Bad Ideas

Don't wear a dark bowtie with a dark polka dotted shirt.

Don't turn left during rush hour.

Don't try to rationalize your belief in God.

Cancelling someone is not really a thing.  They don't go away when you do it.  All you really do when you cancel someone is declare yourself an ass.  Every day is a new chance at redemption for everyone.  Who are you to judge?  Who are you to police?  Think you're immune?   Don't contribute to it.  Curb your reflexes.  Listen to your skeptical filter.  Don't give trolls fodder.  

Don't compliment someone by calling them a "boss".  

Don't opine when a person is telling you they were abused by someone.  You weren't there.

In fact, don't rush to judgment about anything. Don’t jump to conclusions.

The tunafish sandwich wrapped in cellophane in the drugstore cooler is not even as good as you think it will be. 

Make it a goal to stop ordering from Amazon. Think of it as an exercise in free will. First learn not to go reflexively to Amazon when you need something.  (Hint: they are not the only outfit that retails online.)  Then keep doing that until you don't need Amazon for anything, let alone everything anymore.  Do it now while it's still possible.

Don't start smoking. Don't gain weight. Don't quit smoking when you're trying to lose weight.

Don't jump on bandwagons.  Don't create a bandwagon for people to jump on.

As a rule, murdering people is not a good idea.

When you talk to your computer, do you have any idea who you're really talking to?

Don't throw out the tools you need until you have a replacement for them.

If you favor a soul patch, a vest, and a thin brimmed trilby, you're probably not the type who can pull off a soul patch, a vest and a thin brimmed trilby.

Don't fall for hoaxes.  If it sounds too good to be true, don't forward it to me in an email.

If you don’t have the imagination to stop ordering from Amazon, at least stop rush ordering from Amazon.  You’re not rushing Jeff Bezos; you’re rushing a very underpaid and abused worker.  Don’t be the reason an Amazon worker gets screwed.

Say no to credit cards.

Don't settle for just any idea for a blog post.

Don't betray the people.

