I am now employed at Solis USA, where I am putting my electrician's license to good use, mostly in the service of twelve hour shifts.[1] To the several people I'm corresponding to via email, this is why my replies have been slow.

Full time employment means much less time spent fucking around on the internet, though most of my fucking around has mostly been on Tumblr, rather than here. Nevertheless, I do have three posts in the pipeline for this blog, to be published some time between "soon" and "never".

• Superhero comics, and why I don't read 'em.
• How to keep the elderly from destroying the economy again. (Hint: It doesn't involve eradicating Social Security)
• Reforming the English Language is impossible (And why you should try anyway)

So look forward to these posts that I probably will finish, sometime, eventually!

===

1: "What's the best part of a 12 hour shift? The 4 hours of overtime. What's the worst part? The 'twelve hours' part."]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/07/17/how_to_pass_the_washington_state_drivers_test_on_your_second_try/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/07/17/how_to_pass_the_washington_state_drivers_test_on_your_second_try/ 2012-07-17T05:00:18-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc

I've been spending a lot time recently negotiating various state agencies to acquire licenses, and I figured I would write up what I did, because this is a goddamn blog.

Electrician's License

This was more or less easy. I have a weirdo subtype: Nonresidential lighting maintenance and lighting retrofit (7A). Getting this required two years of on-the-job experience, having the supervising electrician witness that I had that experience on a form, getting that form notarized, paying a fee, and then taking two tests.

In the United States, all the states have been bullied into adopting a uniform electrical code, imaginatively titled the National Electrical Code. Every couple years it is updated to phase out certain old practices of electrical work, and institute new safety methods. The individual states often lag by a year or two when adopting: the latest version is NEC 2011, but Washington is still on NEC 2008, for various amusing political reasons.

One of those is money. The NEC, despite being, essentially, law; is actually produced by a for-profit industry association, which means the code will cost you money, and not a small amount of it: NEC 2011 costs $75. Perniciously, when a state updates to the latest version of the code, every single electrician in the state has to buy a new copy, and take various courses on the updated rules. The perverse incentive for the NFPA is to issue updates as often as possible, to extract the maximum amount of rent from their legal monopoly.

The licensing tests are open-book, but I didn't want to give the NFPA my money, so I pirated a PDF copy of NEC 2008, and studied that.

That's the first test. The second test is on 19.28 RCW, the Washington State law governing electrical work.

Both of these tests are administered by PSI Exams, a company that apparently exists solely for state governments to outsource test administration to. Presumably there's all sorts of kickbacks and bribe-taking involved here too, I didn't really want to dig too deeply.

So. I paid my fees, scheduled the test, and studied the Law. Finally, the big day came. I took the test, and passed the NEC portion, but failed the RCW portion.

The proctor printed out the sad evidence of my laziness and incompetence, and handed it to me. I looked at the paper, read it, then instantly forgot the information.

This was one of the most egregious failures of rationality in my adult life, so listen carefully: Somehow, after all that, I became convinced that I had failed the NEC portion, not the RCW.

This is partially explainable by the fact that the NEC part had pitched a couple slowballs over the plate regarding wire marking trivia. These would have been really, really easy to answer if I had a paper copy of the NEC with me... but I was trying to save money! Whoops. So I got those wrong, but still passed the test. My failure haunted me, somehow metastasizing in my head to "I flunked the entire test".

Wrong.

There's a waiting period before you can retake the test. In the time I purchased a physical copy of NEC 2008, and studied the heck out of it. I show up for the retest, code in hand, ready to trounce this test. I sit down at the computer... and the test is for 19.28 RCW.

I am confused. I complete the test, easily passing it. (It picked a different random set of questions, ones I knew the answers to this time, apparently.)

I pick up my book, walk out of the testing room, and tell the proctor that there is A Problem. I've been given the wrong test! I am absolutely, unshakably certain that I had failed the NEC part the first time, not the RCW part. A Mistake Has Been Made.

