Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Sewers I Swim In
I've seen lots of arguments about why reducing the deficit right now would bring crisis to the economy. Most of them are very textbook Keynesian arguments arguing that at times of excess capacity, reducing deficit spending would just add headwinds to an already struggling economy. The other argument is that the US should take advantage of exceptionally low borrowing rates to invest in rapidly aging infrastructure and put Americans back to work using a sort of New Deal 2.0 scheme.
The first argument is a bird's eye solution to a ground-level problem. Yes, government spending would goose GDP, but is that spending creating wealth? Where is that "stimulus" going? Our goal, after all, is not to maximize GDP, but to maximize wealth. GDP is just a poor objective measure for a deeply subjective phenomenon and gaming our own framework won't help anyone, regardless of what numbers the BLS, BEA and FRB release over the upcoming months. And let's not forget that Washington has a very poor track record as an allocator of capital. I'm simply not comfortable leaving these decision up to the people that decided to try to reflate the bubble by pulling-forward demand, subsidizing toy arrows and foreign liquor and build useless airports. Just sayin'.
But does this mean we should address the crisis with full-throttle austerity? Not quite. As it was eloquently pointed out last Summer on interfluidity, austerity is stupid and deficits are dangerous. We can't make generalizations about debt, deficits or balanced budgets. Deficits and debt are neither good nor bad on their own. Leveraging up for wealth-creating projects is good, borrowing to throw money away shoveling sand from one pile to the other not so much. Washington is focusing on abstract goals like "putting real Americans to work." And one can't blame them because that's what people want, jobs. But "jobs" isn't something you can simply create from thin air, you can't just throw money at this problem and expect to fix it. "Jobs bills" and "improving America" are nebulous ideas, subject to interpretation without any objective way to measure success or failure, which is probably what Washington wants.
"Well, fine, but what do you suggest then?" you may be asking yourself. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Sewage. We've spent the better part of the last 10,000 years trying to secure sources of clean water and get rid of waste. Humanity has developed modern plumbing and sanitary sewers. We survived the Great Stink of 1858. We've battled epidemics of water-borne disease, droughts and floods. I feel comfortable in making the broad statement that clean water is good and shitty water is bad. Therefore, one could expect that making something good out of something bad would be a positive thing, an improvement, a wealth-creating action. If you disagree, feel free to stop reading now.
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BP 'Stranglehold' Over Iraq
by Terry Macalister
BP has been accused of taking a "stranglehold" on the Iraqi economy after the Baghdad government agreed to pay the British firm even when oil is not being produced by the Rumaila field, confidential documents reveal.
The original deal for operating Iraq's largest field – half as big as the entire North Sea – has been rewritten so that BP will be immediately compensated for civil disruption or government decisions to cut production.
This potentially could influence the policy decisions made by Iraq in relation to the Opec oil cartel, and is a major step away from the original terms of an auction deal signed in the summer of 2009, critics claim.
"Iraq's oil auctions were portrayed as a model of transparency and a negotiating victory for the Iraqi government," said Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq. "Now we see the reality was the opposite: a backroom deal that gave BP a stranglehold on the Iraqi economy, and even influence over the decisions of Opec."
Read more:
BP has been accused of taking a "stranglehold" on the Iraqi economy after the Baghdad government agreed to pay the British firm even when oil is not being produced by the Rumaila field, confidential documents reveal.
The original deal for operating Iraq's largest field – half as big as the entire North Sea – has been rewritten so that BP will be immediately compensated for civil disruption or government decisions to cut production.
This potentially could influence the policy decisions made by Iraq in relation to the Opec oil cartel, and is a major step away from the original terms of an auction deal signed in the summer of 2009, critics claim.
"Iraq's oil auctions were portrayed as a model of transparency and a negotiating victory for the Iraqi government," said Greg Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq. "Now we see the reality was the opposite: a backroom deal that gave BP a stranglehold on the Iraqi economy, and even influence over the decisions of Opec."
Read more:
Know Thyself: Easier Said Than Done
A few days before a review of my latest book appeared in these pages, I wrote to my editor, saying I had seen an advance copy and how much I liked the color illustration of the yellow moon. He replied that I must be mistaken, since the Book Review doesn’t use color. The next weekend he wrote to say he couldn’t think what had come over him — he reads the Book Review every week, and had somehow not noticed the color. Odd. And yet these lapses can happen to the best of us. Ask yourself what the Roman number four on the face of the church clock looks like. Most people will answer it looks like IV, but almost certainly the truth is it looks like IIII.
