Indignant Desert Birds

This is why LBJ is in heaven.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for watching football. Sundays are for sleeping in. Sundays are for romance, kitties, and being covered in snow. Sundays are not for romancing kitties– that would just be weird.

This week: the US Federal government was threatening to break the internet- so nerds turned the internet off and on again. The problem seems to have gone away. This week, time scientists declined to skip so much as a single second- for the next three year. Good news: February 29th 2012 is still scheduled to happen. This week: mother nature gave in and allowed it to begin raining in San Francisco, ending a several months long dry spell for the City. This week: I lost all of my links, and had to find new ones.

One thing I don’t understand: if the evidence of guilt is truly overwhelming, then a scrupulously fair trial process- in which a defendant is given every possible power and advice- will return a guilty verdict. If that evidence is not overwhelming, then why is it possible to execute someone? The fact that a single supreme court judge- let alone 7 of them- could think it permissible that a defendant would not know that their council had bailed on them boggles the mind. I wonder if corporate people would be given the same raw treatment under the same circumstances?

It does seem legitimately true that the world has grown more peaceful since the advent of mass communication. Though the cause and effect is far from known.

As the world has gone digital, information scarcity goes away. No longer can business models that rely on this scarcity be profitable. Some industries have whined against the future, and tried to legislate the creation of artificial scarcities. The trick in the future will be understanding where the new scarcities are, and charging for those, instead.

As I watch the games today, I’ll remind myself that 80% of NFL players go bankrupt within 5 years of leaving the league. Comparing the life of the most successful pro-athlete to the life of the average athlete is a common mistake. Sadly, it’s about as appropriate as comparing the life of a Hollywood star with that of a community college stage director.

The basic distinction between Left and Right is that to the Right, “Caveat Emptor” is the highest freedom. To the Left, freedom is only begun once Caveat Emptor is abolished. By placing the burden of regulation on producers, rather than the burden of injury or death on consumers, government is able to create a fairer, healthier society. My friends on the Right hate the idea of innocent employers being tasked with insuring that their customers aren’t idiots.

“Right to Work” is an Orwellian phrase, which means that your boss can fire you for any reason or none. Without a “Right to Work”, employees would be able to create, join, and fund unions. Unions, as long-time readers know, are ancient corporations which allow employees to bargain as a single unit against management. Management, of course, never loses the right to collective bargaining.

This week the US government came very close to allowing for the shut-down of any website on the mere suspicion that it might be using material that it didn’t own. Years ago, Spider Robinson wrote a short story about how hellish that might be.

I have some thoughts on SOPA.

I had a whole hell of a lot of links about my hero, Martin Luther King Jr, saved for your edification. Then I lost them. So instead, I’ll point you at Slactivist’s coverage. The Slactivist is masterful as always.

If you click just one link:

If “Christianity” means anything, it means understanding that god lives in the pains of the afflicted. Salvation- according to this theology- can only be achieved by alleviating those pains.

This week, the theme was power, etc and so forth. But then, when isn’t it? Let’s end on a high note: those kids today don’t know how bad their games are:

Tags: Sunday // 1 Comment »

As far as I know, I have never had my words stolen. No one has ever- to the best of my knowledge- taken my work and either claimed it was their own or simply given away work for which I had hoped to get paid. I can only imagine how devastated I would feel– like a sucker punch to the soul. It’s never happened to me, but it’s happened to people I know, people I care about.

It is, however, impossible to stamp out every injustice. Social problems do not go away, they merely asymptotically approach zero. And with social problems, much like engineering, the 90/90 rule applies. So the question isn’t “how do we kill piracy?”, but rather “how do we mitigate the harm of piracy?” The proposed Legislation “Stop Online Piracy Act” would attack a social mosquito with a nuclear weapon.

I’ve written a lot about memes over the years. Briefly, though, they are the social counterparts to a biological gene. Memes, like genes, can be thought of as having a desire for propagation. They propagate by being fit to survive in a certain cultural milieu. Fire is a meme. Pictures of cats with funny captions are memes. The underlying philosophy of SOPA- indeed, of all asserted strong rights to intellectual property- is that it is possible to own memes. This is flatly impossible. The meme that memes can be owned is a cultural virus that must be eradicated.

Genes do not spring de novo into existence. They evolve from what has come before. A sudden random mutation of a tiny chromosome creates a new genetic expression that may well be better than what has come before. Without it’s progenitors, the new gene wouldn’t be possible. So too with memes. Newton wasn’t just being an asshole when he told a small scientist that he (Newton) was “standing on the shoulders of giants”. He was also acknowledgement the debt he owed to those who had come before him, who’s work he had used as a springboard for his own.

