Good News

Well, at least we've gotten that out of our system.

"The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to [the most devious and mediocre]. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

-H. L. Mencken

Inelastic Joints.

The New York Times has recently discovered the concept of inelasticity in the artificial joint industry.

I can only assume that they know this and simply assume that their readership is retarded, because, duh. Of course artificial joints are a total rip-job. In economics, the elasticity of a good is how widely its price can vary with no effect on its market value (price). For example, if bicycles suddenly all cost $5,000, almost no one would buy bicycles anymore. But if insulin suddenly cost $5,000, its sales would only drop a small amount because it's literally a matter of life and death for those who buy it. So it is said that insulin is inelastic.

As such, any good that is highly inelastic is going to foster corruption. If I'm the only maker of bread, and people need bread, even if I don't act like an asshole and charge $500 per loaf, my successor may discover that, regardless of what she does, people always come back. A relationship of such imbalance is never good. The buyer and the seller must both need each other.

So here we are with artificial joints. People who need them NEED them. The market is very difficult to get in to. So, we have a limited, inelastic good that because of its nature limits competition. And we are surprised that the companies suck? Seriously?

Inelasticity is merely one detail in the economic web that, in anything other than medicine, is fine. It's only once it becomes part of medicine that we have, dare I say it, a moral issue. If insulin is a necessity for life, can a society that supposedly cares about its members truly allow free-market principles keep its price high? I don't think so.

Health System Bears Cost of Implants With No Warranties (NYTimes.com)

Capitalism and Democracy and Pressure

I've always looked at capitalism and democracy as the best systems of management that we have because both of them have pressure release valves built in. Economy gets overheated or too cold, natural mechanisms take over and set it on another course. People hate the government, they just elect new assholes.

It's for that reason that I doubt we'll ever see armed rebellion again. There's no reason. Taking up arms happens when there's no way for unrest and pressure to escape the system. Look at France. They had bloody uprising on a near-weekly basis. Compare this to Britain, a paragon of stability in comparison, because Britain had pressure release valves that allowed the expunging of unrest without violence.

Who Wears The Genes in This House?

Monsanto, the most evil corporation on Earth if you have seen Food Inc., is currently in an antitrust suit with a bunch of states and companies. Again, all of this comes back to Monsanto's ownership of their RoundUp-Ready soybeans.

First off, Monsanto is not the most evil corporation in the world. They, like many other large companies, are taking advantage of a totally fucked patent, trademark, and copyright world to the detriment of, pretty much, everyone.

What's at issue is that Monsanto owns the genetics to the seeds, which means that if the seeds blow onto your land and grow, Monsanto owns those plants and any possible cross breeds that may arise.

This hasn't always been the case. Previously, it was understood that life could not be patented. This was generally recognized for moral reasons, but I have a different interpretation of the situation.

It has to do with what a patent does. Nominally, it provides a temporary monopoly on a product. It does not prevent people from owning something. For example, Eli Whitney makes the cotton gin. A competitor makes one illegally and sells it to me. I am now the owner of that cotton gin. Even if Eli sues his competitor, he cannot take the one that was already built away from me.

It is not a right of sale, since if Eli builds some cotton gins and sells them, I can lawfully sell them again. The only part left is manufacture. A patent is a monopoly on making the thing. Eli Whitney has the right of manufacture on cotton gins for a set time.

This cannot apply to life. Life is, by its nature, replicative. When a device is made that can reproduce itself, the maker relinquishes, by the very nature of their creation, the right of replication. A patent cannot logically apply. This would apply to any machine that replicates itself. If I create a robot that, when left to its own devices, wanders about, gathering materials, and builds a copy of itself, I cannot patent that.

It's absurd that life can be patented. Our legal system and the judges who allowed this should be ashamed and either throw themselves or be thrown off of a cliff. Morality need not be applied, it's logically nonsensical.

Change the law. Change it now. Life cannot be patented.

Monsanto’s Seed Patents May Trump Antitrust Claims (Bloomberg.com)

Justification For Life

In everyday life, there are really only three philosophical issues with which people are concerned and should be concerned: God, ethics, and justification.

Other more esoteric concepts are of less importance. For example, the meaning of life. It gets discussed all the time, but what good does it actually do for us when we go to the store for milk?

Ethics is critical because right and wrong are central to our actions involving other people. We do what's right and shun what's wrong. Thus, those two adjectives are REALLY important to define.

