How Republicans Screwed the Pooch

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Paul Begala writing for The Daily Beast:

Seems to me the GOP seeks a banana republic: a toxic blend of right-wing populism, anti-intellectualism, debt defaults, and an end to the ladder of economic opportunity. They would divide us into a few Haves and a lot of Have-Nots. And they would slowly crush the heart of progressive America—the rising middle class created by Democratic economic policies of education and empowerment. All while preserving, protecting, and defending a tiny oligarchy of millionaires and billionaires. The right wing should ditch the tricorn hats and replace them with mirrored sunglasses. They truly are Banana Republicans. There are only a few things that can offend me anymore. One of which is having to listen to bullshit Republican talking points.

The President Surrenders

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Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times:

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t. So disappointed in my party.

Canceling Cable TV: Am I Ready?

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As a preface, I do not mean for this post to be comprehensive. I am not writing this to cover every option available, but only to state how my family current consumes media, the options I've tried, and the options I've considered but chosen not to do. Since January, I've had several conversations with friends and colleagues regarding, for lack of a better phrase, "home media consumption". Should I keep my cable tv subscription or should I opt for HDTV over a VHF antennae? Should one have a Boxee box? What about an Apple TV? Some sort of media center PC? A Roku box? Do you still use a DVD player or have invested in a Blu-ray player? Perhaps Netflix or Hulu Plus subscription? Well, you get the point. In 2011, there are lots of options to go with as far as plugging things into your HDTV to watch.

Our Setup

For the purposes of this post, I want to first outline our setup. We have two HDTVs, a 42" LCD which is almost years old, and a 32" LCD about a year old. Both are Phillips, bought from Costco which we are happy with. In the living room, alongside the 42", we have a HD TiVO, Nintendo Wii, a DVD player, and a Mac Mini. In our bedroom, we have a 32" LCD alongside a DVD player, Apple TV and a Roku Box.

Choices

Television

I have used just about all of the above options. My wife and I have been wanting to cancel cable tv for several years now but what's holding us back is the inability to watch live sports (mainly NFL football) on the Internet and some of the more obscure shows that one might find on channels like Science or Discovery. MLB.tv covers my baseball needs excellently, but I only wish NFL would offer a similar product. The same goes for HBO. I don't see a solution to this problem given that the NFL has a monopoly on the broadcasts rights and sign customer hostile exclusivity contracts with corporations like DirectTV. The executives at these organizations, sadly, still have their fingers in their ears when it comes to the existence of the Internet and are just shutting their eyes and saying "lalalalalalalala" hoping it will all go away. We consume what Comcast sends to us via an HD TiVo. I've been a TiVo subscriber for years because of their superior user interface when compared to any and all DVRs a cable or satellite company might provide you. Now, that's not to say TiVo doesn't have it's faults, but there is nothing that I've found that can beat it as far as ease of use and an Apple-like "just works" ethos. The HD TiVo we have is a generation older than TiVo's most current models. Ours takes two, single stream cable cards. I believe it can take a single multi-stream card, but at the time of installation, Comcast claimed they were 'out'. And don't even get me started on how hard it was to even get cable cards from them.

Plastic Discs

I've had a DVD player for over 10 years now. I haven't needed one for about 6 months. I shall elaborate as to why below, but Steffanie and I came to the decision late last year to digitize our entire DVD library. I've been using RipIt to rip our collection to its raw mpeg-2 form and then using Handbrake to convert them into h.264 encoded .m4v files. I store all of these files on my 6 terabyte Drobo. Each 4-8 GB rip typically converts into about 1.5 GB in its finished .m4v form. I made the decision to go with h.264/.m4v due to its compatibility with all of my devices(iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro). So far the killer app for having instant access to my entire movie collection while at home has been a wonderful application called Air Video. With Air Video, I can stream any video easily from my iPad across Wi-Fi anywhere in my apartment. With a little delay I can also do this remotely, but I need to have solid bandwidth at my remote location. With Air Play, I can also play any movie from the Drobo via Air Video and send that video to our TV using Apple TV. How's that for a TV remote? Doing that for the first time made me feel like I was living in the future. Flying cars? Jet packs? Those are for the birds.