Current American intellectual property law understands this. It “secur[es] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” It also carves out a Fair Use exemption. People have the right to their own work (for a limited time), but others have the right to create derivative works. People can rent cultural space by being the first to do a particular thing, but others can grab off a piece of that thing and use it to comment on society at large, or on the work itself. We cannot own memes, we are merely the vessel through which memes flow.

SOPA is billed and sold as a method of stopping people from squatting on a meme that society is letting someone else rent. It would do more than that. SOPA would kill fair use. SOPA would create a process by which people or corporations could claim ownership over specific memes, and shut down the sites which host derivatives of those memes. If SOPA passes, it would freeze (and possibly reverse) memetic- and therefore social- evolution.

The understanding imperfect ownership of memes has been under attack for a long time. The Sonny Bono act (and it’s later upholding in Eldred v. Ashcroft) began to assert permanent ownership over memes. With this new iteration- SOPA- we see the assertion of perfect control over what can be done with memes.

SOPA does not solve the problem which does exist, and exacerbates an entirely separate problem. It needs to die. Contact your Representatives and Senators.

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It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Sleeping in, having Dim Sum, and going to work. Sundays are for doing household chores. Sundays are for Brunch. Sundays are for taking a day of rest. Sundays are for learning your coffee shop actually sells bikinis.

This week an Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated- the US insists it knows nothing. This week Google rolled out it’s new search algorithm, one which integrates social information along with its link marketplace. And this week Mitt Romney took one more step towards becoming the Republican Nominee for US president.

I really do love the word “theodicy”. It refers to the sorts of moral problems that arise from taking seriously the idea of an omni powerful, omni seeing, omni benevolent entity. The problem is that bad things happen. How and why would an entity such as described above let that happen? And what would that entity’s moral responsibility be towards the rest of us?

Speaking of cruelty: Kids. Each person has something which makes them stand out from the crowd. Nearly everyone has had the experience of being teased for something beyond their control. This would seemingly be fertile ground for empathy, and yet… and yet it doesn’t seem to. The abuse we received conditions most of us to accept it as normal, and to therefore dish it out when it becomes our turn. One of the central struggles of my own blog is to see past the surface differences and to note the intrinsic similarities of humans across time.

Campaigning for president in New Hampshire is nothing like being President of the United States. The job of the US president is bigger, less personal, less concerned with the minutia of daily life, and more concerned with creating the conditions for more than 300 million people to lead happy, healthy lives. Why, then, should anyone take the New Hampshire primary seriously?

Here’s a deal I’m almost willing to cut: in exchange for passing SOPA, IP protections revert to the historic seven year length. And software, biology, and other natural laws will be declared ineligible for IP protections. Sounds fair to me.

Jesus Christ people. Just go fucking vote for the Democrat in November.

Star Wars is the crude oil of my childhood dreams. George Lucas seems to have tapped on the shoulder of the part of me that will forever be an 11 year old and said “Lasers? Swords? Why choose?” Unfortunately, Lucas doesn’t seem to have been able to do anything else very well. The news that he hired a vocal critic to write his next movie is a good omen. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Related to the last post: creators need to know the limits of their medium. Gaming is the ultimate in “show don’t say”- except that a good game designer doesn’t show, they make a person feel. Ken Levine went on to tell one of the greatest stories in gaming. It seems he learned his lessons very well indeed.

We knew this already, right? We knew that Wall Street deliberately picked the worst possible mortgages to put into the CDOs. I guess since Wall Street doesn’t know why they’re being attacked, we should tell them again.

I am honestly not sure what function Wall Street serves, other than being a casino with a high buy in.

The headline does most of the work here. It also does a great job at removing the one claim that Yoo and others might have had to being public servants. If they honestly held that the Executive Branch must naturally have the power to do anything the Executive deems necessary for the health and safety of the Citizens of the United States, then they would naturally hold with Obama’s recess appointments as well. Since they do not, they reveal themselves as partisan hacks.

This week, the theme has been: Games of power and games of narrative. In the comments section, tell me why you think my kitty is adorable.

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for Ninjas. Sundays are for blessing universal plugs. Sundays are for going to work and trying not to look at every customer as if they were a coin block in a Mario game.

This week: the US economy showed signs that it might someday be able to take itself off the critical list. This week the Republican Party held a caucus in one of the corn states. This week everyone thought that caucus sounded more like male genitalia than a mountain range in Russia. This week, manufactures of consumer electronics got together to show off the stuff you won’t be buying in 2012.

The Nation is the closest thing America has to a mainstream Communist magazine. So when it decided to ask former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev if the world is safer without the Soviet Union, we shouldn’t be shocked that he answers “no”. He’s wrong. There’s empirical data that he’s wrong. I think he know’s he’s wrong- he consistently confuses his own (laudable) decision not to crush the East German, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian democracy movements as evidence that the Soviet Union was inherently peaceful. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting take by one of history’s key actors.

