Category Archives: Incentives

An explosive tale about airport security

Incentives, Pals, Save.the.world, security, ,

I really really dug this post about carrying gunpowder through airport security.

You can’t create a secure airport that is worth traveling through.  The solution isn’t to figure out every possible way that people can attack airports and prevent those…  That’s an insolvable problem.  A better way is to find people who are trying to hurt us and deal with them in a legal, just way.

People who are trying to hurt us face many of the same problems we do.  They need networks, support, materials, etc.  They also recruit and are looking for moral support.

These seem like much richer avenues of investigation.

The NYC Government IT has given up.

Dev, Incentives, Pals, , , ,

My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.

Retweet by DOT of 311's tweet that parking rules are suspended

Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there.   The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses.  IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.

So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.

Why the Business Hates the Software Developers

Dev, Incentives, , , , , ,

Inspired by “Why I Hate Frameworks” “Why I Hate Frameworks”

So I wanted a custom spice rack, one that would really help my restaurant, but I didn’t want to build it myself.  I’m no carpenter.  I hired one though.
“Can you build me a spice rack? Here’s what I need – “
“Just a sec,” he interrupted. “I’m going to start building some hammers while you talk.”
“Don’t you already have some hammers?”
“Sure, but those were for past projects.  There’s better ways to build hammers these days.”
“Here – I have a hammer already.  It got left behind by the guy who hung the pictures in the restaurant.  Use this.”
“SIR! I don’t think that using a framing hammer is going to help us develop this spicerack.  Please!”

Satoshi Kanazawa cannot think.

Incentives, Pals, Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

That this has not proven to be a handicap for someone employed by the London School of Economics is astounding and reflects poorly on them.

I found him through the stupidest, most sexist article I have read this year.

He argues:

The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex: there are no women in their relationships to say no.

This is the the point where I immediately knew Kanazawa cannot think. 1  Does he think that gay men do not hold jobs or have careers?  That they get nothing done?  That women do not want to have sex? 2   It takes but a moment’s reflection for any thinking person to look at that paragraph after having written it.  In a room where candles are going out from lack of oxygen one should still see the contradictions and quickly delete it.

Kanazawa cemented my opinion in the next paragraph.

This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software, in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.  There would be no civilization, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice.

Surely he is aware that gay warriors, musicians, authors, poets, artists, scientists might be a slight rebuttal to his idea?

I no longer believe that he is aware of this.  I read another article where Kanazawa advocates killing every human being in the mideast as a solution to terrorism.  His list of articles is a grand collection of logical fallacies.

I do not approve of ad-hominem arguments. However, if  Satoshi Kanazawa makes any statement, I would be biased to think the statement is wrong.

  1. I would also guess that he does not or cannot read the news, let alone know any gay people.  How else could he have missed the great number of gay men struggling for the right to marry?   (back)
  2. Later in the article he reveals that his problem is small sample size.  Women do not want to have sex with Satoshi Kanazawa, and he generalizes from that.   (back)

That Loathsome Phrase

Incentives, Pals, , ,

“Someone has too much free time!”

My hackles rise,  my humours boil, and my smile disappears when I hear this.   It is a defense of sloth, a milquetoast reproach of work and effort and love.  But this post isn’t about that horror of a phrase.  It’s about the folks who use their free time.

The world is lucky to have people with hobbies, people with passions and obsessions.  To dismiss their effort instead of appreciating it is an insult.

I have friends who work their day jobs, but also run Etsy stores, or take time to produce art or write frequently updated blogs.  These people enrich the world.

They do not have more free time.  They are just using it differently.  Consider what we do with our free time, consider we are always approaching death, consider our time as a currency of the current – will we  invest it or spend it?

Will you write?  1 Will you code? 2  Will you design? 3 Will you play?  4Will you craft? 5 Will you photograph 6?  Will you volunteer?  7  How will you enrich the world?

Will you produce or will you just consume?

We don’t have to change our whole lives to do a bit more.  Sometimes, all it takes is committing to one weekend.   Constraints mean scaling back to picking a doable task, and then doing it.

I’d love to hear about what you are doing with your free time.

  1. Twanna writes about sexuality in her off time.  Tove’s fashion analysis blog wasn’t a job requirement, but a work of love. Georgia is writing a book and hopefully I’ll be linking to the amazon page sometime.  (back)
  2. Aaron fights in the courts for software freedom, then finds the time to make free software like identifox, the best identi.ca client.  (back)
  3. Erica’s jewelry is great.  I love her Birdie TV pendant.  (back)
  4. Katie Hasty writes about the music for her day job, but also plays in Numbers and Letters.  (back)
  5. Jess’s craft shop is a side gig, and Michela -how does she come up with all of these amazing quilts!   (back)
  6. Oh, the photo geeks I know… They are so good, it is intimidating.  Chris Restrepo, Darrick Coleman, Michael Mallin, Chris Acton – but you don’t have to be as good as those guys.  My flickr contacts page is full of folks who are just making some art or documenting their lives.   (back)
  7. Katie Schmid worked her ass off as a law student and now a lawyer, but still serves as director of the Newtown Creek Alliance.  (back)

Some good advice to my friends who are terrified of this job market

Economics, Get.rich.quick, Incentives, Pals, , , , ,

Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school.. Many of my friends are considering this sort of move. It’s a sucker bet for a number of reasons that Penelope outlines. My basic argument is her last one.

Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time.

