Letter to the city government

So I just found out that, despite promising to end the program this month, the Mountain View city government has decided to extend its stupid food scraps collection pilot "indefinitely." This program cut garbage pickup services in half to once every other week and instead allowed residents to put food scraps in composting bins to be picked up. Upset at this pointless extension of a decrease in useful services provided by the city government, I wrote them the following email:

Response to a bunch of nonsense

This was originally going to be a Facebook comment in response to this article, but ended up being much, much longer.

Some musings on unwed parents and poverty

My dad sent me an article about inequality a few days ago. The two points of the article were:

1. that the minimum wage is not well targeted at reducing poverty
2. that a large factor in poverty is family structure

Update on "When European 'Austerity' Isn't"

Back in June 2012, I wrote a post about how little actual "austerity" had happened among European governments. Most governments had increased their level of spending between 2008 and 2011, and only three governments had decreased their spending from 2007 to 2011. Now that Eurostat has the numbers from 2012, we can see how things have changed in the past year. As before, all numbers are taken unmodified from Eurostat.

Public School Peril: a Parallel

Horror story of a DC public school.

I had a very brief experience teaching ballroom dance to middle schoolers in an after-school program at a public school, in Woonsocket, RI. Woonsocket is apparently a relatively poor town, but the school buildings were brand new, so it couldn't have been that bad.

Easy solution to the melting ice caps

People are always belly-aching about how the polar ice caps are melting. "Oh, the sea level is going to rise and flood coastal cities!" Blah blah blah, as if this is some unsolvable problem.

Using a Wiimote in Mupen64plus

After much head-wall-banging, I got a Wiimote to pair successfully with my computer and work as a controller in Mupen64plus! There was a lot of trial and error, so I've created a guide to getting a working setup so future generations don't have to go through what I did. The details are in this git repo, which includes detailed instructions and config files.