I really need an irony mark. I may have to learn the unicode.

One of the great features of Science Fiction (and fantasy) is that it enlarges contemporary mores, memories, and memes to the point where they are more easily viewable. When Bioware, for instance, set out to create non-human species they certainly didn’t think about the fact that they’d be creating a perfect example of women being the “second sex”. The fact that this was done both explicitly– and unintentionally– says volumes about the way contemporary society has failed to understand what feminism means.

Risk is one of the great boardgames. It is- at least the version I’m most familiar with- a terrible game. Fortunately, it has been revamped and modernized. The thinking behind some of the changes reveal a great deal about how humans approach the world- and explain why I only enjoy zero sum interactions when they involve low-stakes things like games.

UN Hearing on AI Rights.

A CEO at a major American company got a minimum raise of 27/% last year. The most damming part of this story is that it shows the utter failure of the labor market. American CEOs simply have not added at least 27% value to their companies. They cannot each have performed at least 27% better than any other conceivable person would have in their role. Stockholders at publicly traded companies should do themselves a favor and tell their CEOs to either take a paycut or find a new job. I’m guessing that most CFOs and CSOs would love to get a title bump for next christmas.

I don’t have much to say about this, other than to be incredulous that citizens can be compelled to turn over keys to locks which hide evidence that can be used against them.

I like to play a game with my friends and acquaintances. It’s a simple one, and I win whenever they look at me and say “I shouldn’t have told you that” in their best Hagrid voice. I’m very responsible with the information I collect that way- I never use it for anything at all. Also, Protip: a wave and a friendly smile will get someone into damned near any building.

A coworker of mine was recently telling me that he’s not very conservative- after all, he’s not against gay marriage or anything. To a large degree, I sympathize with his position. I can’t help but think, though, that there’s a better way. The challenge is to not be on the tolerance curve at all. I make this commitment now: as soon as robots meaningfully ask for equal rights, I’ll be in favor of them.

I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that developer expectation of post-release patching has done a great deal of damage to gaming culture. I’m not really sure that gets to the heart of why games are released in a “broken” state. I’d probably agree with it more if I saw the majority of games getting several non-DLC patches across the first 6 months after release. I think it has much more to do with the short term sales mentality. The significant majority of sales are being done in the first week after launch- well before gamers start noticing game-killing bugs. Add to that a games review culture that refuses to talk about anything but the most devastating bugs, and publishers simply have few incentives to spend the money to make games perfect on release.

This list of the most pirated games of 2011 seems to track fairly well with the most-played list. Perhaps most interesting: each of these games launched with a pretty strict DRM protocol. In fact: the Wii and Xbox360 require an entire special (and expensive) piece of hardware in order to use any software at all. I think the lesson is to put less energy into DRM and more into customer service.

President Obama’s EPA released a set of guidelines which will keep Americans much healthier than before. The American energy sector was allowed to create an annual $90 billion worth of pain and suffering to the American people. That’s $90 billion that we didn’t know was happening, couldn’t keep ourselves safe from, and didn’t have any control over. Naturally conservatives are furious that Obama is interfering with private enterprise.

On at least one major TV network, Cops can’t ever be wrong.

One of the interesting things about my ADD medication is that it doubles as an anti-depressant. Since I’m prone to depression, this is fantastic news. Depression is a very misunderstood phenomenon. It’s not simply “sad”, or “very sad”- for me it manifests as intense feelings of worthlessness. I don’t simply make mistakes when depressed- every time my shoelaces come untied I feel overwhelmed by the idea that I’m not quite human.

I’m looking forward to playing DOTA 2 like whoa. Yes, even the confusion and sucking.

The Sims and Sex. No, wait. Not like that. Let me try again: the Sims and human existence. Christ that sounds pretentious. Let me try again. Games, when they’re well made, give us a chance to be versions of ourselves we’d not otherwise get to try. Even the mundane tasks of living can be made interesting when the right set of incentives are created. The fact that the Sims can capture all the trepidation and excitement of a first kiss tells us that it is great art.

If you click just one link:

Learn how free Parking is destroying your life.

This week’s theme was video games and the human condition. In the comments section, let me know your Xbox Live ID, so I can add you.

Tags: Sunday // 2 Comments »

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for resolving to do things different, better- we have the technology. Sundays are for recovering from hiking- or possibly some other end-of-year activities. Sundays are for reuniting with old friends. Sundays are for celebrating the anniversary of the birth of one’s father- a tiny bit early.

