Understanding how cultures work fail
July 17th, 2010
I finally saw District 9, courtesy of Netflix’s awesome live streaming feature. Many of my friends had talked a lot about when it first came out, so I already knew that it was a pretty obvious allegory for apartheid. heck, it’s even set in South Africa!
Now first of all, real South African apartheid was a morally repugnant system because black people are in fact the equal of white people. There existed no good reason for the state-imposed discrimination against them save for fear and racism.
District 9 seems to completely miss this crucial point by portraying the aliens not as the intellectual and cultural equals of humans, but as animalistic child-creatures. In fact, the aliens are even introduced as having been found aboard their own vessel malnourished, impoverished, disorganized, and generally unable to fend for themselves. And yet we’re supposed to believe they somehow constructed the metropolis-sized spacecraft they inhabit? Then when the aliens are brought to the surface, ostensibly due to compassionate and humanitarian impulses on the part of the South Africans, they demonstrate no real understanding of their situation or even the ability to communicate effectively with one another, let alone any leadership or work ethic.
Really, aside for two aliens we meet who are intelligent, have goals, and use technology, 99% of them are portrayed as little more than vermin. They have no desire to better themselves, can barely understand one another, and they spend most of their time squabbling over trash and fighting with Nigerian gangs over cat food. Seriously!
And yet they have weapons of such titanic power that greedy human corporations are rushing to try and figure out how they work. Who made these weapons? It clearly isn’t the bestial creatures we see playing with tires and getting tricked by semi-literate teenagers. So who did? Who made the spaceship itself, for that matter? Where did all the high tech gadgetry come from if most of the alien species is hopelessly primitive?
Perhaps this the alien society is supposed to be a caste system with wise leaders who guide the unwashed masses. This is supported early on with the revelation that the vessel’s command pod detached and plummeted to Earth while it was floating over Johannesburg. Now it all makes sense! The leaders were separated from their people and their technology, leaving the masses virtually powerless. As soon as they’re re-united, the alien society will begin to re-cohere!
Wrong again. Though the two intelligent aliens we meet are indeed from the command pod, when the remaining aliens are flown down to Earth, the intelligent ones appear to have no influence over them at all. I found myself wondering how the alien society ever managed to evolve past the “hitting each other with rocks” stage of cultural development considering how primitive and disorganized the vast majority of it is.
Over two decades, the aliens’ conditions worsen. I found myself incredulous, as later on in the movie, we see the aliens’ martial technology in action: bio-mechanical battle mechs and devastating energy firearms, both of which can pretty effortlessly disintegrate entire platoons of South African commandos. Soooooo…. why don’t the two intelligent aliens use the weapons to improve their situation? For that matter, why didn’t the stupid ones? They seem to like fighting a lot, so why don’t they ever turn their hellcannons on the humans? The movie specifically makes the point that humans can’t use the alien weapons, so the aliens are at an enormous technological advantage for the entire movie and never use it. Feh!
All in all I was extremely disappointed. With so much of the movie’s underpinnings making no cultural or logical sense at all, I found myself frustrated by the excellent CG and high-tech action scenes.
This is my shocked face
July 5th, 2010
Apparently the NSA with all of its billions of dollars of equipment, internet trawling, and email-sniffing were outwitted by these two-bit Russian spies for years. Ahh, I love it when my tax dollars fund unconstitutional, liberty-destroying surveillance regimes that don’t even work!
Let’s talk a little bit about college tuition inflation
June 24th, 2010
One subject that I’ve wondered about for a long time is the rapid rate at which college tuition is increasing. I myself just recently graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. My mother attended the same school I did several decades ago, and her mother was able to pay for the entire tuition out of pocket on a single stenographer’s income, while she and my father were not able to pay for mine after saving for 20 years on two substantially higher salaries. It just didn’t add up.
We all hear that the rate of “tuition inflation” is higher than the rate of “normal” inflation. This is very true:
Tuition inflation appears to roughly track the national rate of inflation but it’s almost always higher. so college tuition increases in cost just like everything else, but faster. Here’s exactly how much faster:
(Ideally, the average ratio should be 1 or lower)
As we can see, in the 1950s, and early 1960s, college tuition costs were increasing as much as seven times faster than the national average! In the last 40 years, though, the rate of tuition inflation has been brought down to only about twice the national average (!!!), but that’s where it’s stubbornly stayed.
Let that sink in a bit: for at the last 50 years, the price of college has been increasing more than twice as fast as the price of everything else, and sometimes faster! Even that last graph doesn’t really do a very good job of expressing just how wildly college prices have diverged from the price of everything else because of this higher rate of inflation:
(This graph was created by starting with average 2007 tuition and going backwards to compute the rest of the prices through the value of previous years’ tuition inflation. Figures are not inflation adjusted, as inflation is shown as its own line)
If college tuition had been increasing at the “normal” rate of inflation, then four years in a private college should cost a little under 30 grand. But instead it costs four times that amount.
