Ideal Jobs

I've seen several people whose job title includes "Evangelist," implying that what they get paid to do is be enthusiastic about things.

That sounded like a cushy job, but I'm really not that good at enthusiasm -- my talents lie much more in the other direction.

So I'm wondering now if there's any company who wants to hire an Anti-Evangelist, a guy who explains why every new idea is horrible and won't work -- I'd be great at it!

(If this were 2000 years ago, I could get the gig to tell Julius "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." That would be right up my alley.)

Identities

I'm not sure if this makes sense, but it's been bubbling up in my head, so let me try to put it into words. (And I actually started this on Wednesday, before the latest furor about Manning, if that matters. It was sparked by something entirely separate, a dismissive little circle-jerk of people complimenting each other on their correct attitudes about "yellowface" and similar things.)

If you're relatively modern and thoughtful about such things (which might require being relatively young, or relatively to the left side of the political spectrum), you generally believe that gender is not defined by birth -- that there are trans people, and intersex people, and various other permutations. That doesn't mean that a person can choose a gender, but instead a belief that gender is somewhat socially defined and to a large extent a matter of presentation. People thus present themselves as close to how they see themselves as they can, or as close as their society allows them. That may entail surgery, or clothing choices, or anything in between.

And so it's generally rude (at best) to insist that a transman is "really" a woman, or vice versa -- that person is the one to define that label, not any third party.

(And I broadly agree with that; it's not always that simple in real life, but treating someone as the kind of person they want to be and are trying to be is usually good manners.)

But people who believe that also seem to believe that race -- which is vastly less biologically defined than gender is, to the point of being entirely socially constructed, from the ground up -- is immutable, and "passing" as another race is one of the worst things an actor (for example) can do.

So there seems to be a weird mental disconnect -- a white man, for example, is much more "white" than he is "man," even though that's the precise opposite of the biological realities. I'd get it if the racial component were clearly political -- rooted in wanting some kind of authenticity, and demanding that -- but it seems to be reflexive, like a prejudice or the reaction to touching a hot stove.

My question is: if it's fine for a person of one gender (by birth or upbringing) to present or play or act as another gender, why is it wrong for the precisely parallel act when it comes to race?

Say No to Dope

Now, I'm not a big sports fan. I used to watch football in college semi-seriously, and I was more-or-less a Mets fan for almost two decades until I had kids. But times and priorities change, and I haven't seen more than a few minutes of a game in years. (I do sometimes watch a bit of baseball when flipping channels in odd hotel rooms, since it's soothing -- but there I don't really care who's playing.)

So that establishes the (lack of) my bona fides.

I don't care about doping in the slightest. More than that, I'm not surprised in the least when it happens -- in fact, I expect it. I don't think it's a big deal, and I don't think it will ever go away -- if I were magically in charge of all sports, I'd let athletes do whatever the hell they wanted with their own bodies, as long as they were adults. This all seems really obvious to me, and I'm continually surprised when I see people getting all worked up -- as if it's a personal affront -- when there's yet another inevitable doping scandal.

Here's the thing: professional athletes are the second-most competitive people on earth. (After only professional stock/bond traders.) They've devoted their lives, and in many cases sustained serious, permanent, life-destroying injuries to get to where they are. Their bodies are tools, and they're used to honing those tools to the highest level possible. So my assumption is always that the best -- the most competitive, the ones most driven to succeed at all costs -- will do whatever it takes to win. And thus I expect the top performers will always, by definition, be the ones using prohibited "PETs."

Are you seriously expecting them to avoid using a specific list of chemicals, when those chemicals are proven to make their performance better? Really? After they've been willing to ruin their knees and brains and childhoods just to get a little more speed or strength or power?

I just can't believe that -- the top athletes are always looking for that tiny bit of edge, and they're clearly willing to ignore everything else in life in pursuit of winning at their sport. Ergo, they're going to dope; it's the logical solution.

Sure, it's against the rules, but those are the secondary rules. Because every sport has two sets of rules, and every athlete knows the primary set -- the ones that govern actual play, the ones that decide who wins -- always outrank the technical details of eligibility and paraphernalia and good sportsmanship and the other "nice to have" stuff.

