Ken at Popehat takes on the (rich) topic of revolutionary rhetoric in political conversation, and I’m eager to hear what (noted burrito fan and revolutionary-rhetoric invoker) TJIC has to say about it.
all the makings of a really interesting dialogue
Posted in blogging, ethics, government, language, law, philosophy, risk, science, security, style
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gouging is in the eye of the consumer
Alternatively: There are very few jobs wherein it is reasonable to attempt definitions of objective “value” based on one’s personal subjective tastes. ‘DJ’ is one. ‘Curator’ may be another. ‘Tech journalist’ is not.
Alternatively: This guy still thinks Apple is a hardware company.
Nobody will argue that Apple doesn’t deserve to cash in on the niche they carved out for themselves on the high end through superior marketing,
Yes, many top technical execs at our budget-conscious software company, specializing in writing software for IBM mainframes and Windows PC’s, are running Macs because of the cute advertising.
but those with an ounce of tech savvy have always known the PC is an all-around better value.
Unless you want to run OS X and its applications on a supported platform.
The comparison case between the Mac and a PC is stronger now than ever before with widespread consumer acceptance of Windows Live Essentials as a replacement for Apple’s iLife. Tools like Windows Movie Maker and Live Photo Gallery arguably do a better job than iMovie or iPhoto, while apps such as Live Writer for blogging have no equal in the Apple realm.
1. Replacements for iLife, you say. I’m intrigued, and might like to try them! Where do I download a trial of the OS X versions?
2. I’m sure Apple’s engineers and product managers wake up every morning ready to kick ass because they’re chasing that sweet, sweet consumer acceptance criterion.
3. Maybe he’s onto something with that “superior marketing” angle after all. Because if these new “Windows Live Essentials”, “Windows Movie Maker” and “Live Photo Gallery” products really are as good as this article claims, maybe they shouldn’t have names that are totally indistinguishable from products that spent the last two decades conspicuously sucking.
But I digress…I actually came to talk about price gouging.
1. All other things being equal, people want the fastest computer that their money can buy. And they should want that. It’s okay.
2. Apple charges customers more (much more in some cases) for desktop and laptop hardware whose raw performance specs are equivalent to their PC counterparts. This is also true of iPods, iPhones, iPads, most peripherals, and (perhaps worst of all) RAM.
3. “All other things” just aren’t equal. Apple can do this because the vast majority of computer users (across the gamut of technical savvy, even at the high end) are just not doing things where productivity and enjoyment (what you might call “overall value”) are principally limited by hardware specifications. They’re limited by the consistency and stability of their user interfaces, and by the extent to which their attempts to do stuff don’t drive them batshit insane.
if there is such a thing as “false consciousness,” it is the state of continuously relearning the wrong lessons, even when the correct lessons are staring you in the face
By now you may have heard of the 7-year-old who got busted by The Man for selling lemonade without a permit. In case you haven’t, you may as well read the New York Times’ version.
County health inspectors shut her down, however, telling Julie and her mother, Maria Fife, that they needed a temporary restaurant license, which costs $120. The penalty for selling food without a permit, they warned, was $500.
[...]
Julie left the fair in tears.
[...]
Jeff Cogen, the Multnomah County chairman, called Ms. Fife and her daughter to apologize. “My kids sell lemonade, and I sold lemonade as a kid,” Mr. Cogen said in an interview.
The Health Department employees were doing their jobs, he said, and “there’s a reason those laws exist,” but “a 7-year-old selling lemonade isn’t the same as a grown-up selling burritos out of a cart.” As for the health inspectors, Mr. Cogen said he had “engaged them in a conversation” about professional discretion.
[...]
Ms. Fife…said she was gratified by the apology…
And you? Are you gratified by the apology? Or are you wondering why, if it’s clearly bullshit to shake down a 7-year-old girl for $120, it’s somehow acceptable to shake down “a grown up selling burritos out of a cart” for $120?
There’s a reason those laws exist.
So if the girl had a burrito permit, but put strychnine in the guacamole, the health inspector’s office is going to pitch in to pay folks’ medical bills, right? Oh no? So they’re going to fire someone, right? Wrong again? So the permit money isn’t part of a contract in which the public can demand some level of accountability? It’s just money demanded by the payee, for the expressed purpose of dissuading the payee from hassling you?
I’m not a lawyer, but I think I know the technical term for that type of contract.
Posted in ethics, government, law
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for the moment, all iOS devices are extremely vulnerable to attack
I cannot endorse this section, however:
Q: How many malicious attacks with this vulnerability have you seen so far?
