for our new President and Commander-in-Chief…

I expect no less than the following:
• Full health care should be guaranteed for all regardless of ability to pay.
• Every couple should be able to receive the full benefits of marriage, including the ability to call it marriage, regardless of the sex/gender composure of the couple.
• Begin the pursuit of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth.
• No more spending resources on irrelevant cold war era systems, within the military or otherwise.
  
• Cut military spending by at least half.

• No more relying on our National Guard for overseas military deployments, except for training.
• Resolve the Mexican immigration crisis in a meaningful way.
• The funding primary education gets in each area must no longer be based on the value of their real estate.
• Spur growth and expansion of small businesses
  
• Housing and food should be guaranteed to all regardless of ability to pay, without having to accept anything from religious institutions.

• Equal pay for equal work should be guaranteed.
• It should be guaranteed that losing employment will not lead to personal and financial ruin.
  
• All able-bodied and competent adults who are not students should be guaranteed a living wage should they wish to work full time.

• He must renegotiate our relationship with Israel (military or otherwise) based on how they treat Palestinian refugees and those living in the territory of Palestine.
• distribution and use of low and moderate risk recreational drugs should be legalized
• high-risk drug trafficking should remain illegal and enforced as such, but addiction should be decriminalized
• gasoline and diesel must be taxed higher on the federal level: for revenue and to encourage alternatives
• begin a process to normalize relations with Iran and Cuba

I will blame the new president, if any of the following happens under his watch:

• if abortion becomes illegal or less accessible in any state or territory.

• if funding and success of the current university system deteriorates one little bit (its one thing that works fairly well right now)
• nothing significant is done to reduce greenhouse gases
• if there is a significant expansion of coal fired electric plants
• war breaks out involving Pakistan or the Middle-East
• relations do not improve with Russia (even if Putin is still there, and is unreasonable)
• if religion becomes any more involved with government (expansion of faith-based initiatives, etc)
  

Side-notes, Disclaimers, Explanations:
I know this wish-list is quite a handful, but they are all items known to be well within the federal power of the president. They are all pretty reasonable, and most would be able to be accomplished within the first term with proper attention. There are many complicated issues each of these items might bring up, and some of them entail thousands of details. That’s what a president does. I simply demand the end result described in each of these items.

Notice I did not say: every American is entitled to a house, or condo, or apartment, or even private living quarters. Boarding houses would be fine for that purpose. I did not say every American is entitled to plastic surgery and teeth whitening. I did not say every American is entitled to a cozy high-paying office job. I did not say that there should be no enforcement of immigration laws, nor that the act of unintentional wrongful immigration be criminalized. I did not say every American should be able to live anywhere they might fancy. I did not say everyone should be entitled to a car. Nor did I say that every American should be guaranteed access to mechanized transportation, mass or otherwise.

There must be means by which incentive to work hard and earn more money (greater productivity) occurs. There must be means by which deadbeats (those who are able bodied but refuse to be employed) are punished. Employee pay should still be based on the current market system, with a few extra safeguards. Employers should not be penalized for hiring employees by carrying the burden of being expected to fund their health care.

Competent entrepreneurs should have access to credit; the ability to take risk, with the security they won’t be completely ruined personally should their plan fail. This will encourage a continuous spurt of small businesses, increasing revenue and productivity, and generating wealth.

The financial markets should continue to operate and be regulated as they currently are with two important exceptions: transparency, and speculation. Financial products should be regulated based on their functionality instead of their name: for example credit-default swaps should be regulated as insurance, and so on. And there should be regulation that ensures product description and marketing do not obscure their actual nature: like equity products that are backed by many prime mortgages and then “poisoned” with a handful of sub-prime. There should be a percentage tax on financial product speculation: i.e. options, short selling, etc. This speculation tax should NOT include taxing of the purchase of commodity futures contracts, but it should tax options contracts of commodity futures contracts. A speculation tax set and rules should be such that it would provide some extra for income to offset what has been/will be lost by the capital gains tax cut, without stifling a reasonable free market.

