Actions v. Money

There's been a kerfluffle recently over the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, where a private corporation is asking that it be allowed to ignore portions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) because they force it to provide insurance for its employees which would, in some cases, cover forms of birth control that the uber-Christian owners of the company find objectionable.

You're going to be completely stunned to find out that I think this is a complete and utter horseshit argument, on basically every level. And that's before I even get into the 'corporations are people' argument, which we can certainly tackle another time.

Look, there's a huge (yooge, in my best Mike Pesca voice) difference between being forced to do something, and being forced to pay for other people to do that thing.

For a long time in this country, you could be, essentially, forced to go to war. You could be drafted, consigned, and shipped away. Even then, there was conscientious objector status, and other ways you could prevent the government from forcing you to do something you found completely awful. But never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, would the government accept you deciding to not pay your taxes because you found the way in which that money was spent objectionable. Too effing bad - no matter how entious your conscience, you had to pay.

And that, in a nutshell, is my principal objection here. Nobody is telling the owners of Hobby Lobby that they have to take birth control. Nobody is forcing them to do anything. They are simply being asked to pay for something that we have all, in the personage of our elected representatives, decided is a valuable thing for us to have.

I object to all sorts of things the government does with my money, but I still have to pay it. Why does Hobby Lobby get an exemption from this requirement?

If my grandma had balls...

Okay, cheap title to try to get you to click on the post. Guilty, as charged.

So, my old company, InPhase Technologies, kinda-sorta folded. Not quite officially, insofar as the corporate entity still exists. But it lost all its funding, then its assets were sold, and now the IP (intellectual property) has been bundled up and sold to a new company, Akonia Holographics.

Akonia is founded by several old InPhase folks, and I wish them all the best. I really do. But there were a series of really poorly-considered papers and articles posted on the bulletin board when I first worked there. My favorite, by far, was the first paper suggesting holographic storage as the next generation of data storage, displacing the current, unreliable technologies. It was from 1999, arguing we'd displace CDs.

No, wait, that's not right. It was from 1963. Nineteen-sixty-fucking-three!!! Then, there was also a paper from 2001 (this was in 2003, when I started), claiming that InPhase was 3-6 months away from their first product coming to market. Suffice to say, that one probably shouldn't have been in public, since we were saying 18 months to public product when I started, two years after that paper came out.

Then it was 18 months, then it was 2 years, then it was 18 months, then it was 6 months, then a year passed, and then I quit. Or something like that. 3 months later, the paychecks didn't show up. Then they did, then they didn't, blah blah blah.

So, one of my former coworkers at InPhase has stayed in contact with those guys. They're having a grand opening party this Friday, which I am truly regretful that I can't go to, for humor's sake, as well as to see a bunch of my former coworkers.

But he wants to go for business purposes, because, hey: they're going to build a laser, it'll need a bunch of optics, we make optics, blah blah blah. Suffice to say, I'm not banking on their product coming to market such that they have to buy enough optics to keep us in business! His response was "hey, if they get it working, it could be huge." To which the only proper response is the classic Yiddish answer to any hypothetical: and if my grandma had balls, she'd be my uncle.

Note to self: have to find the Yiddish translation of this (transliteration: "Az der bubbe volt gehat baytzim, volt zi geven mein zayde) and memorize it. This is the year.

Anyway, this is just empty rhetoric (but really, what that I say isn't?) to get to the point of this post, which is that I love the Yiddish language, or, in particular, its influence on English. Call it Yinglish, if you must. From this post comes a great reminder of the influence of Yiddish on English, and the way that, in particular, Yiddish's heavy focus on accent (as in, which syllable is stressed, rather 'Boston accent' kind of accent) allows the exact same set of words to have completely different meanings.

For instance, take the difference between (stealing openly from the post):

• I should buy two tickets for her concert? and
• I should buy two tickets for her concert?

Both of these express doubt about the conclusion that I should buy tickets, but the reason behind why I should buy the two tickets is completely different. 

In the first case, I shouldn't buy them because someone else should be buying them. Maybe the person I'm speaking to, maybe the person giving the concert, but somehow I have been wronged by the mere implication that I should be purchasing the tickets.

In the second case, it's doubtful that I should even buy one ticket to this concert; clearly, this artist is terrible, and it's offensive to imply that I'd even consider buying one ticket to this cruddy show, let alone two!

This emphasis on, well, emphasis opens up worlds of expressiveness, and makes both the speaking of language and, I'd imagine, the study of language much more entertaining, as well as useful. It's one of the reasons I enjoy writing, as well as talking.

