“As legal entities, the modern corporation is, as far as the law is concerned, a person. That is one of the fundamental legal characteristics of it and is then imbued by the law by an operating principle that it must always serve its self interest. So the idea that corporations are made in the image of human psychopaths is quite literal…we’ve created [an] institution that is incapable of being genuinely concerned about anybody but its own and its shareholders interests.”

You don’t have to look very far to see examples of that. Corporations are driven to reduce their costs and increase their revenues by doing whatever they have to do. The other interests, be it environmental or working people or children or a population’s health, are called externalities by economists meaning that they are outside of the corporation, they don’t need to be considered by the corporation in making its decisions.”

One example of this cited by Bakan takes place in the early days of the corporation. Henry Ford, having achieved great success through the production of the model-T, sought to raise wages, cut prices, and increase production of his product.

The Dodge brothers, both minority stockholders in the Ford Motor Company, sued Ford for not putting the interests of the shareholders first. They won, and the court decided that a business must be organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders, and cannot place the community or its employees first. The board of directors cannot decide to reduce profits in order to benefit the public.

Publicly-traded corporations legally can not be anything but psychopathic.

Quote taken from Cheaters sometimes prosper, at Ubyssey online.

The idea that being born creates a contract with a fictional agency, which in practical terms makes you a quasi-slave to specific individuals, is common to both religion and the state – and one other, far more personal agency, which I talk about in my first book “On Truth: The Tyranny Of Illusion.”

Whenever a priest says: “Obey God,” what he is really saying is: “Obey me.” Since God does not exist, any commandment that the priest claims is coming from God, is actually coming from the priest. “God” is just the fictional entity used to bully you conceptually in order to obtain your very practical subservience in the real world, to real individuals, in terms of voluntarily handing over money, time and resources.

It is far more efficient for exploiters to have their slaves consider slavery a virtue, since it cuts down enormously on the costs of controlling them. If I can convince you that it is evil to avoid serving me, and virtuous to be my slave, then I do not need to hire nearly as many thugs to bully, control and steal from you.

Excellent book on morality. The book hasn’t yet schematized the principia moralitas that it promised, but so far it has done an outrageously good job arguing for an universal, secular morality.

Oh, and it’s free (I did donate 15 dollars to them — it’s chump change considering the quality of the work in the book).

rudd-o@karen: ~ $
history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
76 cd
38 mv
36 svn
34 python
31 rm
30 ls
19 git
14 dpkg
14 aptitude
13 find

Please note: I have history set up so it doesn’t record repeated commands. So this count is a count of unique, different commands each.

Want the graphwatch version? Here it is:

cd 70 #################################################
      mv 36 #########################
  python 34 #######################
     svn 32 ######################
      rm 29 ####################
      ls 29 ####################
     git 16 ###########
    dpkg 14 #########
aptitude 14 #########
    nano 13 #########

Here’s what I did to generate that graph:

1. history > x
2. graphwatch 'cat x | awk '\''{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’\” | sort -rn | head | awk ‘\” { print $2 ” ” $1 } ‘\”’ ” “

graphwatch is a nice Python script that takes a properly quoted shell pipeline that will be run through bash and a field separator (in this case, a sngle empty space). My extra awk invocation there swaps the first and second fields so the first column is the label, and the second column is the value — graphwatch plots a nice set of proportional horizontal bars.

But that’s not it. The command is run once every second, so if the contents of the file x (or the output of the supplied command) change, the graph is re-plotted. Very nifty to watch tabular numeric output in graphical form, in real-time — imagine using it with iostat and you’ll get the idea.