Justification is important because we have to understand the reasons behind our actions. My dad will frequently be heard saying that the most important things in life are knowing who you are, what you're doing, and why you're doing it.

Those first two parts sound simple but are really tough. Importantly, I also think that a person who completely lacks those first two parts can bumble happily through life. But why you're doing something is so important. If you don't understand that part, your actions are chaotic. Anything can happen because you don't grasp the motivations of your actions. You are a slave to your own impulses.

Justification allows us to semi-quantify our motivations. God is the complete abdication of justification. There is no philosophically strong way to rely on God as a way to explain our actions. It is lazy justification.

That's where the disconnect between religion and science lies. A religious person can easily be a scientist, but they cannot fully believe in the precepts of analysis and justification since a critical part of their life is predicated on something that is totally devoid of justification.

That is my answer to those who argue that I should simply leave people alone. That religion has a small effect on people's everyday life, and that they would act and be basically the same person with or without religion.

That's entirely possible, but it's also possible that people would be different. No, I think the question of God is critical and that people would in fact be different, and be different for the better. This study drives home the degree to which people rely on God for either direction or justification for actions.

God is important. These people are directing their lives and having an effect on society and those around them based on a philosophically baseless belief! So rarely does philosophy come into the average person's life, but it does here, and does so in a big way.

Is it any wonder that people once used religion to justify the oppression of women, blacks, and other religions? Or that we now have a war being waged against homosexuality? Or that we now have an "our God can beat up your God" situation going on with Islam? Or that evolution is tantamount to heresy? Or that Fox News is WATCHED?

Baseless beliefs are bad, especially when people don't know that they are. It is in this way that religion is fundamentally dangerous.

God Helps with Personal Decisions, Most Americans Say (LiveScience.com)

Get.... Out.

The New York Times has been shown a report that outlines what pretty much anyone with knowledge of Africa already knew: aid to Africa is fucked.

The report shows that as much as 50% of food aid to Somalia is diverted to various nefarious groups and not to those poor, needy savages.

Here's a novel idea, GET THE FUCK OUT. I understand that us hyper-advanced, white westerners always know what's best for the rest of the world, but it's painfully obvious that our actions are just doing more damage. We're helping no one.

Yes, we're feeding some people for a time, but the old saying of fish and fishing has been around for a lot longer than Africa and its endless crises. We need to get out now. If we want to help anyone, we have to let them find their own way. We did it, everyone remember the Middle Ages? Yeah. It was a shit-show. But we managed!

People are going to die. Governments will fall. Stuff is going to appear to get worse before it gets better. But that shit must be excised from the system before it has any hope of moving forward. Once they've achieves some degree of stability on their own, we can begin doing business with them. We can let them into the big clubhouse that is the global economy.

Some numbers, Africa is the second largest continent after Asia, and the second most populous after Asia. Near-as-makes-no-difference one billion people live in Africa with the vast majority of them living in poverty. Africa has a massive amount of natural resources.

Western nations give about $100 billion per year to Africa. One percent more, ONE PERCENT, of the global economy going to Africa would result in six times that number. Once the systems are in place, our single most important mission, if we actually care about Africa, is to get their businesses up-and-running. There is nothing more important.

Up until this point, I've ignored the moral question. In my plan, letting lots of people die is fine. But morality certainly comes into the equations, but not in simply giving them food and money.

We must stand by our ideals as a nation and not accept human rights violations in the countries with which we are doing business. Countries rich in resources such as oil are going to develop highly corrupt nascent governments. The west must stand by and reject business with these nations until certain goals of human rights development are met. Basically, we must do what we are not doing with the Arab nations and their oil.

Half of Food Aid to Somalia Is Diverted, Report Says (NYTimes.com)

Molten Dinos

It's hypothesized that the asteroid impact that nuked the dinosaurs was powerful enough to fling chunks of Earth into orbit. Has anyone done any work on attempting to find chunks of terrestrial rock on the moon to confirm this? Just wondering.

Why Copyright is Totally Broken

I mention TechDirt on a pretty regular basis. It's the best site to read for a quick crash-course in trademark and copyright law and philosophy. This video is a recent speech from Larry Lessig, a strong advocate for copyright reform, and it's an entertaining presentation of the issues at hand.

The Tubes Are All Clogged!

Brilliant in its simplicity.

I'm Aware, Alright! I'm Aware!

