28 January 1999

Score one for the SF Weekly. I usually have no patience with this paper as it’s little more than a Guardian wannabe with a badly-designed website. In the past two weeks, though, the Weekly has risked alienating its core yuppie audience with George Cothran’s columns on San Francisco’s loftominum invasion.

Last week’s column focused mostly on the insensitive architecture and scale of the new developments. This week’s report talks about the loss of jobs and institutions thanks to the complaints of yuppie crybabies who get pissed off because they were too fucking stupid to check out what their new neighborhoods were like before shelling out that half a million bucks.

Too bad the battle’s already pretty much been lost in my own neighborhood, although I realize the issues are are a little more complex here.

Intel:

As if I needed another reason not to buy a Wintel machine…

Hands down, the superlative award-winning idiots of the month have to be the fine folks at Intel. What the hell were they thinking? Did someone in the boardroom suddenly get the idea that people would be just silly happy to have a computer which identifies its user all over the web? Did this idiot have some sort of revelation which convinced him (it HAD to be a “him”) that people were just itching to give up their privacy and reveal their identities to anyone with a website?

Of course not. Someone with actual intelligence realized that corporations might pay big bucks for the ability to collect this sort of data on unsuspecting potential customers. The idiot in this scenario is the marketing fool who thought that a positive spin (security, my ass…) would keep anyone from noticing what was going on. They were wrong.

This is the same sort of marketing idiocy that makes banks babble on about how destroying competition through mergers will unltimately benefit customers and bring down fees.

I Just Don’t Understand:

I was talking with someone the other day about the irony of the fact that there’s a Taco Bell right in the middle of San Francisco’s Mission District and that it always looks crowded. Surrounded by some of the cheapest and best Mexican food in the country, I have to wonder just who the fuck eats there? And why?

More collards this weekend. Saw an ex at the supermarket tonight. Life is very busy this week. This and more will come later, if at all. Right now, another link I’ve been promising for two months.

And I’m going to bed.