But there’s no such thing as ‘free’!
FTA (from Reddit): There is no 'free' lemonade
This column is a true story -- every word of it. And I think it very appropriate to consider around the Fourth of July, Independence Day spirit.
Last week, I was in a car with my brother and his fiancee, driving through their upscale neighborhood on a hot summer day. At the corner, we all noticed three little girls sitting at a homemade lemonade stand.
[My brother asked how much, and the kids said they're free.]
His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."
...
No wonder America is getting it all wrong when it comes to government, and taxes, and policy. We all act as if the "lemonade" or benefits we're "giving away" is free.
And so the voters demand more -- more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.
They're all very nice. But these things aren't free.
The government only gets the money to pay these benefits by raising taxes, meaning taxpayers pay for the "free lemonade." Or by printing money -- which is essentially a tax on savings, since printing more money devalues the wealth we hold in dollars.
If we can't teach our kids the basics of running a lemonade stand, how can we ever teach Congress the basics of economics?
Um, wtf? As Reddit titles it, "Sweet little girls give away free lemonade. Conservative columnist decides they represent everything that's wrong with America."
Firefox is free. Google services are free. Linux is free.
What really "sets me off" is people drawing conclusions too quickly.
The horrors of the Batt and my fellow Aggies
It's impossible to be ashamed of our school's newspaper editorial (the battalion), and the crappy quotes given by my fellow Aggies. I honestly don't know why I bother reading them in my RSS feed.
Allow me to present Exhibit A: Spotting the steals by Jennifer DeBose
Poorly written article
With the money saved, one can buy a side of fries or fried jalapenos, or another burger if hunger persists.
Also, if customers choose to sit inside, waiters constantly walk around offering more breadsticks for free.
There are so many ways to phrase the sentences. Not to mention the inconsistency of using "one" and "you" in the previous (unquoted) paragraphs.
Useless and truly horrifying quotes got quoted and put in the article
“They’re so tasty,”said Kendall Raabe, sophomore geology major.
“OMG, don’t get me started,” said sophomore general studies major Alli Morris. “‘Bdubs’ is by far my favorite place to eat. They have boneless Thursdays, always a sports game on and the wings are delish.”
“Rosa’s Cafe has easily the best tasting tortillas in Texas,” said Jennifer Meeks, sophomore biomedical sciences major.
Really, Jennifer? You quoted "they're so tasty"? I immediately cringed at the second quotation made by Alli Morris. Third, well, that's just horrible grammar.
See what I mean now?
The stark contrast between Texas A&M and UT-Austin
Call me a two-percenter or a shameful Aggie, but this is one more reason I dislike Texas A&M. (One of the things I complained earlier on the school year was that Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters visited UT and not A&M.)
In Matthew Poarch's article, A modest proposal, he argues "It seems like I can’t walk anywhere in town without seeing a half-clothed woman shamelessly flaunting her attributes for the entire world to see...showing too much skin when around men who are more prone to elevated emotions and lowered inhibitions"
While he was quoting Bible verses about how it is a sin for girls to dress less during summer, UT was crowned as the top Playboy's Party School 2010 (NSFW).
You know, I'm completely speechless. If you walk around the school campus, every girl dresses the same way: tshirt and these Nike track shorts. You rarely never see any girls dressed in a way that show curves. Maybe it's because the upbringings of most A&M students are more rural, so fashion isn't a huge issue. Nevertheless, A&M is the most conservative school you'll find, and it might as well be a Christian college.
I was a Catholic myself, but it's because of these A&M religious zealots that try to convert people's ideology, I am becoming more of an agnostic/atheist and less proud to be an Aggie. First, it's the anti-abortion public exhibition of dismembered fetuses that nobody wants to see. And now, it's this. Next thing you know, Matthew Poarch is out handing out these religious pamphlets that begins with, "You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed" and saying the girl provoked him into raping her because she was showing too much skin.
Sigh.
People need to separate real life from fiction
Books, movies, TV shows create a new world where laws of physics do not exist, miracles happen, and characters don't react how a normal person would. It's alright to fantasize the fictional world the media creates, but by the end of the day, you must realize that is a fictional world. It does not exist.
