I enjoy sitting around feeling useless. That's why I choose to work in politics at the highest levels. Thank you so much for helping me achieve my dream of one day getting hired to sit around with my thumb up my ass for months at a time while you have endless fucking meetings. This is my thank you. Because I know how much you love offending people and nonsense. Thank you.
Well bend my foot on the way through door. I suppose I aught to have sympathy. I will pluck every silver haired thread from any dollhouse I'm given and I'll find the last stomped mouse on my way to work and I'll eat any shithead that thinks his men are more qualified to pre-suppose a pho-castrophe. I find men who think they're qualified to lead because they're matched with rough women. well. I find it amusing. I am rough women.
If I was worth the skins and meat and seed I came into town with and I didn't spend half of it getting wasted with the local loser and I didn't brush and pop and settle well. I might have to run for president instead of ending my career framing what I should have... fuck it. Petraeus should be given . a role. He's kind of a good leader. Even if he can't entomologyze with the rest of US.
My personal experience with local politics was that when the chips are down in a local race people don't see the value of technology to organize. When you're working on a local level you have to think like a local businessman/woman. Politics at the local level has traditionally leveraged free work. Volunteer work. Above all. Get the sap. When the sap proves useful, use connections to get them a position up the food chain instead of paying for it. Save money. Save money. Don't spend. You're going to be a one term shill. You won't make it even if you make it. You'll be more in debt than you can imagine anyway. Sell out to those with money. Don't pay for anything. Don't pay for anything. Don't pay for anything. Use promises. Lie Lie Lie. Don't pay. Get it free. They live next door to lexis nexus and they don't "get it". Its wasted. That's what's down the pipe in 2014 and that's when your shit is gonna go down. That's when you'll need someone to fix it. You know who's gonna be on the phone? A volunteer programmer who's taking 1 class this semester because he failed his fuck... no fuck that. You know who's gonna be on the phone? Liz lemon. With no staff. There IS no fucking saturday night live. Liz has been pretending there is this fucking awesome comedy show and there isn't. There IS. NO. FUCKING. TECHNOLOGY. at the local level. Its not worth doing because if the president pays fuck all then we're not going to bust our budget getting, "data" pfff. Throw more bodies at it!
Know this. I will be somewhere in the world doing cool shit when the DNC shits in SVP's EC2 bucket. I won't know exactly when his heart dies, but I'll feel it. Like thousands of voices screaming out and being silenced. I might be in the bathroom taking a piss, looking in the mirror as the camera slowly pans in on my face and I will breath in slowly, and out like darth vader, but I'll know.
That's what I hate about rails. You spend so much time filling out YAML and reading documentation and making sure you've got the right gems for the job and that you didn't accidentally go down a rabbit hole that by the time you're ready to build something it looks like the same bucket of sand everyone else is waiting for the tide to come and collect.
That's exactly what we did with voteforchange in 08. Scott Thomas and Chris Hughes were the brilliant team behind that. Then they went back to a one page form, like the only thing good about voteforchange was that you could make it cutesy and brand it really easily for lots of different demographic groups and not the shit tons of UI research and optimization that went into creating the shortest possible path for the registrant, collecting partial data, saving application state, etc.
You would need some sort of photo of their passport to verify citizenship for a foreign national. You would have to securely store thousands of these images for reporting purposes. It would be a legal and technological impediment and extra cost involving a large amount of effort for very little payoff. This was easier to limit with the online store. They just didn't provide international shipping options.
The Obama campaign spent less, got more air time, and did it through leveraging technology to optimize their ad buys. Honestly, it should have gone into the salaries of people like Kyle Rush and the hard working dedicated technology workers for more artisinal keyboards.
You could also argue that Republicans will slowly peel off disaffected or disenfranchised talent as technology in politics becomes less of a cottage industry for seasonal fruit pickers and they have the lawyers to push against the true ceiling you're talking about... the legal hurdles and the stagnation of innovation that comes with winning and scaling.
Little off topic here, but did "project dreamcatcher" have as much of an impact as you guys thought it would? I didn't hear much about that toward the end of the election. What kinds of grassroots stories were generated from it? I didn't really get the sense that there was as cohesive a narrative this time around. With hurricane Sandy everything leading up to the election seemed rushed and confusing.
which will far better argue and illustrate myriad points on the invention of language, its beauty and wonder and value to differentiate us as a species and to bring us joy and fulfillment and illustrate the challenges and quirks that make its study such a joy and illustrate language's evolution as a thing of wonder.
Then again, you see something like the Rossetti archive
and you are awe struck at the meticulous rigor and academic sensitivity it takes to understand permanence and context and format and physicality as intrinsic to the right of artistic expression.
Would these works have as much meaning if we OCR'd them, slapped them in times new roman, and beamed them to your twitching sweaty little palm sized cubes? Probably not.
It took a lot of time, a lot of arguing, a lot of hard questions and personal growth before I felt qualified to make statements like, "I don't think its a good idea to build a game engine that uses a Barthes-esque narrative decomposition to dynamically construct compelling storylines for video games." I don't think a religious education qualifies you as arbiter of language. I think his word is fun and quirky. Interesting. Highly relevant and timely.
