tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27219242510241420372024-02-02T06:24:26.896-08:00Monday Never Comes: Joseph Dunphy's SoapboxWhat is it about? Darned if I know!Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-54197971263827934772014-06-13T14:28:00.002-07:002014-06-13T14:32:52.146-07:00Today's Moment in Corporate Spin<br><br><br>
I just read <a target="_blank" href="http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/whole-foods-to-chobani-please-leave.html">Whole Foods to Chobani: Please Leave</a> on Inc.com, and was fascinated by the ethics of the blogger. This is what we see, right under the title: "Is it possible to get too successful for Whole Foods? The grocery chain's latest move to stop shelving the Greek yogurt brand begs the question." <br><br>
Oooh ... boo, hiss. Poor entrepreneurs, oppressed by the pseudo-hippies. But let's look a little further into article than the "tl;dr" crowd would probably go.
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"Whole Foods is reportedly dropping Chobani because it wants to make room on its shelves for products from smaller producers that either do not contain genetically-modified organisms or that clearly label ingredients that are genetically-modified. <b>While Chobani markets its yogurt as "Nothing but good," there have been complaints that some of the farmers who sell milk to Chobani give their cows genetically-modified feed.</b>"
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So, they were selling a product that was inappropriate for their distributor - Whole Foods' focus on organic food is hardly a secret. They've been both praised and mocked for it, for years. While one can have an argument over whether or not the fuss over genetic modification is justified by the facts, one can't really have much of a debate over the merits of selling a product under false pretenses - that is shameful behavior - and when a company has its product sitting on the shelves of a store at which the customers have a reasonable expectation of finding organic goods, false pretenses are exactly what is being seen. So, Chobani was decently embarrassed about the deception, and accepted the loss of business with good grace, right? No, not exactly.
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"In a statement released by Chobani, Ulukaya said, 'Though we have very limited distribution within Whole Foods, they have been an important partner of ours over the years,' and added, 'We hope to continue our partnership moving forward.'"
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Their continued partnership with the company they either defrauded or practiced fraud through? How could they possibly defend an expectation like that?
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"In the past, when asked why Chobani yogurt isn't non-GMO or organic, Ulukaya has generally demurred on two counts: price and community. It's important to him, he has said, that Chobani remain accessible to a mass audience, which he says makes organic ingredients too costly."
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News flash: The masses do not go shopping at Whole Foods, or, as somebody I know calls it, "Whole Paycheck." The masses go shopping for food at places like Jewel Foods or Albertson's. Whole Foods is a niche marketer, catering to a particular clientele that has a certain set of priorities as it makes its purchases, priorities to which it is certainly entitled, <i>because these people are spending their own money</i>. This is one reason why fraud is despicable - because by denying people the freedom to make informed choices, it effectively denies people the freedom to make their own choices. How could one possibly defend that? How about, with the help of one of the Internet's many volunteer corporate shills, one of whom we can see writing this
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"Chobani is owned and operated by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant and entrepreneur who is credited with turning struggling areas of upstate New York into a veritable yogurt Nirvana."
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See! If you're not in favor of defrauding customers who are looking for organic food, then you are in favor of poor farmers losing their farms and going hungry, because as we know, Ulukaya was running his business as a charity. Surely, one wouldn't dream of saying that he's just trying to pocket the profits he makes by selling a cheaply made product at premium prices he can charge because people think his product is something that it isn't, having seen it in a store they associate with organic food, would one? Surely, even if there was something a little dishonest about the marketing, this was just a little white lie of his, the means being justified by the ends, because there was no way that this kind, kind man could keep those poor farmers in business without the help of deception, his selling to Whole Foods being needed to keep Chobani afloat? Oh, the Humanity, now that this has failed! Why children will be dying in the streets of Utica, for sure. The tragedy of it all, the senseless ... what was it that the owner of Chobani said, again?
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"In a statement released by Chobani, Ulukaya said, 'Though we have very limited distribution within Whole Foods, ..."
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Oh. In other words, he's willing to wage a public relations offensive in order to punish a distributor for no longer carrying a product that they should never have carried in the first place. Did Whole Foods know about the use of GMO foods in the product from the beginning, leaving them complicit in the fraud? I don't know. Read that literally - I'm not even going to guess. But doing the wrong thing in the past would be no reason to refrain from doing the right thing in the future, and when doing the right thing makes one into a target for the kind of disinformation we saw out of that Inc.com post, a lack of due diligence can become all too understandable, even if it isn't right. People don't like to be attacked by pit bulls, even the two footed kind, and the Internet, to its shame, provides those in abundance, ready to wage war whenever somebody with a little cash in his pocket wants to make a fuss over the fact that he heard the word "no."
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Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02510794180574568488noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-68319555174236719872012-11-28T04:25:00.002-08:002012-11-28T04:31:10.698-08:00Future States | Tent City<br><br /><br />See if anything in this video seems at all familiar in this video from <a href="http://futurestates.tv/" target="_blank">FutureStates</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><iframe width="320" height="264" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FXngS_gA6ZU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02510794180574568488noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-61931695777077066872008-11-03T19:55:00.002-08:002012-09-03T08:56:00.724-07:00Star Simpson's first interview on the Boston airport LED sweatshirt scare<img height=20 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=70><br /><br /><br />Following up on <a href="http://mcjobs.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/a-little-reality-intruding-on-the-spin-the-star-simpson-incident/" target="_blank">A little reality intruding on the spin: The Star Simpson Incident</a>: I recently came across this video on BoingBoing. A few commercials come before <a href="http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/09/19/star-simpson-once-mi.html" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none">the interview</a> ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Qg3lwBBPZ5M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><br /><br />... which is memorable. Let's take a good look at the "lump of putty" the Massachussetts state police reported seeing in Ms. Simpson's hands, one which she says they refused to return until fairly recently. It's a flower, made out of what Star describes as oven hardened clay. In other words, unglazed ceramics.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://tinypic.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Tinypic, where this image is hosted"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 268px;" src="http://i33.tinypic.com/n19s87.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><br />A view from a different angle<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.tinypic.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Tinypic, where this image is hosted"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 268px;" src="http://i38.tinypic.com/34qmyb5.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br /><br />leaving us with no rational way to avoid a simple conclusion: Pare's career needs to be over. His report to the press, one which so inflamed local sentiments as to deny Ms.Simpson the possibility of a fair jury trial, was fraudulent. A ceramic flower is not a lump of putty. It can not honestly be mistaken for a lump of putty. There is no room for a judgement call on this one - Pare and the police deliberately deceived the public, and the fact that the public was eager to be deceived does not excuse such an action. Not that one had to be in the police to join in on the fun, if one lived in Beantown, as those scanning the increasingly ignorant and outrageous blog reactions during the trial probably would have guessed.<br /><br /><br /><br /><i><blockquote>"STAR: I've become very turned off to living in Boston. I'm taking time off to travel, because that seems like a much better plan than continuing to live in that state. The reaction of people in Boston has been -- based on news reports containing any number of lies by the police, and little embellishments by writers, people have -- any number of reactions towards me. While biking one day, some complete stranger spit on me, spit on my bicycle, and shouted that I should have done time. I know he doesn't know anything about what actually happened.<br /><br />XENI: Does that happen often, hostile reactions from people on the street?<br /><br />STAR: Yeah. Every time I'd go out, I'd meet some person who had something to say, and had formed strong opinions and decided to take that opportunity to take them out on me.</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />I will agree with some of the comments that I skimmed that Boston should pay a real price for this outrage, and given the heavy dependence of that second rung metropolitan area on tourism, an obvious means of extracting the needed pound of flesh presents itself. My hope is that people will simply elect to not travel to Boston, not even with the thought that they're going to be part of some kind of organized boycott or attempt to reform Boston in spite of itself, but because the town simply looks like a nasty, crazy, unfriendly and unwholesome place to visit; who needs to deal with people who think like this? Especially when there are so many far more pleasant vacation choices. Like, say, Hawaii. Or is that Hawai'i?<br /><br />Enough would-be tourists exercise that kind of prudence, and the long fading city of Boston is going to be in for some well deserved economic misery. May it never end.<br /><br /><br /><br /><img height=20 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=70>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-5638036320012091822008-08-09T00:11:00.000-07:002008-08-09T02:58:12.606-07:00WikiCafe: Can you say "hypocrisy"?<br><br><br /><br />Metacafe is one of Youtube's competitors, a video hosting service that is a distant second to Youtube in popularity (if even that), which is perhaps best known for the number of women one can see naked on it without needing to log in. Having thus distinguished itself in one way, Metacafe decided to stand out in another, a few months ago. It decided to become the first major video hosting service to wikify the descriptions, titles and tags for the videos it hosted.<br /><br />Wikification is an extreme thing to do to existing webspace. Think of the complaint that used to be directed against Blogger, back some time before I started posting on it: that there was no comment moderation. That any troll could come along and drop any number of outrageous remarks that he wanted, and that the author of a blog would have to play the proverbial game of whackamole to keep his blog clean if the troll got his friends involved. I understand that there was some real unhappiness about that lack of screening, which I could easily understand, and as Blogger eventually did understand - note that comment screening is now an option - but picture what the experience would have been like if far from having to settle for just leaving rude remarks, they could rewrite one's posts or delete them altogether. That's what wikification is - taking the bad concept of denying the user effective control over the comment section of a page, and pushing it to the point of letting the trolls barge their way into the page itself.<br /><br />I posted a few questions about this change on the Metacafe company blog, reprinting my comment in <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/josephdunphy/browse_thread/thread/7c807acea4853184?hl=en" target="_blank">a post to one of my Googlegroups</a>, having found that Metacafe's staff seemed to have gone deeply into "do as we say and not as we do" territory. I had asked if the users would be able to opt out of having the "metainformation" on their posts wikified. Lurking in their forums, I found that the answer to this would seem to be no - no live and let live with their users on this one, the Metacafe staff was going to force this experiment on all, whether they wished to take part in it or not. "Give it a chance, it might work for you", they said. But take a look at that company blog. These same people who forced their users to admit all other users as collaborators, "come one, come all, whether I want you to or not", with no prescreening of changes, <i>wouldn't even open the comment section of their blog in that manner</i>. Which seems more extreme - not having control over what somebody posts after one's words, or not having control over one's words, themselves?