Capital gains tax should continue to be low as it is, perhaps with a progressive system that lowers the rate if the owner of capital is an individual (not a corporation) and is not a millionaire. Estate tax should be permanently eliminated for estates valued below a certain amount, I am thinking around 5 million dollars, and taxed at the same progressive rate as capital gains after that amount is reached for each individual receiving property or money from an estate. That means each individual benefiting from an estate could pay a different amount. And like I said, the rate of capital gains tax should be based on an individuals wealth (income averaged over last 5 years, net worth), meaning, it should be near negligible for the poor, intermediate for the in between, and higher (but not penalizing) to the wealthy. Estate tax elimination should not apply to corporations receiving benefit.

Universal marriage rights includes a number of simple things currently denied by the system. The ability to call any union between two people marriage. The ability to receive full benefits of marriage should be available to all unions without having to be registered formally as “married”; and members of a union should not have to claim to be married to be valid, (that is a couple should be able to term their long-term relationship by any name, or none at all in legal records), yet still receive the benefits. That means there should be a formal process available, and a union should be able to be formally recorded under any term desired by the couple, but a formal process should not required to receive the benefits and protections. This includes the ability for either couple to file for divorce and custody protection in the case of a break up. This includes the protection of hospital consultation rights without formal documents should a member of the couple become unable to communicate. It also includes access to any and all inheritance laws applicable to married couples upon death of either member. When this happens, it will finally be fully legal to be LGBT like in other modern countries.

Immigration is vital and important to the well being and vitality of America and its economy. It should not be shut off simply out of fear, hate, loathing, protectionism, etc. This only exasperbates problems abroad and at home. Immigration of individuals from less-developed countries to more-developed countries is vital component to ultimately solving the population problem. While immigrants tend to have more children then their counterparts in their homeland, the 2nd generation of immigrants have about the same birthrate as the rest of America (which is slightly less than the replacement rate, excluding 1st generation immigrants and Mormons). Immigrants are an important because they have the potential to bring expertise and wealth generating ability with them, no matter what their country of origin.

As a nation we have a complete and justifiable right to control immigration as we sit fit. We should not be compelled merely because of geography to accept a flow of immigrants without regard to their ability to integrate. Without the ability to integrate, it makes conditions worse for the immigrants themselves and to our society.

Resolving the Mexican immigration crisis means settling on an acceptable flow of immigrants, ensuring they can be integrated into society. It is a problem when our society does not get to choose where our immigrants come from. The policy should be such that it can be enforced humanely, and the policy should be competently enforced. Shortly put: this enforcement should be as tough as it needs to be, but no tougher.

I did not say Israel should not defend itself against terrorism. It must begin to treat the people under its control with dignity and equality. It is not doing that right now.

Ahem, the office of the President can work out the details of implementation. If he needs any further explanation, assistance, or advice he knows where to reach me. Thank you.

Posted by admin as Required at 8:10 AM MST

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A commentary blog has been launched by ReTran USA called Jacked. It brings to light previously unknown, unpublished, obscure, or otherwise extraordinary artwork and seeks to provide a forum for meaningful commentary. Response to the new blog has exceeded all expectations as the moderator has already had his “inbox filled with submissions from readers”. We are pleased at the Business 2.0 division to give a plug for Jacked. We pledge our full solidarity and wish to give a little teaser of what can be found there. For brevity there also exists a quick listing of the Jacked images.

The first submission is regarding the exceptional heroic epic American patriotic image of George Washington praying at Valley Forge. With a first submission like this we are in for a treat as the years pass on.

internal links:
Jacked Extraordinary Image Commentary at ReTran USA
url:http://retran.com/jacked

Listing of Jacked Images:
url:http://retran.com/jacked.htm

Posted by admin as Required at 4:24 AM MST

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Drudge Report recently displayed a headline indicating that it ranked above many prominent news sites in “market share”. It cited a weekly report from a company called Hitwise. From what I reckon this rank might be misleading.