...He begins with the curious case of color in dreams. When people today are asked whether they regularly dream in color, most say they do. But it was not always so. Back in the 1950s most said they dreamed in black and white. Presumably it can hardly be true that our grandparents had different brains that systematically left out the color we put in today. So this must be a matter of interpretation. Yet why such freedom about assigning color? Well, try this for an answer. Suppose that, not knowing quite what dreams are like, we tend to assume they must be like photographs or movies — pictures in the head. Then, when asked whether we dream in color we reach for the most readily available pictorial analogy. Understandably, 60 years ago this might have been black-and-white movies, while for most of us today it is the color version. But, here’s the thing: Neither analogy is necessarily the “right” one. Dreams don’t have to be pictures of any kind at all. They could be simply thoughts — and thoughts, even thoughts about color, are neither colored nor non-colored in themselves.
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Black Box
by Jerry AdlerThey were guarded by silent corpses, the passengers and crew of an Airbus A330 that plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic in June 2009. For nearly two years, the boxes -- not black, actually, but bright orange -- had lain amid some of the most rugged undersea terrain in the world, 3,500-metre-high mountains rising from the ocean floor, covered with landslides and steep scarps.
Until May when an advanced robotic submersible, the Remora 6000, brought the two black boxes from Air France flight 447 to the surface, they were among the world's most sought-after artefacts, the keys to understanding why a state-of-the-art wide-body jet fell out of the sky on a routine flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 aboard. Since no one knew the exact coordinates of the crash, the searchers had to extrapolate their grid from the plane's last known location. It took a team led by the king of undersea searchers, Dave Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, to find the wreckage; Phoenix International, a deepwater recovery company, finally brought the recorders home. Why did it take so long? "You can find a needle in a haystack," Gallo says, "but you have to find the haystack first."
French accident investigators removed the memory cards, carefully dried them, plugged in the right cables, and soon announced that the boxes had preserved nearly all the data they had captured -- two hours of audio recorded from the cockpit and a complete record of thousands of measurements taken between takeoff and the moment the Airbus crashed. It was regarded, rightly, as a technological triumph. Although voice and data recorders are built to withstand the most extreme conditions of shock, fire and pressure -- they get fired from an air cannon as part of the testing regimen -- they are not designed to preserve data for so long at such depths. The black boxes, built by Honeywell, had greatly exceeded their specifications.
But this elaborate and expensive undersea search could have been avoided; the technology has long existed that could make the recorders obsolete. As the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA), the French agency that investigates air accidents, struggled to explain the crash in two inconclusive interim reports in 2009, the question was already being asked: if real-time stock quotes can be transmitted to anyone with a smartphone, why does the vital work of investigating an aeroplane crash still depend on reading physical memory chips that must be rescued from the wreckage?
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Timeshare Wars
by Marilyn W. Thompson
Hollywood couldn’t create a more perfect movie setting than Sedona, Ariz., with its craggy red rocks and all those junipers. So while vacationing with my film-obsessed son, I thought it only natural to stroll into the free-admission Sedona Motion Picture Museum.
Hollywood couldn’t create a more perfect movie setting than Sedona, Ariz., with its craggy red rocks and all those junipers. So while vacationing with my film-obsessed son, I thought it only natural to stroll into the free-admission Sedona Motion Picture Museum.
Housed in a storefront on the city’s main shopping strip, the museum seemed a bit “lame,” as my son bluntly put it. Its collection consisted of framed photos of bygone westerns, with stars such as Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, filmed against the area’s stunning scenery. Within 15 minutes, we had seen everything and were ready to head to the nearby Cowboy Club to sample cactus fries.But a museum attendant stopped us and soon revealed the true purpose of this pseudo-attraction. The museum was partly a marketing device to entice tourists to timeshare pitches at a 14-year-old resort development affiliated with RCI, one of America’s largest vacation ownership exchange companies. In the timeshare trade, the attendant is known as a “tour generation representative,” earning commissions for making “off-premises contacts” with potential buyers. Like slow-witted sheep, my son and I had walked clear-eyed into a booby trap.
What evolved over the next few days was a revealing look at the hard-core salesmanship of timeshare developers and, by extension, of the companies they contract to provide exchange services for buyers — RCI and its principal timeshare rival, the publicly traded leisure company Interval International. Anyone who has ever owned a timeshare has experienced the relentless push during precious relaxation time to persuade you to invest in more weeks, or more “points,” at more resorts in more locations. It’s an oft-repeated ritual whenever you check in for a timeshare swap: groggy travelers presented with “invitations” for timeshare previews within minutes of getting the keys to their rooms.
