Category Ten Minutes

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There's Nothing Wrong With Shoe Boxes

May 10, ’10 12:21 PM

A proposal to replace shoeboxes. The story rubs me the wrong way almost immediately.

Product packaging is one of consumerism’s most toxic byproducts — transient, temporary, and lacking the vaguely utilitarian excuse for existence that the product it contains can claim.

Yes, I suppose that shoes are vaguely utilitarian. I mean, if you’re that kind of person. Sigh!

Christ, you can almost smell the contempt from here.

This is a variant, I think, of the activist’s credo (‘everyone is fucked but me’). The writer isn’t really saying that e.g. shoes are only ‘vaguely utilitarian’; she’s thinking of all those other things. Packaging for TVs, for instance, that are used to watch circus-freak reality shows rather than BBC Four. Packaging for things that the great unwashed not-me wants.

The design:

NewImage.jpg

NewImage.jpg

According to the story:

The innovative structure replaces both the shoe box and the shopping bag, and requires 65% less cardboard than a traditional box thanks to a carbon structure die-cut from a single flat piece of material that requires no additional printing, assembly, lamination, stapling or glueing. Rather than woven, the bag portion is stitched with heat, which means less work and waste.

Oh, joy, the carbon structure — which I think means ‘cardboard’; the word ‘carbon’ has a pretty definite meaning, but these days it’s standing in for all kinds of things — has no polymers and no glueing. And you are left with a ‘clever little bag’ that conveniently serves as an advertising medium.

Packaging should be reduced wherever possible; you’re not going to find too many people, of any political stripe, who think that anything should be over-packaged. But what’s on display here is a special kind of idiocy, because it entirely ignores the fact that a shoe box, as packaging goes, is almost perfectly recyclable. How do you recycle a shoe box? You put something else in it. There are whole chains of stores dedicated largely to selling what amount to shoe boxes without shoes in them because there are people who need more boxes than they need shoes.

Actual smart packaging redesign would approach the shoe box by trying to figure out how to make it even more reusable. Make it stronger than it strictly needs to be to hold shoes; make it better looking; make it easy to label the end of it. Boxes for kids’ should be able to be easily turned into little dollhouses, or Battle-Smurf fortresses, depending on taste.

At the cigar store, they sell empty cigar boxes to people who don’t like stogies but who do have some use for the boxes. Very few cigar boxes make it into the waste stream, because they’re so damned useful for other things. That is the way to improve packaging: by making it better for re-use.

A genuine attempt to reduce the amount of packaging that winds up in landfills would approach the problem from that perspective. Approaches that start off by moaning about ‘consumerism’, though, seem always to tend to be more about self-aggrandizement by way of Grands Projets than about actually making a difference.

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Ideal 'Minority' Participation

Apr 20, ’10 8:44 AM

A new bridge is being built across the Mississippi River in St. Louis. And some groups have a problem because, they say, there is not enough ‘minority participation’ in the construction.

Protesters gathered Monday at the ground breaking ceremony for the New Mississippi River Bridge project.

The group is concerned with the minority participation in building the bridge, said Troy Buchanan, task force chair for the United Congregations of the Metro-East.

“Shame on President Obama, and shame on Ray LaHood to build these projects in America without proper minority representation,” Buchanan said.

Buchanan said the Interstate 64 project had 27 percent minority participation, which he considers an ideal model. UCM is asking for 30 percent minority involvement in the New Mississippi River Bridge project.

Wait a minute, if 27 percent is ‘ideal’, then wouldn’t 30 percent be more than ideal, and therefore, you know, too much? Black people — the article keeps saying ‘minority’, but let’s be honest, this isn’t about Bosnians or Navajos or Mexicans — make up about 12% of the population of the United States, and about 18% of the population of the St. Louis metro area.

It seems to me that a project with 27% ‘minority participation’ means that African-Americans are already not just being included fairly, but in fact favored. The United Congregations guy apparently agrees with me, because he said this was ‘ideal’. But now it should be 30%?

