There's a reason to date your articles

Apologies about the unusually long delay between postings

By now the story about United Airlines going into bankrupty is old news; both the fact that it happened 6 years ago, and the fact that through a series of unfortunate events, Bloomberg reported that it was happening again last week. Anytime something like this happens, the SEC usually stomps around a few times to find out what went wrong, and assure people that it will never happen again (lol). WaPo reports:

Now, the WSJ reports, the SEC has opened a preliminary investigation into how the story resurfaced. It may not turn into a full investigation but a lot of investors felt the impact Monday and those trades aren't being reversed.... The Tribune says the story made it into the current news flow because of one person visiting the article at 1 a.m. Sunday morning and that pushed the story into the business section's "most viewed" list, which is where Google News found it Sunday afternoon after someone else clicked on the link. In an interesting insight into Google News, the first inbound link came in three minutes later. But the major trouble began when Income Securities Advisors put it on Bloomberg News?and getting it there had nothing to do with bots.

There is an astonishingly simple way to solve this problem forever. Date your news articles. Print newspapers don't do this because the paper itself is dated, and dating every article would be redundant, but if you're going to post articles online, all you have to do is include a tag with the date. Ideally, the tag would be in format easily readable to both humans and computers (i.e., make 2, one in html unseen by humans and one at the top just below the headline) so that crawling newsbots could easily figure out what's new, and so could any human who read the article. In fact, most news articles you find online do this already, on account of not being idiots. It might be hard for a computer to easily figure out the date of the article, but that's where the html date stamping comes in.

Seriously, this is not a complicated problem. Error rating: 6. SERIOUSLY, THIS IS NOT A COMPLICATED PROBLEM. Nothing irritates me more than easily solved problems which have not been solved.

-Enginerd

Suing our way to prosperity

What do you do when your favorite grocery store raises its prices? Do you try to waste less food, switch to generics, or stop buying bottled water? If so, move to Cuba you pinko bastard.

Here in America, when something bad happens, we pick somebody to blame and sue them. Case in point, Congress and OPEC:

The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

I feel dirty. This is the second time in the past few months I've found myself agreeing with Bush (other time was the farm bill). The White Houses view:

The White House opposes the bill, saying that targeting OPEC investment in the United States as a source for damage awards "would likely spur retaliatory action against American interests in those countries and lead to a reduction in oil available to U.S. refiners."

Yeah, that sounds about right. Although I'm pretty sure they got cut off before adding that "the Bush family derives most of it's wealth from oil, and so we're making a killing here. Cheney too."

Investigating the cause of current high prices would be a worthwhile activity, and is part of the bill, but Congress has already jumped to its conclusion and pointed the finger. The only effect will be to jeopardize our already tenuous relationship, and drive prices higher. Thanks for that.

Although the real reason for the bill is likely the same as the gas tax holiday. Congress wants to look like it's doing something helpful, but of course it can't.

Error rating: 5.

Let the masses rule? Impossible

So apparently some radicals think that the public should decide how best to govern the nation:

The foundation has posted its Transparency in Government Act of 2008 on the Web at publicmarkup.org and has invited the public to tweak, add to or criticize any aspect of the proposed bill. The goal, said Ellen Miller, executive director of the foundation, is to change the backroom, secretive way that legislation is typically passed in Washington.

Now, some people think this is a bad idea:

The idea was not as well received by Paul Miller, past president of the American League of Lobbyists. Miller says lobbyists are unfairly portrayed as backroom-deal makers.

There is more transparency in legislation than ever before, Miller said. But he disagrees with putting bills up for all to rewrite.

"I don't think the way you advocate is to put everything online and say, 'All right American people, weigh in on that,' because then what's next?" Miller asked. "Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

I'm just going to assume he was quoted out of context, and meant something more like "Policy decisions require a broad base of knowledge and careful, critical analysis, that members of the public simply do not perform." But still, telling the public that they shouldn't have a voice in government decisions IN A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY seems just a tad idiotic.

Error Scale: 4 (assuming there was some redeeming context)

How to prevent lawlessness

The Washington Post reports:

"A crucial yet overlooked deadline looms over the Iraq debate: Unless further action is taken, the war will become illegal on Jan. 1, 2009. ...
The most recent U.N. resolution expires on Dec. 31, and the administration has announced that it will not seek one for 2009. Instead, it is now negotiating a bilateral agreement with the Iraqi government to replace the U.N. mandate."

This is an interesting point, which I was unaware of. Much more interesting is the authors solution:

"There's a simple solution to all these problems: Extend the U.N. mandate for 2009. That would put the use of U.S. armed forces on firm international and domestic legal footing. And it would allow the next president and Congress time to consider the future in a deliberate way.

Reps. William Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) have proposed legislation to do just that. This initiative deserves bipartisan support. It represents the only practical way to confront the lawless unilateralism that the administration plans for New Year's Day."

This was a bit of a curveball. The logical progression appears to be as follows:

1. The U.S. occupation of Iraq becomes illegal Jan. 1, 2009.

2. The U.S. occupation won't actually have ended by then [implied, and I don't think anyone will argue that this is true].

3. We must change the law to make the occupation legal.

Classic government. Most other institutions are in a rather awkward situation when they break the rules; they actually have to face consequences. The government can, and according to the Post should, just changes the rules to fit whatever they decide to do at the moment.

Also, if your problem is "lawless unilateralism", pre-emptively making legal the action which was to be lawlessly and unilaterally imposed doesn't actually solve anything. You might just as well solve all crime by abolishing laws.

Pretty dumb, but the main problem the article is concerned with is the president exercising authority which he doesn't technically have, not the consequences of that authority. Sort of like a piano teacher telling their young student not to do drugs. Not a bad thing to do, just outside their authority.

On the error scale, I'd give it a 7.