Eye on Winer

Dave believes that the solution to the U.S. financial crisis is printing more money. Excuse my language, but… are you fucking kidding me? Does he believe that he must still have money in his bank account because he hasn’t run out of checks yet? Does he believe that somewhere, a bunch of economists are reading his blog and saying “Holy crap, guys! Why didn’t we think of this??”

Even though I’m not an economist, I’m pretty sure that the US government can print money.

So if we have a $1 trillion deficit this year, that does not imply that someone has to lend us $1 trillion and it does not imply therefore that someone will have to pay someone back that money at some date in the future. If there’s an economist listening who thinks this is not true, please say so and everyone else ignore what I’m about to say.

The most hilarious part about this, though… is this:

He asks people to correct him if he’s wrong, and then he closes the comments. Now, I don’t know if he closed them before he had 1,000 people tell him this is a really idiotic thing to propose or if he did it in anticipation of that, but either way: “not an economist” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

In a post today, Dave suggests that instead of a “TV Star”, we choose a “user” of the health care system. This is stupid for a number of reasons. Listen, Sanjay Gupta is a doctor. He does some work on TV. So what?

But, more to the point, let’s think about the ramifications of this:

If you really want to turn things upside-down for the better, instead of a healthy young doctor, how about an older person who is not a doctor, who has health problems and has been treated by the system, someone who has actual experience being a user of American health care.

Aside from the fact that this seems to be a subtle way of suggesting that HE should be the Surgeon General (heh), goodness, there’s just so much wrong with this idea.

First, and foremost, how do you find a user whose experience is typical? If you don’t, how do you know that the “changes” made are going to be better for anyone? Selecting the right user, even if it was a good idea, would be unfathomably hard. Second, does Dave even know what the OSG does?

Wikipedia is helpful on this point (emphasis supplied):

The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the USPHS, a cadre of health professionals who are on call 24 hours a day, and can be dispatched by the Secretary of HHS or the Assistant Secretary for Health in the event of a public health emergency.

. . .

The Surgeon General also has many informal duties, such as educating the American public about health issues and advocating healthy lifestyle choices.

So you want some random layperson to head 6,000 health professionals in an emergency situation? If you thought New Orleans was a clusterfuck, wait until we Aunt Mabel has command of our emergency medical services. As to the “informal” duties, who is going to be the one who educates our surgeon general on these topics?

He has completely lost his damn mind.

Dave solves the Twitter authentication issue, and by “solves” I mean “does absolutely nothing to solve”.

The Twitter authentication problem is two-fold:

1. You cannot grant access to the account to a service without granting them full control of it.
2. Once they have access, there’s no way to revoke it, short of changing your password.

The caveat to any solution is that it needs to be as easy as possible for both the application developers and the users. Dave’s proposed solution addresses neither of these, really.

(more…)

This is classic:

When I heard someone say a customer was stupid, I said if that’s true we’re really fucked.

Here’s how I reasoned…

1. We have to believe our customers are the smartest people, because they were smart enough to choose the best product.

2. If they were stupid, then they chose the wrong product and we’re dead, so you’d better start looking for a new job

The only logical way to proceed is to:

Whoa there, partner. Dave might have set a record for logical fallacy to word ratio. First of all, most people are stupid, so it stands to reason that most of your customers are, too. Here’s the key: stupid people often make good decisions. Even if your product is the most amazing thing ever, just choosing your product does not make them a genius.

After all, if your product is so great, even a moron would see that it was the best, right?

Right.

This might have made a decent motivational speech, but it’s TERRIBLE business. Especially in software.

You can treat people with respect regardless of how intelligent you think they are. When you’re writing software, though, it’s best to assume your user is stupid. This post nicely sums up why most of the stuff Dave writes is horribly cryptic, though:

He expects everyone using it to be a genius. We know, from our past experiences with Dave, that “being a genius” means thinking exactly like him. Makes sense. To use any of the stuff he’s written you basically have to ask yourself: “What would Dave do?”

I never thought I’d see the day… but it turns out that Dave does actually understand why sites like EyeOnWiner exist (emphasis supplied):

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

On behalf of all authors, readers, and commenters here at EOW… you’re very welcome.

I smell a new tagline… “EyeOnWiner . . . cleaning up Dave’s environmental disasters, one post at a time.”

Why am I not at all surprised that Dave has his panties in a knot about his Netflix service being suspended because he didn’t pay it.

I mean… what else is there to say? He doesn’t pay his bill and Netflix are the assholes and losers.

One has to wonder if Dave even called or if he just expected Netflix to have a special “do not suspend for non-payment” flag on his account because he’s Dave Fucking Winer.

Seems like an awfully trivial thing to throw a little temper tantrum over, no? You can just hear him screaming “Don’t you know who I am!?” Heh.

I never thought a post of Dave’s would open up in my feed reader and I would find myself sighing with relief. Today that happened: Dave wrote a coherent, reasonable, and articulate piece in which he engaged in no mud-slinging or hypocrisy.

Of course, it was about technology, not politics. Go figure.