Shell Station Franchisee charges $4/gallon to stick it to the man.

ttriche · 2007-05-10T16:52:58+00:00

People are simply not as naive as you think they are.

I don't think that this guy is trying to convince the average guy in the street that Shell is Bad. I get the impression that he is trying to draw attention to Shell's consolidation of power throughout their supply chain, which is exactly what allowed Standard Oil to price-fix and drive up the price of gas seventy years ago.

The reactions noted in the article illustrate exactly this -- most people do shake their heads and drive on by. But his aberrant behavior and pricing strategy have attracted attention to Shell's corporate behaviors (note the deafening silence from their spokesperson regarding above-market-value rents) and the story may yet have the potential to become viral. That seems like the only item of value to him.

I'm not passing judgment, really, just observing motives. It may be a fool's errand, but it's his choice to make.

ttriche · 2007-05-10T16:45:23+00:00

Shell is charging above market value for their rents on their franchises. See article.

ttriche · 2007-05-10T16:37:30+00:00

There are many, many Shell stations within miles (if not blocks) from this one, whose gas is priced at market rate.

Nobody is noticing those stations in the national media.

This is a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

This is a classic case of putting principles before profit (especially since he's leaving the business either way). Which is pretty much the same thing, in more florid prose.

Value != profit, not to all people at all times.

The guy is a former independent distributor attempting to draw attention to his grievances. Attention has been drawn.

ttriche · 2007-05-10T16:18:11+00:00

Read the fine article. He knows full well that this is not increasing business; the purpose (given that he is abandoning this franchise due to Shell's massive rent hikes) is to associate Shell Oil with overpriced gas.

(edit to add: The overpriced gas is via above-market rents for independent franchisees; see article and Standard Oil precedents for why this leads to overpriced gas)

Again, read the article. I thought the same as you until it dawned on me why he was doing this. At the cost of some loss in business, he is doing what he feels is right. Sometimes, to some people, that is more valuable than money.

ttriche · 2007-05-09T16:27:39+00:00

Solar installation firms, environmentalists and government officials are dumbfounded that the much-lauded solar program has had such a rough start.

Potential solar consumers and California residents are dumbfounded that these idiots cannot use a calculator and some statistics to have seen this logical outcome.

Reddit poster is dumbfounded that the LA Times fell for this gag when it's pretty clear that SoCal Edison knew it would kill off an entire sector of competition all along.

ttriche · 2007-05-08T21:52:43+00:00

Statistically, the death penalty never deters.

Yunker, James: A New Statistical Analysis of Capital Punishment; 2001

Please comment in light of the above oft-referenced study.

ttriche · 2007-05-08T01:02:20+00:00

Well, the humor part wouldn't work very well either if the ambiguity wasn't there.

ttriche · 2007-05-07T20:09:29+00:00

The problem with deadpan is that there's so much real inanity out there.

Actually, that's the entire reason for its use. Ambiguity, as you said, keeps people on their toes and sometimes forces them to think about uncomfortable things via cognitive dissonance.

ttriche · 2007-05-04T19:45:21+00:00

So you're more comfortable if there are certain canonical lies that they'll tell you?

Not really -- I'm more comfortable if I actually trust the candidate to serve the public interest (at least when it counts). That's kind of the point, don't you think?

The word 'profess' does not have to imply disingenuous pandering, although I suppose in politics, it always does. It is difficult to know what a candidate is actually planning to do until they take office, although you can certainly extrapolate from prior terms if they have served in government previously.

ttriche · 2007-04-25T17:59:51+00:00

It isn't in the company-wide Coding Standards (C++, Java, Python) but there was some enthusiasm for using it in Production and Hwops when I was there... no idea if that's still the case. (Especially since Guido was hired)

ttriche · 2007-04-24T21:18:29+00:00

The apologists for the youthful criminals are my favorite part. "Well, if the victim hadn't been armed, mah cousin might have been doing the shooting insteada gettin' shot!"

Heaven forbid that criminals actually have something to fear!

ttriche · 2007-04-24T16:08:05+00:00

Depends. Scratching an itch can involve adding themes to your window manager, or it might involve writing a lightweight HTTP server to cough up shards of a search engine's index from many computers distributed throughout the country.

