<CharlieDigital /> Programming, Politics, and uhh…pineapples

Confessions of a Sriracha Fanatic

Count me in

The smidgens and dabs became double-fisted squeezes and dripping spoonfuls. The table was not fully set until the squeeze bottle was centrally placed between the salt and pepper shakers. I carried breath mints in my bag to mask the telltale scent of garlic on my breath. Any savory item at all hours of the day was a candidate for a squirt of sauce.

I knew I had crossed the line when one day I found myself squirting a little red sauce on dark chocolate. I looked in the mirror and took a deep breath as I wiped a trail of red sauce dribbling from my mouth. At that moment, I realized I had transformed from a sriracha-ignorant food snob into a full-blown rooster addict. Hello, my name is Lynda and I am addicted to sriracha. There: I said it.

Why the USPS SHOULD Lose Money

The whole fracas over the USPS losing money has been overwhelming lately with the predictable arguments from the Right citing it as another example of Government Failure and a system that is better served by fully private corporations -- not this funky implicitly government backed entity.

Let's forget all of the other details for now like the decline in mail volume and the odd requirement that the USPS fully fund its pension plan.  Forget the odd restrictions that Congress has placed around the USPS and how it runs its ship.

Forget all of that for a moment.  It occurred to me a while back when sifting through the tons of junk mail that I get, the USPS is a business subsidy.

Yes.  Those credit card offers?  Those coupon mailers?  Flyers and ads?  Brochures?  Would it be possible for small businesses (and big businesses) to afford these services if the USPS charged a fee that actually covered the costs of running a profit at the USPS?  In that sense, the USPS is important as a small business subsidy as physical addresses are easily enumerated whereas email addresses are much more "ethereal".  Not everyone watches TV.  Not everyone listens to radio.  Not everyone has Internet access.  But every person has a physical address that can be targeted for advertising.

I mean, of the volume of mail that I receive, I would guess that over 80% of it would be what we consider "spam" in this digital age.  But it's different from "spam" in that the coupons and ads are typically much more relevant.  I've used many local service providers (plumbers, gutter cleaners, driveway sealers, landscapers), visited local merchants, and patronized local restaurants based on coupons and promotions I've received in the mail.

I conclude that proposing that the USPS curtail services or charge higher rates is tantamount to proposing placing a tax on businesses which will especially impact small/local businesses.

What I’ll Remember Most About Steve Jobs

Ford, DO IT -- BUILD IT JUST LIKE THIS!

I know I'm about a week late to the whole Jobs retirement story, but as I saw Ford's new Evos concept, I was reminded of an article I read on Jobs back in 2005 that stuck with me:

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he'll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. "Here's what you find at a lot of companies," he says, kicking back in a conference room at Apple's gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an Ivy League university and an iPod. "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!

"What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."

Alan Simpson on “Western Conservatism”

In the Michelle-Bachmann-I'll-eat-your-brains-stare issue of Newsweek (8/15), there's a great interview with Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator from Wyoming:

You and Cheney represent an old tradition of Western conservatism.  What happened to those views?

I say clearly, abortion is a terrible, terrible thing, but it's a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don't think men legislators should even vote on it.  Now, that takes you immediately from a conservative to a commie.  Now I also think that we all have someone we love who's gay or lesbian.  There should be no special prejudices, no special penalties, no special privileges.  And so that'll knock you into the commie box, too.

One would like to think that Simpson is speaking in hyperbole, but it's the sad truth of the current state of "conservative" politics.

Straight Talk from Fareed Zakaria

An excellent interview from NPR with Fareed Zakaria.

Straight talk about the problems that the US is facing and the straightforward solutions that are being defeated by politics and ideology instead of pragmatism.

No better way to spend 45 minutes today.

Can I Hadoop My Way Out of This?

Quite possibly one of the funniest slides I've ever seen:

Courtesy of Jared Rosoff

It's from a slidedeck on real-time analytics and MongoDB.

I guess one cannot simply Hadoop their way out of that type of mess.

Where Pakistan Went Wrong

Okay, so there's lots of things wrong with Pakistan these days, but there was an interesting bit in an editorial in Newsweek by A.Q. Khan -- Pakistan's notorious nuclear architect:

On Dec. 10, 1984, I informed Gen. Zia-ul-Haq that we could explode a device at a week’s notice, whenever he so desired. We achieved credible nuclear capacity by the second half of the ’80s, and the delivery system was perfected in the early ’90s. For a country that couldn’t produce bicycle chains to have become a nuclear and missile power within a short span—and in the teeth of Western opposition—was quite a feat.

I have to wonder: how would Pakistan have turned out if, instead of focusing its resources on building up its nuclear program, it invested in the factories, the foundries, the workers, the mining operations, the transportation networks, and so on for manufacturing, distributing, and selling bicycle chains (for example) instead.  I think the world -- and Pakistan -- would have been a better place for it.

Perhaps they would have turned out more like South Korea or Taiwan instead of remaining a dangerous, unstable, largely third-world country with little prospect for economic and industrial progress.

It's sad that a guy who could figure out the intricacies and complexities of constructing a nuclear weapon has lost all perspective on what really would have advanced Pakistan and would have been a far more worthy investment of Pakistan's resources: creating gainful employment opportunities, building industry and commerce, and creating hope for their people.