What, praytell, does this video have to do with anything? Oh, right. Silly me. Breast cancer awareness. Of course it does. It's taking something that's predominantly male, involving boobies, and wrapping it up in breast cancer awareness.



Fuck you. It has nothing to do with that. It's an excuse for men to stare at boobs and pretend like it's something noble. And FUCK YOU about breast cancer awareness.

We're all aware! We ARE AWARE. Trust me. We all know how bad it is. You want to help? Stop spending money on awareness and start donating to research clinics. America, stop buying little pink stickers down at the fucking Piggly Wiggly and acting like you've done something.

The plague of stickers showing our support for Breast Cancer research or "our troops," is driving me up a wall. You know what having one of those stickers tells me? It tells me that you're an asshole. You're an asshole who acts self-righteous about things instead of doing something.

You know what you should support? Breast cancer research awareness. Support awareness that cancer research in this country is a mess of slapdash clinics working in secret, ignoring each other, and failing to communicate and collaborate. Support that shit. Support systems whereby groups and companies work together and draw from a centralized pool of donations. I don't know, have a fucking March of Dimes, just cure that shit.

If you have a pink sticker on your car, or have EVER said "breast cancer awareness" seriously and in context, I fucking hate you.

Continued Stratification

I wrote a review of Chipotle for my Watery Gourmet blog where I referred to the restaurant as the new fast food. As America's palate grew, be it caused by just greater interconnectedness or the Food Network, traditional fast food would fade and be supplanted to a degree by higher-quality food.

This is definitely happening. Burger King, Arby's, and Wendy's are all facing difficult times. McDonald's has managed growth, but is that at the expense of Chipotle or other fast food joints? I suspect it's the latter.

I also suspect that McDonald's has been aware of this market shift for a long time, going all the way back into the early 1990's when they created the Arch Deluxe. We're seeing it to an increasing degree, with McDonald's selling lattes, Dunkin' Donuts selling panini sandwiches and deli meat, and Subway overhauling their entire menu a number of years back.

Again, if you watch documentaries like Food Inc. or Super Size Me, you'll hear all of the arguments against fast food and the government subsidized cheapness of it. Cows are treated poorly, meat is of low quality, and as long as the food won't kill you, they'll sell it.

Ok, I exaggerate a bit on that last one, but it's obvious that the price point is of greatest interest to the fast food companies. The introduction of the dollar menu by Wendy's has pushed the entire industry to, effectively, a race to the bottom. The primary goal is to lower prices, but that will inevitably mean lower-quality foods. And, what with McDonald's and Dunkin' pushing out higher quality stuff, that none of them want to be part of that race.

For evidence of this, just look to the recent lawsuits between Burger King franchisees and BK corporate. The $1 double cheeseburger was actually losing money in an attempt to grab customers from the other dirt-cheap competitors. A race to the bottom means a race to zero profits.

But in much the same way as there is growing stratification in the economic and educational worlds, will we actually see increased delineation between classes in the world of food? Where the only people going to the cheap places are those to whom price is the primary determinant? Because there's certainly a market segment for whom price is more important than quality. How far will that market separate from the market where they'll pay for extra quality like Chipotle or Panera Bread? Will we get to a point where people go to McDonald's to have slop shoveled into their mouths while anyone who can afford to do so goes elsewhere, thus perpetuating a fat, ignorant, and poor lower class?

That just sounds horrible. That's Time Machine/Soilent Green level shit. But is it also inevitable? Is the necessary end result of classic capitalism social stratification perpetuated by the levels themselves because of economic forces? The lower class wants cheap food, for obvious reasons, but that only serves to send them ever-lower on the SES ladder.

That's the classic conservative model, where those that deserve a good life rise to the top. The classic liberal model would be free, good food to all. Obviously, the classic liberal model is too expensive and pie-in-the-sky to work, but is the conservative model, while feasible, what we want? Do we want to live in a world where the lower class are all but fated to stay fat, dumb, and poor?

I know that I don't. I'm a free-market capitalist like the day is long, but if that world is the end result of capitalist forces, I don't want it. I want stops and measures in place to stop that slide. We got out of that shit in the 1800's and I don't want to go back.

I'm not making a moral statement about that, mind you. I don't think that it is amoral for poor people to die in the streets. Nor is it amoral for other people to not care. But that's a nasty world in which I wouldn't want to live.

