The song about Delilah that's been on the radio was written about a girl who isn't interested in the guy.
As a result, someone came up with a hilarious parody of the song that is in response.
For a fascinating series of examples of how really REALLY far-left debaters think and behave, especially when confronted with alternative points of view, check out the comments in this article:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/10079#comment
It is extremely interesting to read how they think but also how intolerant many of them are to opposing points of view.
I merged the two hives -- just in time as the queen in one of the hives had died. I am pretty confident one of the hives will survive the Winter but I have reservations the other honey bee hive will make it but I'll do my best.
Next year I plan to try to get up to 5 hives. My friends think I'm nuts (they're probably right). I don't really like honey, I'm in it for the bees. We need them (they are the primary pollinator of flowering plants including much of our food supply) and they're just a fascinating thing.
Of course, some people thought I was nuts for not destroying the bald faced hornet nest. But our patio has been free of yellow jackets (the favorite food of bald faced hornets) and the hornets don't bother us, they never come around. People just find their big nests in trees very intimidating even though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who has been stung by one (other than someone who messed with their nest).
It's not so much that I love "bugs". I just don't like the idea of destroying things simply because we can. If the bald faced hornets were a problem, I would have gotten rid of them. But people tend to just reflexively do things that can be destructive. We are, after all, part of nature. If people can't be bothered to try to conserve, can we at least try not to actively destroy without cause?
Anyway, sorry for the soap box. I'll keep you up to date on how the bees are coming along. 
Why don't garbage men or teachers or factory workers make as much as CEOs? We need teachers right? Our society would get pretty dirty in a hurry without garbage men and the things we rely on every day wouldn't exist without factory workers. How can we justify living in a world in which some CEO makes 1000X as much as these people?
A garbage man doesn't make as much as a CEO because the number of people who can be a garbage man are far more than the number of people who can be a CEO.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the reason why CEOs and pro basketball players make so much is because only a tiny percentage of the population can do what they do at their level.
So what makes people mega rich? Again, it boils down to supply and demand: In a capitalistic system, how much we make is tied to how much wealth we produce combined with the competition for people who can produce that wealth.
The value of what we produce is determined by other people (which is what makes capitalism work in the first place). Bill Gates doesn't get to decide he's rich. Society does by valuing what he does enough to pay him for the products and services he provides.
Let's use the inventor analogy to illustrate how becoming "mega rich" works. The supply/demand pipeline we'll call it:
Our creative inventor invents a robot in his basement. He made it because he enjoyed making it. But its value to society is nil because it's a robot in his basement at this point.
Making a robot was enjoyable to our inventor and our inventor is one of the few people who can produce such a robot.
But to make the robot really change the world, it needs to be available to people everywhere. To do that, our inventor needs that robot to be able to be mass produced, mass distributed, mass marketed.
But many of those things are NOT enjoyable to do. The number of people who want to hop on a 6am flight to Tokyo to meet with component vendors and then fly to New York 3 days later to meet with Ingram Micro for a distribution meeting with buyers from major retailers is very small. Definitely not fun. Our inventor would also need to raise investment capital in order to pay for the mass production of this robot, pay for marketing, and other up front costs so he would have to build a business plan, travel around to meet with investors, etc.
The items I list above involve skills that very few people have. And out of those few people who have those skills, very few people are willing to do them because they are not fun, especially given the risk -- our inventor could do all these things and have the product fail and all this work and pain would be for nothing.
But every once in a long while, someone steps forward who not only has all or most of the skills necessary to take an idea and get it out there (Henry Ford being an example) but also the willingness to actually go and do it.
And as a result, they become mega rich.
But they don't do it simply because they want to be rich. They start out because they like doing what they're doing. Material wealth, however, becomes a key ingredient because they won't love every part of what they have to do.
The super rich make enormous sacrifices that most people simply wouldn't be willing to do to maek their visions a reality. They miss family time. They have to often do mind numbing work (try putting together a distribution schedule while on a plane at 3am to Hong Kong to meet with a parts supplier and see how fun that is).
But those sacrifices are much easier to tackle when they thought of compensation comes into play. Our inventor thinks to himself "Well, going to a robotics trade show in Tokyo during Thanksgiving is a pain but I'll be able to afford a nice Ocean vacation house for my family to go and relax at and have enough money to put into my next invention."
The ones who REALLY benefit from this, however, are the rest of us. Our friendly inventor ultimately succeeds with his robot idea and the rest of us can buy a cool household robot for $299 at Best Buy that cleans houses, does wash, whatever.
Of course, that won't stop some academic at a left-wing site from writing an article arguing that our inventor is greedy and shouldn't be allowed to have his vacation house and the fact that he's worth $5 billion is a disgrace even as one of the inventor's robots is quietly cleaning his house in the background...
The smirking chimp is a site dedicated to not just insults of President Bush but also of promoting radical left-wing nonsense like the article "When the rich make too much money".
It never ceases to amaze me to see someone write, without irony on a computer, built by companies started by people who are now "rich" full of components made by companies whose founders are "rich" running computer software made by companies whose founders are "rich" complaining how unfair it is that there are rich people and how it endangers us all.
Above is a quote from the article that is written without a hint of irony. Apparently, being a politician or diplomat has more worth than Warren Buffet. Who defines how valuable a human being is to society? Apparently in the liberal utopia, learned academics like Dr. Lower.
