If you want to dramatically raise unemployment with the poor, then by all means advocate for "living wage" laws. Did you know that some cities already have living wage laws? The resultant unemployment amongst the poor in those cities is probably publicly available on the net somewhere. New York, for instance, has areas that have living wage laws. And here's what happens: Let's say I have a living wage law that says that you must pay at least $10 per hour. One publicized example was a...
Having a search engine also being the one who provides the ads makes for interesting reading. Check the bottom right of your blog and you'll see the google ads. But here's the kicker - the google ads are based on Google's search engine results. So you can see what kinds of people are visiting your site, to a degree, based on what types of things are being advertised. I was reading Tangled Wishes website and the ads were about personal relationships, meeting people, that sort of thing. I r...
Stardock is a very profitable company. But I hate to say it, but we could be immensely more profitable than we are if we were just willing to do things we don't think people would like. For instance, our site, WinCustomize, is the world's most popular skin site. But it loses money every month. It doesn't even come close to paying for itself. At the same time, it has to compete against websites whose skins install spyware. Needless to say, they make a lot more money than us. Occasiona...
Oh yea...this is a leap year. 29 days this month and it's sooo awesome. Employers all over the world know what I speak of. For those of you who get paid a salary, you work an extra day this year. No extra pay. Just extra days. EXCCELLLENNNT! It's great. At our company, salaries make up the vast majority of our expenses. So February 29 is like a free day. So the thousands of dollars in revenue for that day are basically pure gravy. Mmmmm. Gravy. Each day I tell my co-workers: "I...
In hindsight it was probably a mistake for the Democrats to start trying to smear Bush with the AWOL nonsense. When one side of zealots begins smearing the other side, that other side's zealots are bound to strike back. And it looks like Kerry's glass house is about to get shattered. Wesley Clark told reports that Kerry has an "Intern problem" and predicted that Kerry's campaign would implode as a result. Sure enough, The Drudge Report (linked to at the bottom of this article) has a report t...
I didn't accomplsih as much as I had hoped today. Lots of busy work. As my friend and co-worker Kris would say, too many things in the oven. Did spend some time on The Political Machine. Now that it's up and running on my laptop (stayed up until 4am on that and still had to go into the office) I'll be able to work on it more. JoeUser is up to nearly 80 new articles today. I am hoping we will be able to officially launch the site in early March. Still a few more features we gotta have in th...
Democrats are talking about "Two Americas" in which they crudely separate Americans into two categories: The noble have-nots and the corrupt haves. Calling such a description an oversimplification would be charitable. Republicans and Democrats talk past each other because they, fundamentally, don't understand each other. There is no "compromise" really possible because they approach their positions from completely alien points of view. When someone tries to pro...
So if we can combine Comcast with Disney we can create some sort of super villain type scenario. Oh boy.
Not too excited to hear Mexicans treating our soccer team this way . Booing the US national anthem and yelling "Osama" as a soccer game in Mexico helps make the case that the US really needs to secure the border. It's not just that Mexican illegal immigrants aren't assimilating as well as other cultures have for economic reasons, they're not assimilating because unlike other immigrants, there's a considerable number of them quite hostile to the US. I have seen interviews with imm...
I didn't realize that the newer laptop didn't have Visual Stuido. In fact, it doesn't have development tools on it in general! Having gotten in at 11am I spent most of the day pouring through email, getting DesktopX 2.1 announced, and taking care of various "biz stuff". At 9pmish I got home and started on getting the laptop ready which included downloading the 200+ meg DirectX 9 SDK. Good grief it's huge. And stupid too as it it's just a bit self extracting EXE with an installer in it. Woul...
In 2002 we had the GUI Olympics . It was a contest to see who could create the best user interface designs for the Windows GUI. The tool used was WindowBlinds to apply them. The contest was a huge success. Something over 100 skins were submitted. But while the contest was a huge hit, running it was an absolute nightmare. The politics behind the scenes nearly brought it all to a screeching halt. The near-disaster should have been easy for us to predict but we were a bit naive o...
Anyone who's written enough on-line over a long enough period of time knows that there are a lot of people out there who write before they think. This is particularly true on Blog Sites. My favorite blog, USS Clueless , doesn't allow any comments on his articles. He used to have a message board but eventually he grew weary of the idiocy there and disbanded that too. We have some advantages in that our IT staff can put together some interesting options for bloggers. Ultimately, JoeUs...
One of the biggest challenges in designing a US Presidential political strategy game is balancing the fun factor with accuracy. And nothing quite exemplifies this as much as coming up with political issues for the game to have. Ultimately, as political junkies, we decided to throw out wisdom and not make the political issues generic but instead contemporary. That puts the burden on us to keep updating the game but at the very least players will be able have an advantage in ...
I highly recommend reading this article: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/236jmcbd.asp It is a very good article that discusses why the US went to war with Iraq in the first place. It never ceases to amaze me that two things about the on-line world always remain true: 1) How little people know about the facts of history and 2) How willing they are to go on-line and demonstrate this. The United States and UK went into Iraq because it believed, correctl...
I don't watch a lot of TV. I just don't have time. So when I do watch TV I want to watch the things I want to watch and not just whatever is on. For that reason, I've been an advocate of PVRs (Personal Video Recorders). 2 years ago, I bought a software PVR called Snapstream. It was a good start but fairly primitive at the time. So I went and got a Tivo and have been quite happy with it since then. But Snapstream has made steady progress on their PVR and rebranded it "Beyond TV&qu...