When the Left Lets Us Down

So, I'm a lefty. Like, really a lefty. I believe in Medicare-for-all, I'm okay with confiscatory tax rates on incomes exceeding some benchmark (probably in the tens-of-millions range, but whatever), and I've been saying since the mid-90's that, someday, I'll have to explain to my kids that, when I was their age, two dudes couldn't get married, and they'll give me the same quizzical look I gave my parents when they explained the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement of the 60's to me.

But here's the thing - although I agree with the ends of the left basically universally, I also nearly as universally disagree with their means, and no part of the left demonstrates this better, to me, than the modern environmental movement.

I have a hot-and-cold set of feelings towards the environmental movement, but when it comes to the single dominating issue, greenhouse gases and climate change, I am 100% in favor of the ends, and 0% in favor of the means.

So, let's review. The ends are: reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to slow and hopefully eventually reverse the effects of climate change. Also, make sure that the effects are well-understood, so that we can adapt accordingly (some significant warming is already in the cards, so adaptation will have to be part of the long-term strategy).

So far, so good. And if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there are two ways of going about it, both of which are quite time-tested and proven to work in previous environmental situations:

1. Outlaw emissions. Straightforward, and simple. Probably not very useful today, given that we are a very energy-dependent society, and the only way to get the amount of energy we are quite 100% reliant on right now will result in emitting quite a bit of carbon dioxide.
2. Cap-and-trade. Very effective in the 80's with the acid rain scare (remember when America was going to be deforested due to sulphur emissions from coal power plants?), and other circumstances where some emission is necessary, but it might be possible, given sufficient economic motivation, to find alternatives.

A 'carbon tax' is a slight modification of the cap-and-trade, where the product is taxed at each economic transaction, rather than just at the emission point, and without the more easily-measured trade market for the emissions, but the effect is pretty similar.

You know what doesn't work, and has been proven not to in a nearly infinite number of previous examples? Determining ahead of time what the winner will be, and subsidizing it heavily. The examples here are nearly endless, and not worth going into. I'm not even talking about Solyndra; investment in up-and-coming companies is a totally defensible use of government funds. I'm talking about all the completely unjustifiable love we scatter on electric cars. I'm not up on the current subsidy, but as Bjorn Lomborg (definitely not an unbiased observer, but his facts are pretty solid) notes in Slate, it's not at all obvious that electric cars, at the moment, are actually an environmental win. Between the fact that a huge amount of energy goes into making the batteries, and the fact that a lot (although ever-shrinking) amount of our electricity is made by burning coal, the additional cost associated with these cars is rarely worth it, and I believe our government certainly should not be giving them preferential treatment.

If someone is willing to pay the extra price associated with buying a hybrid or electric car, whether because it makes them feel better, or because of the status it affords them, that's awesome; they should totally do so. And when Teslas are available for under $40K, I'll definitely consider it, because that car looks like a shit-ton of fun to drive. Until then, this is just a huge expenditure, which wildly favors those rich enough to afford the cars in the first place, for negligible environmental benefit. Which means that the left, with the best ends in mind, is embracing the worst means, which is not a compromise I'm willing to sign onto.

On the difference between doing and being

Another subject that I expect we'll return to frequently in this space is the difference between doing something and being someone.

I am, by my nature, not much of a belong-er. I don't tend to define myself as 'a blank-er', where 'blank' can be running, or engineering, or riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. This last one is almost certainly the one most salient to the conversation at hand, because there is a huge difference between owning and riding a Harley-Davidson, and being a Harley-Davidson owner. I own a Harley. I ride it. I like it, although I'm looking to sell it right now (anyone need a motorcycle?) But I'm not a Harley guy. I don't own any Harley gear other than one of my motorcycle jackets. All my other motorcycling gear is not Harley-branded. I don't own a single Harley t-shirt. I would never go to the Sturgis Rally. I give the little 'hey, you're riding a motorcycle too!' wave to non-Harley riders when we pass on the road.


This tendency definitely bleeds off into other areas of my life as well. I don't tend to socialize with my coworkers after hours, because I don't want to be one of those people who spends their entire life with the same tiny set of people. I like many nerdy things, like science fiction movies/TV shows and board games, but I've never been to a Con, and the one time I went to a meeting of the Boulder Board Game Meetup group, I felt like I had to take a shower afterwards. You know all those stereotypes you have in your head of creepy, socially inept nerds with bad personal hygiene, who laugh inappropriately loudly at the most unusual moments? Yeah. I feel like my experience of a Con would be much worse (maybe some newish readers can weigh in here - James, Eli, AJ, Josh, Lindsay?)

There was definitely a period where I was an Ultimate Player, but those days are long gone, and it was definitely the single glaring exception.

