You Can’t (Must) Do That!

Monday, February 6, 2012 by Dick.

1. Whitehouse.gov has a petition to the Obama administration to “require automakers to replace the nearly useless Check Engine Light with a display that actually explains what’s wrong.” The petitioner says “we need a federal mandate…”

Say what?

“Yeah, like that’s what we want governance to do,” my friend Liz Arden said. “We really want the Administration to replace its mission for social engineering with even more automotive engineering.”

2a. Meanwhile, in the real world, America’s poor use food “stamps” to buy staples like milk, vegetables, fruits and meat. Technology update. The coupon book has morphed into a debit card. A Florida state senator wants to stop them from using the food stamp cards to buy sweets like cakes, cookies, and Jell-O™ and snack foods like chips. She also wants to limit other welfare funds, known as Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, from being used at ATMs in casinos and strip clubs and anywhere out of state.

Ya think?

“That’s something of which I would approve,” Ms. Arden told me. If our government insists on “spending our tax money helping out the poor, then social engineering in this respect is appropriate. My tax dollars are not a gift to be used by the recipient as they please — they are an investment in this country’s good. ”

The Florida bill recently passed committee. Liberal critics say the government shouldn’t dictate what people eat.

“Gummint isn’t,” Ms. Arden said. “They may use any of their own earned dollars to eat snack foods and go to strip clubs.”

But, but, they are poor. That pretty much means they don’t have their own money, yes?

“Then work hard to get off the public teat so you can afford to have Twinkies™ and Ho Hos™.”

I’m not sure I’d even call it “social engineering.” I’d simply call it a grant requirement. Or a contract. Or the law.

Grant recipients have to jump through specific hoops for their funds (a college lab can’t spend the money it gets to research norovirus on, say, staff mammograms even if that’s a good thing to do). And, just as an aside, the letter carrier who delivered the welfare check or food stamp card in the mail passed a criminal-history check, a physical examination, and a drug test.

2b. On the other hand, the ACLU here in Florida brought a class action suit last year to stop drug-testing welfare recipients. That’s probably social engineering because I’m thinking very few street dealers have the required credit card machines. That makes it hard to use food “stamps” for crack or meth.

3. At the other end of the spectrum, Liz Arden does think the Federal gummint should get out of the marriage business altogether. “It’s a contract and Congress is trying to social engineer it,” she says. “Let the churches or the Towns or even just the individuals download a form or call a lawyer and just do it.”

That’s a good Libertarian response to a Congress that is either hellbent on destroying marriage or saving it. Or both. Or not doing anything at all.

Congress is nothing if not schizophrenic.

Except contracts don’t bind parties outside the contract to their terms so a private marriage contract can’t by itself change HIPAA, can’t override probate laws, can’t affect the tax code, and can’t protect child brides, people of unsound mind, or close relatives (you cannot, for example marry a parent, grandparent, sister, brother, child, grandchild, niece, nephew, aunt or uncle in Vermont). United States federal law is supposed to assure that a marriage licensed in one state is recognized in all the others, a pretty important fiat. And the Supreme Court overturned state marriage laws that barred interracial marriages on the basis that marriage is a “basic civil right…” Not a likely outcome for a private contract.

Government must not/must mandate Idiot Lights.
Government must/must not mandate food stamp junque food.
Government must/must not mandate welfare drug tests.
Government must not/must mandate marriage.

The Check Engine or Service Engine Soon lights aren’t necessary to the well-being of American society. Period.

The junk food and drug test orders do improve the well-being of American society. Worth running through the legislature.

Marital contracts deserve the same crafting latitude as any other legal contract but the basic tenets of civil rights, inheritance, safety, and taxation are national concerns. Creating a legal umbrella that assures that both the redneck and the Brahmin recognize the contract does improve the well-being of American society.

Posted in Sociology, Society, Politics & News, Random Access | 5 Comments »

Revolutions

Monday, January 2, 2012 by Dick.

I quit smoking for my birthday in 1976.

I have mentioned since that that used up all my willpower. I don’t smoke. I still like the smell of a good cigar but I still didn’t smoke today.

I figure I have aimed my stock of willpower at not smoking which doesn’t leave much to avoid lusting after a new Android tablet or a different boat.

Researcher Roy F. Baumeister sort of agrees in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Like a muscle, willpower is fatigued or broken down completely by overuse.

We’re not talking about the Australian racer who drives for Team Penske in the IndyCar Series. Willpower is usually thought to mean self discipline, self-control, or the ability to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

Like keep a New Year’s resolution.