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image credit:
Read My Lips
[ed. I'm no fan of taxes, but I understand their necessity. It's what government does with those dollars (and who's exempt from paying them) that I find most frustrating. Mulish stubbornness promoting simple black and white solutions to complex problems will never get my vote. Put it this way: if you had two applicants applying for a job, which would you hire, the one who believes in the company, or the one who wants to starve it to it's core? Developing efficient policies that benefit the entire country (not just corporations and the wealthy) should be the issue, not fundamental revenue generation.]
by Steven Mufson
A scorching summer. A struggling economy. A stalemate in budget talks. A Republican leader reluctant to break his anti-tax pledge. Democrats balking at spending cuts. A proposal for a balanced budget amendment.
It was 1990, the year Congress passed one of the biggest deficit-reduction packages in American history. But before it was cemented into law, the country endured months of bickering and brinksmanship. Sound familiar?
By some measures, the 1990 budget deal was a success: It helped shrink the deficit, then at 5 percent of gross domestic product, by $492 billion — $850 billion in today’s dollars — over just five years. And it passed with support from both parties. But in other ways, the 1990 budget deal set the stage for today’s fiscal deadlock. At the center of it all was the Dirty Harry-style pledge that President George H.W. Bush had issued during his 1988 presidential campaign — “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Although an agreement was eventually reached that raised taxes and cut spending, many Republican lawmakers thought the deal and its aftermath proved the folly of compromise.
“The 1990 budget agreement was real bloodshed. It was a civil war within the party,” says John Feehery, who worked for Republican former congressmen Tom DeLay (Tex.),J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and Robert H. Michel (Ill.), who was at the center of the 1990 dealmaking.“We’re still living in the world of that agreement. That’s when it became really radioactive to vote for tax increases.”
Read more:
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by Frank Bruni
WHAT does the face of antitax absolutism look like?
It has a tentative beard, more shadow than shag, like an awkward weigh station on the road from callow to professorial. It wears blunt glasses over narrowed eyes that glint mischievously, and its mouth is rarely still, because there’s no end to the jeremiads pouring forth: about the peril of Obama, the profligacy of Democrats and the paramount importance of opposing all tax increases, even ones that close the loopiest of loopholes.
It belongs to Grover Norquist, and if you hadn’t seen it before, you probably spotted it last week, as he pinged from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, reveling in the solidarity Republicans had shown against any new revenue. The country was lurching toward a possible default, but Norquist was riding high. In between television appointments on Thursday, he met me for breakfast near Times Square.
As he walked in and sat down he was sermonizing. As he got up and left an hour later he was still going strong. He seems to live his whole life in midsentence and takes few detectable breaths, his zeal boundless and his catechism changeless: Washington is an indiscriminate glutton, and extra taxes are like excess calories, sure to bloat the Beast.
...It’s the group Norquist runs, Americans for Tax Reform, that has been pressing politicians for decades to sign a pledge not to vote for any net tax increase under any circumstances. All but 6 of the 240 Republicans in the House, along with two Democrats, have done so.
...But vanity is too commonplace inside the Beltway to be troubling. What’s alarming about Norquist and the pledge mentality, which has spread to other causes and other points of the political spectrum, is their promotion of the idea that political rigidity is to be prized above all else. That purity is king. Such a theology precludes nimbleness and compromise, which are not only the hallmarks of maturity but also the essence of sane government.
Read more:
by Steven Mufson
A scorching summer. A struggling economy. A stalemate in budget talks. A Republican leader reluctant to break his anti-tax pledge. Democrats balking at spending cuts. A proposal for a balanced budget amendment.
It was 1990, the year Congress passed one of the biggest deficit-reduction packages in American history. But before it was cemented into law, the country endured months of bickering and brinksmanship. Sound familiar?
By some measures, the 1990 budget deal was a success: It helped shrink the deficit, then at 5 percent of gross domestic product, by $492 billion — $850 billion in today’s dollars — over just five years. And it passed with support from both parties. But in other ways, the 1990 budget deal set the stage for today’s fiscal deadlock. At the center of it all was the Dirty Harry-style pledge that President George H.W. Bush had issued during his 1988 presidential campaign — “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Although an agreement was eventually reached that raised taxes and cut spending, many Republican lawmakers thought the deal and its aftermath proved the folly of compromise.
“The 1990 budget agreement was real bloodshed. It was a civil war within the party,” says John Feehery, who worked for Republican former congressmen Tom DeLay (Tex.),J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and Robert H. Michel (Ill.), who was at the center of the 1990 dealmaking.“We’re still living in the world of that agreement. That’s when it became really radioactive to vote for tax increases.”
Read more:
----------------------
by Frank Bruni
WHAT does the face of antitax absolutism look like?