So, that's me. But the one thing I'm not actually sure of is: is it a good thing? I used to think that being a blank-er was kinda lame - why define yourself as one thing, whether it's your job, one activity, whatever? I can still run, and ride my Harley, and take beautiful photos, without being defined by any of those things. But I've been doing a lot of reading lately, from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers to Drive by Daniel Pink (I recommend the latter, in particular; Gladwell is great as always, but Pink really opened my eyes about some unusual ideas about satisfaction in the workplace), and I'm no longer at all convinced that it's a bad thing to be consumed by a single or small number of habits and hobbies.

Much more to come on this later, but for now, a question: are you a do-er or a be-er? If you could change, would you? Why?

Things we do wrong, but also stupidly, Part 2

Ugh. I guess it's a good thing that the Supreme Court is hearing a case about the validity of patents for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, thought to have a significant role to play in whether a woman is susceptible to developing breast cancer, since it means that the awarded patents might be overturned, but the mere fact that we had to get to this point means that the system is inherently and perhaps irretrievably fucked, like the idea of shareholder capitalism described in the previous post.

If you haven't already, please listen to perhaps the most-important-ever episode of the always-important This American Life, When Patents Attack. It's an hour that will thoroughly fuck your shit up, when you consider the idea that, technically, nearly every idea that underlies our current mobile-and-connected economy is probably being illegally produced, since nearly every idea contained therein is patented, most of them several times over, by competing, inconsistent, and incoherent patents.

Then, think about how much worse it is to patent a gene. Not one that some nifty scientist threw together in a lab, but one that exists in you, or your mom, or your sister, or a coworker of yours (unless you work in high tech, in which case it exists in one those species known as "women" that you have probably read about online. You know, the green ones in Star Trek?)

For reference, let's go back to the place patents are defined, Title 35 of the United States Code. Section 101 reads:

Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

Emphasis mine. Think about that: "new and useful". How, for the love of all that means anything in the English language, can a gene, which already exists in people, be defined as new? This cannot possibly be accurate, in any possible interpretation of the English language as it currently or ever existed.

Now, if Myriad wants to invent a particular way of testing for this gene, which is new and novel, then by all means, patent away! But patenting the very idea of a gene, which they did not invent, nor did they discover the idea of? BS.

Usually, I'd put something here like 'I'm as pro-patent as the next guy, but...', but I'm not actually sure I'd mean it if I put it here. Do we really think that patents actually work? They certainly inspire innovation, which is good - it's good that a pharmaceutical company gets to make hundreds of millions of dollars if they invent a really kick-ass drug. But is giving that company the right to charge whatever the heck they want for 20 years actually the best way to realize these gains?

We all benefit when really important new drugs are created. Shouldn't we, as a country, just pony up and pay for it? There are lots of ideas for a prize system for drug discovery/invention, many basically proposing something like the X-Prize, given for revolutionary ideas like cheap spaceflight, self-guiding automobiles, and overcoming other important technical challenges.

This is, of course, completely independent of the question of the wisdom of patenting a gene. That's just batshit crazy. Hopefully the Supreme Court will agree that the actual wording of the US Code prevents the patenting of things that you didn't have a hand in inventing. Hopefully.

Things we do wrong, but also stupidly

So, one of the themes that we're going to undoubtedly return to a lot (and, I mean, a lot) in the new-ish incarnation of this blog is the idea that we do some stuff really, incredibly stupidly. And that until we fix that basic idea, any of the work we do on the topic is going to be fundamentally flawed and prone to fall over, like a million-dollar-mansion built right over a swamp.

Undoubtedly, we'll end up in politics eventually, but let's start tonight with economics. In a fairly simple post about the joys of Amazon as an unusual-and-successful (and unusually successful) corporate entity, old friend and frequent link-subject Matt Yglesias has a small throwaway line at the end:

But this really is an idea that cuts against the basic logic of modern shareholder capitalism.

The short version of the argument preceding this line is that Amazon, in focusing on customer satisfaction to the point of actually cutting pretty deeply into profits, is completely unusual in modern American corporate culture.

But, look - Amazon pays its employees very well. I bet Bezos makes plenty of money. And its share price does fine; as Yglesias notes, it's P/E ratio is astoundingly high. Plus, they offer completely insanely satisfying customer service; when I have to pay to ship back something defective, Amazon gives me a shipping credit. Sometimes, when I want to return something, they just say 'keep it', and credit me the money back.

I bet that Amazon makes a ton of money off of me in a year. And I'm happy to spend it there! Why is this not the goal of every American company?

If, as Yglesias notes, this cuts against the basic logic of modern shareholder capitalism, then modern shareholder capitalism sucks. It's bad for customers, it's bad for employees, which means it's bad for the majority of people of whom the American economy is made up, which means that it can't win in the long run against other, competing systems that work better for the people in them.

