Odd Man Out

I'm going to take the risk of opposing Donald's views about lifecasting.

I'm a big fan of technology, generally, and I'd love to be able to plug my brain into infinite storage, which would be like having an inexhaustible eidetic memory. I'd like to be able to commit some events to that sort of memory, and I'd probably acquire wearable computing clusters and storage if such things were available. So on that side of things, hey great, so long as you manage to avoid solipsism (most of what I do in a week isn't even interesting to me, and I see little value in recording it willy-nilly).

It's the public-facing side that I find singularly unappealing. My casual consumption of these various lifecasting projects has always led me to say "So what?" It's one thing to lifecast an actual public or historic event, such as a political rally. It's quite another to broadcast the banal minutiae of one's life. Regarding Frank's site, referenced by Donald, I find nothing of historic, artistic, political or humorous value in the little collage of pictures. It is merely narcissism, and it even lacks originality. It's been done. All of this stuff is just noise, and I have plenty of ways to waste time already.

I have no problem with photo galleries, event-centered and intended for consumption by friends and family. Blogs likewise often involve (not often enough maybe) skill and taste, and at their best have real, valuable content. It's the self-marketing and hubris of lifecasting that drive me crazy. I'm perplexed by imageering marketers who feel their lives are worthy of attention, bored with the ironic detachment of hipster douchebags and frustrated by tasteless artists whose medium is merely tedious images and who lack any semblance of craft or skill.

Why is it so often the case the technical decisions get made by people who clearly lack any real expertise?

Well I suppose I know why, but I'm taking a minute to whine about it anyway.

In our office I've elected to solve a data transfer issue by setting up a VPN (please refer to Wikipedia) with the vendor in question. It'll cost us nothing and we'll have live, on-demand access to the vendor's database.

Meanwhile, company HQ has a secure server system that allows vendors to upload files. It works well but requires the vendors to set up accounts, install client software and learn to use it.

For our office, the VPN is certainly the more elegant and useful solution. We don't need to transfer static files because we can get live data instantly through the VPN. The process can also be cleanly automated. But today we got a very terse email from the HQ VP who's demanded to know why we aren't using the secure server.

So my reaction was something like, Good god man, edit for tone! Then I started getting annoyed. This guy is a medical doctor and statistician. Why does he presume to tell me how to transfer data? Do I tell him how to write a clinical trial protocol?

No. No, I don't, and I don't care to be second-guessed by a man who hasn't a tenth of my expertise.

At every office where I've been employed there's always been some Clueless Baby Boomer ("CuBBies" -> new pop buzzword), clearly out of his depth, demanding that we do things his way. It is so tiring. I have ennui.

This post is going nowhere though, so I'll have to hang it up for now.

Some scientists are saying it's highly likely there are unknown, large creatures in the ocean, yet to be discovered.

Well sure, I guess it's not surprising, given the sheer vastness of the ocean and the fact that we've explored only a fraction of the surface waters, a smaller fraction of the ocean floor and virtually none of the intermediate depths. Of course there could be critters we've never seen.

In a less clinical vein, though, doesn't this kind of story thrill you? Who wouldn't love to see a modern journey to the center of the earth?

Here's a fun Cringely essay on how we can save the world by changing exactly nothing about how we live our lives. Fascinating stuff.

Dig through Mr. Cringely's archives if you have a spare moment. He's got a lot more fascinating stuff in there.

I've been reading about the rising levels of violence and crime in Washington D.C., which has never been a happy place. Well apparently it's even worse than awful. It's gotten so bad that the police chief is planning to block off the worst neighborhoods and permit entry based on ID.

And this is the "lite" form of what she, the police chief, had in mind. The stronger plan was warrantless, house-to-house searches for guns and drugs. Of course, I'm deeply troubled by the thought of grim officers saying "Papers please" to DC residents trying to go home, but I'm also deeply troubled by the Hobbesian state of nature that appears to have broken out in our country's capitol. Perhaps Donald, as a resident, has some thoughts...

On another note, I feel somewhat vindicated in my view that gun control needs to be federalized. DC has the most restrictive gun control laws in the country and they haven't dented gun violence one iota. Why is that? Nearby states (*cough*Georgia*cough*Virginia*cough) with loose gun control make it possible for unscrupulous sorts to buy up tons of cheap handguns and sell them for 2-4x their retail value in DC. Because those neighbor states exercise no oversight, yon scumbags (I'm in a Dirty Harry frame of mind) will never have to account for the guns they purchased and resold. All that DC's gun restrictions do is make things inconvenient for citizens attempting to purchase guns legally.