Here’s the code. I will release it as a proper package with enhancements (it’s a quick hack right now) later on:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from time import sleep from subprocess import PIPE,Popen from sys import argv,exit,stdout import os

try: cmd = argv[1] sep = argv[2] except IndexError, e: print "usage: graphwatch 'shell pipeline' 'separator'" exit(os.EX_USAGE) print "Running this command in a shell:" print ">", cmd

def getstdout(cmdline): p = Popen(["bash","-c",cmdline],stdout=PIPE) output = p.communicate()[0] if p.returncode != 0: raise Exception, "Command %s return code %s"%(cmdline,p.returncode) return output

try: while True:

    output = getstdout(cmd).strip()
    stdout.write(getstdout("clear"))

    labels = []
    values = []
    for l in output.splitlines():
        try:
            label,value= l.strip().split(sep,1)
            label,value = label.strip(),value.strip()
        except ValueError, e: label,value = None,l.strip()
        labels.append(label)
        try: values.append(float(value))
        except ValueError, e: values.append(0.0)

    try:
        maximum_value = max(values + [maximum_value] )
    except NameError, e:
        maximum_value = max(values)

    try:
        longest_label = max( [len(l) for l in labels if l is not None ] )
        label_fmt = "%" + str(longest_label) + "s"
    except ValueError, e:
        longest_label = -1 # to compensate for the extra -2 below
        pass # nothing will happen later

    longest_number = max( [ len(str(int(i))) for i in values if type(i) is float ] )
    number_fmt = "%" + str(longest_number) + ".0f"

    column_width = 61
    leftover_for_plot = column_width - longest_label - longest_number - 2


    for value,label in zip(values,labels):
        if label is not None:
            print label_fmt%label,
        print number_fmt%value,
        print "#"*int(value/maximum_value*leftover_for_plot)

    sleep(1)

except KeyboardInterrupt, e: exit(0)

Frecuentemente, en mis discusiones existenciales, escucho a la gente decir que (parafraseando) soy un apologista del libertinaje. Que porque estoy a favor del aborto. Que porque detesto el antitabaquismo. Que porque no soy patriota. Que porque estoy a favor de las expresiones sexuales antes del matrimonio (francamente, popular estos días) y la prostitución (siempre popular, nunca admitido por sus fans). Que porque no creo en Dios.

Nada más alejado de la verdad. Lo que soy es tolerante. Lo cual me ayuda a ponerme a filosofar “desde el otro lado de la baranda” en todo tópico. Asumir posiciones filosóficas impopulares. Discutir un tema jugando a abogado del diablo.

Pero la verdadera razón por la que detesto la palabra es porque, a fin de cuentas, “libertinaje” es un oximoron. “Libertinaje” es el grito de batalla de aquellas personas con miedo al cambio, cuyos dogmas se ven amenazados por un nuevo conjunto de valores. Fíjense atentamente en la próxima persona que la pronuncie — con toda seguridad la usará para denunciar algo con lo que no está de acuerdo. Y cuídense de esa persona, porque alberga en su mente intolerancia y autoritarismo. Que, a fin de cuentas, es lo único con lo que no estoy de acuerdo porque ellos sí me afectan personalmente:

• fanáticos ecuatorianísticos que me miran mal porque encuentro falencias en mi país
• religiosos que me denuncian como hijo de Satán porque no rezo como niño lerdito
• mojigatos que me critican cuando digo algo de sexo, de los niños no deseados y de la anticoncepción
• antitabaquistas que me echan la culpa de sus cánceres al dedo gordo del pie

…todos grupos de gente que viven sus vidas para joder a los demás, y no vacilarán un momento si se les presenta la oportunidad de dictarme cómo debo vivir, pensar, vestir y caminar. Y castigarme cruelmente si me desvío de sus normas en el ejercicio de mi libertad.

Y a ustedes también.

Piénsenlo.

Lo bueno (cuando llamé a Ecutel)

• Me contestaron el teléfono en segundos
• Me pasaron con ventas en segundos
• En 5 minutos tenía resueltas todas mis interrogantes:
  • Me dan IP pública por $5 extra al mes — todos los demás proveedores, sin excepción, me quisieron vender el corporativo que son cientos de dólares más al mes
  • Me dan 512 Kbps! Por sólo cinco dólares más, incluida la IP pública, tengo 20% más de velocidad que antes.
  • No me filtran el acceso a Internet.
  • Me lo instalan en menos de una semana.
• Fui, pagué la instalación y el primer mes, firmé el contrato, y listo. Diez minutos. Y si a mí me daba la gana, podían haberme visitado personalmente.

Eso es servicio. Que quede constancia de que el Ing. Jorge Montenegro fue quien me atendió, y le tomo la palabra, porque me atendió muy bien.

