Jeffrey McManus

One of my favorite tracks by the emo-before-emo-was-cool duo, owing to some deeply strange and personal connotations with my freshman year in college. I was surprised to learn via Wikipedia that the band consider this song to be among their worst. I think it’s their masterpiece in many ways. Well, anyway. The favorite part of unearthing this was the YouTube comment: “This must be the 80s, there are British people doing engineering and there’s not a call centre in sight.” Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, wait.

This is related to last week’s Monday music post in that both songs did not appear on full albums at the time they were released (Big Country’s “Wonderland” was released as an EP, which I owned, while “The Way You Are” was a 12″ single and never appeared on a vinyl LP. You remember LPs, don’t you, kids?)

“In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, “why would we want to get into this debate?”

It’s telling that Boehner believes that debating gays in the military will somehow add to the “security threat” our country faces. And as one of most disingenuous liars in Congress, I am certain that Boehner is not actually looking for an answer to his question, but I’ll supply one because the writer of this piece, the Times‘ Elisabeth Bumiller, didn’t. It is precisely because we are fighting two wars that we need every solider we can get. We simply don’t have the luxury of running certain types of soldiers out of the military when we are fighting two wars at once.

Since its inception, our policy toward gays in the military has cost us thousands of soldiers. Bigotry has cost us more than any single enemy action. It’s time to stop this, if not because it’s the right thing to do, then for the sake of national security.

via Forces Pushing Obama on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – NYTimes.com.

If you like Scottish dudes in the 80s playing guitar while freezing their patooties off on a mountain somewhere, we have you covered.

Just read the dismal news that the Supreme Court has gutted the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign contributions that have been in effect for 20 years, thereby once again permitting corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns.

The toxic influence of campaign donations on politics should be something that Republicans and Democrats could agree on, but it seems like reinstating these kinds of restrictions would require a constitutional amendment at this point. I’m in favor of an amendment that says that contributions should only be permitted by natural persons and limited to something very low like $100 per candidate per election cycle, but good luck getting something like that passed. Without a rule like that, we’re basically conceding that America is a plutocracy, only permitting the wealthy and powerful corporations to have access to political influence. This is a tragedy for our society.

There is a possible alternative that might mitigate the quid pro quo effect of campaign contributions: anoymizing campaign contributions. To make this happen, we would set up an independent government corporation, a payment processor which would be the sole legal way to contribute to any federal campaign. The payment processor would take in donations, verify that they are legal, then lump the funds together and disburse them to candidates on a monthly basis during a campaign. It would be illegal for candidates or anyone working for them to handle contributions except the money given to them by the independent payment processor. Records pertaining to contributions would be kept and released — but only after the candidate leaves office.

This would enable people and organizations to contribute freely to candidates, protecting their (apparently) Constitutionally-protected right to engage in institutional bribery, but it would remove the appearance of quid pro quo. Influence, not money per se, is what’s so gross about large campaign contributions (particularly where corporations are concerned, since we can assume that nearly 100% of their donations are an attempt to buy influence). But by disconnecting the donor from the money, you go a long way toward reducing the potential that a particular donor will influence a particular candidate.

One other thought: I think it would be important to limit the anonymizing function only to candidates in national elections (as opposed to extending it to state ballot initiatives). We’ve had a few problems in California in recent years with various out-of-state interests screwing up our state Constitution with various scummy ballot initiatives; we should continue to be able to find out who’s funding these attacks.

This was one of many terrific music recommendations from DJ Dougie Gyro.

In March 2007 I kvetched about how difficult it was to pay Skype online, and about how crooked it seemed that the money you put in your Skype account vanishes after six months.

Well, it looks like somebody agreed with me, filed a class-action lawsuit, and won. Skype credits will no longer expire after six months, and anyone who lost credits prior to December 31 is owed $4.

I think this will be good for Skype long term because it will attract more casual paid users. The old terms certainly prevented me from giving them my money for quite a while. When you give a merchant money to hold prior to consuming their product, you expect they’re going to be able to actually hold onto it, you know?

My wife sits the kids down this morning to have a serious talk:

Mom: “As you know, there’s a lot of stuff going on this week: grandma and grandpa are in town, momma started a new job this week…”

Daughter: “…the NBC situation…”

OK, that’s it, no more talk about corporate entertainment before bedtime.

I’ve been getting a few pings from folks regarding Yahoo’s plans to transition its Shopping property to a third party. My team at Yahoo launched the Shopping API in August 2005 (although I don’t work for Yahoo anymore so I can’t provide insider answers on what’s going on here).

Since the new partner service (PriceGrabber) apparently doesn’t have a public API, that essentially kills this API. Killing an API is a very big deal, not just because it kills applications — it kills your credibility as a platform provider. I’d be very reticent about adopting any technology integration provided by Yahoo until things settle down over there. That said, there would have been a potentially interesting opportunity for PriceGrabber to provide a compatible API and make the developer switchover fairly seamless. It’s anyone’s guess as to why they elected to not do that.

Ben Metcalfe has some “cautionary” words which I think describes Yahoo’s lack of developer/platform strategy pretty well. The company’s developer releases over the past few years have mostly fallen flat for a variety of reasons (lack of business value for third parties being foremost, I would say, although there’s also a very unfortunate lack of organizational focus and unclear articulation of product strategy and tactics at work here as well). It was not clear to me that enough of Yahoo’s execs valued third-party developers in 2006 when I left the company, but it’s quite clear that they value third-party developers and open integration even less today.

I think you’ll agree that indy rock band videos simply don’t have enough costume changes, in general.