Tag Archives: Politics

by Ben Trube | October 24, 2012 · 5:29 AM

It’s Not The Economy, Stupid!

Both candidates for President have tried to frame the economy as being the most important issue. This is an assumption that is carried forward into mainstream news media, and just about every corner of political commentary.

But is the economy really how any of us are going to make our decision for president? Personally, I don’t buy it, and I think most of the reasons we vote for one guy or the other have little to do with the issues as everyone wants to frame them.

First off, many of us simply vote party lines. We’d rather vote for a dead republican than a live democrat. Now one could argue that we some of us choose the party we’re affiliated with because of economic philosophies, but those are general principles not specific to an election cycle.

Many people don’t want to vote for Obama because he’s black, Muslim and not born in this country. Hopefully these people are in the minority, but there has been enough nonsense tossed around about these issues by news outlets like Fox News that more people believe them than ever should.

Many people have other wedge issues, abortion, gun rights that trump everything else.

Many people are uncomfortable with the fact Romney is Mormon. If you’re the kind of guy who makes his decision based on who you can have a beer with, or even coffee, Romney’s not your man. And I do think that there is a difference between evangelical Christianity and Mormonism one that makes a lot of conservative Christians less than comfortable with him.

Many of us just don’t like the other guy’s personality. We think Obama is cold and a technocrat, and we think Romney is an arrogant jackass.

Most of us have still had jobs these last four years. As concerned as we might be about the economy in general, and whatever scares we might have been through, the story for the majority of Americans is one of continued employment. I’m not saying you can’t still be worried about the economy if you have a job, but I do think it leaves you more open to other factors in making your decision.

Many of us are concerned about international relations more than social issues. Iran is a threat and Syria is a human rights debacle. We want someone who is tough on our enemies and doesn’t piss off our allies.

And lastly, most of us made up our mind about who to vote for months ago. In these last two weeks the candidates are fighting for an incredibly small but valuable piece of the pie. But even undecided voters will probably make their decision for a lot of the reasons I expressed above. It’s not like we don’t know both side’s opinion on how to handle the economy. In the end we just have to go with our gut.

Politics is sports, we root for the home team no matter how they are doing. Who won these debates is largely determined by who you liked in the first place. We cheer for our guy, and can’t believe how people could ever like the other guy. Its 6:28am and Romney still sucks, etc. We like to think that we are making these decisions for important reasons, and many of us are, just not the ones the candidates want to think we are.

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Tagged as Economy, Election, Obama, Politics, Romney

by Ben Trube | October 17, 2012 · 5:15 AM

I Heart NPR

I love public radio and television.

My local station is WOSU, out of the campus of THE Ohio State University, and I can drive by it on Olentangy River Road on my way to a writing session.

Now before you become too worried, I’m not here to debate the federal subsidy (which is really tiny), or Mitt Romney’s feelings on Big Bird (he did say he loves him after all). I think the Obama ad featuring the big yellow bird was stupid, and the Children’s Television Workshop was right to ask him to take it down (something I’m not sure he did).

I just want to tell you I heart NPR.

I got the back struts on my car and my wife’s car fixed because of listening to Car Talk. I unpacked a lot of the Foxconn controversy and the financial meltdown with This American Life and On Point. I heard touching stories of my college president, his daughter, and a legacy his wife left many years after her passing. And I get a weekly laugh with the irreverant Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (particularly their Sandwich Mondays).

I listen on the radio, through podcasts, and reading their website. I can download the full audio of the debate, without commentary, the day after the event from the NPR “It’s All Politics” page. Every Friday I can download the “Pop Culture Happy Hour” podcast and listen to a panel talk about TV, music and all sorts of pop culture conundrums.

Simply put, I learn about culture, science, economics, politics and life, and they ask so little in return.

It’s pledge season til the end of the week. I used to think pledge drives were a drag, but with Ira Glass calling up people who don’t give and giving them “radio justice”, Alec Baldwin’s fervant speeches AGAINST NPR, and the local color which made me laugh out loud on my drive home, I’ve changed my tune. They’re not talking about Romney’s comments, or threats to Big Bird, they’re just trying to get a handful of us to support the thing we love so we don’t have to listen to ads all the time.

If you heart NPR, consider giving. Otherwise Ira might have to call you at home.

A Matching Sweaters Interview with Obama and Romney

I am soooo tired from watching the debate last night. I’m not going to waste your time trying to convince you which is the better candidate, that’s what Facebook is for. Instead I thought I’d just list a few of my impressions in no particular order:

– Jim Lehrer still has the blackest eyes of anyone I have seen on television. Does he even have whites in his eyes?

– Romney cracked a joke about Obama’s anniversary and being stuck with him. I laughed.

– Romney likes Big Bird (and Jim Lehrer) but doesn’t want the government to subsidize them. I’m sorry, he likes Big Bird?

– The conversation was more free format than I would have expected. I like this.

– Obama talks a LOT. And slower than Romney. Jay Pharaoh is doing a good impression with those long pauses and the low guttural … uh.

– We have only three minutes left to talk about partisan gridlock, and Jim Lehrer is eating half of them.

– Romney came off MUCH better than I expected, but he’s still kind of a tool.

– Obama needs to look at Mitt and not his notes.

– I think Taran Killam will play Lehrer in the cold open on Saturday. I will be exhausted from watching OSU football and the Stewart v. O’Reilly debate.

– I don’t need specific cases of who you talked to, either of you. Statistical outliers do not a policy make.

– Next time I’m playing a drinking game. Thank God Biden’s the next debate.

I’m gonna take a cat nap.

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Tagged as Debate, Humor, Politics, Presidential, Random

by Ben Trube | September 5, 2012 · 5:08 AM

The Gigabyte Tax

Image Courtesy of XKCD

Hard drive and flash drive manufacturers are taxing your devices. It’s insidious and I think the public has a right to know the two ways your drive is being taxed!

Ever notice that the size of a folder is sometimes smaller than the size it takes up on the disk? You can see the truth in this by looking at the properties of any file or folder. The reason is the size of your file chunks. See, a file is not stored right next to another file or even all the pieces of itself. It’s broken up into buckets of the same size. For big files the empty space in these buckets is small but for small files it can add up quick.

These chunks can’t have pieces of two different files inside them, and the chunks must all be the same size. NTFS, the standard file system on Windows hard drives, has chunks of 4 kilobytes. Many programs have thousands of tiny files, storing settings and other data. Let’s say we have 1024 one kilobyte files, or one megabyte. Since each file needs its own bucket, and the buckets are 4 kilobytes in size, our 1 megabyte of files takes up 4 times as much space. On flash drives there is even more wasteful storage spending, with chunk sizes of 16 or 32 kilobytes. Our 1 meg in files can take up as much as 32! (For CDs and DVDs this is not true since they use a file system that uses every bit of space).

But that’s only one tax you have to pay. When you buy an 8 gigabyte flash drive what you get is only about 7.47 gigabytes. That’s a more than 6% tax! It gets even worse at higher capacities. I bought one 64Gb drive that was 59.5Gb and the same brand a month or so later and only got 57.5! That’s a 33% tax increase in a month, raising my rates to more than 10%!

See drive makers aren’t using the engineering definition of a gigabyte. They’re selling you a GB not a Gb. A GB may be a 1000 megabytes instead of 1024, or even less. My own hard drive tax is 200Gb+. That’s 250 movies or 1000s of songs and pictures.

However you vote this November, make sure they are willing to sign a pledge to stem the tide of the gigabyte tax. It hurts small businesses and digital hoarders everywhere.