All posts by Rand Simberg

Humor, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Tell Us What You Really Think About The Donald

5 Comments

For those among you so benighted as to not receive the weekly Goldberg File via email, here’s why you should:

Anyway, I spent a week getting crap from all of these allegedly purer-than-moi conservatives about how we could not possibly risk letting Chris Christie or GOProud sully the peripatetic temple of conservatism known as CPAC. And then they invited Donald Trump to be one of the keynoters, with more time than nearly any other speaker. And that did it for me. CPAC is free to invite whoever it wants, of course. But spare me the CPAC-is-for-true-conservatives bunk. I consider Trump a ticky-tacky ass-clown of metaphysical proportions. He’s a huckster and a buffoon who thinks he’s a genius because the rubes fall for his act and his reality show gets good ratings with C-list has-beens who wouldn’t make the cut for a remake of The Love Boat. His conservatism conservatism — to the extent it exists at all — is all by the seat of his pants, which makes sense given that is the article of clothing nearest his brain.

You can sign up for it here (along with the Morning Jolt, which is a daily from Jim Geraghty).

Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Amazon Advantage

7 Comments

So, I’ve been trying to set up a page for my book at Amazon. So far, color me very unimpressed.

The Advantage site has a form to fill out with book description, author bio, and three reviews. It very clearly states:

You don’t need to use HTML to fill out the edit boxes below – just type normally. However, if you’d like to use advanced formatting, you may use HTML to indicate breaks, boldface or italics.
<P> = a paragraph break <BR> = a line break
<b> </b> = boldface <i> </i> = italics.
Example: The <b>quick</b> brown fox <i>jumped over</i> the lazy dog.<BR>

Well, I kind of like paragraphs. Call me crazy, but that’s just how I roll. So I put in some <p>s, and bolded the names of the reviewers.

When I saved my work, it didn’t display the HTML properly, instead showing the code. Moreover, it had removed the second two reviews, and attributed the first one to the second reviewer.

I scratched my head, and went back int to edit, reinserting the other two reviews, and straightening out the reviewer names. I hit “View” and got exactly the same thing. HTML still in the code, no graf breaks, and the second two reviews disappeared, with the wrong reviewer name on the first.

I send a complaint to Amazon (via a web form, so I have no record of it, unless I had the foresight to copy it somewhere, which I didn’t). Here is the response:

Dear Vendor,

I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Please be informed that when you update any information using update item content and then click submit button, everything will get disappear. However please be informed that the same will appear on the website in 5-7 days.

I request you to update the information without using HTML tags.

As you have the limit to add only 3 reviews, I request you to write back to us with the reviews that you wish to add and we will do the needful.

Thank you for selling with Amazon,

Sowjanya Reddy T.
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

So, they can’t show me what the page is actually going to look like until it goes live, and despite the fact that they clearly invite me to use HTML, they then request that I not do so. Which means that I can’t do so much as break paragraphs.

I’m kind of gobsmacked. I mean, this is fricking’ Amazon.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Obama’s Second-Term Troubles

10 Comments

…have already begun:

According to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, half of independents express a negative opinion of the president’s performance; just 44 percent approve.
 A majority of Americans give Obama negative marks on handling the economy. And the president has only a four-percentage-point lead over Republicans when it comes to whom the public trusts more to deal with the economy.

This is clearly not where a president who is less than two months into his second term wants to be. But in some respects, it’s not all that surprising. Mr. Obama, while he won his contest with Governor Romney fairly handily, was not a particularly popular president for most of his first term–and the key elements of his agenda are decidedly unpopular.

He didn’t win in November because people voted for him — he managed to scare them into voting against Romney, or not bothering to vote.