Internal Monologue

GREE International is hiring!

2012-01-24T23:05:00.000+03:30

GREE International, is a mobile social gaming and platform company. We are trying to double in size in under 6 months. We have A LOT of money and 73 open positions. These include Programmers (Android, iOS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Unity3d), Build Engineers, Sales Engineers, QA Engineers, Network Engineers, Product Managers, System Administrators, 2D Artists, Web/Graphic Designers, UI/UX Designers, Marketers, Studio Directors, Copywriters, Lawyers, HR Generalists, Recruiters, Japanese Technical Translators, and people who do Customer and Community Management, Data Analysis, Business Operations (whatever that is), Corporate Development, Business Development, Business Intelligence, Public Relations, and management (Director and VP level) for most of those kinds of positions.

Must be able to relocate to Bay Area. There is a giant sucking sound of people being inhaled into the company. Apply here.

Starz and Netflix in a spat

2011-09-02T22:08:00.002+04:30

I really hope Starz and Netflix work out their differences and come to an agreement. For their sake, more than mine. If people can't get their video legitimately, that will just bolster the illegal methods. Really, BitTorrent clients are not that hard to use (or so I've heard), and the more people figure that out, the worse it will be for people who produce and distribute video content and hope to charge money for doing so. Have they learned nothing from the music industry?

Yay! California joins the national popular vote for president movement

2011-08-19T23:32:00.003+04:30

Internal Monologue has long been an advocate of this:

A national movement aimed at sidelining the Electoral College in presidential elections got a big boost Monday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation adding California to the list of states supporting the drive.
Brown's signature makes California the ninth state to sign on to the effort, which would hand the electoral votes of all participating states to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Currently, California's 55 electoral votes go to the person who wins the most votes in the state.

Note that this law only kicks in if states with a majority of the electoral college votes have a similar law.

The Electoral College is a national embarrassment and needs to be sidelined. It is a vestige of anti-democratic forces that have no legitimate place in today's polity. This is a great way to get around the EC without amending the Constitution. The latter would be very difficult to do, because states that are over-represented would be very reluctant to relinquish their unfair share of power.

The Electoral College is one of the political institutions that privileges rural, conservative interests over urban, progressive ones, because low-population states get proportionally more power in the EC than high power ones. If laws like this had been in effect in 2000, Al Gore would have defeated George Bush, regardless of how the small amount of contested votes in Florida were handled.

I do hope other states join us. It's good to hear some political good news for once!

You know patent law is screwed up...

2011-08-16T02:13:00.001+04:30

...when Google pays $12.5 billion dollars for Motorola, primarily to use its portfolio of patents in lawsuit wars.

This is a lame-ass state of affairs and doesn't benefit anyone except lawyers and patent trolls.

Invest in children

2011-08-14T08:39:00.002+04:30

The basic point of this TED talk is that at-risk children are woefully under-capitalized in our society. Early childhood intervention provides the public a fantastic rate of return that any venture capitalist would jump on immediately. This is exactly the sort of thing that will help our society be strong, and unfortunately it's exactly the sort of thing that gets cut, because the constituents lack political power.

Delightfully Morbid Statistics

2011-07-26T22:30:00.002+04:30

Here's a chart that shows what dollar value various government agencies assign to a human life when doing their cost-benefit analyses. Via Yglesias.

Some commenters reacted negatively to the very idea of cost-benefit analysis and human life. I guess my reaction to that is: "Grow up." Yes, it seems heartless and cold-blooded to place a dollar value on human life. But any safety decision we make (requiring seat belts, helmet laws, disease prevention, etc.) implicitly places a dollar value on human life. Indeed, many government policy decisions (health care, war, whether it is more important to fight unemployment or inflation) make an implicit statement about the value of human life. I think making those implicit statements explicit can help us make more just decisions.

Pros and Cons of smartphones

2011-07-25T21:54:00.001+04:30

The Oatmeal. A sample:

Sane conservatives on why we need to raise the debt ceiling

2011-07-22T01:48:00.003+04:30

The main fault line in American politics these days is not between liberal and conservative. It's between conservative and bat-shit crazy.