This week: the interim Egyptian government got caught at, and subsequently agreed to stop- interfering with pro-democracy groups. This week, Verizon got caught at- and subsequently agreed to drop- plans to add a $2 fee for online bill pay. This week China unveiled it’s intention to land a human being on the surface of the Moon. This week the Old Year ended, and the New Year began.

2011 saw the rebirth- in America- of the massive protest that disrupts business. Citizens in Wisconsin used it effectively to end plans by their Governor to destroy labor. Citizens in Oakland, New York, and other cities used it with less tangible results. Nevertheless, it is good to see that Americans are once again learning that they have power that goes beyond choice of cellphone plan.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but it sure does buy enough food to eat.

The Cold War had a downside. Well. The Cold War had many downsides, but this one doesn’t involve the potential destruction of the human species. The downside of the Cold War is that Americans tend to not know about or recognize Soviet geniuses. It shouldn’t matter that he was on the wrong side of a border, this man advanced humanity. We should know his name.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but it sure does buy the electricity that heats my home.

We tend to think of the word “meme” as relating to cute pictures of cats on the internet. A meme is an idea, a unit of culture. It is the cultural analog to a biological gene. The 7 day week? That’s a meme. Cheating at online games? Meme. Wearing skinny ties? Perhaps the best meme of all.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but it is definitely nice to be able to call my friends and loved ones.

I don’t believe a word of this. If Japan were truly covering up decades of economic growth in order to foster good-will from the rest of the world, it would be a monumentally huge conspiracy. Granted, for both cultural and structural reasons, I think the Japanese government would have an easier time engaging in that coverup than anyone else in the world. But they’re still human over there. At least one person would get drunk and start bragging. Ok. So the LDP didn’t go out of power the way you would expect the ruling party of a nation with a shitty economy to do. Even so.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but my anti-depressants make life much easier.

The Cambodian genocide was horrific. Humans are so good at following incentives that we will start cutting off one another’s hands if the conditions are correct.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but the good toilet paper kind of rocks.

The mass protest really is a good thing. We Americans needed to begin engaging with it once more. Stop doing it stupidly, though.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but being able to buy a new vacuum cleaner because it’s on sale? Very nice.

America gets race wrong. Very wrong. We get it so wrong that we summon it into existence, and then believe in it. Worse than that, we utterly misunderstand racism. We understand it as a product of evil people, of Hitler. Instead, we must conceptualize racism as the domain of Eichmann. Basically good people who are following evil incentives without questioning where they’re going.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but I do love being able to afford drinking water!

This ought to cheer you up.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but with it, the cats and I aren’t eyeing the same food.

I am very sad to see that Love FAQ will be ending. Someone with compassion and a wicked sense of humor was needed to teach geeks about relationships, and Laura Crigger was a deft hand at both. But then, this final column can basically function as the UR text for all future relationship advice columns of all types. Once she’s done that, what else is there?

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but these cookies are delicious.

I do love how human Newt Gingrich is in these tweets. His sense of delight shines clearly. I think he’d be one of my favorite professors, were I to take a class by him. Sadly, he’s running for President. And he’s crazy.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but dinner and a movie is a great date.

This article lamenting the rise of the hashtag would be great- were it transported back to 2009 when the hashtag were in it’s golden era. Perhaps I’m just a bit bitter- I do tend to #overuse #metadata and #hashtags.

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but it’s hard to read a free newspaper in the dark.

The entire concept of sports metaphors used in a business setting is a tiny bit ridiculous. Geek metaphors, though. Those are full of win. Who doesn’t need a good team to grab aggro while they lay down the DPS and bring the team to victory?

They say that “Money can’t buy happiness”, but they’re wrong.

This week’s theme has been last year’s wrap up. I hope you’ll keep tuning in and together we can chart the world’s progress. In the comments section, tell me something that money bought which made you happy.

Tags: Sunday // 2 Comments »

So here it is. 31 December 2011, The ultimate day of the year. It’s been a good one for me, personally.

When 2011 opened, I had been-with only intermediate exception- unemployed since late 2008. My unemployment insurance had long since run out, and the job situation was beyond bleak. My bank account had run dry, and with it, so had my ability to buy food. January sucked. February sucked worse.

Funny thing about immanent starvation: it tests your boundaries. I had sworn that I would never let family connections find me a job, and yet… and yet I knew I couldn’t stretch those last 2 boxes of pasta for more than a week. So I let my little sister get me a job with the restaurant in which she had worked. I would be a host (the lowest-run of the restaurant industry) reporting directly to one of her closest friends. I got my first paycheck a couple days before my 33rd birthday. It was for $17.