I wish to make an informal refutation of the implied analysis that the recent Hitwise rank of new sites indicates that the Drudge site is more popular and/or important than The New York Times, Fox News, People Magazine, Yahoo! Weather, and others. Hitwise is a web statistic tracking company owned by Experian, one of the big-three credit reporting agencies. Hitwise obtains the raw information to compile web traffic statistics directly from ISPs.

The basis for my refutation of the implied analysis is quite simple. Anyone familiar with the drudge-report might as easily point this out. Drudge’s page instructs your browser to refresh once every three minutes, thus inflating the hit counts. Drudge presumably does this to keep you “up to date” but as I will argue below, this is a very outdated method. What might motivate drudge to continue to use it? Read on.

The Drudge Report, a hand-edited collection of news headlines, is unique among websites today. It has a very anachronistic look-and-feel: it consists of a single page, the home page, with few internal links of its own. Technically speaking the site is constructed completely of plain HTML except for the advertisements (a prominent ad is always placed on the top). This format was extremely popular in the mid 1990s when the web was brand new. The original NerdWorld [screenshot], and the original Yahoo Directory [screenshot], quickly come to mind. The site could very well be maintained by someone (perhaps drudge himself) hand editing a notepad file.

That’s fine in and of itself, that’s how the web has always been intended from the start. Scientists, laypeople, etc can make basic HTML to distribute information easily to potentially anyone. Yet also from the beginning of the web there were more complex features, extensibility, for more “advanced” things. It is these “advanced” features that rapidly changed over 10 years, over and over, wandering to and fro. This includes popularity of forcing users to use java implementations, all sorts of ebmedded objects such as various competing media players, and the short-lived dream of microsoft’s OCX objects. Also, the popularity of using many proprietary features has risen and waned along with the popularity of the sponsoring browser (a battle within the browser wars). One of these were the use of META tags to do all sorts of things that are standard now done with Javascript. And also there were many competing methods to do the same thing in Javascript. I have casually observed that since around 2004 there have not been any significant “feature battles” within the (still ongoing) browser wars as the standards have been settled upon. To say it briefly, the consensus is: flash for games/video/animation/fancyshit (as opposed to slow-bloated Java or insecure OCX); and AJAX for most everything else (includes Javascript, CSS, and XML, but more broad explanation is beyond the scope here).

Drudge uses an outdated method to update information to a user’s browser screen. The proper way would involve AJAX dynamically changing the visible text. This updated text could be obtained by a now-standard AJAX process, safely in the background of a users computer. This does not require refresh and information is updated as often as the website owner likes. Even in real time: like Google’s implementation of live streaming quotes in its finance section, or its email service Gmail. But Drudge uses a brute forced refresh of the page. This exactly mimics a user pressing “refresh” button, except its done without the user’s permission. That means when you visit the drudge-report site, as you are reading through the headlines your reading experience will be disrupted multiple times by an automatic refresh. This is done once every three minutes. If you keep the screen open for a moment more than three minutes, it will register with your ISP that you have visited the page 2 times. That’s two hits, where for normal websites (including all the ones that rank below and above drudge), it would only register as one hit. The potential cumulative effect this would have on hit statistics is not hard to see. Website tracking services, internal or external, could not tell the difference between a user initiated website visit and an automatic brute-forced browser refresh merely by compiling hit counts of URLs.

It has probably served drudge well over the years to keep this old fashioned refresh method on his site. He could afford AJAX reprogramming of his site. Its standard stuff now: most very smalltime business sites implement some AJAX.

There is no indication in the Hitwise report (including their background statement or any other place on the web where I’ve done my due diligence) that suggests they take brute-force refresh on drudge’s site into account with their site popularity ratings! (Hitwise uses the term “market share” instead of popularity). If it seems ridiculous that drudge outranks The New York Times and Yahoo, that’s because it is. Yahoo! web pages are the 2nd most popular set on the internet, for god’s sake. Would advertisers relying on such ranking data be well advised to take that into consideration? Hitwise’s opacity on the matter of how/if it takes drudge’s outdated browser-refresh method into account are bound to make it less relevant among serious web stat analysis makers.