Conservatives have been raising the debt ceiling for years. Now suddenly right-wingers want to take the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise it. This is crazy, and weakens America.

Thank you conservatives, for speaking out against this nonsense:

Sane conservative economists recognize that not raising the debt ceiling on August 2nd would be a disaster. Sane conservatives understand that the ratings agencies will lower our credit rating if we won’t raise the ceiling, and that we have almost $500 billion in maturing treasuries that we need to roll over in August alone which, as UBS argues, is a problem [...]

Another Yglesias Quote

2011-07-16T00:05:00.002+04:30

If members of Congress think like partisans who want to capture the White House, then the smart strategy for them is to refuse to do whatever it is the president wants. The content of the president’s desire is irrelevant. But the more ambitious his desire is, the more important it is to turn him down. After all, if the President wants a big bipartisan deal on the deficit, then a big bipartisan deal on the deficit is “a win for President Obama,” which means a loss for the anti-Obama side. When Obama didn’t want to embrace Bowles-Simpson, then failure to embrace Bowles-Simpson was a valid critique of him. But had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson, then it would have been necessary for his opponents to reject it. That’s why now that Obama has a position well to the right of Bowles-Simpson, his opponents are still against Bowles-Simpson.

-Yglesias

Quote of the Day

2011-07-13T08:08:00.002+04:30

[I]f you’re interested in labor and working conditions, you’ve got to be interested in full employment. Full employment gives workers meaningful leverage. Mass unemployment gives it all to the bosses. In strict dollars and cents terms, I think everyone is better off with prosperity than with sluggish growth. But in terms of power, mass unemployment is a boon to bosses.

-Matthew Yglesias

Amen. If the market value of a human being's labor is shitty, people will be treated like shit by their employers. If someone can say, "Take this job and shove it!", that's real power for the worker. If an employer can say, "I've got 30 people lined up ready to replace you.", that's real power for the employer. Everything else is fiddling at the margins. I'd take 4% unemployment and free agency over 10% unemployment and labor union backing me up any day of the week.

The Federal Reserve's job is to keep both unemployment and inflation low. Low unemployment benefits workers. Low inflation benefits banks and people who are holding a lot of cash. Guess which group the Federal Reserve seems to be serving better. This is one of the great moral travesties of our time.

(Yes, hyper inflation is bad for everybody. But 4% inflation might help get rid of some of our debt overhang at both the personal and national levels. Of course, as a mortgage holder, I'm not disinterested here: I'd love to have a %0-1% real rate on my home loan!)

Looks like Republicans are balking on holding the economy hostage

2011-07-13T03:54:00.002+04:30

This is a good thing:

For sheer cynicism it’s hard to top McConnell’s latest bright idea, which is essentially to pass legislation that will give the Obama administration the power to raise the debt ceiling, subject to a 2/3rds over-ride by Congress. The practical effect would be to raise the debt ceiling while allowing Republicans to vote “against” doing so with impunity.

Yes, it's a cynical ploy to make Obama look like a bad guy for raising the debt ceiling (to pay for a budget that Congress passes, of course). But it's a total cave on all the policy concessions they were trying to extort from Democrats by holding the economy hostage and threatening to let the US go into default.

I'm glad to finally see some movement on this.

Gollum sings "I Will Survive"

2011-06-29T23:07:00.003+04:30

The song doesn't start right away, but it's pretty hilarious.

Would Congress please grow a pair and assert its power over declarations of war?

2011-06-28T00:06:00.001+04:30

Tom Tomorrow pretty much sums it up.

Image of the day

2011-06-27T23:08:00.003+04:30

I forgot where I took this from; I apologize.

Fitting for my first post in a while

2011-06-27T22:07:00.001+04:30

xkcd does Hofstadter. A favorite topic of Internal Monologue.