I remain hopeful. I love capitalism and democracy because both systems have pressure release valves, as I call them, built into the nature of the system. Democracy can get unbelievably broken, like it is now, but once the pressure gets bad enough, we throw all the bums out... Unlike old political systems which generally required violent revolution. Capitalism is based on the money. If the social system underlying the economics gets so out of whack that huge chunks of the populace can barely live, it collapses and we start again. At what point the system is broken enough for that to happen is a matter for the academics, but that is the backstop for the entire mess.

Appalicious

The Apple App store has had something of a controversy. Long story short, Apple expunged most of the sexual apps from the marketplace. This included pretty much anything involving boobs except for apps from major developers.

There have been countless words spilt on the subject, but one element that hasn't been discussed is the nature of the two genders vis-à-vis the iPhone and the programs for it.

One of the biggest problems for gender science is that, even if differences can be experimentally discovered between men and women, it's very difficult to determine whether those differences are the result of anything evolutionary or biological or from social and societal mechanisms. One of the biggest issues with this potential confounding variable is that society is still male-dominated.

We've certainly made progress, but there's still a huge gap in which sex drives the societal dialog. Movies are all written by men. TV is dominated by men. Men dominate advertising firms. Men decide how society presents certain subjects. For example, what is sexy? Sexy is heavily affected by pop culture and male advertisers determine what pop culture is. Again, this is changing but is still a strong influence.

Aside from the usual attacks on the good ol' boys that keep women out of the power structure, is there something else? I think there is, and the app store provides me a little evidence in support of this. Namely, sex sells, as we all know, and is the male sex drive (I'm grouping all aspects of sexual behavior in the term) so strong that it simply drowns out other things?

Look at the app store. iPhone users are roughly equal, with a slight skew towards male, but in less than two years, the app store became dominated by male-oriented sexualized apps. Weather... with boobs. Calendar... with boobs. In very short order, the entire app store had sexual apps dominating the top ten of multiple app categories.

I won't bother discussing the manifold reasons why this could be the case, just suffice it to say that it is the case. Where the hell do we go from there? Apple had to make a public-image decision to shut down that aspect of the app store because it didn't want every new user of an iPhone, be it straight or gay, male or female, to have their first experience with apps be soft-core porn aimed at straight men.

Is sexual culture dominated by the male perspective not because of sexism, but because classic economics dictates that is what will happen? The app store was a new market. Its genesis was in as liberated as a time as any in history. A new platform, a new product, and a company that appealed to both sexes. Less than two years later, it was nothing but fart-noise apps and boobies. If Apple wasn't the overlord of the market, and the market was allowed to operate entirely on free-market principles, there would have been nothing to stop it from becoming dominated by the male perspective.

So I ask again, where the hell do we go from here? Is any free market economic system doomed to be dominated by the male perspective? Or is this simply a symptom of women not being completely free, or not feeling that way, to express themselves in these systems? Perhaps because systems like this have been so classically male that the women don't even bother trying to make their voices heard.

It's an annoying prospect. The app store issue was consternating because it painted a very negative portrait of men, at least to me. One of the greatest technical innovations in history... used to dispense soft-core smut. My, how we've advanced. It's all so infuriating for someone like me, who is very interested in how and about what other people think. If my perceptions are colored by a world designed for and by men, what do I learn? Nothing! I learn nothing about other people who happen to be women. And worse still, it hurts those women's (Firefox spell check wants me to change that to "womenfolk's") quest for self knowledge, since their cognitions are colored by a society that objectifies them (nothing against objectification) and only looks at sex and male-female interactions from a male perspective.

That's damaging! Self knowledge is perhaps the most important type of knowledge there is, and the male society does damage to women by preventing them from having a level emotional ground from which to embark on self analysis. And how can you blame them for having a skewed perception of themselves when all they see of the world is breasts and farts?

A Really Good Chair

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

I'm a design fanatic. I'm also a psychologist (sort of). This was an incredibly cute combination of both.

Video Game Cover Designs

Kotaku has an incredibly interesting interview with a graphic artist discussing how crappy box art for video games are in the United States.

He laments how cover art for movies and books can be much more interpretive and abstract than the default "Hero + Logo = Box art" formula. And I agree with him; video game covers are pretty bad.

But I disagree with his assertion that movie covers are any better. The VAST majority of DVD covers and movie posters are the exact same thing. I didn't use his fomula, but I referred to them as facecovers. Pick up any DVD at Wal-Mart, or go to Amazon, go to the movie section and bring up a big-ass list of DVD's. It's all a bunch of faces. Hell, some are nothing but a giant face.

