No one Everyone could've predicted...

...that our glorious corporate overlords (all hail!) pushing for more "skilled" immigration to solve our desperate "skills shortage" were doing so solely in order to keep wages in the STEM sectors low.

A brief excerpt:

If there was a shortage of IT jobs then you'd expect wages to rise, but in fact the team found wages in the field (on average) peaked in 2001 and have remained flat ever since, and in some cases have fallen over the last 14 years. The reason, according to the research, is that overseas workers are being recruited to keep wages low.

The researchers found that the US produces a surfeit of STEM graduates, but only half of them are hired. The rest of the jobs in the IT industry, primarily entry-level positions for the under 30s, are filled using foreign workers and may account for up to 50 per cent of new hires.

"Even our high-end estimate, of 50 percent, is a conservative estimate of the proportion of guestworkers hired," Professor Salzman told The Register. Salzman has spent the last 13 years researching this area of the market and has amassed a large body of evidence to support his claims.

I'm so surprised.

Just to be clear, I'm totally fine with immigration. Let people come here, whether they want to be ag workers, or tech workers. Just don't pretend that a certain kind of immigration is all swell and good and shiny while a darker icky smelly kind of immigration is eleventy times as bad as Hitler.

R.I.P.

Richie Havens, yet another relatively unsung great, died today. If not for the vagaries of fucked up logistics at Woodstock, he may never have even garnered the minor fame he ended up with -- he went on first because all the other filthy hippies were late.

Regardless, he was a man able to transform the blues standard "Motherless Child" into the Woodstock classic "Freedom":

RIP Richie.

UPDATE

Moar, 'cause fuck you Mr. Death:

The following contains the entirety of the first video above after the initial song. Oh well, sosumi.

Update again, 'cause fuck you that's why:

Update again: Moar? Yeah, more, you got a problem with that?

Fuck the NRA

And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.

What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.

Nothin'

I have nothing positive to say about anything. So here, have a puppy in a bowl:

Blinkout

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm having too much fun with this shit, but I don't care.

You really really need to

C'mon, you know you want to... All the kewl kids are doing it...

Evil Zedbra

For the fine folks at Riddled:

RIP Blinky, take 2

Since you lot were so enamored with my previous seizure-inducing ode to Blinky the wonder tag, here's something even worse! A twitching, blinking, color-shifting monstrosity that will terribly frighten and/or nauseate all viewers. Be sure to share it with your friends!

Much like last time, we first simply apply a "class" tag to any elements we want this technique to apply to. But to really fuck things up we throw a whole shitload of nested <div> tags in the mix:

<div class='blonk'>
<div class='blonk'>
<div class='blonk'>
(etc...)
<p class='blonk'>Some shit goes here</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
(etc...)

And then we write just a tiny bit more code, simiilar but much worse than the last:

<script type="text/javascript">
//Two timers to make it kinda jerky and twitchy:
var longdelay=100; // change to adjust speed
var shortdelay=10;

var delay=longdelay;
var positive = 0;

// Evil array of evil color evilness:
var colors=["#ff00ff","#ffff00","#00ffff","#880088","#ff8800","#ff0000","#00ff00","#0000FF"];
var c=0;
function blonk() {
  var annoyances = document.getElementsByClassName('blonk');
  for (var i=annoyances.length - 1; i>=0; i--) {
    var b = annoyances[i];
    b.style.border="0.5em solid " + colors[c];
    if (positive === 1) {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'visible') ? 'hidden' : 'visible';
      positive = 0;
    } else {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'hidden') ? 'visible' : 'hidden';
      positive = 1;
    }
    if (i>=c) { // make the blinking a bit twitchy
      delay=(longdelay * 3)/2.5 + (shortdelay *c);
    } else {
      delay=shortdelay;
    }
    if (c < colors.length) {
      c++;
    } else {
      c=0;
      positive=1;
    }
    b.style.color=colors[c];
   }
   window.setTimeout(blonk, delay);
}

blonk();
</script>

And the result is gloriously, hideously, afwul!

Now that's just plain fucked up!

Oregon's Dumbest... Aw fuck it!

Oregon's Stupidest Fucking Shithead Glibertarian is at it again.

All you need to know about today's stupidity is that "taxation is theft" -- as if that's a new and clever idea -- and that everybody was better off 100 years ago before income taxes.

No really, that's pretty much it.

I really can't even bother with this shithead anymore, it's just not worth it. I mean you'd think he would at least try!

Fuck it.

RIP Blinky

A sad, sad day. The much-maligned <blink> tag is being removed from the last browser that supported it, Firefox.

Thankfully, we can easily come up with an even more annoying alternative, our own special programmatic "blink" that has adjustable speed and alternating blinkage.

