Author: Aaron Weber

Fear of Young People

The Globe:

“In an effort to make playgrounds safe, planners recommend not including the sandbox that could harbor dirty needles and basketball courts that could attract the older teenagers who might carry weapons or have drugs. Even a bench can be used to climb a fence or as a place for teenagers to gather. Instead, some planners say, playgrounds for tots invite fewer troublemakers.“

Are dirty needles in sandboxes like razor blades in candy? The whole thing seems implausible to me, but I haven’t got any data. Could be an issue.

But the thing that gets me here is that they’re suggesting that people avoid creating places that are inviting to teenagers. I feel like our society has an irrational (ok, maybe not so irrational) fear of teenagers. So we do things like try to keep them away from public places. But where are they going to go? In many cases, it doesn’t much matter whether you build the park for older kids or younger kids. The older kids will show up at nightfall, and if they don’t have a basketball court they’ll hang out on the swings and the slide. You can’t get rid of them– you can to a certain extent move them around, supervise them, channel them. But you can’t make them go away, or stop doing stupid or dangerous things.

In general I think that groups like the Trust for Public Land are doing some of the most important work in this country– making sure that kids have somewhere safe to play, that there’s enough green space to balance concrete and help to clean the air. But people expect too much from them and from the design of the public sphere.

A place can be safer or less safe, but it can never be perfectly safe. It can discourage crime or provide really easy places for crime. But it won’t eliminate it. At best it will shift it around. People are infinitely devious and will find ways to misuse anything you give them, and if you blame a public planner, landscape designer or an architect for the high crime rate in a public park, you’re laying blame in the wrong direction.

Corruptilicious, Part II

Earlier I noted Florida’s reputation as a center for corrupt politics. New Jersey is another one, of course, as are Louisiana, NYC, Vegas, Rhode Island, Boston…

But what has a reputation for clean politics, really? I mean, come on. It’s politics.

Headline of Doom

Financial websites get some great headlines sometimes. A few years back the now-defunct Green magazine (URL now hosting John Deere enthusiasts) had one titled “Young Dumb and Full of QCOM.” But today’s Motley Fool article about the Glenmorangie distillery is priceless: Scotch: Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.

There’s also a more serious article about outsourcing and economic risk and the elections and although it’s OK it’s not great. Outsourcing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s bad if you assume that there is a static amount of wealth in the world, and that every job created in India takes one away from an American. But the fact is, that’s just not true. Outsourcing will be difficult, and it will result in the loss of jobs in America. But it will also lead to the most efficient allocation of resources. Cost pressure is pressure to outsource. Combine that with a socially generated pressure to outsource slowly and to increase standards of living and worker and environmental protection in the target countries, and you’ll get a higher standard of living for the world, not just for Americans.

Nobody I know is against globalization. Not really. They might say it, but the fact is they all want an iPod and a well-made inexpensive car and a bottle of Shiraz from Australia and Belgian chocolates and Chilean out-of-season strawberries. Who doesn’t? Those are nice things. They are globalization.

Corruptilicious

NYT and Slate both weigh in on Florida elections.

My parents had an opportunity to move to Florida a few years back and one of the reasons they decided not to was that Florida seemed to be riddled with corrupt politicians. That, and my brother and I were pretty stiffly opposed to the whole concept of leaving our friends behind. And my mom wasn’t too keen on it either. And in fact it wasn’t that great an offer. But the political intrigue was definitely on the list of reasons not to move to Coral Gables or wherever it was.

Quotation

Gelwan at Follow Me Here posts a link to Kos quoting an important historical figure about “the big lie” (a term we’ve seen a lot of in relation to the Swift Boat Vets ad, a perfect example of the Bush team’s baldfaced style), and challenges us to guess who it is. As a statement, it could definitely describe our current election, except that it talks about “the masses” and “nations” in ways that place it firmly in the mid-to-early 20th century.

It sounds a little like Orwell, who’s always been one to go on about lies and truth (Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia….), but it’s too contemptuous of the “common people.” I thought Mencken, because he’s always been snide about the little guy, but it turned out to be Hitler.

It’s not clear what putative lies and liars are referred to in that passage, but I can tell you this: once HItler comes into it, all useful debate has ceased. So, best to look at that statement as long as you can before thinking about who said it, because once you start in on what’s implied by the choice of source material, you’re lost in rhetoric and noise.

I Am One of Them

Today one of the sysadmins in the office looked me up and down as I walked past. Then he said, “Interviewing?”
“No. Why?”
“You’re all dressed up.”

To me, it’s obviously not interview wear. I mean, for starters, no tie, no jacket, unpressed shirt. I’m dressed… like marketing on a regular day. Apparently I also have the same haircut as the boss, which is kind of weird. It wasn’t deliberate, but now it’s the Aaron and Charlie haircut.

I Hope This Is Funny

I’ve seen this before, and you may have too, but it’s brilliant: Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. Not merely bad docs, but genuinely weird docs.

On the subject of strange or hilarious commercial speech (Honestly there’s a tangential connection here) I want to share Fafblog’s review of the Dunkin’ Donuts MooLatte, a beverage whose name Slate derided as sounding too much like the word “mulatto.”

(As readers ought to know, but may not, “mulatto” is considered somewhat disrespectful, (although not as bad as other racial slurs, which I will not even allude to) and is therefore deprecated in favor of the more accurate biracial or multiracial (I don’t know if you can use hyphens in there or not, but I suspect that’s a grammar, rather than sensitivity, issue. I think multi-ethnic gets the hyphen, though.))

Anyway, Fafblog says:

Fafblog… looks forward to the day when all ethnically-dubious desserts are judged by the tastiness of their character an not by the way they seem to judge the color of people’s skin. We can only hope this comes in time to exhonerate such fallen treats as the Jewlato, the Hispana Split, an the Wopsicle.

(I hope that’s funny.)