Privileged White Male

Trickle Me Elmo

2011-09-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

(I originally wrote this in the summer of 2008 but didn't publish it. Sadly, it's as apropos now as it was then.)

What loon came up with the notion of trickle down economics? This notion that somehow if you give more money to the rich, it will benefit everyone? That somehow if you give businesses more money, they will "naturally" take that money and invest it in their operations, grow them, create jobs, etc.? Would you like to hazard a guess as to where the rich and business tend to put their excess money? Yes: they buy various investments from other rich people and businesses who think they've made enough money on whatever it is they're selling.

What is it that actually prompts businesses to invest in and expand their operations? Sales. What drives sales? The 95% of the country that aren't rich. ~~Haven't we been hearing~~ Didn't we hear for most of the Bush administration that it's "consumer spending that has been supporting the economy"? All the while the businesses were retrenching following the dot-com implosion, it was consumers buying what businesses had to sell that brought us out of that recession. It wasn't the rich buying stocks, or golf club memberships, or fleets of cars, or $10,000 shoes, or any of the things one tends to buy when one has more money than one can sensibly use.

It's a very simple concept any capitalist can get behind: businesses grow their business when they can make more money by doing so, and they can only do so if there's a market, and there's only a market if people have money to buy what's being sold. Giving a tax break to a business for which there's no market simply causes them to put more money in the bank, or pay the additional profits out as dividends.

Update: Goldy posted an eerily similar post on the SLOG today.

In Memoriam - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

2011-07-31T16:01:00.000-07:00

I've just left the memorial service for Steve Lacey, who was killed a week ago by an enraged drunk driver. I didn't actually know Steve all that well. He worked in the Kirkland office, mostly, and I don't go over there much. But in the last four years we've had a few chats, and beside that, he touched many people's lives -- the church was entirely full.
There are many surface similarities between us (which is part of what is so distressing about this event, I suppose): he was a year younger than I, also tall, good humored, loved to build things, loved to write code, loved to create things to help people. He shared more of himself than I do. A lesson to be learned there, perhaps.
I do not believe it is possible or healthy to live your life as if you could be killed by a drunk driver while driving to Costco on an ordinary Sunday afternoon. But to do the important things first: that I need to work on more. Thank you for that lesson, Steve and those who spoke at his memorial. My heart goes out to all of Steve's family. May life give you better than what you got on the 24th.

Brother Can You Spare a Billion

2011-07-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at the money being raised in the market, both in VC and IPO transactions, and aside from wondering what the hell those companies are going to do with all that money (Color: 51 million? you going to do some serious TV advertising? You're not a hardwaree company...) I can't help but wonder if this is what the wealthy are doing with their tax breaks? It seems like there a lot more effective ways to create the kinds of jobs we need in this country (hint: it's not a few thousand geeks in silly valley, though I'm one of them.)

Then There Were Two

2011-04-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

[ed: I started this post on the 17th of November, with Ralf's body in the back of the van]

It never gets any easier. Our sweet boy Ralf went to college today, with a push from us. You would think after 8 graduations, I might be inured to it. I think I'm happy that I'm not. With Bob it was easy to see she was ready to move on, and I spent the day with her, then took her to the vet to be put down. Harry bled out after surgery. Rosie did too. They were hard because of the suddenness. We sat up all night with Madeleine until she died, mostly quietly. The others were harder or not, depending on the circumstance and whether they felt they were ready.

None of them was easy.

Ralf, though...there were some possible treatment options. He had good stretches of a few hours. But really. When I got home, he used to get so happy and whirl around, barking (we think that's how he injured his shoulder, but it's really who he was). He used to bark at horses, applause, and fake bird noises on TV, standing indignantly with his ears forward and his nose an inch from the screen. He hadn't heard birds in a year, though there'd been plenty to hear. He couldn't stand up on his own, and in the last couple weeks couldn't even get into a sitting position. He'd been reduced to lying, with his head on a pillow, snapping in pain when we would get him up, and staggering around panting. Steroids might have helped, but for how long? It was mostly clear what he wanted, so we gave it to him. We are blessed to have Rachel Bergman in our lives.

We took on Ralf back in 2002, as a foster dog, because we've got a soft spot for collies. He was 6 years old, 105 pounds, and crazy. Then Jake got so sick, and the only people who wanted Ralf were families with small kids, not the carpenter-guy-who-would-take-Ralf-to-job-sites that we thought he deserved. When we finally got out of that crucible 3 months later, we had a 4th dog.

Through the not-quite-9 years he was with us, he taught us about patience, the importance of food, love, silliness, joy, and endurance. We endure without him now, even now, occasionally expecting to see him, or hearing his soft meef. When he came to us, I repeatedly said I didn't want 4 dogs. But really. Who was I kidding? I want him back.

The Art of Photography

2011-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Made a quick stop at the MOMA in SF today. Really interesting exhibit of Muybridge shots, including many old photos from SF in the 1860's. There are also a series of stereographs that cemented for me an impression I've had over the years: photography really need a 3rd dimension. There is definitely a place for 2d photographs and what they can convey and how they can move people, but the lack of a real 3d option for photographers means we are missing out on so much that we could experience from other people's viewpoints. So many times I catch something, close one eye, and recognize the loss of the 3rd dimension renders the photo uninteresting. I know there are ways of using the modeling of light to convey the 3d dimension, but often that light is simply not available. The other exhibits reinforced for me my definition of art: art is anything that moves me emotionally. If it has to be explained or placed into an intellectual context, it's masturbation, not art.

Birthday Girl's Lament

2010-04-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

(to the tune of "My Girl")

I want sunshine
on my damn birthday.
It's still cold outside
and it's almost May.

chorus:
Well, I guess you'll say
what can make me feel this way?
Seattle (seattle, seattle!)
Fuckin' Seattle. (Seattle!)

I've got so much water
I've got prunes for feet.
It's been cold so long
I don't believe in heat.

(chorus)

I don't need no mountains,
or green covered hills.
The cold and the people
make me want to take pills.

(chorus)

Fuckin' Seattle.
I want sunshine on my damn birthday!
Seattle...
I'm tired of all these cloudy days
Seattle...

The Eyes Have It

2010-03-11T23:12:00.000-08:00

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, and that's how I knew she was gone. We'd lain on the floor with Daisy most of the morning, reassuring her, petting her, reassuring ourselves. I was looking at her when it happened: her eyebrow and right eye had been twitching but she'd watch me when I moved, then her eyebrow slowed and suddenly she wasn't looking any more. Within two minutes, her body tensed, her eye rolled up, her tongue came out, and she was dead. It was hard to sit with her, hard not to call our excellent and generous vet and have her put Daisy "to sleep". Hard to gauge whether Daisy was suffering, any more than a being on the verge of death would suffer, feeling her body shut down. I'm sure it wasn't painful. Her breaths got shallower. She seemed at times to be dreaming, as her paws would twitch, though her eyes were open. I will remember staring into those eyes for a long, long time.

There is closure, and there is completion in life run its course, all the way to death at the finish line. We cannot know what any other being wants, whether that other is human or canine. Even if someone writes down their wishes, we can't be 100% sure that the-person-who-wrote-those-wishes will feel the same as the-person-who-is-facing-death. With a dog it becomes infinitely harder. So we went with our gut, knowing we had a conflict of interest, wanting to keep her with us longer, wanting it all to be over so we could get down to grieving and get on with our lives, sadder but also no longer angst-ridden trying to figure out what she might eat, since she couldn't tell us that either.

Witnessing a loved one's death isn't for everyone. We surround ourselves with animals, so we've had more than our share, and we've got a rough decade ahead of us as the remaining 3 cats and 3 dogs "go to college." I'm awestruck, saddened beyond words, grateful, all at once.