<br /><br />Some weeks have passed, more posts have appeared atop the Metacafe company blog, but my comment (which was left awaiting moderation) still has not appeared, and as you can see for yourself, it doesn't even come remotely close to qualifying as trolling. While I am not saying that comment moderation is censorship - I practice it myself, and with good reason - I am saying that there is something kind of questionable about forcing others to do that which one isn't willing to do, even to a diminished extent, oneself. "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" is a cliche for a good reason; if one is unwilling to do something, and one feels that there is a good reason for that, why do those good reasons suddenly evaporate when somebody else stands to be inconvenienced?<br /><br />When somebody posts about what some would dismiss as being "the unfairness of life", the usual refrain is "what can you do", but in this case, there is a simple answer. Youtube's traffic dwarfs that of Metacafe, and they haven't denied their users the freedom to post without being interfered with by any busybody who feels he has the right to second guess their creative choices, and the willingness to get into a test of wills about the matter. Usually, the problem in getting a provider to behave itself is one of asking a group of total strangers to cooperate in giving something up - the use of a valued service - in exchange for the deferred gratification of better service (should the other boycotters stick together and get the provider to back down, but getting more traffic and more creative freedom in exchange for having fewer headaches isn't much of a sacrifice, temporary or otherwise. In this case, the greatest good is worked by the users going out and seeking immediate gratification, which in this case can be found on Youtube and a number of other video hosting services for free.<br /><br />So really, why not pursue it? Metacafe is not being nice about this, and they have no leverage other than that which their users are foolish enough to give to them. Let's hope that they'll decide to not let that be very much.<br /><br /><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-64951546588413423592008-05-04T07:09:00.002-07:002012-09-03T09:20:51.316-07:00I did not know that!<br><br /><br /><br />I discovered something remarkable today. For all of these ... months ... I've been under the misguided impression that I was living in and blogging from Chicago, when, in fact, I've been in Southern India the whole time. Why, you could have knocked me over with a feather, but Alexa couldn't possibly be wrong, could it? Let's take a look at <a href="http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com" target="_blank">the Alexa listing for this site</a> and see what we find:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>Joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com<br />9/4 IIIRD STREET SUNDARAM COLONY , TAMBARAM WEST<br />CHENNAI, TAMILNADU 600045, <br />INDIA<br /><br /><br />Phone: +1 415 538 8404<br />Fax: +1 212 629 9305<br />dns-admin [at] google.com</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />Oh, and good news - Google is ready to help me with my newfound national identity! Quoting what just came upon my screen as I backed up my work:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>Blog in your native Indic script<br />Convert English characters to Indic script as you type! Learn more about transliteration on Blogger.</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Why, thank you, boys! If only you could teach me to understand my native indic script and maybe even a few words in my brand new native tounge, I suspect that that new found ability to blog in a less European mode would be even more helpful.<br /><br />Now some people, some very boring people, might suggest that I'm still an American and still in Chicago, and that what we're seeing is an excellent example of the problems that arise when a site accepts contact information from any Tom, Dick or Harry who wishes to offer it, or in this case, I suppose, any Dinesh, Tushar or Haresh, to be properly non-anglocentric about these things. They might even go so far as to say that the submission didn't even come from me, but instead, from somebody who seems to intend to hijack the url for this blog, and not understanding the difference between domains and subdomains, doesn't know that a registrar can't submit joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com as a domain name. Can you imagine that? I will tactfully decline to comment at length on the making such terrible accusations in this more sensitive and enlightened era in which we all know of our duty to assume good faith, especially since I am one of those shameful people who has been denying that this contact information is accurate, and if one can't be tactful with oneself, truly, who can one be tactful with?<br /><br />While I work through the obvious self-esteem issues posed by my insistence on my own Midwesterness, I would make a request of anybody coming to this site from Alexa. Regardless of what you might have read in the site description in the search results, please accept that this is not, in fact, the number one site for "Alien Resurrection" downloads. I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for such things, so please don't ask, and please don't be too disappointed when you discover that there aren't any other bootlegged downloads at this location, or at any other location I have anything to do with. No movies, no mp3s, not even any faked nudes of the Bush twins ... nothing. I know, it's a terrible oversight on my part, leaving out the contraband like that, one which I must confess I have no intention of ever rectifying, but one for which I might someday be forgiven, if only by the truly gracious few.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><blockquote><b>Addendum, June 14:</b> A few weeks after this post, I sent Alexa a correction of the contact information, and they removed the address and telephone numbers. Eventually. The url for this blog, however, remains listed as if it were a domain name to this day.</blockquote></blockquote> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-62921714265272488682008-02-29T11:34:00.000-08:002010-12-21T15:38:28.092-08:00Blink and you'll miss it<br><br />A first, as far as I know - a link to an image in my gallery at Flickr, from somebody else. Somebody at "<a href="http://www.schmap.com/" target="_blank">Schmap</a>" wrote to me and asked me if I would object to their inclusion of a thumbnail of the photo you see below, along with a linkback, in the fourth edition of their Chicago neighborhood guide.<br /><br /><br /><img height=10 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=20 align=left><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_dunphy/437225784/" target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 30px 20px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 230px;" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/180/437225784_601f28910f_d.jpg" border="0" alt="Links to fuller sized image at Flickr" /></a>Of course, I was very happy to say yes, and you can see the image appear as part of a slideshow <a href="http://www.schmap.com/chicago/introduction_neighborhoods/#p=2015D06&i=2015D06_5.jpg" target="_blank">here</a>. You don't see it for long, before, as your arm lightly brushes across your mouse as you reach for something or your hand twitches, you automatically skip into Chinatown or somesuch place within a few scale inches / miles of where I was shooting, but my picture is there, and the fullsized version has seen 50 visits in the few hours that have passed since I received the acceptance letter. Not a bad start to my afternoon.<br /><h2><a name="return"> </a></h2><h2><a name="back"> </a></h2><img height=10 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=20 align=left><a href="http://josephdunphy.scriptmania.com/Chicago/Chrysthanthemums_above.html" target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 30px 20px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 230px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-A73WXHH0M8wJLGqac8UfdT-Mr1P_eumpkGATDUKL2yWA5jmk-KnMD8ywVEXROo9Qbvq77goEAbSkFeUr5W-hNVnhJmVTvLrUp7ta-O01jZHxTQUX2y1SyNnmdK9me8eXqIQnTteKv8qj/s320/chrysanthemum_download.jpg" border="0" alt="Links to fuller sized version of image, against a black background. Link opens in new window." /></a>Out of curiosity, I decided to see which pictures had proved the most popular. I wasn't surprised that the few chrysanthemum pictures had done better than most, but mildly surprised that the effort you see to your left was proving so much more popular than this far less heavily shopped one that follows. Not that I'm complaining. This is valuable feedback, and I may be learning from it. Having just written that, I now have to wonder if some funny person will now find the absolutely worst image I did and start clicking on it repeatedly.<br /><br /><br /><img height=10 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=20 align=left><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_dunphy/2167475800/" target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 30px 20px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 230px;" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2227/2167475800_31777175a5_d.jpg" border="0" alt="Links to fuller sized image at Flickr" /></a>That would probably be my picture of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_dunphy/1109285224/" target="_blank">this ferocious little guy</a>, who could be heard a block away. On his scale, that was probably like a mile for one of us. I was so delighted by the subject, this tiny little dog who was going to defend the building all on his own, that I had to post the picture, even if the photoshopping needs a lot of work. Getting detail out of a black subject against a much lighter background isn't easy, which is why our little hero seems a shadow of himself; this is one of those cases in which I'll probably just accept the surrealism of the results as I bring out the lasso tool and see what I can do.<br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-53806184907263434912008-02-16T12:19:00.000-08:002011-01-21T23:03:44.206-08:00Delayed Bayer Recall Story<br><br />Referring to: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1450916820080215" target="_blank">this article</a>.<br /><br />Having never heard of this drug or this study, I asked a retired physician in my family what he thought of both. While he wasn't familiar with either, he did raise a question. While one might, perhaps, see a reason why Bayer would, were this report accurate, want to keep the public in the dark about any corporate misdeeds, why would a small army of prescribing physicians prove cooperative? While he was in practice, every month the FDA would send a report to practicing physicians warning them of reports of possibly dangerous side effects, with a form on the last page that the physicians were encouraged to use, to report problems that they had witnessed. While drug companies have been known to give physicians kickbacks for agreeing to do things things that might not be in the best interests of their patients, such as enrolling them in experimental drug trials (this was reported in the Wall Street Journal), bribing the entire profession would take some doing, even if the whole profession were open to being bribed.<br /><br />He stated - arousing a little of my own skepticism - that thirty avoidable deaths from a medication would be considered a scandal, leaving me wondering how one would detect such a statistical blip in a population (open heart surgery candidates) in which the mortality rate is going to be high under any circumstances, at present. But I suppose that was the point - we are not looking at a reasoned reaction but an emotional one, and if what may be nothing more than an artifact arising from poor stratification in a study of what is a not a very homogenous population to begin with can result in a draconian response on the part of regulators, what would be the regulatory response to killing patients by the tens of thousands?<br /><br />This might bring forth the easy answer that given that we are now in year eight of the George W. Bush presidency, living in a country under the administration so psychotically pro-big business that it is literally willing to send its own nation down a path very likely to lead to its destruction (see: earlier comments regarding outsourcing) for the sake of short term corporate profit boosting. That, and for the sake of making nice with India, which said frighteningly inept president still seems to hope will become an ally in America's "war on terror" and send massive reinforcements to our troops in Iraq, and never mind the fact that India has, at length, failed to show any signs of real interest in doing so. Construct your own Moby Dick metaphor with Bush cast as Ahab, I suppose. One possible problem with that easy answer: eight years is far from long enough for the Clinton era appointees to have retired. Would they have all cooperated in this hypothetical burial of what would have been physician reports of problems with the drug in question which would have been arriving by the tens of thousands, or at the very least, certainly by the thousands? A conspiracy of silence involving thousands of nonfirable bureaucrats that lasted for years? Does that really sound plausible?<br /><br />Even granting that Clinton's liberalism was more a whacky, fashion conscious love of narcissistic self-indulgence and trendy rhetoric than it was anything genuinely progressive, are we to believe that every single appointee from that era was a good, Bush supporter style corporatist, or that the few who weren't would be so easily silenced? No, I'm not saying that stories can't be made to go away. I've certainly seen that happen before, <i>but</i> generally in places where those cooperating with that conspiracy of silence had to fear for their own jobs, worry about whether or not they'd get to graduate, were in some way in danger of suffering from the reprisals if those who desired their silence became unhappy with them. To what extent does that describe an FDA administrator?