Live from Austin!

Food riots are in the news. Meanwhile, the New York Times talks about the fact that food prices for Americans, as a fraction of income, are almost at an all-time low; and that Americans waste 27% of the food available.

This is one respect in which I have been unable to "go native".

I don’t remember exactly what my mother said to me as a child. I remember being told about starving children. It was probably more about getting me to eat what I was given, rather than getting me not to leave anything, but the programming worked so well that even now, I find it almost impossible to throw away food.

If I order at a restaurant, the amount of food I get is the amount I eat. If I have to, I take some of it home and eat it the next day. If rothko takes leftovers home and doesn’t eat them, I eat them for her so they won’t be wasted. If something has gone somewhat past its "best before" date, she won’t touch it. The same is true of leftovers that have been around for more than a day.

Me, I won’t throw it away unless it smells, tastes or looks bad, or I have sound scientific reasons to think it unsafe. For instance, on Friday I found a small amount of Philadelphia cream cheese that had a best before date in March. It looked fine, so I ate it. (It tasted fine too, and if it was going to poison me it would have done so by now.) If there had been some mold on it, I’d have cut off the moldy bit and eaten the rest. After all, what is cheese but fancy moldy milk?

Rice shouldn’t be re-heated repeatedly. If I ate meat, I’d be careful with that. Fish can’t really be re-heated. But most of what I eat keeps pretty well, so I rarely end up throwing anything away.

Sometimes I have to arrange my meals based on what needs to be eaten. If I buy a bag of salad, that means I have to have salad every day for the next few days, so that none of it will go to waste.

If we have guests over and food is involved, it’s always fresh, and there’s usually leftovers. If we make espresso brownies for book club, I know what I’ll be having for breakfast the next day.

I feel that if I buy food and don’t eat it, that’s a moral failing.  Food is something precious. You simply do not waste food, just like you do not burn books.

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

Google press release:

We recognize the impact that our operations have on the Earth’s climate, and are taking steps to ensure that we are carbon neutral by the end of 2007.

Solving climate change won’t be simple, and there won’t be a single solution that addresses the entire problem at once. We all need to act together to meet the challenge – from the largest corporations and governments to individual households.

Meanwhile in the New York Times:

In the annals of perks enjoyed by America’s corporate executives, the founders of Google may have set a new standard: an uncrowded, federally managed runway for their private jet that is only a few minutes’ drive from their offices.

The Google founders, according to one of their own Google maps, will spend just 7 minutes to get from their offices to the NASA airport where their jet is parked. As the crow flies, the airfield is only 1.7 miles away.

For $1.3 million a year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin get to park their customized wide-body Boeing 767-200, as well as two other jets used by top Google executives, on Moffett Field, an airport run by NASA that is generally closed to private aircraft.

We all need to act together to meet the challenge, eh?

What’s the betting that Google don’t include Larry and Sergey’s burning 5 tons of jet fuel per hour in their “carbon neutral” calculations?

According to the New York Times, I can no longer think of myself as in any way middle class.

Interestingly, the US has worse social mobility than several European countries—but not worse than the UK.

I remember back in the John Major days, hearing a lot of talk about the “classless society”. A lot of people seemed to believe the US was one.

InfoUSA is a list broker, a company that aggregates personal data and sells it to telemarketers and catalog sales companies. The New York Times reports:

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

So InfoUSA actually sells lists of suckers deliberately selected for their gullibility. You might be wondering who buys these lists. Well, the NYT investigated.

InfoUSA sold [one list] dozens of times, to companies including HMS Direct, which Canadian authorities had sued the previous year for deceptive mailings; Westport Enterprises, the subject of consumer complaints in Kansas, Connecticut and Missouri; and Arlimbow, a European company that Swiss authorities were prosecuting at the time for a lottery scam.

[...]

Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.

Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

The story goes on to reveal that according to internal e-mails, InfoUSA knew some of their customers were scammy, but continued to sell them lists of sick and/or gullible elderly people to exploit.

Update: InfoUSA have put out a press release giving us their side of the story. My summary: “We’re not selling lists of suckers any more, we sold that part of the business. Plus, the authorities didn’t find us criminally liable, and anyway it was a long time ago.”

A&E is showing a reality TV series about one of the Austin roller derby teams, the Texas Rollergirls. Reviews from the New York based media seem to have missed something.

AP writes:

This new generation of roller derby queens skates that thin line between blue collar and white trash, balancing nights of tequila shots with days of their real-life careers as nurses, teachers and rubber-lingerie designers.

[...]

Despite their penchant for fishnet uniforms and rump-shaking celebrations, they bristle (in episode two) at the suggestion that roller girls are easy. Still, they smoke and drink and curse like sailors and extend their middle fingers liberally. When Miss Conduct is missing in action at a practice, a teammate offers this explanation: “Miss Conduct is drunk.”

The New York Times isn’t quite so diplomatic:

For a while, it seemed as if Roller Derby was a lost art, like illuminated manuscripts or clog dancing. Actually, it’s more like polio: many people assume it was eradicated in the 1970’s, but it’s still around and, in some areas, quite virulent.