I “came of [management] age” in the 70s and 80s when the B-schools thought employees were valuable and Theory Y was king. I still believe in Management By Objectives, a program I first implemented at Harris.

MBO relies on participative goal setting in which employees decide on what business goals they can attain and the tasks they will undertake to fulfill them. The part I like best is that we measure the actual results against the standards we set at the beginning of the period so we all — managers and managees alike — always know exactly how we are doing.

The reason managers like MBO is that the employees think they have power because they are setting their own goals and are more committed to the company (and more likely to outproduce the company expectations) as a result.

The only real downside to MBO is that it is still a top-down process.

On the other hand, it doesn’t rely solely on willpower. Properly done, every goal has both an external deadline and a manager or coach or peer to make sure we do it. It’s a pretty good process to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

When I led a parent group at our local middle and high school, we started a goal setting club. The kids created their own goals, set milestones, and chose someone to monitor their results. We had a reward at the end. The kids did very well.

Back to Dr. Baumeister’s weight room. He has shown that we can build “new” willpower in much the same way we build muscles in the gym: practice and reps, practice and reps. And by eating properly. Our brains need fuel to make decisions, store and retrieve memories, and pass standardized tests. Dr. Baumeister found that willpower requires glucose too so we can be strengthen our willpower simply by working out and adding to the brain’s fuel stores.

Building working muscle means working with moderate weights but doing it over and over and over again.

Want to keep your New Year’s resolutions?

Take Dr. Baumeister’s advice and use what we’ve learned in MBO. Just like the 7th and 8th graders:

• Create a goal you can reach. It is darned near impossible to lose 50 pounds but it is reasonable to lose a pound a week.
• Set checkpoints to make sure you’re on track. That’s no different than going to the gym every day.
• Choose someone to monitor your results. There is nothing like peer pressure to make sure you haven’t snuck out to the barn for a smoke — I told everyone I knew I was quitting and they watched me like hungry mosquitoes.
• Build your willpower and resolutions just one or two goals at a time. You can work your biceps today and your glutes tomorrow.

Revolutionary, that is.

Posted in Sociology, Lists, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Sex, Sex, and More Sex

Monday, December 5, 2011 by Dick.

Twenty-nine percent of ordinary Americans have had sex on a first date, and about as many have had an “unexpected sexual encounter with someone new.” Among people who are married or living in a committed relationship (or formerly married), sixteen percent have cheated on their partner (nearly twice as many men as women) — while more, thirty percent, have fantasized about it.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an affair.

Ordinary Americans are pikers.

Voice of America reports that “When U.S. businessman Herman Cain suspended his campaign [Saturday] for the Republican presidential nomination following allegations of sexual harassment and a lengthy extramarital affair, he joined a long list of U.S. presidents and presidential contenders whose personal lives have attracted scrutiny.”

The long list is pretty much all of them.

Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gary Hart, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there are the Mark Sanfords, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Eliot Spitzers, Anthony Weiners. Apparently about 97.7 percent of American presidents and 110 percent of American presidential candidates.

What did we expect? From the Victorians through Viet Nam, public morality did inhibit any open acknowledgment of sexuality but things have (sort of) changed. Most American homes today probably have copies of Playboy and Fanny Hill and the Joy of Sex but the owners still keep them out of sight. On the other hand, a couple generations of soap operas have been hotbeds of in-your-face adultery. They reflected American life or at least American political life.

Now we tell ourselves stories — stories about how prim we are and how licentious our neighbors are — and those stories hurt us.

Countries with an ultraconservative attitude towards sex and sex education like the U.S. have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.

I have some simple advice for these people in public life:

Grow a pair!
You guys (and I mean all of you political philanderers from any affiliation) think you’re winning the dicksizing contest.

You ain’t.

You’d like We the People to believe you are King of the Bedroom or at least the oval rug but you can’t even stand up for your bigger self when your littler self gets caught standing up.

Here’s the answer. When the admittedly brain dead reporter asks, “Did you really have sex with three women, and a goat?” tell the truth.

“Yep. What’s it to you?”

About the only follow up to that is, “Was it good for the goat?”

Actually, a decent reporter should ask the spouse to comment. It would be a good teaching moment for relationship building. Maybe for polyamory. Or at least for truth in advertising.

Posted in Sociology, Society, Politics & News, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 7 Comments »

Keep Your Hands Off My Junk

Monday, November 21, 2011 by Dick.

We used to call it our “privates” because we (allegedly) value our privacy and don’t want to show off our, well, junk.