<br /><br />Questions are sometimes just those - questions. In this case, I do not claim to have the answers, and suggest that the reader seek them on his own. I wonder if any of them will.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Perhaps not. In the filler post I put in place before writing this, I said something about being more interested in the reaction to the article on Digg, than I was in the article itself. What interested me was the willingness of somebody to imply that market forces would so strongly compel a company like Bayer to be nice and abstain from producing a product that would hurt its customers that if they did, it was probably an honest mistake. Quoth one of the users:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>Free markets and capitalism provide greater amounts and more advanced technological breakthroughs than purely government run and controlled systems.</i></blockquote><br /><br />Except that both free markets and capitalism could exist without corporations and the detachment from personal responsibility for personal misdeeds they sometimes offer, so being anticorporate doesn't necessarily mean that one is opposed to capitalism. Know what a single proprietorship is?<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>This is demonstrated both logically AND historically.</i></blockquote><br /><br />Which brings us to why Economics is not a real science: in a real science, the scientists know that knowledge about the external world can not be generated ex nihilo, through the pure application of reason without need to ground the starting assumptions of one's arguments in observation, because Logic can do no more than reveal the consequences of the assumptions one makes - garbage in, garbage out. Any argument that would claim to circumvent that limitation is, at best, a well crafted fallacy.<br /><br />Economics fails to be a real science because it fails to be empirical. Instead of looking at the evidence to see how the participants in a market actually do behave, the true believers will offer arguments about how one should expect them to behave, declare the conclusions of those arguments to be as good as observations on the basis that they sound plausible, and then build their theory on that. That isn't science, that's Metaphysics, with maybe a dose of Calvinist theology. Take an old sermon, replace "G-d" with "The Market", and see how familiar the results sound.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>A company such as Bayer makes money selling drugs to help people and obviously wouldn't make much money selling drugs that kill people. Thus, as they are a greedy company trying to make money, it is in their best interest not to kill people and to in fact help people.</i></blockquote> <br /><br />Except - and this is where that failure of empiricism comes in - as a matter of historical reality, greedy companies during the Robber Baron Era frequently did knowingly market products that did grave harm to their customers, making very good money along the way. That's <i>why</i> all of that consumer protection legislation was passed during the early to mid 20th century in the United States. This is not a controversial view I'm sharing, either. This is something that was basic, high school level history until that magical time when the schools decided that being sure to "not be divisive" was more important than giving their students a sound education.<br /><br />Case in point: Tort law during the period did not recognize the concept of "wrongful death", so, I'm told by an attorney, the Pullman Cars were designed to collapse in the case of collision and kill everybody inside, in order to shield the Pullman Car Company from the liability that would arise were some of the seriously injured passengers to survive a crash and need medical treatment. Certainly not very good for the customer of the railroad that purchased such a car, but the cars sold well. Then there is the extensive history of adulteration in the meat packing industry, which market forces did little to nothing to curtail prior to the establishment of regulation and inspection in that industry.<br /><br />The user might try to claim that he (?) acknowleged the point, when he wrote<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>The fact is sometimes they mess up and there should be oversight and a system in place to quickly fix the situation. There should also be enough prior study in place to be sure these mess ups don't reach the market in the first place.</i></blockquote> <br /><br />but, if so, that's an evasion. If a tourist asks a new resident of Chicago which way Lincoln is while the two are standing at Clark and Belmont, the new resident tries to remember where Lincoln is, and then points eastward by mistake, the new resident has messed up. If, on the other hand, that same tourist, late at night asks for directions to Second City, and a lifelong resident gives him directions that will take that tourist to the Robert Taylor Homes, that resident has not "messed up", he's just plain evil. The difference is this - did the person offering the directions make an honest mistake and did he mean well? The user has tried to claim the presence of good intentions on the part of a corporation are self-evident, or logically necessary, when in fact History has shown that Corporations very frequently don't mean well at all, meaning that any supposed logical argument that they must is left in the same place as the old Scholastic arguments against the existence of sunspots - in direct conflict with observable reality, and yet, strangely enough, not discarded.<br /><br />He continues:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>These last two statements are where government and regulation come in.</i></blockquote><br /><br />Clearly implying the corporate mistakes must be honest mistakes, calling for the kind intervention of government which will help straighten them out, much like the confused newcomer in the above example. The Digg user then attempts to dispel any perception that he might be a neoconservative ideologue, writing<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>This whole "CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL" attitude is just as ridiculous as "GOVERNMENT IS EVIL" thinking. Both can be good/bad and both have their place,</i></blockquote><br /><br />Which sounds more reasonable than it really is, when it is seen out of context and one forgets what that place is supposed to be, and when one overlooks the fact that the user is setting up a strawman. The article didn't speak about corporations in general, everywhere and at all times, it spoke about a single corporation (Bayer) in a single era (our own), and responses made in Digg's limiting, soundbite format are made in that context. To criticise the moral direction the American corporate community has been moving in during the last few decades, overall, is not the same thing as criticising everybody who does now or ever has worked in a corporation, any more than an admission the existence of a gang problem in Englewood is an attack on all African-Americans, yet just as we saw that kind of false equating of very differing ideas with inflammatory intent so often during the Politically Correct 1990s, "playing the hysteria card" as I used to call it, now we see the same directed toward that which is questionable on the Right instead of on the Left, in a softer tone of voice, but clearly with the same manipulative intent.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><blockquote><I>but much of the polarizing anti-corporatism propaganda spit out on digg is just as bad as the support our troops or you're a terrorist thinking, its just on opposite sides of the table.</i></blockquote></blockquote><br /><br />Yes, Heaven forbid that the chickens should develop a distrust of the foxes. <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPmOnSQwLrSQ9qQiEl2ftY6BKbzwrPkGqJr5KiXw4SOdEqBlGbr3gT188ayGdmKqzIy17_6DW2Ec5AYm9AB0qbx-GioZzGKy-xaPpYtENQz_r-Wa1fkJQJOTS8oRAO4EQsCjmMUeAHDiVp/s400/gr_smiley.gif"><br /><br />Notice the shift from the now recognized PC buzzword "divisive" to the more Centrist sounding "polarizing", but there is nothing Centrist in the ideas advanced so dishonestly. Real Centrists, unlike Neocon pretenders, are not shy about critiquing social institutions or bothered by the suggestions that some of the currently existing ones might have gone bad, or even, by their very nature, be rotten to the core. For reform to even be conceptualized as a possibility, one has to accept that such things are possible, and Neoconservatism is, above all else, defined by the misplaced anger with which it greets any attempt to achieve reform. I'd be more amused by the fact that toward the end the user seems to be stumbling in the direction of an attempt coopt Liberalism in support of Neoconservatism as well, with a last minute substitution of "polarizing" for "divisive", were Neoconservatism something other than a cooption of Conservatism by those formerly part of the New Left that became more palatable for those who got cushy jobs at a time when those were given out far too freely to a spoiled generation whose character, overall, has not improved with time. There is no humor in watching our friend attempt to coopt either Centrism or Liberalism, because humor requires the element of surprise.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Why would a corporation choose to do something not in its own best interests - assuming that poorly serving the consumer must necessarily fall into that category? Perhaps, in part, because a corporation doesn't make decisions, for the excellent reason that in a real sense, it doesn't actually exist. A corporation is a sort of legal fiction created to make a huge, complicated buzz of human activity comprehensible by helping people to imagine it to be a single collective entity, a person in its own right, in fact, and we are so used to the fiction that somewhere along the way, we forget that is what it is, and our own clarity of thought suffers. <br /><br /><b>For example:</b> a man walks into a human resources office with solid credentials, applies for work, and as he walks away, gets to hear his application and resume being torn to shreds. In utter disbelief, he shares the experience with others, who tell him that he shouldn't question this, because that's the company's privilege - as if the company had torn up his paperwork, when, in fact, this was done by a nineteen year old intern who didn't want to have to bother filing it, and was still revved up after a stirring lecture in her woman's studies class about the evils of the White Male and decided to fight the imaginary power, especially when the imaginary power in the flesh wasn't as blond haired, blue eyed and buff as she preferred her apologetic young men to be; the insubordinate act of a spoiled little girl with a temp job becomes a sacred part of the American way of life, above any possible legitimate criticism.<br /><br />The metaphor is confused with reality, the representative with the company and all of those who work at it, and the fact that she doesn't actually own the company that she has (on her own ungranted authority) refused employment at, is swiftly forgotten. Her actions are accepted as a personal, private exercise of freedom the rationality of which is guaranteed because of the demands of market discipline, the choice of a company which must surely act in its own best interests and therefore, through the acting of Adam Smith's invisible hand, work the greatest good for the greatest number, and never mind the fact that Smith never wrote that. True believers will speak as if the rogue employee and the company were one, so assuredly so that she couldn't have any agenda or issues of her own apart from a passionate desire to do that which would well serve her employer's interests, and that in an office staffed with her friends, her employer would surely know if she had done any less than her absolute, most responsibly professional best. <br /><br />It's a common sort of experience, one that should make certain fallacies easier to see, and yet it doesn't seem to do so, very often. Corporate decisions at the higher levels of management aren't "made by the company" any more than the ones at the lower levels are, they're made by managers who jump from company to company, may very well leave long before the damage they do is noticed, and are looking for quantifiable results to cite when selling themselves to their next employer. As for being associated with a disaster - can anybody get very far into adulthood in any Western society without understanding some variant on the initials C.Y.A.? We have a job market in which almost nobody pretends that hiring is based on much other than successful networking, and one has to have allies to do that, preferably powerful ones. How is the truth to come out when lies are likely to prove so much more beneficial to the witnesses? The assumption that the company's interests will ultimately impact on a departed manager's interests would seem to require an assumption that the truth about who did what and why would be generally known and really, seriously - is there anybody out there who has never seen an unsavory incident or stupid act on the part of somebody in a position of authority just sort of go away, as people decided that they really didn't need trouble that badly?<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />How does life experience vanish so utterly the moment it has a chance to find application in political discourse? At so many moments like the one I alluded to, we witness, first hand, the ironic failure of Neoconservatism as an opposition movement to the Far Left - the neoconservatives will go so far as to radically empower the Far Left - their own supposed opposition - by refusing to ask the question "what happens when our supposed opposition or their darlings become those in power", and trying to shout down those who do, but the question remains. What happens when the inmates start running the asylum, if people have been conditioned to unquestioningly accept the dictates and actions of those in power, on the naive assumption that those in positions of responsibility must surely be responsible? This belief, our neocon friends have frequently clung to with absolute ideological rigidity, as if it were religious dogma, with seeming indifference to how appalling the consequences may be, or how surprising they aren't.