Take the recent popular teenage-girl novel, for example. I've never read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, but I've read/heard reviews about it. And this FML post proves my point:
Today, my girlfriend dumped me proclaiming she wanted someone more like her "Edward". I asked her who Edward was. She held up a copy her "Twilight" book. She was talking about a fictional vampire. FML
If anything, this is probably what would've happened: CollegeHumor's "Deleted 'Twilight' Sex Scene"
Anyway, back to the point. If you say, "Aww, come on. It's just a teenage girl who doesn't know any better." Okay, let's move on to my next example: 24 and torture. Anybody who have seen 24 knows it's a very intense show, and Jack Bauer never gives up a chance to torture someone until the guy gives up the info he wants. In the show, those intel are always accurate - not necessarily true in real life.
It is Day 6, between 10.00 and 11.00 in the hectic schedule of the television series 24, and a normal day at work for Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorism Unit. “People in this country are dying, and I need some information. Now are you are going to give it to me, or do I have to start hurting you?” Inevitably, he does. A few lurid torture scenes later and the terrorist confesses, the civilised world is saved for another hour or so, and Jack, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is hurtling towards his next violent confrontation with the forces of evil.
This is the central plot of 24, in many respects the only plot of 24, a brilliantly constructed, wildly popular, strikingly timely series based on a single premise that also happens to be untrue. 24 is fiction, and so is the notion that torture produces results.
...
Torture is morally repugnant and illegal, but also frequently useless. It certainly extracts confessions, but the resulting intelligence is usually flawed, and often dangerously inaccurate. Instead of undermining insurgency, routine abuse of captives has precisely the opposite effect.
...
A person confessing under torture is motivated solely by the need to end the pain, which means telling the person wielding the electrodes whatever he wants to hear. The truth is irrelevant. Indeed, the greater the agony, the more likely is the victim to say whatever is expected. Once one lie has been extracted, more lies follow to back it up.
...
Yet the idea that torture works has become deeply embedded in popular culture, thanks in large part to Jack Bauer, whose onscreen behaviour both reflected and reinforced the supposed correlation between inflicting pain and saving lives.
(Source: Times Online)
In this video, "Bill O’Reilly was desperately in search of a good argument for torture, but thanks to Cato Institute legal analyst David Rittgers — a former Army Captain — he came up empty."
Third argument: special Hollywood effects. Enough said. If not, watch some Mythbusters (If Discovery Channel lies, then I don't know what to believe anymore...)
How much is it to run my site?
Call me a cheap Asian, but I'm starting to think my hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, is overpriced. On their pricing chart, storage cost is one cent per MB per month. MySQL database is one cent per day.
Say if you have a WordPress running, with 30 MB of stuff, and assuming you have really (really) low bandwidth, that'll be $14.6 a year.
You'd say, come on, $15 a year isn't that much, but keep in mind that's only 30 MB worth of stuff. Let me put it this way - I can store 8.11 GB (276% increase in storage) of stuff on Amazon S3 with the same amount of money; $10 more, I can have Flickr pro, with unlimited storage and bandwidth (∞ increase in storage).
Something to rant about...
On the other hand, Google's CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) is looking promising. This AI-thing is happening sooner than I thought. Also, judging by her blog she created, she's really into pandas (haha)
Google is implementing CADIE on all its services: Docs (Docs on Demand) , Gmail (Google Autopilot)
The problem with diaries/blogs
I would very much love to account every detail of my trip to Taiwan, but it is so much work. It is hard to remember all of the details of each day, though the pictures I've taken would jog my memory. See, I would've written down all of the day's anecdotes, but I get tired when the night came. There's another batch of events to write about on the next day, and pretty soon, I've got 3 weeks worth of stuff to write about.
-sigh-
And now that I'm back in the States, I've got other things I got to do: finalizing a solution to all my pictures (Flickr Pro or S3 w/Gallery2), mac mini server, organizing my files, partitioning my drives, replacing hackintosh with Ubuntu, and college stuff (which encompasses a lot of stuff...). And oh, web and blog design.
And on top of that, I have my night and day flipped because of jet lag.
Off to Taiwan, but not off to a great start
The total time spent on sitting on UA economy class seats is around 17 hours, but if you add the time I had to wait for flight transfer, baggage claim, shuttle bus, and traffic, the total time that it took me to get from my Dallas home to my Taipei home, it'd be a seemingly never-ending 26 hours. I left Dallas at 5 a.m. and got home at 8 p.m. (equivalent to Dallas's 7 a.m.)