The only movies that break the mold are the special editions. The ones designed to look a little special. Take, for example, the recent release of Inglorious Basterds...


It's a well-designed cover, but it's just an exercise in wedging as many faces into it as possible. They did a good job of it, but, man. So, now, take the movie's two-disc special edition.


It's amazing! It's as though the box designers are totally aware that the default design looks like the default design, and they exploit that to make the special edition cover look better.

I suppose then, if that's the case, they're brilliant. Do something for so long it looks like shit, then sell the ones that don't look like shit for more money because people want it. I like this explanation better than the interviewee's, where they simply recognize that hard-core fans are more forgiving of odd images. I think that they're just more critical of crappy covers.

Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better (Kotaku.com)

Ladmags, Cosmo, and Magazines for Me.

I used to get subscriptions to both Playboy and Rolling Stone. In both cases, I just got tired of the magazine's voice. I really did read Playboy for the articles. Frankly, I think most people who read it do so for the articles at this point. It's barely porn, and just having naked women posing there is terrible masturbation material. But those articles were the same damned thing over and over.

I think Playboy became something of an anachronism, and this is evident it its formulation of what it means to be male. In the Playboy world, "male" is a state of being where one is confident to the point of being weird, dressed in expensive clothing, smokes cigars, fucks or could fuck every woman he comes across, and drives a Ferrari.

Rolling Stone didn't have a specific formulation of masculinity, but instead is just very male-oriented. One only needs look as far as the "Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Almost universally male and white. The magazine spends most of its time ranting about republicans and discussing rock & roll, which is mostly male, and rap, which is mostly male. Females usually show up in the celebrity photos section, frequently on the beach.

Just look at the covers. I went through Rolling Stone's cover archives and counted all the covers with men, women, and then non-sexy-symbol women.

Like this. She's attractive, but she's not on the cover simply to look hot. She looks rock & roll.

This one is blatantly used for sex purposes. So now you understand my criteria. I also ignored political covers, covers with an ensemble multi-sex cast, and anything about current events.

Total count? From 2000 to 2009, One hundred and fifty-five covers with men, sixty with women. And of those women, twenty-seven were there just get hard over. Further, of the women, eight were either Madonna or Britney Spears. According to RS, 58% of their readership is male, so I guess it's not surprising that they cater to male readers to a degree. But I just don't understand how an active thinker wouldn't get bored with this.

Or take the newest issue of DETAILS, which fashions itself as the younger, puerile, slightly retarded brother of Esquire, discussing the remasculation of the American male. Remasculation?! Ok. Fuck you. That's all I can say to that. To even assume that we need to somehow be given our masculinity back, and to have the audacity to advertise that you know shit-about-shit to write about it, or tell us what it is, that just blows my mind.

What the fuck is going on in pop-culture, today? Are white men the world over utterly threatened by women? Like those entirely insane Super Bowl ads that had this simmering misogyny underlying every situation. How vapid and shallow must a man be to find this nonsense entertaining and appealing? How could any man find the voice of Playboy, DETAILS, or Esquire stimulating for a long period of time? How does he not get bored?!

Fuck writing for men! Fuck writing for this trite, pigeon-holed concept of masculinity that demands every story be framed in such a way as to discuss the subject of kinky sex and Lamborghinis. Write for people, not men.

This is coming from a male perspective, obviously. I'm sure there are legions of women out there who feel similarly to Cosmo or Redbook. But at least those magazines rarely wrap themselves up in fake, pseudo-intellectual, classy, wannabe haute-couture pretenses. There's nothing classy about them. Cigars are nasty, most people think Ferrari drivers are assholes, and discussing Plato in public makes you look like a dick. Reading GQ doesn't make you intellectual or classy. It makes you look like that fourteen-year-old, dripping with Axe, wearing a Gucci belt he bought on eBay that was too big so he had to drill extra holes. No one wants to fuck you, and any woman who does will give you the clap.

I want stuff written for me as me, not for me as a MAN. I'm not a man. I'm me. I am who I am, and that is a person with certain interests. Write about those things. Write it with a certain personality that makes you unique, and I'll lap it up. The alternative is where we're at now. I'm bored, I don't read your shitty magazines, and an increasingly large number of people don't either.

No. Instead they're reading AskMen.com, which is, somehow, even worse. Ugh. Men suck.