It has a tentative beard, more shadow than shag, like an awkward weigh station on the road from callow to professorial. It wears blunt glasses over narrowed eyes that glint mischievously, and its mouth is rarely still, because there’s no end to the jeremiads pouring forth: about the peril of Obama, the profligacy of Democrats and the paramount importance of opposing all tax increases, even ones that close the loopiest of loopholes.
It belongs to Grover Norquist, and if you hadn’t seen it before, you probably spotted it last week, as he pinged from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, reveling in the solidarity Republicans had shown against any new revenue. The country was lurching toward a possible default, but Norquist was riding high. In between television appointments on Thursday, he met me for breakfast near Times Square.
As he walked in and sat down he was sermonizing. As he got up and left an hour later he was still going strong. He seems to live his whole life in midsentence and takes few detectable breaths, his zeal boundless and his catechism changeless: Washington is an indiscriminate glutton, and extra taxes are like excess calories, sure to bloat the Beast.
...It’s the group Norquist runs, Americans for Tax Reform, that has been pressing politicians for decades to sign a pledge not to vote for any net tax increase under any circumstances. All but 6 of the 240 Republicans in the House, along with two Democrats, have done so.
...But vanity is too commonplace inside the Beltway to be troubling. What’s alarming about Norquist and the pledge mentality, which has spread to other causes and other points of the political spectrum, is their promotion of the idea that political rigidity is to be prized above all else. That purity is king. Such a theology precludes nimbleness and compromise, which are not only the hallmarks of maturity but also the essence of sane government.
Read more:
Saturday, July 30, 2011
The Roach in Repose
[ed. The story about Searching (a couple posts down) got me thinking about something that's always been a mystery to me. In Hawaii there are dead cockroaches everywhere. In fact, it's an odd day when you don't find at least a couple, somewhere. But the thing is, a lot of them aren't really that old. You see all age classes and most of the deceased look relatively serviceable (in terms of their condition) except for one small detail. So what's up with that? Parasites, territorial disputes, starvation (hard to believe), incidental poisonings, pre-mature old age, cockroach AIDS? I have no idea, and, surprisingly, can't seem to find much clear information anywhere. But now I do know why cockroaches die on their backs.]
Dear Cecil:
While working part-time in the food service at USC, I had the opportunity to see thousands of dead cockroaches. One thing about these roaches intrigues me: why did they all die on their backs? Is it programmed into their tiny little genes, or do they do it just to bug us?
— Leslie, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Dear Leslie:
Frankly, if I saw thousands of dead cockroaches at the food service where I went to school, I'd have other things on my mind than why they all died on their backs. Besides, they don't always die that way--basically it depends on how the little scumbags happen to meet their Maker. I've been discussing the subject with the crack bug scientists at some of the nation's leading institutions of higher learning, and we've formulated the following Roach Mortality Scenarios, which represent a major step forward in our understanding of roach postmortem positioning:
(1) Roach has heart attack while crawling on the wall. OK, so maybe roaches don't have heart attacks. Just suppose the roach croaks somehow and tumbles earthward. The aerodynamics of the roach corpse (smooth on the back, or wing side; irregular on the front, or leg side) are such that the critter will tend to land on its back. Or so goes the theory. Admittedly the study of bug airfoil characteristics is not as advanced as it might be.
(2) Roach desiccates, i.e., dries out, after the manner of Gloria Vanderbilt. This is what happens when you use Cecil's Guaranteed Roach Assassination Technique, described elsewhere in this archive. The roach saunters carelessly through the lethal borax crystals, causing him to lose precious bodily fluids and eventually die. Since this process is gradual, it may happen that the roach simply conks out and dies on its belly.
(3) Roach dies after ingesting potent neurotoxins, e.g., Diet Coke, some traditional bug poison like pyrethrum, or the food served at USC cafeterias. Neurotoxins cause the roach to twitch itself to death, in the course of which it will frequently kick over on its back, there to flail helplessly until the end comes. No doubt this accounts for the supine position of the deceased cockroaches you observed.
One unresolved issue. Having seen thousands of dead roaches, did it occur to you to avail yourself of, say, a broom?
— Cecil Adams
via:
image:
Dear Cecil: While working part-time in the food service at USC, I had the opportunity to see thousands of dead cockroaches. One thing about these roaches intrigues me: why did they all die on their backs? Is it programmed into their tiny little genes, or do they do it just to bug us?