[...]

Reality contests take ordinary, identifiable women and pose them in an absurd, artificial fantasy fishbowl. “Rollergirls” is a documentary that takes women who pursue an absurd, artificial fantasy sport and tries to pose them as ordinary, identifiable women.

[...]

These players are all based in Austin, Tex., which is supposed to be Texas’s classy town. One can only imagine Rollergirls’ Night Out in Fort Worth.

Ouch.

You may know that the NSA are not supposed to carry out surveillance against American citizens, as per US Signals Intelligence Directive 18, unless given special permission by the Attorney General.

You may also know that the Supreme Court has ruled that the NSA cannot spy against US citizens. They used to get around this by working with GCHQ in the UK—GCHQ would spy on Americans, the NSA would spy on the English, and they’d exchange data.

Well, the New York Times reports that the Bush administration let the NSA off its leash in 2002. It can now spy on anyone, with no judicial oversight whatsoever.

Americans may wish to read up on the ECHELON network and its capabilities. In the interests of balance, I will point out that ECHELON caught at least one 9/11 terrorist. Whether that’s sufficient to justify the fact that your telephone calls and e-mails are almost certainly all being scanned, is for you to decide.

And cordial greetings to my readers in Fort Meade.

To celebrate its redesign, The Guardian is offering free access to its online edition for the next two weeks. If you live in America and have always wondered what a real newspaper would be like, now’s your chance to find out.

(If you think the New York Times is a real newspaper…well, they ditched their entire technology section to make way for more articles on shopping, fitness and fashion. Says it all really.)

To my mind, there are three reasons why The Guardian is a great newspaper.

The first is accuracy—the paper has a policy of correcting every factual error, and the Corrections and Clarifications column can make for very entertaining reading. The paper even does a pretty good job of covering technology and science.

The second is that the paper does real investigative reporting into things that actually matter. For example, today:

MPs from all parties are planning to campaign against the CIA’s use of British airports and RAF bases when abducting terrorism suspects who are then flown to countries where they are allegedly tortured. An all-party group is to be established this autumn to coordinate the campaign and to inquire into the extent of Britain’s support for the operations, which are said to violate international law.

The development was announced as the UN began inquiring into the operations, known in US intelligence circles as “extraordinary renditions”, and as an investigation by the Guardian uncovered the extent of British logistical support. [...]

And elsewhere there’s the first full account of the May 13th massacre in Uzbekistan. If you have no idea what that’s about, it may be because the violence was carried out by paramilitaries sent in by one of the USA’s crucial allies in the war against (some) terrorists.

The third reason I like The Guardian is diversity of opinion. Although it’s popularly believed to be ‘left wing’ or ’socialist’, The Guardian in fact gives space to all kinds of (often contradictory) viewpoints. Today, for example, the opinion section has an article arguing that the UK road haulers’ threatened strike and fuel blockade should be smashed the way Thatcher smashed the miner’s strike. That’s like FOX News suggesting that Michael Moore should be elected President.

I should mention that the digital edition is having a few teething troubles right now; normally all the stories are available indexed, but at the moment some pages are only readable as PDF. Still, stick with it, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

Guardian today:

A new poll suggested yesterday that Ralph Nader’s independent presidential bid represented a serious threat to the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry.

The New York Times and CBS News poll revealed a tight two-man race for the White House between President George Bush and Mr Kerry. Mr Bush had a narrow lead of 46% over Mr Kerry’s 43% — within the poll’s margin of error.

But when Americans were asked about a three-man race including Mr Nader, the 70-year-old consumer activist attracted 7% support, mostly at the expense of the Democrat. In that contest, Mr Bush led Mr Kerry by 46% to 38%.

Mr Nader’s poll ratings are higher than at this point in the 2000 election. […]

Yesterday’s New York Times/CBS poll made bleak reading for the senator for Massachusetts for other reasons. […] Fifty-seven per cent said “most of the time he says what he thinks people want to hear”, while only a third thought he stayed true to his beliefs.

So there we have it. The fact that Kerry is a lying two-faced weasel is so painfully obvious that the voters have already worked it out, and he’s doing even worse than Al Gore. He’s so awful that people would rather vote for Ralph Nader’s pointless ego-trip than support Kerry. The Democrats have chosen self-destruction once again; get ready for four more years of Bush.

It finally happened. The Guardian began offering the complete newspaper in a digital edition. You can go to their web site to find out more and see an example. It has the complete content of The Guardian and The Observer, browsable with any normal web browser.

The interface is really slick—there’s a thumbnail of the page, and you can click on parts which catch your eye to see the appropriate story. If you want to clip and file a story for reference, a single click downloads a PDF version with all the images and formatting, or you can click for a document to load into a word processor for whatever academic purposes.

The killer feature, however, is that the quality of the newspaper beats the hell out of the New York Times, let alone lesser US papers.

There’s a discount offer if you sign up in the next day or two.