Daisy came to us 15 months ago from the Seattle animal shelter. It was clear she'd been an only dog, and it took her a while to get used to being in a pack. The beach was new to her. But those eyes, man. Mischief. Curiosity. Love. Determination. Happiness. She would greet me gently when I came home, waiting for the other, more rambunctious dogs to finish. She'd come up and put her head between my knees, and I would scritch her head, down her back, and end up at her butt as she sidled between my legs. I will miss her more than I thought I would. Go in peace, and good luck at college, love.

Welcome to the Dark Side

2010-02-14T00:20:00.000-08:00

For anyone who doesn't know me, I work for Google. Have done for almost 3 years. Enjoy it. A lot. I'm just stunned at the level of antipathy getting directed at Google lately. Talk about being in the down part of the news cycle. It used to be people loved Google and what Google did for them. The media couldn't write enough positive stories. The excellent search. The free email with lots of space. And the ads were occasionally useful. These days, though, there's this nebulous fear that Google Will Do Something Evil. That the data Google collects, which is collected in the service of giving you better information when you search, is going to be turned over to... the government? the advertisers? Someone Who Will Do Unspeakable Things With Their Newfound Knowledge Of Me And My Searches And Email And Photographs And Everything Else I Put In The Cloud. Today Google had to pull their Olympic-themed logo because of outcries that Google was capitalizing on the very sad death of a luger in a practice run.

Yes Google collects information. It also makes a lot of what it knows available to you and gives you control over a lot of it. But how is it wrong or evil to show you an advertisement that interests you, as opposed to one that doesn't? Are you such a marketing tool that you can't resist when you see an advertisement for something you want? I didn't think so.

Questions for the Health Care Conservatives

2009-09-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to the health care reform debate with increasing bewilderment. Not over what we should do. I've already been pretty clear about that. No, I really want the answers to these questions:

Why is a private-sector bureaucrat incented to not pay for your health care better than a government bureaucrat whose directors are incented to keep you healthy?
How can you call the insurance market, as it currently stands, a competitive marketplace? Most companies contract with only one insurance company, so the only way for most people to choose their insurance is to go work for someone else.
Why are all the expenditures made by private insurance companies, the lack of which expenditures constitutes the supposed advantage a public option has over private companies, so valuable / important that we should continue wasting money that could otherwise go to keeping people healthy?
How do you sleep at night, given all the lies and bullshit you're tossing out there to make people afraid?

Things I Dislike About Bainbridge Island

2009-07-19T23:10:00.000-07:00

They say that Bainbridge Island has the highest per-capita number of lawyers of any city in the state. Possibly the country. I mostly like BI, the small-town feel, driving at night with my high-beams on because there are almost no street lights. All the trees. What I don't like is the self-important hypocritical nasty-ass gits who seem to flock to the place. Take, for example, the blog Let the dog in, that Google Reader was kind enough to suggest to me. I looked at the first post in Reader and thought, "meh." Then I got to the bottom of the post, where it says this:

"Copyright © 2009 Let the dog in!. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement and in BIG, BIG TROUBLE. Please contact legal@www.letthedogin.com so we can take legal action immediately."

It reminds me of the story I heard of a guy from the city who was putting up a fence at a park, and was greeted pleasantly each day by one of the neighbors, and when he was just about done with the fence was told that that same neighbor was suing the city because the fence was too high. Number one: who the hell would be taking posts from some random housewife (and I mean no disparagement to housewives, but usually what goes on in their house is of interest only to the people that live there) and putting them on their website? Number two: if someone were foolish enough to do that, who would be such an idiot as to reproduce such a notice along with the content? Really? You're going to set up a special email address for people to contact you about copyright infringement? Really? Really? Puhlease.

Poeta Vox Vocis

2009-07-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

I find myself

vexed

by that lugubrious animal

The Poet's Voice.

You know it.

As it takes a piece of beauty

and rends it

piece

with unexplained

pauses

and odd rushes of breathless heartless pointless babble

so unlike a brook that I can brook no reading

that treats its subject so harshly.

Poems are precious

not precious,

as poets recite them.

They are lively.

They should move with a natural flow,

like a happy creek,

not creak along

like an old man

with narcolepsy.

It's 1:30 in the Morning. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

2009-07-05T01:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps your children are the pricks with the firecrackers and other things that go BOOM that are keeping me up. The acepromazine has mostly worn off my dogs, so I'm reluctant to go to bed, where the noises are more present than up here with the TV on. It's at times like this that I want one of those old loudspeaker trucks and an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, so I can park next to these assholes and let 'er rip.
A firetruck goes screaming up Stone Way. Is it uncharitable of me to hope that one or more of these nitwits has set themselves on fire? I think not.
If you don't know where your children are, perhaps you should get their asses in bed, and put the rest of us out of our misery.

Did I Miss a Memo?

2009-07-02T00:17:00.001-07:00

So, apparently today was Be a Dick to Pedestrians Day in Seattle. Normally I find the place pretty friendly, but today on the way to work I was walking in an unofficial crosswalk (i.e. from one street corner to the opposite corner) and this douchebag in a pickup, one of these big guys who likes to drink a lot of beer and push people around, comes barrelling down 35th St as I'm crossing. I glare at him as I'm crossing, because it's clear that stopping is not in his plans, and as he slows down he yells, Get out of the fucking road! I glare more and yell, Respect the fucking crosswalk, asshole! while his buddy's on the phone in the passenger seat. Dude starts to slow down and ease over to the side of the road, so I start walking towards him, and he changes his mind. This being Seattle, though, as I continue my walk to work, a guy in a Forerunner who'd been waiting to drive across 35th leans out his window and says, I'm sorry man, that was bullshit.

Then on the way home, I'm standing on the edge of the Burke-Gilman trail under the Aurora Bridge taking a picture of it, and some punk on a bicycle goes whizzing by and yells, You're standing in the way! so I yell back, No I'm not! and keep taking my picture. What a weird day.

Intuit Doesn't

2009-05-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, the folks at Intuit gave a damn about the user experience, but the people who cared seem to have long left the building. The sorts of things I see in Quicken 2008 or TurboTax just make me shudder. Let me give you a few examples:

I'm filling out my taxes this year, for the 2008 tax year, and I enter a date, like, say, 4/13. Can you guess what date TurboTax thinks that is? 4/13/08? Ha! It actually thinks you meant April 1, 1913. I kid you not.
I have my main Quicken file on a server in the basement, and the internal database management is so incredibly bad, after every operation, the entire screen flashes (I mean, every single UI control in the screen) as it redraws, and it puts up a little dialog telling me it's refreshing Quicken data. This is on a machine with several gigs of RAM just waiting to be used.
While I'm talking about refreshing, I just had to close quicken, because it got into some kind of refresh argument with internet explorer, where each window kept repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting and repainting. You get the picture.
My favorite idiocy in quicken is when it's matching up downloaded transactions, and rather than matching a transaction with an uncleared transaction for the exact same date as the downloaded transaction, it'll choose to match it against a cleared transaction for a month prior. I mean, who wrote that code? Sarah Palin?

The sad thing is, from everything I hear, all the other financial management packages suck even worse, so I stick with Quicken, and I stick with TurboTax. But damn!

Photos of the Week - 3/8

2009-03-08T10:56:00.001-07:00

This week's images are two that I like a lot, but didn't quite make it into my Photo-a-Day project. They were both taken at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

I like the sense that these two are riding up to fairy-land, with the big umbrellas at the top of the escalator:

These ladies with their huge duffel/suitcases are in Vegas for serious. They ended up going up into the "Spa Tower" at the Bellagio.