“Investments in infrastructure should be shared by all Americans,” said Ron Trimmer, of UCM, in a press release.

With a slightly larger share, that is, going to Mr. Trimmer’s kind of Americans.

A couple paragraphs further down, there’s a clue:

East St. Louis is 95 percent to 100 percent minority, with an 18.4 percent unemployment rate, Buchanan said. He said UCM’s concern is creating opportunities for those that are unemployed in the communities surrounding the project.

Leaving aside the insanity of a place being ’100 percent minority’, there’s a problem of logic here. The Interstate 64 project, that of the ‘ideal’ 27% participation, was mostly in areas inhabited almost entirely by white people. If one end of a bridge being in a ’100% minority’ area means that there should be more ‘minority’ participation in the project, presumably the highway that was rebuilt through the richest part of town should have had a lot of Jewish and Ivy-League participation, no?

Apparently: no. Of course not.

I’m really of two minds about this kind of thing. On the one hand, it’s all ridiculous. If a black-owned or -staffed firm can do the work, and do it at competitive rates, they should not have any trouble attracting business. It’s in the government’s interest to spread this work around (if only because they are likely to net more in taxes from a lot of small companies than from one big company), and not to effectively annex a few big contractors (likely owned by white people) as arms of the government.

But in these articles, I only see people calling for ever-higher levels of ‘participation’ of people of a certain skin color, and never anything even on how much of a given area’s e.g. construction industry is represented by people with that skin color.

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Gift Guide For Nie-Blankes

Dec 9, ’09 10:59 AM

The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ‘smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.

And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.

Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.

What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:

  • Children’s books about Barack Obama
  • Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
  • ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
  • Gospel cruises
  • Bindya scarves
  • ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.

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Pardon Me, Madam; Your Condescension Is Showing

Dec 6, ’09 9:52 AM

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

And while scores at Hanna Woods [Elementary School] have improved over the last few years, the gains have not been good enough for the federal government. The [No Child Left Behind] law, enacted in 2002, requires states to set testing goals that get tougher every year. By 2014, every student in the nation, including the poor, minority and disabled, is expected to pass all tests.

You will note that the decidedly left-wing Post-Dispatch more or less equates being a ‘minority’ with being disabled or with being poor — and certainly with being too stupid to pass the tests. Every student — even black ones — will be expected to pass the tests: goodness! The Post does not say so directly, but the tone of the thing makes it clear that they believe that reading and basic arithmetic is pretty much beyond the abilities of most ‘minority’ students. Lovely outlook, that.

From the Washington Post, in an article about the ‘digital divide’ and how it’s harming schoolkids:

But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels of the Woodrow Wilson public library in the Falls Church area. Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers.

It’s crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families. All those Indian anesthesiologists, Chinese engineers, Korean entrepreneurs, not buying computers for their kids even though they can afford it. Oh, wait, they do buy computers because they can afford it. Certainly many immigrants are relatively poor; but it’s interesting that the story equates being an immigrant and being poor. A better newspaper would have written that the libraries attract ‘students from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.’

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More Excellent Journalism

Nov 20, ’09 8:14 AM

It’s a truism that the more you know about something, the more the media seem to screw it up. This is particularly true of any story involving aviation; after an airplane crashes, for instance, nearly all the news stories are full of things that clearly show that the person writing it had absolutely no idea what the hell they were saying.

A Washington Post feature story today about a kid learning to fly is up (down) to the usual standard, but with a difference: the inaccuracies can’t possibly be down to misunderstanding, general cluelessness, or confusion. The passage in question:

First, Colin has to check out the airplane: a 27-year-old Cessna 172 Skyhawk. He runs his finger along the propeller blades, checks the oil level and looks for dings or nicks on the wings. He looks over the flaps and the airbrakes. Once inside with the instructor, he fiddles for the right key and starts up the plane. Minutes later, he’s heading for the runway, talking to air traffic controllers: “Potomac Tower, this is 511236 rolling to runway 2-4.”