First, apply a "class" attribute to whatever you want to blink:

<div class='blink'><p>PUT ANNOYING BLINKY STUFF HERE</p></div>

You can use tags other than <div> -- <span> is a good choice too. Note that more than one item can have the same "class" so you can do that multiple times. In fact you should, because that way they'll alternate states and be extra annoying.

Now, add just a tiny bit of code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var delay=100; // change to adjust speed

function annoy() {
  var annoyances = document.getElementsByClassName('blink');
  var positive=1;
  for (var i=annoyances.length - 1; i>=0; i--) {
    var b = annoyances[i];
    if (positive === 1) {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'visible') ? 'hidden' : 'visible';
      positive = 0;
    } else {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'hidden') ? 'visible' : 'hidden';
      positive = 1;
    }
   }
   window.setTimeout(annoy, delay);
}

annoy();
</script>

Presto:

THIS SHOULD ANNOY EVERYONE

BUT IF IT DOESN'T HOW ABOUT THIS TOO?

Oh yeah, that's the stuff. The blink is dead, long live the blink!

UPDATE: I fixxorated it so it'll work (hopefully) with a new-ish version of Internet Exploder too. Woudln't want bbkf and Mooser to miss out.

Filler

Urgh, Monday. Blargh.

Here, have three-plus hours of Frank Zappa to brighten up your day:

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian, cont. Again.

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian has a new article in today's campus paper. (See here and here for the previous installments if you can stand it.)

Today we get the pleasure anguish of reading yet another article about same-sex marriage. Because nobody else in the media is talking about it from that super-special-snowflake of glibertarian perspective. Or something. At least the glibertarians usually want to allow same sex marriage, like sane people should. Unfortunately that's typically where the sanity stops with them, and indeed we'll see that here as well.

As with the last installment in this series, he starts off in semi-sane mode, if you're willing to ignore the usual "government must stay out of governing" angle:

Since the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against gay marriage last week, the bandwagon for marriage equality returned. However, the real issue remains dormant on both sides. We should not be asking government to give us “marriage equality.” Instead, the government should have no part in marriage.

Of course, it immediately continues to accelerate downhill from there:

Marriage has existed longer than the government. Marriage is not a product of the government. Many people believe marriage comes from religion and in America, we have the separation of church and state, but many other ideas of marriage exist, as well. Regardless of any one view, why does the government regulate marriage when it should not?

That's some awesometastic sentence construction there. Good thing you don't write for a newspaper or anything. But yes, why does the evil government have an interest in regulating marriage? It's not like society has any interest in encouraging healthy relationships between people. That's why we also don't regulate any sorts of violence between individuals. And have no regulations whatsoever about interaction between folks in various transactions and how various people treat other people. Because America! FREEDUMB! Fuck yeah! WOLVERINES!!!

Oh wait, what do you mean we do have all sorts of laws and regulations about all sorts of relationships between people? Contracts and such between folks that want to conduct trade without the threat of violence? Oh, yeah, we do! How silly of me.

But still, this one particular form of relationship is one the government should stay completely out of. Uh, because freedom, I guess? Let's see what he thinks:

The government requires marriage licenses in order to call a couple married. But what business of the government's is it if two people want to, and do, get married? The government should not have any rules about it. The government even requires marriage licenses. Why? The original intent of marriage licenses was to prevent interracial marriages. Marriage license laws began in the mid-1800s to stop whites from marrying anyone who was not white. By the 1920s, 38 states had state laws prohibiting the marriage of whites with other ethnicities.

As is his typical pattern, now he's just started making shit up. While he's correct about about states in the '20s specifically using laws to prevent interracial marriage, his assertion that the "original intent" was to prevent them is laughably false. Marriage licenses have been around since at least the middle ages, and were all about contracts between families. That is something glibertarians usually like, sacredfreemarket and all that. I should really stop being surprised by this guy's complete lack of historic knowledge and/or utter contempt for facts, but whatever.

At this point we know how this is going to end, and indeed it proceeds down through all the standard glibertarian tropes of evil government stealing people's money and freedom. I can't be arsed to dissect the rest of it, so just read it if you must. Here's the concluding paragraph:

Marriage equality may be the big uproar right now, but we need to look at the bigger picture. The government erodes our freedoms, and turning to them for more laws and oversight will only wear away at the few freedoms we have left. We need to tell the government to get out of marriage, to get out of our lives, and not return.

At this point I think he only wants the government to stop regulating marriage so he'll finally be able to marry Ayn Rand's corpse. I hope somebody's keeping an eye on her grave.

Not beer...

...but I may just make an exception for this.

And my whining last post paid off -- 75 degrees (nearly a record) and sunny over the weekend. About fucking time.