Streaming Services

Netflix: For the past year, my wife and I have been making use of our Netflix account more often to stream movies or TV shows. Aside from the fact that movies or shows will sometimes disappear abruptly from Netflix, such as when I was half way through watching all of Sports Night when it got yanked, overall it works very well. I can watch streaming Netflix on my iPhone or iPad, any of our Macs or on the Apple TV. Our HD TiVo also has the capability to stream Netflix, which we sometimes make use of if we're already using the TiVo at the time when we decide to watch something on Netflix. Amazon Video: Another service available to us is Amazon Video Streaming, which is free for all Amazon Prime members. We're a family of heavy Amazon Prime users, so we've made use of this services a few times. If Netflix's one drawback is their limited selection of streamable content, Amazon makes them look like a bountiful paradise. I'm hard pressed to find anything above a c-grade movie on Amazon streaming. The service works well and is available to us on our Roku box or on the Mac Mini. Our TiVo HD supports it as well, but we've never gotten it to work properly. Hulu Plus/Basic: A third service I've looked into paying for is Hulu Plus. I've shied away from paying for it because of the cost. Hulu Basic is free and gives you access to a lot of the current shows airing on TV. There are a plethora of bad commercials inserted in these episodes at frequent intervals. Users also only get access to the previous five shows. One would think that Hulu Plus's deal would be for users to pay Hulu money, in exchange for being able to get more content, without having to watch commercials. No. Sorry. You're given all of the current seasons episodes. Last season? Tough luck. You get access to a low of old TV shows you probably don't care about. You still have to sit through commercials. About 1/2 the content is HD. No, thank you.

Set Top Boxes

As stated above, Steffanie and I own quite a few set top boxes, although, we by no means own them all. We do not have an XBox or Playstation (mainly because I've always been a PC Gamer, not a consoler gamer). The exception is the Wii, which Steffanie bought me for my birthday years ago and that was only due to it's unique controls and my long-standing love for Nintendo. If I were a Windows user I could foresee the XBox being useful as I understand that it can connect to Windows media-center software. However, me being a Windows user? Ha. That's a good one. We do own the following boxes: Roku HD, Apple TV, Wii, Mac Mini (late 2010), TiVo HD, and 2 DVD players. With these boxes, we can connect to just about every service available. There are several other set-top boxes I've considered buying, such as a Blu-Ray player or a Boxee Box. I decided against a Blu-Ray player due to the high cost of the discs. I also do not want to have to keep up with physical media any longer. I decided against the Boxee Box in order to go with the Mac Mini instead. I took this course of action due to several Boxee Box reviews criticizing the low performance of the box. A Mac Mini, which much more expensive, is much more powerful. In addition to being able to run the Boxee Software, it also doubles as an iTune server for the Apple TV, or a Netflix client, or just a way to browse the web or serve as an extra computer in times of need. Also, the Mac Mini gives us the option to completely ditch our stand-alone DVD player given that it's now redundant. On the subject of Boxee software, another option that I tried was Plexx. Plexx is OS X only but it's based off of the same core codebase that Bxxee uses, XMBC. XMBC is an open-source project created for the purpose of writing media-center software to use with your own custom-built computer. Plexx and Boxee took the base XMBC codebase and built a better UI on top of it with additional functionality. I ended up going with Boxee due to its greater popularity along with the greater plugin/module support it offers which allows me to stream podcasts I listen to from TWiT or 5by5 easily within the app.

Smart TVs and Smart Blu-Ray Players

When my wife and I bought our HDTV almost 4 years ago, we purchased it spur of the moment from Costco because it was on sale for $999 with free shipping and was a good quality 1080p 42" LCD for our medium sized 2BR apartment. This was about 2 months before the 3G iPhone was released, before the iPhone App Store ever existed. The term "Smart TV" didn't exist yet and the word "App" was not yet a mainstream word you could hear a non-geek use in normal day-to-day conversation. Fast forward to mid-2011, when practically every TV sold these days is a 3D 1080p HDTV with a plethora of "smart apps" built into the firmware of the TV that allow them to connect to online services such as Pandora, Netflix or Amazon Video. The experienced geek in me feels uneasy when it comes to these because when I buy an expensive, traditionally dumb advice such as a TV, I only want it to be a large monitor for my devices. When you start adding software to them, it decreases the life span of the device due to the risk of the software becoming outdated. I can foresee the TV manufacturers angling for the time when the market is sufficiently seeded with Smart TVs that they begin releasing new ones with more advanced software in which the end-user must upgrade their TV to make use of the new software. That's extremely wasteful. I do not want my TV to turn into my computer. I'd much rather buy something like a Mac Mini which i know will be powerful enough to power any of the lame media-center software, for the next 5 years, that I may throw at it. The same goes for Smart Blu-Ray players (on top of the fact that I don't want Blu Ray to take off to the degree that DVDs ever did).