If we don't recognize that this insane focus on quarterly profits is inherently unsustainable, in the long run, any changes we try to make to the American economy will eventually sink into the bog, along with the rest of the economy.

I'll be back

Well, according to the statistics, it's been about 5 years since I last posted here. Which, I figure, makes it about time to start again.

Why? Well, it's hard to explain exactly. But, in short, I found myself Googling myself a couple weeks ago, and ended up reading some of my old posts, and remembering that 'damn, I was a good writer' and that I really enjoyed it.

So, I'm going to put a couple posts up before I announce publicly, but you probably already know about it since you're here, so, well, let's see where this goes!

Enjoy the ride...

Big Changes

Humblest Apologies, Faithful Readers, for my prolonged absence. You know how it goes; you go a week without writing, and suddenly there's so much to write about, and so you wait a little longer until you have time to catch up, and then there's more, and more, and more...

And then there's College Nationals, the Ultimate tournament which basically devoured the last week of my life. The good news is that the tournament went quite well, with everything falling into place and the teams, players, and spectators all pretty much universally saying it was a great tournament. I know that I had a great, albeit entirely exhausting, time.

But the good news is that I'm Back!

The bad news is, I'm Moving!

From now on, I will be blogging at a new home, a co-blog with frequent commenter, and target of my snark, Shane. We've already set up tent at

http://damnlefties.wordpress.com

Please click on over and join us! Hope to see you there...

Google's Done It Again!

Let me be the first to praise Google for their new invention, Google Custom Time. The idea is simple: you can pre-date your e-mails so that it appears that they were sent at the appropriate time (birthdays, anniversaries, before the big presentation was due), and they will appear at that time, in the proper place in the recipient's inbox. It will appear that they simply got 'lost in the ether' during the interim.

Good times! Now that the concept of 'on time' is slowly being eradicated, I look forward to the day when concepts such as 'date' and 'time' lose all meaning altogether, which will allow me to finally live in a nirvana where every meal is breakfast (what? Time for pancakes with whipped cream again?), and every day is both a Saturday and my birthday, simultaneously.

Although, I would like to know a little more about their 'e-flux capacitor' before signing on whole-hog...

Liberal Praises Liberal Paper - Counterintuitive!

Okay, just to prove that I'm not entirely a New York Times-basher, a couple plaudits for its pundits.

In today's op-ed section, the oft-maligned (and deservedly so!) David Brooks writes really well on the subject of behavior and discipline, and how good habits brought on through rote and routine can lead to perfection of execution in the physical sports. He doesn't really go into it in great depth, but I think the point he's getting at, which is something I am really a firm believer in, is how these sorts of habits can help you in your everyday life as well.

For instance, with all these new responsibilities at work, I am finding myself having to be, roughly, a billion times more organized than I've had to be in the past. Which is to say, fairly organized.

Now, strictly speaking, my ability to organize my thoughts and processes have nothing to do with my ability to, say, keep a very clean desk. Indeed, if you listened to Will Wilkinson's diavlog with Richard Florida over the weekend (sorry for the lack of a dinglelink, but I'm too busy!), you'd know that people who score very high on the 'open to new experiences' axis in Five-Factor Personality Analysis tests, like me, tend to have very messy desks.

Nonetheless, I am now aspiring to keep a clean work area, both at my cube and in the lab, the idea being that if I can keep order in my physical surroundings, that will assist my brain in keeping itself neat and tidy as well.

It's really a nice column by Brooks, and a reminder why the hell the Times pays him to write three times a week. I find his political columns to fall in a fairly narrow space between uninformative and uninformed, but when he writes about behavior and sociology, which is the area where he got started, he really can be both interesting and insightful.

On another note altogether, bravo to the Times, via the Freakonomics blog, for giving my brother-in-law's father, the weird-and-wonderful Daniel Hamermesh an outlet for his economic thoughts. Daniel is quite the character, as anyone who has spent a Passover dinner with him can absolutely attest. But he's also, I'm told, quite an insightful economic thinker. I've been to one of his undergrad lectures, and he is definitely an engaging speaker, and his occasional posts to Freakonomics have been fun to read. And he's definitely the most famous blogger that I'm related to by marriage, although since I am very loosely related to David Copperfield by marriage, he's not the most famous person to meet that qualification.

Welcome Mat

And let me be just the latest, if not the first, to welcome Kathy G to the blogosphere. As someone who called for her to be made a guest-poster at Ezra's back when she would occasionally post these random, incredibly insightful comments to some post-or-other of his, I'm very happy to see her finally have her own outlet for thoughts and comments.

Although, I have to say - if I'm saying that you ought to learn how to write some slightly shorter posts, you probably have a real brevity issue.

I Waited A New Week For This Post, And All I Got Were Some Lousy Ellipses?