Photos of the Week - 2/28

2009-02-28T14:06:00.000-08:00

I've been so caught up in my Photo a Day project, I've been forgetting my Photo of the Week posts. I've decided to give myself a little latitude, and post a couple, including some that I had to edit out of my daily photos.

This one is from Seattle Center, and the Experience Music Project:

This one is first in a series of Photos Taken On Dog Walks:

Finally, they say Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man, but on Bainbridge Island, it's a bear:

Inauguration Day

2009-01-31T14:26:00.000-08:00

I have done nothing to deserve this.
I did not march.
I did not call.
I did not show up, when I said I would:
I went to dinner instead.

But I am here now,
on this day,
with all these people,
around the world,
and I am so happy I can cry.

I stand with the old guy
who flips Bush the bird.
I smile with the young boy
who gives out tickets for the show,
so carefully and intently.

This day is a gift
like so much in my life.
I have done nothing to deserve this,
but I am grateful all the same.

Capital Losses

2009-01-27T22:20:00.000-08:00

Quick: name me one form of gambling income that isn't taxed at your normal income tax rate. Slots? Lottery? Multi-state Powerball? Nope. It's "capital gains" on stock sales.

If you talk to defenders of the capital gains tax, and especially those who have argued for it to be lower than regular income tax, they'll tell you about how important it is to encourage people to Invest In Companies That Provide Jobs And Other Good Things, and I completely agree. Except 99% of the shares out there are not actually shares that were bought from the company. There was absolutely zero capital invested In Companies That Provide Jobs And Other Good Things. By giving preference to the stock market, people are encouraged to buy shares from the people who do Invest In Companies, and ensures that they make a lot of money. But let's not kid ourselves that we're encouraging investment in companies.

If we want to encourage investment in companies, rather than encouraging the development of a financial industry that siphons off billions of dollars a year without actually producing anything (oh, except for the financial crisis we're experiencing now), we'd give preferential tax treatment only to the sale of shares that were purchased from the company, i.e. only those things that can truly be considered to be "capital".

What? This would discourage people from investing in the stock market? How do you figure? People were investing in the stock market before the drop in the capital gains tax rate. There's no lesser appeal to the money to be made by buying into the chance that someone down the road will be willing to pay more for your share, except people making that choice won't be able to make as much money as before. But why is this bad? What good does gambling on the market provide to the society, to warrant preferential tax treatment? Gambling on a company, sure, but when you buy a share of stock, you're buying a share of stock, not investing in a company. The stalwarts will continue to maintain that you should value shares based on the performance of the company that issued them, but really, come on. Did the dot-com bubble teach them nothing? The rationales people come up with to justify the different P/E ratios of different shares are just rationalizations. What it comes down to is this: for long periods of time, people implicitly agreed that stocks should be valued based on the underlying performance of the company, but that's just a principle, it's not a requirement, as we've seen all too well.

Let's take the company I work for: Google. In late 2007, its shares were trading north of $700 a share; this month, they're at $300 a share. What has happened to the fundamentals of the company in those 14 months? Still bringing in a heap of money quarter after quarter, with nice gains year over year, even as it expanded its workforce and costs significantly. Yet its "value" is down over 50%. Neither price is based on fundamentals: they're both based on opinion.

Buying stock is gambling, pure and simple. You're wagering that beyond some horizon with which you're comfortable, someone else's opinion of the company is going to make them willing to pay you more for your share than you paid for it. But don't kid yourself that you're "investing in the company": most of the time you're just paying off another person that took the same gamble you are.

So how about we get building businesses again: change the capital gains rate to apply only to the sale of shares that were purchased directly from the company, and make that same rate apply to interest earned from purchasing bonds, in both cases regardless of how long a person holds the instrument. Encourage investors to actually invest, not endanger the economy by frittering away money on more and more elaborate financial ploys.

Artisanal Bread

2009-01-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

I heard about this book on the radio a few weeks ago: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It sounded awesome, and I'm here to tell you that it's so-far-so-good. Easy to make, good texture to the bread (sweetie says it needs more salt, but I don't agree). It's fun being able to have fresh-baked bread pretty much whenever you want, though the bit about waiting until it's cooled down causes some angst in these parts.

You get yourself a food-storage tub (6 qt for the master recipe, though perhaps 4 qt would be enough), where you mix everything up, and set it for an initial 2-hour rise:

After the initial rise, you put it in the fridge, where it hangs out and the yeasties do their fermenting thing on island time:

When you're ready for bread, you chop off a hunk using your bread knife (they say to grab a grapefruit-sized piece to have a 1 lb loaf, but the stuff is kinda sticky and hard to get out of the tub, so I ended up with a large orange), and shape it gently into a ball — do not knead it:

It rests for 40 minutes or so, and about halfway through, you put your baking stone and an empty broiler pan in the oven at 450:

After the loaf's beauty rest, you slide it onto the stone and pour a cup of hot water in the empty pan to steam up the oven:

It cooks for about 30 minutes, and you take it out and put it on a wire rack to cool. All the way.

Then (hooray!) you eat it:

I have to say, though, that I'm a guy who likes to work with his hands, so I'm not positive about this whole you-don't-have-to-knead-it aesthetic. I like to knead bread. It's fun. Perhaps, though, I'll save that for the pizza dough.

Photo of the Week - 1/16

2009-01-16T23:22:00.000-08:00

Actually two photos, because I like them both. The second is from my Photo a Day gallery on my website, where I'm posting a single shot from each day. Makes me edit. Makes me shoot. Makes me happy.

Snow Angels

2008-12-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

Jake doesn't quite have the concept, but he does his best:

Photo of the Week - 12/25

2008-12-25T11:11:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas!

Photo of the Week - 12/18

2008-12-18T22:40:00.000-08:00

Snow in Pioneer Square around 8 am today. Nice to know I can still drive in snow.

Driving (in) Snow

2008-12-13T23:36:00.000-08:00

It's snowing here in Seattle, and it's beautiful:

My sweetie, however, is a California girl, so our second winter in God's Country, I gave her three rules for driving in snow. I thought I'd pass them on, to lessen the chance that someone injures me in the next few days.

Make no sudden moves. This has a lot of corollaries: give yourself extra time to get where you're going; pay more attention to what's going on, so you can stop more gradually.
Don't stop on a hill. Sometimes this means altering your route to avoid hills. When I was a kid, we lived on badly-built hill that forked half way up, with the right branch sloping, so people who drove on the right inevitably slipped to the right, they'd stop, try to start back up, and slip back into the crook of the branch, and we'd have to get out and push them out. When I learned to drive, I drove up that hill on the left, with a prayer.
If you start to skid, steer toward where you want to go. When I was growing up, front-wheel drive was a New Thing, and folks made it sound like it was different for front-wheel than for rear-wheel drive. It's not. They just tell it to you differently ("steer into the skid", which confuses people).

That's it.

Photo of the Week

2008-12-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

I took this shot back in 2005 at the tower on Mt. Constitution, on Orcas Island, and I love the shapes and shadows. I was reminded of it a couple times in the past two weeks, once in the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts gallery, and once by a beautiful photo from an artist at the Ballard Market, who also exhibits at the Wallingford Varsity Inn, whose name I unfortunately no longer remember.

Photo of the Week

2008-11-28T22:32:00.000-08:00

I kept having Caddyshack flashbacks as I watched this little booger pop up, grab some grass, and disappear. Jake thought he almost got him when we walked past later, and I'll not tell him different...

Photo of the Week

2008-11-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

My boy, Jake, at the beach, running on a wing and a prayer, as always...

Photo of the Week

2008-11-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time...

Greenspan is Shocked, Shocked!