— Leslie, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Dear Leslie:
Frankly, if I saw thousands of dead cockroaches at the food service where I went to school, I'd have other things on my mind than why they all died on their backs. Besides, they don't always die that way--basically it depends on how the little scumbags happen to meet their Maker. I've been discussing the subject with the crack bug scientists at some of the nation's leading institutions of higher learning, and we've formulated the following Roach Mortality Scenarios, which represent a major step forward in our understanding of roach postmortem positioning:
(1) Roach has heart attack while crawling on the wall. OK, so maybe roaches don't have heart attacks. Just suppose the roach croaks somehow and tumbles earthward. The aerodynamics of the roach corpse (smooth on the back, or wing side; irregular on the front, or leg side) are such that the critter will tend to land on its back. Or so goes the theory. Admittedly the study of bug airfoil characteristics is not as advanced as it might be.
(2) Roach desiccates, i.e., dries out, after the manner of Gloria Vanderbilt. This is what happens when you use Cecil's Guaranteed Roach Assassination Technique, described elsewhere in this archive. The roach saunters carelessly through the lethal borax crystals, causing him to lose precious bodily fluids and eventually die. Since this process is gradual, it may happen that the roach simply conks out and dies on its belly.
(3) Roach dies after ingesting potent neurotoxins, e.g., Diet Coke, some traditional bug poison like pyrethrum, or the food served at USC cafeterias. Neurotoxins cause the roach to twitch itself to death, in the course of which it will frequently kick over on its back, there to flail helplessly until the end comes. No doubt this accounts for the supine position of the deceased cockroaches you observed.
One unresolved issue. Having seen thousands of dead roaches, did it occur to you to avail yourself of, say, a broom?
— Cecil Adams
via:
image:
Medium Chill
by David Roberts
Mother Jones has an interesting package up called "Speedup: Working More, Making Less." In the lead story, editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery chronicle the harrowing pace of modern work life: the long hours and hairy commutes, multitasking and endless accessibility, the sense of always being busy, always falling behind, always doing a crappy job on both sides of the work/life ledger.
Bauerlein and Jeffery discuss the phenomenon mainly in terms of external forces acting on workers -- a system of laws and regulations comprehensively biased in favor of employers. And that's where the main focus should be; policy changes are the stuff of organizing and politics. But it reminded me I've been meaning to write something about the other side, the internal forces impelling us to work harder and harder. We are being driven, but we are also driving ourselves. Finding saner, happier, more sustainable lives will involve addressing both sides of the equation.
About a year ago, I was visiting with an old friend of mine who lives in Portland now. He's helping to run a tech startup, working 80-hour weeks, half that on the road, with barely enough time at home to maintain a relationship with his dog, much less a romance. The goal, he said, is to grow like crazy, get bought out by Google, and retire at 40. "It's the big chill, man!" (No, Boomers, not the movie.)
I shook my head and laughed. "I'll take the medium chill!"
Ever since then I've been mulling that concept over. By way of approaching it, I'm going to talk a little about personal experience, so if that kind of thing bugs you, skip on down, there's some social science geekery below.
Personal chill
"Medium chill" has become something of a slogan for my wife and me. (We might make t-shirts.) We're coming up on 10 years married now, but we recognized our mutual love of medium chill within weeks of meeting, about the time we found ourselves on her couch watching scratchy bootleg VHS tapes of The Sopranos I ordered off eBay, drinking Two Buck Chuck, and loving life. We just never knew what to call it.
We now have a smallish house in a nondescript working class Seattle neighborhood with no sidewalks. We have one car, a battered old minivan with a large dent on one side where you have to bang it with your hip to make the door shut. Our boys go to public schools. Our jobs pay enough to support our lifestyle, mostly anyway. If we wanted, we could both do the "next thing" on our respective career paths. She could move to a bigger company. I could freelance more, angle to write for a bigger publications, write a book, hire a publicist, whatever. We could try to make more money. Then we could fix the water pressure in our shower, redo the back patio, get a second car, or hell, buy a bigger house closer in to town. Maybe get the kids in private schools. All that stuff people with more money than us do.
But ... meh. It's not that we don't think about those things. The water pressure thing drives me batty. Fact is, we just don't want to work that hard! We already work harder than we feel like working. We enjoy having time to lay around in the living room with the kids, reading. We like to watch a little TV after the kids are in bed. We like going to the park and visits with friends and low-key vacations and generally relaxing. Going further down our respective career paths would likely mean more work, greater responsibilities, higher stress, and less time to lay around the living room with the kids.
So why do it? There will always be a More and Better just beyond our reach, no matter how high we climb. We could always have a little more money and a few more choices. But as we see it, we don't need to work harder to get more money to have more choices because we already made our choice. We chose our family and our friends and our place. Like any life ours comes with trade-offs, but on balance it's a good life, we've already got it, and we're damn well going to enjoy it.
Read more:
image credit:
Mother Jones has an interesting package up called "Speedup: Working More, Making Less." In the lead story, editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery chronicle the harrowing pace of modern work life: the long hours and hairy commutes, multitasking and endless accessibility, the sense of always being busy, always falling behind, always doing a crappy job on both sides of the work/life ledger.