A month or so after that I was formally diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder. I began taking medication and it utterly changed my world. I was able to watch an entire hour-long TV show without needing to also be reading a book! I could walk from one end of my (smallish) restaurant to the other without forgetting a 3 digit number! I was able to distinguish between boredom and inattention. It was glorious.

Also: the medication my shrink and I settled on doubled as an anti-depressant. Turns out that I was also clinically depressed for much of 2009 and 2010. Who knew?

As a result of this medication, my own drive unshackled. I was able to actually work, and work well. My bosses noticed. I was promoted, given extra duty, and promoted again. My financial situation improved dramatically. I was able to stop looking at the cats and thinking about dinner…

In the middle of the year, I began to think that I might be stable enough to start dating again. Just barely stable- but doable. That’s when the internet gods dropped Lex into my life. A couple of dates and we became an official couple. Witty? Check. Pretty? Check. Gay? Only in the sense that she’s generally “having or showing a merry, lively mood”. It’s possible that I’m more than a bit smitten.

As 2011 closes out, I find myself with a slightly greater income than I managed while collecting unemployment, but with a greatly improved sense of self worth. Throughout 2009 and 2010, my life had been in free fall. One piece at a time had seemed to fall apart, get lost, break, or disappear. In 2011, things got built. This is worth much celebration.

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It’s Christmas morning. Christmas is for waking up surrounded with loved ones. Christmas is for eating Latkes and remembering that not everyone uses the same methods in their search for the divine. Christmas is for reminding ourselves that even the poorest among us- even those too poor to afford accommodations inside an inn– are human beings. Christmas is for creating new family traditions until we get them right. Oh hell. And Christmas is for football.

This week the Iraqi Civil war flared back up again as US soldiers left the country. This week saw the deaths of an iconoclast: Christopher Hitchens, an iconic freedom fighter: Vaclav Havel, and an iron-fisted dictator: Kim Jong Il. Also also: a “space ball” crashed into Namibia- there is no word on whether Superman or Jesus walked out of said ball.

Christmas is so institutionalized into American culture that even my family– which contains no Christians– gets together to celebrate it. Because of that institutionalization, the meaning of Christmas is often lost. So in brief: Christians believe that a/the deity was born into human flesh to teach humanity to be good to one another. The trick to happiness, this deity said, is to treat everyone as well as you would the deity who controls your fate. If you have more than you need, he said, why do you hold onto it? There’s more, of course. Much more.

It’s almost funny, in a way. The Christmas story tells of a trio of wise men who paid homage to the newly-born deity-made-human. And so naturally this week two famous wise men and a stooge died. This isn’t really about that, though. This is about what we owe the rest of our species.

“We got a tailwind, bitches!”

The criterion presented here for Greatest US General seem far too limiting. For instance, rather than eliminating from consideration anyone who didn’t “fight[...] an enemy that was equal or superior to the United States in military and economic power and the general had to be fighting the main body of the enemy in that war”, I’d require only that the general had to be fighting a against a force-in-being that was the equal or superior of his/her own. Frankly the idea that no US general from WW2 can be considered great because they never faced the main German or Japanese army is asinine. How different would Kursk have gone had Patton not tied down hundreds of German tanks with the Sicilian campaign? Sherman’s Savannah Campaign utterly crippled the nascent Confederacy. To say that Sherman isn’t among the greatest generals because he had the wisdom to cripple the enemy’s ability to fight, rather than murder the fighting men themselves ignores Sun Tzu’s teachings. Obviously, I look forward to the rest of the series linked to.

It seems odd to say that people can’t get married by a Church unless they have state sanction. I know people who have been married in the eyes of a deity but not the law.

Microsoft has been working on the next iteration of the Xbox. What I find most interesting is that the head of this project is a woman. She seems to have done great work on the new UI, and I’m interested to see how far she takes the convergence project with the new hardware. The Xbox 360 really ought to have been the center of everyone’s living room, but (until recently) the user interface wasn’t good for that. Also: the name is terrible.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this Dutch magazine’s explanation for using a rather racist word. On the one wrist, America sure does seem to have gotten it’s cultural claws into everything. It would make complete sense that we would have exported our negative stereotypes. On the other, well. I’d like to think that we would have started exporting the fact that you can’t use that word anymore. In defense of the Dutch, I only recently learned that “wog” is the British version of the N-word. So I can see how they would have missed the negative connotations.

One of the reasons I follow sports I don’t particularly care for is so that I can make light conversation. People emotionally invest in sports, but not (usually) to the same extent that they do in politics or religion. This is one of the great things about video games. People can enjoy them socially, create friendships around them, and- unlike with professional sports- actually participate in them together.

