saving ink

This argument comes courtesy of Fuck No Liberals:

My friend came to me earlier today.  He’s 31.  He’s got a wife who was laid off from work back in October and hasn’t been able to find a job (despite considerable effort), and two kids under the age of ten.  He has a modest home in an OK neighborhood that is mortgaged.  Their full-size sedan is in the 40th of a 60-month financing plan.  He has a job that pays $35K/year.  Apparently, he is in financial straits.

He came to me today, rather despondent, telling me how tough things have been lately.  The country is in a recession, his wife can’t find a job, the kids have medical and educational needs, his paycheck just isn’t cutting it and he’s afraid of defaulting on his mortgage and/or having his car repossessed.  He asked me for help.

I looked at him for a moment, saying nothing.  Then, I got up, went into my room, opened my safe, and picked up an item.  Returning to my living room, I handed it to him.

He looked at it in surprise, not knowing what to do or say at that particular moment.

In his hands was my Beretta 92.

I told him flatly, “If you and your family are in need, take this and go find someone who has more than they need, and take it from them by force.  Point this at them and demand that which you need to survive.”

He looked shocked, and handed the gun back to me.  ”Are you crazy? I can’t do that!” He said, “It’s wrong!  I’m asking you for help, and you’re telling me to go rob someone at gunpoint?”

“You’re not going to do it?” I asked. “Why not?  Aren’t you concerned about your family’s welfare?”

“Because it’s insane!  It’s wrong!” he cried.

“Would you prefer that I send the gun to the guy you voted in as President?  He’ll do it for you,” I replied.  ”But,” I continued, “does that make it any less insane, or any less wrong?  Is the taking of another’s rightful property by force, for the benefit of your need, OK so long as it’s someone in a position of elected authority doing the taking?”

He stared at me, blankly, his jaw open in disbelief.

I stared back, waiting for a rebuttal.

First of all, way to rip off Ms. Rand.

But more importantly, let’s consider the underlying problem with this premise. It is a fair assumption that these two men live in a Western country - most likely the United States, given the author’s nationality. Assumption two is that both of these men are over the age of 18 - i.e., legally they’re adults. So while they may have had no choice as to which country they were born in, by remaining in that country as adults, they have entered into a social contract.

This contract states that by accepting the status of citizen and all of the privileges that come with it, such as education for their children, roads to drive on, the right to own property, police and fire protection, etc., they will in turn support this state financially, through paying taxes, as well as physically, in the case of a draft during a war.

Of course, if you don’t agree with such a contract, there are two solutions: work within the state’s system by running for office and try to change things, or leave. In fact, I would be absolutely thrilled if all of the teabaggers complaining about every aspect of the state they live in would get up and leave and found their own country on an island somewhere. I imagine they would think they were making Galt’s Gulch (well the handful or so with the ability to read a 1000-page book, anyway), but in reality, I don’t think they’d last a week before they missed their McDonald’s and their Wal-Marts and their FOX News.

How’s that for a rebuttal?

why today is better

The other day, I stumbled upon a website that initially induced feelings of aesthetic nausea, but after a few clicks, brought back what can only be described as a warm, if uneasy, nostalgia. It was a website chronicling old HTML sites from the early days of web 1.0, when oversized T-shirts were the rage, along with oversized <marquee> tags. A virtual graveyard of Geocities and AOL addresses.

And I remembered my own foray into programming. Like all of my friends, when I was 14 I had built my own HTML website, full of animated GIFs, scrolling text, and JPGs of Fox Mulder (future husband) and UFOs. And it had a guestbook, which had a wealth of inside jokes made by silly high school freshmen.

As far as I know, that site is gone, or at least gone from my eyes. I don’t have the original address, and I don’t even remember for sure whether it was on Geocities or another service. I tried some unsuccessful googling of former AIM screennames and my original Hotmail account, but it seems that my Internet infancy, like baby pictures lost in a fire, is gone forever.

But imagine if I were 14 today. As soon as I made my website, which, while lacking the obvious appeal of flashing GIFs and unstoppable MIDI theme songs, would undoubtedly be much more stylish, I would post it on Facebook, link to it from Twitter, and Gmail it to all of my friends. Then, years and years into the future, assuming I was spared in the robot apocalypse, I would just have to search my Gmail account for that original link and a part of my childhood would return.

So what I really, really don’t understand is the people who bemoan our times. Yes, everything is recorded. Yes, there might be a disturbing lack of privacy. But the Internet as a whole is a living record of each individual life, and the greatest storehouse of memories man has ever invented.

Each blog is a diary that your mom didn’t accidentally throw away. Each email from a lover is a letter that didn’t get lost in the move. And each personal website that’s created is a snapshot of the individual behind it during the span of its existence.

I realize that during every revolution, a majority of those living through it end up yearning for the “good old days”, even when those days aren’t that old and in hindsight turn out to not have been that good in the first place. But those who are in their 20s now or younger, those with at least the smallest ounce of tech savviness, should realize that we’re living in amazing times, and instead of hindering the revolution - or worse, whining about it - we should take full advantage, and leave our marks for generations to come.