However odd the drudge report is, it has somehow managed to remain very important. If you want to keep up on what headlines drudge is currently cutting & pasting there are alternatives to using his site directly. Blipnews.com describes itself as the Drudge Report news aggregator. One might forgive blipnews for spamming the comments sections of news sites linked from drudge only because it displays the headlines in a mildly more thoughtful format than Drudge itself. Another aggregator of the aggregator is found on DrudgeReportArchives.com. Besides having daily snapshots of past Drudge Reports, it has a feature which lists current and past compilations of drudge headlines in a format that is as nice to look at and work with as an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps out of habit I use the official Drudge site, but only with the NoScript firefox-addon to keep drudge from refreshing my browser. (not because I am attempting to make hit stats fair, but because it’s damn annoying)

External Information:
US Ranking of News Sites from Hitwise for week ending October 25, 2008 (see source below)
1. Yahoo News
2. CNN.com
3. MSNBC
4. The Weather Channel
5. Google News
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. Fox News
9. People Magazine
10. Yahoo! Weather

External Links:
Drudge Report (C) 2009
url:http://www.drudgereport.com

Drudge Report Archives (C) 2008
url:http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/dsp/links_recap.htm

Blipnews.com
url:http://blipnews.com

Hitwise News and Media Category Weekly Report (for the week ending October 25, 2008)
http://www.drudgereport.com/hit3.pdf
(available on ReTran USA for now because the drudge site uses a strange embedding method for the PDF doc that raises security flags on many browsers)
url:http://www.retran.com/wtf/hit3.pdf

Drudge Report snapshot containing the “Hitwise Shock” headline via DrudgeReportArchives
url:http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2008/10/31/20081031_153241.htm

Hitwise a subsidiary of Experian(tm)
url:http://www.hitwise.com

to see how similar Drudge is to ancient web formats:
Nerd World (1998 version via archive.org)
screenshot:http://retran.com/wtf/nerdworld97.jpg
url:http://web.archive.org/web/19971210162538/http://www.nerdworld.com/

Yahoo! (1996 version via archive.org)
screenshot:http://retran.com/wtf/yahoo96.jpg
url:http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com/

[ps: why is drudge copyrighted for year that has not happened yet?]

Posted by admin as Required at 8:09 PM MST

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Elections are close. So close. It has me tingling with anxiety. But not really tingling, and not really any anxiety. It’s been a simple time really.

I make under $250,000 and therefore would be eligible for Obama’s tax cuts for the middle-class. As this fact is embarrassing, I support John McCain to make me feel like I am shooting for something big, however unlikely the possibility, something big like becoming a multi-millionaire within the couple months.

I yearn to be wealthy, much more wealthy than I currently am. I have dreams of being wealthy and being able to personally affect the world in what would in my view be a positive way. I dream of using that money myself without the use of experts to promote that good, in an arbitrary way as I see fit without myself being an expert in using money to promote human welfare in the least. I have a right to use my money as I see fit.

For the wealthy to share the same proportional tax burden as the middle-class just does not make sense. I earned it. It’s my money. The concept of maintaining and even strengthening the existing system of humans’ differential access to resources is very important to me. Even, thoughtlessly, to my own personal detriment, and to the detriment of friends, loved ones, and to the detriment of bereaved groups of society with whom I feel fleeting senses of sympathy for occasionally.

My world view is such that it requires me to take only an extremely narrow set of issues into account when selecting political candidates that I will support. The fact of the criteria being so narrow allows me to have more leisure time and avoid wasting hours in intense thoughtful contemplation on other issues that are pertinent to me and those I love. In fact the criteria is so narrow, it can be enumerated by only the use of four words (a total of 22 letters excluding punctuation).

This does not mean I mind a little thought now and again upon the limp-wristed, shaved-headed-female, brown-tampon, breast-implanted-male, female-skateboard-riding, confused and obviously abused one-third of society. Just enough thought to say that statement alone gives that to-be-kept-unnamed portion of society all the attention it needs, requires, and deserves. End of story.