A: Zero.Q: So there’s no risk?
A: There’s no risk, at the moment. The potential for risk, however, is big.Q: What’s your best guess, when will we see an iPhone worm spreading via this vulnerability?
A: Within a week or so.Q: How could such a worm arrive to my phone?
A: Via any mechanism that could make your device open a malicious PDF file. [...]Q: So a malicious web page would do it?
A: Yes. Or a malicious PDF email attachment. Or a text message with a weblink. Or a link in Twitter or Facebook feed – assuming you click on that link with your iPhone.
What?
“Potential for risk” is having a real Turing machine connected to the Internet, on which you place lots of valuable personal or business information. That’s my baseline existence, and probably yours too. “Risk,” and immediate right-now boatloads of it, is having an unpatched zero-day exploit gain worldwide fame in addition to an actual fan club among a significant percentage of the installed user base.
As someone with a lot of sensitive data on his iOS devices, and who reads a lot of PDFs, until this vulnerability is patch I will be either:
- Disengaging my work email account from all of my iOS devices, or
- Not surfing the Internet from any of my iOS devices
It’s that bad.
Posted in ethics, security, software
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this just in: custom motorcycle building is awesome
Rough Crafts is a motorcycle build ‘crew’ that basically boils down to a designer named Winston whose taste level is off the charts, who chooses materials well, and who can work with more than a couple of them. Their tagline is:
[Hand] Made in Taiwan
And their bikes are, well:
Posted in art, engineering, style, tools, vehicles
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synchronicity
If you haven’t seen Inception yet, I recommend you see it in IMAX. Millions of people can be (and are regularly) wrong, but in this case they are so, so right. Lovingly crafted…story, shot selection, coloring, effects, foley, the score (my god, the score), and some qualified pros in front of the camera managing not to detract from any of the aforementioned.
Showed up to work this morning just in time for good, still-hot leftover meeting quiche, complete with loose bacon chaser. Ready to deliver some value up in this piece.
Q: When is a $7500 tax credit for an electric vehicle NOT indicated?
Could it be, perhaps, when demand for a product is expected to so far outweigh supply that dealers are planning to charge $20,000 above MSRP for it?
In other words, while the subsidy is supposedly going to those who don’t need it (upper middle class electric-car-buying consumers) for the benefit of those who don’t deserve it (GM, who we just finished bailing out while screwing their secured creditors), it’s actually just going to be pocketed by car dealers.
Brick thrown through your window? Call Al’s Glass!
Posted in economics, ethics
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the recovery continues
The noted psychologist and underachiever Bartholomew J. Simpson will one day write:
For a depressive but otherwise nimble agent, streaks of high-activity and effectiveness can have a lasting healing effect, but they are not immune to twists of dark reinterpretation. They are beams of light that would have gone somewhere else had they not been sucked almost-but-not-quite over the event horizon of a black hole. They show something real but distorted, misplaced, not contemporary. In the Cartesian theatre of the depressed mind, the gravity of passivity is the lens that projects two images that rely on and simultaneously compete with one another for power: the image of inspiring theoretical potential vs. the image of soul-crushing failure to realize that potential.
No huge breakthroughs lately but lots of little “green shoots”…
- got a little cast-iron sportsman’s hibachi; char-grilling steak and fish
- went to the dentist; world didn’t end
- daily reading led to quickly finishing an intro text on motorcycle maintenance and repair; waiting for a textbook-class volume to arrive; been looking at parts breakdowns and electrical diagrams
- have decided to turn garage into a workshop capable of supporting medium-duty motorcycle wrenching; plotting a responsible and budget-conscious tool-up process
- workshop’s first project is the piecewise construction of itself; wrapping head around actual plans, budgets, tools and techniques for turning 2×4′s and plywood into sturdy workbenches; deciding whether or not lights or fans are yet indicated, and if so whether that means screwing things into concrete (!!!)
- still staying up too late, but because the mind is busy
Posted in education, engineering, tools
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the unpopular science and its unpopular mechanics
In common language, because more of us think of ourselves as employees than employers, a “bad” job market is one in which it’s hard to find steady, low-risk employment for ourselves. But all other things being equal, what’s bad for the job consumer should be good for job providers.
If someone used to make $50/hr and he’s currently making $0/hr, the typical “good for employers” interpretation is that he could be hired by someone else to do “the same work” (a job for which he’s equally skilled and expends the same effort) “for less money” (maybe 10%, 20%…do I hear 30%…less).
