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unreasonable worries and prejudices
Nov. 14th, 2010 07:05 pmHere's a list of things that I'm unreasonably worried about this week.
- Jehovah's witnesses apparently sometimes (often?) shun their family members who leave the religion, including breaking off contact with their grown children.
- Oracle now owns all of the Sun open source software and is suing people left and right! Problematic software now includes everything Java-flavored, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox. Panic panic panic.
- Israel continues to be jerks. The US is like "please guys, stop building those settlements and displacing and abusing Palestinians, please? We promise to not let the UN security council criticize you again? ..." ... you'd think we could bargain from a stronger position? ...
- The TSA, "enhanced pat downs" (aka, being groped by TSA rent-a-cops), full-body scanners and what happens to the naked pictures of people (I expect they're saved forever, because disk is cheap), flying, people having to take off their belts, "security" only ever getting more ridiculous and never less. If you were an airline: wouldn't you be upset that the government is giving your customers really good incentives not to fly?
- Money in politics. Increasing campaign spending, and this requiring congresspeople to put more effort and attention into fundraising... (on the upside, working to handle issues like this are the Sunlight Foundation and Change Congress, among others)
- Visas and how difficult the US seems to want to make immigration. I think we want to make it as easy as possible for qualified people from abroad to move here and do scientific and technical work. But these days, the pace of scientific progress seems to be picking up abroad, and as I understand it, we're not getting as many students into STEM fields as we used to. It's not the end of the world if the US doesn't remain the Mayor of Science and Technology Towne, I suppose...
How about you? What are you unreasonably worried about?
- Jehovah's witnesses apparently sometimes (often?) shun their family members who leave the religion, including breaking off contact with their grown children.
- Oracle now owns all of the Sun open source software and is suing people left and right! Problematic software now includes everything Java-flavored, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox. Panic panic panic.
- Israel continues to be jerks. The US is like "please guys, stop building those settlements and displacing and abusing Palestinians, please? We promise to not let the UN security council criticize you again? ..." ... you'd think we could bargain from a stronger position? ...
- The TSA, "enhanced pat downs" (aka, being groped by TSA rent-a-cops), full-body scanners and what happens to the naked pictures of people (I expect they're saved forever, because disk is cheap), flying, people having to take off their belts, "security" only ever getting more ridiculous and never less. If you were an airline: wouldn't you be upset that the government is giving your customers really good incentives not to fly?
- Money in politics. Increasing campaign spending, and this requiring congresspeople to put more effort and attention into fundraising... (on the upside, working to handle issues like this are the Sunlight Foundation and Change Congress, among others)
- Visas and how difficult the US seems to want to make immigration. I think we want to make it as easy as possible for qualified people from abroad to move here and do scientific and technical work. But these days, the pace of scientific progress seems to be picking up abroad, and as I understand it, we're not getting as many students into STEM fields as we used to. It's not the end of the world if the US doesn't remain the Mayor of Science and Technology Towne, I suppose...
How about you? What are you unreasonably worried about?