Problems:

  1. Potomac Airfield doesn’t have a control tower. It’s what’s called an ‘uncontrolled field’.
  2. Nobody would be talking to air traffic controllers while taxiing at an uncontrolled airport.
  3. 511236 is not a valid registration number in the United States.

Number 2 I’m willing to forgive, because when you’re taxiing at an uncontrolled field you often do announce as much on the radio, and there’s no reason for a newspaper features writer to know who the guy’s talking to.

Number 1 I might be willing to forgive, because the kid in question is a student pilot (and probably nervous as hell with a Washington Post reporter along) and he might have actually said ‘Potomac tower’ instead of what he should have said, which is ‘Potomac traffic’.

Number 3 is just ridiculous, though. There’s no way he said this. FAA registration numbers all start with N (which you don’t say on the radio in the U.S.) and up to five numbers and up to two letters, but with a maximum length of five. So N1 is a valid registration number, as is N12345 or N1234A or N123AB. N511236 is just not possible. The Post just needed something that sounded airplane-y, and so they made this up.

In a photo gallery accompanying the story online, the Post has this picture of Colin pre-flighting the airplane:

N64181

And this one of him taking off:

N64181 Taking off

If we squint real hard, we might be able to make out the registration number.

The story at one point also says ‘His next hurdle is winning a coveted commission to the U.S. Air Force Academy’; but you get appointments, not commissions to the service academies. This is likely simply an error, though, and not fabrication.

Now, really, you can easily say that this isn’t important at all. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to the story, which isn’t about the registration number of that airplane, or the phraseology for announcing your actions on the radio at Potomac Airfield, or the specific terminology used for getting into the U.S. Air Force Academy.

But it does show that the Washington Post is okay with just making up details (or quotes) when the reporter didn’t make a note of them, even when they would be easy to check (call the flight school, or look at the Post‘s own photos).

So what else are they just making up when it’s convenient?

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The Narcissism of the Activist

Nov 18, ’09 9:08 AM

I am reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, which, in the version I’m reading, carries a preface about copyright.

In case you don’t know who Doctorow is: he’s a sci-fi author, anti-absolute-copyright activist, and general left-wing complainer, possibly not in that order. He’s originally from Canada and now lives in the UK; as with pretty much all such people, this gives him a special insight as to everything that’s wrong with the United States.

Doctorow’s main issue is copyright, or, more specifically, absolute copyright. Himself, he gives away all (most?) of his writing via his website while at the same time selling the stuff through normal channels. His intention is to be a one-man experiment to prove whether it’s possible to make money from intellectual property without hiring a team of lawyers to sue your fans. So far, it seems to be working.

In the course of explaining why he does this — he quotes Tim O’Reilly in saying that his, and most writers’ — biggest problem isn’t piracy but obscurity — he writes

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don’t get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch.

First: astronauts do not spend 28 hours on the launch pad under any circumstances.

Second: note here that he uses cowboys as an example of people who are oppressed. Now, I’m sure that there were and are some bad cowboy jobs. But to see a cowboy — the very symbol of independence and self-determination — as oppressed takes a special kind of view of the world.

And I’ll be forever indebted to Cory Doctorow for illustrating this so perfectly, because his illustration has allowed me to put words to a concept that’s been annoying me for a while.

The activist’s credo is: everyone’s fucked but me.

The argument goes something like this: Things are just fine for me, but everyone else is getting the short end of the stick, and so it is up to me and other similarly comfortable people to fix all of this for them. In many cases, you can add to that: because they are all too stupid to see the truth.

This is why I can respect Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Tea Party people, etc., but find ACORN and WTO ‘protests’ disgusting. There’s a big difference between a group of people looking out for itself, making its opinions known, and attempting to influence the government or the culture so that its members will be better off on the one hand, and organizations of the Professionally Outraged, abstractly arguing the cases of other, usually unseen people on the other.

