Down and out in discount [North] America

Liz Featherstone, writing in The Nation:

Al Zack, who until his retirement in 2004 was the United Food and Commercial Workers' vice president for strategic programs, observes that appealing to the poor was "Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow." That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies – workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium – contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart. [read more @ AlterNet]

• Alex Trebek is Super - Though some Ethan fellow has him pegged as a scumbag, I think the following exchange during a Jeopardy! commercial break is pure gold:

  Woman in audience: What part of Ontario are you from? We're from [some part of Ontario].
  Trebek: I'm from [some nearby part of Ontario]. Have you been keeping up with the [so-and-so] hockey tournament?
  Woman: Well, since my son stopped playing, neither of us has really kept up with it very closely.
  Trebek: I hate you, and I hate your son.

  You can read more from this first-hand account of a Jeopardy! appearance, but be warned that the authour is a full-on playa hata [via Kottke]
  
• First hypercolour plants, now fish: instead of landmines, these zebra fish fluoresce to detect water pollutants - they're also being sold as pets, which is causing some (predictable, understandable) anti-GMO backlash [via MetaFilter]

TP 20thC Champeen!

• Federal court overturns Canada's MP3 player fee - This will drop iPod prices (e.g.) by $15 to $25! I paid about $3.50 on my RCA player. I don't suppose this means there will be refunds? Who keeps the fees that will inevitably be collected from today until prices are corrected? [Globe and Mail via Engadget]

Is there a Consumer Reports for nerds?

Now that the cold weather has finally hit in earnest, and my widescreen emachines laptop has begun to overheat and shut down (hard power-off, not suspend) during computationally intensive work. Why? Drafty windows and sketchy baseboard heaters mean a huge temperature gradient in my apartment each winter -- unfortunately, my laptop is in one of the too-hot zones, and relocating is not an option.

Are those funky laptop cooler stands actually any good? Google turns up stands made of plastic and metal, with fans or heat pipes or just passive cooling, 'ergonomic' tilt or flat or crazy adjustable [WMV], with bells and whistles (USB hubs & flash memory readers) or just a simple wire frame.

From my younger, geekier days I recall enthusiast sites too dependent on ad revenues (and swag) from the OEMs or VARs that supply the sample units to be adequately critical or tackle head-to-head comparisons like this, and forum users seem to care more about form than function.

Do any of them work? One review show a drop of only a few degrees... is that enough? Will my widescreen fit, and be stable? Would propping up the back corners to let some air circulate underneath work just as well? Bah.

In the New York Times, David Brooks writes:

"[B]efore you get too deep into your preparations, it's important to step back and understand the context of the event and how you as an aspiring policy wonk might best utilize it to climb to fame and influence... it's important to understand that this week's summit (unofficial title: Why President Bush Is Right About Everything) may not feature the widest possible range of views. This is true of all presidential policy summits. That's in part because the staff members who organize these things are rightfully terrified that something newsworthy might happen, and have taken precautions."

[read more]

• The Cubes: in this office, you're the boss! - Legoeqsue cube-farm office drone toys for the white-collar wage slave warrior on your x-mas list [via MetaFilter]

Er, "Ikabod" has a blog now, so you should read it. Or something.

I still feel like the whole world's discovering one of 'my' favourite sites when Google makes the news (at least when the reason it's in the papers is for something other than its IPO or stock price), the same sort of feeling I'd get if MetaFilter were on the cover of the National Post. This time it's their plan to digitize the entire library collects at Harvard and Michigan and make all of the pubilc-domain works available to the general public.

I've been quite interested in the nuts-and-bolts of digitization since working in a related field two summers ago. Imagine a Google-powered sort of Jstor that covers your school's entire collection, full-text searchable (like so), as opposed to a broad but incomplete selection of recent scholarly journals. For basic undergraduate research papers, at least, you'd never need to set foot in the library... the implications of which could be a mixed-bag, for sure, but it will be very interesting to see how this pans out.