No matter how far along an individual, well I guess this only applies to all females, is in the reproductive process, even just at the point of a seminal fluid stream where pregnancy is merely a theory, disrupting that process in any way whatsoever should be considered a heinous crime. Any and all human behavior that disrupts these people with reproductively disruptive thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, actions is completely ethical and permissible. Within reason of course.

I also will spend lots of time ignoring the problems that ownership of modern portable powerful high-energy weapons bring to millions of people living in certain darker parts of the nation. Even to the point of insisting that the law as practiced be structured in such a way as to knowingly exasperate that set of problems. Enough said, especially since I have never had to deal with the consequences on a constant basis.

Thank you everyone for the prolonged length of time I’ve been able to feel comfortably at ease this election season.

Posted by admin as Required at 3:54 AM MDT

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the following is an excerpt from a recent telephone conversation between Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and a mysterious major religious denomination leader:

mystery-leader-X: now Orrin, you’ve realize that there are way more active women the Church than men right
Hatch: of course, everyone knows that because women are penalized more for inactivity and falling away from Church teachings than men, and they’re trained to be more gullible within our Church programs as well
leader-X: well, then we both also understand that our Church welfare system only gives assistance to who are active in our Church, and pay a full tithe, etc
Hatch: certainly, I wouldn’t think about giving my charity to an organization that did not discriminate in such a fashion
leader-X: excellent. Well lets put these two facts together. It is inevitable that there will be many single mothers who are active in our church
Hatch: uh huh…
leader-X: yes. and it is also inevitable that they will often have circumstances where the traditionally meager pay in our great and beloved state will cause these mothers to fall short in things such as unexpected health expenses. even young families with less earning power are falling short and requiring assistance from our “fast offering”
Hatch: so you’re saying, that its these health expenses are taking a bite out of Church coffers because of the number of poor families without adequate health care for their children. now I thought fast-offering was separate from tithing?
leader-X: yes, technically it is. but really this money all comes from the same source; the wage earning members. also, when a family hits hard times they tend to pay us less tithing and also have less money in fast-offerings. with less money we have less money thus less power and control over people and resources we dole out on a meager basis
Hatch: i see where you’re going with this. you need me to…
leader-X: let’s be clear here. I don’t need you, God need’s you. this came whilst i was pondering solemly in the holy-of-holies, that very room where you and I met years ago when the last Senator, what was his name, heh.. fell out of line
Hatch: got it. God needs me to vote with the satanic democrats to have the government pay health care money, so the Church gets more donation money! I will take this very seriously
leader-X: think of it this way; would you appreciate your Temple visits so much if there was simply a $10,000 dollar chandelier in the Celestial room? no. I dare say the Lord would be reluctant to visit such a room. we need at least a $100,000 chandelier for the Lord’s spirit to be present with our faithful temple worshipers
Hatch: make sure God knows I’m on it. I shall collude with the wicked Democrats.. oh hey what about that Harry Reid guy…
leader-X: just please dont mention him, those saints in Nevada i just don’t know.

Posted by admin as Required at 3:32 PM MDT

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Anatoliy Dyatlov had been working as a nuclear engineer at the same plant for quite some time. Generating cheap, safe, and efficient electricity for millions of users for important things like idling computers, powering DSL modems when nobody is home, keeping refrigerators full of moldy leftovers operational. Avoiding brownouts so that important devices like electric toothbrush chargers, xbox 370s, and iPhones http://www.apple.com/iphone do not become permanently damaged. As you know keeping a nuclear reactor is not a trivial task suitable for just anyone like those who head up customer service departments.

With his serious training it was obvious Anatoliy was serious about safety. He decided it was time to upgrade the computers from the “old fashioned” main-frame and dumb-terminal based system to a Windows XP system (replacing the terminals). MS-SQL server running on Windows XP Server spread across 4 or 5 machines would replace the clunky old reliable main-frame.

