Counterpoints

I've been toying around with weblogs.com. My site now is listed there every time I update. Apparently, I'm daft, as I never caught on to the purpose of that site before. I'm afraid that "John" is going to suffer a decrease in the number of hits on his site, as I'll no longer check back every hour to see if he's posted anything new. ";->" I also added a SiteMeter image on the left pane of this site. Since I don't get nice stats logs, like I do for my personal web site, I wanted to be able to see where the people finding my site are from, and how they found it. I can also tell that my mom read my site at 12:53 (my time) as I don't know anyone else who'd be online from Kaufman & Broad.

Probably my favorite thing about my new job, is that I shop for about a third of my day, all with your money. Well, only if you live in Iowa, and you pay taxes, but in any case, it's not my money! Today, I'm looking over new Dell laptops, I've been given $3,000 to spend, with the mission of "getting the most that you can" for that three grand. It's too bad I don't get to keep the stuff that I buy, however...

I watched the third and final (for this year, anyway) Presidential Debate last night. Bush may have won the style competition, but Gore nailed home some excellent points about policy. The talking heads criticized Gore for being too agressive, probably rightly so, but Gore didn't have much of an option.

Gore could not just sit there and let Bush try to cloak himself in the garb of the Democrats. He was either intentionally vague or unintentionally stupid about the details of what type of reforms he supports. When Gore said:

I support a strong national patients' bill of rights. It is actually a disagreement between us. A national law that is pending on this, the Dingell-Norwood bill, a bipartisan bill, is one that I support...

Bush responded with:

Actually, Mr. Vice President, it's not true. I do support a national patients' bill of rights. As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through.

Gore could not simply let it end at that, he HAD to make the point that the bills they support are radically different. Bush tried, during the entire debate, to paint his positions on Medicare, Affirmative Action, and Patient's Rights as being identical to Gore's. Simply because bills have similar titles, does not mean that they are even remotely the same, or contain the same rights for patients. I think that this difference may be lost on many of the voters, they'll assume that both plans contain the same details, when in fact, the Republican version of the plan protects the rights of HMO's far more than patients. Gore had no choice but to respond:

I referred to the Dingell- Norwood bill. It is the bipartisan bill that is now pending in the Congress. The HMOs and the insurance companies support the other bill that's pending, the one that Republican majority has put forward.

Bush tried the same tactic regarding Affirmative Action. What the hell is Affirmative Access? Gore was absolutely correct when he referred to quotas as a red herring, quotas are already gone from all modern Affirmative Access programs, but Bush either tried to paint Affirmative Action as something it's not, or he simply didn't realize this. As Gore said:

Affirmative action means that you take extra steps to acknowledge the history of discrimination and injustice and prejudice, and bring all people into the American dream because it helps everybody, not just those who are directly benefited.

Bush may not have been as aggressive as Gore, but I think he came across as Bush Light. If you were concerned about policy, Gore won that debate. If you were concerned about the style and demeanor of the President, then Bush had the edge.

The Onion has a hilarious Point-Counterpoint between a receptionist and her Dell Dimension 4100. I laughed pretty hard at this one, I loved what the computer wrote:

I feature a one-Gigahertz Pentium III processor and 128 megabytes of RAM. And this broad is whining that I'm not fast enough. A fucking Lamborghini isn't fast enough if you don't know how to shift, brainiac. And, believe it or not, you actually have to exit a program when you're done with it. Not just close the window. You actually have to select "Close" from the File menu. Or, better yet, Alt-F4 on your keyboard. I'm not gonna take the fall just because you left RealPlayer, AOL Instant Messager, Microsoft Word, ACT! 2000, WinAmp, McAfee First Aid, and the sound- and video-card software all open, and you're trying to open Excel! All that stuff costs RAM, dumbass. Maybe if you'd check the system tray once a month. The precise reason I'm "groaning and grinding so much" is that your stupid catalog of open programs is so taxing to my RAM that it forces me to open virtual memory, which is gonna be slow as hell no matter what computer you're on.