But when things get “really bad,” conditions should be perfect for a different phenomenon; one that has the potential (in search-term virtue of “divergence from previous local maxima”) to have a greater healing effect on the economy. That’s the appearance of new types of jobs, things no one used to do (or no one did in the same way, in the same market niches, in pursuit of the same strategies). And those, if we set aside the research wings of large and established institutions where turnover is low, a direct result of entrepreneurs testing business ideas that in a “good” job market would be too risky to try.
Some of these “very new” jobs will be bad ideas, fizzle out, and blink out of existence almost as quickly as they blinked in. Some of them will be good ideas, fizzle out anyway due to bad luck or poor entrepreneurship, and blink out once or many subsequent times before someone lucky and skillful enough shows the rest of the market how to make them sticky.
But for any job that’s sufficiently new, it may be that whatever the number of unemployed people at the time, none of the unemployed people (or indeed any employed people doing other things, for that matter) are immediately qualified to do the job well. It’s new, after all, and labor is “skilled labor” exactly when it requires some practice to do competently in a competitive market. It follows, then, that such a job can only be bootstrapped if one of the following scenarios obtains:
- The employer has dump trucks full of money, only hires people who (currently employed or not) claim to be worth lots of money, pays them a lot of money from day one, keeps all but the most clearly dysfunctional on staff indefinitely…until the group builds up sufficient skill to do what their customers need. See also: the 90s.
- The employer finds people willing to start out making 50% of what they used to make (or 40%…do I hear 30%…) to start doing a job at which they’re initially much less effective, with quick pay increases or long-term bonuses (or not) for people who show quick or consistent aptitude gains.
Clearly, scenario #2 is more efficient. And in a “really bad” job market, it should happen plenty unless people stop coming up with ideas.
People have definitely not stopped coming up with ideas, so there must be something else preventing this from happening.
- It could be something that penalizes invention (new new things) by destabilizing concepts of idea ownership generally, or by stacking a particular market-deck in favor of some old and proven thing, or (much worse) some unproven, merely fashionable, recently-new thing.
- It could be something that makes new businesses really risky to start, regardless of how plentiful skills are, or what people are willing to accept for take-home pay.
- It could be something that discourages people from ever working for less than 50-60% of what they used to earn, even if their present earnings are 0% of that figure.
- It could be something that makes it difficult for entrepreneurs to secure even modest sums of initial seed capital in the form of debt…from banks, from other people, whatever.
I guess my point is that once you come to believe this economy should heal; once you recognize the barriers above as imposed conditions created by the powerful to exploit the weak, if you accept that it’s morally correct that the economy be allowed to heal, then you must also accept some personal responsibility for a) understanding who or what is creating the conditions, and b) resisting them to an extent consistent with your power, the strength of your conviction, and your tolerance for risk.
To give a practical example, one of our next-door neighbors just started a shade-tree bicycle tune-up and customization business. My guess is that the business is technically illegal to operate, and that he doesn’t pay tax on the income. People dig it; he’s clearly doing a service to the community by running it.
Not to get all Cryptonomicon or “Nuke the entire site from orbit” about it, but alternative currencies should be a viable option here. It feels like the most popular ones are used primarily to drive behavior inside virtual worlds rather than the actual world. And all the ones called “Hours” start with the (counterproductive) supposition that each person’s production clock time is more alike in value than not, which has the net effect of forcing actors producing big value back into the fold of the standard currency.
Anyway, good luck out there.
Posted in economics, ethics, government
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motorcycle maintenance
[Last week...]
Technologically speaking, my bike is pretty modern. And for the past 6 years, its modernness (I almost said “modernity” there…*shudder*) and my more-or-less respectful treatment of it have resulted in a low-hassle ownership experience.
Until now.
Since putting it on the road this season, it’s been flaky. The battery wasn’t holding a charge, so I was charging the battery every couple of weeks. It started doing this intermittent sputtering / cutting-out thing when trying to rev it from idle, but it only seemed to do that when the battery needed to be charged.
A couple weeks ago, I finally brought it in for a tune-up. They replaced the spark plugs, synchronized the throttle bodies (per my explicit request, not that I could tell you exactly what “synchonizing the throttle bodies” means), changed the oil and filter, lubed all the primary controls, and washed the bike. I did not have the battery replaced. But it ran smooth, shifted smooth, clutch lever felt great, and looked better. Took it down to Scituate and back (hot / humid weather on the way down, cooler evening air on the way back) with no issues.