You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn’t likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power.

—

The Disposable Worker - BusinessWeek

This is definitely worth reading in full. Basically, temp jobs will become the norm, loyalty is disappearing and the average worker is getting increasingly screwed, and will continue to do so for the next decade or so at least.

What the article doesn’t mention is that there is one way to drastically improve this situation: pass health care. And not the stripped-down version Congress is still incapable of passing, but a version that completely divorces health care from employment, so workers can choose jobs based on the jobs themselves, not their benefits or, increasingly, lack thereof. A more European system, if you will.

Case in point (from the same article):

For a glimpse of where things might be headed in the U.S., look at Europe, which makes a lot more use of temporary and part-time workers than U.S. employers do. […] One big difference: Most European countries cover temps and part-timers with government health insurance and require that they receive wages and benefits comparable to those for permanent employees doing similar work.

Barring all of the criticisms of the health care plan in its various incarnations, it’s hard to believe that anyone would be against the idea of divorcing health care from employment. Health insurance was never a part of any employment “package” until the early 20th century, and the concept didn’t really take off until after WWII, when employers were using any gimmick they could to get the best workers.

Now, it’s not so much a benefit as a yoke, forcing employees to take or remain at jobs they would otherwise leave, and crippling the economy in the process. The reason private, non-employer insurance is so expensive is because those who can’t afford it either seek out jobs with health plans or go without, leaving a smaller pool without much bargaining power purchasing private insurance.

Divorce health care from employment: that’s the first step of health care reform. Everything else can be up for debate.

SAD experiment update

As I wrote last month, I am conducting an experiment on myself to determine whether a simple lack of vitamin D due to insufficient exposure to sunlight in this miserable Polish winter is causing the Seasonal Affective Disorder that has been a pain in my ass since I moved here.

I began the experiment over two weeks ago, on the 4th of January. I have been taking one dose of HASCO Vitaminium A-2000+D3-400, which was the only vitamin D supplement I could find in the local pharmacy. However, the box of this vitamin A and D cocktail reads that it’s “for people lacking sufficient exposure to sunlight”, so it actually seems to be perfect for my purposes.

So far, I have not noticed an actual improvement in my mood, but there has been a pleasant lack of depression as well, with one exception: this past weekend, I went out of town for 24 hours and forgot to take the vitamins with me, so on Saturday and Sunday I went without the supplements. Upon returning on Sunday afternoon, I felt a feeling of uselessness and lack of desire to be productive, which stretched into Monday. Now, it’s still unclear whether this is a result of lack of vitamins or a result of wanting to enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon after a good weekend and the usual Monday blues at the start of the workweek - for that I’ll just have to continue the experiment for at least another month.

The good news is, I’ve had no side affects and am perfectly healthy, so at the very least, we know that taking vitamin A+D supplements has not turned me purple or made my head explode. Yet.

Doc in the Machine: An e-play in five acts.

I will now show you how to waste countless hours in an activity that both kills time and makes you question your sanity. All you need is a Mac, Terminal, and the following hack. It goes without saying that as with everything, alcohol makes this better too.

Step one: Open Terminal.

Step two: When it has started up, type in “emacs” (without quotation marks) and press enter.

Step three: Press x and escape together.

Step four: Type in “doctor” (again without quotation marks.)

Step five: You can then begin a conversation with your own personal psychotherapist on your computer. Just write something, and hit the return key twice.

And there you have it: hours of disturbing fun!

His Dark Materials: Tolkien for intellectuals

After four straight days of spending all of my non-sleeping, non-working hours reading, I’ve finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Those who enjoyed the Harry Potter books but found their morality too black and white, those who loved escaping to Tolkien’s world but found it too foreign, those who grew up on C.S. Lewis but now find him too preachy: you need to read His Dark Materials. Now.

Why? An excerpt:

“When I first saw you, in your Oxford,” Lyra said, “you said one of the reasons you became a scientist was that you wouldn’t have to think about good and evil. Did you think about them when you were a nun?”
“H’mm. No. But I knew what I should think: it was whatever the church taught me to think. And when I did science I had to think about other things altogether. So I never had to think about them for myself at all.”
“But do you now?” said Will.
“I think I have to,” Mary said, trying to be accurate.
“When you stopped believing in God,” he went on, “did you stop believing in good and evil?”
“No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

- Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

Though written as children’s literature, the writing itself approaches a level of sophistication largely absent from modern popular fiction, and the story poses philosophical, religious and scientific questions usually reserved for belles lettres. And best of all, just because Pullman’s audience is children, he doesn’t sugarcoat reality in any way: The heroes mess up, badly. People die - a lot of them, in fact, even main characters. Good and evil switch sides in a pirouette that doesn’t finish until the very end. And OK, I must admit a huge part of me loved the books because so much of their mythology is based on real theories in quantum physics.

