Day: August 18, 2003

Radio Userland Is Broken

Dave Winer complains today that a story about RSS left out any mention of Radio Userland. According to Winer,

There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you’re done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio’s aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.

No, actually Radio’s aggregation features suck for precisely this reason. I know this because I’m using Radio as an aggregator.

Well, technically I’m ignoring it at the moment because it’s impossible to actually use Radio Useralnd if you want to subscribe to a lot of feeds.

This is something I’ve written about before. Net News Wire has a very nice system that lets you organize and aggregate feeds by categories the user defines (see this nice screenshot). But Dave doesn’t work that way, so the odds of seeing this in Radio is non-existent (please port Net News Wire to Windows!)

Dave says all you need are your feeds in reverse chronological order like a weblog. Earth to Dave — relying on reverse chronological listing as the main organizing principle for news is stupid. Ever visited Google News? Notice how they divided the stories into categories? Same thing with the New York Times.

But the world according to Dave is that all anybody ever needs is a reverse chronological listing and so that’s that. As a result I see RSS feeds arranged like this:

Wi-Fi Networking News (2 items)

AllAfrica News: Zimbabwe (2 items)

AllConsuming ( 9 items)

BoingBoing! (6 items)

CNET News.Com (5 items)

Moreover Animal News (3 items)

Moreover Asia (6 items)

NYT Business (1 item)

NYT Homepage (5 items)

Tomalak’s Realm (1 item)

BBC News Home Page (7 items)

Animal Concerns News Service (5 items)

Moreover SE Asia (14 items)

Moreover Asia Pacific (15 items)

Samizdata.Net (2 items)

Register (1 item)

FARK (5 items)

Yahoo! Oddly Enough (5 items)

Yahoo! Strange News (2 items)

Reuters Science (2 items)

Scientific American (1 items)

New Scientist (2 items)

EurekAlert (1 item)

Economist:Books (1 item)

Dave would never have the animal-related feeds and tech-related feeds grouped together, so why would I ever want this? It’s the Henry Ford principle — any color you like as long as it’s black (or reverse chronological).

The upshot is that I rarely bother to even check Radio’s aggregated feed anymore. It’s much more efficient to visit these sites in groups using Mozilla’s tab features than it is to wade through the chaotic output of Radio Userland.

Government Spending Is Not Capital Investment

Dave Winer apparently believes government spending is like private investment,

His homilies were hackneyed and dishonest, for example he repeated the story pols love to tell, about passing on debt to the next generations, as if anyone who thought borrowing for growth meant they don’t love his grandchildren. It’s misleading, the grandchildren get to live in a richer world because of the debt we create today.

Borrowing to create wealth is certainly a great idea. To suggest that is what government deficit spending is misses more points than I can go into here (in fact one of the appalling things about current deficits is that this will need to be recovered from future taxpayers who could better use it for investment that generates real wealth).

This post was modified to make it clear that that future taxpayers get screwed by deficit spending.

Moral Blinders from Another Era

I haven’t been much of a fan of conservative columnist Mona Charen, but her book Useful Idiots is an excellent look at the cast and crew of Left-liberals who were willing to look the other way or make excuses toward the Soviet Union. Unfortunately I didn’t get very far into it before I got a book recall notice from the library here, but I can’t return it without repeating a quote she digs up from then-ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young.

According to Charen, Young spoke at a New York church on “Human Rights Sunday” and explained to the audience that,

We must recognize that they [the Soviets] are growing up in circumstances different from ours. They have, therefore, developed a completely different concept of human rights. For them, human rights are essentially not civil and political, but economic. . . . One lives in a land where, in most of that land, the sun sets as early as three o’clok in the afternoon, and where the planting season is minimal. Under those circumstances the struggle for human rights inevitably becomes far more economic in its expression that it would in a country such as ours, where we almost take it for granted that anything can grow almost anywhere year ’round.

As Charen notes, this was pretty much a straight-ahead parroting of Soviet justifications of their human rights abuses and failed economic policies. As Charen puts it (emphasis added),

It may not have occurred to a single one of his listeners in that fashionable church in Manhattan that day, but there was something almost obscene about an officer of the United States government lecturing the U.S. on sympathy towad the Soviet Union’s farmers. For in donig so he was not actually seeking sympathy for ordinary Russians — a sympathy richly deserved — but toward the government that enslaved them. The peoples of the Soviet republics were not deprived because the growing season is short and the sun scarce in that part of the world (the country had been relatively well fed under the last tsar); they were deprived because their government had committed genocide against its farmers for more than a decade beginning in 1920 and stretching into 1933.

Just take out that “almost” up there, and Charen nails it.

Judge Hears Arguments in Pheasant Hunting Case

In July a federal judge heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals aimed at ending a ring-tailed pheasant hunting season at Cape Cod National Seashore.

The groups filed the lawsuit last fall and attempted to obtain an injunction to stop the hunt, which was turned down by the judge.

The groups that the National Park Service has never performed an environmental impact study of the pheasant hunting, and that such a study would likely find against the hunt. The case is complicated by the fact that the ring-tailed pheasant is a non-native species to Cape Cod. Every hundreds of the birds are bought by the state, trucked to Cape Cod National Seashore, and released the night before the October hunt.

Kimberly Ockene, a lawyer representing the animal rights groups, was quoted by the Boston Globe as asking,

Why should the federal government be supporting something as inhumane as this on national parkland for a few hundred hunters? They’re supporting and authorizing a program to truck in nonnative species that are farm-raised and completely unprepared to survive in the world.

According to the Globe, he practice of stocking pheasants for hunting began in 1906 and Massachusetts releases 40,000 pheasant across the state every year.

Eugenia Carris, an assistant U.S. attorney for the National Park Service, told the judge that the stocking of pheasants would likely be phased out as the Park Service restores the area’s natural greenery and native game birds return. Carris said,

The park has to balance various interests, the interests of people who want to use the land in a traditional recreational way with the interests of people who want to abolish hunting. We’re talking about a few hundred birds that don’t live that long. Thy are not invasive. There’s no evidence there’s significant effect on the environment.

Source:

Pheasant stocking is target of lawsuit. Andrea Estes, Boston Globe, July 16, 2003.

PETA's Anti-KFC Billboard

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals found its latest billboard attacking KFC widely rejected before finding a billboard company in Illinois willing to take the group’s money.

In a press release, PETA said,

Showing Col. Sanders spattered in blood and clutching a terrified chicken in one hand and a bloody butcher knife in the other, PETA?s new billboard, reading, “Kentucky Fried Cruelty ? We Do Chickens Wrong,” has just gone up in Springfield as part of PETA?s international campaign to pressure KFC to crack down on cruel treatment of animals by its suppliers. The billboard was rejected by nervous advertisers in cities all over North America. The billboard is located along North Grand Avenue on the right side, 50 feet east of 6th Street.

In a news report from the Edmonton Sun, PETA’s Dan Shannon responded to questions about the billboard (an Edmonton billboard owner rejected it) explaining that,

We’re frustrated. We think this is an important message that people need to hear.

You have to love PETA. Kill a chicken to eat it: bad. Kill a human being as part of a serial killing spree: good.

Sources:

Billboard company chickens out on campaign. Rob Drinkwater, Edmonton Sun, May 9, 2003.

Ad Depicts Knife-Wielding Col. Sanders “Doing Chickens Wrong”. Press Release, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, July 8, 2003.