2008-10-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the radio today, and had the "pleasure" of listening repeatedly to Alan Greenspan's testimony to Congress about how his ideology / world view seemed to have a flaw in it. How he was "shocked" that absent regulation, the bankers would so betray their shareholders as to get into a pickle with credit-default swaps and other instruments and endanger the livelihood of their institutions.

Are all economists this stupid? First the whole nonsense about trickle-down economics, when a giraffe could tell you that if consumer spending has been what's buoyed the economy for the past umpteen years, through the dot-com burst and other travails, then you're best off ensuring the masses keep more of their money, rather than letting the rich trade money as they gamble in the stock market. Now this eminent banker is stunned that people who make their money by engaging in risky behavior, and who never actually suffer the consequences of their company getting into trouble ("thanks for the retention bonus, Mr. Bankruptcy Judge!"), would do anything else?

The corporate liability shield is what will destroy this world: people who direct the companies should absolutely be held liable for what they direct their companies to do. No one will take a chance? Maybe that'd be better. People would act properly if they knew they'd pay for acting improperly.

Photo of the Week

2008-10-12T23:32:00.003-07:00

This week we have Alice, seeking to prove that any photo can be improved if you just include a cat in it:

Photo of the Week

2008-10-03T23:56:00.001-07:00

This is Sophie. I've got a total love-hate relationship with this cat. She's gotten me so mad I've injured myself. Believe me, this picture lies.

Photo of the Week

2008-09-28T12:25:00.001-07:00

An homage to summer-now-past:

Interesting Commentary on White Privilege

2008-09-19T23:57:00.000-07:00

This is a different category of white privilege than mine, I think. Interesting commentary from a guy named Tim Wise that my sister sent me and my sweetie found online.

Photo of the Week

2008-09-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

Moonrise at Gasworks

Holes I Have Known

2008-09-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

They come
into your life
by chance?
by luck?
by design?
I can't tell.
They cuddle, and frolic,
and work their way deep
deep
into your life.
So when they go
they leave a hole
that never fills.
You just learn
to walk around it.

Island Time

2008-09-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

Island time is marked
by the horn on the ferry.
As I sit on my butt,
on my back
on my front
on the water, in my kayak
without a watch, or a phone, or a care,
and the day spins away
with the osprey and the gulls,
the horn intercedes
every hour
telling all who will listen
that it's too late
to get off of this rock.
Better luck next time.

Photo of the Week

2008-09-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

Well, ok. So maybe not "week". Or at least, not a week on this planet. I will not be discouraged.

I like photos that tell a story, especially when it's one from ordinary life, like this one.

Photo of the Week

2008-08-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

I'm conducting an experiment. On myself. Each week, I'm going to post at least one photo I've worked on recently. Every week. At least one. We'll see how it goes.

One of the things I love about our fishing shack is the abundance of wildlife, and the usually peaceful space it occupies (except, of course on the 4th of July). Sometimes it gets a little racy:

Usually, though it's beautiful. There are deer walking across the harbor at low tide. A seal comes in a few times a year. A family or convocation of otters haul out on our neighbors' docks. Bald eagles soar and dive, with their "entourage" of starlings, crows, finches, and an occasional hummingbird. My favorite, though, is the pair of osprey that nest high up in a cedar tree behind our house. My brother, the avid ornithologist, had been telling me about how osprey and eagles sometimes tangle, and last June, they did just that. In front of my house:

Yes, the eagle is flying upside down. No animals were harmed in the production of this photo.

Death is Taxing

2008-08-10T00:04:00.000-07:00

I was telling a friend recently that death is a magical, though haunting, thing. I've never had to deal with violent death, and actually have only limited experience with humans dying in my life — I've been to only one funeral so far — but there are 8 urns in my house with what's left of 6 cats and 2 dogs, all of whom I loved very much, and each of them died so differently.

Bob was my first. She was my first critter, as an adult, and she died when she was 8. Lymphoma. Survived for 18 months on chemo. Went downhill fast. She was such a bad-ass. We had a bittersweet final day together, hanging out in the backyard in the sun. She went and sat under her geraniums, while I sat on the grass and talked to her. Late in the afternoon I was lying on the grass and she came out and, with difficulty, got on my chest. We lay there for a little while. Eventually I bundled her up, and we went to the vet, where they gave her two drugs to put her down. She was peaceful as she left, except at the very end, when she gave a loud gasp as her brain stem took over trying to live. It haunts me to this day.

Harry was next. A big sweet lug of a dog. Bernese mountain dog + australian shepherd, we think. He'd been with us less than two years. He'd been reluctant to jump up into the truck for a couple weeks, and we finally took him to see the specialists in San Leandro. His abdomen was distended, and turned out he had a few liters of blood in there. He had hemangiosarcoma. Cancer of the blood vessels. They operated on him to take out his spleen, which was a mess and had been leaking blood. Shortly after, he bled out of his liver while we were back at home having picked up my brother and his family from the airport and settled them in. We'd been at the vet's all day. They called at midnight to tell us he was having trouble and wasn't likely to make it. I've never driven so fast nor run so many red lights and stop signs. We got there just in time to see him off. It was the night before thanksgiving.

8 months later, Rosie died. While we'd been away for a week, she hadn't been eating. Important note: cats that don't eat for 72 hours are in great danger of developing hepatic lipdosis — their body starts turning their liver into fat. Hard to recover from. Took her to those specialists in San Leandro. They wanted to biopsy her liver to confirm, and to be safe they tested her blood to make sure she had enough clotting factors of the kind the liver uses. Put her under, did the biopsy, and put in a nasogastric tube so I could force her to eat (she'd been carefully throwing up her appetite-stimulant pills, and I'm really good at pilling cats). She was still out of it when they brought her out to me, but she had to go home because the specialists were transitioning to the emergency medicine people. Her nose was dripping a little blood from the stitches that held the tube in place. On the way home she was flopping around in her carrier. I thought it was because of the anesthetic wearing off. Bob had done that when they'd done the exploratory surgery to confirm the cancer. As I was on the phone with a vet nurse friend trying to figure out how to put the food down the tube, I realized Rosie wasn't breathing. Another mad dash to San Leandro, but she was gone before we got there. I can still hear her flopping around, though mostly I remember her alive. She was just 4 years old.

Madelyn died a year later. She was 15. We knew it was coming. Didn't make it any easier. She'd been getting thinner and weaker for a while. On The Day, she tried to get out of the yard, but I wouldn't let her. We took her upstairs to bed, laid out a towel. Lit some candles. Talked to her, petted her. Her systems began to fail. She was scared. We did what we could to reassure her. Got a box so she could be in a smaller space. Cuddled her. She couldn't move much. Around 4am she sat up, scratched her ear, did this odd forward stretch with her forepaws in the air in front of her. Brought her paws together in a slow-motion clap. Then she lay back down. Shortly after, she stopped breathing. 5 minutes later, her heart stopped. Letting go is hard.

Amanda and Sammantha, Madelyn's girls, died about 10 months apart. Amanda ended up in my office, curled up in a corner. She lasted through the night, with us on the floor. When she started seizing, we called the vet. No final gasp, just a cessation of seizing. Sammantha wasn't feeling well through the day, then she got up on the couch and curled up. We called our friend Annie at 1, and she, bless her, came over and gave Sam a single injection. Sam never moved, and we put her in a basket still curled up.

That was 2002. Jake came near death that year, but happily the next death wasn't until 2007 when Max died.