<br /><br /><b>For example:</b> Out of respect for law and order, we're told, we should always side with a police officer - any police officer - against anybody he has just arrested, and as good Americans be properly appalled that taxpayer money is wasted manning a department like Internal Affairs, which, they will passionately insist, is there just to try to get good, honest hard working cops as they try to protect you and me. One can see such people go so far as to defend the use of torture as a means of interrogation (eg. Commander Jon Burges of Area Two in Chicago). But what if a gang manages to get one of its members on its local police force - and yes, that has happened before - in this perfect world in which there is no oversight? If the mental image of a lucky member of the Disciples or Kings being able to grab citizens off the street on a whim and torture or even summarily execute them with impunity would not be enough to be one of our ideologue friends to reconsider the extreme position he has taken, what would be? The answer is: nothing at all.<br /><br />Our neocon friends are beyond the reach of reason, building the core of their own identity as a group around a theory of government designed for a perfect world, never asking themselves what a government would be needed for in that perfect world. The only dispensation that seems available for those who would flirt with heresy on this point would seem to come when a breaking with this doctrine of their faith is needed for one of them to attack a popular neocon whipping boy, eg. one of the surviving Kennedys, or a democratic appointee, when railing against bureaucracy is in fashion and the appointee proves useful for that purpose. As when an anemic Catholic is granted leave to have his steak during a friday in Lent, the doctrine has not been questioned, it merely has been temporarily neglected for the sake of the perceived greater good, with the hope, perhaps, that G-d or the Market will understand.<br /><br />This is the failure, and I would argue, on some level a willful one, of Neoconservatism, and it's a persistant one - neocons never seem to ask what happens when society starts to deviate from the ideal, as it inevitably must, and those they would acknowledge to be the wrong people get into power. Will society's response tend to correct the problem, or exacerbate it? If, on every occasion, the response to the very question is to respond with the zealous rage of a fundamentalist whose faith has just be questioned, the former (self-correction) will not be in the realm of possibility, because criminals do not, by their nature, voluntarily respect boundaries or go where they're expected to go, and few crimes, either great or small, ever solve themselves. <br /><br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-1177305934075169052008-02-04T20:30:00.000-08:002008-12-09T06:30:30.876-08:00Obama Support: Just a question, if you can deal with it.<br><br /><br />Something I've often found strange is the way in which some can argue a point at length and with passion, and at the same time ignore its simplest implications. For the last seven years, much has been said about the Bush administration's alleged shredding of the bill of rights, and I understand that some basis for this has existed in fact. If so, then the implication of this is that the office of the presidency has become far more powerful than the founding fathers ever intended, and dangerously so. Civil liberties are supposed to be a natural outgrowth of the system, not a gift to be granted or denied on the whim of any one man.<br /><br />That having been said, what do we now see a large chunk of the democratic party ready and eager to do? Fast track somebody with a very limited political past into that dangerously enhanced office. The question for the would-be supporters is this: how much does one really ever know about somebody, until he has established a track record of performance? Without that, what does one have to go on? A platform? The discarding of those on attainment of office has been the stuff of bitter jokes longer than most of us have been alive. Some nice speeches? Good writers are easily hired. The fact that he's a passably good looking black man who can hold a crowd's attention?<br /><br />If that's all it takes, then maybe I should add a second question. Is this the presidency of the United States we're talking about, or the presidency of somebody's high school student council? Because if our standards of choice are something so superficial as how fashionably beddable a candidate is, I think our electorate might be taking that collective trip back to high school, and not even back to senior year at that, at a time when the stakes are a lot higher than those represented by the choice of next year's prom theme.<br /><br />The usual overwrought and factually unsupported charges of racism may now begin. <img height=0 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=7> <img alt="Smiley courtesy of www.FreeSmileys.org" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGi3p2ixUITlJ3XMCvdy0wKVVL0pA32BBvXwt9pGKWA3m8jvAj-V798TLgFJoKOcFMrCL7dbhVW2ZFFSy-FGpGg_zLYel51bMvn4ITMsM2luvFEVhpb8N5-nuosJIx3DFqXYi6RVG8xNMZ/s400/rolleyes.gif" border="0" /><br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-68829075261980266692008-01-13T16:04:00.000-08:002008-01-13T17:35:00.882-08:00Rooting out nofollow and asking for a little assistance<br><br /><br />Recently I wrote about <a href="http://joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com/2008/01/keep-eye-on-these-sites.html" target="_blank">the unhappy surprise</a> of discovering that a number of social networking sites that I had established presences on used "rel=nofollow" tags on their homepage links, explaining why this practice is unethical. I was even more unpleasantly surprised to discover, as I read <a href="http://webstractions.blogspot.com/2007/05/removing-nofollow-from-blogger-styled.html" target="_blank">this post on Tips 4 blogspot</a>, that said tag is automatically entered in the links on visitor posts to Blogger. As I discovered by quickly unrendering the redirect used by a number of Typekey equipped blogs, Typekey seems to do this, too.<br /><br />The good news is that as the owner of this blog, I seem to be able to remove those tags by taking them out of my template, which I just did. I do appreciate <i>civil</i> feedback on this blog, and am more than glad to show my appreciation by doing my part to help give your site a boost. All I ask, other than the obvious "please don't leave spam", including the barely disguised Bravenet guestbook variety, where somebody says "great site" on one's post about architectural preservationism and then links to his discount pharmacy page (just how much Xanax does America need) is that you please keep my journal in mind when you start installing a few links of your own.<br /><br />Getting people to notice a new blog is very difficult, and there is something a little discouraging about going to Technorati and noticing that all but one of the references to one's blog appear on one's other blogs. Nobody knows you're there, so nobody links to you, so nobody finds you ... chicken, egg ... you know the drill. The fact that I'm not really very far to either the Right or the Left probably doesn't help, either. A bushite (bushie? bushwhacker?) who visits a neocon site where the virtues of torturing prisoners are being extolled knows within seconds that he is among his own. He settles in, he's at home, and already starting to network in less time than one needs to fry an egg. Knowing what a Centrist blog is about, on the other hand, takes time. Maybe this is one reason why one finds so few of them. With your help, at least there can be one more of them that isn't completely invisible.<br /><br /><br><br><br><br /><br /><b>ADDENDUM:</b> On posting my thanks to the blog where I found the suggestion, I found rel=nofollow appearing in the links in my post. The problem has not been fixed at all.<br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-51256262382058079362008-01-10T11:07:00.000-08:002008-01-10T11:12:21.038-08:00Spiders on Drugs<br><br /><br />Vital information for the kids of today in this instructional video from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=apeman888" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">apeman888</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><object width="320" height="264"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/sHzdsFiBbFc&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/sHzdsFiBbFc&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="320" height="264"></embed></object></center><br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-66406593139945015522008-01-05T08:57:00.002-08:002012-09-03T11:05:45.404-07:00Keep an eye on these sites ...<br><br /><br />... and I don't mean that in a good way. If you recently visited <a href="http://my.mashable.com/joedunphy" target="_blank">one of my mashable sites</a>, you might have noticed that the list of social networking sites I have in that left bottom sidebar has grown shorter. There's a good reason for that.<br /><br />I've started posting to <a href="http://josephdunphy.stumbleupon.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">my StumbleUpon blog</a>. If you haven't used Stumbleupon, then I'll start by saying that any brief description fails to explain it. It's a site for sharing links and reviewing the sites linked to. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it is. One installs the toolbar, clicks on the Stumbleupon icon (next to which is the word "stumble"), and is instantly transported (yes, there's the cliche you were waiting for) to a random site that fits into one of the areas of interest one has listed in one's profile. A lot of these are really good sites, places you'd never hear of, and a lot of them are really creative and different (yes, more cliches, wow do I stink). The sites are natural conversation pieces, and where one finds conversation pieces, one tends to find some sort of conversation, and that's one place where community begins - something which Stumbleupon encourages, providing options to review other member's blogs and to link to them by becoming their fans. There are a few twits, but they seem ignorable enough, and so far at least, the crowd seems friendly and if I've known them too briefly to comment on how bright they are, at least they have generally good taste, and that, at the very least, is something. (Third cliche. I'm on a roll - and there's the forth).<br /><br />What, then, is the problem? As I started posting reviews, I would sometimes have cause to link the review that I was writing to relevant outside source material, sometimes commentary on one of my sites, sometimes not - and noticed that the system was inserting these tags into my links:<br /><br /><blockquote>rel="nofollow"</blockquote><br /><br />That tag tells the search engine spiders to ignore the link. Some bloggers have been putting that tag to use in the comments section for their blogs in an attempt to dissuade spammers from posting comment spam, by removing the search engine boost the homepage link attached to their comments would give to their sites. This, of course, is futile, as it ignores the reality that nothing seems to dissuade spammers, who've been submitting comment spam to moderated guestbooks for years, even guestbooks with clearly posted notices that "all comments are screened before they appear", meaning that nobody other than the soon to be annoyed site owner will ever see the spam. The spammers hit, anyway; spamming is not economically rational behavior in practice. These same bloggers ignore the fact that they are harming somebody, and I'm not talking about the spammers. How about those who do take the time to think out and post legitimate comments to their blogs and are now, for no good reason, being denied the benefit of those links? Is that really fair to them? That little boost is what gets a lot of new sites and new blogs going. But we're in the middle of a fad, and reason is going to have little impact on the Groupthink.<br /><br />Stumbleupon seems to have followed suit, which is a little bothersome, but not quite what I'm complaining about. This morning, out of idle curiosity I checked the code for <a href="http://josephdunphy.stumbleupon.com/public/about/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the page on my Stumbleupon site</a> on which I get my one and only linkback to my homepage (I use my mashable site for that), and found that link, too, had the rel=nofollow tag. Stumbleupon's management had been playing me and many other users as well, by offering a linkback that wasn't really a linkback at all.<br /><br />As I explained in my not altogether unfavorable review of Stumbleupon, posted on their own site, the problem with that goes well beyond the fact that my other sites are seeing no significant benefit from their association with my Stumbleupon site, while my Stumbleupon site has certainly been boosted in the search engines by the fact that those other sites link to it. Having to relocate my pages after the plug pulling incident at Internet Trash I mention <a href="http://virtualofframp.wordpress.com/jan_15_2008_post_main/" target="_blank" title="links to an interstitial page linking to that page">over on my main page</a> and then having to regain the visibility that I had lost gained me a little practical experience dealing with issues of search engine optimization. One of the lessons I learned the hard way involved the severe drawbacks of having some of my pages link to some of my other pages, where the links are not reciprocated; creating "terminal pages" as I call them. I found that the terminal pages would soar in the listings, staying high for a long time, at the expense of the nonterminal pages, which would plummet; as if the spiders, on finding their way to the terminal pages, would get stranded there and forget where they had been previously. I soon started making a special point of not designing my sites that way. Now I find that while I wasn't looking, Stumbleupon slipped in a little code that had the effect of causing me to do just that.