The proctor is not having a good day. To be precise, she is not having a good first day on the job. She is not familiar with PSI's computer system, but figures out that I had taken the test that had been assigned to me. She calls PSI technical support (for apparently, the fifth time that day) and we investigate. The conclusion is reached that everything is working fine.

I am still not convinced, but this is obviously not the place to resolve it. (The PSI testing center is a single, two-room office suite in a office park in a Seattle suburb) I'm holding things up for other people who actually took the right test, so I drive home, dreading what is obviously going to be a couple hours of phone hell, navigating the bowels of a giant bureaucracy to correct a weird computer error. This is going to really, really suck.

I get home, open a beer, and spend 10 minutes on hold. I finally get a rep, tell her my name, social security number, blood type, and secret fear; she accesses my file, and tells me that I've passed both tests. I am now a 7A licensed electrician.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Oh."

I thank her. I hang up. I feel like biggest idiot in the entire world, the dumbest man who has ever, or will ever, live.

So that's how I got my electrician's license. How I got my driver's license is similar in the broad strokes.

Driver's license.

In Washington state, if you're over 18, all you need to get a learner's permit is to pass a knowledge test, and pass a simple eye exam. I spend half an hour waiting for my number, while watching a lot of alarmingly old people renew their driver's licenses.

I pass the knowledge test with ease, (It's taken on a computer, which uses a CRT-based touchscreen! Blast from the past.) and receive my learner's permit on April 3rd, 2012.

I don't know much about learning to drive, but I've read a little about learning how to fly, so I keep a logbook.

Over the next month, I rack up 269.35 miles, and a number of hours that I really don't want to go through and add up, watch the instructional videos produced by the DoL, until finally I decide that I'm ready to take the test. It is scheduled for May 14th, 2012.

This is what it looks like when you fail a driving test. I got a 78/100, the passing score is 80/100.

Highlight:

"So, have you ever conducted a test where the guy hit someone?"

"I can't answer that."

"Oh."

So how did I fail the driving test? It's easy: during the test, a specific phrase is used. It is, "rejoin traffic."

When I took the test, it was a beautiful, sunny summer day. 70F, not a cloud in the sky. Driving tests are (almost always) conducted on empty side streets, since of course this is a driving test, and the driver may fuck up.

The street is empty. The proctor says, "rejoin traffic". I glance into a mirror and, duh, see nobody, so I just drive into the street.

No! Wrong! You're supposed to be pretending that there is traffic. They are looking for three specific things:

1. Checks mirror.
2. Physically turns around and checks blind spot.
3. Turns on turn signal.

If you miss any of those, you lose the maximum 4 points on that test, failing the section entirely. Do that often enough, and you fail the test.

Don't do that. Perform those three actions. Even better: say them out loud ("Mirror, blind spot, turn signal") Driving instructors like to be talked to, they want to hear you thinking through things. I also repeated instructions back to them, ("Turn left at the upcoming intersection" "Turning left, roger") which you probably don't have to do, but they didn't seem to mind.

I passed parallel parking perfectly... except for signaling.

Minor point loss: at a stop sign with a blind corner, you're supposed to come to a complete stop before the white line, creep forward until you have visibility, come to another complete stop, then go.

Something I was warned about by a friend who also recently took the test: the rules for parking on a hill are somewhat esoteric. (You have to point your wheels in a certain direction, depending on circumstance) Study them carefully, or else you'll be dinged the full 4 points on that test.

Note: a perfect score on the driving test means that they'll never touch the scoring form. If they write anything at all, it's because you screwed up, and they're deducting points. (If you ask the instructor what you did wrong, they may or may not answer. I think they're not supposed to, but if it's clear that you're going to pass, they may bend the rules. This means that they won't help you when you actually need it, but oh well.)