Naturalmente que el servicio no es para todos. No Tengo la fortuna de tener line-of-sight con el edificio de Ecutel, pero supongo que alguien, podría instalar una antena de 50 metros o algo así.

Lo malo

Todos los otros proveedores que llamé:

• EcuaNet nunca me contestó el teléfono (técnicamente su PBX lo hizo, pero deben haber estado viendo tele o algo así, porque ventas y operadora, nada).
• Interactive trató de venderme “el corporativo” (eufemismo que indica servicio de Internet decente, porque el servicio “regular” es con filtros, limitaciones artificiales y dirección IP privada).
• Los demás no tenían cobertura o no contestaron el teléfono.

Llamé a doce. Sólo cinco contestaron y con ellos pude establecer una conversación semi-inteligente. Con todos ellos (excepto con Ecutel y con Onnet), la constante fue el “plan corporativo” (fíjense todo lo que tengo que hacer para mandar un puto mail con mi propio servidor de correo):

El infame “plan corporativo” y la IP pública

Señoras y señores, he aquí el gran “plan corporativo”: no es más que una conexión a Internet común y silvestre, donde:

• en lugar de hacerte compartir tu ancho de banda contratado con otros doce o dieciséis incautos, sólo lo compartes con cuatro o seis,
• te dan una IP pública (cosa que ha sido históricamente estándar y mandatoria), y
• te levantan una serie de restricciones y filtros que intencionalmente te clavan en los planes “residenciales”.

Es un fraude, donde la diferenciación en valor agregado es que el ISP mismo te caga el servicio “residencial” y te vende la solución “corporativa”. Si crees en esto, te invito a que caigas a mi casa — te voy a romper las piernas cuando estés por acá, porque tengo unas lindas muletas para venderte y quiero ganarme ese gui$o. Y si no te gusta, ándate a otro lado donde también te van a romper las piernas y te van a vender las muletas. Ya me imagino el va-y-viene entre los ejecutivos de estos proveedores de Internet a cargo de sus “políticas”:

• Hey, jefe, estamos ganando muy pocos millones de dólares.
• ¿Qué podemos hacer para ganar más?
• Tengo una idea: ¿y si vendemos más “planes corporativos”?
• Fantástico, pon al staff a vender duro y feo.
• ¡Pero es que nadie los compra, son casi la misma huevada que los planes residenciales!
• (Con voz de Alf) ¡No hay problema! Cágales el e-mail a esos hijueputas, y vas a ver cómo vienen a pagarnos cerros de $$$$$$$$ por el mismo servicio que tenían antes.
• ¡Mbwuahahahahhaaa!
• ¡Y también bajémosle los sueldos al personal del call center!
• ¡Hahahahahaha! ¡Somos unos genios!

No cabe la menor duda de que dejaron el encéfalo en su domicilio cuando salieron a trabajar con resaca.

Honestamente, mil créditos a Ecutel. Fueron los únicos que comprendieron que yo, como cliente, querría hacer más que usar MSN y navegar Hi5.com todo el maldito día. Porque sin IP pública, hay un sinnúmero de servicios que no puedes hacer:

• Recibir llamadas con un teléfono Internet.
• Unreal Tournament.
• Remote desking.
• Peer-to-peer efectivo y rápido.
• Administración remota.

El principio fundamental de la Internet — lo que la hace tan fantástica — es que dos nodos de la red participan de igual-a-igual; sin IP pública, tu computador es un “ciudadano de segunda”. Me apena que este principio fundamental sea corrompido lentamente por la avaricia de los ISPs, que lenta e intencionalmente van destruyendo el valor del acceso a Internet en el nombre de vender sus exorbitantes planes corporativos.

Bienvenidozzz a Pasifitellll

Pero el premio se lo lleva Pacifictel, donde una señorita — a la cual generosamente llamaré Señorita Ventas — tuvo la audacia de querer (si se puede querer algo apáticamente) alquilarme:

• un enlace de 256 Kbps a $125,
• donde estaba (cito) terminantemente prohibido darme una IP pública,
• sin entender mi pregunta “¿su servicio es filtrado?”, y
• sin garantías sobre el servicio DSL a través de mi ruidosa línea telefónica

Pero démosle crédito, algo de crédito — Señorita Ventas fue muy clara y convincente para venderme su servicio. ¿Su grito de batalla? Esos son los precios, y si usted gusta ahí verá si contrata o no. Y yo me pregunto: ¿será que la Señorita Ventas limpia con regularidad el charco de baba en su escritorio?