Best intentional misreads of the day:

World's Hackiest Hack, Bill Kristol:

Most Americans want to be told we can leave Iraq sooner rather than later. McCain has chosen instead to tell Americans the hard and unpopular truths that...there’s no...path to defeating our enemies and securing a lasting peace.

And the occasionally anti-Bushian Paul Krugman:

[T]he Bush administration actively...tried to protect families against predatory lending.

Of course, those aren't the real quotes, but wouldn't it be funny if they were?

You gotta love the blatant, unrepentant hackosity of Kristol's rantings. I don't know how long a contract the Times signed him to, but it's already been going on too long, as far as I'm concerned. Senators Clinton and Obama have many faults, but accusing them of holding a "stale liberal orthodoxy" can only be the opinion of a fool or a madman. Unlike Charles Krauthamer, I do not hold a Ph.D. in psychology, and will not speculate as to the mental state of my ideological opponents, so I'm left believing Kristol to be a fool.

Although, I must admit, I do appreciate Kristol's confidence in his own manhood to publicly declare his appreciation for the qualities of John McCain's 71-year-old buttocks:

The qualities of a young military hero may not be those of a successful president. McCain knows this. As an elected official, he’s never rested on his P.O.W. laurels, remarkable though they are.

My Favorite Least Favorite Coach

Sorry for the overload on b-ball coverage, but I'm in that kind of mood right now.

I know that I'm contractually obligated to hate Roy Williams, the head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. For one thing, he's the former long-time coach at Kansas, who was the best team in the Big 12 back when I was a regular attendee of University of Colorado basketball games (there's no real defense for this, except that sometimes it was fun to be one of 300 fans in the arena for early-season games.) Anyhow, he was always so snide and snotty and easy to hate, and the one magical year that CU went undefeated at home in conference, including wins over #13 Oklahoma State, #6ish Texas, and #2-ranked Kansas, he nearly threw an apoplectic fit at the end of the CU-KU game, insisting that star player Kirk 'Frodo' Heinrich had been fouled on their last possession, I thought he was going to have an aneurism.

Very immature.

Anyhow, now he is the coach of UNC, and since Michelle and LJ, official BFFs of The Consistent Fool, are NC State alums, I am still contractually obligated to dislike him.

But, despite myself, I find him occasionally quite charming. The #1 example of this was back when he left Kansas, and told Bonnie Bernstein, standing outside the locker room moments after his team narrowly lost to Carmelo Anthony's Syracuse team, that he didn't "...give a shit about Carolina right now."

And just today, in a post-game interview after his team absolutely dismantled Arkansas, he told the interviewers, regarding star player Ty Lawson playing at full capacity; "when he plays like that, I'm a much better coach."

It doesn't quite count as humility, but it's still pretty funny and fairly charming stuff.

Further Basketball Thoughts

What Shane said.

Also, it's a testament to how absurdly well Stephen son-of-Dell Curry has been shooting through two rounds that I was surprised to see that he was only an 89% free throw shooter. I figured him for a Reggie Milleresque 93-94%, one of those 'misses a couple a month' sort of guy. Then, he actually missed one which would have sealed the game, putting Davidson up 4 with a few seconds to play. Of course, it was the front end of a 2-fer, and he hit the second, rendering the whole argument moot.

But that kid has a future in The Association. Oh, and, suck it, Hoyas.

Basketball Thoughts

This post is probably two weeks too late, but early March is traditionally when I really start paying attention to basketball. A few weeks' decompression from the end of football season, and it's time for some roundball.

But, with being busy and all, I really haven't had time to become as aware as I usually manage. Throw in the fact that I don't have cable, and I really am pretty solidly not knowing what's going on. A fact which is well-reflected by the way my NCAA bracket completely self-destructed in the first 4 days of the tournament.

A few random thoughts from the first 3 days of NCAA play:

• It may be the fact that my TV is aging a bit, or the fact that my eyes are aging a bit, but it seems like the text that CBS is putting up is nearly impossible to read on my screen. In particular, the scores of the other games going on are so small, they're almost impossible to read. I'm guessing that this is an outcropping from the prevalence of high-res HDTV's these days. On those screens, I'm sure the smaller text is quite readable, and leaves more room on the screen for the game being shown. But it's irritating for those of us who think there are better things to spend money on than expensive toys...
• So, wait. You're telling me that Duke is a slow, unathletic team which is overly-reliant on distance shots, who is highly ranked based mostly on owning the best home-court advantage in the game? And they flame out early in the tournament, losing to some unheralded lower seed? Man, that is some seriously new story. I never saw that coming.
• Every year, I run the bracket at work. I put in some extra brackets for reference. This year I only put in two - one where the higher RPI team wins the game, and one where the higher-seeded team wins every game, called 'Old White Men's Committee'. As of this writing, OWMC is tied for second, and also tied for second for most possible points remaining. I think the point is not that there were almost no upsets, but instead that the upsets were difficult-to-call ones, like Siena, that very few people got right. That's what I think. But, then again, I am tied for 17th, so my thoughts ain't worth much.
• Kansas has definitely looked the best through two rounds. But it's still Kansas, and I have faith that they will find a way to blow it before all is said and done.
  