Everybody in the known universe (except in Andromeda) knows that Facebook and privacy don’t mix well. Frankly, the Innernoodle and privacy don’t mix well but that’s another story. Facebook is >||< close to settling with the Federal Trade Commission after the FTC charged the social networking site with issues related to your privacy and mine. See, Facebook has access to a lot of our junk and they keep changing how they will display it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reminded PBS viewers that everything Facebook knows about us is everything we have put there. Other companies, he said, like Microsoft and Google and Yahoo, “have search engines and ad networks, have a huge amount of information about you. It’s just that they’re collecting that information about you behind your back really. But you never know that… it’s less transparent than what is happening at Facebook.”

I can keep my junk hidden from the Interwebs simply by not using the Interwebs. No Facebook. No Google. No online bill paying. No Netflix streaming.

Meanwhile, the bank known as Chase Manhattan until it merged with J.P. Morgan a decade ago, is one of the Big Four banks of the United States. I’ve been a Chase customer since I got my first “BankAmericard” in the late 1960s.

Chase sent me a privacy notice with a lot of little aptitude-test ovals to fill in completely. I’ve never been one to color inside the lines but I did my best. “We’re going to send you junk mail from these guys.” NO THANK YOU. “We’re going to bill you for these other guys.” NO THANK YOU. “We have this wonderful offer for …” NO THANK YOU.

I can keep my junk hidden from Chase as long as I send in the “opt-out” form. Every five years. Unless they ask for it more often. Like tomorrow.

The St. Albans Messenger reports that the village of Richford has become the first northwestern Vermont community to install law enforcement surveillance cameras on its streets; their two new cameras cost five grand (money that was to have underwritten a second constable). The live video feeds directly to the Sheriff’s Office via the Internet. U.S. Border Patrol and Vermont State Police also have access to the feed. The cameras were installed as a “safety measure” in response to concerns from residents about area crime but not all residents are happy about the cameras.

Richford officials remind us that Richford is not the first to have cameras trained on its streets. Public Access TV has cameras looking at the streets in both St. Albans and Enosburg, officials said. The fact is that those cameras were not installed at taxpayer expense and those cameras don’t feed Law Enforcement.

I can keep my junk hidden from Richford’s cameras as long as I …
Oh. Wait. I can’t keep my junk hidden from Richford’s cameras.

The World Naked Bike Ride got me thinking about this question I found online: “Imagine that you live in a place where public nudity is not only legal, but also socially acceptable. Assuming that the climate is favorable, how often would you be totally naked in public?”

In that case, I’d opt in to show off my junk.

Posted in Privacy, Sociology, Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Dead? Dead

Monday, November 14, 2011 by Dick.

Burlington, VT (October 28)–Our own local group of Occupy Wall Streeters began a weekend encampment in City Hall Park in Burlington today, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the park overnight. Under city ordinances, people are forbidden from sleeping in parks after 10 p.m. or setting up tents and bedding for that purpose. The Vermont Workers’ Center, meanwhile, “encourages everyone to stop by with family and friends to celebrate the right to peaceably assemble and to exercise the right to free speech.”

It’s a real conflict. Most of Burlington’s city government is pretty much on the OWS side but there is a farmer’s market in the park on Saturday, so Occupy Wall Street is gonna end up Occupying Main Street and fouling local commerce.

“Real change can happen and it feels to me like it’s starting to simmer…” my friend Enola “Fanny” Guay said.

That may well be, but the issue still comes down to a single question: Do the protesters have a defined goal?

I was in college during the anti-war protests of the 60s. Looking back on my actual experience, there were a lot of different, non-homogenous groups running around but they all had one over-riding goal: they would shout and shout until the war came tumbling down.

I don’t remember any protesters shooting each other.

Burlington, VT (November 10)–Police are investigating three deaths — two fatal shootings and an apparent overdose — at or near Occupy protest camps last Thursday.

A young man was fatally shot Thursday evening just yards from the Occupy Oakland encampment outside City Hall. And a homeless veteran died after shooting himself in the head in a tent in Burlington’s City Hall Park, where the local Occupy movement has set up tentkeeping. Police here cordoned off part of the park as a crime scene sparking a confrontation with the protesters.

Also on Friday, a 42-year-old man was found dead inside his tent at Occupy Salt Lake City in Utah. Officials believe he died from a combination of drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning.

This sign is making the social network and email rounds.

“It’s obvious the sign maker and all the Facebook copycats are either blind to or unwilling to discuss the class advantages and good luck that bolstered their hard work,” Fanny Guay said.

That’s Fanny-speak for “we need to take away that advantage so no one can get ahead of anyone else.”