The bodies running those sports will, and should, enforce all of the rules, and catch as many dopers and other violators (bat-corkers, pine-tar-grippers, and so on) as they can -- understanding that no enforcement mechanism can ever be 100% effective. Some dopers will slip through, and never be caught -- I'm sure many of them are in Halls of Fame right now, and will stay there.

But fans that see this level of extreme competition as a moral failing should look in their mirrors: you want those athletes to fight as hard as they can, because you want them to win. Well, this is how to win. It's not pretty, but it works.

And remember: nobody ever talks about how nice it is that they all played fair when your team loses.

The Anti-Woody Allen

This is today's 9 Chickweed Lane, a well-drawn but molasses-slow and idiosyncratic at best comic strip; if its creator allowed commenting on the comic itself, I probably wouldn't bother to post this here:

(click to embiggen)

So, this young man -- I gather he's supposed to be in his twenties -- has an erotic fantasy harem entirely made up of women old enough to be his great-grandmother? The youngest of them is Kelly, who's also been dead the longest (since 1982).

Also, please note that all of these women are dead, and have been dead since at least 2000 -- sure, we'll assume that he knows them all through old movies, but does he live entirely in old movies? (In this strip, that is sadly a possibility.)

Please, creators, remember the old rule: just because you like something, or identify with it, doesn't mean your characters should.

Generational Trolling in Our Time

Certain sectors of the Internet -- those whose ox is being gored this time, mostly -- are complaining about this here Time magazine cover story, which claims that Young People Today are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unlike the upright older generations who, gol-durn it!, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and Built This Here United States.

This is indeed a stupid argument, but it's not a new stupid argument. Time in particular trots it out every few years -- see the following two examples from 2005 and 1990, grabbed quickly and haphazardly -- but all of the lazy wing of American journalism (which is most of it) likes this "we're better than you people, even though you're young and healthy and pretty and thin and have your whole lives in front of you" story, because they are old and crabbed and grumpy and have their entire failed lives burning behind them.

I'm part of Generation X, which was massively vilified in the media throughout the late '80s and early '90s -- remember "slackers?"; that was us -- even though we were very much like other teens and twenty-somethings before us. Folks older than me can chime in about how the mass media similarly demonized hippies, "juvenile delinquents" in the '50s, and all the way back to the flappers of the '20s.

The point is that this is what the media does. They identify a stupid trend, don't bother to check to see if it bears any relationship to reality -- or if they've filed the exact same story every five years for the last seven decades -- and run with it, hoping for attention and ad revenue. You don't have to let the idiots troll you. Just tell them to piss off, and go on about your life.

And remember: in twenty years, you and your age cohort will be the ones complaining about the new generation of Lena Dunhams and Douglas Couplands and Abbie Hoffmans. So you'll get your chance in the smug asshole chair, don't worry.

(Also, an actual journalist named Elspeth Reeve -- one of the few who checks facts and has a historical sense and more than one functional brain cell -- has debunked this for Atlantic Wire already.)

How My Mind Works

I wonder if I'm the only who reads things like this amusing anecdote from Not Always Right and immediately tries to figure out what the unnamed "special effects show, experienced in the form of a walking, guided tour" in a theme park in Orlando could be.

Surely there must be other people who immediately want to know, right?

(And it's got to be Poseidon's Fury, right?)

James Patterson Is Unhappy

So the book business is all aflutter about a recent advertisement by ex-ad man James Patterson, in which he demanded that someone (unspecified) do something (unspecified) about the horrible problems in publishing (unspecified). The ad is histrionic, hectoring, and utterly vague.

(If this is emblematic of the keen sensibility and razor prose that Patterson commands, I feel better for never having read one of his books.)

I don't seem to be the only one confused about his aims; Patterson spoke to Slate yesterday to insist that he has no plans and can't really articulate exactly what the problem with "books, bookstores and libraries" is, but he definitely wants someone to do something to maintain the industry that pays him millions of dollars a year.