The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that People in general either

  1. do not know enough to run their own lives (search for ‘voting against self interest‘ for many examples) or
  2. the real majority supports X, even though the most accurate measures seem to indicate that people support Y.

Either one in the end justifies autocratic rule by a ‘benevolent’ dictator, and the best part is that you don’t actually have to demonstrate that people are hungry/oppressed/being shipped to Gitmo/whatever: you just assert that they are from your perch of middle-class comfort.

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My Constitutional Amendments

Nov 9, ’09 9:56 AM

Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a lot of people proposing the amendments to the U.S. Constitution that they’d like to see, and that they think would make the world a better place. I have two.

So I’d propose:

Commerce between the several states shall be understood to mean: only commercial activity wherein some good or service is sold by one party to another party in exchange for money, other goods or services, or other valuable consideration; and only that commercial activity that is not conducted entirely in one state.

We need this because of an argument over 239 bushels of wheat.

In 1941, Roscoe Filburn planted 23 acres of wheat, in defiance of a New Deal quota system that only allowed him to plant 11.1 acres. He fed the excess wheat to his chickens.

The government argued that this was nevertheless interstate commerce (and thus regulable by the federal government), even though the wheat in question was never sold, and even though it never crossed a property line, much less a state line.

The government’s argument, simplified, was that had Filburn not grown this forbidden wheat and fed it to his chickens, he would have been obliged to buy chicken feed, and that had he bought this feed from another farmer in the same state, this would have in any case affected the market price for chicken feed, and thus have been interstate commerce.

Plainly, this is insane. The Supreme Court said:

Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce. The stimulation of commerce is a use of the regulatory function quite as definitely as prohibitions or restrictions thereon. This record leaves us in no doubt that Congress may properly have considered that wheat consumed on the farm where grown, if wholly outside the scheme of regulation, would have a substantial effect in defeating and obstructing its purpose to stimulate trade therein at increased prices.

By this logic, anything is regulable as ‘interstate commerce’ (and, indeed, this is pretty much how the Congress has chosen to see things since the 1940s). The stimulation of commerce is a use of the regulatory function quite as definitely as prohibitions or restrictions thereon. By that logic, the federal government could conceivably order you to take two baths a day, in order to stimulate trade in soap. They could order you to get up earlier, and so push up the market price of coffee. For that matter, they could dictate a specific breakfast menu to you, in order to favor the producers of eggs, bran muffins, bagels, orange juice, or whoever has spent the most money on lobbyists recently. This is utterly insane.

The Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, grants to the federal government the authority to regulate foreign commerce and commerce ‘among the several states’. If the real intention of the Founders was for commerce ‘among the several states’ to be anything, even activity that is neither ‘among the several states’ nor commercial, presumably they would have just said so.

So. Interstate commerce means interstate commerce, and not anything else. I expect that this amendment would mean a lot of vacant office space on K Street.

My second amendment is:

Section 1.
Having voted for, in the case of a member of the House of Representatives or of the Senate, or having signed, in the case of the President, any law later found by the Supreme Court to have been partly or wholly contrary to the provisions of the Constitution or any of its amendments, shall be cause for articles of impeachment to be brought against that person in the appropriate body.

Section 2.
In cases of impeachment brought under this article, a one-third vote in favor of impeachment shall be required for conviction.

The president and members of Congress all take oaths to uphold the Constitution. It has become very common, though, for them to see the determination of whether an action is or is not Constitutional as solely the Supreme Court’s job.

This amendment would basically require anyone thinking of voting for or signing an unconstitutional law to be pretty sure that their party would be significantly in the majority for the rest of his political career.

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Advice For Men

Nov 4, ’09 7:39 AM

Today, Merlin Mann writes on what he knows about women. It’s seems like it’s all pretty sound advice, like:

Listen. Hear what she’s saying. Synthesize what you hear in your head, but be slow to offer advice or “solutions.” Women (like many men, including me) often think by talking — or, if you like, by being heard. Shut up and listen. Seriously. Shut the fuck up sometimes.

