Not a Potted Plant

Driving through town today, I saw confirmation of a creeping suspicion that I have lately been having: over the past couple weeks there has been an influx of vagrants in the Callie area. Or dirty hippies. Or something. It started off with noticing a couple of panhandlers in a place where panhandling is not very common. I shrugged it off because it’s summer and when we do have them it’s during the warm months for rather obvious reasons.

I went into town with Lain today, though, and they were suddenly everywhere. It has begun.

Every few years, there is some national organization of nature loving individuals that descend upon Callie. Some places lobby for the sorts of events that bring commerce to the area. A place where I previously lived boasted about having more World Horseshoe Championship Tournaments than any location outside of Las Vegas. Callie, though, made no such lobbying effort. We have our rodeo (which is a pretty big deal around here) and our crashy derby, but by and large, there’s no great push to bring lots of people to town. And certainly not hippies.

Now, one of the things that I like about the west is that the relationship with hippies is different than back home. They are not considered quite so dirty. Indeed, their appreciation of nature is appreciated. Sometimes with an eyeroll, but hey, they’re heart is in the right place. The personification of the irritating environmentalist isn’t some guy with long hair and tie-dye, but more along the lines of some guy in a suit in New York City who thinks he knows what’s best for the folks out here. Hippies? Harmless, for the most part.

Callie is a pretty Republican area, though, so the goodwill is not unlimited. And, to be honest, the problems that these events bring to the town are legendary. The town is equipped for 5,000 and these events boast between 7,000 and 25,000 people which is far more than its built for.The city’s part-time police force goes full-time. Off-duty cops from other parts of the state come into town. Fire departments are on stand-by. Shop-lifting becomes a problem. And the hospital becomes cluttered with people who do stupid things possibly under the influence of narcotics. Clancy’s last day is Friday, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is the fact that we will be sending July Fourth back in Deltona.

So, for fear of any more unwanted visitors late at night (no, we’re pretty sure our previous visitor was not a hippie), we are going to start locking our doors while they continue to roll in.

We will nonetheless be showing our solidarity by putting the baby in tie-dye when we take her out.

Things are a bit tough at the moment. You’re telling a young woman who at the moment thinks far too much of you that you think it would be best for everybody involved if you went your separate ways. Everything is going to be fine, but things are going to hurt a little bit in the meantime. You know what she sees this coming. Over the past couple weeks she has latched on to you with the increasing ferocity that comes with knowing that something is about to be lost. You start talking, but before you can get there, she drops a bomb.

“I think I might be pregnant.”

The words echo in your ear and you forget the platitudes that you were attempting to put out there with all earnesty. The strategizing for how you are going to handle the decoupling gives way to a wave of different thoughts, mostly pertaining to not expressing the string of cursewords running through your mind. It’s okay, though. In the narrowest sense of the word “okay”. You don’t know what it says about the current state of affairs that it’s not the first time you’ve been in a situation like this.

Frankly, you think that she’s lying. Probably to herself, but maybe just to you. She is always best at lying to herself. Regardless, the correct response to “I think I might be pregnant” is not “You’re full of excrement” but something else entirely. You’ve never been able to put your finger on exactly what, but you know it doesn’t involve substituting biological terminology for expletives. So you ask “Why do you think that?” when you’re really thinking “Okay, lay out your case, woman.”

She doesn’t have anything concrete to hang her fake fear on. They never do. Either because the symptoms of incoming heartbreak mirror those of pregnancy or because their subconscious is performing some wicked trickery, it’s always vague things like increased breast tenderness, headaches, cramps, and the like. The sort of thing one finds if they google “symptoms of pregnancy”. You try to express with confidence and consolation that she’s not pregnant. She tries to get upset that you don’t want her to be, but she can’t get too upset because that’s what she claims, too. Three times something along the lines of “Of course I hope I’m not, though if I am I’m glad it’s with someone that would help me through it.”