On the very unlikely chance Patterson sees this, let me make some suggestions:

• If the problem is that libraries are underfunded, then the solution is to find stronger and more stable streams of funding. Libraries in the US are traditionally maintained and funded on the local level, but a federal program or private foundation could certainly step in to add broad financial support to the entire sector. Such a foundation could be set up relatively quickly by an individual or group of individuals with high personal wealth, and would enjoy broad support in the publishing industry and among the general public.
• If the problem is that bookstores are closing, then the solution is to get more people to buy books in bookstores -- this is a capitalist economy, so demand rules. If that doesn't happen, the next most plausible option would be some kind of non-profit status or preferential tax treatment for physical locations for selling printed matter, to help make those businesses more viable. But, as Yogi Berra said, if nobody wants to come, you can't stop them. And Patterson seems to have missed that large swaths of middle-class retail -- from JCPenney to Best Buy to Staples -- are also in trouble; this is likely a big-box retail problem rather than a book problem.
• If the problem is that big publishers -- primarily among them, the major competitors to Patterson's longtime publishing company -- are merging to better negotiate terms with ever-larger partners and retailers (e.g., Amazon and Apple), then someone first needs to articulate exactly how that is damaging and to whom. There are a lot of medium and small publishing companies; there has not been a notable flood of bankruptcies in that sector recently. If Hachette becomes somewhat less powerful in an industry dominated by Random Penguin on the one hand and Amazon on the other, that may be less than pleasant to Patterson, but it's difficult to see why the rest of us should care.

In short, Patterson needs to first define the problem. There can be no solution if we don't know what we're trying to fix. "Things are changing" is not a problem; it's a description of the world.

A Useful Op-Ed Strategy

Whenever reading an opinion column or signed editorial, it's always wise to consider what benefit the writer could get from the course of action he's suggesting.

For example, just this morning, here's the head of a company that provides bomb-detecting equipment insisting that the federal Office of Bombing Prevention needs to have a major increase in funding.

Hmm. I wonder where that money would go? Perhaps to buy more of Mr. Liscouski's wares?

That's only one very blatant example; in our modern, commoditized "news" economy, there are a thousand more subtle expressions of the same idea: we must do this very urgent thing...which will benefit me.

Today's Political Thought

Say, aren't bombs just as much military weapons as guns are? Even more so, in fact.

So if the Second Amendment is really meant to allow ordinary Americans to have military-grade armament, why on earth wouldn't it cover bombs as well?

It's a shame that ordinary patriotic Americans have to make their own bombs crudely by hand, simply because a fascist repressive government won't let them buy grenades and fuses. I'm sure the Republican leadership in Congress will get right on correcting that horrible imposition on the rightful liberty of patriots.

Things Tom Waits Has Taught Me

"Don't you know there ain't no Devil; that's just God when he's drunk."
 - "Heartattack & Vine"

"There's a lot of things in this world that you're gonna have no use for. And when you get blue, and you've lost all your dreams, there's nothin' like a campfire and a can of beans!"
 - "Lucky Day"

"The women all control the men with razors and with wrists."
 - "In the Colosseum"

"If you want money in your pocket and a top hat on your head, a hot meal on your table and a blanket on your bed, well, today is grey skies, tomorrow is tears. You'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here."
 - "Yesterday Is Here"

"All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble and still have room for you and me."
 - "Misery Is the River of the World"

 "So what's become of the little boys who run away from home? The world just keeps gettin' bigger, once you get out on your own."
  -  "On the Nickel"

"Uncle Biltmore and Uncle William made a million during World War Two. But they're tightwads, and they're cheapskates, and they'll never give a dime to you."
 - "Cemetary Polka"

"And all the rooms they smell like diesel and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here. ... And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear -- "One for every year he's away," she said. Such a crumbling beauty, ah there's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix."
 - "9th & Hennepin"

 "They're alive, they're awake while the rest of the world is asleep. Below the mine shaft roads it will all unfold. There's a world going on underground."
 - "Underground"



And, most importantly:

"Nothin' else matters in this whole wide world when you're in love with a Jersey girl."

