Social media, October 2013.

TUESDAY, 1 OCTOBER.

Folks like to point out how the shutdown is really gonna affect Congress’s poll numbers. They don’t understand: It’s the president who cares about national polls; he’s the one with the nationally-elected job. The only polls a member of Congress cares about are the local polls of the constituents who voted ’em in. And the libertarians shutting Congress down were elected in gerrymandered libertarian districts who want Congress shut down, who love the obstructionist fools they sent to Congress, and who don’t care what the rest of us think. Polls shmolls.

Take a break from the government news, and listen to “The Elephant Song.”

WEDNESDAY, 2 OCTOBER.

A parable about the shutdown.

THURSDAY, 3 OCTOBER.

Look, I’m not thrilled about Obamacare. It’s basically doing for healthcare what the state of California did with auto insurance: It requires everyone to have it, and suggests it may lower our rates. It offers to insure those who can’t afford it, so there’s that.

But even lower rates are insanely high. Because healthcare is for-profit. And rescue aid services ought never be for-profit. Otherwise you get insane markup costs added, as HMOs profiteer on human suffering. As you can see in this comparison between U.S. costs and other first-world healthcare costs.

FRIDAY, 4 OCTOBER.

Can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this already.

Well, we in California have CalFire. Not sure what the rest of the states have in place.

SATURDAY, 5 OCTOBER.

How internet feedback works.

Unfortunately Wikipedia changed it back.

Netflix, like meth.

To follow up from my previous post, “Netflix, like crack,” we did watch Breaking Bad. Hence the new title. ’Cause, you know, meth is a big part of that show. And now we’re on to Mad Men, and if I’d written a piece after we finished with that show, it’d likely be titled “Netflix, like nicotine,” ’cause of all the smoking. May as well beat this addiction metaphor into the ground, right?

No we didn’t finish Breaking Bad. Netflix hasn’t posted the last eight episodes in the United States. (Apparently it has elsewhere, ’cause Netflix was the only pusher supplier of the show in other countries.) Yes, I already know who dies and who doesn’t, ’cause the internet can’t keep it’s bloody mouth shut, but I’ll watch the rest of it anyway once Netflix finally puts them online.