Concerns & Complaints

Due to the setup above, I'm almost able to ditch cable. There are a few hangups however: 1. Not able to buy HBO à la carte: I do not subscribe to HBO, partially in protest. I dislike that I have to pay 84$ a month for my current cable option that that still doesn't give me access to HBO. I'd rather have the ability to cancel my cable subscription and pay HBO separately to access HBO over their Web site or through, from what I hear, their excellent iPad app. However, it seems their iPad app only for users who subscribe to HBO through their cable subscriber. HBO, you're doing it wrong. 2. Live sports, with the exception of Major League Baseball (and even then, they still don't get it 100% right), you cannot watch live sports (for me, college and professional football) without having a cable or satellite subscription. I understand that I could drop my cable and receive networks like ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox over the air for free via VHF antennae for HDTV. The exception is ESPN or the NFL network, both of which are on cable-only channels. Boo. Like I mentioned above, MLB almost gets this correct by allowing customers to pay $99 a year to get access to all[^1] games through their Web site, a device like an Apple TV or their Web site. [^1]: The problem with this, however, is that anytime you wish to watch a local game that is being broadcast on TV, the game is blocked out on MLB.tv OR if it's a Sunday night game that is nationally broadcast, it is also blocked out on MLB.tv.

My Secondary Reason For Wanting To Drop Cable

This next section is a general gripe I wanted to include somewhere in this post. It is only loosely related to the above, but it a more personal reason for my wanting to stop contributing to the cable television industry as a whole. The slow degradation of the quality of content on the TV channels that I've liked over the past 10 years has turned me off of most content now found on TV. I used to watch a few series on network TV, Discovery Channel, TLC, Science Channel, Animal Planet, SciFi, National Geographic, and cable news. The horrible state of cable news needs no description but suffice it to say, it's bad. The rest of the channels mentioned above have slowly been turned into a nest of horrible reality-based shows that have diluted the channels I loved into a small pile of streaming crap. Pull up your DVR's channel guide and look what is on from 5:00 pm until midnight on a channel such as TLC, which I might remind you dear reader, stand for The Learning Channel. After doing so just now, I see that tonight's lineup contains Fabulous Cakes, Toddlers & Tiaras, Cake Boss followed by another Cake Boss, then Surprise Homecoming, 19 Kids and Counting, another 19 Kids and Counting, The Little Couple, and then repeats for previously listed shows. I'm sorry, I just vomited a little in my mouth just then. I dislike reality programming. I define reality programming into any show in which something happens and then the person in the scene where something happens then is taken aside into a little room, alone, and comments on camera about what just happened. The show is a series of events where they switch from action to a personal aside where the subject tells their side of the story or how they feel about what just happened. The slow degradation of good content into the race to the bottom in order to appeal to the widest possible audience goes against what most of these cable channels were originally founded for. When most were created, they were centered around a niche topic that appealed to a finite amount of people, but they did so very very well. The Animal Planet was mostly nature documentaries and other nature shows. Discovery Channel was a mixture of things you might find on National Geographic to shows like Mythbusters. It seems that over the years, all of these channels have just started peddling reality-based shows in their primetime that centers around whatever topic their cable channel was supposedly based around. Some channels, such as TLC, seem to have given up any pretense of creating shows around their specific niche topic. The few remaining shows I still enjoy, such as Castle, The Late Show, Conan, The Daily Show, Colbert Report, or The Late Show with Craig Ferguson or anything on HBO are all able to be found online or on DVD 6 months later. As mentioned above, the exception is live sports. If the NFL were to release something like MLB.tv, that would be the final act that pushes me over the edge. One final note - I am also hesitant about losing the ability to flip on the Weather Channel, the local news or a cable news channel in order to get local news coverage, or breaking news, but the low quality of those news sources and the increasing ability to get that same content on the Internet leads me to believe that my caution is probably unfounded and I wont actually miss it if and when we make the switch.

Boehner's Speech, Translated

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Reposted here from this Reddit thread originally written by Redditor RevThwack.