Bauerlein and Jeffery discuss the phenomenon mainly in terms of external forces acting on workers -- a system of laws and regulations comprehensively biased in favor of employers. And that's where the main focus should be; policy changes are the stuff of organizing and politics. But it reminded me I've been meaning to write something about the other side, the internal forces impelling us to work harder and harder. We are being driven, but we are also driving ourselves. Finding saner, happier, more sustainable lives will involve addressing both sides of the equation. About a year ago, I was visiting with an old friend of mine who lives in Portland now. He's helping to run a tech startup, working 80-hour weeks, half that on the road, with barely enough time at home to maintain a relationship with his dog, much less a romance. The goal, he said, is to grow like crazy, get bought out by Google, and retire at 40. "It's the big chill, man!" (No, Boomers, not the movie.)
I shook my head and laughed. "I'll take the medium chill!"
Ever since then I've been mulling that concept over. By way of approaching it, I'm going to talk a little about personal experience, so if that kind of thing bugs you, skip on down, there's some social science geekery below.
Personal chill
"Medium chill" has become something of a slogan for my wife and me. (We might make t-shirts.) We're coming up on 10 years married now, but we recognized our mutual love of medium chill within weeks of meeting, about the time we found ourselves on her couch watching scratchy bootleg VHS tapes of The Sopranos I ordered off eBay, drinking Two Buck Chuck, and loving life. We just never knew what to call it.
We now have a smallish house in a nondescript working class Seattle neighborhood with no sidewalks. We have one car, a battered old minivan with a large dent on one side where you have to bang it with your hip to make the door shut. Our boys go to public schools. Our jobs pay enough to support our lifestyle, mostly anyway. If we wanted, we could both do the "next thing" on our respective career paths. She could move to a bigger company. I could freelance more, angle to write for a bigger publications, write a book, hire a publicist, whatever. We could try to make more money. Then we could fix the water pressure in our shower, redo the back patio, get a second car, or hell, buy a bigger house closer in to town. Maybe get the kids in private schools. All that stuff people with more money than us do.
But ... meh. It's not that we don't think about those things. The water pressure thing drives me batty. Fact is, we just don't want to work that hard! We already work harder than we feel like working. We enjoy having time to lay around in the living room with the kids, reading. We like to watch a little TV after the kids are in bed. We like going to the park and visits with friends and low-key vacations and generally relaxing. Going further down our respective career paths would likely mean more work, greater responsibilities, higher stress, and less time to lay around the living room with the kids.
So why do it? There will always be a More and Better just beyond our reach, no matter how high we climb. We could always have a little more money and a few more choices. But as we see it, we don't need to work harder to get more money to have more choices because we already made our choice. We chose our family and our friends and our place. Like any life ours comes with trade-offs, but on balance it's a good life, we've already got it, and we're damn well going to enjoy it.
Read more:
image credit:
Searching
by Nishant Batsha
Type “why am I” into a Google search and autocomplete will suggest “why am I here?” Type “why did” and you’ll find “why did I get married?” These questions seem so hackneyed, the kind of generic lamentations you might hear in a bad movie. And yet, Google’s autocomplete algorithm insists that searches relating to marital strife and existence are, in fact, incredibly common. This has led me to wonder again and again: has Google become one of our expressions of existential moaning?
Outside of the confines of autocomplete, we generally know very little about each other’s online searches (although blog metrics can provide surprising—and sometimes bizarre—insights). But back in 2006, AOL’s research division released a text file containing 20 million searches conducted by 650,000 users over a three-month period. While the furor surrounding the privacy implications of the release ultimately led AOL to remove the file from its website and issue an apology, the document remains easily downloadable.
If Google's autocomplete gives us a broad picture of how people use search engines in times of crisis, these AOL logs provide much more detailed case histories. Take this series from User #71845: “Why do men have online affairs,” “sin to feel pleasure when other hurt,” “why do women accept infedelty." From User #2413067: “why can’t I save money”. User #2446971: “why didn’t mom want me to get married,” “my ex husband is dying and I would like to speak with him,” “why are you so cold to me on mother’s day,” “why are the men in my life including my son emotionally beating me.” User #3898228: “in speculation the worst feeling in the world is the dawning of realization. when you wake up and realize that nothing is as it should be and everything is wrong. when you wake up and put your situations into words and want to cry. nothing is right.” (Surprisingly, this isn't a song lyric or a poem, but instead seems to mark a sort of meta-realization: the realization about the dawning of realizations). User #4553622: “why am I not lucky,” followed up with “who are the lucky people." All of these were turned up from a brief search of one of ten logs, using “why” as my ctrl+f.