There's a couple of commonsense tips:

• Drive slow. By default, I drive slowly enough to annoy my mother, so that wasn't really an issue, but still.
• Bring a book to the DMV. Or something, anything. I had to keep myself entertained for a couple hours. Don't be like me. Be smart.
• Don't argue with the driving instructor. That cannot possibly help. Unless it's a very obvious, and very trivial mistake, ("Your headlights aren't on." "Actually, they are." "Oh.") then disagreeing with them isn't going to end well for you.

Anyway, I passed the test with trivial ease on my second try. Anticlimax ending!]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/07/bad_transcript_prometheus_2012/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/06/07/bad_transcript_prometheus_2012/ 2012-06-07T19:13:25-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc I heard from my sources that Prometheus was not good, so I endured what was probably the worst cam I've ever seen to bring you a Bad Transcript for it.

Spoiler alert: yes, it really is that bad.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/04/25/looking_ahead_to_our_glorious_future/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/04/25/looking_ahead_to_our_glorious_future/ 2012-04-25T07:48:40-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen Etc "The War Against Youth"

The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama's 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don't exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, "The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget."

[...]

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It's all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it's clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: "One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.

[...]

A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, "those who earn less than a thousand euros"; the NEETs of England, "not in employment, education, or training"; the hittistes of Tunisia, "those who lean against the wall." Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.

(Don't forget Connor Kilpatrick's list of objections over at The Exiled.)

"Depression is a choice" and "Two quick responses"

We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.

Usually, economists are admirably catholic about the preferences of the objects they study. They infer desire by observing behavior, listening to what people do more than to what they say. But with respect to national polities, macroeconomists presume the existence of an overwhelming preference for GDP growth and full employment that simply does not exist. They act as though any other set of preferences would be unreasonable, unthinkable.

But the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.

[...]

Affluent retirees depend heavily on asset wealth; Social Security cannot cover the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed, and the expenses and commitments they’ve accumulated.

Affluent older Americans hold a large proportion of their wealth in bonds and cash-like instruments (bank CDs, money market accounts). They also maintain significant positions in stock funds that might “do better when the economy does better”. But, unsurprisingly, retirees keep the wealth they most depend upon in safer, fixed income vehicles. The proportion they keep in stock funds tends to increase with wealth. [2] Since they can’t clip coupons, retirees rely upon asset sales and redemptions for income. They try to manage the pace of sales so they don’t outlive their capacity to maintain their lifestyles.

Retirees living on asset wealth are very exposed to inflation. It’s an error, a fallacy of composition, to assume that the existence of hedges and “sophisticated vehicles” means that somehow everybody can be protected. Every debt contract imposes inflation risk that some party must bear. Stock markets get the press, but most financial claims on capital are structured as debt, all of which must be held, directly or indirectly, by some human (usually an old or rich human).

[...]

So people who intend to live off their nest eggs rely first and foremost on the “safety” of bonds. Expansionary policy is a hazard for them.

"The Energy Trap"

Many Do the Math posts have touched on the inevitable cessation of growth and on the challenge we will face in developing a replacement energy infrastructure once our fossil fuel inheritance is spent. The focus has been on long-term physical constraints, and not on the messy details of our response in the short-term. But our reaction to a diminishing flow of fossil fuel energy in the short-term will determine whether we transition to a sustainable but technological existence or allow ourselves to collapse. One stumbling block in particular has me worried. I call it The Energy Trap.

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability—first in petroleum—our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but…energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term—effectively steepening the decline—for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

So I was re-reading "The End Of Men", because if there's anything an unemployed 23-year-old semi-electrician (for reference, my extremely unimpressive resume (source code)) likes hearing about more, it's "your entire gender is worthless and unemployable"; when I peeped this paragraph, yo:

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.

As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

"Greenberg"? Never heard of it. Let's hit IMDb.

