Rubénerd!

This has to be one of the most patently absurd, nonsensical plans I've ever read, and I've read Ayn Rand.

The story

In a further effort to distract us from their morally bankrupt stance on the treatment of refugees, we now read on SBS News the Australian government is to implement a website to discourage boat people from coming here.

Pardon my language in this blog post.

Online videos of asylum seekers boarding planes to Malaysia will be posted on YouTube and Facebook in an effort to discourage asylum seekers making the dangerous boat journey to Australia.

Immigration department spokesperson Sandi Logan, do tell us why!

"Some of the people we are dealing with may be not overly literate so seeing people being loaded on to a plane, people being checked into a processing centre is as strong a message as you can send."

He said asylum seekers and smugglers were "very net savvy".

If they're looking for an even stronger message, why not blow up boats with cruise missiles launched from ships? That way you could make all the propaganda videos you want, and it would double as a Navy recruitment tool!

Sarcasm aside though...

Let me see if I understand their reasoning here. They claim these destitute, desperate people are all "very net savvy", yet they're not "overly literate". So they have nothing, they can't read, but they can get to a computer, do some text searches to uncover videos, then watch them in a reasonable time on their high speed internet connections?

Even if we were to entertain this bullshit with anything other than the scorn it deserves and assume these refugees were watching these videos, you really think they'd "scare" people compared to the horrors some of them have witnessed in their home countries? These people have seen their homes destroyed, families and loved ones killed by war and natural disasters, and are willing to risk their lives on the open sea, and you honestly think you'll change their mind with a few videos of boats?

You know what? I'm not as angry at this story as I am insulted. These numbskulls in Canberra regard us, the voting public, with such contempt that they think this farcical plan will be effective, and that we'll buy it?

I tell you what Sandi Logan, ruin the ending for the people you're working for and tell them this will not work, and advise them the funds they'll waste on it would be better spent elsewhere. Say, oh I don't know... thoroughly repudiating Howardism and implementing an ethical, compassionate, responsible program for the less than 0.1% of refugees worldwide that want a chance at a life in Australia.

Whole Wheat Radio and its mission of providing a grassroots, all-volunteer, donation supported website and webcast that competently and without mainstream advertising supports independent musicians and their craft is currently offline.

Having just checked this morning, the Whole Wheat Radio webcast and wiki are offline, with a message from its founder Jim Kloss. For those not familiar with the site this post might not make much sense, if I had more time I'd delve into what WWR is all about, for now consider this an "in" thing.

So here's what happened, I think

I've largely avoided Facebook for the last year or so because to me the site represents all that is wrong with my generation (The Zuck) and it depresses me, but I logged into it again this morning to find out what was going on.

I'm not entirely sure how all this went down, but as I understand from his explanation on the site, some listeners of the station formed a seperate Facebook group for wheatheads to converse that was outside the channel Jim had set up for the site. As a result, conversations and collaboration were occuring outside the official site which, as a collaborative wiki, has a dramatic effect on the effectiveness of the platform. Whole Wheat Radio only works if there are people collaborating and helping out on the site itself, and; to be blunt; a seperate group leeches off this.

From a personal perspective, I had no idea about this new group but, as Jim so rightly observes, I was added to it automatically. Having visited it, I noticed a link to "Leave the group" despite never agreeing to join it. If this is an issue with Facebook, there are grave ramifications. (UPDATE: Apparently it is, and I missed it. What I get for not being in the loop with the tech media for the last month).

Thinking out loud

I've always so deeply appreciated all the work and effort Jim has put into maintaining such an open, advertisement free and honest site over the years when many others in his position would have long ago sold out. It takes conviction and a well placed moral compass to do this.

As a result, I felt it was my obligation... no scratch that, it implies I was forced to... I felt compelled to help out. Sometimes I didn't agree with Jim's approach to the site, for example I was nervous when he deeply integrated Facebook and essentially began hosting discussions with them instead of on the local wiki; but I figured he had solid reasons for doing so, and I respected all the work he put into it that I had no problem whatsoever accomodating.

If you're reading this Jim, I deeply hope that whatever has happened and wherever your life is taking you right now, I hope you figure things out and are comfortable again soon. Above all else, I respect your position and admire your convictions. A lesser person would have let this (and other issues over the years) slide, taking the integrity and honesty of the site down with them.

*manhug*

That reminds me!