It would be easy to dismiss this as the wackiness of AOL users, but I’ve found that in certain moments, either when it’s too late, or I’m too tired, or I can’t quite muster the nerve to click anyone’s name on my Gchat list, I end up typing into a search engine the particular crisis that confronts me. Questions that are self-consciously academic (why is it that emptiness tends to co-exist with our late capitalism?) or simply existential (why is this all so meaningless?) appear in the search box. I’ve confessed this habit to friends, who at first tend to label it as just another idiosyncrasy. After a few drinks, the confession surfaces: they too find themselves seeking solace in Google from time to time. To borrow a turn of phrase from Søren Kierkegaard, we all seem to be suffering the Sickness Unto Search. We are Existential Googlers.
But why? There’s no denying the fact that the Internet is a Big Place. At the 2010 Techonomy Conference, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, repeated what had been kicking around Google’s press releases for a few years: the size of the Internet was about five million terabytes (5.12 billion gigabytes), with Google indexing about 205,000 gigabytes of that information (a measurement from the Dawn of Civilization until 2003—it’s unclear whether Google just stopped keeping track after that). It should come as no surprise then that, with this amount of data sitting on our desktops, nestled away in our pockets, we channel our existential angst through the search box, believing that somewhere in that tangle of information must be stored some crucial piece of advice.
Or maybe we're not even looking for advice. Maybe we're looking for company. Writing this, I looked up to find the carcass of a dead yellowjacket on my windowsill (bear with me for a moment; I promise I’m not suffering from Diminished Attention Span, another Web Disorder). The stark un-digital life and death of the insect caught my attention. This dead bug was unfortunately not alone. If you were to look out my window and glance towards the uppermost outer ledge, you will find a parade of yellowjackets flying to and fro; they have a small nest in a crevice in the bricks above. Sometimes one somehow slips through the small crack of an open space and makes its way inside. Here, it becomes frantic, desperate. In its longing to escape from its newfound prison, it begins to ram its head, over and over again, into the glass, as if hoping to make the window give way by sheer force of will. If I'm out of the room when this happens, I will find its still body later. This one's analog death brought me back towards humanity. What kind of loneliness does one feel in that kind of isolation?
Most of us don’t need to think about yellowjackets in order to arrive at this question; most of us experience isolation on a regular basis. Blame it on the cruelties of modernity, the banalities of existence, or the Xanax prescription running out, this kind of capital-L “what am I doing in this world” loneliness is pretty common. And we all respond to it in different ways: exercise, chain-smoking, incessant status-updates on Facebook, alcohol, blogging. Despite all the advances in personal technology that seek to link us with each other in a myriad of ways, we are continually confronted with chasms of emptiness. And yet, we return to technology, seeking to find answers in the network that lay behind the search box.
It might be useful if I were able to use these searches to develop some sort of grand unified theory of our collective post-modern psyche. But instead I can only grapple with why I keep entering my questions into the engine. I know that when I do, I'm never quite looking for an answer. Instead, I tend to hope for a brief moment of catharsis. I’ll scan a few search results, sure; maybe I’ll even browse a link or two. But nothing is more satisfying then that moment of Existential Googling and pressing enter. Emotion, search, relief.
I can only speak for myself here; I don't know the reasons for other people's searches, just as I don't know why User #2446971 spent, according to her search timestamps, a sizeable portion of her Mother’s Day asking a data-mining algorithm why her son has abandoned her. Perhaps this is simply another iteration of calling out into the dark, whispering prayers on bended knee, or lying under the stars. The singing of psalms, the singing of qawwali. Augustine and his pears, Sartre and his nausea. A teleology of adaptation, a continual movement of our despair.
I keep thinking of the yellowjackets on my windowsill. They too exist in networks of kith, kin and information. And I can’t help but wonder if, in its last moments, the dying creature secreted forlorn pheromones into the unusually still air of my room. I can only imagine its search query: how did I get into this prison? Why am I here?
via:
Outside of the confines of autocomplete, we generally know very little about each other’s online searches (although blog metrics can provide surprising—and sometimes bizarre—insights). But back in 2006, AOL’s research division released a text file containing 20 million searches conducted by 650,000 users over a three-month period. While the furor surrounding the privacy implications of the release ultimately led AOL to remove the file from its website and issue an apology, the document remains easily downloadable.