You know those fleeting, inelegant moments and transitory, almost Seinfeldian scenarios in our lives that, unlike on Seinfeld, we never really talk about, because they betray how clueless and insecure we all are? You know how we'll go to parties basically to see one person and find we're inept at opening up and socializing with anyone else? You know those pointless, roundabout stories we'll tell about something that happened that we thought was interesting or funny but we don't realize how boring or monotonous they are till we're halfway through them? What about the receiving end of that situation? Why are we so worried about hurting these painful storytellers' feelings when they're making us so uncomfortable having to feign interest or amusement for indefinite durations? You know those sexual experiences we never talk about even to our best friends because they were so painfully awkward and nakedly ungraceful? You know how when we're on drugs we only indulge occasionally and we find ourselves wording things in creative ways, feeling overconfident and impulsive while everyone else is viewing us as rather reckless? Roger and Florence know, all too painfully, awkwardly, uncomfortably, recklessly well.

Golly, that sounds like a laff riot. Hold on, lemme hit up Amazon to order this gem on DVD. Hell yeah I want next-day shipping! Gotta see this bad boy ASAP.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/11/21/unsubscribed/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/11/21/unsubscribed/ 2011-11-21T17:33:26-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen Etc (Attention conservation notice: You'll note that this post, unlike the last six, isn't tagged "important." That's because it ain't.)

Things I've unsubscribed from recently:

• Ribbonfarm. Prime example that the Gell-Mann amnesia effect isn't just for newspapers. I wrote a refutation of another Ribbonfarm post eight months ago, where I concluded that he had no idea what he was talking about... but didn't unsubscribe from his blog. It took reading this post for me to realize, "Hey, wait, this guy's an idiot!" Also, he won't shut up about his book.
• Megatokyo. I realized that I had been reading Megatokyo since middle school, yet I couldn't tell you what the last year of plot was about, nor did I particularily care about any of the characters.
• Twenty sided. This one was kinda hard. About a month ago, Shamus started writing a series of autobiographical posts. I unsubscribed in disgust, (I didn't really want to read what was pretty much "bbot's childhood, yet worse") intending to pick it up again once he stopped. I checked back, saw that the autobiography series was over... and then noticed that almost all of the front page were daily posts about Shamus' video LP series.
  
  I don't really want to watch other people play video games I've already completed. What's even worse is that all of Shamus' high-level video games criticism work goes into his LP, now, which means no more traditional game reviews. Obviously some people enjoy them, since they get thousands of views. I just have better ways to spend half a hour a day.
  
  This is hard because a big chunk of my readership comes directly from Twenty sided, and this post will probably result in some unsubscriptions. But man, I just give no shits about his LP. None at all. If it was possible to just subscribe to his code projects, I would, but I can't, so I won't.
• Gunnerkrigg Court. Got tired of the stupid shit it kept saying about the philosophy of science, and AI. That, and the moronic error it made about the underwater dorms, (10 metres is not terribly deep, but if you spend 8 hours at depth, decompression is required before returning to the surface, or else you're in for the full spectrum of amusing neurological effects resulting from nitrogon fizzing out of your blood and shredding brain tissue) finally pushed me over the edge.
  
  I briefly flirted with the idea of doing a long-form post about the fundamental errors of thought underlying Gunnerkrigg Court, and I got a couple hundred words into it before I realized what a collosal waste of time this was. You would have to pay me money to get me to write about that crap. Haha, wait, hold on.
  
  (EDIT: Donation button removed, because I forgot that I don't have access to that paypal account right now, for various reasons.)
  
  Okay, here, you can pay me money to write about that crap. Donations will go towards a hamburger, and some of Burger King's awful, terrible coffee.

This is odd, since aboutlogo.html hasn't actually been linked anywhere on bbot.org for at least a year. It's a relic of an old version of the front page, which I forgot to delete. Unless 207.46.199.30 maintains the world's most boring bookmark collection, this means that it's a web spider, refreshing a stored link.

