What? No More Free Lunch? I'm Outraged!

I must say I'm finding all the hand-wringing concerning the changes to the pricing of Netflix subscriptions a little odd. (See here, here and here.)

When Netflix started offering streaming movies at no extra charge I was an early adopter, and why not? Even if I didn't use it that often it was free. I also realized that it wouldn't be free forever. Nothing is. The real question becomes then how much would I pay for it. Well, whatever that price is it is under $8 a month.

I'll admit having to get used to going to a new site to manage my, now, Qwikster queue will be a little annoying, but somehow I'll manage to cope.

Forgetting 1 + 1 = 2

More brilliance in thinking! Foreclosures by Race and Ethnicity: The Demographics of a Crisis

Our new research shows that the foreclosure crisis is not over, and runaway foreclosures continue to drain hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from families, hitting communities of color the hardest.

• An estimated 2.5 million foreclosures were completed from 2007 – 2009, and an estimated 5.7 additional ones are imminent.
• An estimated 17% of Latino homeowners and 11% of African-American homeowners have already lost their home to foreclosure or are now at imminent risk.
• The great majority of homes lost were owner occupied, as are those at imminent risk of being lost.
  

And this comes as a surprise how exactly? One of the stated goals of loosening the criteria for getting home loans (including the riskiest sub-prime mortgages) was to increase home ownership among minority groups. Those loans were always the riskiest, so it should come as no surprise that they would be hard hit by foreclosures when the economy hits a prolonged slump.

There is nothing profound in my observation; its simple common sense. Seemingly, it is a sense beyond many these days.

"Don't Make fun Of Our Murderous Jackass!"

Stupidity never takes a holiday: Citroen regrets Mao ad 'insult'

French carmaker Citroen has withdrawn an ad featuring a doctored portrait of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, after complaints it was an insult.

In the ad, carried in Spanish newspaper El Pais, Mao scowls at a hatchback.

"It's true, we are leaders, but at Citroen the revolution never stops," reads the text below the portrait.

Citroen apologised for the "inappropriate" ad, which Chinese chatroom users had complained "hurts our national pride".

"This is no small thing," said one visitor to a chatroom about the ad - based on the famous portrait of Mao which hangs in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

"It has an influence on the whole country. It damages the whole Chinese people."

Whatever "damage" this ad does is about 1/10,000,000th the damage done to the Chinese people by Mao himself.

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me

The DK offers this today:

I started writing for the most selfish of reasons. I wanted to change the world around me. Or, failing that, I wanted to leave the slightest imprint upon it, during dark days, so that I could feel I had stirred the dust in some small way. Like a leaf pressed in the pages of a book, rediscovered long afterwards, I wanted the thin veins of words to exist somewhere, even if only as memory of the true thing itself.

We have plenty of people who write about politics, these days. And some of them are rational people, and the larger share are butchers. It is easier to be bloodthirsty than not; it requires no courage. It is easy to shave the smallest possible straws of principle from the larger sheaf, and the smallest possible slivers of paper from the law; it is the harder challenge to leave them there. It is the easiest thing in the world to be a bigot: it requires no knowledge, no sense, no logic. It is harder not to be.

And that is, in a word, insanity. It is a flaw in the fabric of the world. We are, apparently, monstrous creatures, and if we are truly created in God's image than God would have to be a more petty creator than we can possibly imagine. It seems more likely we are beasts.

Translation? "People who do not think exactly as I do are evil sons-of-bitches. I hate them so"

Somebody, please give this guy a lolipop, a hug, and a clue.