• Natural Resources minister John Efford to break rank with Cabinet over same-sex marriage bill? - I think serious public debate about the merits of cabinet solidarity, as parliamentary convention, could get very interesting [Globe and Mail]
  
• The Games Political People Play - "how come when a fan complains about how much money pro ballers make it's considered a common-sensical observation, but if you question why CEO salaries are 400 times the size of their workers' people call you a communist?" [AlterNet]
  
• What labour learned on Nov. 2 - "[Union members] are 8 percent of eligible voters but were 14 percent of voters in the presidential election, and another 10 percent of voters came from a [union] household." [AlterNet]
  
• Latest missile sheild test fails - the target missile launched properly, but the interceptor didn't even make it off the ground [CBC News]

Apologia abounds, apparently

From Cathy Young's "Defending Repression: Why are conservatives trying to rehabilitate McCarthyism and the Japanese internment?" in Reason :

One would think, though, that if you truly wanted to counter such slippery-slope hyperbole about ethnic or religious profiling, the last thing you’d want to do would be to defend internment. It’s a bit like trying to counter arguments that legalized abortion leads to acceptance of infanticide by publishing a tract in defense of infanticide. Malkin’s calculus, however, is different: She hopes that if Americans can be persuaded to get over the Japanese internment guilt complex, the profiling of Arab Americans and Muslims will become more acceptable.

[read more]

• "The ad has caught the attention of marketers, who praise its professional production values and say it's one of the first 'pure' advertisements seen on the internet. Though homemade ads are nothing new, most are parodies, protests or political commentaries." [Agenda, Inc. via reBlog]
  
• You Are Beautiful - the guerilla highway overpass attack is my favourite [via MeFi]
  
• Flash-based iPod mockup - swank, though fake [via Gizmodo]
  
• "Every Matthew Sweet album has only one good song, and this good song is inevitably the first single, and this single is always utterly perfect... He sells enough albums to live comfortably, and that seems reasonable." [Spin via Kottke]
  
• Be the first on your block to own a Beretta Series 9mm handgun made from lego [via MeFi]

A queer sort of ignorance

The torrent of screeds against same-sex marriage has made it increasingly difficult to fact the Toronto Star's Opinion and Letters pages each morning. Readers like Brian Cybulski, who insist that same-sex marriage has been “imposed on the public by unelected judges,” do not have their facts ‘straight’.

While it is true that court cases have established the legality of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court of Canada is not forcing a statutory re-definition of marriage. The elected Liberal government sent its own proposed changes to a Court which, far from forcing change on an unwilling Parliament, carefully responded that those changes would indeed be consistent with the section 15 equality requirements of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and affirmed that section 2(a) of the Charter would protect the religious freedom of those opposed to performing or hosting marriages contrary to their beliefs.

The Liberals gave the Court an opportunity to declare the current, opposite-sex only, definition of marriage unconstitutional but the Court refused to do so. Armchair pundits who insist that the Court is forcing the government’s hand would do well to read the Court’s ruling themselves instead of relying upon misinformation from religious groups.

From McSweeney's :

The camera is a neat toy... but ultimately, the camera is not personally transformational.

No, friend, it is the tripod that sets you apart. It is the tripod. You take our hypothetical clever slob with the armpit stains and you give him a $500 tripod to clutch nonchalantly as he strides across a parking lot toward a rental office, what you have now is a photographer, a professional worthy of respect and deference. Amateurs do not carry tripods now do they. [read more]

Take a chance you stupid ho

Sad but true: a rare viewing of MuchMusic gifted me with an early xmas present in the form of a writers' block anthem. Discovering that Gwen Stefani's new album can be purchased via the Amnesty International USA website, as a fundraiser, mad me feel a little less like a dork.

I bet if I were "a super hot female" I'd have no problem writing about Foucault, Derrida, and Political Science. Alas, I can only bob my head and flip aimlessly through journal articles.

[EDIT: Bwa ha ha ha]