Nothing says “Christmas” quite like porn. Ok, maybe not literally. But the human sex drive is one of the most fundamental forces of our existence. So it’s not really surprising that pornography has been prevalent throughout our history. And it’s not surprising, therefore, that the people who have been on the business end of it have been the first to push the edges of new technologies.

I’ve gotten a bit preachy today, I know. Christmas morning is for opening presents, and finding toys. How much do we value those toys? Not metaphorically, but in actual cash terms. It’s worth remembering that most of what we buy in the 21st century is not physical product, but intellectual ambition.

Best quotes of 2011. Pet peeve warning: this “top 10″ list starts at “1″ and counts up to 10. Why do people make lists like that?!

The Swedes spend every Christmas with Donald Duck. Well, and why not? I’m going to do a little snoopy dance in celebration.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

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It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for watching “How I met your Mother”. Or Sundays might be for gearing up for Christmas. Possibly, Sundays might be for blushing furiously that you missed last Sunday’s blog post. Alternately, Sundays might, just maybe be for visiting the wonderful world of Dickensian England.

This week: The War in Iraq ended on schedule– yet another promise kept by President Obama. This week: the world economy kept on teetering– but now in a whole new way. Also this week: a desperate Republican Presidential candidate called for an American caliphate vatican perfectly, lilly white, protestent theocracy.

The theory of justice underlying American wealth distribution holds that those who add the most to human welfare are rewarded with the most- and most fun- material possessions. Which is why when incredible money generators turn out to be destructive of wealth, it feels like a major betrayal of American values. Also: class warfare.

America is building a huge, awesome new rocket. It’s got a huge, awesome new name. Personally, I’d probably have avoided reminded the world of the ill-fated attempt to use nuclear weapons as a method for space propulsion. But that’s nit picking. Rockets. Red glare. Space. Awesome.

You have angered your god. This card can’t help you now.

The National Labor Relations Board is the government entity which ensures that workers are not exploited by their employers. When Walmart employees were repeatedly locked- without pay- into stores overnight, the NLRB was there to help. That’s one of the many reasons that conservatives are doing their best to destroy it. All things considered, I admire both the style of the play and the shear chutzpah displayed in being so nakedly evil.

Longer school years are better for students.. Shorter school years are better for the theme park industry’s ability to hire cheap labor. When education and business colide, guess who wins.

Wait, wait wait. So it turns out that those “surveys” designed to terrify non-teens as to what those kids today are doing are wildly inflated. Who would have thought?

As a pedestrian, the rules between myself and cars are well understood. I’ve got the right-of-way, and in return, I don’t go near the road unless I have to. Cyclists don’t. Cyclists imitate the rules cars observe when they find them convenient, and ignore them when those rules get in their way. I’ve never been hit by a car while I’ve been on foot. But bikes? More than once. And every time the bicyclist has yelled at me.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was always intended to sit at the heart of the living room. They’ve done a poor job at communicating this fact outside of the gaming world. From what I can see, even for non-gamers, it would be a sound investment as a media center.

Thursday the 22nd of December is the Winter Solstice- the shortest day of the year, and the holiest on the pagan calendar. That’s one of reasons municipalities light “holiday” trees. It’s less to do with avoiding sectarianism, and more to do with including everyone in society. Also: it just so happens that I’m pagan.

This might be the best holiday buying guide I’ve ever read.

Learning how to read fundamentally changes the way a human brain interpretes the universe. As we’re moving into a new, electronic, method of interacting with information, there are questions about what effects this might have on the human brain. Also: Starcraft is awesome.

I don’t understand the 3D craze. It doesn’t add anything to the viewing experience. I tend to tune it out immediately, or become pained by it. The technology actually limits the angles at which people can watch, and thus removes value from the potential viewers. If brought into the home, it would actually make superbowl parties worse. 3D is bad for your home, and bad for America.

Class Warfare at it’s most raw.

Patents strike against the very core of free flow of information. They can serve the useful function of allowing for the monetization of new ideas, but they do so by preventing anyone else from using that idea. Even when using that idea without permission can save a life. The privatization of human existence by the America Supreme Court has been both awesome and terrifying to behold.

I do hope that a certain legally-named young lady reads this as being directed at her.

Speaking of learning. And data. The Khan Institute. Fascinatingly, they do as much tracking of user experience as the most intense software developers.

Fun fact: I was the Time Magazine Person of the Year back in 2006. Totally deserved it. This year, Time recognized the efforts of protestors around the world to create change. So, um, I guess I win again? Anyway. The best 40 signs of 2011.

0ne of the reasons the protest movements around the world are so successful is that police departments are incredibly supportive.

Sunday Morning Comics.

I hope no one reading this is diabetic. Not that there’s anything wrong with people with diabetes. But the thing you’re about to see at this next link is so adorable that it might produce an overabundance of insulin. And that would be bad.

