — here — now has a permanent redirect which brings you here in five ticks. I may stretch it out a bit at a later date depending on various statistics.
Therefore, if you haven’t done so already and you are here from the redirect, reset your reading habits. Or we can agree to part, too.
The pro is that now that I’m used to not logging into Blogger, I don’t miss it. The application never figured out how to make my block quotes look good.
Google’s Blogger application and its infrastructure continues to fail on a regular basis. Coming into the weekend, FTP publishing collapsed, as well as commenting.
In all likelihood, this post will only publish to the mirror, which is here, if you’re reading it.
One of the reasons for this mirror is to migrate from the old blog (the one you’re used to reading, to this — on WordPress — in a different directory on DD dot com) is the regular failure of Blogger’s FTP publishing infrastructure. It is now so obvious a problem to users, one might call it a feature. (See here and here, for example.)
This adds to the April problem of Google Blogger’s overzealous spam robots regularly classifying blogs which aren’t spam as spam blogs. (See here.)
And this does not include the failure of Blogger’s syndication feeds a couple weeks earlier, one in which the application was corrupting atom and rss feeds worldwide and replacing them with 0-byte files.
Or the time, when FTP publishing failed previously for DD this year when the application simply blew away the index root file of the old blog, necessitating a restoration from snapshot backup.
These problems are not isolated. They happen to Blogger’s users worldwide, particularly if they’re using FTP publishing to deliver their blogs from Google’s servers to wherever they are hosting, usually on a small business site or an institution. And they largely go unaddressed UNTIL hundreds of people start posting in Google’s ‘Help’ forums. At which point, wheels start to slowly turn, and something gets a little fixing without anyone actually explaining much about what was wrong. And then the punters stop whining. That is, until next week’s similar failure.
One might think this would occasionally be read of in the news media. After all, Blogger is a fairly widespread and socially well-entrenched application. But no, most reporters won’t deal with Google because it has become so big no one can talk to it.
Instead, Google tells them what for. It tells them they need to shut up and find new jobs because Google is going to take their news and spread it globally for free until they no longer exist, which will be soon. So all the good little journalists on the business and tech beats at the dailies spend their time extolling Twitter and how everyone ought to use it right away or their lives will crumble into ruin.
Hey! Maybe Google could be persuaded to take Twitter over and give it that unique Blogger touch. Then everyone would really have some fun.
Update: Blogger eventually took enough ragging over the FTP issue that one of the milksop computer business websites did a story on the subject here.
However, if you read through the short piece, the reporter never really gets around to putting the Blogger rep’s feet in the fire. For the record, it’s Rick Klau.
Since the FTP problem had been so obvious, Blogger did manage a rare apology.
“Let’s start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we’re sorry,” said Klau.
However, Klau also furnished the standard response Blogger has delivered during the last few years whenever there’s an FTP publishing screw up.
It’s the private domain user’s fault. And it’s his or her fault because the hosting service is always changing its FTP logon protocols, flummoxing poor Blogger.
However, anyone who has used FTP through Blogger during the past couple of years knows this song and dance is the stock reply, one delivered even after the user has run down every detail on their hosting end and determined that nothing has changed.
In another way of speaking, it’s Google Blogger’s standard excuse. And they stick to it rigidly until complaints in the help forum get so loud they’re forced to quietly fix what is cocked up on their side. When the momentary trouble with FTP abates, they go back to whistling the same tune.
It’s one of the primary reasons I abandoned Blogger. Couldn’t stand the technical faults and excuses insinuating it was always the user’s fault. If you want to use your domain to host a blog, you should not go down the road with Blogger drawing your carriage.
Related:
Another way of describing various Google apps and their general approach to failure and crack-up:
Google’s introverted population certainly knows that it’s easier and cheaper to legalese your way out of a customer’s problem than it is to hire a person to pick up the phone.