You put in many years of avoiding adult life and prolonging adolescence, then commit to a career you have no real idea about. When I thought I might want to be a lawyer, I worked for a law firm and was firmly told by many lawyers that this is the worst job ever. When I thought I wanted to be on the news, I became a news reporter and learned why the news structurally has to be terrible. You learn more by doing.

Of course, that’s coming from a guy who hasn’t gone to graduate school. I still think though, that if you are lost, or unsure, the general best bet is to say yes to lots of opportunities and ditch the ones you hate. You will get somewhere by staying in motion, and learn more things.

Books: Supercapitalism

Books, Economics, Incentives, Reviews, Save.the.world

Robert Reich wrote a very surprising book on the interplay of capitalism and democracy. His argument is that we’re seeing a lot of problems in our democracy because we have demanded too much of corporations. If, instead, we strip away some of our fiction that corporations are people, we won’t expect them to be noble, or fair, or honorable.

Instead, we should see corporations for what they are. They are legal contractual agreements between groups of people in order to generate profits. They have no purpose or concern other than the flow of capital and profit. Just as we don’t ask a gun to distinguish between good directions to shoot in or bad directions to shoot in, we shouldn’t ask corporations to do anything but obey our laws and generate as much money as they legally can.

At the same time, we shouldn’t allow corporations any entrance into democratic policy, since they aren’t people. Corporations shouldn’t have the ability to sue to overturn laws or any rights to free speech. Since they are legal agreements without morals, without any concept of right or wrong, corporations have no business participating in democratic politics. They aren’t, after all, people.

People can say things like: “I quite like cheap sneakers, but I don’t want to allow anyone to employ children to make them.” Corporations can’t do that. So people can get together and decide what rules corporations play by.

Now, this is good. It’s a good thing to have a book that connects the dots between corporate influence on politics, the changing marketplace, the economics of globalization and the legal concepts underlying corporations. I just wish it didn’t take so long. The last chapter, “A Citizen’s Guide to Supercapitalism” contains the only real proposals and it is 16 pages. The previous 208 pages are all lead-in. Frankly, I got it early on. The book didn’t need quite that much paper.

To be fair, I did have some good insights while reading.

  • A good portion of the decrease in economic security resulted from container ships and other technological advances which led to a decrease in the security of large corporate profits that supported the deals between labor and management.
  • People want to live on charming Main streets, but the people who work there can’t afford to live there. My neighborhood, Cobble Hill, is fantastically charming, but I couldn’t work there and afford to live there. On the flip side, I can afford to pay rent there, but I couldn’t afford to buy there. I earn around 5 times my first salary, but I can’t afford to purchase in the neighborhood I rent in. Oh, how I’ve worked the numbers but it ain’t happening.
  • Fascinating nugget: Sam is a City employee, and her pension is administered by William Thompson, the city comptroller. He has heavily invested in the Fremont Mining Corporation which owns open pit gold mines in Papua New Guinea. They seem to dump toxic waste in fragile river ecosystems, which is legal since they seem to bribe the local officials to make it legal. This sucks, and Sam would never support it but Bill Thompson (he’s now a potential mayoral candidate) just is in charge of maximizing Sam’s pension.

NASA being slowly dismantled

Incentives, Money, Pals, Save.the.world

Thought my pals might want to read this entry I found from Bruce Sterling about the Planetary Society’s campaign to fight for the mission and budget of NASA . It was bad enough when this administration removed “to understand and protect the Earth” as a primary goal of NASA. It just gets worse, and because there isn’t a clear bodycount, it isn’t going to be big news.

Go check out that article and then maybe give the planetary society a donation and sign their petition. I’m going to give them $20 and sign the petition. If you email me what you’ve donated, I’ll also match what you’ve donated.

The problem of spam

Browsers, Captchas, Economics, Incentives, Spam

Been reading a lot about spam problems lately.

It isn’t a problem for me, since I’m not a high value target for spam. The other reason is that I’ve raised the bar by a very tiny amount. CAPTCHAs (those type the letters in the picture tests) are designed to raise the bar for spammers, and I’ve got kind of a unique one on this blog.

My comments aren’t hosted on blogspot, but rather on a site called haloscan. That tiny little difference has meant that I have never displayed a single comment spam ever. Automated comment spam occasionally is done, but it is always done using the normal blogspot comment fields. I get notices of these when they happen, but they aren’t a worry because they aren’t displayed ever or crawled by search engines.

This works because spam is a problem of economics. It takes very little work to be not worth the effort.
This is also a reason that firefox tends to be more secure than ie6. Fewer folks use it and therefore its less lucrative to write firefox exploits. So one of the surprising things that would tend to make ie6 and the web more secure is if opera, safari, and firefox took off!

Let’s not applaud yet.

Get.rich.quick, Incentives, ,

I’m just waking up on sunday morning and I throw on the news. NBC has found this family of butter trolls and given them a nutritionist and a physical trainer man. It’s three months later and they show the before picture of dad. He was 303 pounds, 6’3. Three months and he’s lost 28 pounds. He looks essentially the same. Maybe his big toe is smaller. Same fat face, same man tits, same jiggly neck.

This little stick of a human interest anchorwoman, so chirpy you can practically see the coke eating her nasal passages away, she asks him what the reaction from family and friends has been. He looks exactly the same.

“Oh, they are all saying ‘Wow!'”

I bet they really did say wow to convince him he’s doing well.