It’s particularly worrisome that most of the OWS simmering comes together that way. After all, most of Vermont’s flower children had liberal college educations that their parents provided. Many of Vermont’s flower children have grown up to accumulate the advantages and luck

And here in Vermont, it is mostly the children and children’s children of privilege who band together to protest.

All curmudgeonliness aside, OWS could be a good thing if they stay peaceful. Protesting our problems is an American tradition and Wall Streeters getting $100 million bonuses from tax money is a problem.

If the simmering does come together, the OWS might have something to shout and shout about, a cause that allows every man, woman, and child to live in an identical, government-owned house, with identical, government-provided healthcare, watching identical, government-programmed television. As long as everyone can have a television.

I wouldn’t bank on it.

For now? It seems like all noise and no tumbling. And it’s dying a blusterous death.

Posted in Banking, Sociology, Society, Politics & News, Random Access | 2 Comments »

GIYF

Monday, October 10, 2011 by Dick.

Have a little whine with your cheese and crackers? I have mine right here:

Rufus is fond of believing he knows everything and that anything anyone else says is wrong. Period. Paragraph.

That’s healthy.

Except when the anyone else is, well, me.

Rufus particularly likes to dispute pronouncements on technology, on God, and on history. He insists, for example, that there’s no advantage to increasing the sensor size in a digital camera. Doesn’t matter that I’m a pretty knowledgeable daylight photographer. Doesn’t matter that most other digital camera experts agree with me. Doesn’t matter that large format film cameras have already won the “size” battle. Rufus knows better.

The most recent example comes from the very large (about 800 million population and growing) world of very small issues (Facebook). Our mutual friend Brock posted a note about why a cop should take a gun to a knife fight; I added an anecdote about the army adopting the .45 Colt after Philippine-American War. Brockley Mann is the chief of the South Puffin Police Department.

The “suspect’s momentum may continue forward with enough force for the edged weapon to end up injuring the officer” even after the suspect has been shot, Brock posted.

I recalled that the reason the army switched from a .38 to the Model 1911 Colt was to stop the Filipino Moros running full tilt (a “bolo rush”) with their 18″ machete-like swords at the officers who had only side-arms. Even a dead running man can decapitate a soldier on sheer momentum. Experiments showed the .45 caliber punch could almost stop that rush. Almost.

Unfortunately, the M1911 design wasn’t finished and it never saw service in the Philippines.

Rufus responded that he “thought the ’service .45′ was ALWAYS a .45 starting with the original Colt revolver. But you say the Army had a dalliance, for a time, with a little .38. How long did that last? (I could Google it, but YOU brought it up…)”

Let’s keep that thought. Rufus could Google it, but I brought it up…

Another poster commented, “I can’t imagine the Army using .38s. I have a .38 and it is really small.”

I might note that it’s not the size. OK, it’s the size.

Thanks to Liza Arden who spent the 30 seconds on Google that Rufus had no time to do, there is plenty of firearms history available:

• .45 Colt on Wikipedia
• The Legend of the Colt and the Moros
• Living with the 1911

I cited these examples not (just) to pick on Rufus. OK, maybe to pick on Rufus, but also to talk about how so few people are willing to reach out to the sources we have to store our history even when it is crucial.

You might have a problem reconciling your checking account and need to look for calculation tools. You might need to know when Louisville Slugger first produced a bat with a knob on it (Babe Ruth ordered the first one in 1919). You might have a leaking PVC sink drain and need to look for repair techniques.

I mostly enjoy researching, but I don’t enjoy doing your research. Or Rufus’.

Google Is Your Friend.

It was not always thus. I grew up before the Internet so I had to use the books in the house, the books in friend’s houses, the books in the library. Remember e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-as? Me, too. I still have a Marks’ Handbook that I rarely use and a Machinery’s Handbook that I use all the time. Mine is the 18th Edition, printed in 1968, because tap drill hole sizes haven’t changed much in the intervening years. I don’t have the CD version but I do look up work gear temperatures online more often than in the Handbook. And I’m more likely to find the mechanical engineering facts, figures, standards, and practices of the Marks’ online. On the other hand, my favorite reference book here is the Oxford English Dictionary my folks gave me more than 30 years ago.

See, it doesn’t matter if you use an Internet search engine or the local library to find your answer. It just matters that you find the answer.

Of course, where ever one reads the data, there remains the small problem of remembering what you read.

(I found that 2010 essay by Googling.)

Posted in Writing, Sociology, Geekery, Random Access | 3 Comments »