<br /><br />I came back with a measured punitive response. I have enjoyed using Stumbleupon, seeing some real value in that site, so I'm not going to shun it or urge others to do so, but I'm also not going to be a sucker and continue reciprocating what I was never really being given. Blogger allows its users a lot of freedom in the design of their blogs and the writing of their posts, and one of the freedoms it gives is the freedom to tailor make one's links. If you unrender this site and take a look at my links, you'll find that every link I have to Stumbleupon has that same rel=nofollow tag that I was so displeased to find Stumbleupon putting to such sneaky and really almost unheard-of use. The linkback to the user's homepage is sacred. A provider should not touch that, <i>ever</i>, because aside from the inherent sleaziness of seeking to gain a consideration that one is sneakily refusing to reciprocate, one has the fact that the gain in visibility for one's sites in general is the only way one is repaid the time and work one puts into posting to these sites. For them to fail to respect this, especially in the way they did, then, is unethical and for me to overlook this particular breach of ethics would be foolish. Where I could not reciprocate with rel=nofollow tags of my own, I removed the link to Stumbleupon altogether, and resolved never to link to that site again from Tribe or anywhere else where one can not edit the HTML used for the establishment of external links.<br /><br />I found myself even more curious than before - who else was doing this? I've recently established presences on a number of social networking sites with the intention of putting them all to use. Most are still sitting idle because I have a lot of sites and haven't had time to get to all of them, yet, but I wanted to make sure that I'd didn't miss an opportunity to claim my own name on these sites before somebody else did. I'd much rather be the user "joseph_dunphy" than the user "joseph_dunphy_69260" or something like that, as the latter is just ugly, and when one's name is as common as mine is, that becomes a real concern. I thus had a major incentive to establish myself quickly, which I did, but having done so, I then was faced with the question of what each of these sites would be for. I don't want my blog at Wordpress to be a clone of my journal at Blogger. I want each of my sites to have a purpose and a character of its own. This one, for example, which I finally gave a less generic name to last night ("Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox / Blog to Come" - what was that) has evolved into the place where I go when I feel like commenting on politics or the directions that American popular culture has been moving in (closely intertwined subjects, those) and choose to pretend that somebody other than me will care. As the site counter at Yahoo 360 (the previous location for this blog) racked some thousands of hits in its few months of existence at the old location before I switched over here, I guess somebody must, but ... yes I'm digressing, and there's another cliche. <br /><br />I really need to get slapped. So, as I piece it together ... Multiply is where I'll post my photos of places of worship and write about any and all things Jewish, Imeem is where I'll post most of my short stories and pictures of the parts of Chicago that maybe aren't always considered the best places ... and I find out what Stumbleupon has done, I find that I'm wondering who else has put my trust to bad use. No sooner do I start unrendering site source code and looking, than I find a number of sites doing what Stumbleupon has done, and I am much disappointed by the list. I expected better. These are some I've found so far:<br /><br /><blockquote><ol><br /><li>Googlegroups. What was that about "not being evil", guys? <img height=0 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=7> <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPmOnSQwLrSQ9qQiEl2ftY6BKbzwrPkGqJr5KiXw4SOdEqBlGbr3gT188ayGdmKqzIy17_6DW2Ec5AYm9AB0qbx-GioZzGKy-xaPpYtENQz_r-Wa1fkJQJOTS8oRAO4EQsCjmMUeAHDiVp/s400/gr_smiley.gif"><br><br /><li>Yelp. That hurt.</li><br /><li>Digg</li><br /><li>Mag.nolia</li><br /><li>Youtube</li><br /><li>Metacafe</li><br /><li>Vimeo</li><br /></ol></blockquote><br /><br />A few of the sites I'm involved with that had enough class to <i>not</i> do this include<br /><br /><blockquote><ol><br /><li>Blogger. Yes, It's a Google enterprise, just like Youtube and Googlegroups, but as is the case with Yahoo, Google's different divisions seem to function almost as if they were little companies in their own right, some good and some not so good. Blogger, so far, has seemed to me to be a very good one for the most part, and nothing that happened today undermined that view.</li><br><br /><li>Imeem. I am delighted for no particularly logical reason. Little experience there, yet, but something felt good about the place. I don't know why, so don't take that seriously just yet.</li><br /><li>Flickr</li><br /><li>Yahoogroups. One does get rel=nofollow in the group descriptions, but not in urls posted to the lists, at present.</li><br /><li>Tribe. Very limited formatting options, but an interesting looking collection of communities that puts out a lot of striking, original photography.</li><br /><li>Wordpress</li><br /><li>Livespaces (MSN)</li><br /><li>Mashable</li><br /><li>DeviantArt</li><br /><li>Uber</li><br /><li>Squidoo</li><br /><li>Vox</li><br /><li>iLike</li><br /><li>Bakespace</li><br /><li>Opensource Food</li><br /><li>Livejournal</li><br><br /><li>Librarything. A mixed performance. They <i>do</i> insert rel=nofollow into the "also on" links, which is very much not cool given the fact that those are most of the outbound links, but they didn't seem to do this to the homepage link back to Mashable.</li><br><br /><li>Twitter</li><br /><li>eBay. No homepage link, but one can place outbound links on one's blog, which eBay doesn't seem to be tampering with at all.</li><br /><li>IGN. Haven't used it much and the homepage link is in a slightly out of the way location, but the code for the homepage link looked fine.</li><br /><li>Mog</li><br /><li>Multiply</li><br /><li>Veoh</li><br /></ol></blockquote> <br /><br />Break.com I wasn't able to put into a category, because the programmers have used some strange non-html Stylesheet coding that leaves me, so far, unable to find the code for my homepage link using my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the subject. I'll try to find out what the status of that is sometime in the next week or two, but if I remain confused at that time, I'll just assume the worst. In the case of those sites which I've determined aren't honestly reciprocating the links they've been getting from me, I've already removed feeds from those locations on my other sites, and as with Stumbleupon, inserted rel=nofollow into my remaining links to those places. I will still make some use of them, contributing a little content at each, but these are going to be very minor, secondary efforts, the sites on the second list definitely being a much higher priority.<br /><br />I do take some pleasure in the fact that this time, the good guys outnumbered the bad guys. Most of the sites I was looking at, in this at least, did right by their users. I'll keep those Googlegroups in place, as they have been very reliable, experiencing little if any downtime and serving the essays I've posted to them at a good speed, and those little essays are still relevant for the blog posts to which they are attached. Certainly, they are a wonderful source of traffic, if Google's traffic counters are to be trusted - the Googlegroups / Dejanews archive is a popular resource and deservedly so, and probably a great many of my visitors did their searches there. However, what Googlegroups will be getting from me, henceforth, will be synopses, teasers, call them what you wish, with the actual essays they refer to being posted to some of the better behaved sites. The more one is willing to give, the more one should on one's way to getting; Googlegroups gets something out of my participation, it merely doesn't get everything, and this is fitting.<br /><br />If in a very disappointing kind of way. At least, though, the hard decision of where to begin as I start to flesh out my new sites just became a lot easier.<br /><br /><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-43201966571697479822007-10-22T19:55:00.005-07:002012-06-03T17:23:02.685-07:00Which brings us to the present<br><br /><br />Given the logic of the circumstances, as explained in that preceding post, I can't say that I was very surprised to discover that I had, indeed, been right. A few days ago, Yahoo announced the closing of its 360 profile and blog service. The author of the deservedly unpopular announcement tried to avoid using the word "closing", assuring the reader that the blogs and friends networks would be moved to some nebulously described global profile service that nobody outside of Yahoo had seen any trace of, leaving any reasonably attentive user with the question "exactly what is the functional difference between 'closing down a service' and 'relocating the contents of the accounts on that service to a new service' - isn't that a little like arguing that Yahoo! Photos is still with us because so many of the images from there ended up on Flickr" - which is not to say all of them. The move to Flickr, from what we could see looked far more solidly planned, and still ended up with a sizable number of users complaining about images that were lost in the move. History had left us with no reason to think that our blogs would far any better, and the loss of work would tend to be far greater, so some of us, myself included, decided that a move of this magnitude was a thing best done by hand.<br /><br />I looked at a number of services, but was stunned by some of the choices I saw system administrators making. Consider, for example, multiply.com, a popular choice, one offering many tools for the user, but my understanding is that one can't screen comments before they appear on one's multiply profile. That was just asking for trouble, so I moved on - but found that the much-praised Wordpress had its own annoying feature - one couldn't modify the eye straining font size without the letters overlapping each other. At another location - I stopped looking before I even started, because the owner was a fairly well know outsourcer, and you've already seen what I've had to say about that practice, raising the question of just how long my relocated blog would be allowed to stay. So this went, until I finally just decided "to H*** with it", and began relocating my Yahoo 360 blog to a new location here at Blogger.<br /><h2><a name="return_october_22_2007"> </a></h2><br />I still do see the virtue of having more than one active blog on more than one server - this incident should serve as an excellent illustration of why that is - but eventually one does say "I've spent enough time doing this" and takes a few shortcuts. Maybe I'll use the place at Wordpress as a photoblog - visitors seem to enjoy those, and one can keep the eyestraining text to a minimum. You may have noticed that the look and feel of this blog has changed in the course of the move, which is inevitable to a degree since Blogger and Yahoo 360 use different templates, but I've also replaced backgrounds, substituting the wood page background you see for the <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQwE2Zl3d9mj7iil6sgWOgQC6xTl48qlbY9fc0w_hmFsXWheqAEPEJGYjhcGb9CE-PiPK8cH0q30-APDDXdxcEu-XfcjXtrWYi6Higq57BtFlzm7kXm9GIgfPk2vKAbQX5c04JnVB-UstN/s400/blue_cloud2.jpg" target="_blank">blue smoke background</a> I used on 360. I hope you'll find the look more restful.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i>(If for some reason you actually want to know what the old look was, you can see it on <a href="http://joseph-dunphy-footnotes.blogspot.com/2012/06/old-place-at-yahoo-360.html">this post</a> in the footnotes to this blog. A link at the bottom of that post should bring you back here).</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br />I might put the blog that comes with my account under the new Yahoo service to some use - assuming that there will be such a blog - but I can't very sensibly ignore the fact that Yahoo, for no compellingly good reason, decided to break every single link to every single member's blog, putting the not inconsiderable amount of work many of us put into promoting our blogs to waste. How does one respond to such a position rationally, aside from noting that those who've done an injury once, and done it casually, ought to be expected to be equally casual about doing it again, especially when the logic the injury is done under is so conspicuously lacking in coherence. The Yahoo 360 team is dissatisfied with the level of activity on the current service, so they're going to break every link to it - how can that do anything but reduce the level of activity seen?<br /><br />The answer is to assume that one is likely to see more of the same, and design one's sites in such a way as to minize the damage done by the expected inconsideration. One might note that my blog at Lycos serves as an annex of sorts for <a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly</a>, the articles there being expansions on points made on that other journal of mine here on Blogger. Hardly anybody is going to link to my Lycos blog (<a href="http://joedunphy.20megsfree.com/Miscellaneous/Notebook.html" target="_blank">Joseph Dunphy's Notebook</a>) because of this; if I resume blogging activity on Yahoo, I will be approaching my blog (at its new location on a new service) in much the same way, as an add-on to this and other blogs of mine. That way, if Yahoo flakes out on me again, all that I have to do is reload the affected posts to a new location, and edit some of my own links.<br /><br />As for those "return to your post" links on my Googlegroup that will now take you to what will be a defunct Yahoo 360 url - sorry about that, but Google has configured its system in such a way as to thwart any attempt on my part to fix that. The posts are over a month old, so I can no longer reply to them on the group, and so I can't upload good new links to replace the soon to be bad old ones, as much as I wish I could. The best I can do is learn from the experience, and try to route the return links through pages which, unlike Googlegroup posts, can be edited indefinitely far into the future. This might look a little sloppy, but we are left with a choice of annoyances, are we not?