Don't scold.*

Don't try to feed a strange raccoon by hand.

~~~~~~~~~~

* oops

Theory of Change

Ning Wang

A major product revision is pushed out, touted as a vast improvement over previous product. The old product is no longer supported, requiring users to migrate to the new product.  It turns out to be a spotty improvement on a few esoteric technical things that maybe some engineers are cool with.  For everything else it's buggy, slow, and makes life hell for users of the previous version.  Eventually after years of painful customization, setting adjustment, bug detection, patching and hot fixing, the product finally becomes useable for end users.  

Time for another major version.  You have no choice in this.  The old version is out of date, expiring, no longer supported.

It's a guarantee that the product you are using, and may even have become accustomed to will be improved before you are ready for it, probably even against your will.  None of it is up to you.  Not the impetus to overhaul it.  Not the aspects of it that are overhauled or what happens to the parts you have come to rely on.  Not the quality of the upgrade.  Not what's new and in the way and not what's swiped from you.  You can't predict what's in store for you.  But one thing you can be sure of is that it will work nothing like it did in the demonstration that warned you it was coming. and that it will make life difficult for you for some time to come.

And you can be sure that after years of hot fixes patches and updates to repair what it broke (often breaking something else that has to be patched in the process), it will eventually reach a point where you are comfortable with it.  And then it's time for another major version.  After generations of repetition of this cycle of regenesis, new versions may never reach a State of Goodness, but in comparison to the threat of what is to come, usefulness can come to be seen as a relative term.

Why does this happen?  Why when the product that you use from day to day approaches utility is it swapped out for a new and improved version that takes everything back to zero.  This is partly the fault of those who administer the new software that you use. It was on them to map everything you relied on in the old reliable system to some assumed counterpart in the alien tongue of the useless new system.  Given the massive complexity of the task they have, as often unwitting ambassadors of the "revolution" you all are being subjected to, they can surely be somewhat forgiven for not identifying (or for identifying and de-prioritizing) every thing that you find missing on day one of the rollout.  But they are as much victims of this as you are.  It was just their burden first.

If you trace it back to the software company, you will probably be surprised to discover that there too, the employees on the front line are not the perpetrators of this misery, but merely the earliest victims of it.  They too were just getting into the swing of things when the new direction of the company pulled the rug from under them.   No the problem lies in the decision of the executives of the software company to declare the obsolescence of the first version.  The feelings on the part of the designers, programmers, users of the product is immaterial.  

There is a custom of software companies to recruit a "user community" to identify areas of the current version that need improvement.  Sounds democratic, but in practice, these are not the users who will be subjected to the change.  This is not really even a community. It's more like a league of nations, of firms with different cultures, different needs, different experiences, different competencies, all competing to get items they were tasked to bring to the table, each reflecting their idiosyncratic whims and tastes, represented in the list of enhancements of the current version.  And it does give credence and form to the rationale for creating a new version to subject everyone to.  But could the "user community" say, "Don't create a new version! Fix this one!  Then leave it alone!"?  No, they could not.  Because their very reason for being is to determine what's in the next version.

It's a bit crazy.  It's ass backward.  But the reason for being of the software company is not the version they sell that sets the ball in motion for their latest victims, but the Version That's Coming That Will Make the Version You're Using Obsolete!   It's a change machine.  No one questions the wisdom of this because that's how it is.  

If you trace it back even further you could blame the business schools where the starters of the company learned their trade.  Change that no one asked for is a driver of our economic system.  The executives of the firms that use the software are steeped in it too.  They're not going to be caught out paying good money for old software.  But it is also a driver of our political system because those guys come from the same places. The people we send to our legislatures are our "user community". Their mission is to keep the wheels of government going which is going to involve the passage of bills and the formation of committees to study the feasibility of convening to discuss the establishment of commissions.  The mission of government is not to improve what we have but to keep the sausage coming.   It's why we get Modifications to Code 14c, and Condemnations of Acts of War and Anti-BDS legislation and Exemptions of Nursing Homes from Liability for Cost Cutting during Pandemics, and State Flowers, but we don't get Universal Healthcare.

Burden of Proof

 First, I gasped.   The image I came across in my routine internet wanderings a while back is shocking.  An apparent relic of a shameful past, it shows a good-sized officious looking European decked out in the costume of the colonizer - boots, the formal suit of a functionary, pith helmet- seated in a basket strapped to the forehead of a small woman dressed in what appears to be the traditional costume of some subjugated dark skinned people.  The woman is stooped over to bear on her back the weight of the man, who rests, arms relaxed in his lap, comfortably settled in for the ride.  The man gazes at the camera imperiously.  It's hard not to read entitlement in his expression.

In retrospect I can't be certain whether the picture was understood first or if the impression was aided along by the caption: "Bengali woman carrying her British master on her back, circa 1900."  Accompanying the shock is an almost aesthetic satisfaction at the sheer perfection of this photographic encapsulation of all that European colonialism has ever stood for.  The utter contempt for the back-- let alone the dignity-- of his colonized subject.  First, the gasp, then the smile of recognition at having your worst notions of Western imperialism incontrovertibly confirmed.  

