Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

People are only now beginning to realize the real estate bubble of the noughties was naught but a gigantic pyramid scheme. There is unexpected resistance to the idea of bailing out the investment bankers who did most to get us in this mess (while paying themselves handsomely to do so), and one of the counter-proposals is to give money to insolvent mortgage owners, i.e. reward the imprudent over those who followed the rules, did not lie about their income on a loan application. Economists call this moral hazard.

That said, the idea may have political wings. Investment bankers are not the only ones who like the idea of feeding at the public through. When a substantial enough proportion of the population loses its shirt in a pyramid scheme, it expects to be compensated by the public purse, and sometimes the entire social order breaks down, as happened in Albania circa 1990. Might this be the direction the US is headed towards?

It’s conventional wisdom that politicians are self-absorbed windbags. Another piece of evidence to contribute: the longest words in the English and French languages are antidisestablishmentarian and anticonstitutionnellement respectively, both of which pertain to the political realm.

One of my happiest experiences in the Bay Area was the reopening of Crissy Field as a national park. They were handing out free kites. I flew mine for a couple hours of pure, carefree, unalloyed fun, then gave it to three kids who had arrived too late to get one.

Crissy field is one of the windiest places in San Francisco, and ideal for flying kites. I am not sure who thought it would be a good place to build an airfield, though…

I blog at best once or twice a month on my regular low-intensity blog, which runs my home-grown Mylos software, but am surprising myself by blogging on an almost daily schedule with this WordPress-based blog. Mylos is batch-based: you edit a post, run the script to regenerate the static pages, review, edit and iterate. It takes a minute to regenerate the entire site.

This is a similar effect to using an interpreted language like Python or PHP vs. a compiled language like C or Java. Even though I am more comfortable editing in Emacs (used by Mylos) than in a browser window, the short cycle between edit and preview in WordPress makes for a more satisfying experience and encourages me to blog more freely.

I suspect I will end up importing my Mylos weblog into WordPress, once I figure out how to address some niggling differences in functionality, such as the way images or attachments are handled, and how to use nginx as a caching reverse proxy in front of WordPress for performance reasons.

Much virtual ink has been wasted on discussing the Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld, and how useless or ineffective it may be.

I wonder what it says about our society that we are discussing ad campaigns instead of the merits of the product they are supposed to be about, just as political news coverage often devolves on discussion of campaign tactics rather than substantive issues, as if they have any relevance to what happens after the election.

I know advertising is a major “industry”, and that without it people in the design field would find it hard to find well-paying jobs. Focusing the discussion on marketing campaigns instead of actual products ia a case of the tail wagging the dog, however.