También creo que el apellido de la Señorita Ventas es Servicio, porque cuando le pregunté si, siendo Pacifictel, no me podían arreglar el ruido del teléfono para instalarme DSL, me dijo llame al 132, que esto es Easynet. ¡Realmente debe estar muy deseosa de facilitarme todo para que yo les pague $125 al mes por la mitad de la velocidad que tengo ahora!

I could of course rant at length about style, but it’s pretty open-ended: people constantly find clever new ways to be unclever. So I will restrict my stylistic remarks to the use of the word “utilize”. “Utilize” has been scientifically demonstrated to be used only by stupid people, so if you use it you could easily be mistaken for one. A stupid person, that is, not a scientist. “Utilize” is one of the all-time classic Stupidity Indicators, right up there with saying “choo-choo-choo” out loud when you’re thinking. Ever notice how only stupid people make train noises when they’re thinking? “Oh gosh, lemme think, chsh chsh chsh… hmmm, choo choo choo…”I could of course rant at length about style, but it’s pretty open-ended: people constantly find clever new ways to be unclever. So I will restrict my stylistic remarks to the use of the word “utilize”. “Utilize” has been scientifically demonstrated to be used only by stupid people, so if you use it you could easily be mistaken for one. A stupid person, that is, not a scientist. “Utilize” is one of the all-time classic Stupidity Indicators, right up there with saying “choo-choo-choo” out loud when you’re thinking. Ever notice how only stupid people make train noises when they’re thinking? “Oh gosh, lemme think, chsh chsh chsh… hmmm, choo choo choo…”

The article’s got great tips for aspiring young people who want to make their résumés look great too!. I wonder if the author will pick this post up and as a consequence, read my own résumé.

While I’m obviously keeping the details under wraps, I can tell you the following about the trip.

First off, I have never in my life seen so many gorgeous women in such a short time. Just strolling downtown of ———— for 20 minutes I saw more candidates to supermodels than I’ve ever seen decently groomed women in my country’s streets. Now hold on for just a second, because I’m about to tell you why that was not important during my trip.

Second: the interview process was grueling. We covered from ———— to ————, quite a bit of ———— ———— and the hardest part was when I got grilled by ———— and ———— on ———— ———— (the answer was a ———— ———— in a ———— of ———— ————). I personally know of zero people who could have answered the questions reliably — and I must confess I answered most of them with fear of mistakes in my heart.

(No, I will never reveal them. It is my understanding that these types of interviews do a great job of weeding out candidates in no small part because they don’t cover common ground.)

Third, ———— is really a party of cool people. If you want a challenging job, and you’re willing to move to the First World to get it, you should definitely interview at ————. Not only that, but in contrast to popular perception of ————s, they were a diverse bunch of heartwarming and welcoming people. If you want to be in, and you want to stop being soft-pedaled, ———— is definitely the place to be in.

And ———— is proof that Linux skills are in high demand. And I’m not throwing around high demand like it’s a catchphrase. I really mean it.

Well, back to the gorgeous women talking point. Heck, an extremely gorgeous woman (Gabriela was her name, and I’m infinitely grateful) offered to go out of her way to help me around the airport and the main train station. She actually had her (rather not young!) mother wait for her while she helped me get train tickets! She was the truly living example of ———— hospitality.

I guess I should have asked her for her phone number. But I didn’t.

Because of an italian girl. As soon as I got on the plane, I scoured for familiar faces. Finding none, I just turned to (what I thought to be) the next best thing: a naturally pretty girl who seemed to be in her early twenties. Someone to talk to, with the express purpose of avoiding the 20-hour boredom that ensues on transcontinental flights. No battery on my Palm, right?