<br /><br />Welcome to the new location. Yes, this did used to be "Joseph Dunphy's Blog to Come". I hope you like the new location, but I should tell you that <a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly</a> will be the main site for my blogging for a while for a few reasons, one of which is a simple desire on my part not to think about politics for a while. Yes, I know, we're about to replace Bush, so what a strange time to start ignoring politics, but to be realistic - how likely are we to see him replaced by anything better? Wake me up when the circus is over and all but one of the clowns have left the stage.<br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-75423833451937319782007-10-22T10:34:00.000-07:002011-10-17T18:04:17.084-07:00Shifting emphasis over to other blog, maybe temporarily<br><br /><br /><blockquote><i>First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday August 24, 2007 - 11:22am (CDT)</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><p>This blog will be going on a temporary hiatus of sorts. I'll leave it up as long as Yahoo allows me to leave it up, but until certain issues get resolved, I'm going to do my posting elsewhere, probably most on my journal over at Blogger (<a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/" target=_blank>The Urban Backpacker's Quarterly</a>). Rumors about the closing of Yahoo 360 are floating about, and these rumors seem to have some basis in fact. Maybe not a conclusive basis, but enough to warrant some concern. Consider, for example, this quote from <a href="http://www.techshout.com/internet/2007/04/yahoo-photos-to-shut-down-flickr-to-take-its-place/" target=_blank>an article about the Yahoo! Photos closing</a> from <a href="http://www.techshout.com/" target=_blank>TechShout</a> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><em><font color=#004c00>"In closing Photos, Yahoo is adopting a major tenant suggested in an internal memo by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president at the company, which was leaked to the press in November. In an article dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto for his description of Yahoo being spread too thin, Garlinghouse called for a number of the company’s products to be eliminated as way to help revive growth and restore focus. There was no word whether Yahoo planned to close other products. In his memo, Garlinghouse had mentioned redundancies involving bookmark services Del.icio.us and myWeb, and Yahoo Groups message boards and Yahoo 360 social network service, among others."</font></em></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />"Now, Joseph", somebody will probably write, "Techshout is just a website, and as you've said yourself, anybody can put anything he wants on a website". True, but this is very far from being an isolated report of rumors that Yahoo has to know are going to tend to induce a little panic in its user base on 360, because the relocation of a blog is going to result in far more upheaval for the user than the relocation of a few photos. Think of the links broken, the comments lost, the massive efforts that would merely go into cutting and pasting to code for the posts at the old blog into the archives at the new. Users have to be expected to have questions about such rumors, and what are they to think when their providers stubbornly refuse to answer those questions? When I wrote to the Yahoo 360 team to ask them about these rumors, the team did not respond to my query. Others have reported being stonewalled in the same way on their 360 blogs, and one can see, just by reading the comments on the Yahoo 360 team blog, that still others, in asking the simple question "is Yahoo 360 about to close" or variants on it, don't get replies from anybody other than fellow users. <p></p><br /><p>One might well ask why the fellow users feel qualified to post on the subject, as not a one of them seems to work for Yahoo; the blind are volunteering to lead the nearsighted. As for Yahoo's refusal to say a word, they would have to be unusually clueless to not understand that, while in case like this one can remain silent, one can't possibly fail to answer the question being asked of one. Silence will be read as an affirmation, because if one could squash a false rumor that is starting to hurt one's business merely by having a few employees saying "it isn't true", why wouldn't one do so? The only reasonable user response, under such circumstances, is to assume the worst and act on that assumption until he has a factual basis for doing otherwise, especially when one can read reports about an upcoming Yahoo product called "mosh" that would push Yahoo 360 further in the direction of redundancy, like <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/08/mosh-yahoos-new-social-network-initiative/" target=_blank>this one on TechCrunch</a>.</p><br /><p>I'm hoping that Yahoo 360 will stick around. If I'm given some real reason to believe that it will - and no, handholding from another user does not qualify - then I'll probably start posting to this blog again, but until then, I'll do what I can to minimize my prospective headaches, and that is going to include sending my next few posts to where they are least likely to evaporate. Namely: <a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com" target=_blank><strong>HERE</strong></a>.</p><br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-41592759468874319172007-10-22T10:30:00.000-07:002008-12-09T06:30:30.931-08:00Where should I be after I escape Chicago?<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday August 14, 2007 - 07:49pm (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Mystery resolved <img height=0 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=7> ... <img height=0 src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxt60d_Ct4Mxrqx_xmKFQ8I6riqJnCNmQZCflwEywtbC1XIyOUxL2lG_RzBy36jGt_hGOFWqzR_Q5u87zfWyX-XaXs9WmQh4DZlnQCXShVIbOvQCCrNLz467Jd-OKpAPCB7r0u31dH1vGR/s400/space.gif" width=7> <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPmOnSQwLrSQ9qQiEl2ftY6BKbzwrPkGqJr5KiXw4SOdEqBlGbr3gT188ayGdmKqzIy17_6DW2Ec5AYm9AB0qbx-GioZzGKy-xaPpYtENQz_r-Wa1fkJQJOTS8oRAO4EQsCjmMUeAHDiVp/s400/gr_smiley.gif"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><! -- original colors: table background, title 3366ff, link 000099 --><br /><blockquote><center> <table cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 align=center border=0> <tbody> <tr> <td align=middle bgColor=#000000><font style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; COLOR: black" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong><font face="comic sans ms" color=#3366ff>You Belong in Paris</font></strong> </font></td></tr> <tr> <td bgColor=#3366ff> <center><img height=100 src="http://i18.tinypic.com/4kuo5t0.jpg" width=100></center><font color=#000000>You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. <br /><br />You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe. </font></td></tr></tbody></table> <div align=center><a href="http://www.blogthings.com/whateuropeancitydoyoubelonginquiz/" target=_blank><font color=#000000>What European City Do You Belong In?</font></a></div></center></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />And this seems to be a pattern ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><center> <table cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 align=center border=0> <tbody> <tr> <td align=middle bgColor=#000000><font style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; COLOR: black" face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong><font face="comic sans ms" color=#3366ff>You Should Learn French</font></strong> </font></td></tr> <tr> <td bgColor=#3366ff> <center><img height=100 src="http://i10.tinypic.com/4mx1spi.jpg" width=100></center><font color=#000000>C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs. <br /><br />You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up... </font></td></tr></tbody></table> <div align=center><a href="http://www.blogthings.com/whatlanguageshouldyoulearnquiz/" target=_blank><font color=#000099>What Language Should You Learn?</font></a></div></center></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I can already hear somebody saying it: "generations later, your DNA is still your destiny". Or part of it at least, in this case. Sorry, bubbe. I think I'll go make myself some chicken soup.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-14401861211733752422007-10-22T10:19:00.000-07:002007-10-22T10:26:00.072-07:00Penelope Trunk brings us doublethink to sooth the troubled heart<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>First posted on my 360 blog at Yahoo on Thursday August 9, 2007 - 06:44pm (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />Reading <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/careerist/38889" target=_blank>some commentary about generation Y and its future in the workplace</a> by one of my least favorite bloggers (Penelope Trunk, aka "The Brazen Careerist"), I couldn't help but notice just how much our smugly passionate defender of the status quo was predicting that the very youngest adults would be able to get away with, and the reasons she gave for this.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i><font color=#004c00>"What’s the point of baby boomers complaining about Generation Y at work? First of all, it’s a cliché, because people over 40 have been complaining about “young people” since forever. Even worse, it’s a losing battle. Generation Y is huge. It’s one thing for boomers to verbally squash Generation X — that was no problem. Gen X is tiny and the baby boom was huge. ... <br /><br /><br /><br />1. They won't do work that's meaningless. These kids grew up with parents scheduling every minute of their day. They were told TV is bad and reading is good, and are more educated than any generation in history. They just spent 18 years learning to be productive with their time, so they're not going to settle for any photocopying/coffee stirring job. ... <br /><br />2. They won't play the face-time game. We've known forever that it isn't necessary to be in the office from 9 to 5 every day to get work done. But many of us have missed family events only to sit at a desk all day getting pretty much nothing done because of the stress of missing a family event. And there didn't used to be any option -- if you wanted a successful career, you made sure co-workers saw that you were putting in the hours. Generation Y wants to be judged by the work they do, not the hours they put in. ...<br /><br />3. They're great team players. If you've climbed a corporate ladder your whole career, then it's probably inconceivable to you that Gen Y doesn't care about your title. But it's true -- they don't do rank. Chances are they saw their parents get laid off in the '80s, so they know how ephemeral that special rung you stand on is and they don't want to waste time trying to get there. Generation Y played on soccer teams where everyone participated and everyone was a winner, and they conducted playground politics like diplomats because their parents taught them that there's no hierarchy and bullies are to be taken down by everyone. And Gen Yers take these values to work -- they expect to be a part of a team. Gen Y believes that no matter how much experience an individual has, everyone plays ... <br /><br />4. They have no patience for jerks. Generation Y changes jobs every two years, typically because the work isn't a good fit, or the learning curve isn't steep enough, or they don't like their co-workers. And Gen Yers will disengage from a jerk before trying to get along with him or her, ..."</font></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />Stripping away the rhetorical spin, what are we left with? A "team" being built of insubordinate post-adolescent employees who may or may not show up for work on time, heading out the door whenever they feel like, treat their jobs like they were hobbies, really not with much more seriousness than that, and will just get up and quit if their every whim is not indulged. A work place in which the 22 year olds are calling the shots, and take a look at the argument being offered as to why this is the case, something we may well wonder about when we consider, for example, how thoroughly disempowered generation X has been in the workplace. So much so, in fact, that far from asking to be pampered as Trunk's glorious twentysomething divas have supposedly been doing, the members of the crowd immediately preceding generation Y were often viewed as being throughly unreasonable because they asked for safe working conditions, to be paid for the overtime they worked and to have some reasonable limits on that overtime so that they could have personal lives as well as jobs, to in general be allowed to live like human beings and to be treated as such. Why the difference? According to Trunk, because generation X is small and generation Y is large. In power politics, that may work as an explanation, but in the context of the free market dogmas that we are expected to accept without question, as those who (like Trunk) are fond of saying that what is reality in the market defines what is justice, this produces an ideological crisis that Trunk herself does not seem to see. Why? Go back to the Microeconomics 100 course in which you were first indoctrinated into believing that economic might made right, and remember the theory that you were taught.<br /><br />"That which is scarce becomes dear, that which is abundant becomes cheap". But if labor is just a commodity, as our apologists for outsoucing and other neoliberal delights insist, then labor should be a more valuable commodity when it becomes scarcer, which means that generation X's negotiating strength, member by member, should have been increased by the small size of that generation, and generation Y's negotiating power, on an individual basis, should be decreased by its large numbers. Yet we have Trunk insisting that the exact opposite is the reverse, and who notices the incongruity of this?