Thanks to windows XP he and his crew was reminded about very important occurances on their computers they would never have been aware about previously under the old setup. While running computer simulations of various reactor states the Taskbar usefully notified a crewmember that “You Have Unused Icons”. This Windows spread the responsibility of marginally important computer tasks to everyone, not just the nerdy IT guys. It was a breakthrough and perhaps after so long the help desk could be phased out entirely thanks to Windows. It was a Wednesday morning, and another of his crew was notified during examination of controls that there was a “Critical Update” and that “You’ve received an Instant Message”.

These were surely important events because they came from the computer, and Windows was designed to make sure these events seemed every bit as important to a user as the applications a user actually chose to run on their own. This is another great feature. The users aren’t trusted to know what is the most important, nor are the applications themselves (especially non Microsoft affiliated applications, like the nuclear simulators). Its kind of a breakthrough because before the user would just be lost in their own world of whatever program they were using, not realizing they had unused icons or mysterious software “updates” that are so critical to the modern computing experience. Upon turning on the interface to the reactor (which was a USB device) users learned that “This device could perform faster with USB 2.0”. So now the engineers can spend time figuring out what the hell USB 2.0 is and if it really has anything to do with how they plugged it in. Perhaps the cord is too long? Perhaps the hub they are using is antiquated? Oh wait, it’s the device itself? Well now what. Nevermind. Employees devote time to use the world wide web and see if they have updated the nuclear reactor USB 2.0 interface cards through Shopping.Yahoo.Com. Thankfully Yahoo has installed so many toolbars on internet explorer there is not much room to view the web pages themselves, content can be distracting.

Posted by admin as Required at 4:28 AM MDT

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I attended the Wordcamp 2007 in San Francisco. I was not really expecting to go until a month ago when my friend and employer suggested I go. There a few strange characters who spoke on the first day, and the second day was MANY strange characters. More on that later.

I found the cheapest most terrible hotel that Hotels.com would list information on. As luck would have it the instant I checked out laborers were removing the hotel furniture hastily out of the rooms, then smashing them to pieces on the side of the road. Danging television sets by the cord they would swing them into a rusty container that was probably supposed to be a dumpster. A Russian man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt (with the hood up while inside) who had been working the front desk informed me the hotel was recently purchased to some aggressively expanding art college in San Francisco and it was going to be a new dormitory. Those poor students. Late into every night constructions crews would operate the loudest and most rattling combinations of heavy equipment. It would then begin in the morning. Perhaps the new building across the street had to be finished in an extreme hurry. Rest in peace Olympic Hotel: Deceptively their website is still up and so is their listing on Hotels.com.

This was my first chance to experience and interact with actual real-life heroin addicts as well. Absurdly skinny blond females cuddling involuntarily next to crazy old men ranting nonsense in the soggy San Francisco morning. A more lucky schizophrenic woman I sat next to kept ordering fast food items from me on the Bart ride back to the airport.

I found if I wished help when I was about to kill myself I should be somewhere besides the Golden Gate Bridge because their emergency counseling phones are out of order.

Posted by admin as Required at 9:31 AM MDT

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Per settlement, the following transcript is required to appear prominently on RETRAN.COM
{conversation between “customer” and ReTran USA award winning service department}
Customer:
Is ReTran USA aware that CafePress products require that a vendor provide high resolution images so the logos do not look pixilated on the clothing?
Customer Service Dept:
If you don’t like them, just purchase one for full price some place else.
Customer:
No, I didn’t mean to… I was just suggesting!…
Customer Service Dept:
[interrupts customer] Maybe we’ll just intercept the package before it arrives so you wont be able to have your maternity shirt before your scheduled abortion.
Customer:
Please, I need it!

[Editor]:
That is right. If you submit proof that you or a close friend or mate is scheduled for an abortion, ReTran USA will supply you with a high-quality Maternity fitted shirt with a pixilated face on it from The ReTran USA Profit Website. Just email abortion@retran.com for details.
{remainder redacted}

Posted by admin as Required at 7:21 AM MDT

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