Old Spice wins Christmas.

This week’s theme was, um, I got nothing. Seriously, that’s the theme. Also: anyone want to spot the number ten in this post?

Tags: Sunday // Add Comment »

I looked up “sublime” in the dictionary, and got this.

It’s Sunday Morning. Sundays are for figuring out how to become better at the position you were just promoted into. Sundays are for waking up and smelling the Christmas tree. Sundays are for sleeping in. Sundays are for godliness and brunch. Or perhaps, just perhaps, Sundays are for waking up early and going to work.

This week: Proving that the world learned something in 1929, Europe, America, and other large economies finally got their acts together for a European bailout deal. Egypt held it’s first round of parliamentary elections- results were announced after this post was written. This week AT&T whined that the FCC realized that if AT&T bought one of AT&T’s competitors, there would be less competition. Also this week: The Syrian uprising has turned into a full scale civil war. Good luck to the good guys.

In this space, I often criticize cops for doing bad, bad things. I honestly do think that it’s better to point out when power is abused than to note when it is used responsibly. And yet, I’m going to point out this story, where the police officers had the chance to trump up charges against a citizen protester– and declined to do so. Their small act was as utterly in line with the best traditions of the First Amendment as it was utterly out of line with expectations of unionizing workers throughout American history.

Beards ‘n Maps.

Interesting study about nakedness and perception of agency. I’d love to know the extent to which these findings are cross-cultural. For instance, many cultures have a culture of shared bathing among strangers. In those cultures, nudity and desire must (presumably) have some greater measure of divorce than they do in less public cultures. At any rate, one more thing to be wary of before making snap judgments about strangers.

Greatest prank ever.

I have just barely dipped my toes into the world of Frozen Synapse. It looks awesome and feels huge. What’s perhaps most interesting is the way the company has turned conventional wisdom on it’s head with regard to it’s business model. They declined to make a “free to play” game, and they declined to appeal to a huge audience. They declined to make an iPad game. And they appealed to a traditional gamer crowd- by declining to make a traditional game. The key, I think, was to fulfill a desire their audience didn’t know they had.

This is a great stick.

The greatest freedom is freedom from “arbitrary”. Clear rules, set up in advance, with understanding of the expectations due from all sides. This need is a deep part of the human psyche. Look at the Book of Job in the Torah- one person is tormented for reasons that seem utterly arbitrary. Every reader of that story walks away understanding that there has been a deep injustice. Labor agreements cannot simply be about compensation. At least, not as long as employers hold ultimate control over a worker’s schedule. It is simply too easy for an employer to abuse their unlimited power over a worker’s ability to afford food. Frankly, actual compensation is the least important part of Labor’s demand.

“Oh poor bastard.”

I’m not sure why Cracked turned into a great online magazine, and Mad limps along in a weird timewarp of nothingness. When I was a kid, both magazines tried to woo the same maladjusted-child demographic. Cracked wasn’t nearly as successful. And yet here we are in 2011, and Cracked is turning out funny social commentary aimed at adults. Also: can it really be the case that America is still terrified of black men and white women getting it on? If so, how much less terrified would we be if Hollywood showed such relationships as utterly normal?

An Ode to UC Davis.

When reading a survey of Alabama newspapers from the 1963 civil rights struggle, it is easy to conclude that the media was unsympathetic to the plight of African Americans. Looking at it from this perspective, contemporary newspapers are considerably better than their progenitors. I’m not sure that this is the best lesson. Instead, we see a group that challenged the existing power structure, and a media that was on the side of the powerful. Viewed in this light, modern media fares considerably less well. Very few newspapers in history actually wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.

Newsflash: Lobbyists are getting their money’s worth from Congress.

The framers of the American Constitution were terrified of arbitrary use of power. So they set up a system where everyone who had power would be answerable to a whole lot of people. The President would only have the power to do what Congress told him (so far, always a him). The judicial branch would make sure the States and Congress didn’t get out of line. Congress had the power to decide what kinds of cases the courts could preside over. The president got to appoint judges- and congress got to say “no” if those judges were horrible. And Congress was answerable to voters and states. Congress has declined to check the presidency, and the whole system stands imperiled.

Apple is pushing abortion-seeking women towards anti-abortion organizations.

Petroleum demand is climbing. Petroleum is hovering at $100 per barrel. Saudi Arabia can extract oil for roughly $2 per barrel. If Saudi Arabia is claiming they don’t need to drill for more oil, it’s because they either love Canada (cost: $50 per barrel to acquire), or don’t have any oil fields left to tap. Since the Saudi family maintains it’s hold over the Arabian people by controlling the oil wealth, my guess is that they don’t love the Canadians more than they love power.