<br /><br />Interesting, don't you think? So which is the fantasy? The rosy picture that Trunk is painting for this reportedly privileged generation, or the economic theory that is used to tell us that what common sense would tell us is unjust is merely the inevitable way of the world, and thus above question? Or perhaps, could it be both? What happens to a political ideology should the supposed social science underlying it start to crumble?<br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-22824237680534780622007-10-22T10:12:00.000-07:002007-10-22T10:19:11.362-07:00Brokeback 1776<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>Posted to my Yahoo 360 blog first on Thursday August 9, 2007 - 06:39pm (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />History as I'm sure it will be taught someday, brought to us by <a title="Youtube profile" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/pinkwhig" target=_blank>Pinkwhig</a> ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/uJlBycCWh8A width=320 height=264 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed> </center><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-49879814359005746892007-10-22T10:07:00.000-07:002012-11-28T04:37:42.664-08:00Sensitivity Training<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Friday August 3, 2007 - 10:22am (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />Sometimes you just have to show that you care (video previously uploaded to Metacafe by <a href="http://www.metacafe.com/channels/bloodasp69/" target=_blank>bloodasp69</a>) ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><table align="center"><tr><td><object width="320" height="240"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x2y4bv"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x2y4bv" width="320" height="240" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"></embed></object><br /><b><a target="_blank" href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y4bv_sensitivity-training_fun">Sensitivity Training</a></b><br /><i>Uploaded by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.dailymotion.com/negativeone">negativeone</a>. - <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/us/channel/fun">See more comedy videos.</a></i></td></tr></table> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-43950909320876772092007-10-22T09:59:00.000-07:002007-10-22T10:05:55.641-07:00Can you say chutzpah?<br><br /><br /><blockquote><i>Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Friday August 3, 2007 - 10:14am (CDT)</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />Some stories bring back such happy memories. <a title="Full text of story elsewhere" href="http://ap.lancasteronline.com/4/japan_youtube" target=_blank>Here's one</a>:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><font color=#006600><i>Japanese companies slam YouTube<br />By HIROKO TABUCHI<br />Associated Press Writer<br /><br />TOKYO --A coalition of Japanese television, music and film companies slammed YouTube Thursday, saying the online video sharing service was not doing enough to rid the site of cartoons and other clips that infringe on copyrights.<br /><br />(snip)<br /><br />"YouTube has to stop how it runs its site and get rid of the illegal clips. We want them to reset the service," composer Hideki Matsutake told a joint press conference in Tokyo Thursday. The coalition met with YouTube and Google executives earlier in the week, the second such meeting this year. "There is no middle ground," Matsutake said. "We demand that all copyrighted material be removed immediately." Talks with YouTube and Google will continue, said Matsutake, who was acting as a spokesman for the group.</i></font></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />One of the personal quirks that helped me during my coursework in grad school was that I have a very good long term memory, and so I have no difficulty at all remembering something that our friends in Tokyo might want us to forget at this moment. Let's turn back the clock to the 1980s, at about the time American industry started going south in more ways than one, the Job crunch was beginning to materialise for scientific professionals, and let's remember a brash East Asian country that, as it clamored to be taken more seriously as world economic power, was confronted about a number of its trade practices. One of them, of course, being its habit of hypocritically screaming whenever another country would consider closing its markets to imports from that brash East Asian country without feeling the need to reciprocate by opening its own markets at home, but there was something else. What was it, again?<br /><br />Oh, yes. It's seems that the budding young economic superpower was in the habit of not honoring patents from overseas. Circuitboards that would be designed in America would be duplicated there, with no greater alteration being made than a changing of the colors of the covers put over the chips, and that was good enough for the government of that brash young power. Complaints about this practice from the United States, made on behalf of home grown companies which had actually spent the money for the research that produced the designs that were being pirated were greeted with a stonewalling test of wills, and on being interviewed, the man in the street in that country seemed to offer a stereotyped response, saying in one way or another that America needed to stop whining. This took away much of the economic incentive to engage in research and development, derailing careers and damaging lives, and doing much to help create the present day rustbelt in the American Northeast and Midwest, many cities to this day having not recovered.<br /><br />Now, what was the name of that country? I seem to remember it's a big place built on an island chain, east of China, south of Korea, next to the sea of JAPAN.<br /><br />Thought for the day: what goes around comes around, and it should. If Japan is not going to honor the intellectual property rights of those living outside its territory, those of its own citizens should be shown no more respect. For far too long, that nation has been allowed to steamroller its trading partners into going along with a series of double standards that have benefitted it while scr**ing everybody else. When America had legitimate demands to make of Japan, Japan refused to listen. Now that the situation has reversed, America should absolutely return the favor, and expect those companies headquartered in it to do likewise. Tokyo might squeeze, but Washington can still squeeze a lot harder, and pardon me if I'm blunt, but Japan needs America a lot more than America needs Japan. Without our military support, Japan would be Finlandized by the Chinese at best, and would most likely be on its way to becoming a province of that country. The Cold War is long over, there is no enemy that poses a plausible threat to the United States, and the time for us to take abuse from so-called allies who act like anything but is long since over. Let's start reminding a few of those nonallies that actions have consequences. There is something to be said for holding a grudge.<br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-92124076151272528622007-10-22T09:54:00.000-07:002007-10-22T09:57:17.000-07:00Half Judaism<br><br /><br /><blockquote><i>First posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Thursday August 2, 2007 - 09:37am (CDT)</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />Counting my blessings as I view this video by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/chocolatecakecity" target=_blank>chocolatecakecity</a>. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/QVv6nXkJpCQ width=320 height=264 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed> </center><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-13997317315414093172007-10-22T09:47:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:29:45.277-08:00William Shatner, The Beetles ...<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>Posted first on my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday August 1, 2007 - 03:25pm (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />This is just wrong, so very wrong ... and no, I don't know who made this or even who uploaded it ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><embed id="VideoPlayback" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-7258896287489458266&hl=en&fs=true" style="width:320px;height:277px" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed></center><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-44810314803366991772007-10-22T09:43:00.000-07:002007-10-22T09:47:16.256-07:00Singing Tesla Coils<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>First posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday August 1, 2007 - 01:44pm (CDT).</blockquote></i> <br /><br /><br /><br />Posted by <a title="User profile on Youtube" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/demjp8RqDA" target=_blank>demjp8RqDA</a>, you're watching an engineer play with one of his toys out near Naperville (a suburb of Chicago) at Duckon, a science fiction convention that has been taking place out there for some years. Yes, the music is being made using the electrical discharges. Very cool.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/3ff_AXVlo9U width=320 height=264 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed> </center><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-2036853759447181292007-10-22T09:39:00.000-07:002008-12-09T04:57:49.424-08:00Sensitive love of the Intifada: Shall we cut the c**p?<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Wednesday July 25, 2007 - 12:20am (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br /><p>I'm reading a few posts over on <a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/" target=_blank>Liz Taken's blog</a>, about things that are just sad and pathetic. Here are a few: "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/17/Hamas_Killer_Bee_TV" target=_blank>Jihad Bee replaces Terror Mouse</a>", "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/19/A_video_sent_from_a_friend" target=_blank>A video sent from a friend</a>", "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/35/NY_times_has_selective_memory" target=_blank>NY times has selective memory</a>", "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/36/Farfour_Murdered_in_Season_Finally" target=_blank>Farfour Murdered in Season Finally</a>", "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/38/Please_sign_this_Petition" target=_blank>Please sign this Petition</a> (about the practice of 'honor killings'), "<a href="http://lizzysworld.multiply.com/journal/item/42" target=_blank>For anyone who thinks we can negotiate with Terrorists</a>". "So, about what a menace the muslims are?", some will ask expectantly. No, but how interesting that this would be their take on this, especially in the case of the honor killings article because, as Ms.Taken points out, we're witnessing behavior that is in direct conflict with Islamic law. No, what we're witnessing in most of these posts is a hate movement sustained by people who are culturally Muslim; to oppose that isn't to be anti-Muslim any more than to oppose the (mostly Christian) Ku Klux Klan is to anti-Christian. What I find most interesting is not so much the existence of people like the ones Liz portrays - though they do represent a movement large and dangerous enough that they do need to be noticed - but how some supposedly compassionate Western liberals will counsel the Israelis to deal with this hate movement in their midst, basically telling them to drop their guard, give all that is asked of them and more, appeasing their enemies no matter what the cost. "Being anti-zionist is not the same thing as being anti-semitic", some will say. "We don't hate Jews, we just politely disagree with a few of them".</p><br /><p>The thing is, I get to see a bunch of those people from a different point of view, in part because of what I am. People hear the name "Dunphy" and they instantly assume "Irish Catholic", for reasons that elude me assuming that I'm purebreed, even though one would think appearance alone would be enough to convince them otherwise. Some of these very same people seem to have a very definite, narrow image of what a Jew should look like and be like - usually either somebody looking like Woody Allen or that "Neumann" guy from Seinfeld. Short, maybe fat and bald, approaching life and its threats shaking with fear; such is the stereotype. I, on the other hand, am somewhere around 6'6", having grown considerably since I started posting, and my memory of the school bully involves me beating the living snot out of him. To these people, I didn't look the role, and that fact had consequences. I got to hear things that some might have otherwise been shy about letting me hear, and this has been enlightening.</p><br /><p>I've heard "nice, liberal" people defending the Holocaust on the basis that "the Jews owned all of the banks". "You know what Jews are like", has been a popular one. That and more, and then, the moment that somebody who does fit the popular image of Yiddishness shows up, out has gone that rhetoric and in has come the forced openmindedness and false sweetness, generally from "nice" people politically leaning to the left of center. If you've ever wondered why I seem to feel insulted on those occasions when somebody has referred to me as being a "liberal", this is one of the reasons why. I respond to that movement, not on paper as a theoretical construct, but as a living reality, one that I've found to be hostile in a sneaky kind of way. I'll accept "Centrist" or "Conservative", depending on where the political pendulum has swung at the moment, maybe "Progressive" though our Politically Correct friends would probably feel ill at the suggestion, but not "Liberal". "Liberal" to me suggests an unwholesome blend of self-righteous hypocrisy and passive aggression, overlying well-established and weakly rationalised bigotries that are barely, if at all, concealed.