Now, I see a lot of stealth-spiders, but it's rare to see one that's clever enough to request the CSS as well, like a real human. Google and Yahoo will occasionally do it, so they can generate accurate screenshots, but generally nobody else bothers, or they don't give themselves away like this. (It didn't ask for favicon, which is understandable, since it Expires in 2037, but it didn't ask for the image on that page, which was a bit of a blunder.) Let's run a WHOIS on the IP, and see who owns it.

And nslookup says:

Now that's interesting.

What's (very mildly) alarming is that they didn't ask for a robots.txt. That /16 is apparently used by bingbot, so it's entirely possible that they requested my robots.txt officially, got a 404, and concluded that I don't give a shit.

Which is true, of course, I give no shits about web spiders; but there's a lot of hysterical pansies on the Internet who hate it when people actually look at the stuff they've published publicly. And, of course, it contradicts Microsoft's stated policy.

So, who knows.

Apparently Marshall had to quit his (twelve-year) job to publish it, which displays some extraordinary testicular fortitude. It also allows him a certain degree of editorial freedom he perhaps did not enjoy while working at Reuters.

The Yellow Shirts were initially a broad-based and relatively good-humoured alliance from across the ideological and political spectrum that drew together royalists and liberals, radical students and middle-class aunties, progressive activists and patrician establishment patriarchs, united in opposition to the increasingly baleful influence of Thaksin Shinawatra; over the years they morphed into a proto-fascist mob of hateful extremists addicted to the bloodcurdling rhetoric of rabble- rousing demagogues. The Yellow Shirts proclaim their undying love for the king, but it is the flipside of that love that has transformed them into a baying apocalyptic death cult: they are utterly petrified about what will happen once Rama IX is gone.

PROTO-FASCIST MOB OF HATEFUL EXTREMISTS

BAYING APOCALYPTIC DEATH CULT!]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/19/bitcoin_five_months_later/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/05/19/bitcoin_five_months_later/ 2011-05-19T15:53:30-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc Five months ago I wrote about upstart cryptocurrency Bitcoin. In the intervening time, they've gotten a lot of press, a meandering UR essay, and neat-looking physical tokens. They've also increased in value. A lot.

In December, one bitcoin was worth .21 dollars. Today, they're trading at seven dollars each, a 3270% increase. If you had bought $10,000 worth of bitcoins five months ago, it would be worth $327,000 today, phowar, dude. Like, whoa.

But past performance is no guarantee of future results. When a mainstream media news outlet puts "criminals" right in the title of a piece about a currency exchange, it's not a good sign that it will continue unmolested by very serious people in very conservative suits.

Even without official intervention, bitcoin still isn't a sure bet. Right now, in its nearly completely unmonitized state, bitcoin looks a lot more like a commodities market than a currency market. And commodities markets, as any foole kno, are twitchy, excitable beasts, prone to dramatic price shifts as bubbles inflate, then pop. Buying into bitcoin now would be pretty dumb. Or maybe not, you might not want to take my advice, seeing as how I didn't buy all the bitcoins I could find back in December.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/03/04/psa_rss/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2011/03/04/psa_rss/ 2011-03-04T18:45:37-05:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Etc Recently I've discovered that several friends of mine don't use RSS readers. In fact, quite a few people I know, I would even go so far as to say a narrow majority, don't.

These aren't non-technical people, mind you. They're all reasonably au courant, which just makes it all the more surprising. Well, no longer. You're all on notice.

If you are even vaguely competent, you have to use a RSS reader.

This isn't a fad. This isn't Myspace, or Foursquare, or Twitter, or Last.fm; or any number of fashions that have swept the tech world. This is e-mail important. If you're checking news sites and blogs manually, you're wasting your goddamn time.

I subscribe to 366 feeds. It hardly needs to be said that keeping up with that many sites the stone age way is straight up impossible. I could spend twelve hours a day typing in URLs and hitting refresh and not even touch half of them.

So if the rest of this post persuades you not at all, at least have some self respect. Get off the irregular reward treadmill, and get back precious hours of your life.