If Google's autocomplete gives us a broad picture of how people use search engines in times of crisis, these AOL logs provide much more detailed case histories. Take this series from User #71845: “Why do men have online affairs,” “sin to feel pleasure when other hurt,” “why do women accept infedelty." From User #2413067: “why can’t I save money”. User #2446971: “why didn’t mom want me to get married,” “my ex husband is dying and I would like to speak with him,” “why are you so cold to me on mother’s day,” “why are the men in my life including my son emotionally beating me.” User #3898228: “in speculation the worst feeling in the world is the dawning of realization. when you wake up and realize that nothing is as it should be and everything is wrong. when you wake up and put your situations into words and want to cry. nothing is right.” (Surprisingly, this isn't a song lyric or a poem, but instead seems to mark a sort of meta-realization: the realization about the dawning of realizations). User #4553622: “why am I not lucky,” followed up with “who are the lucky people." All of these were turned up from a brief search of one of ten logs, using “why” as my ctrl+f.
It would be easy to dismiss this as the wackiness of AOL users, but I’ve found that in certain moments, either when it’s too late, or I’m too tired, or I can’t quite muster the nerve to click anyone’s name on my Gchat list, I end up typing into a search engine the particular crisis that confronts me. Questions that are self-consciously academic (why is it that emptiness tends to co-exist with our late capitalism?) or simply existential (why is this all so meaningless?) appear in the search box. I’ve confessed this habit to friends, who at first tend to label it as just another idiosyncrasy. After a few drinks, the confession surfaces: they too find themselves seeking solace in Google from time to time. To borrow a turn of phrase from Søren Kierkegaard, we all seem to be suffering the Sickness Unto Search. We are Existential Googlers.
But why? There’s no denying the fact that the Internet is a Big Place. At the 2010 Techonomy Conference, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, repeated what had been kicking around Google’s press releases for a few years: the size of the Internet was about five million terabytes (5.12 billion gigabytes), with Google indexing about 205,000 gigabytes of that information (a measurement from the Dawn of Civilization until 2003—it’s unclear whether Google just stopped keeping track after that). It should come as no surprise then that, with this amount of data sitting on our desktops, nestled away in our pockets, we channel our existential angst through the search box, believing that somewhere in that tangle of information must be stored some crucial piece of advice.
Or maybe we're not even looking for advice. Maybe we're looking for company. Writing this, I looked up to find the carcass of a dead yellowjacket on my windowsill (bear with me for a moment; I promise I’m not suffering from Diminished Attention Span, another Web Disorder). The stark un-digital life and death of the insect caught my attention. This dead bug was unfortunately not alone. If you were to look out my window and glance towards the uppermost outer ledge, you will find a parade of yellowjackets flying to and fro; they have a small nest in a crevice in the bricks above. Sometimes one somehow slips through the small crack of an open space and makes its way inside. Here, it becomes frantic, desperate. In its longing to escape from its newfound prison, it begins to ram its head, over and over again, into the glass, as if hoping to make the window give way by sheer force of will. If I'm out of the room when this happens, I will find its still body later. This one's analog death brought me back towards humanity. What kind of loneliness does one feel in that kind of isolation?
Most of us don’t need to think about yellowjackets in order to arrive at this question; most of us experience isolation on a regular basis. Blame it on the cruelties of modernity, the banalities of existence, or the Xanax prescription running out, this kind of capital-L “what am I doing in this world” loneliness is pretty common. And we all respond to it in different ways: exercise, chain-smoking, incessant status-updates on Facebook, alcohol, blogging. Despite all the advances in personal technology that seek to link us with each other in a myriad of ways, we are continually confronted with chasms of emptiness. And yet, we return to technology, seeking to find answers in the network that lay behind the search box.
It might be useful if I were able to use these searches to develop some sort of grand unified theory of our collective post-modern psyche. But instead I can only grapple with why I keep entering my questions into the engine. I know that when I do, I'm never quite looking for an answer. Instead, I tend to hope for a brief moment of catharsis. I’ll scan a few search results, sure; maybe I’ll even browse a link or two. But nothing is more satisfying then that moment of Existential Googling and pressing enter. Emotion, search, relief.
I can only speak for myself here; I don't know the reasons for other people's searches, just as I don't know why User #2446971 spent, according to her search timestamps, a sizeable portion of her Mother’s Day asking a data-mining algorithm why her son has abandoned her. Perhaps this is simply another iteration of calling out into the dark, whispering prayers on bended knee, or lying under the stars. The singing of psalms, the singing of qawwali. Augustine and his pears, Sartre and his nausea. A teleology of adaptation, a continual movement of our despair.
I keep thinking of the yellowjackets on my windowsill. They too exist in networks of kith, kin and information. And I can’t help but wonder if, in its last moments, the dying creature secreted forlorn pheromones into the unusually still air of my room. I can only imagine its search query: how did I get into this prison? Why am I here?
via:
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