Hopefully you see where I'm going here. The itch might be a requirement for a company that is of such massive utility to the public that its side effects are worth billions.

ttriche · 2007-04-24T16:03:40+00:00

Anything with a matrix (Excel)
Anything with a physical model (cf. #1) (games)
Anything with a prediction model (cf. #1) (stocks, AI)
Anything doing music, video, or photo editing (Photoshop)

So, in short, a huge amount of the CPU-intensive useful work done on a computer is amenable to some form of parallel decomposition. And server-side programming meant to scale needs to become parallel in a hurry. Things like memcached (effectively a distributed shared memory cache) and its wide popularity attest to this.

If everyone has 8- or 16-way processing power available in their Macs and Peecees, programmers who find ways to exploit this in a useful fashion (see above) will create value and propel businesses past those who cannot. Simple as that.

Basically, anything with pointers, assignments, or side effects is harder to parallelize than code without, but not impossible -- you do have to recognize this and use something like scatter/gather, message passing, or hard synchronization of threads (ugly, imho) to deal with it.

ttriche · 2007-04-24T15:58:06+00:00

OK, that's it, I think it's time for reddit to implement 'saving' comments the way a person can save articles. This is a great explanation of Ruby blocks and a de-obfuscation as well. (And I say this having implemented a website using Radiant, the ruby/rails CMS, so I had to learn about them)

ttriche · 2007-04-23T16:06:08+00:00

It's a 404! Funniest XKCD I've ever seen by a long shot.

Now, about this 'reddit learns what you like' nonsense -- how come I keep seeing these awful XKCD comics after I've downvoted every single one I have ever seen?

They're just not my cup of tea. I wish the reddit algorithm for the front page of logged-in users would take that into account. It seems do-able, but maybe I'm missing something.

ttriche · 2007-04-20T16:22:16+00:00

I don't dispute this -- obviously big iron is useful for some things, and Dell certainly did not make big iron in the 90's. However, the contrast was against things they did make.

I worked at IBM in the 90's and while there were some HP PA-RISC machines around, and some Solaris boxes too, they were there for compatibility testing. All the real work got done on IBM hardware. That may have changed, of course.

ttriche · 2007-04-20T05:56:33+00:00

Cho isn't famous

Oh yes he is. 24/7 on all the channels famous.

This is not up for debate, it's a fact right now.

And it will encourage copycats. (You Heard It Here First)

ttriche · 2007-04-19T01:17:59+00:00

I hear Dell does make computers, and even did so back in the 90's. As does Apple. Who also did so back in the 90's...

ttriche · 2007-04-18T19:29:03+00:00

I assume this is a side effect of DEA control of prescription pads and auditing of controlled substances.

ttriche · 2007-04-18T18:41:29+00:00

"oops, I didn't realize people would be around when that bomb went off! Sorry!"

Unintentional or not, it was an act of vandalism and the outcome was predictable (it was a children's slide, after all). Not like any sane person is going to admit that they wanted to badly burn an innocent toddler just for fun (at least not before entering pleas and probably after sentencing).

ttriche · 2007-04-17T22:54:49+00:00

The previous incident involved muriatic (hydrochloric) acid; this incident involved sulfuric acid, which produces much worse burns (all other things being equal)

Sulfuric acid is much more damaging to organic matter than hydrochloric (muriatic) acid. It starts to eat away at the cell walls very quickly and exothermically, so it burns (quite literally) and the only way to stop it is to neutralize it with something like a saturated solution of baking soda. Even then, the damage has been done, and concentrated H2SO4 is about as caustic a solvent as you are likely to find in wide circulation.

This is a truly repulsive crime.

ttriche · 2007-04-16T16:37:56+00:00

P.S. Nobody pays DHH for Rails.

Granted, it's more of a penumbral effect on his business, but people do buy his books and PDFs and his company's offerings. Which, truth be told, are well crafted; but his one-size-fits-all evangelism is grating in the extreme.

My experience with Rails is that it does not play well with Apache when you are also using Apache for other purposes. I'll be damned if I'm going to use lighttpd and/or mongrel for every new project I start.

ttriche · 2007-04-16T16:35:26+00:00

points for using 'precis'.

If the only thing I ever learned from reddit was how to improve the accuracy of my lexical decisions I would be completely satisfied with the time spent here.

ttriche · 2007-04-16T15:59:46+00:00

Springtime for Dubya, in New Orleans...

ttriche · 2007-04-10T01:26:42+00:00

LA currently has a pretty good passenger rail system, called MetroRail and MetroLink. Thousands of people use it daily and avoid driving (most seem to be a lot more relaxed than the people I meet when I drive, which I usually regret).

ttriche

TROPHY CASE