Seasonal Thoughts

I'd like to wish a Happy Easter to all those out there who celebrate such things. Personally, of course, I am mostly excited about the prospect of half-priced Peeps starting tomorrow. I have a funny relationship with Easter candy. I don't like the chocolate bunnies, if only because a) they tend to be hollow, hence a big disappointment on a chocolate-per-inch basis and b) they are made from grade triple-Z chocolate, the kind of stuff that aspires to generic chocolate chip status. It used to be the case that every year, Easterish time would roll around, and I would say 'oh yeah, a Cadbury Egg! I haven't had one of those in a year!' So I would buy a 4-pack, bite into the first one, and then say 'oh yeah, this is why I don't like them at all! They're disgusting!'

Fortunately, I seem to have grown past that point, so I don't try them anymore.

But Peeps? I mean, come on - how can you not love sugar-coated marshmallows (in other words, sugar-coated sugar), pressed into whimsical animal shapes, and dyed some unnatural color that, in the wild, would indicate 'WARNING! This animal is made almost entirely of poison! Do not eat!' That's gold, Jerry!

Also, I do apologize for the total lack of posts since Monday. Firstly, after that marathon post that night, I was pretty well spent of things to say. More important, I found out on Tuesday that I am being promoted. My lead's job is being split about 2/3-1/3, and I got the 1/3 put under my belt. So I am now the lead for the build line of the laser.

It's a classic InPhase promotion, in that I get more responsibility and more work, but no more money. But still, it is exciting to have some faith shown in my basic ability, and also a good thing that more focus is being put on improving the quality and reliability of the build line.

I'm sure that I'll get better at it, but for the first week at least, managing is really hard! Trying to keep track of not just what I ought to be doing, but also what 6 other people ought to be doing, and what they are doing, and whether what I think they ought to be doing is actually right? That's a lot of mental balls to keep juggling.

Additionally, this week is a Hunter Education course, in case I can find the time next fall to get out and try and plug me a winter's worth of dinners.

So, I just don't know how much posting I'll be able to do in the short term, while I get put in place some systems to help keep track of all of those things. I hope I will be able to get some brief stuff online, but I can pretty much guarantee no Big Thought postings, at least not during the week...

On The Perils Of Substance Abuse

Reihan is apparently suffering some sort of traumatic come-down from his weeklong SXSW bender, and has chosen to commemorate the occasion with a typically brilliant, but bit of a downer of a post, starting with accurately describing the inherent tensions between 1) the basic concept of a leftist philosophy and 2) certain behavioral tendencies that are quite specific to the American psyche. He then pivots, a bit incongruously in my opinion, to the subject of Senator Obama's pastor, Rev. Wright, and the current controversy surrounding a video of him which recently hit the airwaves.

I'm not going to get into the details of the controversy, because I mostly feel that it's a serious case of trumped-up charges, for reasons which I'll get into in a bit. If you want to know more about it, your favorite major news outlet will have at least one story from the last couple days.

Instead, I'm going to deal with some of Reihan's arguments in a bit more detail, and try and use these specific instances to get to a bit more of a general philosophical discussion.

Also, as a warning - I'm not exactly famous for my brevity, and the post I'm responding to is not exactly short either. So it's unlikely that I'm going to be able to keep this easily digestible. Humblest apologies, and such like. At least you're getting your money's worth today!

Regarding the American constitutional arrangement, and its somewhat "elitist and anti-majoritarian dimensions," Reihan writes:

For example, it shapes and some would say perverts the kind of redistribution that occurs. As Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have argued, it seems that ethnoracial fragmentation cuts against redistribution — taxpayers are reluctant to subsidize members of outgroups, a gut instinct that is easily characterized as racist. But perhaps this impulse is a useful corrective, and one of the virtues of diversity — i.e., perhaps greater homogeneity leads taxpayers to overinterpret a kind of nationalist sameness, thus leading to higher levels of redistribution than are in fact desirable. Now, I don’t think this is obviously true, but it’s no less plausible than the other story, namely that the interrelationship between extreme homogeneity and social democracy is an unambiguously good thing.

I certainly don't argue that extreme homogeneity and social democracy are, ipso facto, an unambiguous good. I don't think that many things, once you get past the realm of tautologically good things like puppies, Twizzlers, and reruns of Thundercats, qualify as universally good, no justification needed.