Therein the lies the groundwork for the fork you have in the road. You can dig your heels and tell her that she is of course not pregnant and get on with the whole breaking up thing. Since she almost certainly is not pregnant, you’ll probably get along just fine being straightforward like this. There is always the risk that she’s going to tell people that you ditched her when she said she was pregnant, but her friends don’t matter to you, anyone that knows you knows that you’re not like that, and it’s not in her character to start a smear campaign even when hurt.

If she is pregnant, though, the results can be devastating. You’ve just alienated the mother of your child. You’ve hurt your chances at custody hearings. Most of all, though, you’ve injured the likelihood that you will be able to work with her to come to a satisfactory arrangements and out there on the fringes you’ve probably killed any chance of raising the child with her, which would be ideal with the childz. If she is pregnant and she’s not making any of this up, then the goal is not to keep you from leaving. If you’re the asshat that would call her a liar and ditch her when she’s legitimately pregnant, she might want you to leave. Continue Reading →

Mating:

[M1] I’ve written a couple of times about the way our society is structured against early marriage and parenthood. Jacoba Urist thinks we should do something about it.

[M2] Hugo Schwyzer explains why men need to find women their own age.

[M3] Overspending as modern mating deception wouldn’t be an issue if aspects of our culture didn’t suck so bad.

Progress:

[P1] How many terrabytes can you fit into a brain?

[P2] A teen invents a 20-second phone charger. Another a submarine.

Ecology:

[E1] io9 has a series of articles on the Yellowstone megavolcano.

[E2] Washington Post lists seven thrilling facts about the carbon tax. Credit to them for mentioning the regressive nature of it. It’s probably the best way to combat AGW, but consensus would be monstrously difficult and I hate that one of the biggest question is “What would we do with the money?”

[E3] One of my hope-beyond-hopes with regard to global warming is carbon capture. They’re testing it in Alberta.

[E4] Next up: water crisis. There’s a pretty strong likelihood that desalinization is going to be critical to humanity’s future.

Hurm:

[H1] Myths and teachable stories about the apocalypse.

[H2] Intriguing: An interview with a dead man.

[H3] Important: Tips on faking your own death.

Internet:

[I1] How to reform comment trolls.

[I2] Figuring out business models for WiFi is hard. This is one of those things that’s crying out for a systemic solution. The equivalent of calling cards.

[I3] Presenting… The 8-bit Iron Man.

America:

[A1] Marijuana makes for better proscuitto.

[A2] America’s latest export: For-profit universities.

[A3] Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on state budgets and higher education. GE Miller writes about the cost of the college experience.

[A4] I love the term “unexotic underclass.” I will start using it.

[A5] The ruins of Jerusalem… in a decaying theme park.

World:

[W1] The Atlantic has a good article on the dubious economic sustainability of China’s urbanization project.

[W2] How Brazil is tackling its rural physician shortage. I find it odd that doctors would immigrate from Spain and Portugal to Brazil.

[W3] A look at Taiwan before its economic boom.

For whatever reason, this has not been shared on any of the blogs I frequent despite it being instructive on the future of the surveillance state.

The Wall Street Journal notes the gobsmacking ineffectiveness of our efforts to stop terrorism:

Per life saved, the Food and Drug Administration maintains society should be prepared to spend $7.9 million. The Environmental Protection Agency has its own figure: $9.1 million.

The Homeland Security Department has shied away from any such discipline, though it once suggested that a life saved from terrorism was worth twice as much as any other life, bizarrely based on the public’s exaggerated dread of terrorism. Even so, the Federal Air Marshal Service has been estimated to cost $180 million per life saved. Airport security—don’t ask. One British study estimated that security efforts would have to stop 30 attacks per year on the scale of the 2005 London transit bombing to justify Britain’s spending under normal metrics.

Rather than concluding, however, that maybe we should spend somewhat less on things that don’t work…

Maybe the best outcome, then, would be to take metadata surveillance away from the spooks and apply it more broadly and openly to regular law enforcement.

Absent an improbable Bernanke-sized bailout of civil libertarians by Scalia and his newfound friends, this seems to me that it will eventually be the winning argument.

Pew says that 56% of Americans found acceptable the “NSA getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.” This was somewhat unsurprising because asking some one whether something should be done to “investigate terrorism” is basically like asking whether or not they hate America.