I’ve included the median family income for the years that it’s available from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1994, the total price of 4-year college exceeded the average family’s entire yearly pre-tax income. That’s before 7% for Social security, 3% for medicare, federal income taxes, state income taxes, state sales taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes…
Does graph look familiar? It very closely resembles graphs of the effects of compound interest at different levels. Just like how 40 years later, a financial account at 10% interest will be worth far and away more than twice an account with only 5%, college tuition today costs far more than twice that other products do, despite only having an inflation rate that’s about twice as high.
It’s the miracle of compound interest, and not only does it work in reverse for your debts, but it apparently affects college tuition as well. These things increase faster and faster over time, raising prices to unbelievable levels if left unchecked.
But it gets worse. Here’s how the average family sees it:
Glup. Today, an average family would have to spend almost twice its entire pre-tax income to be able to afford four years in a private college for one child. That’s about 45% of the average household income for each year. Compare that to 1967 when it took less than 4% of the average household income per year. That’s a tenfold increase in 40 years, with not even a doubling of income. Yowzers.
So there’s no sinister plot to destroy American education. There’s no marxist takeover, no corporate collusion that explains the skyrocketing price over the last 40 years; it’s just the ordinary effect of inflation compounded year after year, writ large due to a much higher rate than that of most products and services. So the real question is then why is the rate of inflation for college tuition so much higher than the national average?
That’s the subject for another post. Expect more soon.
I think I just found the most insane commenter on the whole internet
June 19th, 2010
On an article about a privacy flaw in the HTC Droid Incredible, some genius decided to post this brilliant series of comments:
And 13 people have fanned this guy. Wow.
On freedom and the app store
May 22nd, 2010
One thing that’s really bugging me is how often tech pundits and blogs are misusing the word freedom in these Apple-Adobe-Google debates that have gripped the blogosphere. I see a lot of charges that Apple is destroying freedom with their restrictive app store policies.
There’s a big hangup people have over the word freedom. In these big debates about the role of platform vendors and who can block whose products, the word “freedom” gets thrown around in the context of platform vendors destroying it.
But freedom is something only governments can destroy, because only governments have the power to compel by force actions that people would not choose for themselves. If your choice is not forced and you have an alternative, then your freedom is intact.
In a free society, people are able to associate with whom they please. This includes the freedom not to associate as well. And this extends to companies and products. I am free not to buy a Maytag washer. Shop owners are free not to stock products that they don’t like. Microsoft is free to reject games from its Xbox platform that don’t meet its standards. Black people are free not to hang out with Asians.
Any individual consumer can opt not to purchase an Apple device and thus bypass the app store restrictions entirely, in the same way that consumers can buy a PS3 or a Wii if they don’t agree with the games Microsoft has let onto their platform. In the smartphone market, people can buy a device with Android on it. They can get a Microsoft Kin. They’ll be able to buy Windows Phone 7 devices soon. Choice exists.
This is freedom: the ability to choose between several options with no entity able to compel you by force to choose their own offering. If you find Apple’s app store rules stifling and controlling, then don’t buy an iPhone! It’s that simple.
So Apple is not “destroying freedom” by failing to include Adobe’s Flash in their products because it owns and controls the platform and there’s nothing wrong with that. If Apple doesn’t have the right to determine what happens on its platform, then a gay bar doesn’t have the right to keep out straight hecklers and you don’t have the right to keep out of your own house people that scare or repulse you.
Why? Because this is about property rights. Apple’s platform is their property; should they have the right to do with it as they please, including keeping out those they don’t want in it? I argue that they have as much right to this as we all have to our own property. If Apple can be compelled by force to “open up” their App store, what does that say about the sanctity of your domain should people decide they don’t like the color you’ve chosen for your veranda or appreciate that you didn’t let those hungry bikers in at 3 AM?
Choosing what one wants with one’s own property is not evil, and we should stop acting like it is. Free societies endure precisely because people can make their own decisions about their bodies, their minds, their property, their wealth, and their lives. Let’s stop being busybodies and criticizing others for their choices, and instead work on making better choices ourselves.
Modern dinosaurs
May 18th, 2010
DigitalDaily has a fascinating interview with Adobe’s co-founders. Go read the whole thing. I’m going to talk about two exchanges that I think are quite illuminating. Here’s the first:
John Paczkowski : Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?
Chuck Geschke : Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.
For years, Mac users have been yelling and screaming for Adobe to finally come out with products that respect the Mac user interface by using Cocoa, taking advantage of OS X-specific features, not overriding standard controls, and not resulting in UI nightmares. We want native OS X apps that use OS X’s features and look and feel right alongside other first-class Apple apps, not this cross-platform garbage that throws shit all over our disks, practically has a different user interface theme for every dialog box, and re-implements native controls in weird, incorrect ways. We hate it, and we hate them for making it.
I find it extremely telling that when confronted with these issues, Geschke doesn’t even think there’s a problem. No wonder it seems like our gripes are going ignored; they are! I mean, the guy thinks Mac users “certainly don’t say it about Acrobat”? Please. Don’t insult my intelligence.
Literally not comprehending how much your customers hate you and your products isn’t the greatest business strategy I’ve ever heard of.
Then there’s this:
John Paczkowski : Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?
Chuck Geschke : What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.
Wrong. It may be a computer, but it’s not a PC.