The first book, Northern Lights, was made into a film called The Golden Compass a couple of years ago. Don’t see it - it’s a Disney-fied fantasy that forces good guys to be good and bad guys to be bad and endings to be happy. While these kinds of films rarely live up to the books they are based on, that film completely distorted the book’s message, and turned it into the same mindless drivel the books rally against.

So just read the books. You will not be disappointed.

Why is this a surprise? This is exactly what I predicted last year, and will predict again - CDs are on their way out, and digital or digital + vinyl will become the new standard.

Why do people even buy CDs anymore?

With services such as Bandcamp or iTunes allowing you to download lossless .wav or .aiff files, there goes the argument of buying CDs for sound quality.

What’s that, you say - you like the pretty artwork? Well, take a look at a full-size booklet, or perhaps a poster, or a beautiful, frameable front cover which is a part of vinyl packaging, any of which will put that tiny CD booklet to shame.

Granted, not all releases are available on vinyl today. But hopefully artists will be the ones to push the market in that direction by being the first to abandon the CD format.

Personally, I’m someone who cannot afford to be a collector, partially for financial reasons, but mostly for spacial ones: I simply have no room for excess stuff. When you pack up all of your belongings into two suitcases and move across the globe, suddenly carting all of your music on hundreds of plastic discs in plastic containers makes no sense at all, especially when 2.5” hard drives exist. So I now opt for digital only, being content with iTunes viewer versions of artwork. Am I losing some of the aesthetic value of the album as a product? Yes. But am I still getting the most important part, the music, at a high quality? Absolutely.

And I make it up by telling myself that one day, when I’m done shuffling from continent to continent, I’ll get that vinyl player and start a proper collection once again.

But no CD will ever grace my shelves.

don't be SAD

I’m going to attempt a public experiment. Since moving to Poland (a very, very cold climate) from Texas (an unbearably hot climate) four years ago, I have either developed Seasonal Affective Disorder, or I have always had it but it lay dormant as long as I had regular exposure to sunlight during the winter. But now that I live in a place where the sun sets around 4 pm for months at a time, the textbook lethargy, physical weakness, melancholy, and general lack of enthusiasm for anything have started to appear on a regular basis during this time.

And frankly, SAD is a pain in the ass. While I wish I could indulge in the “tortured artist” stereotype and create great works of beauty during this period, unfortunately depression just generally renders me useless. Then, this uselessness leads to being even more depressed about my uselessness (and stressed on top of it, because my to-do list only grows in winter), creating an endless, annoying cycle. So this year I plan to end it, with an experiment as follows:

Hypothesis: A deficiency of vitamin D is the main cause of my seasonal depression.

Reasoning: This depression feels more chemical than emotional, so the best course of action is to fight it with chemistry. By this I mean that I cannot at any point pin my feelings on any particular cause, and thus they seem irrational (and even more irritating because of that). I think the physical lack of vitamin D, rather than an emotional response to a lack of sunlight (which I don’t get to enjoy that much of in the summer anyway because I work full-time), is the culprit.

Experiment: I will begin with the recommended daily allowance of 1000 IU of vitamin D via supplements for two weeks. If I do not notice any results, I’ll gradually up the dosage (within a safe range, of course).

Result: I’ll let you know in March.

Meanwhile, does anyone else find themselves SAD in winter? Have you tried to fight it, and if so, how?

EDIT: I am not moving from Poland this winter at least, and even when I do move it won’t be to a hot climate again, so that’s out. Also, I can’t afford one of those fancy sun-like lights.

Who watches the watchmen?

It’s a sad state of affairs to think that society’s traditional watchdog, the media, needs its own watchdog. Case in point:

It may have been the letter from Fox News — or maybe a stinging piece last week about Mr. Beck’s gold associations on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — that led to the change in the “paid spokesman” designation.

- Glenn Beck’s Gold Deal Raising Questions at Fox, NY Times

Luckily, there’s Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to fulfil that role. But what does it say about the shape of journalism in the United States when it takes a comedian on a fake news program to police the “serious” journalists*?

I think the main problem is motivation. The purpose of journalism used to be information, but now it’s purely profit. No matter how dedicated and idealistic an individual journalist may claim to be, as long as they’re part of a for-profit system (this obviously excludes services like the BBC, NPR, PBS and so on), their work is governed by their employer’s very legitimate need to make money in order to employ them. This then leads to the watchmen being at the mercy of the very companies they’re supposed to investigate, and it’s corrupt turtles all the way down.

I think the model for the future is BBC News. While it’s not perfect, quality-wise it’s far superior than any comparable (i.e. mainstream, ubiquitous) American news service. Of course, the BBC is more far-reaching than just news, but that doesn’t mean this sort of public subscription model couldn’t work for individual news media. But the model does not necessarily have to rely on public funding, as long as the means of funding does not impact a journalist’s motivation to report the truth in every situation.

*Yes, I know FOX News classifies Beck as a commentator, not a journalist, but he is given prominence on a news channel, and there are enough people who take his word as gospel to establish that he does have a responsibility to at least divulge any conflicts of interest.