I was going to delete my current Facebook account and start fresh. All my previous records would still be there forever, but at least with a new account with a fake name (I'm think Ruben GrilledCheeseSandwich or something) then my contributions to their hive mind would be less valuable from now on. Plus, I'll only be adding friends like Jim to it instead of everyone I've ever met. More on that later.

SBS News is reporting that some US billionaires have pledged at least 50% of their wealth to charity through a campaign started by Warren Buffett.

A noble cause, but those billionaires could have made an infinitely more positive impact by running ethical and sustainable business that perhaps would have made less money, than robbing us and giving some of it back later. CEOs could (if they wanted to) use their influence to affect the world in positive ways; when they retire their money is no better than anyone else's.

This could be my late hippy mum speaking through me, but isn't it about time we stop valuing a company based on its profits and more on its impact?

Presumably they asked Apple but it was rejected from the App Store. Thank you thank you, I'll be here all week! From SBS News:

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

In all seriousness though

In all seriousness though (wait, I said that already), I wonder what overseas contributors to Android think of that? I suppose that's always the risk of writing code for free/open source projects, you really don't have much say where the code goes or what it could be used for, aside from what the resulting code will be licenced under in the case of the GPL.

Are there any free/open source licences that have a provision precluding code from being used in military settings? Maybe we need go back to a three clause BSD licence to accommodate, though that would break GPL compatibility again. Ah but that's okay, then we could use ZFS again! I think I'll stop now.

Google has a better weapon already

I'd think Google's irritating new image search would make for a better weapon. They could force people into using it, which would drive victims to insanity and therefore would make them more cooperative. The CIA would have to ship them off to Eastern Europe first though.

I know we're all bored to tears with American healthcare reform analysis, but someone against the bill tweeted me this afternoon with a message I think summaries the debate pretty damn well.

@Rubenerd: Question is do you think that people should have a right to that which they do not earn?

Do you think people "earned" cancer and subsequent medical-related bankruptcies? Do you think human dignity, love and compassion are financially negotiable?

Phrasing healthcare as something that has to be "earned" sure doesn't sound like freedom to me. What about the freedom to be with your loved ones? The freedom to live without pain and suffering? The freedom to not live in fear?

Then again I suppose I'm one of those "super evil socialists" the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck warn you all about with blackboards and books they didn't write.

Pardon the French...

My family was damned fucking lucky to have excellent medical insurance to pay for my mum's 12 years of cancer treatment. If we couldn't afford it and we lived in the US, she would have died half of my lifetime ago, and I probably wouldn't remember her. That'd be okay though, because that means taxes are a bit lower.

If you'll excuse me, I've got a lump in my throat for some reason.

That wasn't quite the "time capsule" I had in mind...

Having spent the better part of the afternoon and evening here working on fixing broken links caused by my recent abrupt domain and webhost move, I encountered a potential problem to do with posterity. All the world's problems pale in comparison to it you must understand.

The problem was, internal links between posts on my blog here that were created before the move pointed to addresses at the old URL. With some SELECT REPLACE requests to my MySQL tables here I was able to change all these links from over five years of posts to point to this new domain (well actually this domain is older than the one I moved from, but that's beside the point).

Once I'd cleaned up these links though, I started getting carried away. I started converting some categories to tags that these older posts had assigned to them, then I started optimising some of the images they contained and reuploading them. Previously I had also added header images and text explaining the context in which old posts were written, and I replaced one entire post from late 2005 with a grilled cheese sandwich I had cooked but dropped on the floor and was subsequently reluctant to eat.

Screenshot of an old blog post from 2004 modified with a header thingy and whatnot

So here's what I got to thinking: Is it really right to be doing this? I've been reading a lot about the concept of a digital dark age (Wikipedia) where original material gets lost online because it's in a constant state of flux and some material inevitably goes offline never to be seen again.

With this in mind, should blog posts be treated as time capsules? As in, when you create a blog post and publish it, to be honest should they never be changed? In my case I didn't change any of the content per se, I just changed the links and optimised the images, but the text and the images themselves are the same. I know plenty of my earlier posts have spelling mistakes and the images aren't aligned correctly, but I haven't felt right changing them. As far as I care, posts from 2005 were written in 2005 and look the same as they did in 2005.

It's funny how ideas and quandaries that seem really important when they're floating around in your head seem extremely important, but when you explain them by writing them out on a blog post they seem so utterly ridiculous in their irrelevance.

Hey, at least I spelt "quandaries" correctly.