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Worthless petitions

Daily Kos is suckering its constituency with a fraudulent petition to strip the NFL of its tax exemption. If an organization sets up a petition for political action and addresses it to someone who has no power to solve the problem, they are not being honest. The petition is a fraud designed to leave everything exactly as it is but make people happy that they are politically active. 

Congress gave the NFL its non-profit status in 1966. No agent of the executive can strip away that status without legislation first redefining what 501(c)6 nonprofits are. Anybody who researches this for more than 5 minutes and understands basic american civics would not set up a petition this way. So what are they accomplishing by doing it? Is there no more important thing on the leftist agenda going on or is this a shakedown, with NFL people understanding that Kos won't fix the petition to go to the right addressee if the NFL contributes enough money to Daily Kos? 

In any case, it stinks of dishonesty or incompetence. Who knows, maybe they are actually dumb enough that they launched a campaign that's landed almost 60,000 signatures so far on the mistaken and unchecked premise that the acting IRS commissioner can do something about it. 

Justin Bieber improvement

I am reliably informed by my daughter that nightcore can make Justin Bieber palatable. I do not know how this magic is accomplished but here's a long sample of the style.

My wife brought me homework last night

My son heard it first, hissssss...

If Discount Tire were still open we'd have been close enough to make a run for it. No luck, so I ended up changing a tire for the first time in many a year and set up the spare so I can get it fixed first thing. An hour of waiting and we're all good. 

Bitvisitor payment delays

Bitvisitor seems to be having payment problems again. They've had periods where they hiccuped and delayed payments for a time before and it's happening again now. This time, they've changed the code so you can actually see how late they are. The promise payment every 60uBTC, here's how far behind they are on my account.

Balance: 189.352 uBTC - Payment is sent every 60 uBTC!

This translates out to about a week behind promises. Since the amount is so small and they've recovered from these hiccups before, I'm still grinding out these little ad views anyway for now.  I'm sure a lot of their viewers are. Past a certain point it starts to get to be a problem and it's time to cut them loose. Any ideas on what an appropriate level might be?

Update: And they finally released the balance at 193.35 uBTC on the 20th at 9PM. It's a classic bitvisitor hiccup and exactly the sort of problem that bitcoin transactions regularly have.

21st Century Government - The Homestretch

I'm walking backwards, laying out a practical pathway to get to a decent vision of 21st century governance. The home stretch is all about implementing consensus to create 21st century governance. This is a consensus that doesn't currently exist but at this phase, the vision's been laid out, talked out, consensus has been forged and a critical mass of the politicians have come on board or been booted from office. Expectations have been reset and now it is time to get on with the work.

Actually implementing 21st century governance is exactly the sort of mid level work that many are claiming is disappearing and will never be seen again. Grabbing data and creating scripts to reformat for import, creating reports and even dashboards takes more patience than intelligence. It's production, and like most repetitive production does not require extremely high levels of intelligence to execute. Ordinary education, ordinary workers can accomplish the vast bulk of this job.

On the government end this is mostly accomplished by adding in requirements for openness into their normal IT development schedules and not with flashy big bang exercises that will suck up all their scarce IT dollars. After all, the only thing that they need do on their end is dump the raw data in a directory. It's such a simple task that it's going to be hard to explain why they would resist doing it. Once they do it, then it's up to the private sector to interpret the data into something that everybody can use.

Duck Dynasty update

we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helmThe other shoe has now dropped and the Robertson family is standing by its patriarch, entering into talks on whether the show will go forward. Their opening bid is literally "we cannot imagine the show going forward without our patriarch at the helm".

Congratulations A&E on blowing yourselves up. My best advice is to tape the next shareholder meeting where you explain how you lost your biggest individual revenue maker. That's likely to be the most entertaining product coming out of your operations in the near term.

Pass the popcorn.