thene | (no subject)

So I'm actually reading United States vs Windsor. It is almost as good as the one about the ponies. The interesting part for me was that the reason this whole thing was allowed to happen wasn't, as I thought at first, because the IRS claimed that Edith Windsor owed them money, but because she'd given it to them and they refused to give it back even after the Obama DOJ stopped defending themselves from her. The other upshot of this manoeuvre? Because the Obama administration wanted Windsor to win, the United States was classed as a prevailing party. Yes, American taxpayers: you fought Edith Windsor, she shook you down for $363,053, and you all won.

Roberts' dissent is a sad mixture of gee-golly-wiz he swears their WAS a legit, non-malicious reason for DOMA to ever exist, but he unfortunately neglects to spell out what it was, and some slippery-slope pearlclutching about how, if they decide this now, they might have to decide other things in the future; he doesn't explain why this is a bad thing. Scalia's dissent is literally six times as long and I can't be arsed because it is bedtime.

ETA aahahaahaa omg I changed my mind and tried reading Scalia's first page. This stuff is godtier. No really scroll to p35 of the document and start reading. Never stop reading. What the fuck am I reading.

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I started skimming Scalia's dissent almost as soon as it went online because I really cannot help myself. Where were all his special feels 24 hours earlier with the VRA decision? What is it like inside his brain

Poor helpless little Antonin Scalia who can't possibly be allowed to decide things. :( He is so very amazing.

Random Fucking Comments (RFCs) on previous posts - after all, context is for menus.

I instantly thought of your bank account on hearing about DOMA. I can't say why. (That final sentence of the first paragraph is the best sentence I have read all week, possibly all month.) I am reading judgements on whether people are entitled to social security benefits; there are decisions that are in the tangent space of my case so I may qualify for an appeal, but all I see is the state fucking people over.

Jango pointed me at Darr Williams in an effort to wean me off Sarah fixation. I haven't got round to buying any albums yet so I'm not jealous. Not owning her songs means I haven't resolved whether Book of Love should go before or after Suzanne Vega's Book of Dreams in my playlist. Likewise, I would have to worry how to arrange it with Sisters of Mercy's Temple of Love and whether I then add then acquire Monotone's own take on the Book of Love. These things keep me awake at night. (I notice, also, that while I'm concerned about love, you're concerned about torturing people. :-P )

Internships are a hot issue in the UK for the reasons you outline. It must tie in with Open Source, wikiserfs, and others labour issues of our time, but I haven't thought about it. Patronage and vocation are back in vogue. (But there does seem to be a logic to it: these ideas need years of investment an international scale to turn a profit but nobody knows which ones will work, so the business angels water lots of ideas and the conglomerates pick the juicy fruit at an overinflated price, giving the venture capitalist enough money to fund the next crop and the next learjet. It's redistributive and reminds me of how the record industry used to be. It would probably be cheaper for a business to fund lots of ideas themselves but shareholders can't see the value in R&D.) There is an apparently a well established idea that we should pay everybody a minimum income, regardless of what they do, and I would be in favour of that. My client, who is a O(decade) older than you, is giving away our software for free, so I don't know what his business plan is; but as long as he keeps paying me the pittance he's paying me, I don't care.

HPS is science for people who can't do covariant derivatives. I should have done it.

The gay people who'll benefit, taxwise, are primarily couples that include a stay-at-home parent, because that's what both the federal income tax system and the social security system in the US were set up for; couples with one primary earner. No one up top has yet been informed that it is no longer the 1950s. Therefore a lot of married queers who have relative parity in income can look forward to paying higher federal income taxes and/or receiving lower social security benefits if they're retired. So all the amendment jockeying is likely to be from estates.

Dar Williams is a wonderful storyteller. I got hooked back in 2004, when a Deadjournal friend sent me a mix disc that included February and The Babysitter's Here. She's never made a perfect album but there are a few really good ones; Mortal City, The Honesty Room, End Of The Summer, The Green World and My Better Self, in roughly that order.

WIKISERFS i had almost forgotten that we met on Seth Finkelstein's blog. The people at Zombies, Inc told me that that venture capital is not what it was, on account of everyone losing all their money in the crash and therefore becoming more cautious about randomly throwing money at things on the offchance of getting huge returns. The concept I have picked up on lately that explains Virtually Everything is that of externalising cost - all kinds of things that companies used to waste money investing in (such as a trained workforce, or developing their own new ideas), they will now try to ensure is paid for by Somebody, Anybody Else.

What crapped me out was integration, in lower-sixth pure maths, although in my defence that course was structured in a really irritating way and as soon as the same mathematical concepts came up in physics, I got it, but by then it was always too late. But yeah, HPS is something that honestly makes your brain a more fun place to live but unless you want to scrape out a living as a science (or SF) writer or an academic, there is no real point to it. Also, it will make you permanently mad that most people's understanding of How Science Works stops at naive Popperianism.

Edited 2013-06-29 18:37 (UTC)