Steve Jobs isn’t saying that iPhones don’t have processors and memory and input devices and the like; what he’s saying is that the experience of handling a mobile device fundamentally differs from the experience of sitting down in front of a screen, and keyboard, and a mouse. If this clown can’t understand what Jobs is saying when he talks about the difference between conventional PCs and mobile devices, then I seriously worry about his company’s future. Cultures change. Markets change. If you don’t adapt to them, then you’re dead. End of story.
Not open, but claims to be
May 14th, 2010
I’ve tried to keep quiet about the whole Apple vs Adobe thing, but this is just too true:
The $600 Flash authoring tool is the only way to produce Flash applications.
The free Mac OS X Developer tools (that require an $800+ Mac computer) are the only way to produce iPhone and iPad applications.
Both systems are as closed as each other.
The iPad
January 27th, 2010
Yes, it’s finally released! There’s not much I’m going to say because I’ve been working on its guts for months now, and it’s unlikely you don’t already have an opinion one way or another. Either way, go check it out! Admit, it, you want one. I know you do.
I need to post this RIGHT NOW
January 26th, 2010
Maybe I’ll comment later but the most important thing is that I get this up here THIS SECOND!
Free speech and big money
January 22nd, 2010
Every once in a while, the Supreme Court decides to drop a real bombshell. The last big one we got was Roe vs. Wade, but yesterday was another one of those days, with the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case that was decided yesterday. I think it promises to be the next big Supreme Court-created wedge issue. And what a wedge it is! On the Huffington Post, commenters are saying no less than that it represents a fascistic corporate coup, while the Drudge Report proclaims it a victory for free speech.
When one side sees it as an attack on democracy, and the other sees it as a triumph of liberty, you know there’s gonna be a fight. I found a couple good round-ups of the differing opinions regarding the decision. And as I read the articles and debates listed there, I noticed that the primary difference between reactions was not reflected so much in the writers’ political parties, but in the way they perceived and framed the issue itself.
Those who celebrated the decision generally spoke about free speech, and the dangers of regulating and privileging certain types of speech above others. They warned that once the ball on clamping down certain types of speech had gotten rolling, it would keep going until all speech was regulated. They decried the fact that a man who produced a political video had more rights to show it than a man and his friends organized as a corporation created for the same purpose. They wondered it was fair that GE’s political speech was protected because it owned NBC, but corporations that had no media subsidiaries were muzzled.
On the other side, people who viewed the decision as unfavorable focused in on entirely different aspects. They tended to talk about free speech very little, while talking about democracy itself quite a lot. They worried that corporations would dominate political discourses with infusions of cash. They felt that regulation or even banning of political speech can be justified if it furthers the goals of an informed polity. They ruminated on the substantial differences between corporations and individuals and sought to elevate individual voices while clamping down on corporate ones.
In short, one side focused on the process: Is it fair that men organized as corporations have fewer speech rights then other men? Does “free speech” really mean anything if congress can strip it from disfavored groups and entities at will, and enact laws about who can speak where, when, and about what subject?
The other focused on the outcome: What will unfettered corporate influence and money do to democracy? How will the common man’s political voice be heard in a sea of corporate cash? What does democracy really mean if money can speak louder than votes?
I encourage you to read the NYTimes debate here, but here are telling snippets from each contributor that I think illustrates my point that they focus on dramatically different elements:
The debaters opposed to the decision:
Heather K. Gerken: “The court has done real damage to the cause of reform[…]”
Richard L. Hasen: “The way the opinion is written will make it very hard for Congress or state legislatures to put effective controls on money in campaigns, or even adopt effective public financing laws.”
Michael Waldman: “What can be done to prevent this outcome? Given the huge power of corporations to tilt policy, at the very least it may make sense to pass laws saying that corporations and unions with government contracts cannot spend unlimited sums on campaigns.”
Fred Wertheimer: “Today’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is a disaster for the American people. It will unleash unprecedented amounts of corporate “influence-seeking” money on our elections and create unprecedented opportunities for corporate “influence-buying” corruption.”
Now the ones in favor:
Eugene Volokh: “The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision simply means that other corporations, and unions, will enjoy much the same First Amendment rights that media corporations have.”
Joel M. Gora: “The First Amendment has always been based on the idea that the more speech we have, the better off we are, as individuals and as a people. The Citizens United case eloquently reaffirms and reinforces that core constitutional principle.”
You see how all the writers opposed to the decision focused on its perceived negative political outcome, while those in favor focused on the perceived improvements to the process of free speech?
I am totally fascinated with this stuff. Ever since I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions
The issues this judgement addresses are age-old and pretty irreconcilable. I think we’re going to be debating it for a very, very long time.
Update:
Here’s a set of word clouds from a Harvard social science blog showing the relative frequency of words used in the majority and minority opinions:
The majority opinion:
So say the Harvard social scientists: “Obviously, what we see is a strong consideration of “speech” interests — no doubt discussed in the context of First Amendment issues.”
And the minority one:
So say the Harvard social scientists: “The actual phrase “speech” is much less frequent, suggesting that the liberal Justices were more concerned with corporations influencing elections than free speech issues.”
Fascinating!