Author: Payam

Chemist, philosopher, vagrant.
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Come, Swim in LA’s Cess Pools

Best (and worst) beaches in the U.S. – Today Show – MSNBC.com

The primordial soup prides itself on being a heavenly place, a paradise of a big city by virtue of its location on the Pacific coast, its eternally sunny climate and its “casual” attitude.

Look closely, however, and you will see that the “casual” attitude is a ploy to hide the aggression that roils inside everyone, and that the city’s largest tourist attraction and crown jewel, Venice Beach, remains one of the nation’s filthiest. Considering the fact that, after 50 years of operation, the Hyperion Treatment Plant has not managed to remove this stigma from the promordial soup’s beaches, one begins to grasp neglect that the prevailing “casual” attitude has cultivated in this city.

And, just to think that it used to be worse.

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Working too Hard? You Had Better not Be!

Interesting news about the office workaholics | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

This fact alone can potentially explains so much about the primordial soup: the long work hours, the unnerving sexual frustration that everybody exudes, the practice of sexual predation that passes for “dating” in this city and the emergence of the largest pornography industry on the planet. Yes, people work very hard in the primordial soup because hardly anything else ever works here.

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More Great News for AAPL

VMWare, the operating system virtualization powerhouse has just released Fusion, their virtualization machine for OS X. To my mind, this is huge news for Apple, Inc., because this means that Apple is gaining market share rapidly.

It also means that the suspicions of many that Apple has been gaining market share from the Unix/Linux segment of the market is also true. VMWare is clearly betting that OS X will be the dominant Unix flavor in a very short time. VMWare’s entry into the OS X market also means that they fully expect Apple to gain market share from the Windows segment of the market as well, and VMWare is all too happy to make quite a few bucks in this process.

The list of features in Fusion is impressive. Seamless integration with existing Boot Camp Windows installations, full Directx support for games, full USB device support, full networking, and seamless integration of Windows into OS X. It’s almost as if they figured out how to do what neither Windows nor Apple could do: tame Windows!

If you are holding AAPL, as I am, hold on a while longer. The next few months are going to be very interesting. In fact, Apple’s announcement of new iMacs tomorrow (August 7, 2007) promises to be very interesting.

I’m not the only one who thinks this is big. Check this out.

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Did Dick Cheney Arise from the Primordial Soup?

Bad bosses get promoted, not punished? | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

By nearly all accounts, this is the standard M.O. in the primordial soup.

And, this begs the question in the title of this post. Or is it the case that the primordial soup acquired its ways from Cheney’s ilk?

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Ving Rhames, Slave Owner?

Ving Rhames’ Dogs Kill His Maid

The primordial soup is the mother liqueur that gives rise to sensational lives and deaths. It is with some frequency that the sensational lives are intertwined with sensational deaths, and on this day, Ving Rhames’ quote about his special breed of slave-keeping dogs is raising the mauling of his housekeeper by his dogs to the level of a sensation so powerful that it just might overshadow the misfortunes of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.

The primordial soup changes everyone. Once immersed, no mortal can survive its influence.

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California Elections Go from Mediocre to Ludicrous

State decides to secure electronic voting machines – Los Angeles Times

It seems as if Debra Bowen, California’s Secretary of State, is screaming “Damn it! We can be a greater laughing stock than Florida, and we ain’t gonna quite until we are!”

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Political Economics

White House Budget Director Portman Resigns – washingtonpost.com

Sobering feedback based on the best available economic data was never welcome at the Bush White House according to the Treasury Secretaries (Paul O’Neill and John Snow) who have resigned after discovering that they were playing ceremonial roles in the Bush Cabinet. This latest resignation (article above) reaffirms the intense politicization of everything that is under way in the Bush Administration.

The funniest aspect, or the most vexing aspect depending on one’s point of view, is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has consistently shown that the federal deficit 1) resulted from the Bush tax cuts and 2) the federal deficit will disappear as soon as the Bush tax cuts expire in both its July 2006 (pdf) economic forecast and its January 2007 (pdf) economic forecast. The summary, page IX, of the 2006 projection states quite flatly:

After 2010, it [the federal deficit] would decline sharply, reflecting the rapid increase in tax revenues that would occur after provisions initially enacted in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) expired. By 2016, the deficit would decline to 0.4 percent of GDP, according to CBO’s baseline projections.

Mindful of the fact that the CBO is, historically, the most nonpartisan and the most reliable economic forecasting institution, public or private, in the US, one can hardly refrain from rendering the most damning judgment against the Bush and Republican budgetary process, and this damning judgment is what this budgetary process merits.

But, perhaps the ultimate blame in all of this lies at the doors of voters who fail to realize that economics is a numbers game, and that numbers matter more in a numbers game than ideology.