</p><br /><p>When Israeli soldiers are condemned for defending themselves against those who are "merely armed with rocks", as we're expected to be as cooperative in our forgetfulness as to exactly what the most popular means of execution has been in that region for the last few thousand years (stoning), this is not about somebody's love for the Muslims. Note the lack of general outrage among those same "sensitive" elements of the US population during the "Road of Death" incident toward the close of the First Gulf War, when all those being burned to death were guilty of was running for their lives away from a hostile army they knew they couldn't possibly defend themselves against; note how many of the victims were Muslim and note just how lonely an experience questioning that act was in the United States, at the time, not really so very long ago. No, this is about hatred of the Jewish soldiers. It is about an indirect route to homicide, as those offering the sermonettes try to get their intended target to essentially commit suicide by engaging in a course of action that he is very likely to be killed in the course of pursuing. On a larger scale, this is what is being asked of Israel, which is condemned on a regular basis merely for being somewhat diligent in her own self-defense, by a large number of "nice", generally upper class liberal people in the United States, and should the rest of us be surprised by this?</p><br /><p>All you have to do to understand so many of them is listen, so when one hears the preaching, perhaps one ought to be willing to be "mean" enough to consider the source, remembering just how much of that "sweetness and light" is an illusion. There is, as I've said before, a hate-filled cultural movement underway, one whose supporters clearly long for a world in which everybody is exactly the same, places no value on the life or dignity of the individual and will stoop to anything to get its way, but it's not Islam. It's Modernism.</p><br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-18724656030009745852007-10-22T09:32:00.000-07:002007-10-22T09:38:09.031-07:00The Daily Annoyance, from Google / Blogger this time<br><br /><br /><i><blockquote>Originally posted to my 360 blog at Yahoo Tuesday July 24, 2007 - 05:37pm (CDT)</blockquote></i><br /><br /><br />As you may have noticed from looking at the feeds on my Yahoo 360 profile I have <a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/" target=_blank>a place at Blogger</a>, which I had been thinking of doing most of my posting at, henceforth. In theory, it is my main blog, even if I've been doing a lot more posting here in the last few months, so this didn't represent a change of plans, so much as it did a return to what my plans were, but sometimes plans need to be rethought, even over as little a thing as one's choice of provider. I find myself doing a little rethinking right now. I went over to edit a post, which is now a draft again and not because I want it to be. As I go to edit it, I see this notice atop the page:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i><font color=#004c00>This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.<br /><br />Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked. </font></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br />I was, to say the least, curious, as I've never attempted to sell anything in the brief history of my little place. This turned out to be a very good thing, because on clicking on "click here", I found myself presented with a notice that if I didn't notify Google / Blogger within two weeks, I think it was, that my blog would be automatically deleted! It had been flagged, apparently, because (according to Google) it displayed the "characteristics" of a spam blog. What those "characteristics" might be, I can't imagine, and if you look at <a href="http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/" target=_blank>the little thing</a>, I think you might be a little mystified, too. I will say that this was definitely not cool, especially during summer when one should expect that people are going to be out. The only reason I looked is because, by pure chance, I looked at my most recent blog post, thought "OK, people aren't going to entirely get that I'm telling a joke because 'Dunphy' doesn't 'sound Jewish', as if such an expression even made sense since Jewishness is matrilineal and surnames are patrilineal, and how many of the ancient Israelites would have had names sounding like Abramowitz, anyway, such a headache I'm getting ... where's my iced coffee?" What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Blogs that people take time, good time, to put together, being put up for deletion while they're away, without any human being having so much as having taken the time to look <em>before</em> they were put up for deletion. This is a breaking of faith with the user who, reasonably, expects that his work will not evaporate without reason. Far from living up to that trust, the company has squandered it through an act of sheer recklessness. As Google itself writes <br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i><font color=#004c00>"Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive." </font></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br />"We apologize for having risked putting your time and effort to waste, by having oversight on our system being done by what we know is an inherently unreliable piece of artificial intelligence software" ... and thank you for being our guinea pig, I guess. I am, to say the least, very disappointed with Blogger and Google, at a time when I was already busy enough being disappointed with Lycos.<br /><br /><br><br><br><br>Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-79267754395045027522007-10-22T09:24:00.000-07:002007-10-26T02:32:19.001-07:00Skateboarding Dog<br><br /><br /><blockquote><i><b>First posted to my 360 blog on Yahoo, Sunday July 22, 2007 - 05:45am (CDT)</b></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Found this on YouTube, where it was uploaded by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/rnickeymouse" target=_blank>rnickeymouse</a> ...</b> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/CQzUsTFqtW0 width=320 height=264 type=application/x-shockwave-flash allowScriptAccess="none" wmode="transparent"></embed> <br /><br /></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2721924251024142037.post-12264851674909871482007-10-22T09:05:00.000-07:002011-01-18T08:07:22.408-08:00Lycos/Tripod offers a merry f*** you to its users!<br><br /><br /><blockquote><i>First posted to my old Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday July 17, 2007 - 05:03pm (CDT)</i></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />There are some moments that just leave one scratching one's head in wonder. One of those moments happened just now. Let's say that you're running a free webhosting service. Presumably, since your income depends on the ad revenue generated by the visits to the sites on your system, content provided to you free of charge by the way, you <i>might</i> be seen as having a vested interest in supporting your users, as they try to make the best sites they can. So, what would be one thing that you might want to really, really, really NOT want to do?<br /><br />How about, arbitrarily lock people out of their own accounts, thwarting any attempt on their part to add new material to their sites or otherwise update them in any way? Forget the usual babbling about the accounts being free and beggars not being choosers - which is garbage anyway, because we pay for those services with the loan of the content we provide - and get back to the common sense question of why on earth a provider would want to do that. Yet I can report firsthand that Tripod (a subsidiary of Lycos) did exactly that, just last night.<br /><br />I attempted to <a href="http://www.tripod.lycos.com/" target=_blank>login to Tripod</a> in order add a little material to <a href="http://joedunphy.scriptmania.com/" target="_blank" title="This site has since been relocated, in response to further bad service">Joseph Dunphy's Cowboy Wannabee Site</a>, and to my amazement, as I clicked on the "login" button, found myself on the Lycos search engine page. "Has the system mangled my password?", I wondered, knowing that I hadn't, because I had it written down. I clicked on the link on the Lycos page marked "forgot username or password" - and absolutely nothing happened. I went nowhere. I closed then closed all but one of the widows, cleared my cache and rebooted - standard operating procedure. Same result, and I noticed a few other interesting details. See the part where it says "write a blog, build a site, share your photos"? I clicked on the button that says "start now", which a prospective new user would hit if he wanted to begin a new account and found myself, not on an application form - but back on that seach engine page!!! Anything I did ending up leaving me there, and logged into nothing.<br /><br />Clinging to my admittedly mystifying belief that when something has broken down, one ought to write to support about it, I did, and promptly got to watch support play the stand BOFH game of pretending that the problem didn't exist, as it sent out a form letter response.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><i> <blockquote><font color=#006600><b><u>Your message on Mon, Jul 16th 2007 5:42 pm</u> </b><br /><br />Your system will not let me log into Tripod, and when I click on the "lost password" link, nothing happens. Not that the password I'm entering could possibly be wrong - I have the darned thing written down. What happens when I try to log in, is that instead of ending up in my member space, I end up on the Lycos search engine page <br /><br />http://www.lycos.com/ <br /><br />where the "lost username or password" link I tried clicking on is displayed.</font> <br /><br /><br /><br /><font color=#990000><b><u>Message by Tyler on Tue, Jul 17th 2007 6:50 am</u></b> <br /><br />Please note that we are able to log into your account with your username and password.<br /><br />Clearing your cache will likely fix most of the errors you are receiving as well as significantly improve the speed and performance of your browser.<br /><br />The following procedures provide steps to clear the cache memory from your browser: <br /><br /><br />Clearing Cache on Microsoft® Internet Explorer 7.x <br /><br />Select the TOOLS menu, then select INTERNET OPTIONS<br />Under the heading entitled Browsing History, click the Delete button<br />To clear the cookies select the DELETE COOKIES button<br />To clear the stored temporary Internet files select the Delete Files button<br />Click close to return to the Internet Options menu, then click OK to return to your main browser window.<br /><br /><br />Clearing Cache on Mozilla Firefox 2.x<br /><br />Select the TOOLS menu, then select Clear Private Data<br />Ensure that the Cache and Cookies selection boxes are checked off.<br />Click the button labeled Clear Private Data Now.<br />You will automatically be returned to your main browser window.<br /><br /><br />Clearing Cache on Netscape 8.x<br /><br />Select the TOOLS menu, then select Privacy.<br />Click the Clear button next to the Cookies heading and click the OK button when prompted.<br />Click the Clear button next to the Cache headingand click the OK button when prompted.<br />Click OK to return to the main browser window.<br /><br /><br />Clearing Cache on Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.x<br /><br />Select the TOOLS menu, then select INTERNET OPTIONS<br />To clear the cookies select the DELETE COOKIES button in the middle of the window under the Temporary Internet files section<br />Click OK in the Delete Cookies window<br />Click OK to return to the main browser window.<br /><br />--<br />Tyler D.<br />Customer Service<br />Lycos Services.</font><br /><br /><br /><br /><font color=#006600><b><u>Your message on Tue, Jul 17th 2007 12:44 pm</u></b><br /><br />Tyler, <br /><br />I cleared my cache last night before I wrote to you, and I did so repeatedly, and I got the same result. Further, just out of curiosity, I checked to see what would happen were I to try to go to the form used to set up a new Tripod account. Once again, I found myself on the Lycos search page.<br /><br />So you'll forgive me, I hope, if I view your response with more than a little skepticism, and ask you to please respond to a serious problem report with something more serious than an attempt to bluff the user into believing that he didn't see what he saw, as you dust off the same form letter every ISP seems to send to every user who reports any problem with the system. Clearing the cache does not cure all ills. Sometimes you guys will need to actually break down and do some maintenance. </font></blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />But if they're actually going to do any maintenance, I've seen no sign that this is going to be the case. All that "Tyler" (if that is his real name) was willing to do was cut and paste the form letter that you just saw and expect me to be satisfied with that, and I obviously can't be satisfied with that. Not being able to get into the file manager is not something that I, as a user, can simply work around. This is something that is going to stop me absolutely dead in the water. As for Lycos itself, the company these staffers are supposedly working for, how does it imagine its Tripod subsidiary will fare when its users, discovering that they've been locked out of their own accounts, eventually give up and move to other providers, and new users, ones who I assume wouldn't have heard of this, find that they can't sign up?<br /><br />I'm going to write to the technical contact for Tripod and see what the company has to say about this, and be sure to post about any further developments on this blog. But until then, I've added a new member site to <a href="http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=lycos;action=list" target=_blank>the Lycos Homepage Ring</a>, a forum entitled "<a href="http://ispreports.proboards52.com/" target=_blank>ISP Reports: Tripod, Ringsurf, Webring and the Rest</a>, where you can talk about what has gone right and what has gone wrong at the service you use. New members will always be sought, but as usual, postmodernists, corporate shills and other undesirables need not apply. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>Added Thursday, July 19: <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy/browse_thread/thread/e9de01f3d14d5be9" target=_blank>Googlegroup post</a></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Joseph Dunphyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12346971398718044156noreply@blogger.com