Node.js is Cancer. Node.js is a tumor on the programming community, in that not only is it completely braindead, but the people who use it go on to infect other people who can’t think for themselves, until eventually, every asshole I run into wants to tell me the gospel of event loops. Have you accepted epoll into your heart?


Warren Buffet wants to pay more taxes.  Perhaps he should start by having Berkshire Hathaway paying the taxes that it already owes.  “The rough translation of the report is that Berkshire Hathaway did not pay all the federal taxes that it was required to for 2002 through 2004.  The IRS examination team caught Berkshire Hathaway on at least some issues.  Instead of paying up, Berkshire Hathaway is threatening the IRS with protracted litigation and is in the process of cutting a deal with the IRS Appeals office.”

Keith Ellison (DFL-MN) is an ignorant pus-weasel.  I have spent time working to comply with regulations.  Most recently this very weekend where a application that calculates regulatory compliance got a bit of bad data from ERP and threw up all over itself. In the end fixing it is going to involve four people @ several hours each.  Not counting the time Friday and Saturday that three of us spent holding up it’s hair while it threw up in the toilet and whimpered.

There was nothing productive about it.  It was wasted time, time during which I neither delivered value to my employer, nor made life better, nor built a product, nor had a lot of fun.  The only thing I did was ensure that somewhere an auditor is happy.

Op-Ed: Obama ‘Devastating’ for Civil Liberties. (NPR).   (The) purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

Obama has taken everything that Bush did and dialed it to ’11’.  We wanted change …

Evolve. A case for modernization as the road to salvation. Technology got us into this mess. Only technology can get us out.

The sound of capitalism. Hip hop music was blamed for the August riots. But behind the celebration of “bling” is a culture of entrepreneurship.

Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful and long-overdue compilation of Market Anarchist thought.  And although editors Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier seem to have made the farcical mistake of including a couple of my pieces they have done an amazing job on the whole.

Vive La Revolution!  The US is probably getting ready for a revolution. Back in the Cold War days, the CIA was asked to do a portrait of a country that might have a revolution. It decided that such a country would have three characteristics:

Occupy Wall Street: Fighting Capitalism, One Food Cart at a Time. And while the occupation has been compared to the Arab Spring and Tahrir Square, the mostly Egyptian kebab cookers and breakfast sellers who are losing their livelihoods aren’t too sure.

Co-lateral damage, maaaaaan.

Alert readers – having got this far – might wonder what this is. What it is … are items that were lurking in the open tabs on my browser. Too interesting to dismiss, not worth a separate post. From my short-term memory to yours.

Also – The ol’ Brief isn’t seeing much posting these days. No posting means no readers. No readers means there isn’t much point to having it around. I like it too much to see it limp into the darkness, unloved and unread.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.