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The State of American Infrastructure

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Game Over | PBS

Robert Cringely is not a guy to be taken lightly. He has been the authoritative voice on technology issues for over a decade. He has literally written the history, and his predictions are the most reliable anywhere. It should be of concern to everyone when he declares the US’s communications infrastructure a lost cause, when compared with other industrial countries.

If you don’t believe Cringely when he says that America’s pathetic communications infrastructure is reducing business competitiveness, listen to UPS’s CEO, Michael Eskew, saying the same thing.

And, if you still have any doubts about how poor America’s infrastructure has become, listen to this fantastic nugget to find out how pathetic our infrastructure spending is, and which party keeps infrastructure spending so pathetic.

And, if these facts do not impress upon you the horrendous toll that the Iraq military campaign has exacted on the American economy, consult a psychiatrist or revisit elementary math.

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Browser Wars on Windows: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer

There were many who believe that the browser wars are long over, but this is simply not true. With Apple’s entry into the Windows browser space and Mozilla’s spectacular capturing of Internet Explorer’s market share, there is little doubt that the browser wars are back on! Comparison of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer on Windows XP

How does one decide? It was quite easy for me. On the Windows platform, Internet Explorer simply cannot compete with Mozilla’s Firefox browser. The collection of themes and extensions (collectively called add-ons) make Firefox indispensable.

But, not everybody needs or wants to have all of the amazing extensions that block ads, help with html code, script, and manage online social networks. In those instances, one wants pure browsing enjoyment, and the absolute latest Safari beta (3.0.3 as of this writing) delivers. Safari provides this pleasure in three ways: fast beautiful rendering, elegant interface and a good collection of basic and desirable features.

The first surprising thing about Safari for Windows is its speed. In my experience, it renders pages far faster than Internet Exploder and Firefox. In addition, it offers Apple’s own brand of font smoothing in the appearance tab of Safari’s preferences. If you click the thumbnail above and click again to see the full-sized image, you will see what a huge difference this makes. The pages rendered in Safari do not only appear faster, but they appear crisper. The graphics are much more alive and the text resembles written text in finish.

The aesthetics extend from page rendering to the interface itself. Safari is made to look exactly like iTunes in order to leverage iPod’s popularity to push Windows users toward Apple’s services (iPhone and iTunes Music Store) and user interface. (This is Apple’s way of encouraging people to switch, and Apple’s way of building a revenue stream on Windows to make money from users who don’t want to switch.) Some people think iTunes looks drab, but it has an elegant design in as much as it places all the right buttons in the right places. After all, many users who don’t have iPods like iTunes because it is as easy to use as a CD player: press play, and listen to music. Safari’s user interface is similarly spartan, neat and functional. Like iTunes, it’s ready to go on installation.

Safari is not nearly as feature-rich as Internet Explorer or Firefox, but it need not be. It has all the features one wants. It has a terrific popup blocker, which politely asks you if you want to turn it on upon the fist popup encounter. It has a spell checker that checks what you are typing as you type (this is not activated by default, however). It has a very elegant tabbed browsing scheme (also not activated by default), and a superb forms manager that really takes the pain out of entering forms over and over. The “private browsing” feature allows you to conceal your tracks on public terminals. Like most Apple products, it has everything you need, though not everything you want.

So, Firefox is the best browser on the Windows platform, but if all of the bells and whistles of Firefox are making you dizzy, get Safari and enjoy internet surfing in its purest form. Until they let you out of the office, this could very well be your only source of pleasure.

PS If you are curious to make Windows XP look like OS X, read this. PNM

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Market Regulations Foster Profitability

GM back in black | | Guardian Unlimited Business

I have spent considerable time blasting American car makers, General Motors especially, for being such lousy stewards of one of the nation’s most important industries. Specifically, I wrote this post, and this one and this one in the aftermath of Big Three’s spectacular decline over the past five years.

When I saw this headline from The Guardian, I thought that I would have to eat my words, but then I started reading the article, and I happened upon this golden nugget.

GM, which made a loss of $3.4bn during the same period a year ago and came close to bankruptcy in 2005, is shedding more than 30,000 jobs in the US where it made an operating loss of $39m compared with one of $3.95bn a year earlier.

The company, which owns brands including Vauxhall, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Saab, is struggling to cope with fierce competition from Asian rivals in its core US market. But Carl-Peter Forster, GM Europe president, said it had made record sales and net profits ($236m) in Europe – the highest earnings since 1996.

And, there’s the rub. Just like Ford, General Motors is still losing money in the US, but making record profits in Europe. This begs the question as to whether capitalism is working in the United States. After all, the general consensus is that nearly all of the profitable companies on Wall Street make all of their profits from their offshore operations, not from their domestic operations.

And, this further begs the question regarding regulations. If General Motors and Ford are making record profits–indeed, the companies’ salvation comes from their European profits–in the most highly regulated marketplace on the planet, yet still recording losses in the least regulated marketplace in the industrial world, how can anyone argue that regulations are inherently bad for the marketplace?