But I think it’s a lot worse than writers with extra YouTube posting time on their hands. There’s a piece in the L.A. Times about how non-Hollywood money is starting to find good writers (via pmarca)

Writer Guild members, listen up. There is a lesson here. Just ask Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of “Michael Clayton,” a nervy thriller that’s won critical raves this fall. Gilroy had a script that was dead in the water until a total outsider — a Boston real estate developer named Steve Samuels — said if Gilroy could get a star and stick to a budget, he’d bankroll the film.

…

Being entrepreneurial isn’t for the faint of heart. If you want a sweet upfront paycheck, you may not have the stomach for it. But after seeing studios bowdlerize their scripts, many writers will swap a big payday for more control. [Writer-Director David Twohy] says that after Relativity [(the firm that financed "3:10 to Yuma")] read his script, “They told me, ‘Script approved as-is.’ I’ve never heard a studio ever say that.”

I have to agree with Marc Andreessen on this one: “Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?”

Yale economist Bob Shiller says in the weekend issue of Barron’s that he’s still looking for 20-30% housing price declines over the next 5-10 years — including in untouchable cities like San Francisco and New York (and I’ll include Vancouver)

He goes on to quote the article, talking about the relocation that’s occurring. Some folks left comments that pointed out that there are always going to be people drawn to jobs in hot markets like New York or San Francisco, but I know of at least one San Francisco-based company that’s looking to hire outside of the city.

“But here’s the question.  The question is, how do you respond to [the intelligence failures]?  Do you respond to it by correcting the intelligence, or do you do what the Democrats are doing, which is [thinking critically] with it.  And I think the president’s point was at this critical moment in this critical war, with this central front in the war on terror, [thinking critically] is not what we should be doing.”  Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman – Transcript for November 13 – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC – MSNBC.com

Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are [thinking critically] with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. And that’s irresponsible.  President Delivers Remarks at Elmendorf AFB on War on Terror

I’m sure there are other substitutions that can be made, for “sending mixed signals” and “rewriting the past”.  In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s possible to translate Bush-speak into something intelligible.  Heh…nevermind…I can’t believe I just said that.

technorati tags: playingpolitics, bush, bushspeak, meetthepress, mehlman

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on Electowidget. Electowidget is a plugin for MediaWiki designed to make it possible to conduct Internet polls and elections using many different voting systems, including the Schulze method, Instant Runoff Voting, Approval voting, and even plain old Plurality.

Electowidget isn’t designed for secure public elections. Rather, it’s designed for the types of informal polls and elections that currently happen on wikis today. It’s also designed as a tool to help election theorists provide comparitive examples of how a given result will be tabulated comparing multiple different systems.

All data is stored on wiki pages, in JSON format, and some parts of the system currently require you to get your hands dirty editing JSON. My next step is to hide as much of the JSON away from the end user as possible, so that editing raw JSON
isn’t necessary. One nice bit about JSON is that it’s a very machine-friendly format, so I don’t anticipate that step being too tough to accomplish.

The ultimate goal is to make a library that can plugged into most any CMS or other PHP application. A lot of the functionality is already such that this is possible.

This work is seemingly unrelated to my work on Spectaclar (user management project), but there is a tie-in. I’ve done some initial work on a CMS-independence layer which can be helpful in porting plugins to different CMS systems. I haven’t decided yet just how far I’ll take this, but I keep this idea in the back of my mind whenever I’m in that part of the code.

Anyway, I hope people find this useful. I anticipate it’ll be useful for at least some of the things I’m doing, so I suppose that’s good enough for me.

There are so many things wrong with this, I’m not sure where to start…

Of course, his first dispatch was “first p0st! LOL!”, but he’ll get the hang of it.