DC's police are in a tough spot. Lacking any federal action on the gun matter, all they can do is hunker down. My personal feeling is that DC should decriminalize, as much as possible, the drugs but make illegal gun possession a class A felony. Find a guy carrying a handgun illegally, his sentence should be on the order of 20 years. Generous reductions should then be offered if our criminal buddy will rat out the seller and anyone else he knows. Then, guns should be treated like drugs in the sense that possession above a certain number should be treated as "possession with intent to distribute." If a guy is caught with a pound of marijuana, it's assumed, legally, that he means to sell some. Similarly, if a guy is caught with three guns, say, it should be assumed he means to sell some. The sentence should be that much worse then. Every effort should be made to locate the sources of illegal guns. If, as I suspect, they turn out to be located in Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina, then DC should have grounds to file suit against those states in federal court. (I'm not a lawyer, but I'd think the case would be far, far clearer than the case for suing the manufacturers, which was tried and lost; basically the argument is "your lax oversight has resulted in homicides here, so you're implicated in manslaughter and you owe us money for dealing with the consequences of your poor oversight.")

If the sales channels can be shut down, we should see an improvement in the reasonably near term. This isn't effective for drugs because their points of origin and manufacture, so to speak, are unknown and/or out of reach. But guns are absolutely traceable. Every gun can be traced from manufacturer or importer, to distributor to dealer with great precision. DC doesn't even need a lot of cooperation from other states, they only need help from the gun manufacturers and distributors--and some local regulations to support this little plan.

Another smart thing to do would be to enlist the NRA. The NRA has always said something like "crack down on illegal sales and transport but leave law-abiding citizens alone." Take them at their word. Offer to ease gun control for lawful folks and get them to enlist their considerable lobbying power on your behalf. They won't support federalization, but they ought to support developing new ways to choke off illegal sales. It's part of their platform! The NRA lobbying for supportive laws in GA, VA and SC could be very helpful.

So I now hold, in Washington State, a concealed weapons permit. I can carry a loaded pistol, as long as its concealed, pretty much anywhere except Federal buildings, schools, bars and outdoor music festivals. (This last will be understood by anyone who's ever been to the Gorge Amphitheater, and yes, it is specifically called out in the state code.) As it happens, I have no desire to carry a pistol. I've lived in Seattle a while now and I've never felt sufficiently threatened to want a pistol. In fact, the only time I've ever thought to myself, "I wish I had a gun" is when I've been well outside the city. We have both cougars and meth labs here, both found in abundance outside the city. No, I actually applied for the permit because getting one requires a full background check. One must be fingerprinted and backgrounded by the FBI. Because the check is more thorough than the standard I'd-like-to-buy-a-handgun check, one can generally assume that a CPL holder with ID is safe bet (that's Concealed Pistol License). Many of the sellers in the Washington State Arms Collectors will no longer sell to people they don't know and who don't have a CPL. It's about liability. No one is afraid of criminal liability, but a civil wrongful-death suit could, hypothetically, be made to stick, even though secondary sales are not regulated here. Some ranges will not accept people without background checks. Also, I'm now exempt from the usual waiting period. Usually, buying a handgun in WA means a 10-14 day wait. CPL holders are exempt from it. So in the end, I got the CPL partly as a convenience and partly so that I can easily convince people, "hey, I'm alright here." (Obviously, I mean gun-owning people. I'm aware it has the opposite effect on others.)

I own and enjoy guns. I do, however, think gun control is a great idea. I loathe the NRA. Now most of the gun control laws out there are half-assed at best, but the principle is sound. And my odd, residual liberal guilt about acquiring a CPL forces me to jot down some thoughts about that principle.

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Foreign Affairs (Sep/Oct 2007) has a pair of essays on foreign policy by Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards. Since I have an instinctive hatred of Giuliani, I thought I ought to take a look (I'll look at Edwards' essay later).

(Side note: I'm going to assume, for convenience, that the candidates actually wrote the essays, and didn't simply sign whatever their smartest staffers slapped together.)

Rudy starts by establishing his bona fides, framing the debate. We're all part of the 9/11 generation. And he was right there in it. We can't criticize Rudy without implicitly impugning all those innocents who died at "Ground Zero." He's heavy-handed. He goes on to say:

America is a nation that loves peace and hates war. At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state [no capitalization in Rudy's text].

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