Boehner

Millions are looking for work, have been for some time, and the spending binge going on in Washington is a big part of the reason why. CBO reports say that in the fourth quarter of 2010 there were somewhere between 1.3 million and 3.5 million people who were then employed who would not have been had the stimulus not been enacted. Boehner Before I served in Congress, I ran a small business in Ohio. I was amazed at how different Washington DC operated than every business in America. You were with that company for a total of 13 years. You have been in politics since 5 years after starting at that company. You have been in politics for 29 years with 21 years of that being your term in congress. Stop trying to pretend you're still a business man. Boehner Where most American businesses make the hard choices to pay their bills and live within their means, in Washington more spending and more debt is business as usual. The Joint Committee on Taxation stated that the Bush Tax Cuts costs combined cost us over $2 trillion between 2001-2017. Bush raised national debt by $4.08 trillion thru tax cuts and spending. You were in the house the whole time Bush was president, and voted down party lines 95.95% of the time during those years. More spending and debt is something that you have supported over the years. Boehner on the heels of the largest spending binge in American history. Well, on pure dollar ammounts, yes. As a precentage of GDP, the last few years are much less than the spending binge that happened for World War 2. Boehner Here's what we got for that spending binge: a massive health care bill that most Americans never asked for Actually, most Americans did back health care reform. It was one of the hot topics that helped Obama get elected. Beyond that, the CBO also reports that although there would be a $940 billion price tag over a 10 year period, it would actually reduce the deficit by $138 billion. Boehner A 'stimulus' bill that was more effective in producing material for late-night comedians than it was in producing jobs Once again, 1.5 to 3.5 million jobs accredited to the stimulus bill by the CBO. I'd say that was a larger effect than the effect it had on late-night comedians. Boehner a national debt that has gotten so out of hand it has sparked a crisis without precedent in my lifetime or yours. A case could easily be made that due to increases in the debt ceiling being common place, that the crisis isn't due to us approaching the limit, but instead due to the inability of the House to pass a bill that has even modest bipartisan support. Boehner And over the last six months, we’ve done our best to convince the president to partner with us to do something dramatic to change the fiscal trajectory of our country. Actually, over the last six months the House has done it's best to convince the president to give into its demands of huge cuts to entitlement programs, pushing the entire burden of these cuts onto the backs of the lower and middle class. Boehner Last week, the House passed such a plan, and with bipartisan support 5 Democrats voted for it, 188 did not. 2.6% is not enough to be considered bipartisan support by any stretch of the imagination. Bohener Unfortunately, the president would not take yes for an answer. Had the "yes" been "yes, we will pass a bill that fairly affects all Americans", then he would have accepted it. He and the gang of six both said yes to such an answer, you are the one who said no. Boehner Even when we thought we might be close on an agreement, the president’s demands changed. That was because his demands kept getting closer to your demands as he accepted compromises on things such as entitlements. That is what politics is about. Your demands on the other hand have remained steadfast... that is what blackmail is all about. Boehner The president has often said we need a 'balanced' approach -- which in Washington means: we spend more. . .you pay more. No, by "balanced" he means that the burden doesn't fall just on the backs of the middle and lower class, but that the wealthy take some of the hit as well. Boehner Having run a small business, I know those tax increases will destroy jobs. If cutting out tax loopholes (which is what the gang of six plan proposes) destroys jobs, then why didn't it do that when Reagan closed tax loopholes and raised payroll taxes himself in 1982? Boehner The sad truth is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today. Considering that the president is backing a plan that would cut the deficit by more than the raise that is being asked, it's not a blank check. In fact, He's not asking for a check at all, but instead the ability to keep the government operating. The check writing would come at the time that the yearly budget is crafted. Boehner If the President signs it, the ‘crisis’ atmosphere he has created will simply disappear. It is the responsibility of congress to craft and pass bills, the only responsibility of the president is to either sign or veto those bills. Obama has acted as a mediator between the two political sides, and has gotten the Democrats to agree to things they do not like. This crisis situation is not due to his actions, but due to partisan bickering in congress. Boehner The solution to this crisis is not complicated: if you’re spending more money than you’re taking in, you need to spend less of it Or take in more, or do a combination of the two. TL/DR: You should be ashamed of your speech and all the lies contained inside it Boehner. I posted it in it's entirety here because I wanted the most people to read it. If you have a Reddit account, please go give him credit by voting up this thread.

Andy Rutledge Redesigns The New York Times

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Andy Rutledge, in a post called "News Redux":

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

The Follow-up To John Siracusa's OS X Lion Review

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If you enjoyed John Siracusa's epic OS X 10.7 Lion review, then you should be aware that he does a weekly podcasts on Dan Benjamin's 5by5 podcasting network called "Hypercritical". The most recent episode of Hypercritical, called "Nakedly Optimistic", serves as the first episode in what will probably be a couple episodes that covers his review in more depth (if that's even possible). John covers the details he wasn't able to get to, due to the uncertain deadline he was under depending on when Lion was released to the public. He covers a few mistakes he made, and provides a bit of follow-up to some of the comments he's seen regarding the review. I highly recommend you listen if this sort of thing excites you.