That brings us to July 17, the day that Ferghal died. This one was hard, because he clearly wasn't ready to go, and we weren't ready to be without him. He was 13, and getting wobbly. He'd had a series of what we assume to be strokes, but had recovered from each of them, but each time not quite to where he'd been. His last week he'd had trouble walking. We bought a wagon to take him down to where he usually did his business. On the Monday, he rallied and, stubborn pup that he was, insisted on walking around a lot. He got massive edema in his foreleg as a result, which we managed to get down through heat, range of motion exercises, and other things. But he didn't take many steps after that. Wednesday we took him for chiropractic and acupuncture, and he wasn't looking good. I carried him everywhere. Wednesday night it was clear what path his body was taking, though he protested. We lay on the living room floor with him, with candles lit. He lay on his side, and had regular full-body spasms that would last maybe 3 seconds for a contraction, after which he would bark in protest. This went on for a couple hours. He wasn't eating. He was in distress. But whenever one of us got up and went somewhere, he lifted his head a little to follow us. It was clear where this was going, but our sweet vet, who would come to the house to give him acupuncture, wasn't prepared for this, so there was nothing we could do to help him along where he was refusing to go. We were absolutely not going to bundle him into a car so he could be put down, when he wanted to be with us. So we stayed together, on the floor, all of us fitfully dozing between protests. Finally at 11 another sweet vet was able to come. Even though he didn't want to go, his body wasn't giving him any choice, so we said our goodbyes, and the vet gave him something that rapidly put him to sleep, then stopped his heart. After a few minutes, his bladder sphincter relaxed, but we had a towel ready (had had one by him since the night before). It still hurts.

I suspect when the time comes, I will be like Ferghal: not ready to go, and fighting it all the way. I started a poem last year, which I may finish some time, about envying the dead of Hiroshima, but I think the process of dying is important. It's the inverse of birth, but like it in many ways: a painful and magical transition. Several people I've talked to about these experiences have said the loss is why they don't have pets. The loss, though, is the price of all the joy. I don't know why the world is set up so all good things must end, and nothing good happens without a price, but that's the way it is. For all the joy and love they've brought me, I'm willing to pay the death tax.

Happy F****** "Birthday"

2008-07-04T12:36:00.001-07:00

I used to enjoy July 4th. When I was growing up, the Regent Street Neighborhood Association held a little parade over by the high school, and my father and brothers and sister and I would march in it in the band. My brother and I played the kazoo, if I remember right, and my dad would always play the big bass drum. We'd get together at a neighbor's house a couple times before the parade to "rehearse". Good times.

That was before I took on some dogs who have issues with fireworks. One runs around the house (inside or outside, and I do mean runs around the house) barking madly, while the other quivers and shakes. A third dog has started being scared of the banging too. Living on Bainbridge Island doesn't help, because we're near the Suquamish reservation, which means miles upon miles of fireworks for sale. (Now the local Ace Hardware store has gotten into the act, hosting a fireworks stand for four days. Not helpful. Not hardware, man.)

So these days I have this to say about July 4th: how very fucking apropos that we celebrate the marketing, not the achievement, of independence, and we do it with crap that was invented in China. Bite me.

It's the little things that count

2008-05-18T17:55:00.000-07:00

When I was in philosophy class in high school, I was assigned the Determinism side of the Free Will vs Determinism argument, and argued it well enough to get some of my classmates really upset. I'm a big believer in Free Will, but there are small things that happen in our lives that can radically alter the trajectory of our lives, and it really makes me wonder. Let me give you three examples of insignificant things that happened in my life, my father's life and his father's life, without which I certainly wouldn't be who I am today, as I likely wouldn't exist.

Let's start with the squeaky hinge in the hospital room of my mother's grandmother. She was in the hospital for a check up and the squeak was really annoying. My father's mother worked in the hospital, and her father owned a hardware store, so she knew how to fix things like squeaky hinges. Now it happens that at the time, she was looking for a place to stay. She got to talking with my mother's grandmother, who it also happened had a room for rent in her house. You see where this is going.

My mother's father played the cello, sometimes with my father's father. My father's mother and my mother's father I believe had started some sort of relationship when he went off to America, as part of the all-Germans-aren't-so-bad tour following WWI, where he met my mother's mother and got engaged. They came back for a visit, and clearly the relationship with my father's mother was going nowhere, but my father's father's first wife had recently left him with two kids, and my father's mother decided to marry my father's father instead.

My dad is the 7th of 8 kids, and at some point was on a train with his father when they passed Hamburg. It was the middle of the night, when my dad should have been asleep, but he and his father were both awake as they passed a factory outside of town. My grandfather told my dad that the factory belonged to Uncle Otto, my mother's uncle, and my dad filed this away. A number of years later, my dad finds himself in Hamburg, having decided not to go back to East Germany. He's got no job, and no place to live, but he remembers Otto and his factory. He goes to the factory looking for Otto, but Otto isn't there. The foreman decides to have pity on him and gives my dad Otto's home address. He goes there, but Otto isn't home. His wife, however, is charmed and says he should stay for dinner, which he does, and shortly thereafter is working in Otto's tire factory.

At some point, Otto's niece Matilda comes to town, and Otto asks my dad to show her around. He does this, and is smitten. They get engaged some time after this and he comes to America, sponsored by Otto's brother (my mother's father, who went to America all those years ago).

As for me, I owe my marriage and current life to a quarter. My sweetie and I met in a production of Much Ado About Nothing (she was Hero, I was Claudio; it was like Romeo and Juliet, but flakier and without the death), for which she would not have auditioned if the quarter to decide between auditioning and going to Fiddler on the Roof had come down the other way.

So, don't sweat the small things. Just know that you never know which one will send you down the rabbit hole. (and I mean that in a good way, sweetie :)

Ode to Fur

2008-02-13T22:30:00.000-08:00

(to the tune of Carry on My Wayward Son)

Go away you wayward hair
What you doing in my ear?
Gonna pluck you out of there.
Don't you grow no more!

What is it about age = increased fur? At the same time your eyes are getting weaker, you're expected to focus on little (sometimes not-so-little) hairs growing out of your ears? It's not like there's any depth perception possible, either. For my money, this is proof that there is no god, or there's no reason to worship him/her.

Sexual Harassment

2007-07-08T23:02:00.000-07:00

I write this with trepidation, with due apologies to my wife, and fully aware of the vast difference between what I'm going to write about and true sexual harassment. But I write it anyway.

I am an honorable man. Happily married to a wonderful woman, who, like many people, has a jealous streak. I'm a photographer, and thus very visually attuned. More importantly, though, I'm a man, and thus very visually attuned. So I admire women, but not in a gross leering sort of way. I love the company of women, I enjoy their beauty, their grace, their voices, and of course, their bits and pieces. Being, however, an honorable man who does right by his sometimes-jealous wife, I try not to enjoy the bits and pieces too much.

Last Friday was not easy.

As I'm sitting in the cafeteria, I notice a pretty woman on her way to the dessert table. She's wearing a black-and-white horizontal-striped top and a pretty pink just-above-the-knee cotton skirt that's got some nice lines to it -- flared just enough to draw attention. As she walks past, I notice that it looks like the top is not actually a top, but perhaps a leotard, because I can see black and white stripes through the fabric of the skirt. But wait, the stripes are different. It's at this point that I realize that she's wearing zebra-striped panties that are showing through the skirt. Being, as I said, a man, and thus very visually attuned, well... you get the picture. Let's just say the lunch conversation was harder to follow until she was back at her table.

Now, here's the thing: I understand the concept of a hostile work environment, and I understand wanting to look nice (I've considered dressing nicer myself), but it seems like there's a line one shouldn't cross in a workplace, and zebra-striped panties under a translucent pink skirt is a serious Lorelei moment for those of us who are honorable men. Don't you think? Sexual harassment? Ya gotta wonder.