If McDonalds sells “Angus burgers”, then “Angus” can’t mean “premium”.

This is a great and nuanced look at illegal immigration. I do think the author missed an important angle. He asserts that “I know already that many here will argue that this isn’t racism; and that if it were white Canadians working illegally we would be having the exact same conversations. But I remain dubious of this argument; for me it just doesn’t pass the sniff test.” I’d say that we’d be having equally racist arguments, but that “white Canadians” would be found to be of a different “race” from “white” Americans. Those poor English/French mongrels.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure is a precondition for it.

A Hyatt hotel decided to hold a “Housekeeping Appreciation Week”, and decided not to give those housekeepers money. Nor extra breaks. Nor so much as a free lunch. Nope. The management team at Hyatt Regency Santa Clara decided that to appreciate housekeepers, they would paste housekeeper’s faces onto supermodel’s bodies. This is the way that management tells labor that they don’t consider themselves coequally human.

86 year old man reflects on his life.

Within the last few weeks, a major game’s company made the claim that it wasn’t worthwhile to develop for the PC market- 95% of the people who would end up playing the game wouldn’t actually give the developer money. Another developer disagrees, claiming that it’s only 83%. I’m not sure if that 12% difference is why the later publisher is so willing to make games for the PC, but they have been fantastically profitable in doing so.

Despite the fact that I’ve been complaining about arbitrary practices all post long, don’t confuse that with “random”. Here’s a great post on randomness being important to storytelling.

I become more convinced daily that the key skill of the 21st century will be the clear translation of information into graphical formats. That’s right: the graphic designer will be the highly paid specialist of the next job boom. Artists with philosophy degrees will have the last laugh.

If you click just one link:

Leonard Cohen asserted that “Everyone knows the dice are loaded. The Occupy [City] movement has been demonstrating that not everyone is aware of this. Far too many of us saw our inability to find a job and felt alone. Far too many of us saw that we were unable to afford the lifestyle of our parents and believed it was a personal failing on our part. We’re not alone. We didn’t fail. The system changed. America became a third world nation so rich that none have noticed. Occupy [City] has been about fighting back. Here’s hoping for effective action in the next phase.

This week’s theme has been about power. Well. Isn’t is always? In the comments, leave a message about a time you abused power.

What do you mean you haven’t seen the Muppets yet?

Tags: Uncategorized // 1 Comment »

The key to a free market is competition. Without several- or at least two- firms trying to get dollars from customers, there is no incentive for a business to innovate in terms of goods or services. Nor is there pressure to lower prices. There is no reason (other than boredom) to change what is profitable. With competition, consumers have the ability to spend money elsewhere. In order to create competition, firms must have the ability to easily enter a new market (if they think they have a good idea), and leave the market (if they think they’re failing miserably). America makes it rather difficult for individuals to enter and exit the market, creating a dearth of entrepreneurship.

One of the major barriers is healthcare. An individual with a large, ongoing medical condition (say: diabetes, or a history of cancer) would find it nearly prohibitive to leave a company which provides healthcare benefits and form their own firm- they would have to buy healthcare on the (much more expensive) individual market. Some of this pressure has been alleviated by the recently-passed Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, but much of this problem still remains. A potential solution would allow for individuals to purchase healthcare through Medicare- a significantly less expensive alternative than most private healthcare plans.

Another obstacle is simple lack of money. No matter how great the idea an individual has, without access to cash, it’s going to remain just an idea. Compounding this problem is that between 50 and 90 percent of new businesses fail in the first 2 years. In order to encourage people to start new companies, we need to lower the cost of failure. Here’s a potential solution: Every American will be allowed an interest free loan from the US government. If the company fails in the first 2 years repayment will not be expected. If the company succeeds, then the loan must be repaid in full. Obviously a lot of details will need to be worked out- including issues of fraud detection.

Even in the absence of fraud, this program will be costly. I’d propose that 5 years after the program goes into effect, we enact a tax increase on individuals earning more than $500,000 a year. Simple fairness dictates the deal: America supported high earners when they were getting started, and now it’s their turn to pay back that support for future generations.

Perhaps the largest barrier to new businesses is the mountains of red tape enacted by state and local governments. Frankly, a lot of this bureaucratic busywork seems designed specifically to prevent existing companies the indignity of having to continue to justify their existence to their current customers. But some- perhaps most- of those laws are legitimate public interest regulations that lead to a better society. Other than a general statement that rules need to be streamlined and clarified, I’m not entirely sure what a solution might be. Weak? Yes. But the problem needs mentioning, even in absence of a solution.

No real conclusion here. Move along. Move along…

Tags: politics // Add Comment »