ecstaticist

John Edwards’ supporters are trying to set a money raising record on January 18th, 2008. Edwards has not been getting his fair share of media coverage, even though he is still polling substantially. For some reason the MSM has decided that only Clinton and Obama warrant coverage. I believe it is, in their estimation, the best storyline, in keeping with the binary metaphysics of recent US politics. Everything is Us vs. Them in the US, so two tribes provides the most meaningful narrative. To consider a third party is too much of a mental stretch, apparently.

I’m not saying I am an Edwards supporter, but I support the democratic nominee for sure, and I want the best one possible. Hillary and Barrack might actually just mutually assure their own destruction at the rate they are going, what with the racism charges being bandied about. I can’t see how that helps either of them.

The only problem with this money bomb strategy is that, when it fails, the failure becomes the story, and if it fails badly, “failed badly” will be the lede. So, he better make it.

Cheap chicken is a great thing. People who eat meat eat a lot of it. Most have no idea how it is produced. A recent factory food dust-up in Britain revealed some facts that are shared by North American chicken farming practices as well, especially for cheap meat that feeds the fast food industry.

Next week, on Channel 4, the chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver will seek to show the ugly reality of cheap chicken and call on supermarkets to improve their conditions, and the public to choose free-range or organic birds.

About 855 million chickens are slaughtered for meat annually in the UK, but as well as being the most popular meat, chicken is the subject of most welfare concern. The majority of birds – about 95 per cent – are kept indoors, packed densely into vast sheds in what academics and campaigners say are clearly harmful conditions.

Research has found that 27 per cent of these standard chickens have significant or serious walking difficulties because their legs cannot support their abnormally large bodies genetically bred for meat.

Many also suffer burns to the legs because they are standing on sawdust soaked with urine that is only changed every six weeks.

One in 20 birds dies from sudden death syndrome, usually caused by respiratory or heart failure.

If you care about animal welfare and your own health, but you don’t want to stop eating meat, I recommend you read Fast Food Nation to get a sense of what is being done to both the animals you eat and your health.

Sometimes the facts are a drag. Better to meet them head-on.

As much as I enjoy my flickr community experience, I have to say that I have never seen a large-scale commercial web service that is so poorly deployed. Today, January 2, 2008, I expect everyone will be uploading their holiday photos, and flickr will be under heavy load. In fact, flickr is unusable today. It is so slow that I just close the browser window. I have other things to do rather than stare at a blank screen.

Thing is, if I can anticipate that, it is something that should have been anticipated by flickr as well. With a deep-pockets parent company like Yahoo, there should be no question of performance problems. Instead, they are the rule, not the exception.

I am afraid flickr banks on the fact that it is very hard to leave the service because it is hard to move your photos. It is also hard to leave your established community. So, the poor performance is tolerated by users like me.

There comes a point, however, when things get so bad you just start to question your own sanity in sticking with a service that sucks so bad. Love the new stats feature. The new editing tools are obviously great for people without good software on their local computers. Plenty to like. But when pages won’t load, it kills the rest of the goodness.

flickr recently changed their tagline to “flickr loves you”. I think that is more than a little tongue-in-cheek”. I think some arrogant shit at flickr knows that the service is addictive and therefore they can get away with things few other businesses can. flickr is kind of like the oil companies, or the monopoly hydro company, or the crack dealer on the corner.

I wish flickr would live up to their tagline. I wish someone would stand up for the users and make performance a priority. I am sick of “waiting for www.flickr.com”.

Someone at flickr should be fired today to make way for someone else who knows how to deploy the needed infrastructure to support the service.