Even more hiring at OpenFeint

2011-05-06T21:35:00.002+04:30

Remember when I said OpenFeint was hiring? Well, we're hiring even more now. We were recently acquired by GREE, a large and profitable Japanese social networking company. And they want us to grow. Fast. And they have given us a lot of money to do so. Exactly how much is confidential, but it's a lot.

If you ever wanted to get into the mobile gaming/social networking universe, now would be a good time. Even if you don't match a job description exactly, I'd encourage you to apply if your overall skills are good. The job I got hired for is actually very different than the one I applied for.

My evil plan

2011-04-29T04:35:00.002+04:30

My evil plan is to seduce a seduce a woman and lure her back to my house. Once it is clear she is coming home with me, I'd jokingly toss out the classic "Perhaps you'd like to see my etchings?" line. When she is at my house, I'd actually show her some etchings. And all the etchings would be of Rick Astley.

MOOOHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Super Mario...with a Portal Gun!

2011-04-29T02:44:00.004+04:30

Here's some geekitude for yall:

There's also...Portal Kombat!

Vegetarians horrified to discover coffee contains beef

2011-04-19T19:37:00.000+04:30

It's not a lot of beef, but the process does use some animal products. Here's the link.

If I wasn't already employed...

2011-04-09T19:46:00.000+04:30

...then maybe I'd do this:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/money_making_scheme/

Come work with me at OpenFeint!

2011-03-30T01:02:00.002+04:30

This place is trying to hire like crazy. Here's a list of openings:

Current Openings

Business Development

Senior Business Development / Developer Relations Manager

Engineering

Android Engineers (multiple positions)
Big Data Software Engineer
Build and Release Manager
Javascript Engineer (multiple positions)
Lead Platform Engineer
MySQL Guru
Product Manager - Analytics
QA Manager
QA Mobile Engineer
QA Server Engineer
Ruby on Rails Engineers (multiple positions)
Senior Product Manager
Software Engineering Manager - Mobile
Software Engineering Manager - Server
Sr. IT Systems Administrator
Web Developer Back-End

Marketing

Graphic/Web Designer
Sales and Marketing Intern
Visual/UI Designer
Web Developer

Operations

Sales Engineer

Lots of good things: friendly people, free food and drink, mobile gaming social networking and e-commerce. And a big kickback to me if you tell them you heard about it through me!

Happy 5th blog anniversary to me!

2011-03-26T10:05:00.001+04:30

Celebrating five years of shouting into the ether. Thanks to all my readers an commenters!

Worst codename ever: "Odyssey Dawn"

2011-03-20T00:35:00.002+03:30

I don't suppose the folks at the Pentagon remember that Homer's "The Odyssey" takes place over a period of ten years as the hero struggles to get back home after participating in a decade-long war.

Best evidence I've seen that this is all improv theater

2011-03-20T00:18:00.002+03:30

Things in Libya are moving so fast, the Pentagon doesn't even have time to deploy its PR hacks:

There wasn’t any press briefing Friday at the Pentagon, even though a third simultaneous war is about to commence. That’s a pretty strong indication that the military doesn’t know what the goal is, either.

So, what are our objectives again? Protect civilians from Qaddafi, I guess. For how long? At what cost? What happens if Libyan civilians start needing protection from the rebels?

How come the leaders of Yemen get to kill their civilians? And Bahrain can import Saudi troops to crack down on their own dissidents? The lesson seems to be that as long as you curry favor with the US, you can oppress your citizens all you want. It seems as though we're attacking Qaddafi because we can, not because he is more evil than other dictators in the world. A little honesty about our actual motives would be refreshing.

An undeclared war

2011-03-20T00:03:00.002+03:30

According to this post, we've started firing cruise missiles at Libyan air defense sites. This is an act of war, and since Congress has not declared war, it is clearly unconstitutional and an abuse of executive power. The UN cannot declare war on behalf of the United States. I hate to say it, but there are now clear grounds for impeaching Obama. Would it have been so hard to get authorization from Congress first?