If you refuse to use a RSS reader, and "subscribe" to my blog by visiting it manually every so often, or worse,[1] then you can fuck right off. (Except for you, several people I know in real life. You can stay. For now.) The front page of the bblog has one purpose, and one purpose alone: convincing people to subscribe to the RSS feed. The archives are used so the web spiders find the old posts, so that people using search engines hit the individual posts, read them, and then subscribe to my RSS feed. People use the bblog for other things, but the intent is to gain a RSS subscriber, increment the number in the counter, and to give me the warm glow of knowledge that yet another person is subjecting themselves to my inane crap.

The third reason you should use RSS, after saving your own time, and feeding my ego, is to save precious, precious bandwidth, a resource so rare that Australia rations it.

Anybody who hits the front page of the bblog makes dozens of HTTP requests, to the index file, the stylesheet, the favicon and a blizzard of image files. Now, my addiction to images may be exacerbating the problem, but even in the best case, this is a couple of megabytes.

A RSS reader will check a site more often than all but the most obsessed fan, but the web server will only return a "file unchanged" status code until it's actually updated. In this case, the only bandwidth consumed is that of the HTTP request.

It can get even better than that. Google Reader uses a single web spider, serving updates to, potentially, thousands of subscribers. The same is true of any web-based RSS reader.

There's a fourth reason, and it's to save me time.

Every linkbait "How to be a better blogger" article on Reddit is usually a 50/50 mix of mediocre advice and poisonous SEO crap. One of the latter pieces will usually be something along the lines of "update often, more than once a day". This is cool, but it means I can't subscribe to your blog. I just don't have time!

So I'm subscribed to 366 feeds. Depending on the day of week, I'll get about 60 updates a day, which is just about as much time I want to spend looking at a RSS reader.

35 or 45 of those will be webcomics, which I like to see updated, or a variety of sparsely updated blogs, which are also a pleasure to read. The other twenty are feeds that are updated daily, or more often. The math is simple. Frequently updated blogs are 4% of the total subscription count, but take up maybe half of the total updates. Frequently updated blogs are expensive in terms of attention. I have to pick and choose, and carefully. I can't subscribe to everything I want.

I'd like to subscribe to Dave Barry's blog, but I can't. He just posts too damn often. Same with John Gruber. I used to subscribe to Hack A Day, but then they started posting more than once a day, for some reason. I'd like to read dooce, may god have mercy on my soul, but for every genuinely amusing post, she throws up a dozen pictures of her damn dogs. Or pictures of her children. Or pointless metablogging posts where she apologizes for not having a post up that day, which is a real spectacular waste of my fucking time when I have subscribed to your feed.

It's not like the value of the blog linearly scales with each post. Daily posts are just filler, meant to keep the site in the minds of its readers. Bruce Sterling's blog: for every alarmingly insightful essay about wikileaks, there's a couple dozen pointless links to old news I already saw on social news sites and elsewhere. Plus, he apparently doesn't know how to create inline links.

This, all of it, is a waste of time.

Let's compare two posts: this one and this one. One of them was made by someone who has to post two entries a day, even if they don't have anything particularly interesting to say. One of them was not posted according to a schedule. No prize for guessing which.

If it wasn't for the clueless masses, authors I otherwise like wouldn't be forced to churn out shit.

There's a simple technological fix to this problem. Engadget, of all the places, pioneered it: a rss feed just for important items. It's implemented in a half-assed and largely retarded way, of course, since AOL is where smart people go to die, but at least they're trying. Without this feed I wouldn't read Engadget at all.

So I'm stealing it. The bblog now has an important rss feed. It'll only have stuff like water sims and amusing legal threats, and not amusing chat logs. The flip side is that I'll be posting more often, but never more than once a day, unless in the event of nuclear war, or PAX.

And if you implement one too, I'll be able to read your blog.

1: I know of one person who checks my blog by typing "bbot" into Google, clicking on the link to bbot.org, then clicking on the blog link. I am not joking. What the hell is wrong with you, Ian? Why do you hate America?