Author: Aaron Weber

Look upon my works

Back in the day, people used to hope their work would make them immortal. Or at least that they would be remembered for generations, or centuries. These days, you know you’re going to be forgotten in ten years, at best.

Places like the Institute for the Future and the Long Bets Foundation are trying to get people to focus on the long term. I’ll be lucky if I can focus on the immediate task before me, namely writing and editing.

I’m particularly proud of this paragraph, from the rug.1 man page:

RUG_ARGS
This environment variable is prepended to any command line
options that are passed to rug and acts as an extra set of argu-
ments. The variable is ignored if the –ignore-env flag is set.
Do not attempt to set the –ignore-env flag in the RUG_ARGS
variable; this is absurd.

Asses and Asinine Behavior

The word of the day is butt call, the accidental calls you get when people sit on their phones and it dials a speed-dial number. The side-effect, of convenience, is the inconvenience of others.

More on unintended consequences, this time with respect to the US war on drugs:
Reason magazine on heroin addiction, (they have a strong libertarian bent, so you know they’re going to be arguing that the drug laws are stupid).
Criticisms and directions on how to fix US drug policy, by some guy named Randy, whom I don’t know much about,.
Note also the previously posted questions for public health students.

Other unintended consequences: intellectual properly policies that are insufficiently clear can leave you open to annoying jokesters. And failing to plan for the extended character sets of non-English languages can leave your software mocked mercilessly by the famous Joel.

Secondhand smoke: hard evidence

Is there any real research to indicate that secondhand smoke is bad? Now there is: Helena Montana had a dramatic drop in heart attacks after banning smoking in bars. Then they dropped the ban, and the heart rate rose again.

The People’s Republik bar, in Cambridge MA, has a chalkboard out front. On the day the Cambridge smoking ban took effect, it read “You can’t smoke in here, but some of us can still stink up the bar.”

Three barely related paragraphs

The Church keeps trying to convince people not to use condoms because it’s a sin. Perhaps they need some information about harm reduction.
Speaking of deliberate harm, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a great ode to alcoholism, and Michael Pollan (of “Botany of Desire”) has a great article in the NYT this week on obesity which I wanted to turn into some sort of rant about the way people cede control over their lives to marketers and corporations, and then blame the corporations for running their lives poorly.

Of course if you give your life over to alcohol or television or junk food or consumerism, it’s not going to be yours, and it’s not going to make you happy. Of course if you give your life over to a philosophy that has very strict absolutes you’re going to find uncomfortably sharp edges and contradictions, like persuading people that condoms are useless in order to prevent contraception, and being unable to recognize that you are spreading potentially fatal misinformation and are therefore responsible for the deaths of thousands.

If I’m a marketer of a branded lifestyle like, say, McDonalds or Catholicism is it my responsibility to make sure that my customers are emotionally healthy and moderate in their beliefs? If someone loves me in an uncomfortable way, I can distance myself from them, help them love themselves instead. But I don’t want to make myself unlovable. I want to still be loved, just not loved by this person, or not so immoderately. What does Disney do with someone who loves, really LOVES, Disney? What does the Catholic Church do with someone who is, perhaps, over-fanatic? They don’t want to shut down! They can’t.

If someone gives their life over to your control, even partially, what responsibility do you bear for that? If it’s my job to be loved and lovable, and someone grows obsessed, what do I do? A celebrity, a product, an ideology, a lifestyle… are they the same in their obligations to their fanatics?

I’d say an ideology has a greater obligation to avoid its adherents getting out of control, since adherence is part of its makeup, whereas a product doesn’t include fanaticism by default and isn’t as in control of, or responsible for, that fanaticism. But I’m not sure. Is McDonalds as much an ideological state apparatus (to get a little althusserian on you) as the Church? Urgh, I’m getting back to my thesis here…

Misconceptions and Misperceptions

Forbes portrays the Free Software Foundation in a rather negative light. Of course, the FSF is known for being doctrinaire and annoying, but I wouldn’t exactly call them “hit men.” Meanwhile, conspiracy mongering about the mono project. Come on guys. It’s software. I know you live it and breathe it. I live it and breathe it.

But this isn’t the movies. There are no hit men. X never marks the spot. It’s not called “evil” or “double-crossing” in this world, it’s mere unethical business practices and breach of contract. You want to see pirates and hit men, go run opium from Burma to Hong Kong.

Consumer Preferences

I’ve made this prediction before and I think it’s coming true: Rye whiskey is coming back. Increasing numbers of people are trying it and it’s appearing in larger presentations on store shelves.
Mall Discount Liquors in Alewife had a very large selection, and I picked up some Rip Van Winkle, which I’ve yet to try. This’ll be the 3rd bottle of rye I’ve bought, and will make two unfinished bottles in my collection– along with the three kinds of bourbon. That’s too much damn whiskey. I sense a party coming on.

More on Real Estate

When you’re looking to rent, remember these things:

Your landlord may run a background check that makes a cavity search feel like a handshake.

Your landlord paid a lot for that building and needs to make it back. Needs to make a lot just to pay for upkeep and mortgage payments.

You have rights. Plenty, in fact. Enough to validate the entire history of tenant-vs-landlord antagonism. Enough to make you wonder how landlords ever make any money at all.

People keep agitating for rent control around here and I think it’s a bad idea– cut regulation, cut the cost of providing rentals, cut barriers to apartment creation, and the price of rentals will come down. I want to see more apartments, not rent-controlled apartments.