And then the doubt... Does using a petite woman as transport serve any sort of purpose other than reprehensibility for the sake of reprehensibility?  Was this transportation; was it a punishment of some kind; or was something else going on?  Could this sort of thing have somehow been customary to the region before the coming of the Europeans?  How would something like this have developed?  The more thought I gave to it, the less certain I was that I had a proper understanding of what I was seeing.  After a quick google search turned up plenty of hits featuring the photograph but no more information about it, I scanned through the comments of the post looking for some sort of pushback.  Buried deep within, I found it: a link to a debunking of it by John Kelly on medium.com.  By Kelly's admission, the debunking did not come easy, but after sticking with it for months of work that involved a bit of internet sleuthing, communication with  scholars across the globe and some primary source translation, he solved it.  He was the right person for the job.   His account of the ordeal makes for instructive, enlightening reading.

The thumbnail: It was a stunt, performed amicably and voluntarily by all participants.  The woman is Burmese, not Bengali (or Indian or African as some captionings on the web have it).  The man is French, not British (the pith helmet gives him away).  He's a visitor, not a colonizer.  The basket was commonly used in the area, traditionally for transporting both frail elderly and the young as well as for carrying goods.  The man was invited to ride by the woman's husband, who was serving as translator to the Frenchman, and it was offered with his wife's un-coerced consent as a demonstration of her strength which the Frenchman had remarked upon admiringly.  The photograph commemorates the feat as a memento; it does not document an atrocity.

The truth does not erase the crime that it is mistaken for.  But it is freeing.

That's Just Super

I had an incorrect intuition about the apparent ubiquity of super hero movies these days.  Based on the proliferation of titles and the inescapability of them among the choices in online catalogs and streaming services, I was convinced that their "popularity"  was the inevitable consequence of their being the only kind of movie getting produced.  I was wrong.   While I could not find data for a “superhero genre” on the sites that concern themselves with movie numbers, I learned that while the action and adventure categories of which they are a sub-genre constitute together approximately only 15% of the total number of movies made annually by genre -- number 1 being run-of-the-mill Oscar fodder dramas-- they earn nearly 50% of the box office.  I found it hard to get a handle on how much is spent on movie production budgets by genre but one study has shown that action and adventure have among the lowest returns on investment of any, which could be a reflection of the size of their budgets.  (The category with the greatest return by far: Documentary!)   

What this tells me is that contrary to my intuition, superhero movies are not what the public is being force-fed.  It's what they want.  The hype surrounding them is merely a consequence of the size of their budgets.  

My intuition was of course based on my own tastes about them, which puts super hero movies near the bottom of the list when it comes to choosing entertainment.  It isn't that I consider them childish and shallow.  On the contrary, I lost interest in them when they became dark, deep and novelistic in the netherlands of the 70s.  My consciousness of them was formed in the golden age of the previous decade when the earth looked like a Rand McNally globe from outer space, the sun had squiggly lines surrounding it and henchmen still wore black masks and Kangol caps; a time when supermen were supermen and supervillains were supervillains.  None of this psychological and human superhero melodrama for me.  I like my superheroes like I like my presidents -- vapid and innocuous.   Sure it made no sense that someone who could make time go backward by reversing the rotation of the planet would once an episode find himself helplessly bound by a common thug, but there had to be some dramatic tension.   But I suspect part of the reason for their popularity continues to be the opportunity they afford for vicarious experience of what, in a world in which it's easy to feel helpless, it would be like to experience power over the forces of evil.

In fact, I've been thinking about super heroes and super hero movies because I finally have an answer to the party game inspired by them of naming the secret power you'd want to have if you could choose only one.  It has to be limited to one because what superpower would you not want to have if your choices were unlimited?  Imperviousness to bullets, knives and nooses would be an immediate reducer of anxiety. The strength of a volcano would come in handy in so many situations -- jar opening, subway door prying, getting out of bed.  The ability to fly like lightning, to shrink to the size of an atom or grow to the size of a building, to stretch like rubber, breathe underwater, see through walls... who wouldn't want these?  But the game stipulates only one selection.

The answer came to me one day watching some annoying thing on tv-- the news, corporate PR, one of those dishonest PSAs from an undisclosed PAC, a true crime show... I don't remember which, but it was the sort of thing that raises my temperature and forces a flood of clear and concise invective to form in my mind. It occurred to me that the power I would most like to have is laserlike eloquence.  Not merely a talent for words but a superior ability to use them to penetrate the mind of my foe with incontrovertible truth and defeat the evil that motivates them by persuading them to come to the light.  Under cover of night he enters the chambers of his adversaries and whispers Truth to them in their sleep to make them dream of redemption.  No evil mastermind is too great to be tamed by his words -- not the murderer for jealousy or insurance money,   not the billionaire would-be conqueror of outer space, not the head of the apartheid state nor his enablers, not the Corporate CEO, not the evil funder of think tanks and foundations.  How useful would that be?  I could use it right now for instance.

It might not make for a blockbuster movie.  But I'm looking for power, not for entertainment.  On the other hand, if a Bizarro Superman movie gets produced I'll be first in line for tickets.