Magical Thinking and the Modern World

I just had to re-connect Excel to the local printer; when I went to print a document, I got an error. So I pushed the "connect to printer" button. That didn't work. I pushed it again. A slightly different error, but still no connection. One more push, and the printer was re-connected.

And now I wonder if we moderns are training ourselves to be more susceptible to magical thinking than people living with more obviously mechanistic technology. We turn USB drives over three times before they finally insert, we ritually unplug and plug, turn off and on, and repeatedly hard-restart devices that operate in ways we really don't understand.

We just know the rituals -- if the computer freezes up, try this key combination, then that one, and finally hold down the button if you have to. (And make sure you never let the magic black smoke out of the box; that means it's broken for good.) We know what works, eventually -- but we often have to do the same thing several times, or work down an opaque list of odd button combinations before something does work. But we never get a good sense of the connection between what we did and what happened.

I have no solution for this; I'm just another person who has only a slight, foggy notion of how a computer chip works. But, as those chips, and the rituals that make them work, become ever smaller and ever more embedded in all of the things we touch, this will happen more and more.

What happens when your hoodie has a color-changing chip in it, but that chip will only turn from black to red when you zip and unzip twice quickly? Or your shoes keep losing track of your total distance walked unless you whack the heels together three times? What kind of a world will we have then, and what stories will we tell each other to explain our devices?

Outside of My Expertise

Someone should make a comparison image:

• Doraemon (the little cat guy)
• Pokemon (probably Pikachu)
• Lululemon (the lower half of a woman with yoga pants that are not as opaque as they should be).

Internets, go do this for me, please. I offer fifty quatloos. If you want, you can throw in Master Aemon as well.


(Related: I just this second realized that company's name is supposed to be Lulu Lemon. I've been eliding the third L, probably due to weariness.)

What Flashed Through My Brain Just Now

This sentence, in the voice of whoever originally said it (Google is no help):

It's hard to dance on the bodies of your dead friends!

My first thought is GWAR, but I don't think I ever actually saw them -- they played Vassar when I was there, but I was doing security outside.

Perhaps it's a movie quote.

It's disconcerting to hit the age when your brain, like your closets, has things in it that you don't remember putting there.

Euphemisms

Reading Shelf Awareness this morning -- particularly this article about Kobo describing the difference between their "regular customers" and the influx of new business from ABA stores -- I hit a term I'm not familiar with.

That term is "active romance."

My assumption -- since that's the way my mind always goes -- is that the "active" in "active romance" refers to the characters' genitals, and this is another way of saying "erotica" or "hot romance" or "spicy romance" or whatever last decade's term was; that this indicates a romance with a lot of sex in it, or a book with a lot of sex in it that tries to sneak in as a romance because the main characters stay together. [1]

Anyone out there able to confirm or deny?


[1] I make this distinction because romances, like every other mature genre, have important genre and subgenre markers, and so there are things that look like romance to civilians that real romance readers consider the equivalent of Michael Crichton for SF readers. I don't know enough to define all of those markers, but I'm smart enough to realize that serious romance readers care about them.

The Rare Obligatory Political Post

Or, A brief jeremiad aimed at people who agree with Hobby Lobby and the various other companies jumping on their bandwagon.

For those who haven't been following the news, first a chain of profitable craft stores, and now a whole slew of other organizations, are claiming that they shouldn't have to pay for some of the health-care requirements of the Affordable Care Act [1] (aka "Obamacare") because it interferes with their religious freedom.

I know the religious freedom card is one with powerful sentiment, particularly among the kind of white middle-class Christians who have never had to suffer the tiniest bit of actual persecution in their lives, but please do think through the implications.

This is a private company -- not a religious institution, not a non-profit, not any kind of specialized organization, but a plan ordinary company trying to make money -- that wants to enshrine in law a right to avoid following a particular piece of law. And the basis of that right to skip out on a law would be their own interpretation of the personal religious beliefs of the owners. Logically, there's no reason why the same argument couldn't be extended to any company -- or any individual, since a company is a legal person just as a natural person is -- and any law.

In other words, Hobby Lobby is trying to make it impossible for any laws to be enforced at all if anyone can think up a pseudo-religious explanation for wanting not to follow that law. This is literally a prescription for anarchy.