Impeach Them Now

2007-07-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

It's funny how it's the small things that really get to you. How the camel's back really can be broken by something as insignificant as a straw. For nearly 6 1/2 years we've watched, and occasionally protested, as Bush and Cheney have degraded their offices and this country. For nearly 6 1/2 years these people who pledged to bring honor and integrity "back" to the White House have stained that building with rapacious self-interest. With the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence, the camel lies immobile on the ground. The trail of high crimes and misdemeanors are clear for all to see. Congress should impeach them both. Do it now.

For an inspired rant on the topic, watch Keith Olbermann on MS-NBC.

Smokers are Idiots

2007-06-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

These days I walk a lot. Up the hill from the ferry to the bus. From the bus to the office. Back again. I wait for the bus a lot too. Everywhere I go, I'm walking into clouds of smoke, because everywhere I go, there are people smoking. In cars with their windows rolled down. At bus stops with no-smoking signs. Huddled outside buildings getting rained on and shivering. What is wrong with these people? They pay $5 - $10 per day for the privilege. Interestingly, when you hear these personal finance gurus on Oprah, they'll talk about not buying a daily latte but I have yet to hear them tell someone they should stop smoking. $3,600/year is a heck of a lot of dough.

I've got no problems with people harming themselves, so long as I don't end up paying for it somehow. People should be able to smoke in their own homes (though if they have kids, it smacks of child abuse). Whatever. But not near me.

Look, if someone enjoyed sniffing nitrous oxide and walked around with a canister of it whiffing from a tube so that a bunch of it went into other people's lungs and left them woozy and disoriented, we wouldn't allow that. If someone wore a hat that spun a monofilament line around them to enforce a 3-foot personal space, we wouldn't allow that. So what gives with smokers?

Don't they feel stupid and manipulated and pathetic? That's certainly how I see them. If you're a smoker, you start out at a serious respect deficit with me. I've got friends who smoke, but it's definitely in spite of their idiocy; they're pretty special people, or it wouldn't be worth it.

People can do whatever they want so long as the only person they harm is themselves, but this smoking in public crap has to stop. It has to.

In Memoriam

2007-06-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

We lost our eldest cat Max yesterday. Came home from running some errands to find him seizing on the kitchen floor, with foamy spit coming out of his mouth, eyes and head twitching, lying in a puddle of pee. Grabbed him up, wrapped him in a towel and sped off to the emergency room, but the reality of rural life is, emergencies don't get fixed when the ER is half an hour away, no matter how much you speed. Not that I think there was anything really to do for him.

Max came to us in 1997. Appeared on our porch one night. I said hi and gave him a good scritching, but didn't let him in. Two nights later he was back, meowing like a cat in heat, with a row of tomcats lurking in the street. Mari said we couldn't let the cat get pregnant and let Angela (yes, we named her) in the house, then we called our cat sitter who also ran a rescue group (we already had four cats at the time). As we were leaving a message though, Max walked across the desk and we noticed (finally) his cojones. We told the rescue lady's answering machine it didn't need to pass on the message. We tried changing his name to Angelo, but that didn't work; a couple days later, while we were waiting for the vet, he became Max, and Max he remained. Maximillian sometimes. Maxwell others. Maximus, too. But usually just Max.

He was a tuxedo cat -- by which I mean he was black with a white chest -- with some white on his paws and whiskers that would have made Salvador Dali proud: white, and long, and curved just so. Around that time I bought a silly screen saver that had a cat come on your screen and you could give it balls of yarn to play with, and it would jump on top of your windows, and meow. The tuxedo cat acted so much like Max, we accused him of modelling and not handing over his pay.

He was silly, with lots of toes to spare. His extra thumb, and toes, on his front right paw almost allowed him to grab things, like the refried beans from my take-out container. He loved going into pizza boxes, and once when I was carving a pumpkin for Halloween, he kept putting his head and paws into the pumpkin to get at the stringy stuff. (When I scan in the picture, I'll put it here.) When I'd come home from work, he'd come walking down the street to meet me. He liked to sit on the ottoman, half on my legs, and purr. Loved kids, just loved them. The only cat I know who actually approaches toddlers.

About 5 years ago, responding to a non-specific fever, the vet gave him 10mg pills of Baytril, an antibiotic. I noticed that his eyes seemed to be overly dilated and he wasn't tracking the peacock feather as well as before. I called the vet to tell him that, and he assured me it couldn't be the antibiotic doing it. Yet another lesson in trusting my instincts. I stopped the antibiotics the next day, but it was too late: Max was one of the one in 124,210 cats who was sensitive to Baytril at the recommended dose, and the side effect was retinal damage. The opthamologist that Bayer paid for said, "wow. I haven't seen that layer of the retina since vet school." A couple months later, when Mari saw him walking down the street completely oblivious to the car bearing down on him, Max became an indoor cat.

He did have his downsides, as we all do. He used his bladder as a weapon. If we weren't giving him what he wanted, he would look at us, turn his butt toward something, and let loose. The bookcase. The curtains (multiple times). The chair in which I was sitting. We tried various things, but in the end it was Paxil that mellowed him out. 2.5mg 2x/day. We called it Maxil.

He also used to masturbate on a cashmere throw we had on the bed. I don't know if that's really what he was doing, but it's the only word that fits the scene. When you were making his breakfast, he liked to rear up and bop behind your knee with his front paws. Only mildly annoying unless his claws were sharp, then I would push him away with my other foot.

He was goofy, as tuxedo cats tend to be. Climbing under papers. Hiding in boxes. Looking at me from the top of the (empty) china cabinet, or from inside the TV cabinet. He didn't move quickly, except when food was involved. He bulked up to 15 or 16 pounds (once, because his abdomen was so firm and swollen, at our vet's recommendation -- yes the same one who said the antibiotics couldn't be affecting Max's eyes -- we spent $500 taking him to a specialist, whose conclusion was that Max was fat; we made up a certificate to that effect and had both vets sign it). He had lost weight over the last year, down to 11ish. He loved to go outside when we would let him. Putting a harness on him was pretty funny, as he'd roll on his back and not move. So no walkies for Max.

What else can I say about Max, other than that I miss him terribly. We gave him a very good life, but I wish there would have been more of it.

E = mc**2

2007-06-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

A reformulation for the technology industry: energy = mission times the square of the available cash. True in general? Maybe, though in the case of webvan and other .com singularities, the energy didn't actually go anywhere. But it is the case at Google. It's really quite astonishing the amount of energy at the place, especially in Mountain View, where there are so many people and so many of them moving places. From desk to meeting to tech talk to volleyball to food to foosball to the gym to the future. And people move quickly. And talk quickly. They make quick decisions and go on to the next thing.

The last time I felt so energized at work was when I was just out of college and building a graphical operating system that was going to bring the brilliance of the Mac to people with low-end IBM PCs. We were going to revolutionize the world of computing by writing a system in the oldest high-level language (assembly language), for old computers, that would let them do the most modern of computer-enabled tasks. If only we hadn't fired all the marketing people, they could have told us that people with old computers tend not to like buying new things. Ah well. Last I heard, the system was still being put on refurbished PCs and made available to people in developing countries. So maybe it is changing the world, in some way.

My point, though, is that it's wonderful to be at a place filled with people with ideas, energy, and the resources to make them a reality. Such a contrast from Openwave. Relativity, indeed.

Noogie the Noogler

2007-05-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

Well, it's 10pm and my first day at the Google is complete. Not a bad day. Learned a bunch of things (yo, openwavers: I can't forward your resumes until 30 march next year because Google doesn't want even the appearance of violating my non-solicitation agreement with openwave; I'm sad to miss out on the referral bonuses). So much more to learn. On the plus side, I'm now clear who my manager is.

The food really is as good as they say. It was a very interesting sight: 7:30 at night, and a few hundred people are still at the office eating dinner; not sure how many of them went home after that, but the energy was really nice.

