Category Archives: Interesting

Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow

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I catch The Colbert Report every once in a while, but after reading this article about Colbert's (real) Super PAC and the way he's using it as a kind of grand performance art experiment/exploration of our current political environment, I think I need to add him to the old DVR list.  This is just brilliant:

In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

“It’s bizarre,” remarked an admiring Jon Stewart, whose own program, “The Daily Show,” immediately precedes “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central and is where the Colbert character got his start. “Here is this fictional character who is now suddenly interacting in the real world. It’s so far up its own rear end,” he said, or words to that effect, “that you don’t know what to do except get high and sit in a room with a black light and a poster.”

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”

 

Krampus

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I've unwittingly stumbled upon a goal for 2012: start a Krampus tradition in Lewisville.  What's Krampus?  I just learned about it from the excellent, free, Now I Know newsletter:

A goat-man creature bound to service by the Devil, Krampus’ origins trace back to Germanic traditions from before the advent of Christianity. Per the myth, Krampus goes from home to home (in some places, along with St. Nick), seeking naughty children. Some get off with a stern warning, but for the truly bad children, you better watch out. Krampus throws these children into his sack (or, in some traditions, into a washtub he drags behind him) and carries the child off, to be made into Christmas dinner.

Been rotten this year? No need to get nervous on Christmas Eve; if you’ve made it that far, you are in the clear. Krampus makes the rounds on the night of December 5th, being the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas. As is customary, many people dress up in Krampus costumes that night (as seen above) and take to the streets that night, going home to home “scaring” children. The custom further suggests giving these false Krampuses a drink (schnapps is recommended) to make them go away.

Krampus

Now I just need to figure out how to get myself one of these masks before 12/5/12.

 

Not Exactly the 1099EZ

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According to the this if you printed out GE's tax return it would be 57,000 pages:

In a November 28 letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, wants to know how many hours IRS employees spent reviewing General Electric’s massive 2010 tax return and what it cost the taxpayers.

Wolf says that, according to an article on the Weekly Standard’s website, if printed out, GE’s 2010 electronic tax filing “would be the equivalent to 57,000 printed pages.” If those pages were stacked, they would stand more than 19 feet tall – 19 feet! (Now that’s a monster if ever I’ve heard of one.)

According to Wolf, “A return of this magnitude was clearly necessary to take advantage of every loophole and earmark in the tax code to avoid paying federal taxes.” (May I note that “every loophole and earmark” in the tax code was put there by the United States Congress.)

BTW, Rep. Wolf has one of the all time great lazy-man signatures. See it here.  Basically it looks like a hastily written "8".  I'm thinking of making mine "9" which should save me many hours over my remaining years…oh wait, I rarely sign anything.  Never mind.

Why Design is Hard

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Okay, this has been bugging me forever. I've been trying to figure out why entering a calendar event on my smartphone or Google calendar or Outlook feels so…annoying?..

Now back to calendars. When I think of months, I reflexively picture a circle, with January 1st at the top and June at the bottom. That uses the spatial processing part of my brain. When I think of a day within a month, I picture a wall calendar grid with four horizontal weeks. That's a different spatial model. When I think of the time of day, I think of a round clock with two complete cycles for AM and PM. My smartphone unhelpfully adds another spatial model by making me enter times in a sort of slot machine interface with rolling windows, which causes me to imagine a tire shape, with the tire heading toward me. Meanwhile, the other options I need to click are spread around the screen and require a mental scavenger hunt, which is another spatial task. 

Add to this spatial overload that my calendar likes to present itself sometimes in a month format, and other times by week. Worse yet, on some of my calendar interfaces the months scroll in a left-right orientation, and on other interfaces the months scroll up-down.

When I read Scott Adams' post about his frustration with the Google and Outlook calendar interfaces and got to the excerpt I've shared above, what struck me was that his arguments helped explain perfectly why designing anything is so hard.  I don't think I could picture the items that Adams describes any differently than he does – to me a month is a block, not a circle and every reference to time (minute, hour, day) looks like a line, i.e. a timeline.  Now take the two of us and multiply by the millions of people who use those calendars and you can understand why it would be near impossible to design something that is comfortable for everyone to use.

Having spent years in direct marketing, print publishing, online publishing and nonprofit management I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about design and usability.  I'm no designer (God help you if you need me to design anything), but I have to utilize design almost every day to do my job. My number one rule of thumb is this – just because I like it doesn't mean that the majority of the intended audience will.  The important part there is "the majority of the intended audience" because even Steve Jobs couldn't design something that everyone would like, but he was able to design products that literally enchanted a huge percentage of the human population. To me the ultimate goal with design is to make it as attractive and usable for the most people as humanly possible and that, my friends, is incredibly difficult and why I have no problem tapping the experts out there to do it for me.

Complexity and Money

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Scott Adams (Dilbert) has a blog and on it he recently wrote about banks.  I found myself nodding when I read the following:

As a general rule, you can usually assume that someone is trying to screw someone else whenever you find these two elements working together:

  1. Complexity
  2. Money

Complexity is how evil schemes are hidden from the public. Complexity is what caused so many people to get mortgages they couldn't afford. Complexity is how hedge funds hide their treachery. Complexity is how the derivatives debacle was possible. Complexity is how your financial manager can get away with charging you for doing nothing. Complexity is why you don't know if you can get a better deal with another phone carrier.

 

 

Adams (or someone like him) in ’12

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Scott Adams, the dude behind Dilbert, says he's running for POTUS as an Independent in 2012.  You have to believe him because he wrote it in his blog which, as we all know, is how you know you're dealing with someone serious.  Even if he doesn't run I'd like to have a candidate who thinks like he does:

On the budget, I propose a plan to cut every Federal government expense by 10% and increase every Federal tax by 10%. I'd call that the default plan, meaning I prefer a better plan, but I wouldn't expect anyone to come up with one. The advantage of this plan is that it's bad for every American. That's a little something I call "fair."

I'd also call a public debate on the topic of supply side economics, to end once and for all the question of whether lowering taxes increases government revenues. I would host the debate myself, with a Judge Judy sort of approach, and decide the winner. If it turns out that my proposed 10% tax increase would reduce government revenue, I'd cancel that part of my plan the same day.

I'd propose capping the amount any one person can inherit per death at $50 million. Estates can choose to donate the rest to charities, distribute it to stockholders, or give it up in taxes. $50 million is more than enough to turn any offspring into a lazy, self-absorbed, drug addicted, douche bag. Any more would be a waste. That plan needs some fine tuning, but you get the idea.

As President, I would remain deeply committed to flip-flopping. If new information or better thinking changes my opinion, so be it. That's how brains are supposed to work.

I can also promise that I won't try to remember the names of other world leaders, federal agencies, or even my own staff. Only an idiot believes a president can remember all of that stuff.