No woman wants to be your Mom. Give more than you get and be a grown-up about asking for sacrifices — especially if making that sacrifice goes against something she’s kinda unsure about, but which sticking to until she IS sure is making her feel stronger and more whole. Don’t be a dick.

Do things without being asked. Even things she maybe didn’t know she wanted you to do.

Be extremely clear in your own mind about the very very tiny number of things only you are allowed to ever be right about. Keep making that list smaller every month.

and he does preface it with

Yes, a lot of this goes both ways. Obviously. Give it a rest

But. When’s the last time you read something like this, but with the sexes reversed? Once in a while, some women’s blog might post a list of a few tips with ‘dealing with your Neanderthal’, which is pretty much the same advice in reverse, but usually with a lot of references to how men are stupid children, and with a comment thread with hundreds of posts about how all of this is wrong and that what’s really required is basically more emotional abuse.

And what little you get isn’t nearly as good as Merlin’s advice. You never see the corollary of the first advice-cule above, with women being encouraged to talk through their decisions bit by bit, because men think by talking and that this might help them understand what’s going on. Once in a while you might see women being advised to listen to men, but usually the goal there is for the woman just to better understand exactly how the man is wrong.

And you never, ever see women being told that they’re only allowed to be right about a small and ever-shrinking number of things, even though a whole lot of Advice For Men essentially amounts to ‘shut up and take it’.

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Decadence Inflation

Oct 30, ’09 3:23 PM

Until recently, chocolate was usually involved in any desserts described as ‘decadent’. Apparently pumpkin pie is now also emblematic of decay.

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Speaking Truth To Power

Oct 29, ’09 11:01 AM

Someone wrote in to Glenn Reynolds with a point I’d been thinking about yesterday, and planning to write about today. Speaking of the Obama administration, he wrote:

These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing.

Reynolds comments:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say that Obama & Co. ‘never really understood the problems of governing’, but the rest of this rings true. The Left, and the Democrats in the US in particular, have become something like a dog chasing a car. The dog is just acting instinctively and chasing after anything that moves; he doesn’t really have a plan for what’s going to happen should he actually catch the car.

The Democrats, from 2000 to 2008, blamed all of their problems — hell, all problems full stop — on George Bush. Couldn’t get their policies enacted? It was all the fault of George Bush (spit) and those corporations (spit) and talk radio (spit)!!!11 It’s all just lies and fear that are fooling the people into a false sense of complacency!!!1 so that Halliburton (spit) can get richer (spit)!!1

And so on. Before George Bush, it was just corporations and talk radio and the vast right-wing conspiracy etc.

Some lefties actually seem to understand that their real problem is that the majority of the people don’t like their policies. Once in a while, this slips out, as in these examples from just after the election in 2004, but in general you have to keep this kind of contempt for the electorate under wraps if you want to have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning elections.

Immigrants-Against-Democracy Fuck-Middle-America Dailymirror-Bush

By spitting at the straw-man enemies of George Bush and Fox News, though, the left was able to forget about, or at least to paper over, its differences; this is how you have a ‘coalition’ that include both billionaire capitalist George Soros and the Berkeley Marxist League. What did they stand for? Well, a lot of things, many of them directly contradictory. But more than anything, they stood for opposition to Bush, hatred of Fox News, etc., etc.; many of the Democrats’ troubles now are the direct result of their confusing this emotion-based unity with genuine agreement.

The left now controls the universities, TV, movies, nearly all major newspapers, NPR, PRI, all TV news except for Fox, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, and yet you have Valerie Jarrett saying

I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.

Their ideology has become so wrapped up in ‘struggle’ and ‘organizing’ against some more powerful force that you wind up with a person with an office in the White House who reports directly to the President of the United States talking about how she and her colleagues are going to speak truth to power. It’s like a tic.

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