I’ve been trying to think about whether or not the world is going to end if this bill passes like it’s supposed to — and the answer is, “kind of yes”. When small sites, and it’s the small sites that get turned off in the night and no one for the most part notices, say my friend’s political blog or news site gets blocked by the US government and she has no way to get it back up even though everything she did was legal according to current law, and no one can help her except she can choose to file suit to defend herself, I feel like I die inside a little. Living in a country where you are being shut out and left powerless to really defend yourself is like living in another country, the ones you hear about. Life starts to feel shot when that happens, especially to our friends or our favorites sites.
I was speaking with a Greek friend about this situation last night. He said both he and his family in Greece see the unelected technocrat government as the best alternative to the country holding elections. The political system is broken, he told me, and there is no way an election would yield a government that could tell the people what they don’t want to hear and implement the immensely unpopular austerity reforms demanded by Northern Europe in exchange for the bail-out.
It is the same in Italy, where the political system has become so dysfunctional it allowed a prime minister to stay in power while he openly flouted the law, had sex with underage prostitutes and called his own nation a “shitty country.”
“It’s not like democracy has been working so great for us,” an Italian friend told me. “I felt powerless before with Berlusconi in power. At least this way I’ll be powerless with a competent government.”
So has it come to this? Have our political systems in the West failed us so utterly that people are willing to try less democratic approaches? The prospect of unelected technocrat governments has caused alarm in many quarters of Europe. And the fact that Greece is the birthplace of democracy is an irony lost on no one.
This contradicts one of the central tenets of the War on Drugs, which is that the psychopharmacological effects of drug use lead to criminal behavior. Most studies show that it’s in fact the competition of an unregulated market that encourages the majority of violent crime. This concept was evidenced during the prohibition era in the 1920s, a time that coincided with an increase in crime, corruption, and contempt for law.
As a counter-example, drug use in Mexico is relatively low, approximately 2 percent, whereas in America it hovers around 8 percent. Yet, violence there is at an all-time high. The market and the crime surrounding the trade might have crashed in the U.S., but the death toll has only increased South of the border ever since that region inherited the title of lead cocaine importer. Currently valued at over $3 billion annually, the Mexican cocaine market shows no signs of subsiding, and as long as such a high-valued market exists, violence will most likely follow.
Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors the vast majority of the time. Shareholders seem to get this. They’ve tried to unseat directors through lawsuits just 24 times in large corporations over the past 20 years; they’ve succeeded only eight times. In short, directors are to a great extent autonomous.
Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. Time and again, Isaacson repeatedly asks Jobs about Gates and Jobs cannot resist the gratuitous dig. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs tells Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
After close to six hundred pages, the reader will recognize this as vintage Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional. It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.
The Obama administration will be defending the warrantless use of [GPS] trackers [hidden on cars] in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. The administration, which is attempting to overturn a lower court ruling that threw out a drug dealer’s conviction over the warrantless use of a tracker, argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices.
But to me, the thing that will always be most unfathomable about Alcindor [ed: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar] was his very first game, played when he was an ineligible freshman: UCLA was coming off back-to-back national championships. As an exhibition, the Bruin varsity — ranked no. 1 in the nation — opened the season by scrimmaging the freshmen team. Alcindor had 31 points, 21 boards, and eight blocks. The freshmen hammered the varsity by 15 points; the no. 1 team in the country could not beat a player who could not yet play. As an ineligible 18-year-old, Alcindor was (at worst) the fourth or fifth-best basketball player in the world. So I guess talent does matter, sometimes.
I hear a lot of people say, “I wouldn’t want to work on any project I didn’t feel passionate about.” That’s lovely as a statement of artistic integrity, but as projects get bigger and bigger, fewer and fewer developers have the benefit of that luxury. Instead, you do it out of professionalism.
When President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden on the evening of May 1, he said something which I found so striking at the time and still do: “tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.” That sentiment of national pride had in the past been triggered by putting a man on the moon, or discovering cures for diseases, or creating technology that improved the lives of millions, or transforming the Great Depression into a thriving middle class, or correcting America’s own entrenched injustices. Yet here was President Obama proclaiming that what should now cause us to be “reminded” of our national greatness was our ability to hunt someone down, pump bullets into his skull, and then dump his corpse into the ocean.
During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting “under erasure” the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, “I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.” It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity.
Almost every day I wonder where the outrage is over 400,000 drug users in jail. By comparison, over the past 5 years I’ve read dozens of stories about the 400 terror suspects at Guantanamo. Yes, the issues are different in many respects, but I still see a lack of proportion. The drug war may be our greatest unnecessary loss of utility, showing up big not just in lost liberty, but also unnecessary pain from diseases, and more crime and violence.
In the latest move of the Obama Administration’s incomprehensible attack on medical marijuana, U.S. attorneys announced today that they will begin to prosecute media outlets that publish advertisements for medical marijuana! It seems that when it comes to medical marijuana users, or the states in which they live for that matter, the Bill of Rights means practically nothing.
When we drop down to the algorithm level, I think OO can seriously thwart reuse. In particular, the use of objects to represent simple informational data is almost criminal in its generation of per-piece-of-information micro-languages, i.e. the class methods, versus far more powerful, declarative, and generic methods like relational algebra. Inventing a class with its own interface to hold a piece of information is like inventing a new language to write every short story. This is anti-reuse, and, I think, results in an explosion of code in typical OO applications. Clojure eschews this and instead advocates a simple associative model for information. With it, one can write algorithms that can be reused across information types.
Fascinatingly, WNYC does not seem to treat Jad [Abumrad] and Robert [Krulwich] as their resident geniuses. WNYC likes them fine. It supported their work before anyone was noticing. And all credit to WNYC for being one of the very few public radio stations who see it as part of their mission to invest in innovative new shows like this and Studio 360 and The Takeaway. But the two guys who are rethinking and reinventing American radio don’t seem to be a big part of the station’s identity. Perhaps inevitably, it’s the daily talk show hosts (and especially the very skillful Brian Lehrer), who log so many more hours on the air, who define that. Meanwhile, around the country, public radio managers seem to appreciate the show and to understand that Jad and Robert are trying something new, but often they broadcast Radiolab at marginal times without the kind of heavy promotion that might befit the most groundbreaking, audience-friendly show of the last decade. (Though to be fair, because Radiolab is not in weekly production, it can be hard to schedule effectively.) The fact that it took the Peabody Awards committee so many years to figure out that Radiolab deserved that honor is a sign that a lot of people used to a more mainstream media sort of excellence don’t always apprehend what’s so special about Radiolab. Sometimes it seems like the only people who understand how terrific the show is, are listeners. When I meet public radio fans, and we get to talking about what programs they’re liking these days, Radiolab is the program they want to gush about.