But before we are assigned a human worth value by the academics, I would ask -- how much has our life changed in just the past 100 years thanks to people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and so on? What would our lives be like today without the tiny percentage of people who go out and truly change the world?
If the government were to tell me that I had a maximum cap I could earn, then my answer would be "fuck you" and I would simply stop working. I have a wife and 3 kids. Sure, I employ 50 people but if I'm not going to be able to benefit beyond a certain point from my efforts, then I'm not going to work beyond that point either. How would that affect the 50 people that work at the company I run? Probably not very well. But being forced to work without compensation is slavery and I won't be a part of that.
I could retire right now if I wanted and live comfortably. I'm not driven by money or wealth accumulation, but I certainly expect to enjoy the fruits of my labor (see Draginol's new car). I expect to one day be able to afford a lot more than what I have today. That isn't what gets me up in the morning (making cool stuff does) but there are plenty of days when my job isn't fun and having goals that involve materialism do help (well, I sure don't enjoy having to deal with employee issues but on the other hand, I can afford to buy a nice lake house up north).
One of the things that drives people like me is the desire for new experiences and new frontiers and many of those new experiences take a lot of money because, as I've written before, money can buy time to allow people to experience more in the limited amount of years they have on this Earth.
The problem with left-wingers is that most of them are inevitably divorced from reality and have no conception to how we got from serfdom (where the "goverment" did put hard limits on how much one could earn) to where we are today in a fairly egaltarian society where the child of a single parent with no economic advantages can grow up and live the American dream.
Too many left-wingers think jobs and opportunity simply exist on their own and are not connected to anyone. But our society is a reverse pyramid. You remove the handful of movers and shakers from society and it would collapse in a hurry. Supply and demand deterine where we are on that pyramid -- not some group of learned academics.
You'd think that academics would see the obviousness in this. After all, one presumes they have some grasp of history. Yet, when they espouse short-sighted proposals like this which would, in essence, return us to a social structure more resembling feudalism (except where our lords are "elected" rather than born into) it's hard to take their words very seriously.
It's ironic that a site that has so much venom directed toward the current elected political leader that they would, if they had their way, redirect so much power and wealth into the hands of such leaders and away from people who made their wealth from the voluntary choices of millions of people.
Lots of coding in Twilight of the Arnor this week. One thing we're putting in is right of passage treaties which should make a lot of people happy.
But as we've been playing around with things, we've come to realize that what is going to make Twilight of the Arnor so spectacular is not the unique technology trees unto themselves but rather the planetary improvements and ship components that these unique tech trees can deliver.
For this reason, we're going to have a beta next month for people who have pre-ordered. More details soon but we're so confident that people are going to like the changes that we're going to do the beta program quite differently than past ones, it'll be a real treat I think for people who closely follow things as we roll out the various tech trees one at a time.
For those of you who really know GalCiv, consider very carefully the possibilities that unique tech trees can really provide. Forget the techs but rather the unique planetary improvements as just one example. Think about how different the civilizaitons can play out with enough unique planetary improvements. Envision that.
I wish you guys could have been with us at the lab today. This expansion pack is just going to be something that we think players will be so happy with. We're just incredibly excited about the possibilities that are only starting to really dawn on us as the implications of what unique technology trees do.
At long last the new car has arrived. A 2008 Porsche 911 Turbo. My daily car remains the Jaguar S-type R, but on these beautiful days, the Porsche is a fun ride.
I'll write up a more thorough review when there's more time. My problem with most car reviews is that they're written by jaded, snotty sounding auto-reviewers who seem to be so out of touch with what normal people care about that their reviews are largely wasted.
For example, many of the reviews I read in Car & Driver talk about things like "engine emotion" or some other completely non-sensical term. I realize that what people like in cars changes from person to person, but I like more specifics or at least words with specific meaning.
The new car, for instance, is fun to drive. I think people can relate to that. I can't speak to whether the exhaust has enough emotion in it or not since I don't know what that means. It's certainly a louder car than the Jag is and ironically I find myself driving it slower than the Jag (I think that's probably because it's a stick shift unlike the Jag which is an auto). Being a stick, you are much more aware of how fast you're going and hence what speed laws are being violated.
Anyway, more to come.
For the uninitiated: SkinStudio is a program that lets users creates skins to change the look & feel of the Windows GUI. These skins are applied by the program called WindowBlinds. Both WindowBlinds and SkinStudio come as part of the suite of programs called Object Desktop.
SkinStudio 6 is a complete rewrite of the program designed to make it much easier for users to make skins. Over the years, as WindowBlinds got more powerful, the existing version of SkinStudio (versions 1 through 5) were extended and extended to the point where it was simply too complex for new artists to easily get into.
SkinStudio 6, by contrast, has been re-designed so that skinners can skin Windows step by step. And anything they choose not to skin is automatically skinned with the native elements of the OS (Aero on Vista, Luna on XP).
Beta 2 has tons of small changes (and a few big ones like a tree view option and classic color choosing). It's only available to users of Object Desktop presently.
The final version of SkinStudio will have a free version and a Pro version with additional functionality. Let us know what you think.
Aroche is a skinner who has been around for 2 years now and has created a significant library of great CursorXP cursors. With CursorVista in development, the role of cursors is set to become increasingly popular over the next year and Aroche has led the way for awhile.
According to his stats, he has commented on his and other people's skins and cursors many times and his activity has helped make WinCustomize the kind of community that people enjoy being a part of.
If you don't have CursorXP, get it. And then check out Aroche's gallery.