Look, think of even this mild extension of the doctrine: what about a company run by Christian Scientists? They don't believe in modern medicine at all, so does that mean that company should be free to avoid paying any health-care coverage?

This is just a stupid legal argument. Admit it, give it up, and move on. Your side has comprehensively lost the battle against contraception, and the tide is just not going to shift back the way you want it.


[1] Specifically, the requirement that employers cover FDA-approved contraception for female employees, which Hobby Lobby and its lik say they consider abortion. This is actually one of the core issues: this case is based on what they consider a procedure to be, not what the general understanding or the actual scientific facts of that procedure are. In other words, they're demanding that their faith be given preferential legal treatment, because it is their belief.

(inspired by this Chuck Asay cartoon, which I couldn't manage to make work for Editorial Explanations, since it's not even wrong)

Toldja!

Two weeks ago, I complained that the current Internet-fueled economy was destroying vastly more jobs than it was creating, and reshaping the entire landscape for careers in the future for the worse.

Today, the AP has the same story -- though, since it's reported by professionals (unlike my Internet-fueled amateur thought piece, which is actually a symptom of the problem) there are quotes and numbers and lots of backup detail.

Turns out we're all screwed, unless we do something unique, or are willing to do the kind of service jobs that can never be automated (shelf-stocker, waiter). Everyone who doesn't self-identify as an "artist" or "entrepreneur" might as well learn how to eat grass; our jobs and middle-class income will all disappear eventually.

In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

The Imp of the Perverse

Yesterday, along with the other mail, I got a copy of A Memory of Light, which, as you know Bob, is the thrilling conclusion to a very long-running epic fantasy series. It presumably contains many shocking and surprising events that are eagerly awaited by hundreds of thousands of fans.

And so it came with a little notice, asking -- well, perhaps demanding is more correct -- that any coverage or reviews hold off until the official publication date in early January.

So of course I was immediately seized with the desire to thumb through the last chapter or two, type up what seemed to be the juiciest and most amazing bits, and post immediately. That was a silly, weird desire, particularly since I've never read any of the other books, but it was definitely there.

I didn't do it, obviously -- I do have more tact and couth than that. But I'm sure someone, somewhere on the vast Internet, has already done so. And perhaps that's the lesson of the Internet: anything you can think of, someone has already done.

In Which Robots Are Not As Effective As They Think They Are

Inspired by James Nicoll, I ran my two blogs through two sophisticated analysis engines of the Internet -- aw, who am I kidding? They're both probably hack-jobs put together by a couple of geeks in their spare time, like everything else on the 'net. But it's amusing anyway.

Antick Musings:

• GenderAnalyzer: I am a woman, or at least 51% female
• AgeAnalyzer: I am somewhere between 36 and 50

Editorial Explanations:

• GenderAnalyzer: 88% -- as close to "ineluctably" as you can get -- masculine
• AgeAnalyzer: I am still between ages 36 and 50

That's a huge gap in my gender between two things I write regularly -- 39% of difference. Is it because EE is mostly made up of short posts and dripping in sarcasm? Or is it the stench of politics that drives women away?

Interestingly, the collective wisdom of the crowd is that AgeAnalyzer is less correct -- 59% of the votes are currently "no" -- even though that's not my experience, and it has some wide bands (though still not as binary as male/female).

Does this mean anything at all? No, of course not. But it's yet another tool to poke through things that look like data, which I suppose is moderately useful, at the very least as a way to waste time.

We're Safe From Skynet for Another Few Months

The following piece of spam appeared today, as a comment on this morning's book-review post about Christopher Buckley's novel They Eat Puppies, Don't They?

Your post about to stop the eating puppy is really nice one. I think it will guide the people who are eating him and find out the bad things happen while eating a puppy.

Yorkie Puppies for sale in Texas

Clearly, there's a bot looking for the word "puppies" and willing to post something close to a coherent English thought wherever that word may be. Equally clearly, it's not very good at the "coherent" bit, or at having any guidance on context. Thus I postulate that we are safe from the Singularity for at least a little while.