And, you know what? Conversation just flowed from there. She told me what she did for a living (answer: it’s nothing you selfish bastards would ever do, even if you got paid millions of dollars). She turned out to be italian (I originally had her penned down as an eastern european girl; there goes my nationality radar). She turned out to be older than me (and I thought I had great genes, but the bunch of grey hairs in my forehead strongly suggests otherwise). She turned out to be an economy postgraduate. She said it, but I already knew it: “Behind these glasses, there’s real substance, you know?”.

She destroyed several ideas I had about people in general. I hate when people do that to me, but I have to welcome it. All in all, she’s living proof that first impressions count for shit.

I don’t know why, but I find myself missing her just enough to be thrown off-balance. I mean, she’s the complete opposite of … me? She’s generous, giving and she’s actually fulfilled by what she does. She’s urban, but she ain’t afraid of getting her hands dirty while getting down to what she does for a living. She’s not a supermodel, but she’s really pretty. She knows the world, and she could own it (in the conventional sense of the expression) if she went for it. And she does (in her very own sense). I respect that.

Let’s just hope she finds herself reading this. I’ve seen the interblags do much weirder things for people before, so why not count on serendipity tonight?

You know what? I’m gonna go back to just listening italodance — after all, I’m gonna talk to her at some point. And I’m friggin’ exhausted from the trip, so unleash the vodka!

The bit about the vodka was a figurative expression. But… come on, come clean and raise your hand if you can’t count on Stoli!

From the World Wide Web Consortium Q&A blog, article titled Craft of HTML:

HTML is a practical art. In a professional context, it requires precise and extensive skills. As with many popular crafts, the vast majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living. The quality of products varies a lot.

Bruno Pedro has recently published Top blogs fail W3C Markup Validation. He has taken the top 20 list of popular weblogs and puts them through W3C validator. None passed markup validation. Then the author is encouraging people to take care of validation. The comments following the article express either frustration, anger or support. This article is a good illustration of the misunderstanding about HTML validation.

[...]

When you are a developer of a content management system, of an authoring tool, of a small widget, be sure to create all the fonction to sanitize the content in production and input. Maintaining the quality of your content is a better goal than a one time validation.

Reference of tools

• Wordpress XHTML Validator by Manuel Amador Briz
• MTValidate Plugin by Jacques Distler
• LogValidator by Olivier Théreaux

Incidentally, I validated my own pages and I found two validation issues related to the Creative Commons license (something about the XML namespace used by the code) so I just commented those stanzas out. Dear Lazyweb, how can I specify several valid namespaces for an XHTML document?

To the W3C staff: thanks :-). Much appreciated.

We don’t give a fuck. We still do it. We swallow fire for fun, with 95° proof alcohol, and here’s the YouTube video to prove it. One of the virtues of living in a third world country — I doubt you can do this abroad without getting jailed. Favorite it; maybe we’ll get famous as the fire-breathing amateur wackos ;-):

Video on YouTube

And here are some stunning pictures (leaving aside the fact that the video was shot in extremely poor lighting conditions):

…he’s on fire!

El hombre de la campana no hacía esta huevada!

That’s me and a couple buddies/family there. Three of us do the fire dance, the other three are too gay to try it.

Como verán, ayer estaba farreando en uno de los clubs simpáticos de Guayaquil con mi posse. En mi estupor etílico, me puse a jugar con una vela — cuya cera derretida se derramó encima de mis preciosos pantalones negros (nota a mí mismo: no jugar con velas borracho). Malo me dijo: “torpe, ahora te fregaste, esa mancha no sale!”

Determinado a no valer verga, me desperté hoy sobrio y busqué en Google how to remove wax stains from clothing. Enseguida apareció el consejo que me pareció más razonable: usar dos servilletas (una atrás de la mancha, la otra adelante) y una plancha tibia para extraer la cera.

Ve tú a saber… el maldito truco funcionó de película — salió absolutamente toda la cera después de varias repeticiones con servilletas limpias. Por si acaso, aquí están los trucos de limpieza que encontré.

La verdad que el slogan de Google debería ser ayudando a los borrachos estúpidos a corregir sus estupideces.

What I cannot do is post any story from this Web site, though. I imagine everyone else is having the same problem.