This same public would surely support proactive surveillance to “identify sex offenders” or “identify school shooters”. (There’s no need to include the word “potential” in either of those…unless you’re a sex-offender defender.) Do you think it would be considered inappropriate to troll through the database if it might assist with an AMBER alert?

Whether you support this development or not is immaterial because it is going to happen. If you still doubt this, consider that Julian Sanchez of Cato concedes that even the most sweeping of surveillance measures are probably legal under the Supreme Court’s current interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. Sanchez alludes to the need for a new constitutional amendment, which tells you just how lost a cause it is. Godspeed, Cato. [EDIT: OK, not really. See Sanchez’s piece and the edit below.]

For those of us who accept the constraints of reality, however, we can work on adjusting to our rapidly approaching futures. Here is my humble starter suggestion: a digital mirror.

The government and corporations have tools to help understand everything we do. Google and the government know every search I’ve made using it and how it compares to other users, but I don’t. Costco and Amazon know everything I buy (to the point of being able to contact me about product recalls), but I don’t. The government has apparently been tracking our credit card purchases, something I wish I could get some more help with.

A functioning digital mirror would consolidate whatever data you give it, process it into some intelligible points about what you might look like to an outsider based on that data, and tell you those points and how they compare to other users. Have your Facebook posts been particularly serial-killer-ish lately? Check your digital mirror to find out!

That’s all I have so far. Can you detail how such a service would work and what insights it could provide to a customer? Can you think of other tools that might be useful?

EDIT: Julian Sanchez notes in the comments that he makes no mention of the need for a constitutional amendment. Well, this is awkward. The parts of his piece that made me leap to the need for an amendment was that “When you used technology that left traces of your activity in the phone company’s files, the court reasoned, you ‘assumed the risk’ that the company would reveal that information — even if they had explicitly promised not to — and waived your ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ under the Fourth Amendment.” He later notes that presently “a vast array of private information that would previously have required a physical search — and therefore a search warrant — to obtain is now available under a far lower standard.” This is the current protection offered by the Fourth Amendment, which suggested to me the need for another amendment if one really expected to protect data held by companies as opposed to just physical property.

I was quite pleasantly surprised when the Obama administration responded quickly for allowing cell phone users to unlock their phones.

There has been some misunderstanding about what unlocking a cell phone means. It basically only means that you can prevent the phone from being carrier-specific as they are manufactured and released to be. This actually has very limited application, however, because in the United States, the carriers are generally incompatible with one another anyway. That’s one of the reasons that despite the current prohibition against unlocking, most of the carriers will let you do it anyway. Most Verizon phones cannot be unlocked to run on AT&T. No AT&T phones can be reworked to get onto Verizon’s network. Really, of the four major carriers, only T-Mobile plays really nice.

Derek Khanna, the GOP wonderkind who was fired from a thinktank for advocating a reworking of copyright laws and who initiated the petition, wrote a follow-up in The Atlantic stating that allowing the unlocking and jailbreaking/rooting* of phones is not enough.

Currently there is an exception for personal jail breaking (allowing individuals to install unapproved applications by altering the OS), but developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal and there is no personal exceptions for tablets or other devices. This is unbelievable, especially when according to @Saurik, 23 million iOS devices are running a version of Cydia – a rough barometer of the number of devices jail broken. Until recently, personal jail breaking was illegal as well – meaning that all of the owners of those devices could be criminally liable. Unlocking new phones, as previously explained, is now illegal in all circumstances.

Accessibility technology has received an exception, but it is so narrow that it is nearly useless for persons who are deaf or blind. This exception was not the one requested on behalf of persons who are deaf and blind. And like the jail breaking, while there is a narrow exception for personal use — developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal. What use is an exception for accessibility for personal use, if no one can develop the tools?

Technology to backup legally purchased DVDs and Blu-Ray discs for personal use is widely available and widely used but is completely illegal (in the US) – thus making millions of Americans criminals for a what most would consider non-infringing activity (if they own the content).

Continue Reading →