But this past week, I’d just left for work when it started doing the rough idling thing again. Then it did the sputtering and cutting-out thing, and continued doing it as I turned around to limp it back homeward. By the next day, I’d replaced the battery and put it on a charger.
This morning I started it up again. It started easily, but almost immediately started idling rough (almost a “running on one cylinder” sound, but not quite). And by waiting for the right moments, I could consistently kill it by trying to rev it from idle. If I gave it very gentle throttle, I could rev it up, but at steady slight-open throttle it had a tendency to surge and dip rather than holding a consistent RPM.
So that’s where it’s at. New spark plugs, freshly sync’d throttle bodies, new battery…and not safe to ride anywhere except back to the bike shop. The question is: now what?
I really want to see this is as an opportunity, i.e. to “learn to work on bikes.” The bike is mostly flawless mechanically, so in theory the repair should boil down to finding and fixing the single flaw.
But the reality is, this isn’t a choice between “finding one flaw” and “finding and fixing all of the flaws contained in a project bike.” It’s a choice between “finding one flaw in a modern, complex motorcycle, starting from the most rudimentary knowledge and basically no tools available” and “paying a trained, experienced mechanic, who just so happens to ride the exact same make and model of motorcycle as I do, to draw upon his wealth of experience and shop materials to find and fix the flaw, for about $100/hr plus parts.”
The bike is fuel-injected. I don’t know how to get at the injectors. If I could access and remove them, and assume they’re clogged, I don’t have an ultrasonic parts washer to use to unclog them. The bike has microprocessor-controlled ignition. That means there’s a FRICKING COMPUTER IN THERE, taking readings from a bunch of sensors (throttle position, probably air temperature and pressure, engine RPM, exhaust temperature?) and deciding how much gas and air to let into the cylinders. That’s a lot of “what if’s”, and I don’t know how to begin to troubleshoot any of them.
There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of other little things I don’t know, all of which are vitally important for the man who doesn’t want to turn his mostly-flawless bike into a heap of newly-damaged, expensive-to-replace parts. For every screw, nut, or bolt…how much torque is too much? What lubricants are safe to use for which hard parts and which soft parts? What gaskets are in play? Are there gaskets that, once unsealed, must be replaced because they aren’t designed to re-seal after initial installation? Behind what holes lie fluids, waiting patiently to be spilled all over my garage floor? Into what nooks and crannies must no foreign objects intrude, under any circumstances? Basically, IS IT SAFE, FOR ALL “IT”?!
And that’s BEFORE putting the bike back together, getting it to turn over, and trusting yourself not to have overlooked something that could come back to haunt / kill your wallet or paired organs.
[present day...]
I was so, so right to take the bike to the mechanic. It took him about 15 seconds to diagnose the problem, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the scary modern engine technology.
Motorcycle gas cap assemblies are generally not water-tight. There is a small water drainage hole under the gas cap, normally to the left of the tank opening, where any water should drain when the motorcycle is left on its side-stand. The drainage hole on my bike was clogged with 6 years and 15,xxx miles worth of random particulate shite. And since I leave my bike out, uncovered, basically all the time, water could have leaked under my gas cap during any of this season’s many rainstorms. And finding no drainage point, some of that water probably made its way into my gas tank. I think you know that’s Bad. Water and gasoline don’t blend, so the result is a heterogeneous mixture. In a tank full of gas, that mixture is mostly gas, but every so often a little blob of water can get sucked through the injectors and pushed into one cylinder or another. That’s bad because you can’t light water vapor on fire…at least not at the operating temperature of my motorcycle engine. The result: weird intermittent rough running of the engine.
The fix: pump all of the liquid out of the tank, take the tank off to inspect it and dry it out a bit, unclog the water drain hole and hose, put the tank back on, fill the tank with known-good gasoline, add a little fuel injector cleaner for spice. Total cost: $98. Result: bike runs awesome.
This whole experience recalls a bit of wisdom whose examples always surprise and delight me: People often think of expertise as “the ability to do the hard stuff.” But the value of true expertise is not the ability to do the hard stuff, but the perspective to tell you whether your problem is one that requires “doing the hard stuff” at all.
And sadly (justifying the ‘ethics’ tag on this post), many industries are plagued with “experts” who will tell you everything is the hard stuff, and that your only hope of success is to pay them exhorbitant fees to do the hard stuff for you.
My mechanic’s words to me:
There’s nothing too high-tech about this fix; and as someone interested you’d probably be fine doing it yourself. But I could do it in about an hour, and honestly I’d be grateful for the work.
Damn that’s good business.
Posted in economics, education, ethics, technology, vehicles
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