And keeping in mind the fact that absolute redistribution should not be the goal of any society which hopes to maintain a vital, growing economy is a very important reason to be inherently suspicious of redistributive policies. The problem I have with America's economic system is not that it is not sufficiently redistributive. It is that it's built backwards, funneling the water of economic growth uphill through arrangements which benefit primarily the supremely wealthy, and the rest of us in roughly inverse proportion to our demonstrable need of the benefit.

The best recent example is obviously the federal bailout of Bear Stearns over the weekend, ensuring the value of investments made at a point when it was becoming increasingly obvious that they were questionable-at-best. For much better-written outrage on this topic look no further than Kevin Drum, or, even better, Sir Charles over at Cogitamus.

I can think up many morally defensible positions in favor of an economic policy which says "when enough poor and under-educated get caught up in a bad financial scheme that threatens the health of the economy, the government will help them out at least enough to keep us afloat." Alternatively I can't think up a single morally defensible argument for the policy that "when enough poor and under-educated get caught up in a bad financial scheme that threatens the health of the economy, the government will bail out the creditors who financed this harebrained scheme, ensuring that their risky capital investments aren't damaged, while leaving those who were less well-informed about the risks to simply flap in the wind."

And yet, time and time and time again (if I was a better blogger, or possibly less gainfully employed, each of those 'times' would have a link to a story about some other example of such a governmental policy, but it's after 10:30 already so get over it) this is exactly the type of policy which we enact.

So, maybe reducing the ethnoracial fragmentation would drive our policies too far in the downward-redistributive direction. You know what? It's a chance I'm willing to take, because I'd rather make the wrong decision for the right reasons than the wrong decision for the wrong reasons.

Anyhow, Reihan then turns towards the Obama/Wright flap. Quoting from Chris Hayes' excellent piece in The Nation, Reihan writes

So while Ann Coulter can call John Edwards a faggot, Grover Norquist can say he wants to drown the government in the bathtub, and a host of imperialists can foment an illegal and pre-emptive war based on lies, Barack Obama’s pastor isn’t allowed to mention that America has been throughout its history the site and cause of much evil in this world.

This, of course, is a fairly straightforward result of the nationalism of most Americans, and the (mostly correct) view that while America has been been “the site and cause of much evil in this world,” surely we’re not unique or even terribly distinguished in this regard. Mind you, this is more of a sad commentary on the world, but it is true nonetheless.

I'm sorry, I'm just not buying this attitude at all. Specifically, I want to see a quote from anyone who is being very critical of Rev. Wright who says 'well, yes, America has committed many sins in her past, but compared to Imperial Britain or Napoleonic France, she's really not doing so badly.'

Incidentally, I think that this view would be entirely justified. In antagonistic conversations with my politically active South African ex-girlfriend, I would often point out that, as singularly dominant world powers go, the U.S. has undoubtedly been the most beneficent, the least likely to exploit native peoples and resources, purely for its own benefit. Not to say that we are blameless, or maybe even a net good for people around the world. But a hell of a lot less likely to be out exploiting the natives with the raw power of the US government. And that ought to be worth something.

But that's not what gets said. Instead, there is hateful bile about Rev. Wright, baseless accusations that Senator Obama, in contrast to anything he's ever said in public, will be supporting Palestinian terrorists over the Israelis. Claims that Senator Obama believes the white government brought crack and AIDS to the ghetto.

Most of the reasonable conservatives, the types of people who I would read (like Ross Douthat or the good folks over at The American Scene) aren't engaging in speculation about the specifics of Rev. Wright's comments, or what they really say about Senator Obama's beliefs. Instead, the speculation is all horse-racey, about how 'Obama will have to come out and really distance himself from this', or 'well, this is really something Obama is going to have to work to explain.' The closest anyone I read has come to accusing Senator Obama of holding any questionable views is Ross (say, here and here), and he doesn't approach the realm of the absurd (let's call it the 'Ace of Spades line'), not by a factor of 10 or more.

So it kind of appears, to me, that the types of people Reihan is defending, the good faithful who believe that America is "not unique or even terribly distinguished in this regard," don't actually exist, or not in sufficient numbers to really be discussing in detail.

Reihan continues, writing about the possibility of a white Rev. Wright-like figure.

Of course, documentary evidence of a white man doing the same would surely have a similar impact. I grew up watching television, and I have a keen appreciation for the power of images. By layering race over this simple and familiar fact, Chris takes a mundane fact, that people respond to images more readily than text, and makes it seem alarming and suspect.

