Category: observations

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The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity

The Appalachian range made it difficult and expensive to transport surplus corn from the lightly settled Ohio River Valley to the more populous markets of the East, so farmers turned their corn into whiskey — a more compact and portable ”value-added commodity.” In time, the price of whiskey plummeted, to the point that people could afford to drink it by the pint, which is precisely what they did.

Nowadays, for somewhat different reasons, corn (along with most other agricultural commodities) is again abundant and cheap, and once again the easiest thing to do with the surplus is to turn it into more compact and portable value-added commodities: corn sweeteners, cornfed meat and chicken and highly processed foods of every description. The Alcoholic Republic has given way to the Republic of Fat, but in both cases, before the clever marketing, before the change in lifestyle, stands a veritable mountain of cheap grain.

I hadn’t understood how directly government policy influenced how farmers produced and sold food today versus 50 or even 30 years ago. I fear it’s too esoteric to be a campaign issue, and perhaps is tuch a political hot potato as to be untouchable by any but a second term president, one who doesn’t need to be re-elected.

Found in Rebecca’s pocket

Blogger Con: The Rule of Win-Win

A corollary to the Rule, there is no such thing as a Win-Lose. I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve never seen it happen. Microsoft dominates Web browsers, but can’t make the browser go anywhere after they own it. Lotus dominates spreadsheets, but fails to make the transition to GUIs. There must be a thousand examples. When you become the only winner, you plant the seeds for your own loss at the same instant.

Sometimes Dave Winer can transcend his penchant for ego-driven self-aggrandizement and offer an insight. The above is an excerpt from an example of that . . . .

It is perhaps paradoxical or counter-intuitive to think that 2+2 can equal 5 while 2+0=0: playing the marketplace as a zero-sum game means no one wins, even the dominant player. But perhaps that make the technology business more like art, where each new idea or paradigm is part of a continuum of ideas, than like manufacturing where the market matures more quickly and the players don’t change very often. This could also be a side-effect of the immaturity of the software business: software on a personal scale has only existed since the personal computer, or about 25 years. Many common manufactured goods reached their present form a century ago . . .

Mac OS Rumors

Panther is proving to be the most impressive upgrade we’ve seen out of Apple in our eight years in this business. If you have to pay $129 for an operating system, at least you can hope to get your money’s worth if not a bit more…and on this point, Panther delivers in spades.

This article mentions several of the features Apple has been touting and some other below the surface improvements (faster, more reliable networking, improved application startup times). If the new brushed-metal Finder is all we have to complain about, I’m encouraged . . . .

Lick Me, I’m A Macintosh / What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about design and packaging and “feel”?

This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil.

These are the things that are nearly dead in our mass-consumer culture, things normally reserved for elitist niche markets and swanky boutiques and upscale yuppie Euro spas and maybe cool insider mags like I-D and Metropolis and dwell. They are most definitely not to be expected of mass-market gadget makers. This is why it matters. This is why it’s important.

This is one aspect of a conversation I’ve had a few (?) times. When you consider that you’re going to spend a certain number of hours looking and and manipulating a tool, why shouldn’t it be pleasing and not just the cheapest damn thing you could get? People spend more time choosing a car that they spend an hour or two a day using, but the tools they use to make a living are what was on sale at Circuit City last weekend.

Is it wrong to care about your tools and to feel some sense of pleasure from using them?

SEIU Local 925

It became official last week. My working relationship with my supervisors went from collegial understanding to contractual obligation, all in a matter of 15 days. On Sept 8, there was a conversation about how best to reclassify my position as professional staff. and on Sept 23, I was informed I was going to be subject to Article 18 [Corrective action/dismissal] of the collective bargaining agreement.

Since the amount of positive paperwork in my file outweighs the negative — three performance reviews in the 6 month probationary period, culminating in “exceeds expectations” for most categories — coupled with the sudden change in direction from reclassification to removal, I’m not sure how the union will deal with this. The steward I took my paperwork to last week couldn’t understand it, and the members of the administration who heard the details were scratching their heads.

I just want out. In June, I made the offer, in good faith, to let a new position description be created around the realities of the job and that I would serve until that was done and the position filled. They declined to go that route, choosing instead the current unpleasant course.

Well, now it’s up to me, and I’m doing all I can to get out. Their education agenda, the public initiatives, the policy goals — all of that is meaningless to me now. I don’t care about a bit of it, and what’s more, I’ll be working to rule for the rest of my time there. My father asked me if I had a cloth cap. I may have to invest in one . . . . .
Continue reading “organized labor vs disorganized thinking”

Not so much a review as an appreciation . . . . while I’m not a big fan of science fiction, this one for some reason seems to transcend what I remember of the genre.

Shockwave Rider (sorry, no cover art available)

I read this book in high school not long after it came out and remembered it vaguely but positively. For some reason, it’s themes of ubiquitous data networking and worms (phages in the book) surfaced in my head a week or so ago and I dug a copy out of the library. It was better than I remembered and surprisingly prescient. Most of the reviews I read on Amazon talk about the eerie predictions of a worldwide data network (called the data-net) and how people are increasingly rootless in the physical and plugged into the virtual.

While that’s interesting — he gets a lot of it right, 20 years before most of us were exposed to the Internet — what I found more compelling is the central conflict of the book, the clash between the oligarchy that controls information and uses it against the rest of the world and one man, a renegade systems guru who was schooled in the oligarchy’s thinktanks but fell out with their philosophy.

While those in power throw money and human capital at the task of manufacturing wisdom (without actually understanding it), all the while manipulating the rest of the world’s perceptions and opinions, the hero devises a way of unleashing all the stored information that props up those in power. From detailed accountings of government corruption — with check numbers — to precise ingredient lists of tainted foods, everything everyone could wish to know about everything is available on ubiquitous public data terminals.

One of the related themes is how easily fooled those in power are by what looks like official information: if it comes off the net, it must be accurate. They lack the common sense — or wisdom — to question what they read and the book’s hero uses that against them again and again.

It’s the old theme of empowerment vs control, a well-used idea in speculative fiction, especially of the dystopian school (Brave New World, 1984, et al). But at the same time, it touches on the choices people make, how they live, and the fruits of those choices. Do we live our lives or the ones we’re told to live by advertisers and other models of behavior?

And any book that has a job title of “systems rationalizer,” truncated to “systems rash,” is worth a read.

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

Some technologies, however, are so blatantly obnoxious that the human race would rejoice if they were obliterated. A wise society would honor its young technical innovators for services rendered in annihilating obsolete technologies that are the dangerous hangovers of previous, less advanced generations.

Found in rebecca’s pocket.

EFF: Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk

Long but worth reading.

We recognize that hardware enhancements might be one way to improve computer security. But treating computer owners as adversaries is not progress in computer security. The interoperability, competition, owner control, and similar problems inherent in the TCG and NCSCB approach are serious enough that we recommend against adoption of these trusted computing technologies until these problems have been addressed. Fortunately, we believe these problems are not insurmountable, and we look forward to working with the industry to resolve them.

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