I think I made the right choice. We'll see what I think after a couple weeks of commuting.

Support the Troops

2007-05-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was watching The Daily Show the other day, where Jon was interviewing Jeremy Scahill about his new book, and it came out that a "private security" person in Iraq earns in a month what a soldier earns in a year. That is just so wrong on so many levels. Then it occurred to me: this society runs on money, so a really effective way to get the troops out of Iraq while smelling like a rose would be to dramatically increase their combat pay and make staying in Iraq prohibitively expensive.

You're taking care of the troops
You're paying something closer to what the market has set as the value of the service
Can you really see Shrub vetoing this?

Seems like a winner to me.

The Story of My Life

2007-05-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

Books and movies are dangerous. I spent much of my childhood immersed in books. Nine Princes in Amber. Dragonriders of Pern. Tolkein. Heinlein. Dune. Mary Renault. World upon world where stories unfolded with heroic protagonists. Plot was inevitable and characters had purpose. Their fate mattered, yet didn't matter. I cared for them and their situations -- I cried and raged and came up for air expecting to be, and sometimes acting like I was, in that world -- but they weren't real.

The experience left me feeling like my own life was a story. I would walk to school with a sense that I was 6 feet up and behind myself, watching myself walk to school, watching my life unfold. Nothing bad really happened in my life (though my parents' divorce threw me for a loop, and I cried when my first hamster died). I feel that anything bad that does happen to me is subject to revision; if not that, it's happening in a story and doesn't really matter.

Yet it is my life.

The whole thing has left me somewhat ill-equipped to deal with life. Eternally optimistic and trusting. Uncommitted to much. Lacking the passion and drive that come from a feeling of limits and the approach of death. Working on software as if I've got all the time in the world (have I mentioned that, until quite recently, I've been working on my 5th platform for mobile applications?). Some recent health issues left me panic-stricken at night, sure that my pounding heart was going to lead to, what is it they say on "Grey's Anatomy"? "v-tach"? At other times I go for weeks without taking my blood pressure, sure that things will be fine, because so far they always have been, and if they're not, I'll just edit the story. I'm afraid I'm going to wake up when I'm 80 and say to myself, wait! you mean that was all real? I don't get to try it another way?

But life is not fiction. Life has limits. Time goes forward. There is no second edition.

All in the Family

2007-04-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I'm halfway through my 8th year of not speaking to my mother. The proximate cause was a flame letter she wrote me one month after my wedding, where she said I was arrogant (even my camp counsellors said so) and a coward and that I'd raised victimization to a high art. She concluded that (my paraphrase) unless I was able to keep my feelings to myself and keep that bitch of a wife in line, she could no longer be in my life. The break had been building for 33 years. Since then, she's sent me occasional birthday cards (including one 2 weeks after she sent me that letter, including a small packet of some fruity tea), and a hear-you're-having-a-hard-time-if-you-want-to-talk-about-it-give-me-a-call card, after I was laid off just before I could quit my job in 2001. Oh, and an email asking if she could print out one of my photographs from my website, rather than purchase one; had to save her money for her trips to Russia and Spain, I guess. Not that I'm bitter.

I've known people who've been really badly mistreated by their parents or siblings who continue to remain engaged with them, because they're "family". I've also seen so many people who treat their friends far better, with far more care and consideration, than they do their family. I've been guilty of this myself (though in my defense -- and there's always a defense -- I tend to be a spotty communicator with everyone, but if a member of my family shows up, I do drop / rearrange everything to spend whatever time they're willing to spare). There's this attitude that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, "[family] is...where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But family should be so much more than this.

Family should be your bedrock. Family should be the people with whom you'd most like to be spending time. There should be no question or worry that you might be intruding on them if you want to visit, no fear that they might not want to spend time with you; visiting family shouldn't require an invitation, engraved or otherwise. Of course, lives are what they are, and some times are better than others, but if someone's too busy to see you, they should be able to say so, without fear you'll read something into it. Family should be trust, and care, and value, and interdependence, and honesty, and heritage, and loyalty, and support. It is not shared genes, or obligation (though as in marriage, that's sometimes all you have to get you through the inevitable rough spots; it's all the rest of it that keeps those rough spots short).

My first falling-out with my twin came when we were 17. We'd been growing apart through middle school and high school, and I couldn't understand why; I even wrote a poem about it. When we finally talked about it, in the bedroom we shared in Switzerland, with the lights out, I said I felt like I didn't know him well but I wanted to know him better -- I think I said our older brother had said that my twin had changed and I should see who he was now -- and he said he didn't want to know me better. (To give his side of it, as I understand it, he felt that I hadn't given a damn about him and to hell with me if I was just now, a couple months before we went to opposite coasts to go to college, interested in knowing him.) He could give me no reason as to why and didn't understand why he needed one: he didn't need one to disregard anyone he met through other means than sharing a uterus. I said then what I still believe: family is special, and you'd better have a damn good reason for disassociating from someone in your family. But when most of what you get from someone in your family is pain and sadness, withdrawal is important / good / appropriate; family doesn't trump self-protection.

Family is as family does. The best of friendships evolve to be family. In my life, I distinguish between "relatives" and "family". Relatives have something of a claim on me, more than a random person on the street, and they remain in that camp until they demonstrate they should be in "family" or "disowned". For family, I will sacrifice / put up with a lot.

Why Hate the Jews?

2007-01-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

Random thought resurrected by listening to a piece on NPR about the gospel according to Judas: how is it that Christians have through history villified the Jews for having turned Jesus over to the Romans for crucifiction, when the death of Jesus (in my mind the willingness of Jesus to die relying on his faith that he was in fact the son of god and would be resurrected) is the central act that redeemed their sorry asses? Did the Jews not do them a favor?

Executive Severance

2006-12-28T23:30:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to get into the issue of executive compensation (yet), though I will say the number of executives I've met or heard of who actually have the impact implied by their compensation is vanishingly small. No, can we talk about executive severance instead? Good.

Here's the thing: severance is meant to recognize the efforts a person has put into the company and smooth the transition to a new job. If someone gets axed because of changed business circumstances, I think it's right to compensate them for that in a way that eases the pain while allowing the company to get on with those changed circumstances. If a company gets bought and an executive is redundant, the same principles should apply; one shouldn't avoid making the right decision for the shareholders because one is afraid of suddenly being out of a job.

But what about when an executive isn't doing what they're supposed to be doing, or doesn't agree with where the company is going? Anyone else would be fired, or would resign and go find work somewhere else. Strangely, though, this doesn't seem to happen in the executive ranks, where salary anywhere from 6 months to 18 months, plus other perks seems to be the rule. At my previous company we had

The VP of engineering who couldn't make a decision and whose directors spent a lot of time talking among themselves figuring out how to get around the VP so stuff could actually happen; dude got dismissed with 6 months salary and went off rock-climbing for a while. I'm pretty sure we never called him up for assistance during that "transition period"
The VP of Operations (as in data center operations) who hadn't a clue about computer networks, spent more time trying to sneak favorable (and exceptional) stock option grants for himself (in his role as General Counsel) past the CEO, and got fired for incompetence. 6 months severance because, being a lawyer, he was happy to sue the company and the board determined that legal costs would be more than the 6-months' salary.
The VP of Sales who went to the board to tell them he could run the company way better than the current CEO, only to find that they thought things were going quite fine. He stayed on the payroll, not doing anything for the company, until he found a job someplace else.

You would think that reading about the myriad other companies where this crap goes on would make me feel better about this stuff, but it doesn't. I am mystified as to why these institutional investors that own most of these companies are willing to put up with it. All I can think is that (a) they deal with large amounts of money, so these numbers don't seem so large, and (b) it's only a couple people at a time; lord knows if the company were so generous with the rank-and-file when they laid them off, there'd be hell to pay. Just ask the workers at Delphi.