I'm sorry, but again, I simply don't buy this. Not to get caught up in the same arguments that everyone else is having, but powerful and popular douchebags like Pat Robertson and James Dobson come out all the time and say things which are, at least to my mind, equally (or more) controversial and repugnant. And yet, they are embraced by the standard-bearers of the right. Maybe the presidential candidates are not members of their specific congregations, but this is splitting hairs, to my mind, and not a valid reason to sweep their embrace under the rug.

To me, the metaphor here ought not to be with Rev. Wright, but with someone like Louis Farrakhan. Senator Obama has, right, denounced and rejected Mr. Farrakhan's beliefs and endorsement. To me, if there was really a symmetry in how we treated controversial utterances from ministers, regardless of skin tone, there would be an equal radioactivity to someone who publicly met and accepted endorsements from a Robertson or a Dobson as there would be to someone who did the same with Farrakhan.

But, of course, there is not. And hence, I don't believe for one second that a video of a white minister, speaking along similar lines as those of Rev. Wright, would have equal valence.

Finally (finally!), Reihan says

I have no doubt that Senator Obama is as devout as he claims, yet he’s also reluctant to wear an American flag lapel pin. Though he’s embraced a devotional, very public brand of religiosity, it could be that his thoughts on faith are decidedly complex, and not well suited to being enthusiastically discussed on the campaign trail.

Where to begin here? Firstly, what the hell does a meaningless, tacky display of "patriotism" have to do with religious devotion? Reihan, of all people, should know that wearing a "Ra-Ra-Riot" t-shirt is no evidence whatsoever that you really and truly get what they are saying. In fact, for almost any band who is saying anything worth listening to, wearing their t-shirt is almost guaranteed evidence that you don't get it. Because, part of what they are saying is 'hey, man, go figure shit out for yourself, don't let the Pepsi or KFC or me tell you what to think.'

Since I think America has a hell of a lot of things to say that are worth hearing, many of them having to do with exactly that same line of thought, I will not be wearing an American flag lapel pin anytime soon. But I still fail to see any link between my opinion and Senator Obama's devotion, or lack thereof.

And, lastly (I promise!), and once again, nobody is talking about Obama's faith. All that is being said involves triple-bank-shots based on whether or not he can be reliably proven to be nodding during a certain part of a certain sermon that was delivered 8 years ago. If you want to know about the man's faith, go ask him. Or, better yet, read his book, which conveniently spends whole chapters discussing this very subject!

So, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "There is too much. Let me sum up."

I believe that the American constitutional system has some inherent unfairnesses built into it, which I acknowledge are there for a reason, but I would like to weaken nonetheless.

Rev. Wright, using language stronger than I would use, but then again he's a preacher and I'm an engineer, pointed out some of those structural difficulties and their historical context.

Senator Obama has never made any public statement which would lead you to believe that he holds truck with any of Rev. Wright's more controversial utterances.

Nonetheless, because he is a black man speaking angrily, the video of Rev. Wright has found great controversy-generating power in the media.

This controversy has led to much speculation about Senator Obama's beliefs, even though, as already explained above, there is zero factual evidence to indicate that there is reason to doubt what he has been saying all along.

Wow, what the hell is wrong with you that you're still reading this far?

The Soft Violence Of Limp-Wristedness

I've been called many things before, both good and bad, but I've never been referred to as an 'electrical elf' or a 'banana fairy'.

While I do enjoy the hell out of my Wii games, I will freely admit that playing them probably looks entirely ridiculous, especially the party games like 'Rayman's Raving Rabbids' or 'Warioware'. Oh well, if you can't look ridiculous in the privacy of your own home, where can you?

New Traditions

Courtesy of Faithful Reader E.S., a new annual tradition for St. Patrick's Day: 'Danny Boy', performed by perhaps the finest trio of voices since the Three Tenors:



Beaker's solo is absolutely heartwrenching. The emotion was so apparent that Simon, Official Dog of The Consistent Fool, woke from his nightly 7-10 PM nap (not to be confused with his nightly sleep from 10 PM - 7 AM, of course) and howled along in participation. Or at least, barked along once at the computer.

My 15 Minutes Redux!

The beauty of the blogosphere is that the definition of fame has been so watered down, that you can have your 15 minutes of it over, and over, and over again.

Once again, I find myself linked to from a 'legitimate' blog, this time after accusing Reihan of blatant libertinism, and also of being a dirty, dirty drug user (which I guess is better than accusing him of Bangladeshism, but, well, whatever.)

And Reihan calls me 'entertaining'! Right back atcha, little man...

UPDATE: I should also welcome any American Scene readers who click their way over here. If you're a regular TAS reader, our politics probably don't particularly line up, but I do hope you stick around for a bit...put your feet up, get comfortable, that sort of thing. You never know - you might find something entertaining after all.