What is the point of all my rambling? It is this: where is the incentive for the executive to perform well, if they know that should they be dismissed for doing a poor job, they're going to continue with their already-large salary for a nice long time? So many people are motivated to work extra hard, even when trying to meet ridiculous goals set by executives who have no real sense of the level of effort involved, because they're afraid if they don't do what they're told, they'll be fired, often with no severance at all. Have executives somehow risen above such base concerns that they wouldn't be similarly motivated? Hardly.

Ridiculous executive severance remains because it's set by executives who like that perk of their own jobs. But the company would be better served by a little fear in the executive wing. Indeed it would.

Point-Counterpoint

2006-10-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

Relationships are a funny thing. Early in our relationship, my wife and I used to argue about whether you should expect your partner to "complete" you, or whether a relationship can survive (or at least avoid dysfunction) only if you both come to it as two complete individuals. Whether you're two halves of a whole, a single soul in two bodies, a yin and a yang, whatever, or two somethings orbiting around each other, held together by mutual attraction. Over time, I've come to the conclusion that the answer is "yes".

To look at us, my wife and I are almost two sides of the same coin; perhaps a coin with some melted spots where you can't really distinguish the two sides. I never realized with how many things, from the trivial to the significant, there are actually opposite ways to accomplish them. There are two ways to hang shirts (facing left or facing right); two ways to fold napkins and sheets (final fold on the bottom/top edge, or on the left/right edge); two ways to think of the color "peach" (the inside of the fruit, or the outside of the fruit). The list goes on and on. This morning I told her about an available freezer that "doesn't run all the time" meaning that, unlike our current freezer, it actually stays cold without having to run all the time, while she wondered if I wanted to use it like an armoire since it didn't work all the time. She's usually the emotional one, while I'm rational, but when I get emotional she calms right down. She tends to focus on the negative ("these bathrobes are scratchy; how Mendocino") while I tend to focus on the positive ("yeah, but the barn cat is really sweet"). Over the years we've rubbed off on each other some -- she'll focus more on the view while I'll see the can of Campbell's Soup in the cupboard in "Witness" -- but overall.... no.

My point is simply this: if you're lucky, opposites attract. A different perspective can teach you things about the world you would never have found on your own. You balance each other's weaknesses. Is that completion, or orbit? "Yes." Happy anniversary, sweetie.

Retelling an Old Joke

2006-08-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

President Bush decides he wants to create a national appreciation day for either the sun or the moon, but he can't decide which one. It has to be the one that's most important to us, but he can't make up his mind.

So he calls in his science advisers and asks them, which is more important: the sun or the moon? They talk to him about fusion and reflection and refraction and rotation and photosynthesis and convection until his head is spinning.

He thanks them for coming in and thinks for a bit, which makes his head spin even more. So he calls in Dick Cheney.

The VP talks to him about oil and solar power and hydrogen made using solar power, and it all becomes clear.

The next day, the President holds a press conference to announce that tomorrow will be National Moon Appreciation Day, because after due deliberation and consultation he has determined that it is the moon that is most important to us: the moon lights up the night, while the sun only shines during the daytime, when we don't need it.

Health Care Not Insurance

2006-08-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

Can we talk for a bit about the health insurance crisis in this country? It's been bugging me for a while.

For starters, it's not a Health Insurance crisis, it's a Health Care crisis. Complaining about all the people who are uninsured implicitly agrees that the best way to provide health care to people is through an insurance plan.

Have you ever thought what it would be like if Auto Insurance were the same as Health Insurance? Whenever you took your car to the mechanic, you'd pay a $10 copay. There'd be in-network mechanics and out-of-network mechanics. Maybe you'd have to pay 10% of the cost of any repair, to try and give you an incentive to shop around, but really it's just to reduce the cost to the insurance company and incent you to try and get by without the repair. Mechanics would have elevated prices that would be their official rate for things, but they'd discount them heavily for the insurance companies, so anyone without Auto Insurance would be getting doubly-reamed.

It all sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?

Insurance was created to distribute risk, to allow people to gamble on the luck of the world. As a side-effect, it enabled people to take more risks than they otherwise would have, which enabled us to move the society forward faster than we could have done if individuals had been forced to carry the whole risk of a venture.

People's health has nothing to do with this.

People get sick through all sorts of mechanisms, and most of them come down to chance. Sure there are illnesses that are due to lifestyle choices (smoking / drinking / obesity -- though that last one is starting to show signs of being partly due to viral infection or differences in intestinal flora), but guys who, in their twenties, get staph infections in their blood that build up on their heart valve and break off and travel up into their brain...that's not a lifestyle choice, that's just bad luck. And it can happen to anyone at any time.

So why should handling all this be subject to the profit motive? Why the insane salaries for insurance executives, and the excessive marketing dollars, and the motivation to only insure the healthy? There are those who point out the difference in administrative costs between private and public health care (read: medicare) is 10x, while others, such as The Council for Affordable Health Insurance like to play around with the numbers to reduce the difference (ignoring the reality that one of the reasons the "hidden" administrative costs of medicare are hidden is because they are inherently part of running the government). Even playing with the numbers doesn't bring the levels in line with each other -- they are left only with trying to justify the higher costs saying they help keep costs low by reducing fraud. But there already are many people who work for medicare looking to reduce fraud; my stepmother used to do this work for the state of wisconsin.

If the private sector and the market are so great at keeping medical costs down, why have they utterly failed to do so? Why are we as a country paying so much more for health care and getting so much less?

People say that the private sector performs more efficiently because the profit motive incents them to keep costs under control. What prevents those same controls from working in the public sector, without the added burden of having to show a profit? If it's only a matter of incenting the administrators appropriately, those mechanisms are just as available to the public sector as to the private. With the added benefit of making defrauding the health care system a criminal offense, not a civil one.

The goal of anyone looking at health care should not be to ensure that everyone has health insurance, it should be to ensure that everyone has health care. Only then can we really put in place the mechanisms to take care of all our citizens.

Don't Be Afraid of the Ketchup

2006-08-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Let me say this and get it over with: if we have to rely on overworked TSA employees at the airport to protect us from terrorists, then we are in seriously deep doo-doo. We're now expected to not bring on board any liquids or gels, not even little tubes of toothpaste, for fear that they could be combined into an explosive device. Are we next going to be required to travel naked? While some might enjoy an exotic-erotic plane flight, the reality is that there will always be people who can think of ways to get stuff on board. Adding checks for whatever has been tried in the past is not the answer; addressing the root motivations of terrorism is.

While the ideology espoused by fanatical islamists provides a pathway, people don't step on that road because they fundamentally believe it. They tread that path for the same reason people join gangs: they are disenfranchised, feel powerless, have no hope for the future, and are looking for something to belong to. Until we find ways to overcome the main weakness of capitalism -- the tendency to widen the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and the amorality of corporations -- we will continue to be threatened in this way.

Even if we lost 10 full airliners a year to terrorists, it would still be safer to fly than to drive.

2006-08-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

I'm a firm believer in something I believe to be obvious to most people, but I'm not taking any chances: your background colors your perceptions. More than that, it can make it impossible for you to see things at all. So before I start posting to this here blog, I thought I'd be upfront with you, about me. I'm a tall, white man who grew up in the midwest as the son of a well-respected professor of mathematics. This comes with a certain amount of baggage (way over the carry-on limit), but I can handle it. I'm accustomed to at least being listened to, and often get my way. I don't expect people to run into me in the store, or ignore me in other situations. I've got an intellectual understanding of what it is to be poor, but let's face it: I've never gone hungry or had to choose which bills to pay. I'm used to having choices. So now you know.